John McDonald

Dreamhost and Bluehost are the two web hosting services I’m using right now to get my internet marketing work off the ground. Hosting is an important decision because the minor details of the company’s policies and agreements make all of the difference in how your websites will be able to operate, what amount of resources you’ll be able to use, and basically, whether or not your websites will be online at all.

This site is hosted on Dreamhost, and since its been up and running the load times and up-time have been great. My education bookmarking website is also hosted on Dreamhost, and I have to say this has been great. Some other shared hosts won’t allow beta software like Pligg, but this one will even install it for you. I had a hard time manually extracting the Pligg files and setting them up properly, so I set the website up in the advanced automatic installation mode and installed a pre-coded visual template. All I had to do was find certain parts in the existing style sheets to make a few modifications regarding the text content of the website. If you can use a Google search to determine which files have template areas and text you want to change, editing this to make your site unique and personal isn’t much different than writing any other digital document.

If you’re signing up for Dreamhot check out this Dreamhost code list for all the discounts available. The best Dreamhost code depends on your website’s software and traffic types, just like the decision of who is the best website host for your plans. Dreamhost has excellent prices, few restrictions on the type of content you post (as long as it is legal!), and they offer a lot of options for server-side software installation that’s useful for new webmasters like myself. I would definitely recommend this for anyone looking to get started.

What’s up with the discount code? Well, anyone who signs up for the rewards program can create their own discounts and get paid when someone uses it! That’s right, you could make money giving people discounts. I figure that’s a pretty good deal for everyone involved because its a service that I use and enjoy myself and so have no reservations about recommending. You can learn more about Dreamhost’s rewards program here, or even sign up if you want!

One of the great benefits of the server-side software revolution known as web 2.0 is that it allows users to contribute and collaborate in building websites and organizing information resources.

By now, most people are probably familiar with the blog format of combining news and content posts with open commenting system. Mainstream newspapers have incorporated a lot of blogging technology into their own websites, allowing a broader discussion and more interaction between the writers and readers.

Another 2.0 breakthrough that hasn’t quite yet matured is social bookmarking and news submission communities. Once users register, they can submit links to interesting websites based on a selection of categories relevant to the topic of the social bookmarking site. Once a new page is submitted, other users can view the links, vote, or comment on the quality of the site. The best sites will make it to the front page, and the process creates a democratic ranking system that helps filter the noise out of the internet without necessarily decreasing or compressing the total volume. The site provides its users with a constantly updated front page of the best of the internet - and great publishers can get great exposure if their articles are particularly interesting and entertaining.

One area it hasn’t caught on as much is in education-specific fields. The educational information on the internet is incredibly fragmented, and there is no real central hub where it can be accessed, discussed, and prioritized. This is where my 2.0 education bookmarking site Scholar Links comes into being. At the moment it isn’t much more than a beta site built on beta software, but as it grows it will be a place where the democracy of the internet can rate, promote, and discuss some of the literally millions of valuable educational links on the internet. If you find something of worth, you can share it here. If you publish your own education site, it could be a useful source of education niche backlinks.