Tag Archives: free

Is Free Web Hosting Worth it?

The web is full of free web hosting options. So why should you go with a service that is going to cost you a monthly fee when you could go for the free alternative? While there surely are a few good free web hosts out there, by and large it’s a situation of you get what you pay for. And since you don’t pay for anything, your experience is likely to be horrible.

Stability

Sure, there are hundreds, if not thousands of free web hosting sites. But you won’t have heard of any one of them. Free web hosts, it turns out, don’t last long. They pop up and then disappear rapidly, taking whatever data was uploaded with them. This means that there isn’t any level of reliability from free web hosts.

Uptime

Uptime is the measure of how much time a site spends running and serving pages to viewers and how much it spends down, doing nothing. Even free web hosting sites that manage to stick around lack decent uptime. Their services crash on a regular basis, making it quite difficult for anyone interested in your content to actually view what you’ve made, especially once you start to see an increase in traffic.

People don’t like it when their expectations go unmet. So being faced with a website that won’t load is a bit like running into a brick wall: quite unpleasant, and you can be sure they will steer clear next time.

Tight Restrictions

Because free web hosting sites are operating on a constrained budget, each site gets a tiny slice of an already constrained pie. With a free host, getting less than a Gigabyte of storage space is standard, and monthly transfers are usually limited to less than a Gigabyte of data. This means that if your site ever gets any real traffic, your site will stall. Traffic builds up fast, and you’ll never know when your site is about to use up your monthly allotment of transfer.

Shady Business Practices

But the biggest reason to steer clear of free web hosting? Most tend to have shady business practices.

Where does the money come to run the free web hosting company come from? The only two real revenue sources are a freemium model and ads. A freemium model goes for the upsell, trying to convince people to pay money for the hosting. Usually this means that the free service is nearly useless so you have to pay eventually.

But ads are even more troublesome. Often free hosts support themselves by having popup ads or banners that get forcibly inserted into your site. Advertising on your site that you do not benefit from is ridiculous and unprofessional. Popups are particularly annoying, if for no other reason than that we remember the early 2000’s when popups were the bane of the internet.

Free web hosting companies could also be using your site to collect personal information from your users, without your knowledge.

If you are going to run a site, there are cheap web hosting services out there. You are going to have to pay for something, one way or another. If you go with a free host, you still need a domain name to point to it, and those cost money. Often pay hosting plans include a domain name.

How To Find The Best Firewalls Of 2012

If you have a personal computer, and you surf the web on a daily basis, firewall protection is important. This is why you need to know more about the best firewalls of 2012. Anyone that uses a computer should be aware of potential malicious programs that could infect their system. To protect yourself, you need a firewall. Firewalls are very necessary, but you must choose the right one depending upon the computer that you actually have. This is an essential aspect of modern computing, so don’t overlook it.

It is important to use Privatefirewall to protect your computer from online threats, especially if you are using a Windows based operating system. Saving your computer, and yourself, from actors that will still your information is an absolute necessity. It is important that you get firewall protection as soon as possible. If you want to, you can use Privatefirewall to help you protect your computer even more so when using this combination of security and firewall protection. You can also use this program with Vista, XP, and Windows 7. This is easy to use because it works in the background and will not disturb whatever you’re doing. Your computer security deserves to have Privatefirewall as part of its arsenal to protect against malicious software programs.

Anyone with a Windows operating system will be pleased with ZoneAlarm Firewall Free 9.2 for their computer protection. Although Windows 7 comes with a default firewall, but it’s always a good idea to enhance this with additional protection. ZoneAlarm is a well regarded name when it comes to security programs, and in the 9.2 version they’ve added some improvements. If you drink a lot of coffee, or go to other locations that provide free Wi-Fi, this protection is absolutely necessary as it is automatic and can protect against security threats every moment that you surf. There’s also anti-phishing protection to protect your personal data from hackers and identity thieves.

Peace of mind is something that you will receive when you install this free firewall software program that will protect your computer from potential attacks.

Some people are unwilling to pay for a firewall, so Outpost Firewall Free, just like its name suggests, can be installed for free, but your computer will have to use Windows. This firewall is meant to be in addition to the firewall already installed on Windows, just like many of its competitors. Computer security is very important, and with all the new threats, it takes more than one kind of protection, especially since everything can’t be protected by Windows own built-in firewall. There are many capabilities, such as malware protection, that normally only come in paid programs, that come in this program, even though it is free. Outpost Firewall Free is made by Agnitum, which also makes even more advanced security products that can be purchased online.

While your computer’s operating system will most likely have a firewall already, you shouldn’t rely on this for protection. Breaking into your computer is the goal of hackers, and they keep finding new ways, so to counteract this, you need the latest measures for protection. You can stay safe from threats, and keep your data protected by using one of the best firewalls of 2012.

Buy Backlinks – Guidance and Points to Consider Before Purchasing

Creating backlinks is an excellent method to increase pagerank and signal to search engine spiders that your website needs to be crawled often, and therefore ranked higher (more links = more votes!). Various free and paid methods are used by webmasters to create backlinks. Adopting the right strategies for creating backlinks will enable webmasters to lead more people to their websites, which results in higher revenues and greater profits.

Several webmasters believe that if they buy backlinks in large quantities, they will be able to achieve the number one position during an online search operation. However, this is not always true and may actually have negative repercussions as the popular search engines may consider this as spamming.

Using some of the free techniques to create backlinks has its own advantages. The most important advantage is that free methods are free, which makes them cost-efficient (but time is money) as some paid methods charge as much as $500 per month for hundreds of backlinks. Free links are controlled by the webmasters and posted in sites comprising of relevant content related to their specific niche. Most of the popular search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo provide importance to backlinks that are manually created and are wary of computer-generated links. Sharing your sites and blogs with other people lets you create a higher number of backlinks. This generates several links which are shared all over the Internet. However, ensure that all the links within your content remain relevant to ensure higher traffic to your site.

Following and commenting on blogs
This is one of the best methods to create backlinks. However, this is a tedious method that provides excellent results. Webmasters can pay freelancers to leave comments on blogs to create high pagerank backlinks, or perhaps even in bulk with a tool such as Scrapebox. Alternatively, webmasters can assess the techniques of other competitors and use reverse engineering to create backlinks.

Profile creation on forums
Most search engines do not encourage forums spamming. Therefore, webmasters must procure the services that enable profiling on the site instead of posting the links within the blog content or thread. Some of the forums allow webmasters to create signature link that is related to every comment that is made. However, while posting replies it is recommended that you post it within the conversation to avoid being ousted as a spammer. Buying forum profiles, or forum postings is one of the great ways to get bulk links; just be sure to not link directly to your money site and filter through web 2.0 sites such as free blog hosting platforms.

Social media networking
Social media has seen significant growth in the recent times. These sites provide users the option to vote and several additional features. Some of the popular social media sites include Digg and Reddit, which enjoy a high trust by the popular search engines. Webmasters may use these sites to post their sites or article URLs to create effective backlinks. Services exist to social bookmark your website, including buying diggs. The bookmarking can be a crucial role to making your website appear as an authority in its niche.

Several webmasters buy backlinks after they have used all the freely available methods to create backlinks. It is common to see webmasters go overboard in the initial phase, when they commence buying backlinks. Inexperience and lack of knowledge results in webmasters making incorrect decisions with disappointing outcomes. Therefore, webmasters need to keep in mind some factors while buying backlinks.

Choosing the right backlinks
Firstly, ensure that the backlinks you buy are what you need. Although, different people have varying opinions, it is best to choose quality over quantity to start. These include article submissions, blog postings, and forum/blog interaction on good quality sites. These methods should provide the site a higher ranking assuming that the anchor text is not highly competitive. In case, these are insufficient, webmasters may choose other methods to create additional backlinks.

Several companies provide numerous options to webmasters to buy backlinks. All these service providers have their benefits and disadvantages along with their own budgets and capabilities. The chosen provider depends on factors, such as the amount an individual is willing to spend, requirements of your anchor text keywords, and other factors. For individuals with low budgets, using the services of freelances from Fiverr or Warrior Forum is advised. Although, the quality would be relatively inferior, these backlinks would still result in increasing the rankings. For highly competitive keywords and large competition, choosing users of Freelancer is recommended. Although, their fees are higher, they provide superior quality content to assist webmasters create effective backlinks.

Research the service providers
Backlinks service providers differ in the efforts and quality that is provided to clients. Moreover, you will often find several such providers who are of no great use and want to only earn some money out of innocent webmasters. Therefore, while hiring the services of backlinks providers, ensure that sufficient research is undertaken. Review the positive and negative feedback given by other users before making your decision. Analyze the reasons for any negative feedback and ensure that the provider maintains the confidentially of the clients.

Another important factor that webmasters must keep in mind while buying backlinks, is to ensure the relevance of the service provider to their requirements. Most of the reputed search engines, such as Google or Bing penalize webmasters when their backlinks originate from irrelevant and unrelated origin. These links are considered as spamming and are ignored by the search engine spiders. Hence, it is more important to create fewer number of relevant and high quality links instead of creating a larger number of unrelated backlinks.

Using reliable sites
Most of the search engine optimization experts recommend using reputed and high pagerank sites to buy backlinks. Some of these sites may include university, schools, and government institutional sites. The search engine spiders provide high pageranks to these sites that are considered reliable. Webmasters must avoid inferior sites, such as gaming sites and adult sites. Although, the users visiting these sites may be numerous, the search engines do not provide good reputation to such sites and hence must be avoided.

Some other points that webmasters should take into consideration while buying backlinks is to avoid blacklisted sites, link on expired domain names, and buying backlinks from link farms that are created only to sell these backlinks.
Creating backlinks to increase your keyword ranking during an online search query is important and recommended for becoming successful. However, webmasters need to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of the numerous methods that are used to create backlinks.