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My Favorite Free WordPress Themes

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

#1 Desk Mess

This theme was by Geek with Laptop. It’s quite well done, though I haven’t seen many using it. Looks more like a professionally done theme. Download it here.

#2 Nukeit Lite Theme

This is the theme TechnologyInsanity is currently running. It could use some work as far as brightening up the words, it was created by the now defunct nukeit.org owner. It’s very minimalistic, which I personally like in today’s world of cluttered websites with fancy graphics flowing about. Since I have the theme I will upload it when I get a chance and edit this post. I’m thinking about modifying it myself for brighter text.

#3 The Original Premium News

This is a woo theme that has been made free. You can get it here.

#4 The default wordpress theme

This is the default theme. Of course, it’s easy to edit and make it your own. It’s a minimal theme, which I like. You can of course download it here.

As far as free themes go, that’s about all I like. There’s a reson for that. Most free themes don’t look too good and are thrown together sloppily. Lots of them are even just the same theme with some different images slapped on and a different URL at the bottom linking to a website. If you want a great theme for your wordpress blog, unless you want to dig and dig and dig, you’re better off joining a premium wordpress theme site such as woothemes.

Run Your Own Shared Hosting Business

Monday, April 30th, 2012

Ever wonder why the hosting space is so competitive?

Well the thing is – it’s very simple to get started, especially with VPS hosting.

You can buy a VPS from slicehost or some other VPS retailer, get cpanel and break it into segments for your customers. (This can all basically be done for you)

From there all you do is setup a website where you’re going to sell hosting, and promote it online. Most people oversell their VPS/Dedicated servers offering shared hosting because most people that buy the hosting don’t use it much.

If a customer uses too much data they usually get kicked off. This is different with companies such as Hostgator as they can take a few users using tons of bandwidth for their sites because they’re so large, but big consumers will still get kicked from there.

Unlimited in the shared hosting world is never really “unlimited” they just say that to make you feel better and the limits are actually in the TOS for the most part.

So if you want to dive right in – that’s pretty much all you need to do – and most of the shared hosting biz is run around advertising now – so you’ll want someone who can really market the crap out of your website. This is where the real cost comes in – marketing.

Don’t expect to make much without heavy advertising.

Newsgroupdirect Review

Monday, April 30th, 2012

Newsgroupdirect has an interesting promotion they have now and then called “terabyte tuesday” – though they are Highwinds and the completion rate isn’t the best on highwinds, for certain binary posts, that is a good deal. You can combo it with astraweb and have steller completion on all your binary posts.

I’ve used highwinds for a long time and they only lack in certain areas, in general if you grab everything you want quickly highwinds is fine. Sometimes they even have posts astraweb doesn’t at the 1,000 day mark.

Anyway, having a decent sized fill account on Highwinds isn’t a bad idea, and at $40, it can’t be beat. So give them a try, see if they meet your needs, because it might just be the cheapest usenet available today. For more info on usenet, take a look at my usenet related posts here.

Astraweb Review

Sunday, April 29th, 2012

Astraweb has the highest completion rate and great retention. They do miss a few things here and there, but it’s nothing a fill server from usenet-news or newsgroupdirect couldn’t fix.

Their billing is simple and straight forward, and I’ve never had issues with them in the past. Putting it to the “test” their retention is very close to what they say it is. Speeds are great, and prices couldn’t be better.

If you go with Astraweb know that you’re going with a high quality usenet provider. They do, however have issues. The 300 day mark has some missing posts and their speeds can vary. If you want the best experience on usenet the best option is to combine usenetserver and astraweb. Astraweb has the content but not the speed, and sometimes things are missing for no reason. With usenetserver the stuff that’s missing is mostly because they removed it.

For a full tutorial on binary usenet refer to my tutorial here.