What is PPC – pay per click

Almost ALL of the major search engines now charge per visitor (pay-per-click) that they send to your site. All you have to do is visit their site or the site in control of providing their listings and setup an account. Then you add money to your account and choose a series of key words that you would like linked to your site such as: web hosting, hosting, internet, etc…

Then throughout the day/week/month you bid against other competitors on the rate you’re willing to pay. Each time a visitor goes to the search engine and searches for one of your keywords your link is displayed in accordance with your bid. For instance if one company is willing to bid/pay $0.50 per visitor their listing may be number on and if you were to bid $0.49 per visitor your link would follow right after theirs and so on. This allows you to control exactly where you are placed in the search engines at any given time and the bids are managed in real-time. Even the world’s largest search engine Yahoo.com – manages it’s first 3 listings for almost every keyword or combination of keywords this way. To rank within the top 3 listings at Yahoo.com you would have to establish an advertising account with Overture.com which is the search engine that controls Yahoo’s top listings.

Here’s a listing of some of the other popular pay-per-click search engines.

http://findwhat.com (now http://miva.com)

http://epilot.com

http://kanoodle.com

http://sprinks.com

http://pageseeker.com

http://bay9.com

http://sprinks.com

http://about.com

http://yahoo.com (http://overture.com)

How to ping your website in Windows

To run a ping:
On your computer Click Start
Click Run…
Open: type in cmd
Click OK
At the dos prompt type in: ping yourdomain.com
This will provide you with the IP of your website and it will show whether or not you were able to ping your site successfully. Note – if the ping fails with a timeout it’s possible that your provider has ICMP packets disabled which will cause your ping to fail even when your site is online.

Unique visitors vs. sessions

•Hits: The number of times your site is given a request for information from a web browser. (Note: a web page with two images would generate three “hits”, one each for the images, and one for the page itself.)

•Files: The number of times a web browser requests a file and the server on which your site resides delivers that file.

•Pageviews: The number of times a web browser requests a text or html file, which shows a truer reflection of the actual documents requested from your site.

•Sessions: The number of unique hosts accessing the server during a given period of time – unique visitors.

•Kbytes Sent: The amount of data sent during the summary period as reported by the server.

Explanation of Data Transfer

What is Data Transfer/Quota:
Transfer is measured by the amount of KB that are sent from the server to your visitors and received by you through the server from outside sources. This is totaled by adding the usage each day for Email, Uploaded files, Downloaded Files, and any other activities that make request to the server for a domain. Forums/Message Boards, Large Images, Flash, Streaming Video and other forms of Multimedia are often resource intensive. These amounts are typically tracked on a monthly basis.

Check for bad blocks on a hard drive

Run this script to check for bad block on the hard drive.  Replace /dev/sda3 with the drive that you wish to check.

badblocks -vv /dev/sda3 > badblocks.log &

It will check for badblocks and write it to a file called badblocks.log.