Lloyd Hester

Author: lloydh

  • How Stupid Am I? This is a Rhetorical Question

    How Stupid Am I? This is a Rhetorical Question

    I woke up the other morning, which is always a good sign in my book. The sun was shining and the sky was blue ( I feel a poem coming on) and it felt like it was going to be a good day.

    That was of course, until I discovered that one of my main hosting accounts had crashed. How wrong could a man be? Now, in the big scheme of things, with global warming, ongoing wars and famine, my problems pale into insignificance. However, in my small World this was a major headache, not least because whilst I know I should backup my websites regularly, I don’t!

    I KNOW I am not the only one who has this stupidity affliction, playing Russian Roulette with my business, but that does not make me feel any better I have to say.

    IT turns out that the server was dead as a Dodo, deceased, no longer living, totally knackered.

    What amazed me was that the hosting company took five days to put it right. FIVE days I spend a fair bit of money and MORE importantly my valuable time promoting my websites. How can it take so long for a hosting company to rectify such a cataclysmic event like that?

    When a hosting company says 99.8% up time does that mean up and running or messed up? in the case of this company I say messed up. I am not going to mention any names as it would not be fair. Actually, who cares about fair, losing five days of revenue and the number of visitors I lost over those days does not bare thinking about. It almost has me in tears.

    The company www.cyberhostpro.com took it all in their stride and showed very little concern for my stress and worries. OR loss of earnings.

    Luckily for me I have several hosting companies and a number of servers. phew…

    This server has at least 40 sites on although not all of them are money sites, it really annoyed me at the lack of urgency that the company seemed to have. They said in their email that they would probably move the migration forward.. Probably.. Can you believe that?

    Anyway, all is well that ends well as my grandfather used to say just before he got hit by a number 33 bus.

    It made me realise how important it is to have a backup of all of your money sites. What makes me really stupid it the fact that most of my sites these days are wordpress based, it is so easy to add a backup plugin which saves it all, and even emails it to you if you ask nicely.

    A fool learns by his own mistakes and a wise man/woman (dont want to be sexist) learns from the mistakes of others.

    So learn from this fool and add an automated backup of your website now…..

  • The results of testingalotlloyd

    The results of testingalotlloyd

    As we all know testing is the key to success and recently created a post with a word that was unique to me. A word that no one else would use. It was testingalotlloyd.

    Now initally is was picked up by technorati within minutes but was soon dropped for some reason. Over time things have moved quite a bit and we then saw digg have it at the number one and two positions for a while.

    Rather than post an image, I suggest you do a search for the term testingalotlloyd and see for yourself who ranks first. It was actually this site for a while www.lloydhester.com but as I type this it is now mixx.com at number one position.

    Here are the websites as they are at present.

    1. www.Mixx.com
    2. www.lloydhester.com
    3. www.jumptags.com
    4. www.digg.com
    5. www.mister-wong.com
    6. www.twitter.com ( a tweet from www.lloydhester.com)

    The interesting thing is that it is not been ranked by a lot of the sites that you might think it would be. It seems to have settled and given the fact that my website is pinged by pingoat, pingomatic as well as a number of others. It is also sent to the bookmarking sites by a paid subscription to onlywire. I was surprised that it has not been found at places like stumleupon and others that we all believe are the ones to go for.

    It goes to show that a lot of these gurus do not know what they are talking about 🙂

    Why not try it for yourself. Create a word unique to you and then post it to your favorite bookmarking sites and ping it and see what happens.

    You will then know where to post your blogs and webs pages in future. mixx, jumptags and mr wong are a real shocker. But I make sure that I bookmark to these sites every time I make a post.

    Interesting eh?

  • Never Ever Give Up

    Never Ever Give Up

    There are so many times when you work on the internet especially in the early days, that make you feel like it is never going to happen and that it is time to give up.

    The reason is that you hear of so many gurus making millions while your site pulls in little or nothing and you end up working so much on your own and not only that, you do nearly all of the work yourself. All of this makes is hard to stay motivated, enthusiastic and positive.

    Whilst it is easier said than done I do know that persistence overcomes resistance and if you persist you will win.

    When times are tough the best thing to do is to stop, take a break have a day off or just sit down with a glass of wine and relax. Come at the problem again the next day with fresh eyes and usually a different solution.

    The one thing to remember is never ever give up 🙂

    Never Ever Give Up
  • Procrastination and the Art of Getting Things Done

    Procrastination and the Art of Getting Things Done

    Now, this is not going to be a blog post on how I achieve so much in a day or how to get things done. This is because procrastination and getting though my own to do list is probably my biggest problem.

    I start off with all the right intentions and sometimes even fool myself that what I am doing is getting me closer to my goals but this is not the case.

    It frustrates me no end. In fact it gets me that annoyed at myself that I get even less done.

    I discovered that I have ADD some time ago and this is a problem that a lot of people have and I have tried all sorts of methods to overcome it with varying degrees of success.

    One of the big problems is that it is very difficult for me to get into a rhythm and I start a system up or buy a diary and commit to writing everything down or adding everything to the latest project manager or auto reminder software only to forget after the first day and end up doing none of it.

    They say it takes 30 days to make or break a habit but I am not so sure.

    I suppose there is no such thing as the perfect system.

    The one thing that I have found to work the best is to stick to doing one thing at a time. Now this might sound easy to a normal person but to me I find it incredibly hard not to get sidetracked or start up 5 things at once.

    IF you have one thing to do and do NO do anything else until that one project or job is finished then I do tend to get so much more done.

    Now the question is, if I know this and if I have experience of this, why do I still end up getting sidetracked and doing other things half way through?

    Like writing this blog entry for example when I should be editing the pictures and adding them to our new site www.portraitpaintinggallery.com ?

    Who knows, but unless I stop now and get back to it, I will still be trying to get it done in 3 days time.

    Wish me luck and let me know of any sure fire methods that are guaranteed to help me and I will give them a try.  🙂

  • Earthquake In Bali – Rocks the House

    Earthquake In Bali – Rocks the House

    There was an Earthquake in Bali yesterday morning. Not long after we got up at around 6.30 in the morning. There was a loud rumbling and the house shook. The water in the swimming pool sloshed about so much it came over the edge. There were waves! That was a sight to see.

    It had the whole household up very quickly, shame it was not a school day as Katie has not been up this early since… well actually never this early I don’t think!

    It only went on for about 30 to 40 seconds but it is a very scary thing to happen I can tell you. Now I think I may be jinxed.

    I lived in the Canary Islands for 17 years and there were one or two small tremors in that time, then we moved to England for a couple of years and we were there when the biggest earthquake for years again rocked our house and cracked the garden wall.

    Now we live in Bali and I find out that we are living on the ring of fire, as it is known. I thought that was something you got after a hot curry. This is the second quake to hit Bali since we have been here and I am hoping that it was the last.

    I am all for a bit of excitement but this is a bit over the top if you ask me.

    Anyway back to business..

    One thing about the Internet business is that you can run it from anywhere in the world. Another thing, is that if you outsource the majority of your work then you have to spend very little time on it. Having others make money for you is the way to go.

    And after this ground shaking event, and no I don’t mean when I fell up the stairs, it may be time to move on.

    As long as we have an internet connection we can work from anywhere. Communicating with staff who live in Brasil, India and the Philippines via skype and email allows us to run our little empire.

    We have just setup a couple of new websites that we think will generate a little extra income almost on autopilot. Check them out and let me know what you think? www.PortratiPaintingGallery.com is live but needs a bit of work. It is a website to promote oil painting portraits from photos. We have an amazing team of artists that really know there stuff and produce some great works of art.

    www.izabellamorgan.com is another one ready to go. Sharon and Astrid designed a range of beachwear that we will promote through the luxury hotels here in Bali and once established, across the World through a network of agents. So all good stuff.

    I got portrait painting gallery ranked on Page one of google, msn and yahoo. Yahoo has dropped down to 35 now but still on first page of google. Not bad in a week eh? That is pretty impressive by anyone’s standards you must admit (He says in a smug voice 😉 )

    I will keep you updated with how we get on with the ranking of this site over time and let you know how much traffic we generate and, how much we make from it.

    Until then from .. 🙂