Express-All-I-Want Open Letter to Exabytes

In conjunction with Exabytes 7th anniversary, I have written an open letter to them. Hopefully someone from Exabytes will read this open letter and give me feedback by commenting here. Here's my 7 paragraphs, 577 words open letter to Exabytes to express all I want. Happy 7th Anniversary!

Hi Exabytes,

I did not know you 7 years ago. I started knowing you since early 2008, that was when I decided to start blogging.

I believe you are one of the best Malaysian hosting companies now, there are others out there but I could not name any off-hand. Maybe my knowledge is limited, or it so happens that Malaysians like to talk about you.

People say you are the best in Malaysia because:

1. Your hosting is reliable.
2. You have excellent and extra-fast support team.
3. Your data centers are based in Malaysia and US, thus ensuring fast access of websites for Internet users based in Malaysia.
   

Although I did not know you in your early years, I have read quite a lot about you and also how you were initially set up. The founding story of Exabytes is indeed inspirational and will be a good motivation for any Malaysians who wish to emulate your success.

Now you are celebrating your 7th anniversary. You may have expanded, have more workers, assets and also customers now than the yesteryears but I believe these days do not count as your glory days in terms of customer satisfaction. I may be wrong but I believe that customers were really happy with your service during your 4th and 5th year in business. Then just few months before your 7th birthday, everything goes wrong - customer complaining about the uptime of your servers, the same customer saying that using shared hosting on Exabytes might affect a site's search engine ranking and finally customers protesting against your new policy which prohibits content related to homosexuals.

Exabytes, why don't you take this opportunity (in view of your anniversary) to put back emphasis on things that matter? Moving forward and expansion are important but you must not lose sight of the importance of maintaining the quality of your services, of which you are highly reputed in the past and a large part of your reputation is based on server reliability and excellent support team. Besides that, regarding the enforcement of the new anti-homosexual content policy, I am sure that your intentions are noble. However you might want to get a professional lawyer to rephrase your policy and you need to distinguish between homosexual adult material and safe content involving homosexuals. Allegation of discrimination against homosexuals is certainly one thing you don't wish to be associated with.

Dear Exabytes, you have established yourself as a reliable hosting with good support and your price is among the most affordable. These are the things that distinguish you from your competitors. Don't forget your roots and continue with the good work you have put in the last 7 years, don't let it go to waste! I am not your customer and have not used your hosting before but if people were to ask for my recommendation of a reliable Malaysian hosting, I would mention your name without a second thought. As for international market, unfortunately you probably would not be my first choice recommendation, there are really attractive offers out there and there is still work to be done if you want to be ranked among the best international web hostings. However, I believe you are not that far off from the big players up there. Make me and other Malaysians proud, I would certainly be happy if one day I could recommend you as the best hosting for international market as well.

Happy 7th Anniversary!
BobbyT

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Update May 23rd: I am back...

Hi, been quite some days since the last post here. I was busy with a lot of things: buying some webhostings and domains, learning the ropes of self-hosting and WordPress and literally doing marketing with other web entrepreneurs.

Also I have been planning to change the Blogger template for quite some time now and finally you can see the template of my choice here. However the "upgrading" of the layout is not 100% done yet, there is still a lot of stuffs to clean up, re-arrange and modify and add. I hope to finish tying the loose ends with the layout soon.

In the last few days, I managed to grab 2 great hosting offers, 1 is a personal account while the other is a reseller hosting account and I got both of them at a killer price. I am not sure what to do with the reseller hosting yet, either give out some free accounts or sell some cheap hosting packages, or use it myself. Seriously I have got more hosting accounts than I can use right now, and recently I was informed that I have won 1 year hosting + domain from a contest I joined.

OK, this is an unofficial questionnaire. I have not decided to sell hosting packages on the reseller hosting but I may depending on the response to the questions I have here.

1. Would you like to have your own blog with your own dot com?
2. What price are you willing to pay per year for blog and domain hosting?
3. If you were going not planning to have your own blog, would my offer of USD3/year hosting and domain entice and perhaps change your mind?
   

Obviously, my hosting will be able to support forums, PHP, MySQL, etc. but I am thinking that most people will prefer having just a blog. My hosting has up to 400GB bandwidth, I will be selling at least 10 accounts if I decide to sell. Some simple calculations, if you were to buy a domain to be hosted with me, the total might only come up to $10USD per year. Interested?

Would like to know your opinions about this. Meanwhile I will keep a watch on the hosting server, to see how stable it is and I may post the report few days later. Also I have 3-4 good posts being lined up and at least 1 or 2 freebies for you guys soon, so don't forget to check this blog again tommorow or the day after tommorow!

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Entrecard Review

Hi BobbyT here. I have wanted to do a review about Entrecard for a long time now but I am afraid that I am not able to review it objectively because I have experienced the ups and downs journey together with Entrecard. However, I am pleased to present here a review done by Lewis Churty, a friend who has been able to introduce Entrecard in the best possible way in this post, especially for those who have not heard about it before. Please welcome Lewis.

Like many blog-specific traffic generation concepts (I nearly wrote fads there) Entrecard has had a pretty prolific beginning. In this post I explain exactly how the Entrecard system works and what you can do with it so that any blogger can have a start that is equally as prolific!

The Entrecard system is a bit involved for new users so it is necessary to break it down a little to explain it. Put simply, it lets you advertise for free. Did you breathe a sigh of relief? I hope so, because I certainly did when I found this out! Effective advertising for bloggers is costly these days with expensive PPC campaigns producing more and more dubious results and the price of reviews on the bigger blogs reaching hundreds of dollars; Entrecard is a way to slightly level the playing field.

So here's the process, step by step:

1. Sign-up to Entrecard for free (note that there is no referral system, this has resulted in plenty of very fair and even-handed reviews popping up around the blogosphere).
2. Create an advert – The format in which adverts are shared on Entrecard is as 125x125 .jpeg/.jpg or .png file which you will have to host somewhere on-line as opposed to uploading it from your computer. These images may be created in any program you may have on your computer such as Photoshop and there are many sites such as Imageshack that supply free hosting for your pictures.
3. Place the Entrecard widget code on your blog – simply create a new object in the sidebar of your blog and copy and paste the smell segment of html code provided on the Entrecard site. In this widget adverts of other bloggers will be displayed.
4. Earn some credits – Instead of spending money on advertising, users of the system trade in Entrecard Credits (ECs) as a substitute for cold, hard cash. This will be explained below.
5. Buy an advertising spot – To promote your blog you need to spend ECs to buy an advertising spot on another blog in the network (over 7,750 as of today). The cost of the advertising spot will depend on the size and quality of the blog and, once bought, will show your blog's advert for 24 hours.

So that's the system in a nutshell, its relatively easy once you get your head around it and is delivering very good results for a large number of bloggers. But the key question of course is how to earn those credits!

Firstly you earn one credit every time you 'drop' your card for another Entrecard member. This is analogous to sharing your business card. Your card shows an image of your 125x125 advert and is a great method of networking. You are limited to 300 drops a day however but the good news is that you also earn one credit every time you receive a card from another blogger.

The second method of earning credits is to accept them as advertising earnings. If you have installed the widget code on your blog (which you must do in order to use the site effectively) you will be able to display the adverts of other bloggers who wish to promote their blogs on your site. In order to do so they will have to purchase advertising with Entrecard credits and you will personally receive 25% of those credits. Entrecard states that this is in order to prevent inflation of advertising prices.

The third credit earning method is a little more obscure. The site has a marketplace where credits can be exchanged for products and services. This is a very innovative and exciting aspect of the system and should not be ignored by new users. Examples of things sold in the marketplace are; hosting for a Wordpress blog, article review services and one member even offered to write a Shakespearean sonnet about the purchaser's blog!

So there you have it, earn yourself some credits and spend it on some advertising. If you have an attractive advert and display it on carefully chosen blogs in your niche you can expect some traffic. Also you should expect to see plenty of traffic from Entrecard members checking out your blog to decide whether or not to advertise on it.

Entrecard is ideal for medium to smaller blogs, the ability to earn enough credits to purchase a 24 hour advert on an enormous blog, for the very cheap price of nothing, is incredible. The system is easy to get to grips with and will involve plenty of networking with other bloggers which is always useful. Like all systems however, it is open to some minor abuse. There are 'chain-droppers' out there who may hardly spend a second on your blog and also plenty of bloggers who are very popular in the Entrecard community and hence have high advertising costs but not so big outside of it. My advice is always to check how popular such blogs are outside of Entrecard before you spend ECs on advertising and, when you drop your card, make an effort to actually look at the blog. You may find several blogs that you really like and establish some great relationships this way.

So there's a brief introduction to Entrecard, an up and coming blog traffic generation that could well continue to grow for a long time, a great opportunity to promote your blog and yourself to the world, for the cheap price of absolutely nothing! Sign up today at www.entrecard.com

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