Why setting up SSL certificates is a pain on Go Daddy

Posted on January 18, 2022 by admin

I had many websites that were hosted on multiple Go Daddy packages, for many years. I recently left Go Daddy due to excessive downtimes (along with a myriad of other problems) and discovered that SSL certificates are a TON easier to set up on other hosting providers.

For example, say you want to set up a Let’s Encrypt certificate with your Go Daddy package. Nope. It’s not a thing. When you’re working in the SSL manager inside of Cpanel on Go Daddy, there is no option to set up a Let’s Encrypt certificate.

I noticed when I moved my hosting to Blue Host (which was far less expensive and I just prepaid for a year as opposed to paying every month), that any website I set up with them automatically obtains an SSL certificate. This is much, much easier.

How I set up SSL certificates with Go Daddy, is I had to do everything manually. Originally, I started buying certificates for around $10-$20 per year. I’d have to generate a CSR in my Cpanel with GoDaddy, then go to the SSL provider. Enter the details for the CSR, generate the cert. Don’t forget the validation / verification method. Once you verify or validate using one of the methods, like adding a txt record, you then have to come back to Cpanel. Upload your certificate, and associate it against the domain.

Setting up an SSL certificate in WordPress on Go Daddy

If you’re setting up your SSL certificate to work with WordPress on Go Daddy, you still have to go through all of the things just mentioned above. However, there’s additional steps with WordPress. You need to install a plugin in WordPress, which will do a number of things. Most importantly, it will force HTTP traffic to use HTTPS instead. This is important, because site visitors need to access the HTTPS version of your website in order for the certificate to apply.

You also need to “pass” the SSL certificate through to WordPress, from Cpanel. An SSL plugin will handle these aspects. Generally, these plugins also offer recommendations for additional steps you can implement, to help improve security.

Site Load Times are Very Slow on Go Daddy – use Cloud Flare’s SSL options

One of the main problems I ran into – and one of the reasons why I left Go Daddy – site load time is extremely slow. Go Daddy is one of the worst hosts in the industry in terms of bottle necking. This is because they load up far too many websites and hosting packages onto each physical or virtual server instance. I have noticed that my site load time was so horrible, I was losing money because site visitors would leave my site before the pages could load.

Keep in mind that the statistics have changed big time with the Internet in the last few years. Almost everyone has high speed Internet now in some form or another. If your website will not load in a few seconds, they’ll leave your site and go check the next one they find off the major search engine of their choice.

I would recommend using CloudFlare as an intermediary. This gives you the option of having a free SSL certificate, but also having CloudFlare use their services as a CDN to speed up load time.

 

Posted in Make Money Online, SSL Certificates for SEO | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Review of YouGov Online Survey Platform

Posted on January 17, 2022 by admin

YouGov – what’s in a name? Before we get started, let us say that we’re not for or against this website, or online survey platform. We’re not writing a review that praises YouGov, nor do we have anything against the website. This is an opinion piece only.

YouGov, like most other online survey platforms, offers a points or rewards system for completing surveys online. They display a points counter at the bottom that shows how many points you’ve collected. It even starts tallying points for you while you’re filling out the sign up page. How nifty!

Of course, this is how a lot of people would think or feel, until you’ve seen a few of these kind of survey websites. While they may try to provide the perspective of providing incentive for simple things like signing up a profile, what they’re doing here is basically trying to make you think you’re being rewarded for every single little thing you do – like putting in your birthday, in this screenshot. Why do they do that? It’s an effort to keep you on website. It likely works in most cases. I would say it’s likely that large percentage of people continue signing up the profile, spurred onwards by this “point counter.” If they’re not, it’s an added reason in their mind to continue signing up. That’s really what the platform designers are going for – provide incentive to keep you on the website, keep you interested.

This type of structure or plan isn’t new. In many cases, platform builders like this or anyone that has the plan to capture your data. Keep you on the website, keep you putting in your own details – the more data points they capture about you, the more it can be sold to a third party, or used for some other kind of “big data” analysis. This “big data” concept proliferates the Internet today.

Coming back to YouGov (what the heck does the name mean anyway?) they try to make the user feel like they’re more important. Ultimately they want you to fill surveys to capture data points. They likely make some money off every survey that is filled out, and then compensate you in points. This isn’t new – it’s the same model that many online survey companies use. The only differences are:

  1. YouGov tries to infatuate you or make you feel like you’re accomplishing something, by giving you points for everything you do. However, the way to look at this is how many points do you actually need in order to redeem for something
  2. The platform also tries to tell you that you can make a difference in the news, if you fill out enough surveys.

As you’d imagine, the bottom claim is false. It’s just another method used, to try and get the user or site visitor (that’s you) to stay on the website. The longer you’re on the site, the more money they make off you. This is what many people don’t understand about survey websites like this. Keep in mind every survey you do, every “point,” they give you, you’re only seeing a small percentage of the overall pie.

Leave a review of YouGov for other site visitors

Have you used YouGov? What do you think about the platform? Have you made much money on it? Why not leave a review and let us know what you think about the online survey platform. Leave a comment below to let us know what you think.

 

 

Posted in Make Money Online, Make Money with Online Surveys | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Why Cancelling my Go Daddy Hosting Packages and Migrating WordPress Websites Made Sense in November 2021

Posted on December 28, 2021 by admin

So in November 2021 Go Daddy had a huge hack happen. I figured this out only because my websites were down for days. Down, then up, then down again. Now, to be honest this is sort of not new with Go Daddy. I have monitoring set up on my sites through a number of third party providers (they’re all free if you’re wondering). A very simple way to set this up is to use a WordPress plugin, Jetpack. Jetpack will give you a stats breakdown of who views your site each day, how they got there, search engine terms used – and of course, downtime monitoring. All of this is free and you can set it up on any and all of your WordPress sites. Not bad, right?

There are many other third party monitoring services out there. I would say don’t pay for one, because there’s so many that are free. Jetpack, as mentioned offers a simple monitoring service and will e-mail you when your site is down. It e-mails you when it comes back up too, so it’s simple and useful.

Monitoring emails of site uptime from Jetpack

With my downtime monitoring in place, I constantly was getting notifications of my sites going down. Generally I began to understand that there would be a reboot of the server (or something along those lines) around 11:00 PM every night. Generally the downtime would last about 10-15 minutes, however in other cases it sometimes would last a half hour. Every once in a while, the downtime would last an hour. Sometimes, the downtime would last several hours.

Yeah. I dealt with that for a very long time. When you Google online and look at other people having similar problems, the reports are wide spread. However, one thing you’ll find – you don’t find a lot of people talking about their websites being up with Go Daddy much. Mind you, this is the shared hosting I’m talking about. Many arguments can likely be made “well, you paid for shared hosting, your website is hosted with many others, blah blah blah.” But let me tell you something.

I recently purchased a hosting package with Blue Host. I am in no means a proponent for blue host. I had read reviews, and I’ll be honest their interface sometimes feels a little slow to load. But heck, my sites now load WAY faster since they’ve been migrated over. Same thing, shared hosting with Cpanel. But the load time is much improved.

Also, they were having a sale so I paid $75 for a year of hosting unlimited domains and I haven’t had a problem yet that a chat session can’t solve. Much, much easier in terms of management for me so far. Getting my sites moved over was super easy (I did it all myself using Updraft and knowing how DNS works). Less time spent managing downtime and trying to restore backups when something goes wrong on Go Daddy, means I can now focus moreso on content creation. That’s super important. Uptime too – no more crashes or emails in the middle of the night about all my sites being down.

How website speed affects site traffic

There are many services out there that check the load time of your website, and give you recommendations how to improve it. Even after moving to Blue Host, I still fared poorly for one of my sites on sitechecker.pro . This statistic pasted here that they have on their website, makes a lot of sense. If your website takes too long for that first load, you’ll get people that just go somewhere else while they’re waiting. On the Internet, fast load times are very important.

When I had all my sites on Go Daddy (and I’m still in the process of moving them), I had to use Cloud Flare to host my DNS. If I didn’t do this, my sites were SO slow to load – or sometimes, simply wouldn’t load at all. Once I set up Cloud Flare to be in the middle, they secured my sites with SSL (free) and my sites loaded much quicker. This is because CloudFlare is a content caching service. If you’re not sure what that means, read my article about how Cloud Flare provides a free SSL certificate and can help speed up site load times. I found when I had my sites on Go Daddy’s servers for years, I had to use a content cache provider like Cloud Flare. If I didn’t, my websites would load SO slow that I’m sure I had people leaving the sites before they would load. No doubt.

Now – fast forward to using Blue Host. Blue Host provides free SSL certs right from the get go. I’ve done absolutely 0 set up with SSL certificates – which is awesome. All free, included with my yearly. I signed up for a shared hosting package with cPanel and I can host unlimited websites for $75 for the first year – that’s in CAD. Amazing. Again, this is not an ad for blue host. But I definitely didn’t know what I was missing. Setting up DNS and getting sites moved over was so easy I did many, many websites all in one evening.

Go Daddy was very slow to respond to domain transfer requests. Some of them I had to submit multiple times. I was always waiting on the “losing registrar to approve the transfers”  that’s Go Daddy. Trying to call Go Daddy for any help meant calling a phone number in Arizona and waiting 45 minutes to speak to them. Paying outrageous bills for phone support, and getting no help once I got them on the phone.

Go Daddy technical support will upsell your package. That’s what they do. They probably get compensated on it. I learned this after years of trying to work with them and get support. They’re the masters of bullsh*t. They’ll tell you you’re out of resources when all they need to do is reboot the server. They won’t reboot the server where your websites are hosted, because it’s a shared server and if they do that it then interrupts everyone else on that server. But guess what. After they upgrade your package, miraculously all your websites begin working. Why? Because they rebooted that server. Yup. You just paid a price increase of $10-$20/month for them to do a reboot, or for them to refresh something on their side. Seen it before and will never see it again. They can’t tell you specifically what resources you’re out of, or why I/O looks high. Just upgrade your package and then I/O or whatever resource issue will no longer be an issue. It’s like using a giant bulldozer to swat a fly when all you needed was a meter stick. Everything is overkill and every part of it is built to take your money – the waiting, the nervousness of your websites being offline, all of it.

Go Daddy, I eventually realized is a scammer’s company that was built to screw people as much as you possibly or humanly can. Screw them 5 ways from Sunday. Once they have your website data you’re deep in the sh*t then. Get your websites and your data out of there as fast as you can. Run for the hills and don’t ever look back.

Transferring domains away from Go Daddy can be done instantly if you know how – otherwise you sit and wait for transfers that take a while

Moving domain names is actually a trick, I found with the Go Daddy reseller that I was using. If you know the trick, you can move domains almost instantly – in less then an hour. But if you don’t know the trick, you’ll wait days and have to login again, click different buttons and just jump up and down until the transfers are done. Like most other processes with Go Daddy, domain transfer is a little bit of a slow, frustrating process until you get good at it and know the trick.

Bluehost waiting on losing registrar

This is what I see on Blue Host, after initiating a transfer an waiting for the “losing registrar.” The losing registrar is the one who is “loosing” the domain to your new registrar. In this case, I’m moving domains from a Go Daddy reseller to BlueHost after years of dealing with downtimes with Go Daddy, plus they didn’t even tell their customers about the large hacks, heads up change your password because you’re on WordPress, etc. If I called in, I have to wait in que to talk to someone in Arizona – no 1-800 number, and email support refers all support requests to call in for support. I’ve blacked out the account numbers and etc. as well as the domain name and the reseller I was with, as the intent here isn’t to point fingers at Go Daddy or their resellers. It was just time to leave. I had to, to get better support and better uptime. Bluehost’s support is actually really good and I can do everything over chat support in real time.

Let’s show you the tricks below to get domains moved faster away from Go Daddy and their tendrils…

Before you do anything…take a backup of your website. Make sure you’ve changed your DNS to the new provider. This way, you can point name servers to your new hosting provider, migrate your website, and have the website hosted at the new host before you transfer the domain.

Let’s do it step by step…

  1. Take a backup of your website. If you’re using WordPress, I recommend Updraft. It’s free, plus it can even take automated backups. However, we don’t care right now about that. Take a manual backup. Backups are generally 5 files – DB, Plugins, Others, Themes, and Uploads. Depending on who you’re with, Plugins can sometimes be a plugins2 file also and then you’ll have six files. Make sure you have all five or six files, especially the database.
  2. If you’re not using WordPress or another Content Management System (CMS), then you need to log into FTP and download your files that way to take a back up.
  3. Once you have a backup, go to your Domain Manager, click the Domain, click DNS settings and update the name server to your new host. For me, it was ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com

A note: if you are using a CDN (content delivery network) like CloudFlare, you need to login to CloudFlare, change your A records and any other relevant records, and set the records to “DNS only.” Turn off the proxy setting for the records needed, because while you’re waiting for DNS to update – it can take 24-48 hours and it’ll take a long time with Go Daddy, trust me – the CDN will be in control of the DNS records, until they reflect the update at the source. So, what I mean by this is the record change at the source (let’s say you’re hosting with Go Daddy currently), can take time. While you’re waiting for that change to happen, CloudFlare will still be the one who is pointing your DNS. So update the records in Cloud Flare too. Once Cloud Flare detects that they are no longer the name servers, they’ll email you about it. Ignore this email, but also you can take it as a reference point that now Cloud Flare has recognized a name server change (so their records basically don’t mean anything at that point). They’ll scrub your DNS records and your website will no longer show up in Cloud Flare within a few hours or 1-2 days of them detecting this NS change.

4. Now here comes the magic. Initiate the domain transfer by requesting the unlock code. Provide the unlock code to your new host, then proceed through the process of paying for the renewal. You don’t need to pay for domain security or WHOIS blocking services unless you don’t want anyone to know you own the domain. This is sometimes the case depending upon the industry you’re in. Without WHOIS protection & privacy lock services etc., most domain renewal services charge around $9-$20 USD per year per domain.

5. In about 20 or so minutes, look for the “transfers” screen, it looks like this (look inside your Go Daddy login area once logged in, or Go Daddy reseller),

Go Daddy Domain Transfers Out Screen

6. Click on the domain and then “approve transfer,” it’ll likely give you an error but it’ll work

Go Daddy Approve Transfers

7. Check your new registrar, the domain should now be with them. Again, for me it was blue host.

 

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How to Setup your First WordPress Website

Posted on December 17, 2021 by admin

So, you want to get started making money online and build your first website. Excellent.

Other webmasters online will tell you, “you need to pick a product or service before you start your website”  or before you start any forms of affiliate marketing.

I don’t agree with this at all. I feel that what needs to be decided upon – let’s keep it simple – what is your subject.

What will your website be about?

Although this seems like a very simple question – it really starts the overall thought bubbles forming, in terms of what your website will be about.

What are your interests? This is often a good place to start. What are you passionate about?

Then, what you’re passionate about – can you turn that passion into writing? Writing, and writing more, and writing endlessly, on that given subject?

This is really what’s important when it comes to deciding on what you will build your first website about.

Set Up a Website on WordPress using BlueHost

OK, let’s say you have that out of the way. You know what your website will be about, and you want to get a website set up to start the writing process.

WordPress is a great pick for a lot of people, because you can set it up with not a lot of programming, HTML or “web” knowledge for the most part. Let’s start with the first few things that you need to do.

The very first thing you need is a domain. If you don’t know what domain to buy, or need help picking a domain, see my guide on buying your first domain name.

Once you have a domain, you need to set it up. I’m going to use BlueHost to show you how to do this. I used Go Daddy for many years, but eventually found they were scamming me left and right and my sites were always down. So I moved to Blue Host. My sites are online all the time now, they load faster, and I haven’t had a downtime since I started.

Assign a Domain in Blue Host to Set Up the Sub-Directory and Sub-Domain

The first thing you’ll do in Blue Host is go to the domains area. Go to the Assign button.

Bluehost Assign Domain

 

Once you click assign, you’ll see the following.

Bluehost assign a domain already associated with your account

Basically what we’re doing at this step is telling Bluehost, yes I want to “set up” this domain. Choose addon domain. The concept here is we’ll create a folder in this step, that basically will be a repository for our HTML files. If we don’t do this assign step, then we don’t have a folder to place our files in for our website.

Bluehost create new directory

Do not edit the “create a new directory” field. The field will automatically be filled out and match the name of your domain. DON’T CHANGE THIS!

A folder will get created under your public_html folder. This is what you want, in order for your website to work properly.

Once this is done, click assign this domain.

Domain is now Assigned – Set up Website using WordPress

OK, next step! All aboard the WordPress express. Click on the Advanced button in the bottom left of your WordPress panel.

Bluehost Advanced Button

Scroll down and look under the software heading. Look for “WordPress Manager”  click on this

Wordpress Manager by BlueHost

Click the install button at the top left.

Choose an installation URL. Note: Do not use HTTPS. It is better to use HTTP, and then install a plugin to manage your SSL set up.

If you are restoring a website using a plugin like Updraft, it’s especially important to use http. Using https will break your site.

Choose the domain you’re setting up in your list of drop down domains.

WordPress Set Up – What Fields are Important in the WordPress Manager Set Up Process?

The only other fields that are important is the admin username and password. Once WordPress is set up, you’ll be able to login to it from www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin . The username and password that you set up in this step will be the set of credentials that you use, to login to the /wp-admin area.

The site name and site description can both be edited later.

You’ll have the option to install some plugins under Select plugins, but these can also just be installed from the plugins tab – so it’s optional.

Setting the language is important if you don’t want it to be English by default.

Themes can be chosen later, so that part is also optional.

I would recommend not to change anything under the Advanced Options area. Do not change the database name or the table prefix columns.

Auto upgrades are not required and can break your site. It’s better to update your WordPress instance, and plugins when you’re looking at it – to test after, and make sure the site’s still online.

 

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Why Dealing with Amazon Seller Central Support feels futile

Posted on July 5, 2021 by admin

Yup, the title pretty much sums it up. Amazon seller central recently changed their help menus, so it’s even more difficult now to find support when you need it. That being said, this very much feels like a global thing now. The big tech companies and manufacturers of electronics alike REALLY make you jump through hoops to get support. Microsoft does something similar. The push is for the user or consumer to reach as much as possible, to innundate themselves with information and try every single thing possible before possibly reaching out for help.

It’s frustrating that this is the way of things now. The way Amazon has changed seller central’s help area means that you have to jump through hoops before you can get support now.

Amazon Seller Central Help Area

Amazon Seller Central Help Area – or lack there of. Clicking the case log button does not even let you open a new case. Wow, that’s infuriating.

Amazon Seller Central was already pretty difficult to get help before, now it’s even more frustrating then before. Responses from Amazon Seller support are generally canned.

 

 

Posted in Online Marketplaces for Buy & Sell | Leave a comment

How Uber Continues to Evolve to Find More Ways to Take Money from Consumers

Posted on June 30, 2021 by admin

So, how else can Uber take my money? Let’s see, hmmmm. Well, let’s make it so that users have to pay extra to have their food delivered directly to them. If they want to buy less food, let’s ding them with a small order fee. Oh, don’t forget to charge more when there’s weather conditions, like rain. Guilt the user base into feeling bad about drivers having to “dodge rain drops” so they tip the drivers more.

It’s a little frustrating at first, but then you realize how good the psychologists at Uber have built this thing in order to take money for every little thing. They’ve done a great job at finding revenue sources for their company, there is no question in that. As the consumer though, I have to make mention that I’m really ANGRY!!! at times with Uber. I find it absoloutely ridiculous that the company now asks for an extra fee simply to deliver your food directly to you, without stopping. If that really makes you mad like it does for me, I suggest you don’t use Uber. Use another app like Skip or Doordash.

The problem is with me saying this is, Uber really has a lot of the market share with their Uber eats app. It also seems like it’s generally the fastest delivery option much of the time. So I probably sound like a hypocrite, telling people to use another app when I likely have no intention to use a different one myself. I’ve contacted support so many times on Skip that they banned me from using the support option. However, I can still order food. So once or twice when I have used skip since that’s happened, if there’s a problem with the order I just wind up calling the restaurant. And there’s been a few.

One of the things I’ve personally experienced is potentially a lack of drivers with other apps. I swear I’ve seen one driver get assigned to my order, sit there, not pickup the order and eventually 20 minutes later the job goes to another driver. This isn’t with Uber; I believe this happened with door dash once. Uber is a far more reliable application, but they do tend to over charge for being so. It’s almost as if they know they’re the best option on the market when you’re hungry, they know they’re the most convenient and so they feel they can really rip you good.

“Your Driver is dodging Raindrops on their way”, or “Driver is delivering so you can stay dry”

This is one of the most annoying messages I find on the entire app. What this says to me is that Uber can’t afford to pay their drivers properly, so it’s on me to tip the driver more because he or she had to drive in the rain. This is total nonsense and I wish Uber would remove this from their app. What they should do is pay drivers more for having to deliver food during rain storms or etc. rather then passing the buck onto the consumer. However, I should watch what I say because it wouldn’t surprise me to see a “bad weather fee” on my receipt at some point. We know that Uber has found every other way possible to ring up the fees on a receipt. There are times where you can easily pay $10-$20 or more in service fees for a delivery. Now that’s frustrating.

The psychology of these statements that I reference feel like they can either guilt a Uber user into paying the driver more, or simply to make them angry (like me) to then provide drivers with less. I would say if anything, to remove this completely from the app. Uber users are going to pay more for a good delivery and good service, not because the app guilts them into it. I don’t pay extra money because it’s raining. When I had to drive hours for work, I was never paid extra for having to drive in the rain. I had to pay attention to my surroundings and make sure I arrived to work in a different city in one piece. That’s on the driver, to do their due diligence, just like any other job. We don’t get paid extra for driving in the rain, so why should the service industry?

I feel like with all of the fees and extra costs that Uber passes onto the consumer (for no reason other then to make their fat cat execs richer), they could afford to pay their drivers better.

Paying an extra dollar or two for Express, so your food shows up at least lukewarm

One of the most annoying things about Uber is that you wind up car sharing with another person who ordered. This is past just frustrating, this is stupidity to some degree. You see, Uber started as a ride share business, so when you hail a taxi (an Uber) you share the taxi ride with other people. Uber decided to incorporate this into their food delivery business, so most of the time when you order food, you have to wait for another order to get delivered.

Uber refund

When your order gets messed up all the time, or shows up inedible, or shows up inedible due to just being too cold, be sure to request a refund.

While this is happening, your food sits in the car, getting cold. It sucks. The food is cold often. It’s OK sometimes to get somewhat warm food, other times it can make you sick. Further still, at times the delivery time gets moved, and moved, and moved. Delivery time becomes unpredictable at times, especially at dinner time.

Does working for Uber pay well?

In a word, no. Uber Drivers have to pay for all their own maintenance, as well as gas. Although Uber says they provide a support system, it’s really not the case. It’s just PR talk. If you have a full time job already, and looking to make a few bucks on the side, then driving for Uber during peak times might be a good way to earn a little bit of extra money. However, be ready for a lot of the following issues when doing so:

  • When driving passengers, they will often make you wait outside for them. You don’t get paid for this waiting / idling time.
  • You can sometimes have multiple passengers in the car who don’t like each other, or don’t feel like they should have to share a ride with others.
  • Passengers who are unwilling to co-operate with COVID19 regulations like wearing masks.
  • Passengers that may ask you for special trips to places like McDonald’s. You have to take them or they’ll give you a bad star rating.
  • Passengers that don’t speak the same language so aren’t able to answer any questions.

This is just a few things you’re going to have to deal with as an Uber driver (this is if you are delivering passengers). If you’re delivering food, expect to have to go into many apartment buildings, looking for apartment doors, trying to find your way around; people not coming to meet you in lobbies, then complaining their food delivery was slow, etc. All of that, and more. We live in an entitled society, it is what it is.

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Easiest Ways to Backup and Restore WordPress Websites

Posted on May 23, 2021 by admin

Backing up and restoring WordPress websites is easy, if you know what tools to use. Using the right plugins, you can skip a lot of restoral steps like having to create a database in myPHP or other. If you’ve worked on websites before WordPress, you’re likely familiar with the old school method of using FTP to backup and restore your website. With WordPress, it’s now been made a lot easier; many WordPress users might never have to use FTP for anything.

It’s important to backup your website. I like to back mine up at least once a month. This of course becomes more a challenge when you have more then one website. There are many options out there. If you don’t want to manage backups yourself, many webhost providers now can help you out with Managed WordPress plans. They do the backups for you, as well as the updates, so you don’t have to worry about much. If you don’t have Managed WordPress hosting, you can automate the backups yourself in some cases as well, depending upon who you’re hosted with and what kind of options are provided.

With all of that being said, personally the easiest option I have found to backup and restore WordPress websites is via using Updraft. Updraft backs up your website in 5 files: plugins, uploads, others, database and themes. It’s rather straightforward to understand what each file does. You can generally even be missing one or more of these files, but the file that you never want to lose is the database file. Without this file, you’re sunk in terms of a restore.

Why should I backup my WordPress website?

There are many reasons why you should backup your WordPress website often, and protect it from being hacked or defaced using another plugin like Limit Login Attempts. The Limit Login Attempts plugin does what it sounds like, it stops people from trying to repeatedly login to your wp-admin area and use brute force attacks to get in. This plugin will block IPs that attempt to login too many times, for a temporary period.

WordPress Updraft Backup

Updraft is a very simple plugin to use in WordPress. Hit the start backup button, and Updraft will create 5 files containing your website.

Updraft prompt

Make sure that you choose to backup your database when this prompt comes up. It is turned on by default. The database contains all your pages, posts and content of your website. Without the database, you’re pretty much sunk.

Why would anyone want to hack my website?

Whether your website is active, inactive, has traffic or is a recently new startup, people are always trying to hack. Because WordPress is a well known CMS (and this can happen to any CMS really, not specifically WordPress), hackers will try to exploit known vulnerabilities. They do this with all platforms, whether it’s WordPress or someone running a mail server at home, etc. Hackers have a number of objectives they try to hit, and it depends on the hacker or the hacking group involved, in terms of why they’re hacking you. Often you may just happen to have a certain vulnerability that they’re looking for. It does not matter who you are, or what your website does; you just happen to have that specific vulnerability and they get in.

Hackers will often just try to break any website, it often does not matter what they get into, as long as they’re making some progress. They might run the same attack on 2 million websites over the course of a month or two, and just try to break into as many as they can. They might be doing this to try and find other vulnerabilities. For example, they might try to hack a website that uses E-commerce tools, in an attempt to obtain credit card details or intercept transactions. A hacker may not care about financial objectives at all; they may simply be trying to deface websites and put their logo or brand on it, to raise awareness of their group. They might have a message they’re trying to spread.

Long story short, we don’t care about the objectives of hackers. What’s important is to protect your website. There are two ways to protect yourself and ensure you’re safe if this does happen to you:

  1. Being ready in case you’re hacked and/or defaced. To be ready, you want to ensure you backup your website often. Make sure you know how to restore your website, too. I recommend using Updraft. You can use other plugins or other methods, but again: make sure you know how to restore your website.
  2. Attempting to prevent your WordPress site from being hacked or defaced. As I’ve mentioned, plugins like Limit Login Attempts will temporarily block users who are trying to access wp-admin over and over. There are other security plugins too, like Word Fence.

Once your website is defaced or other, if you don’t have a backup of your website, you may be sunk. The first thing to do is try to get into the wp-admin website login area. In most cases, if your website has been hacked or defaced, you likely won’t be able to get into this area. In order to restore your website, you’ll likely have to completely delete the wordpress instance, and then create a new one with a new database. Once you do that, you can then re-install Updraft and run a restore. As long as you have a backup, restore that backup and you’re off to the races. Try to figure out how your website was hacked and protect against it in the future. Using a plugin like Limit Login Attempts, as I mentioned earlier in the article, is an excellent way to keep an eye on any brute force attackers or script kiddies trying to knock on your door.

Setting up automatic backups using Updraft

Updraft is a really nice and easy to use WordPress plugin. I use it for all of my WordPress websites. Even better, is to set up automated backups using Updraft. You don’t need a premium version of Updraft to use this feature either. You can do all of it with the Updraft free plugin.

To get started, install Updraft if you haven’t already. It’s one of the first plugins I install with any new website.

  1. Login to your WordPress wp-admin area (yoursite.com/wp-admin), then go to the plugins area.
  2. Click on Add New

Add new Login in WordPress

 

3. Search for Updraft

 

Updraft WordPress Plugin

4. Click on Install. In this picture you see update because I’ve already got it installed.

5. Once installed, click Activate.

6. Log back into WordPress and click on Plugins.

7. Under Updraft, click on Settings

 

 

 

 

Posted in Habits for Success, Web Hosting & Design, WordPress Support | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Easiest Ways to Make Money Online in 2021

Posted on May 1, 2021 by admin

So, this is a great question. At the time of writing this article in April of 2021, I would say the three below methods are probably the easiest ways to make money at this time. Two of the methods I describe – advertising through Google AdSense, and using Amazon’s affiliate program, have been around for a while. They are two of the most reliable ways to earn an income online, assuming you have a website and you have some traffic visiting your website. If you have never built a website before and don’t know how to use AdSense or Amazon, check out my article on making money online on your own website. There you can start learning about search engine optimization, finding a passion for writing content online, and strategies to make your site #1 on Google keyword related searches that are relevant to your niche.

Running Google AdSense ads on your website

Running Google AdSense ads is likely one of the easiest ways to make money online, assuming that you have a website to run the ads on. If you have a website but don’t have much traffic, check out my article on how to increase website traffic. If you don’t have a website at all and need to start from scratch, check out my article on buying a domain and hosting, and then if you want an easy way to build a website, I recommend using WordPress for your first website.

Once you have a website running with some traffic, sign up for Google AdSense. I would generally recommend having at least 50-100 unique site visitors per day. I would also recommend using Analytics or any other traffic suite you want (like Jetpack for WordPress) to observe what your top pages are, as well as how many pages a site visitor will visit on their visit to your website. You want to look at conversion and browsing time. If site visitors stay on your website for a long time and look at lots of pages, then you know that you have good unique content on your site that people are wanting to read more. If people are quickly leaving your site and only reading one page before leaving, you may want to review where they are exiting the site – there’s ways to track that, also.

Anyways, coming back to money money with AdSense now. AdSense now provides “auto ads,” so it’s really easy to get their ad code loaded up on your site. If you’re using WordPress, Google now has a plugin for WordPress called the Google Site Kit. It will help you to run ads, get analytics up and running and whatever else you want from Google basically. Having it all in one place now is pretty awesome and makes it a lot easier, then having to load up all of the Google services you want individually.

You also have the option of placing ads manually instead of automatic ads. Google isn’t terrible at placing ads on its own, but you may find that you want the ad to show up in the same place every single time as opposed to dynamic placement. With Google auto ads, they always move around on the page. That may work for your site, and it may not. Either way, as long as you’ve got some good traffic coming to your site, you can make some money easily with AdSense. Just keep traffic coming to your site, build your site organically by adding new pages often, and as your traffic grows, so will your earnings.

Amazon affiliate program

The other way to monetize your traffic is to have Amazon associate links on your website. Depending upon what your niche is, you can find relevant products to sell on your website. You place links and images for relevant products, and when site visitors go to Amazon and buy that product, you make a commission. The commissions usually range anywhere from 5 to 8 percent or more. Amazon has a scale where if you drive more revenue in a month, your commission rate will increase. However, at the start of the next month, the scale resets back to zero again. So you have to drive that revenue again the next month in order to hit that bonus commission rate again.

One of the things many webmasters will say about the Amazon affiliate program, is that the conversion rate is very good. A lot of the time, a site visitor will click a product link. They will be sent to Amazon, where they may buy that product or something else. Even if your site visitor does not buy the product you were advertising, Amazon will still give you a commission on everything that they buy in that “instance” where they hit your website. Pretty cool, right? So all you need to do is send that traffic to Amazon, and be rewarded as long as they purchase something. It could be totally unrelated to your website and your niche.

Note: The Amazon Affiliate program is selling Amazon products, and earning a commission. In essence, you don’t need to do any real selling – just send traffic through web links to Amazon. Sooner or later, a site visitor is going to buy something. Don’t get this confused with the Amazon Seller Central marketplace, where you sell products of your own, take care of the shipping, and any returns. The difference between these programs is night sand day, and it’s important to keep that in mind.

Online Surveys

So the above methods mentioned require you to have your own website. But what if you don’t have your own website and have no intention to start one? Online surveys require no commitment, and the time investment isn’t the same. If you want to just walk away from online surveys, and not continue anymore, you can anytime. It’s not the same when you pour time into online ventures like building websites.

One thing to understand is that doing online surveys works similar to a job works. As long as you’re there at the computer, providing input, then the output is getting whatever form of currency that that online survey provides. It might be money, but more likely it is some form of points system that’s redeemable for other things.

Make Money Online in 2021

Online surveys are an easy way to spend time (or waste it however you look at it), but it’s not a residual form of online income. That’s important to note, however there’s also 0 commitment, other then your time. Pros and cons.

In comparison, if you’re able to earn an income online via building a website, this eventually can become a residual income for you. That means as long as you spend a little bit of time here and there, your website will continue to earn even while you sleep. It’s running 24/7, generating income for you. Online surveys are not residual, there’s no way for them to make money for you while you sleep. Unless you build some kind of bot that can fill out the online surveys for you, but that’s beyond the scope of this website.

Posted in Guides to Make Money Online, Make Money Online | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Issues with GoDaddy Technical Support

Posted on April 12, 2021 by admin

So, I have to say I’m not super happy with GoDaddy Technical Support. I’ve been with a GoDaddy reseller for ages now. The only reason I probably haven’t switched is the price point (however, I’m probably paying more now then most other hosts as I have two packages) and the frustration of having sites offline while I’m moving web hosts.

In terms of moving my WordPress sites, I likely could move them all with a simple backup and restore. I use Updraft which is a free WordPress plugin; backups and restore are a breeze. Moving sites though means they’re down for a bit while I have to move them. I’ve also found before that when I setup my SSL certificates with CloudFlare (it’s free, although it’s not the same level of SSL encryption you get from a certificate) it can take a day before you’re able to see the site secured with an SSL padlock. So, a little bit of downtime, some lost earnings; a good bit of work to move everything over. Then of course there’s always some issue that requires more troubleshooting then you anticipated.

The Trouble with Moving Web Hosts

The idea of having to move web hosts is I’d only like to have to do it once. Also, if I move away from Go Daddy I have to renew my domains with another host either when I move or at renewal time. If I really want to leave GoDaddy completely, it could be a bit of a hassle to move everything over. I need to do it eventually, though, once I find something better.

Being with a Go Daddy reseller means it’s not “actually GoDaddy.” I found this out the hard way when attempting to buy a domain on flippa. The guy I dealt with was either an idiot or a scammer, and eventually it wasn’t worth my time for a $200 transaction so I told him I was done messing around and to refund my money. But the guy tried to do the Go Daddy thing where it just sends you an email you can accept for the domain transfer. I was excited to take possession of the domain I had purchased, but I found that I wasn’t able to use the Go Daddy link.

Some frustrated calls to Go Daddy tech support later advised me I couldn’t do it this way and the owner had to provide me with unlock codes and unlock the domain. I tried to explain that to the seller and he couldn’t figure it out, although he had sold a bunch of other domains. The problem was though he didn’t try; likely easily could had resolved it if he called tech support.

None of the above though is why I am unhappy with Go Daddy tech support. The reason I am unhappy with them is because they sell you a solution to fix every problem. Most of the time, what they sell you is something you don’t need I have found. Their solution to everything is to upgrade the package; they won’t even do a simple reboot of your server – they can’t because most setups are shared servers, so “rebooting” your server means a bunch of other websites would also get interrupted.

GoDaddy Support likes to Upgrade your Package…Don’t Expect Much Else

Recently I found that after they upgraded my package, they had simply rebooted whatever my package was running on. I could tell because all of the resource counts went down to zero. On another call, they sold me a scanning tool (this was after I received a message that I had had files injected / uploaded into my site). I had removed all of the files mentioned in the upload report, their scan tool found nothing and didn’t really work well. I cancelled it after a month or two.

GoDaddy support is usually vague about a problem and don’t offer much insight. If you’re intermediate or advanced, don’t expect their reps to provide much answers for a problem other then “you need to upgrade your package.” They don’t look at log files, or can help much to troubleshoot DNS issues etc. Sometimes they may offer tools or resources, but I would anticipate they are commissioned as they like to sell things to you whenever possible. This is after paying the per minute rate to call the United States, as there is no 1.800 number. You have to call Arizona.

Offline Times / Downtime with Go Daddy

With uptime monitoring setup on my sites, I constantly get alerts about my sites being offline. Go Daddy servers generally reboot every day or every night. Generally this is 15 minutes. No problem. But what bothers me is the downtimes at night for sometimes 1-2 hours at a time. Generally I see this 3 or so times a week. Calling in will … you guessed it, result in someone trying to upgrade your package. This is after waiting in a que and paying to wait in that que, because again you have to call a number in Arizona – no 1-800 number to call.

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Why it’s easier to write a blog then operate an online store

Posted on April 12, 2021 by admin

Note: I’ll admit, that this post is probably a little bit biased. I do apologize about that. I certainly write from my own personal experience in this article, and that tends to lean to one side. The side I tend to lean to is someone who’s annoyed with modern day society returning items that clearly have nothing wrong with them. Having an online store on a platform like Amazon Seller Central likely is how I became jaded, and I’ve heard other platforms out there like Etsy give you a little more control over your own store’s capabilities.

The one thing I would say to anyone who is thinking of getting into their own online business, especially if it’s an online storefront – read reviews and do lots of research before you choose to settle on a particular platform. Having your own website and building your own e-commerce store there can give you a lot more flexibility, however this also brings it’s own set of trials and tribulations. For example, when you run  your own online store and do all your own credit card processing, you have to be much more on the lookup for people use fake credit cards and/or forwarding addresses, as well as PO boxes.

Again, do lots of research – and don’t let jaded me tell you how to run your online business. Any business that anyone runs is unique to the person who owns it, starts it and builds it, and depending upon your market niche, you may be able to find a spot where you’re able to operate efficiently and without too many challenges.

As the title says, that’s essentially what this post is about. I’ve always found it easier to simply write an online blog because all you have to do is write content. If your website becomes popular, you can just run ads on it. There’s a bit more to it then that, but really that’s all you need to do to earn a dollar. Once the website is earning money, you don’t need to do any of the things that you have to do when you run an online store.

Running an online store means the way you make money is shipping a product, and processing returns. It can be a headache, especially when dealing with shipping issues. Some online platforms are better then others. Running your own Etsy store, as an example, may potentially provide you more freedom and more security then using a platform like Amazon Seller Central. I’m not saying that this is the case, I’m saying it might be the case depending upon which market segment you’re operating in.

When you deal with returns you could end up being more of a psychologist then someone processing returns. Sometimes reasons for returns can be frustrating to deal with, but it’s still something you have to do because you run your own online store. If you’re able to set your own rules for your online store, that’s always best. Owning and operating a www.com means you can also run your website as your own e-commerce store. If you do this, you make all your own rules and don’t have to deal with potentially ridiculous RMA requests, or insufficient shipping credits to cover the cost to ship. Again, Amazon Seller Central does not provide you with enough costs for shipping to generally cover the shipping costs (as an example).

The Least Amount of Work Required to Make Money Online is Better

Ultimately, if you’re able to do less work to make a second income it’s much better. Running an online store can be a pain. It can take work. Building a website takes work, too. But if you do it right, you can earn a residual income from it, where you just do touch-ups and add new content here and there. Running a store requires input, or work constantly.

Wix and Shopify are supposed to be a couple of the best platforms out there for your online store in 2021. Shopify starts out at $29/month. If you were to host your own website and buy a domain, you’re looking at around $10-$30/month or more and also $10-$20/year for the domain (if you can find a .com you like that is not already owned by another webmaster). So Shopify sounds like not a bad deal, especially if it saves some of the hassle of setting up e-commerce software and a payment processor.

Posted in Make Money Online, Online Marketplaces for Buy & Sell | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment