TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

Halflife.org Acquisition

• Server Problems
• PR Update
• Halflife.org Acquisition
• Blog Updates

Server Problems

A little while ago I received an e-mail from The Planet, where I host my servers, warning me that I was expected to go over my monthly bandwidth. I was surprised… I have two servers, which basically helps a bit in offloading (or a primitive form of load-balancing) some of the bandwidth, and each has 1500 GB of bandwidth a month. I’m not running any file hosting sites, any video or download sites… I don’t have any sites with an insane amount of traffic… so what was going on?

I decided to hire a system administrator who I used in the past once before, to check to see what was up. This is no small matter – bandwidth overage costs are extremely expensive, usually around $1-5 per GB. I was expected to be hundreds over the limit, so do the math and you’ll see what I was so concerned.

I contacted tech support, inquiring on monthly bandwidth increase prices, and was surprised to find them so expensive:

500GB for $125/mo
750GB for $150/mo
1000GB for $175/mo

Plus, they informed me that this would only take effect for the following month, which wouldn’t even help me anyhow.

Anyhow, my server administrator found a lot of crap going on in my server. A friend who I have trusted and hired countless times in the past, had a big WareZ, torrent, eggdrop, shoutcast operation going on. Now, this gets a bit complicated with some back history between him and I, but I won’t bother you with it here. My ‘friend’, who is also quite late on delivering PublisherSpot to me, has been AWOL for two weeks now. I’ve tried phoning him numerous times, with no response.

I had the hired server administrator delete and remove all instances of the crap that was eating away GB’s and GB’s of bandwidth and MEMORY, and low and behold, my bandwidth dropped significantly.

However, maybe something good came out of it; while I was in there, I noticied that I only had 512 megs of RAM on my Bertha server. So of course I contacted The Planet to complain, and late last night they set it up to 1 Gig. Now I have to hound their accounting department, asking for compensation for their error.

Anyhow, I’ve been very stressed over my AWOL friend and PublisherSpot. Wish me luck that he returns soon and provides me with the completed PublisherSpot. If this turns out to be another Replayer — I may just really be a very unlucky person. All of that, coupled with the whole poker fiasco going on, things could sure be going a lot better for me…

PR Update

I think I can finally now write about this. On October 1st, I had mentioned how there was a PR Update in the works, but didn’t confirm it. I’m glad. A lot of people will check the future PR on Google’s multiple datacentres, or will go by sporadic changes in their toolbar, and announce that “PR was updated!”. But there is so much activity with Google’s PR that I think it should only be publicized when you see stability in the new PR on the toolbar; most PR-info sites state that the PR update occured on Sept. 28th, but it didn’t stop jumping around until yesterday for me, nearly two-weeks later, and I’m sure it may still be jumping for a few other people out there for another few days. Anyhow, here’s how I did (I’m only noting sites which had changes):

Movie-Vault.com

No change to index page. Just general new PR on new reviews. A bunch of PR6’s… my estimation: 200~ pages of PR6, 500~ pages PR5, 1000~ pages PR2-4

TylerCruz.com: 2 to 4

I was hoping for a PR5, but I’m guess I’m satisfied with the 4. While I get a fair bit of traffic and backlinks, I don’t have enough ‘powerful’ or ‘weighted’ backlinks yet. I should be a PR5 by the next update though, I’d imagine…

MMAForums.net: 2 to 4
CookingForums.net: 2 to 4
MovieForums.org: 2 to 4

I’m not positive on these, maybe they were all PR4 before, I can’t remember, but I think that they were PR2. Anyhow, they’re PR4 now.

So, nothing interesting. Just the TylerCruz.com PR increase. As for SERPS, I just did a quick search – nothing much of a change that I could see. Some of my forums dropped a few ranks, which doesn’t make me happy, but PokerForums is still #1 and #3 for “poker forums” and “poker forum” respectively, so I’m glad with that.

How did you do? Share your PR-update results on this thread at PublisherForums.

Halflife.org Acquisition

I just purchased Halflife.org. I won’t proceed to educate you guys on what Half Life is, because if you’ve never heard of it.. well… then… what can I say?

I promised the previous owner that I wouldn’t divulge the price, but I traded PageDump.com and a lump sum of cash for it. He also requested a plug for an upcoming site of his, and so here it is:

AlbumConnect.com
AlbumConnect is a new way of uploading images online, featuring ajax-based multiple uploads and full customization of your albums.

He plans on developing PageDump into something similar, so that’d make a good sister site for it.

Halflife.org is a PR4 and has some half-decent backlinks such as this Yahoo Directory one.

It’s #2 on MSN for “halflife”, but doesn’t rank well for other terms or SE’s, which makes sense since it’s not developed.

Backlinks are:

Google: 14
MSN: 507
Yahoo: 666

Anyhow, it’s of course the domain that’s the candy. What do I plan on doing with it? I don’t know yet… Ireally don’t know. I may possibly flip the domain, possibly develop the site and then flip the site, possibly turn into an affiliate site selling their games, possibly turn into a PPC Arbitrage test…

I used to play TFC (Team Fortress Classic) way back when, and absolutely loved it. After seeing the two trailers for Team Fortress, to be released with Half Life 2: Episode 2, I may just have to splurge on a nice video card and play it. Playing Team Fortress in an actual tight clan and playing in clan ladders is unbelievably fun. I’m a medic, BTW *smile*. Anyways, so yeah, I may turn it into a Team Fortress site, even though that’s somewhat of a waste of the domain…

On a side note, since Valve made the decision to pump out new releases much quicker by the way of episodes instead of waiting 8 years or so for each major release, I think that will only increase the value of the Halflife.org domain.

Am I concerned about copyright stuff? Not really. There are a ton of Halflife sites, and Valve/Vivendi seem pretty cool to let their community do free advertising for them. In fact, Halflife.com is up for sale for 1 million dollars (www.halflife.com) and you’d think that Valve would sue them if they wanted to.

Anyhow, so it’s goodbye PageDump and hello Halflife.org.

Blog Updates

No big changes this time – and there probably won’t be many changes in the future… as I’m starting to get pretty used to WordPress, mostly everything is already set up the way I want it to be.

1. Just added a “View Full List” list below the “My Sites” section, linking to a list of all my sites.

That’s all for now…

Good luck and good earnings!