Win 1 of 10 Monitive accounts with Technology Bloggers!

Technology Bloggers has been growing for over a year now, and today marks the announcement and launch of its first ever competition!

We have been approached by a few firms in the past offering to give us prizes for giveaways, and have never really got round to launching  a competition. However now thanks to a new widget/bit of software I have discovered called Rafflecopter, we are able to run competitions with relative ease!

If this competition is a success, then I hope that we can run more in the near future! 🙂

The Prizes

So, to the prizes! We are very lucky to be able to give away 3 Monitive Premium Accounts and 7 Monitive Basic Accounts. Check out their pricing plan page for more info on the accounts.

Monitive

The kind sponsor of this contest is Monitive, who provide site monitoring services, so you know if your website goes offline. Many people have written on Technology Bloggers how site uptime is a vital part of a hosting package, as customers could be lost, and your site could lose rankings, if it goes down.

With a Monitive account you get weekly emails, which let you know if your site has gone down. With basic, pro and premium level accounts (all but the free) you can have it check your site as frequently as up to once every minute, and if it ever finds your site is down, it can email you, text (SMS) you, and it even offers Twitter DM alerts.

Does your site go down on a regular basis, maybe at a time you are not ever online? Well without a Monitive account, you probably don’t know! If your host regularly takes your site down at night, and you don’t know, it could seriously affect your overseas traffic – especially traffic from the other side of the world.

If your website, blog, forum, search engine etc. goes down, it isn’t good. That is why Monitive offer to check it is up, by sending regular (as regular as you choose) requests from servers all around the world.

International servers checking Technology Bloggers uptimeWith a free account you can monitor one website, and get 4 free introductory texts. With a basic account, you can monitor five websites, and get 10 free introductory texts. Pro accounts get to monitor 10 services, and get 10 free text messages every month. If you have a premium account you can monitor up to 30 websites, DNS’s, FTP servers, MySQL databases, POP3’s etc. and you get 30 text messages every month, so if a single site, server, FTP etc. goes down, you know – fast.

Technology Bloggers server status - MonitiveI have been using the service for around a week now, and it works really well. It is easy to use and has all the data you want to see.

How to Win!

I want to make it as easy as possible for you to enter, and I want to make it so that everyone can enter, as we are a community blog, which means everyone should be able to benefit.

To enter is really easy, you only need to do a few things, but the more you choose to do, the more entries you will get.

The first thing you must do is sign up for a ‘Free’ Monitive account. Once you have done this, you can start entering.

Sign in to the Rafflecopter widget below, however you like, Facebook or email. The first thing you must do is tell us the email address you used to set up the account, as we will need this to upgrade your account if you win. After that, do as many or few of the options which become available to you, the more you do, the more entries you get!

Rafflecopter

The Rafflecopter widget loads below this text, it seems to be taking its time (at least when this article went live it was) so be patient, it should load in after a few seconds – and it doesn’t load on some pages, so make sure you go to the giveaway page to get it to work.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Winners

This competition will end at 12.00 am on Saturday the 19th of May. Winners will be announced within the following week, and then their accounts upgraded accordingly.

Best of luck to everyone!

I hereby declare Technology Bloggers first ever competition, live!

How to choose a domain name and a host

If you want to set up a website or a forum, it can be a process which takes a lot of time. Setting up a blog is usually a bit quicker thanks to blogging platforms, of which there are many free ones on offer.

If you are self coding your blog like I did with my old technology blog, it will probably take just as long as a website to set up. However if you are going to use a blogging system to do all the hard work for you, like Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Movable Type, Drupal etc. setting up your blog is likely to be a lot quicker.

WordPress prides itself on its famous ‘5-minute installation‘ but before you get there, and this is the same for any type of site, you need to choose a URL (domain name) and host.

The Official WordPress LogoSome places offer you free URL’s, like WordPress(.com) and Google Sites, however they often restrict the control you have over your site – for example you may not be able to have ads on the site, or you may not be able to edit themes.

Assuming you want to have a unique URL/web address, then you have the challenge of choosing your URL, and where to host it.

Deciding upon a URL

Choosing a URL can be very hard, however my best advice is to go with your brand. If you are setting up a computer review blog, and it is called ‘ComBlog’, then try to find a URL with ComBlog in it.

Some people would say work out what keywords you want to show up in the search results for, and choose your domain taking those into account, e.g. freecomputerreviews.net; yes such domains may help you in the short term, however once you are established, I think that a branded domain is always best.

Going back to the ‘ComBlog’ example, domains like ComBlog.com and ComBlog.info would be great for your site, as they are short – therefore easy to remember and simple enough to spell.

The type of hosting

The next step is choosing what type of hosting you want. Do you want Windows or Linux? If you just want to run a simple website, I would suggest a Windows powered domain, however if you want to run something like WordPress or many other blogging platforms, you will need a Linux server.

Your host

After that you have to choose who is going to host your site. If you have a server at home/work and that is running 24/7 (as if it goes down, so will your site if it is hosted there) then you could host it there. However for more bandwidth, space and security, you probably want to get someone else to do it.

The problem is, who to choose! You could go to individual hosts websites, and try and work out which one is best for you. Alternatively, you could go to a web hosting comparison site, like Web Hosting Search. Such sites can offer you a very detailed overview of different hosts and what they can provide. They also contain users opinions – helping you further to choose the right company.

One useful tool that such sites offer (specifically Web Hosting Search) is a WordPress hosting comparison. This can help you find hosts that offer WordPress hosting – if that is what you are looking for.

Things to check

Before choosing your host, look at what they are offering you. Are your emails free, and can you have as many addresses as you like (e.g. talk@ComBlog.info, hello@ComBlog.info, John@ComBlog.info etc.)?

Also, how much traffic can your site receive each month? I recommend that you have it unlimited (or as high as possible) as there is nothing worse than your host cutting you off because you are too popular! This happened to Chadrack, owner of WebIncomeJournal.com not so long ago.

Also how reliable is your prospective host? Is your site likely to go offline a lot, or do they have a 0 down-time policy?

Some hosts offer you your domain free if you host it with them, so do look out for offers 🙂

Are you looking to set up a website? What is your advice to those who are, or if you are, is this helpful?