Have you seen Dreamhost coupon codes like these?

• Saves50 – save $50
• 3Free4Life – three extra free domains
• bizandblog – one extra free domain and a cash discount

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 coupon 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!

Shared hosting provides a lot of flexibility, a sense of ownership, and a good price, so why am I building websites on free web hosts, too?

Well, Blogspot and Squidoo offer unique web creation software and unique modes of marketing web pages. Each community offers insight, links, and a new perspective on how to approach the internet business.

• Jacksonville SEO – Jacksonville SEO is a collection of about 20 articles I wrote as I was thinking out a business plan that will soon be fully operational. The first trick was to actually rank for Jacksonville SEO as a search key word, now I need to set up a professional landing page offering the services and providing contact info.
• Free College Aid – A place for collecting links to other interesting education blogs on the net, and its been a great place to store drafts and ideas for later posts at my main college blog.
• Politics Undergroud – Again, a great tool for me to collect links of interesting political opinions in the blogosphere. When I’m lucky I can get the article’s original author to come back for some more comments on the topic. The internet has no doubt done wonders for the civil politics debate.
• Gluten Blog – No wheat – its gluten-free for me. The Gluten Blog is a place for me to record recipes on the fly and store links of my favorite Celiac resources.
• Jacksonville Artists – A side-project to help my artist friends and of course the love of my life Aisling 🙂

Squidoo sites:

• Free College Lens – More free college resources for students, parents, and anyone considering continuing their college education
• Website Building – A Squidoo lens web page about building web pages. Including a more thorough introduction to Squidoo and free hosting services.
• News and Politics – News feeds, debate, politics, news, what else do you need?
• Florida Bright Futures – A lens about the history and possible future of the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship program. Also links to a requirements and Q&A page I’m running on shared hosting.
• Dreamhost Coupon – If you’re interested in setting up a shared hosting account with Dreamhost (the same company hosting the JohnMcDonald.info domain) this Squidoo lens includes some discount coupons that can help you save some cash.
• Web hosting types – Free, shared, dedicated? What is it all about and how can you use different types to maximize your online strategy?
• Search Scholarships – My first lens, one of my first websites of my own. A summary of the scholarship hunting process with links to more detailed accounts of the specific steps involved.
• Website SEO – Of course, if you’re going to be building all of these websites, you have to make sure that someone sees them, right!?
• College Financial Aid – A primer for college financial aid, links to free resources, and tips on applying for the FAFSA.

Building websites is cheap (free in many cases) and its fun. Even without going overboard with commercialization, it is possible to make a few dollars in the process. In many way, websites are the new media publishing tool that revolutionizes communications much like the original printing presses did. Prior to the press, you would need to hire highly educated individuals to perform transcription, and a well-illustrated book could be worth a small fortune.

Now if anything, we have the reverse problem. Since the cost of publishing is so low, we’ve probably reached a point where a lot of the information floating around is of diluted value. The good news is that the total amount of available information has never been higher – and the democratic nature of web 2.0 applications promises an idealized internet where the collective wisdom organizes and assigns value to competing content.

Don’t just call me an optimist, I think of website building as a modern newspaper or television station. An individual, with proper distribution of his/her ideas and a sufficiently compelling argument, can have a profound impact on public perception of events & debates. Typical barriers to entry like limited broadcast frequencies, federal licensing, and expensive distribution mechanisms are gone. Marketing has gone viral, and what is left is a simplified game of wits, where ideas and opinions go head to head with fewer distractions. (As long as you can ignore the trolls and spammers, anyway)