Pop-ups and Web Hosting
Posted On: 2007-08-15
No, the two are not related but they are both very important to webmasters like us. One has the potential to increase our bottom line while the other has the potential to destroy our business.
So today let's take a look at them both because we all want to stay in business and we all want to make more money don't we? Well I certainly hope we do.
Pop-ups
Pop-ups, pop-unders, entry consoles, exit consoles ... call them whatever you like but whatever they are we generally hate them when they happen to us. I'm probably safe in saying that it was this industry that was really at the forefront of development of these nasty little beasties that appear just at the time when I'm really trying to concentrate on something else.
Not only did we develop pop-ups but we took them to a whole new level with chained pop-ups that never seemed to stop. Yes, I hate them ... and have for a long time ... but I'm just as guilty of using them as most adult webmasters are and I've built chained pop-ups too.
But somewhere along the way I decided that I wanted to be nice to my surfers, both here and in mainstream, and I stopped using them. Perhaps it was at the insistence of link list owners who thought that pop-ups would drive away their traffic; perhaps it was just because I didn't want to inflict on surfers the very thing I loathed. Whatever the reason might have been, I stopped using them ... and so did a lot of other webmasters.
Then I began to notice something, I was seeing more and more pop-ups on mainstream sites and not just any mainstream sites. I was seeing them on major news sites and they were placed there by major brands. They weren't appearing there every day but at least once a week there would be some major advertiser jumping up in front of me with a pop-up.
Now here in adult our sponsors rarely talk about the effectiveness of their advertising so we really don't know any of the statistics that would show just how effective pop-ups are but over in mainstream they're not quite so secretive. Over there it seems that pop-ups are producing some reasonable click-thru ratios and there are even some profitable conversion rates.
So perhaps it's time to play around with some pop-ups once more. You may be like me and really don't like pop-ups but we're not here to provide a free service so there is no valid reason why we shouldn't be using an occasional pop-up to make sure that surfers see our advertising. Heck if BMW does it then why can't we do it too?
Hosting
You know sometimes we don't realise just how good a deal we get from many of our hosts here in adult but that was brought home to me yesterday in a big way.
Lately we've been thinking about bringing some of our mainstream clients' websites back to a server here in Australia. We think that soon there could be a change in the way Google and Yahoo rank sites and having local businesses hosted in their home country could be very important. So we've been looking around at hosting here in Australia and over the last week or so we've stepped up our research.
At the same time our server in the US has been having some slow moments and the guys at Phatservers have been working on it. Yesterday when it started to slow down it was fixed within five minutes of me emailing them ... even though it was quite late at night over there.
Not only did they fix it but they also decided that they needed to upgrade the operating system ... so they asked if they could do it right there and then. Now that's the sort of service I like and it's a level of service that comes with a very reasonable monthly rental on the server.
Is there anything like that here in Australia? Well we're negotiating with one host here at the moment for a dedicated box that will cost us about the same as what we pay Phatservers ... but just about everything that our US host provides for free comes at an extra charge here in Australia.
At least Australian host we're looking at isn't as bad as another host here who only provides service during business hours Monday to Friday and absolutely nothing on weekends. Now you can get what they consider to be out-of-hours service if you pay a deposit of $1500 and keep topping it up. But if you don't pay that money and your server crashes at 6pm on a Friday night then your sites are offline till Monday morning at the earliest.
Then there's the other host here who decided to move all their servers to another data centre. Not only was the connection to the backbone at the new centre much slower ... and I am talking much much slower but all the IP addresses were changed as well. And the host didn't even bother warning their clients that it was about to happen.
We certainly do have plenty to be thankful for when it comes to the leading US hosts who handle adult sites.