It never ceases to amaze me, how competitive the hosting niche is. The hosting company offer more and more in order to attract new customers, but I think the best deal I have seen so far was offered by Easy CGI hosting. They offer free web hosting for 1 year! Yes, absolutely free, as a part of their promotion, which means if you follow the URL above and sign up, you get 12 months of advanced shared hosting. The Good thing is, we are talking about high quality hosting service, as they provide support around the click and 99.9% Guaranteed Uptime.

Easy CGI is one of the leading providers of hosting service today, and offers everything you might need for your website, including One-Step-Script-Installation tool, (for installing some of the popular applications such as blog, forum, etc) as well as detailed Web Traffic Reports. So, the one year of free web hosting, which you receive through this special promotion does not mean you get less features. You will be provided with:

• Windows 2003 Hosting
• 350 GB of Disk Space
• 3500 GB of monthly Bandwidth
• Community Server Script Installation
• Site Builder
• 24/7 Phone and Email Support

You can easily set up an OSCommerce website, open your online shop, web community, blog or whatever comes to your mind — absolutely at no cost, as with such massive amount of bandwidth monthly, you are unlike to ever go offline. You can choose between 3 plans — Advanced, Advanced x2 or Advanced x4 (which normally costs 26$ a month), or alternatively park your domain for free. Remember, this is a domain hosting, i.e. you cannot get a sub-domain, so you need to either transfer your existing domain to Easy CGI, or register a new one for 10$ a year. As far as I understood this promotion is only valid for August, so hurry before it’s over!

This post contains sponsored links.

Yahoo hosting is considered to be among the best web hosts on the Internet and rightly so. It’s a well established company, with good reputation that provides a highest quality hosting for both professional and beginner webmasters. I just wrote a comprehensive overview of it on Host 2 Get blog, explaining why Yahoo is the best solution.

Up until recently, most of us did know that Yahoo web hosting service is great, but not everyone could afford it. It used to be rather pricy, with 25$ set up fee and pretty high prices for a comparably small disk space and bandwidth. However, now that the competition is tough and big amounts of bandwidth are no longer a luxury, Yahoo cut their prices down. Set up fee was waived, and every once in a while they offer miscellaneous deals.

One of them, is a low cost domain registration, click below for more details.

1.99$ for one year of Top Level Domain registration is as cheap as you can get, and this is only the first part of their on going deal. Don’t forget that you register your domain with a well known and establish company, not one that offers a domain as a bait to get you to sign up with them and pay annually in advance. Yahoo guarantees support and my logic is, they have been around for so many years now, how fat is the chance they would close such a huge corporation down?

At present, hosting prices are cut in 35%! Yes, that is pretty impressive as well, not forgetting you get more disk space and bandwidth then they used to provided before. I’d really recommend Yahoo to both professionals and beginners, you can read more about it in my full review of Yahoo hosting. Beginners get a site builder and all the ready-to-use features for putting a site live online, while professional webmasters get a stable host they can rely on, with excellent uptime and great support. I’d really recommend this company as been both reliable and affordable.

Paid to post community is becoming a trend recently, most people ask themselves, why to post for free, while in many forums you can get paid for it. There are normally 3 types of paid to post communities.

First, those who have a fixed rate for posts and pay by paypal or any other online payment method. The price varies from 1 cents, up to 20 cents, depending on the size of the board and admin’s pocket.

Second are the “shared revenue” communities, where a member can input his AdSense code into a specified field in his cPanel, then when he makes a new thread or replies the last, there are 50% of chances for his Adsense ads to show up.

Third is a more general type of “paid communities”, as the member do not get a direct monetary payment, but are provided with miscellaneous goods in exchange for their participation, such as free (quality) web hosting, domain names, etc.

It’s up to you, what types of communities to join. I personally tried them all, but can’t come up with a good and overall review, as I was not participating equally in all of them, some grabbed my attention and I stayed just for fun, then even became a moderator of the board, while in others I have 150+ posts and can’t really tell how profitable is the business. I will start off with my personal experience though and hope it will be useful for you.

Paid to post communities that pay on a fixed rate are a great way to make fast money, especially if the minimum post count and word count is not too big. 10 cents per post of about 30 words would be a decent deal. Mostly you will find such offers in other big forums, such as DigitalPoint.com, where new forums owners are looking to boost activity and pay people to join and participate in their board. Once the forum grows, the pate per post gets lower, and then normally been done away with completely. So if you are after such a forum, just look for related offers on other huge forums and carpe diem.

Shared revenue communities can boost your AdSense revenue, however, there are a few “but’s”. You need to have AdSense account, where minimum payout is 100$. If, for whatever reason, Adsense will ban you, this type of revenue will no longer exist for you, as Yahoo publisher and Adbride aren’t an alternative in this case. I joined 2 forums that share income with their members, but not out of greed, only because the forums happened to interest me. In one forum I have 150 posts and earnt… just don’t die from envy! - 5 cents. In the other forum I have about 100 posts, and joined the revenue account only on half way, made about 3$. Bottom line is that I’d not count on shared revenue board if money is all you are after, as you will need to post a lot just to get your ads displayed, then again, it will be in rotation of 50%, and then, go and hope that someone will click it. Notable forums in this category are Digital Point and Webmasters Talk
Last type are the forums that provide their members with hosting and domains, as this is the most common thing you get. Most forums do provide quality hosting without ads, some demand a link back to the forum, while others go further and provide ads supported hosting. If the hosting provided is ads supported, then you shouldn’t waste your time posting, there are tons of free hosts out there, some do not even place ads on your site. If, however, it’s a respectable and established website that indeed delivers what their promise and provide high quality professional hosting, you should consider giving it a go. Remember that average host will cost between 5$ and 10$, so as long as you don’t feel like overworking yourself for this monthly price, it’s ok. Some people do not have credit card or paypal,and cannot pay for online service because of it, so for them it will be the perfect solution. Same applies to domain names, which can be registered in exchange for particular amount of earnt points or “stars”. Notable forum that provides domain names and cash by paypal in exchange for point earnt for posting it HostBidder.com

This is more or less my coverage of paid to post communities. Of course if you don’t feel like selling out you can always join my forum - Lorelei Web Forum where the participation is free and volunteer. Hope this pours some light on the paid to post communities and on how you can earn money at home, enjoying talking to your friends.

Lets start with this - if you sign up to hosting service with www.dreamhost.com and enter the promo code: lorelei in the coupon field, you will get 90$ discount off the price. So… if annual price is 119$, using this coupon will reduce it to 29$ per 12 months, during which you get 200 GB space and 2000 GB bandwidth. + Free domain.
I recently moved to Dreamhost.com because it was the only hosting provider on the Internet who seemed to offer enough bandwidth for my needs… 2TB, to be precise. This very blog is hosted on Dreamhost too.
So far my impression from dreamhost is more than positive. Before I signed up I had my doubts because it seemed to be too cheap and most of us afraid to get what you pay for. I won’t try to entice you away into signing up, but will only share my host experience.

Good sides:

1. 200GB of space and 2000 GB of bandwidth is more than you could ever wish for, especially if you get it for less than 3$ per month! Just think about it, it’s a damn good deal.
2. Stable host. They have been around for a few years, have a reputation to maintain, it’s not a host that will disappear tomorrow.
3. Money back guaranteed. (only if you pay with credit card)
4. Excellent support. I emailed them a few times regarding different issues and always got a quick and very detailed response.
5. The free domain you get is transferable, plus it will remain free as long you keep hosting it with them.
6. You can participate in their referral system and earn up to 97$ commission from referring other members.
7. Every week your disk space and bandwidth limit increases in a few GB (during the month, then drops back to the regular limit).

Bad sides:

1. The interface of the cPanel (which is their custom work) is a bit hard to get used to, it’s confusing and hard to follow. Won’t be easy to use after cPanel X, but, 1-2 weeks and you will get there.
2. No Fantastico. One click installation only included some basic scripts like phpBB, images Gallery, blog and a few more
3. you ever decide to cancel your hosting, you would have to pay the 9+ dollar for the domain you got free. (if you cancel before the year expires, that is).
4. In order to get the promo code discount, you have to pay with credit card, not paypal. Also, they will ask you to send them a fax with a copy of your card, so remember to have fax at hand. And printer.

I think this sums it up more or less. Overall, the up time is fantastic, same is the speed. Proved to be very stable with different scripts I tried to use, so… I’d say the advantages are far bigger than the disadvantages.

So, don’t forget, input the word lorelei.

Good luck!