This weekend was bit frustrating for me.  I spent way too much time setting up a new niche site using a new premium WordPress theme that eventually I abandoned and re-built using a free theme.  The most frustrating part was the fact I spent so much time and some decent money for the premium theme AND I wasn’t able to get a refund.

You see, early last week I had someone recommend to me a new premium theme that was designed to allow webmasters to build custom affiliate websites faster.   I’m all for anything that helps me to build my sites faster so I checked it out and it looked like it was pretty cool.  I decided to spring for the license, which was well over $100 and downloaded it.

After getting it installed, I began configuring the super cool affiliate theme and was real excited to get my new niche site up and running in record time.  I had the content I just needed to get the site up.  Needless to say I spent several days, and hours each day fiddling with  the darn thing.  Eventually I really felt like this new theme wasn’t for me.

I’m a fairly technical guy and have no trouble diving into the html, css, or the php within a theme or WordPress itself in order to get the site to layout, function, and appear the way I want it to. I guess that may be MY problem.  With this super fast configuration theme I was bound by the theme itself to place page elements in pre-defined locations, use specific banner sizes, page widths etc. Needless to say it wasn’t saving me any time at all!

I quickly shot an email off to the creator asking very politely for a refund. I figured hey this is IM and everyone offers a refund, or so I thought.  I guess I’m spoiled by the onslaught of offers I see everyday offering an IRONCLAD Guarantee and such.  Because I was a bit shocked to see that the creator was not going to refund my money.

Honestly I can totally understand the authors point of view as there is no way for him to know that I will never use the product again or to “return” the product.  He would just have to trust me.

So here I am again, stuck with a product that I’m never going to use and I’ve wasted another $100+ bucks on hype and hyperbole.

Am I just spoiled with all the current guarantees and refunds?  Should the creator take the loss and give refunds?  Should I just accept it for what it is and deal with it?   We all loose money in this business, many folks hundreds more than my mere $100.

What are your thoughts?  What are your horror stories of lost money on IM products, software, and “SECRETS to overnight success”?  Leave a comment and let me know. Misery loves company and I’d love to hear your story!

Yesterday was an interesting day.  I decided to upgrade my Hostgator shared hosting account to a reseller account.  Now that the migration and upgrade is complete, I’m REALLY glad I did. Its a little more expensive than the standard Baby Croc ($24.99 versus the $9.99/mo plan), but this really sets me up for growth and gives me a whole lot more control and visibility into whats going on with my sites. Plus I just might be able to have my hosting paid for by doing a bit of reselling!

The upgrade went fairly smooth and I really have to thank the folks at Hostgator. They are extremely good at what they do, fast and very professional.  You see when you go from a shared hosting account to a reseller account they have to basically do a fork lift move of your entire account, files, databases and everything and move it to one of their bigger clustered servers.

The upgrade can happen in one of two ways. They can either create a brand new account on a new server all by it self.  This would essentially augment your existing shared hosting account and you could move sites over at your leisure.  The second option would be to move your entire existing shared hosting account at once over to be an account of its own under your new reseller account.  This was the option I chose.  They move all of you files and databases to the new account.  You verify that everything is working correctly and then swing your dns settings for your sites to point to their new ip address.

The biggest key to a big move like this is to verify your sites are working BEFORE  you change your DNS.  This is so important to avoid any down time.  And verifying your sites are working is very easy to do. All you have to do is edit your host file on your laptop or desktop to point to the new ip address.

Not to get too technical on you, but every computer has what is called a host file. On Windows machines this file is located in C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.   Its just a simple text file and can be viewed or edited with notepad.  Here is what one looks like.

# Copyright (c) 1993-2006 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names.
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on indiv
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
#      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server
#       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host

# localhost name resolution is handle within DNS itself.
#    127.0.0.1       localhost
#    ::1             localhost

In this file every line begins with a “#” sign.  A “#” sign means that this is a comment and tells the system to ignore the line.  At the end of the file there are two lines for locahost.  Right after these is where you can enter your new ip address and domain name for the site you want to test. Hostgator sent this information to me in an email when the migration was complete.

So for example, when I tested my blog I put the following at the very end:

174.132.194.222           www.www.joesinternetmarketing.com

Then I go back to my browser and pull up my site.  Your browser will look to the host file FIRST before it looks to DNS to resolve your domain name, so this new address will be the one that you can see.  This is very cool because you can test the new account all while the rest of the world still goes to the old location (the old ip address)

For the most part the biggest issues I had were with database user permissions and in two case my existing database user name was too long and had to be shorten to be fewer than 16 characters.

Now that my new resellet account is all setup I ready to go.  I can now be a full fledged hosting provider or just use my reseller account to have more flexibility and security with my websites.

Here are just a couple of reason why you would want to have a reseller account.

• More disk space
• Bandwidth
• You can also put each of your sites in their own account
• You don’t have to deal with addon domains
• If your account gets hacked they only have access to that one site.
• Skeleton files to automatically create new accounts with WordPress (or any other software )already installed and configured the way you want it!

Are you considering upgrading to a reseller account?  Do know of some other reasons you would want a reseller account?  Do you have some good reasons NOT to?  Leave a comment and let us know.  Comments bring website to life. We would love to hear from you!

Thanks

A lot of Internet Marketers I know use RoboForm to help them to prefill out forms and remember login information, bank information, etc. But what if your not at your computer? Or you don’t have your keyfob? (Roboform comes in a key fob version)

I briefly mentioned this inyesterday’s post but one answer to this is with myVidoop.com. myVidoop.com uses OpenID to save and remember any username/password combo you choose on just about any sight.

myVidoop.com is a free and secure single sign-on to the web on any site using OpenID . What this means is that you sign on once with Vidoop’s image sequence identification system from a browser choosen by you to be secure and all other logins are taken care. Your identify is secure and the tools for managing your account are all provided to you for free from Vidoop.

There are also plug-ins for both I.E. and Firefox to enable MyVidoop to be used on ANY website login.

Overall Vidoop is a cool idea and very convenient if you have a lot of passwords and really get sick of trying to remember them all. Check it out and leave of comment, tell me what you think?