VPSSpeed has been in the pipeline for almost a year, as have several other web-hosting sites that we’ll be opening up in the near future. We opened up and saw an immediate surge in orders and this has continued since our launch. There seems to be no stopping the customers flocking to VPSSpeed!

I can’t blame them though, there are few VPS providers out there that can provide a 512MB VPS plan for under $15 /month and include a free control panel.

As VPSSpeed expands we’ve got loads of plans for it, including:
- Addition of Xen based VPS plans
- TUN Support (for stuff like OpenVPN)
- Pre-purchase reseller plans (i.e you can buy 2GB RAM, 500 GB HDD and 1TB bandwidth and allocate it out to your own VPS plans)
- Affiliate program to earn commission
- Updates Blog (to let people know about exciting new additions)
- A range of OS Templates to cover multiple versions of each supported OS.
- The addition of a Slackware template
- A pre-configured cPanel OS template
- A pre-configured DirectAdmin OS template
- A pre-configured Webmin Template
- A ‘hardened’ template (for those users without a control panel or who need a bit of help with server security!)

All these exciting features will be rolled out starting soon. Obviously not all at once, but we’ll get there!

VPSSpeed are currently running a special offer – get 10% off for life, plus an Unmetered 10mbps bandwidth connection (great for streaming!). Just use the coupon UNMETERED to claim the special offer! It expires on 15th March so be sure to get signed up soon!

www.VPSSpeed.com

I thought there would be some big compatibility problems what with all the changes made in 2.5 however it worked flawlessly! Why the new skin you ask? Why Not! I answer

Ok, so last month. I had a lot going on with college, meaning I didn’t have much time to work on anything. Despite this I managed to get the front-end of the webhostbutler.com script completed, and as for the backend I’ve decided to keep it simple and have a very basic backend.

I’ve also started work on the other project (home server). I’ve got big plans for this one.

Finally, I finished building/configuring my home server, its now running Fedora Linux ( core 8 ) and has a bunch of SATA drives slotted in everywhere I could fit them :p The only thing I’m disappointed about is the RAM. Its the hottest part of the entire system, and actually hurts to touch. Because of this its causing the entire room to become a sauna!

Theres not much I can do to fix this other than buy RAM fans (Which are very noisy due to their small form factor). I may try taking 2 of the 4 1gb sticks out to see if that helps. The CPU (Intel c2d 2.66Ghz) is pretty cold and is running on a stock Intel fan (I found this to be quieter and more effective than an Alaska fan purchased from eBuyer). The hard drives are warm to touch, but don’t give off huge amounts of heat like the RAM. The only other warm(ish) component is what looks to be a northbridge with a bronze heatsink built into the motherboard.

So far I’ve got Apache, PHP, MySQL setup for web development, plus SAMBA so I can access the server as if it was a folder on my own computer, I’m using this to have my itunes library stored on the server, which will free up a good 10GB of space on both my laptop and desktop computers. Its also acting as a media storage for any films / tv programs I’ve got.

I also purchased a usb freeview card and it can record TV directly to the server, which can then be watched from any computer/device connected to our home network! I think an upgrade to a 802.11n router will be needed soon. Our netgear 54g is on its way out at the moment. We get through routers like a fat man gets through mars bars! This time I may spend a bit extra and get a faster router and gradually upgrade the network. Especially if Virgin is going to be getting their customers broadband speeds upto 100mbps by years end! No point paying for 100mbps if your internal network is 54mbps

Anyway, this month I hope to get webhostbutler online, and continue work on the home server site. I dont expect to have this ready to launch for a good 2-3 months yet as I want this to be a well thought out project.

Thats about it for now I think!

RickyMills.com (Re)-Launched
I relaunched RickyMills.com and ditched my old self-made portfolio site in favor of a nice WordPress blog, which would be used to track my progress towards being in control (either through sole ownership or through myself and Mike‘s Rike Media brand) of websites that would generate a long term income.

The blog got off to a great start, however I don’t feel I made enough effort in my first month. This was mainly down to having a lot of coursework to do (and catch up on) as I received 5 conditional University offers.

FotoRazor.com

After looking around at some websites for sale, I purchased FotoRazor.com, a free image host. The site was earning $70 income from text link sales and pop up adverts. I managed to increase this income to over $100 a month by adding optimized adsense adverts on the site.

I found that after this, I really didn’t want to run this kind of site. It had the multiple revenue sources that I was looking for, however I don’t really want to run an image host. Because of this, I placed it up for sale again. I’ve currently had many offers for the site, all of which I am considering. I did have one $700 offer however it turned out to be from a fake bidder. You can bid on the site over at DigitalPoint or DNForum.

WebmasterStash.com

Not much has changed around the site. Mike released some updates for StashNews, which is really turning into a great news systems. I dont think there is a better flat-file news system out there, feature wise. Its got everything that you would expect, plus that little bit more. For example; Integrated template engine with web-based editor (very few flat-file template engines can boast this!), easy and fast site integration, multiple users, captcha image verification on the news comment forms to help battle the spam bots, and more.

In addition to this, I started work on a concept for a new area to WebmasterStash; webmaster tools. Basically the idea is to have custom tools that allow users to check pagerank, backlinks, generate meta tags, etc. I’m still working on this, however I hope to have it live with our first bunch of tools online towards the end of February.

I’m hoping that once FotoRazor has sold that we can get a vbSEO license and/or some decent Photoshop tutorials written as mine aren’t exactly the best! Also I want to get the site promoted more, however I really dont think sticking some banners on a few sites is going to do much to help. We need some quality content. The templates and scripts are good, but the site needs tutorials to survive.

Other bits and bobs

I moved all our sites (except our old WSDeluxe project) over to a single VPS server as our hosting costs were about $60 a month. It was the right time to do it as our Dreamhost account is due for renewal in Feburary and after their “minor” billing problems I dont fancy staying with them (even more so when I saw that our 2007 uptime was only 85%). I moved off our JaguarPC managed VPS as we dont need a managed VPS so I was paying for a service that I didnt need.

The new VPS is a Link 4 at VPSLink.com – We’ve used them before and they have a good reliable service. The only downside is they have hard-drive speed issues which make sites seem a little more sluggish, however this isn’t really a huge problem for us at this stage.

So, thats January! I’ll be posting more progress soon, including the status of the FotoRazor auction!