Alien Hosting is a hosting service that you might not have heard about unless you are looking for service in the UK.  It has been around since approximately 2003.  This does not seem to be a large hosting company, but more likely is a reseller or web development company that is also offering their customers hosting packages as part of their product line.

If you have had any experience with Alien Hosting, we would like to hear from you and learn what you think.  Drop us a comment or send us an email and we will be happy to feature your review here and provide a link back to your own website.  So send us your reviews, we can’t buy you a pint at the pub, but if you sell bar stools online we can help your link building efforts.

Anyone that has spent anytime working with websites or blogs even probably runs across a domain name that they just have to have.  Its like one of those bad ideas you get when you are drinking with your buddies, “Hey let’s go steel a bull dozer and drive it through a Shriner’s Building”.  That was the idea a child hood friend of mine had about 20 years ago.  Jail time followed – I wasn’t there, but it was a funny story after the fact.

Anyway, you get one of these crazy ideas for a domain name, and domains only cost $6-$10 to register, why not?

It could be the next big thing, like Google or Digg or The Onion or Ask a Ninja or Wanks for Piece!

Here’s a few that I thought I’d share with you.  If you register one of these, drop me a comment, I’d like to interview and figure out what the hell you were thinking!  If you get rich from the idea, – piss off.

• http://www.halfwanked.com/
• http://wankersanonymous.com/
• http://www.splogoftheday.com/
• http://www.fartperpost.com/
• http://www.heathenology.com/
• http://www.NaJaJeMo.org – like NaNoWriMo (national november writers month) but national january jerkoff month – hey you know its the internet.  It doesn’t have to make sense until you BRAND it to make sense, just ask Yahoo!

Many companies are not yet taken advantage of the concept of matching search keywords and phrases to physical locations. For example this evening I did a keyword search on the keywords Internet hosting Branson. The general idea would be that I was looking for an Internet hosting company physically located in Branson Missouri.

Initially I had tried a search for hosting company’s Branson and came up short finding absolutely nothing. But when I tried Internet hosting Branson I came up with a company called Hollister Web Hosting which appears to be physically located in Branson Missouri. Many Internet companies have the ability to reach out across the entire Internet and do business anywhere in the world. However sometimes customers are looking for a physical location that’s close to home. In this regard many companies are missing the opportunity to match up their keywords to local cities and towns across the United States and even the world. You might feel to chase the long tail of search results by putting together a little bit of content that includes location specific names to the keywords that you already are strong in.

So how does a company compete when their search term that they’re trying to source traffic from is Orlando Vacation?

The obvious answer is to use link building services. This is a highly competitive search term or search phrase and the only way to stay on top with the search phrase is to continually build up links. You need to source articles with reviews, you need a source text Link ads, and you need to make sure that all of these things are fresh and updated every month.

There are some keywords that you can load up a few sponsored articles on up front and not worry about it again until competitors come along, but when you’re entering a field where there’s already a lot of competition you have to pay to play.

Next week I will be heading back to the Podcast and Portable Media Exposition in Ontario, California.

I’m hoping to add a new segment here at Top 5 Hosting covering Podcast Hosting options and reviews.  If you are a Podcaster and have a story you’d like to share about your hosting experience as it relates to podcasting, drop me a line at info@top-5-hosting.com .

I will be more than happy to feature your site or podcast along with your story to share with our readers here.

Anyone that is going to be at the show next week, I’d also like to meet up with you as well.  The show is a great place to learn this industry and how it works and who the people are that make it real.

There are segments of the show that get pretty wild, sometimes look like the drug rehabs all let some of their patients out a few weeks too early.

Mesothelioma is a form of lung cancer derived from asbestos exposure.  It became notorious decades ago when it was banned in the 1970’s, but it became notorious twice over on the internet when every one and their brother, threw up a website about it hoping to either:

1. Cash in on the tort lawsuits in one form or fashion

or

2. Cash in on the ridiculous pricing for Google Adsense ads from ads covering the topic

Now there are so many different websites covering Mesothelioma that it is almost impossible to find any information about the subject without going through a trial lawyer website of one form or another.  There are lots of different sites out there from those trying to cover victims or their families or offer up options to screen and diagnose people inflicted with Mesothelioma to those trying to pull in the people seeking Mesothelioma treatments.

Technorati shows that just for the word ‘mesothelioma’ alone there are over 26 thousand blog posts and if memory serves Technorati only counts back six months!

Many people also accuse Google of harboring blog spammers with Mesothelioma sites on blogger.  Just out of curiosity, I attempted to set up a blogger blog with the name Mesothelioma Treatments, then Mesothelioma Diagnosis, and a dozen other options and didn’t find an available sub domain until I went all the way down the list to Mesothelioma treatments and diagnosis.

Its a crazy subject in that so many people are covering it for profit and it begs the question, can anyone actually cut through the noise to find real help or information?

This weekend I’m heading on a road trip to recruit college students and teach them how to become pro-bloggers. The goal is to help them understand how pro-blogging works, how they can earn money working as bloggers, how they can develop excellent business experience setting up and running their own business in Internet marketing, Blog Advertising and Internet publishing. Along the way, I’m hoping that as they learn these items, they will also be able to get some experience working with domains and hosts and in so doing they might give us some new fresh insights into hosting companies and hosting service providers.

So right now I’m actually literally on the interstate driving down the highway using voice recognition software known as Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 9. It’s a great piece of software and I highly recommend it especially for bloggers. This is definitely a tool that I will encourage new bloggers to try or at least experiment with.  Years ago when I was a teenager, teachers encouraged me at the time to try the radical concept of composing by writing on a computer keyboard.

That proved to be a terrific skill that I have honed over the years, and now I’m hoping to help people hone a new skill in learning to compose with their voice using voice recognition and DNS9.

This evening I did something unexpected.  I registered a real domain through Google.

In fact I was registering a domain for my mother’s birthday present.  She has been writing on a Gardening blog, on and off for the last year or so.

The blog was in need of an upgrade, but she’s not really ready to tackle WordPress yet.  She’s been writing on a blogger blog all this time and it works well enough for her with Picasa and other things.

I upgraded her blog first to the new blogger, and set up the new blogger templates with a number of items from a Google news feed on gardening and herbs (thought that was well executed on Google’s part actually.)

I added a Feedburner email subscription as many of the people in her gardening club understand email subscriptions but not necessarily feeds.  Plus, I didn’t want her to get in trouble with the canned spam act and a gardening news letter, so that was one less reason to buy her a pulse oximeter to keep her heart in check.  Less stress all the way around.

Google Domain Registration

Then I decided to follow the links and investigate what it took to manage a blog on a real domain from blogger.  I’ve heard some good things about the new system lately and thought I’d give it a try.

It rapidly offered to check for the availability of a domain, I plugged in GardenClubsOfCentralIllinois.com and it was available.  Google offered it for $10.  That was about $3.50 more than I normally pay for a 1 year registration, but I know Google has fallen on hard times lately and needs the money so I said what the hell.

It registered the domain, charged my credit card through Google checkout and will even handle the redirects in about 3 days once all the cob webs shake loose.

Now my Mom can keep blogging from Blogger (going to show her Windows Live Writer next), she’s on the new blogger system and I reconfigured her template for the new setup adding the widgets.

All in all I’d have to give Google an A-.  I’d give them an A if they had more theme options, but all in all it was pretty good.