Internet Marketing Archives

January 30, 2014 By Nick Joelson 2 Comments

Vidahost Web Hosting Review – Save 40% Promo Code – WEBHOT10

For those looking for live 2014 Vidahost 10% Off Promo Codes you can use WEBHOT10.

Also, there are instructions at the bottom of the page on how to get up to 40% OFF.

I have been using Vidahost for part of my hosting requirements for over 3 years. Based on the excellent service I have received during this time, I have decided to write a Vidahost review and help promote their services.

Vidahost Web Hosting are a small outfit based in the UK and offer a wide array of excellent hosting services, domain registration and cloud solutions.

Update: Vidahost have switch all their products to Cloud Hosting and have removed their entry level £17 a year service.

Their new entry level offering starts at £29 a year including a free domain and hosting for up to 6 add on domains. The price then moves to £59 a year for 16 add-on domains and increased storage and bandwidth, right up to £499 for a fully equipped managed server.

–>> See Vidahost’s current range of web hosting packages

All the packages are perfect for using WordPress and offer clean and easy installs using cPanel and Softaculous. Sub-domain creation, domain parking and multi-site hosting (not entry package) are all standard and easy to use.

Watch my review below:

This week I had a lot of interaction with Vidahost with respect to fairly complex account upgrades and bandwidth balancing across hosting accounts. I was extremely impressed with the level of service I received. The requests were all resolved within 2 hours, and their “can do” attitude built a bespoke hosting package for me.

Here are the some of the benefits I have personally experienced from Vidahost Hosting:

Ultra Snappy WordPress hosting and performance – almost doubles GoDaddy in page load time – see pingtest results below

Initial response to technical and customer service tickets have all been within around 10 minutes and is 24/7

My Vidahost sites always out perform sites hosted on other servers such as GoDaddy, Hostgator and 123 Reg for both speed and SERPS. I have now begun moving all my sites over as contracts expire

Their ability to create tailor made solutions to hosting problems regarding sharing bandwidth across packages

They value your business and allow easy cost effective upgrades and expansions – they are not just about taking as much money as they can from you like some companies I could mention.

My sites all rank well in the US where over 40% of my traffic comes from – the page load speed times are the same in both countries

I now have 5 different Vidahost hosting packages sitting on 5 different servers each with different IP address. Useful for SEO purposes. You can request special things like this when you create an account.

Take a look at their hosting options here and for a 10% discount use the promo code “WEBHOT10“

Here are the results for this site’s homepage using Pingtest. It’s 95% faster than all tested websites. Impressive.

It could be even faster if I optimised the website itself as it only scores 82/100 in the site test I used.

Disadvantages I have experienced with Vidahost:

Some of the technical support guys are sometimes too smart for their own good and presume you know as much as them when trying to resolve technical issues
Purchasing additional domain names through them can be more expensive than other domain registrars like GoDaddy

This is all pretty minor stuff and domain names can easily be pointed from other registrars.

Basically, if you care about your website and are looking for a fast, decent web hosting provider then you can’t go wrong using Vidahost. They are definitely best in class as far as I am concerned, and I am pretty fussy about these things.

Vidahost Promo Codes for 2014

Here are some Vidahost promo codes for 2013/2014. You can use as many as you like on one go as long as you are buying those products. Don’t bother trying to use them if you are just buying a domain name though, they don’t work!

WEBHOT10 – 10% Discount for Web Hosting

WEBHOT20 – 20% discount on SSL Security Certificates

WEBHOT15 – 15% discount on VDS

If you use these links and codes I do get a small kickback. Only a small fraction compared to what the larger hosting companies like Hostgator. If you are a regular here you know I only ever recommend products that I personally use and hold in high regard on this site.

How to Get 40% Off Your Vidahost Subscription

For getting the best value from Vidahost, it is currently running a special “buy 2 years hosting and get the 3rd FREE “on all packages except the “Basic” one – which is too small for most serious users anyway.

In order to activate the Vidahost 40% Discount then follow these simple steps:

STEP 1. Click the link and visit Vidahost
STEP 2. Choose Your Hosting Package
STEP 3. Select “2 Year + 1 Year Free” Option from the drop down
STEP 4. Then use WEBHOT10 for a further 10% OFF

Easy!

Note: The Vidahost 1 year free offer can only be activated via special links.

Note: You can still order Vidahost monthly or for just a year at a time but you will only get the 10% discount applied to the first instalment and you will miss out on a free year.

Example One: Signing up to the 36 Month “Starter” package which would normally cost £87. By using the link above with the Vidahost promo code WEBHOT10 it will only cost you £52 making a saving of 40%.

Example Two: Another option is to take the 36 month “Medium” package which would normally be £177, using the promotional code WEBHOT10 for a further 10% plus the link provided will only cost £106.

Do you use Vidahost Web Hosting and if so, do you agree with my review? What has been your experience? Let others know and leave a comment below.

July 1, 2013 By Nick Joelson 2 Comments

Novelty WordPress Theme Review – Peardrop London

Things have been pretty hectic lately with a multitude of projects and family commitments. This includes putting together a new business website for a friend of the family.

The site is called Peardrop London and can be found living at peardroplondon.com.

Pear drop London is owed by Rose Lloyd Owen who’s dream has always been to start her own healthy and alternative lunchtime food delivery and catering business. Her focus is on salads, however, men don’t be put off…these are salads with a difference and are available for delivery in the London, W10, W11 area (Portobello Rd, etc).

After working on countless images for the menu pages, I can say that it all looks absolutely delicious, and this is coming from someone who tends to lean towards, lets say more traditional meals…

Novelty Theme for WordPress

As as the site build goes, it was using the fairly new Novelty theme for wordpress which is available to purchase from Themeforest for around $45 (£35).

It is a clean design that uses either the graphical “page builder” plugin or more traditional short codes to build pages. Shortcodes are my preferred method but unfortunately not all site functions are available to be pulled into a page using the shortcode method – for example portfolio thumbnail slides cannot be showcased as yet.

The page builder plugin, however works very well with this theme.

The Novelty theme was updated twice during this period, from 1.2 to 1.4. The only major change that effected me was the way the portfolio aspect of the site functions. This was a bit of a pain as I had to reload all the images back up plus the new version was a bit fiddly when having a separate feature image to the portfolio image.

Aside from this, it is a clean, easy to work with, adaptable theme that has given a very aesthetically pleasing result and has won many compliments.

I would happily use it again or recommend it.

Check out the Novelty Theme here

July 1, 2013 By Nick Joelson 2 Comments

What Happens if You Change Permalinks in a Live WordPress Site?

Just a quick word of warning to those thinking about changing their permalink structure within the WordPress CMS after the site has been built…

Don’t do it!

I was playing around with one of my new site’s WordPress permalink structure and thought it would be a good idea to add the /%category%/ in the custom field to try and organise things a little better. I did not realise that it would effect the entire site on a “real URL link” basis and thought it would be purely a cosmetic change.

Boy was I wrong!

A quick look at Google’s Webmater Tools will show you the effect this will have on your SERPS. I was ranking very highly for certain terms which just vanished overnight as the pages just started to return 404’s.

Thankfully, to fix it all I did was revert the permalink back to how it was originally, then inform google via the “crawl error” dashboard that the link had been fixed.

The saying “If it ‘aint broke, don’t fix it!” comes to mind.

Thankfully the high ranking pages are starting to appear in the SERPs again at there previous positions. It took a few days for Google to register this.

Whether or not it would have been quicker to allow Google to re-index the new site structure, I don’t know, but I was not going to hang around to find out. Also, I was not prepared to do a whole load of 301 redirects for any back links that the pages may have.

So, what did I learn from this? Basically, build the site and pick a permalink structure that will grow with your site and stick to it. As far as SEO is concerned I dont think there is a huge difference anymore to have a site that is built like:

www.mywidget.com/ranking-widget-term-category/long-tail-widget-term-page-name

www.mywidget.com/long-tail-widget-term-page-name

My experience from using a more simple structure, i.e. without the category in the url has not effected my search rankings and adding it is just cosmetic or organisational structure.

I have discovered that there are plugins that will automatically handle the structure change, but I have not tested them so cannot comment. For know I will be sticking to the original permalink structure.

Made any similar mistakes?!! Let me know if you have made any similar errors with your WordPress site or what your SEO experience is with the different permalink structures with the current Google algorithm.