It’s now two weeks since Wakish Wonderz is hosted with HostIcan; I explained how I did this process in the previous post: Successfully Changed Web Host - How I did When Changing From One Host To The Other. So far so good. As a HostIcan client, and hence an affiliate, I will keep you updated and posted with its reviews and promo codes or coupons whenever it’s the right time to do so.

Today, I will offer you two promo codes which can be used with the package Base-Host and Tera-Host. For a quick aperçu of these two packages, see the image below, else for a detailed view, kindly visit the complete hostican shared plans here!

Hostican Coupons - Grab It Here!

1) For Hostican Coupon 20% Off, use: spring-12
2) For Hostican Coupon $50 off, use: BestHosting-12

See The Difference In Price - Screenshots Of Plans With Coupons

1.A) Hostican Coupon 20% Off - Base-Host

1.B) Hostican Coupon $50 Off - Base-Host

2.A) Hostican Coupon 20% Off - Tera-Host

2.B) Hostican Coupon $50 Off - Tera-Host

Just a quick note:
In this post, I included my hostican referral link. Should you decide to purchase hosting with HostIcan, I would appreciate if you use my referral. In any case, if you don’t want to, your decision is honoured.

Today, while I was reading an amazingly wonderful article titled “Are You A People Pleaser?“, written by Kelly, I remembered my own experience when I made my first steps as an online text-based game programmer/administrator.

I’m sure most of us have read a similar quote or philosophy, but may be not all of us have really experienced it. That’s why I will take this opportunity to share my own experience and show you the moral or conclusion drawn.

The Big Start As An Administrator And Coder

The first time I got the opportunity or privilege of being both an administrator and a programmer of an online text-base game, I felt like I was the most happiest man of this world; since I just love playing such web game systems. To have the chance of taking up the responsibility of actually handling it, was just one of my dreams come true. I owed this mainly because I seemed to have a very special feeling, emotion and care for that community and partly due to the fact that I was among the top players of that game (I ranked #1 for at least 2.5 or 3 years). I was really enjoying the big chance of making new friends from all over the world. All of them were just wonderful friends and players. I still remember, everyday, it used to be a must to communicate with each other and on the game parliaments. We had different countries and hence Prime Ministers, in the game and most of them treated me so well and it was just marvelous.

The Big Mistake Of Pleasing Everyone - I Was Unexpectedly A Big Failure

Since I was a friend and colleague (ingame) of most of the players, I was actually working too hard (not to say working my ass-off like a fool), to please everyone. Yeah, I was madly trying and giving my level best to please EVERYONE. I, thus, felt and assumed that everyone should be happy with my earnest effort.

But alas, a small group of players developed a different mentality. They thought I was siding with my friends and partly jealous for whatever reasons. They even thought I was a corrupted administrator. This gradually brought havoc in the community as those players, who by now madly hated me, strived to make the game go downhill until it disrupts

As a young administrator (some 2years back), and baring the fact that it was my first ever experience, I was really badly hurt and at some point I even abondonned everything. You might say I was a coward to turn back, but believe me, you cannot imagine what was being said about me and what I was undergoing; it was like hell. People who once loved me, was now against me. I think one of the catalyst in this process was while constructing a management team in the game and you know how elections goes..

The Big Lesson I learned

I took a lot of time (months) thinking about why things went wrong and how I could solve it. But the main point which I realized (and which many of the players told me) was that I was a fool to try to please everyone. This time, when I will come back with my new online game soon before the end of this year 2008 (yes, I will be back), I will surely make things the way I want it to be. You can never please everyone; it’s best to make something generally accepted and move on with your own concepts and creativity.

Use Your Pitfalls To Lead Yourself To Success

It is very important that you know what mistakes you made in the past, and use it to shape your future success convincingly. It is undoubted that when you fall due to some reasons, you will not fall again if you’ve mastered what made you fell down the last time.

Before I end up, I want to share with you my all-time favorite quote related to success:

=> Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese Strategist, wrote in his book “Art of War”:
“Know thyself, know thy enemy and in a hundred battle, win a hundred victories!”

How about you, have you experienced any harsh moments like me? I would love to hear yours..

Text-Link-Ads, aka TLA, has just introduced a new text-link system called “inLinks“. (You can read about The History Of Text Link Ads (TLA) for some background information)

What Are inLinks?

Quoted from tla:

- inLinks is an ‘in-content ads’ program for both Publishers and Advertisers.

Inlinks allows you to purchase links within the content area on web pages. You search for instances of your top keywords and replace those static keywords with a hyperlink back to your website. There simply is not a more natural paid link on the market.

What are InLink Futures?

InLinks Futures offers the same features as our regular InLinks product but you pre pay for your ad to be placed so when we find a brand new post with your keywords, your ad will go live instantly with the newly published post! This allows you to get your link on the homepage of the blog which is key in search engines finding your link.

Grab This Exclusive 15% OFF Coupon

For advertisers, here is a golden chance to get a 15% OFF for purchases of inLinks.
The coupon is: Inlinks
You should enter the code as is!

A Surprise For Publishers - Wordpress Bloggers

Tla also provides a Wordpress plugin, which you can download on your publisher panel. Tla provides a very simple and straight forward 2-step instruction to help you in this process. This plugin seems very cool, I just tried it on another blog. The inline links are “nofollow” which should not pause any kind of problem with the new google requirements.

You remember last time I wrote about Revealing My Experience With How Inactivity Affects My Blog’s Growth where I shared an experiment which is quite unique around the blogosphere and which needs a lot of guts since the ranking of my blog is at stake. But I don’t mind trying out things even if it’s hazardous for my blog. The key point is I have enough trust and conviction with Wakish Wonderz.

While this might seem quite early for a follow-up, I consider it’s important to do so right now. You might recall I said the traffic of Wakish Wonderz has rised 2 times to what it used to be before the experiment. To prove this, here’s the new stats observations:

Stats Before Experiment Starts
1) TECHNORATI: Top 98,000
2) ALEXA: Top 270,000

Stats Caused By The Experiment:
1) TECHNORATI: approximately at 450,000
2) ALEXA: At 1,040,000

Stats At The Time Of This Post
1) TECHNORATI: approximately at 295,396
2) ALEXA: 1,013,000

Net Change:
=> TECHNORATI: +155,000
=> ALEXA: +27,000

While the result above is not good enough, I think it’s just positive for this short recovering period (from the experiment). Technorati is quite good on the whole and Alexa rank really does take a lot of time to stabilize. Based on my present traffic, I expected Alexa to rise more positively, but it seems to be pretty slow to gain back in the cool ranking edge.

Points to be noted:
=> Alexa ranking is something which needs a lot of work and patience as opposed to PR and technorati. The positive growth of alexa ranks depends primarily on the nature of your traffic. (I might write something on Alexa soon)

Do you have anything to share with us? I’m sure you do, so feel free to use the comment form below.

Yesterday, I took a big step to changing Web Host. I was previously hosted at XtraOrbit which was a great disappointment and not worth my money. I had 5 more months on my paid contract with them, but I could not withstand staying there anymore. I will soon make a review of it. Anyway, I’m now hosted at HostIcan. Infact I emailed quite a lot of web hosts before making that decision. I wanted to go with Media Temple’s GS, but I recently read a lot of negative reviews while googling and besides they simply never replied to my email which is pretty shocking for a web host of its calibre.

Hostican Offers A Wide Choice

HostIcan has several plans. You can start with Base-Host going upwards to Tera-Host, VPS, Dedicated, Extreme..etc..etc (I will write a review later on). So, you have the choice of upgrading your account anytime, so no worries.

Experience Makes Things Easy

It is now the 3rd time that I’m changing web host. The first time was great pain, the 2nd time was average, but the 3rd time, that is yesterday, everything went out super smooth. This is greatly because of the experience and maturity that I’m accumulating through time. I have always been deploying my installations by myself, whether be it forum deployment or blogs. Despite the fact that HostIcan offers to handle the transfer for you, I insisted to do everything on my own.
TIP: They will even buy out your previous hosting contract.

The Actual Transfer - STEP 1

The transfer was foreseen to be on sunday after lunch. So, since saturday, I have been working a lot with my previous host and I did the following:
1) Made a backup of my recent blog database. PhpMyAdmin helps you do that with the “Export” button. This basically lets you download your database in the form of a ‘file.sql’
2) I downloaded my own custom made theme via FTP
3) Downloaded my plugins too, to make sure everything stays the same.
4) And finally downloaded everything important lying on the root of my domain.

STEP 2

After these initial steps done, I immediately went to my domain account to change the nameservers to point to HostIcan’s nameservers.

 Note that domain names takes long to propagate to another nameserver, aka NS.

I actually change NS for four of my domains, yesterday. Wakish.com and wakish.info took around 19hrs to propagate, while the other two domains took only around 6hrs and 30mins respectively. I have not been able to relate why one of them took as short as 30 mins while the others took longer (normal time frame for propagation). Will figure that out soon hopefuly.

STEP 3

After all set, I rushed to buy hosting at my new host, HostIcan. It took around 30mins for my account to be active. Note that HostIcan provides 1 free domain name which is used as my main domain on my account. Once set, I rushed and did the following:

1) Created other addon domains to host my blog..etc, for example I created addon for wakish.info - Wakish Wonderz
2) Restored database for wakish wonderz. This is as simple as using the import button on PhpMyAdmin. But I prefer doing this DB restore by executing the scripts via the SQL console.
3) Uploaded and Extracted wordpress package.
4) I then restored my theme and plugins directory as they were from my previous host.

==> Last, I then configured robots.txt, which I consider very important.

That’s it! Now it was time to wait for my domains to land home .
The next day, that is monday, when I accessed my domain, everything was normal, running as if no transfer took place. That’s why I said the transfer for this 3rd time was more than perfect.

A small question that you might have: “Wakish, but is there the need to re-install wordpress?”
=> Well, if you do as I said above, there’s absolutely no need for an install. Since an install in essence is simply creating and hooking a database with the php/html pages. As you read above, I already ‘placed’ the wordpress files, the database, themes and plugins. So everything would run ‘as was’ and you can login with the same name/password as before. Is that not super cool?

Has any of you changed web host, how was your experience?