I’m trying not to make this blog post into an environment lesson because you probably already know all about it. There are Web Hosts that claim to be “Going green” by cutting down on carbon emissions. However, are Green Web Hosts actually better than ordinary Web Hosts - Will it benefit more?

First of all, there are different types of Green Web Hosts. There are those that say they will “Plant a tree for every Web Hosting Package purchased” and there are those that optimize their servers to make it use less energy. Hostgator is one host that have recently announced they have gone green by optimizing their servers.

One main point is that Green Web Hosts normally cost more because they think they can get away with selling for higher prices since people will want to help the environment. Green Web Hosts generally aren’t as popular because people are looking for the Cheapest Web Hosting, not bothering whether they are green or not. Also, again, not to make this into an economy lesson but people don’t want to spend more than they need to because of the “Credit Crunch”.

A lot of Green Web Hosts probably don’t even do anything green, they just use the title “Green Web Host” as a unique selling point. Some Web Hosts that say they will plant a tree for every Web Hosting Package purchased could easily be lying because if they were really popular, I don’t think they would want to plant thousands of trees for getting $3 - $5 a month per package. If they actually do, I feel sorry for the guy having to plant them.

In conclusion, there is no point in going for a Green Web Host just because its green, it would be a good idea to purchase hosting from one if they provided a great package (Better than the others you could find) however because it wouldn’t hurt anything, but there isn’t much point in paying more than you need to when they could easily lie. There are a lot more serious factors affecting the environment than the Web Hosts.

Before we start, this method is not recommended at all because it involves breaking Google’s Quality Guidelines in order to earn money. It can be a great way of making money however, and when its all setup, it requires no work at all.

This method is very easy to setup, although it does require a bit of money to be used to start with.

The first step is to register a domain. A .com domain is recommended, the domain will be used for a blog so make it quite relevant to a niche. Then setup Web Hosting. We won’t go too far in detail in this, you should be able to do it.

Now you need to install Wordpress onto the hosting. After you’ve setup the blog and all the options are looking good, move onto the next step.

This is when some more money is involved. You could either hire an Article Writer or you could write articles yourself. They have to be unique or this won’t work. You will be needing 20 articles - 10 to submit to your blog and 10 to submit to EzineArticles. Once you have these articles, gradually post 10 of the articles over the space of a few weeks, don’t post them all on one day or it won’t have as much effect. Then obviously submit the other 10 to EzineArticles but make sure that you have a link to your homepage in the Resource Box so that you can get some backlinks from it.

A custom header is always a good thing with this method. You could either create one yourself if you have Photoshop skills or you could hire a designer to do the job for you, the price could be around $10 - $20. Once created, put it on your website.

Now you should have a decent looking blog with 10 articles published gradually and 10 articles which should hopefully get accepted by Ezine. This is where you need patience. You will need to wait a few months for the next Google PageRank Update. If everything is done right, Google should give you a low PageRank value, but thats a good thing. You should expect a PR1 at least, if not a PR2 or PR3. Once you have a PR value, move on.

Now that you have PR, you should be able to sell some links. Register your blog to the following websites:

1. Text-Link-Ads.com
2. LinkWorth.com
3. Backlinks.com
4. LinkAdage.com

Add the code it gives you to your website. Now the amount the advertisers pay you will depend on how high PR you have. For a PR2 - PR3, you might get paid $4 - $8 monthly per backlink. If you sell 5 backlinks at $4, you’d make $20 a month from it. Doesn’t sound like much, right? Well now that this website is all setup and earning money while you do nothing, it means you can keep creating more. And more. And more. Say if you created 100 of these sorts of sites (Yes it would cost quite a lot as an initial investment), then that $20 a month could easily turn into $2000 a month, and yet you still don’t need to do anything. All you need to do is keep paying for the hosting and keep renewing the domain names.

As you all know, Google doesn’t like selling links. They will penalize your website if they find out you’re selling links. Luckily, Google normally find out by people reporting your website and if you get no traffic, there won’t be many people to report your site, right? If they do find out and give you a PR Penalty, it isn’t much trouble especially if you are running a lot because you could still set another one up or still try to sell links from it because there are people who buy links from PR0 sites, you just won’t get as much per backlink.

Google have announced how they treat Inbound links towards the rankings and also towards the Google PageRank value given to sites. This was a very interesting announcement.

As we all know, Google uses the inbound links to your website as a rough guide to see the importance of your website. That is why people spend a lot of time link building. People have been thinking that the number of backlinks is what is important - What they announced says otherwise.

According to Google, they are starting to devalue links from websites not related to yours, even “ignore them”. This means that none-relevant links won’t have any effect on your Search Engine Results or PageRank. This makes it a lot more difficult to link build because you have to concentrate on links from your own niche or it won’t help.

As Google explained it:

“Let’s say I have a site, example.com, that offers users a variety of unique website templates and design tips. One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.

Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.”

This would explain why a lot of users are having lower rankings after having an initial boast from the links before Google devalues them.

This is Google’s way of trying to stop link building. They only want links from the owners who are writing a review or an actual link instead of thousands of links from directories.

Some tips they did give to get valuble links were to create a blog, and post some interesting content - Such as latest news. This will make people link to you, but the problem is, what if they don’t? If you start a new blog, nobody knows about your site and you can’t get great Search Engine Results if they ignore directory links and the “non-valuble” links, which makes it even more difficult to get off the ground.

Google likes to make things more difficult for us.

Web 2.0 seems to be the future of Web Design. There shouldn’t anyone who doesn’t think that Web 2.0 looks nice. Here are some valuble resources, all of them are Web 2.0 Generators. These generators will help to make you some Web 2.0 content so you can “stay up with the times” and make your website look nice.

Link 1: Quick Ribbon - This site will generate a nice Web 2.0 ribbon for the corner of your website. It just adds a bit of extra style into your website. The small things have a big difference.

Link 2: Spinner Generator - This site will generate a good-looking loading spinner button for you. It works great if you have a good amount of content to load which will slow your website down, the Web 2.0 spinner adds extra style like the ribbon does.

Link 3: Button Generator - This site will help you generate a cool-looking Web 2.0 button. Although it isn’t the nicest looking, it will work well in certain situations.

Link 4: Stripe Generator - This site generates nice stripe boxes for you to use on your Web 2.0 website. It can be good for a logo or as a background box on your website.

Link 5: Web 2.0 Badges Generator - This site can generate some great-looking badges to use on your website, maybe for a logo if you want. They do stand out, thats a good thing. It draws attention.

Link 6: Web 2.0 Logo Generator - This site makes a basic, yet sleek-looking logo for your website. It can look nice on any site, Web 2.0 or not.

Link 7: Web 2.0 Tabs Generator - This site can make a Web 2.0 Navigation Bar for your pages - In the style of tabs. A very clever way of ordering your navigation, and it looks nice too.

Link 8: Web 2.0 Button Generator - This is another button generator but this generates a different type of button - A bit bigger this time, one of those buttons you could use as a “Purchase” button or something.

Hopefully you will use these resources very well, and good luck making your websites Web 2.0.

Now this is an interesting debate that isn’t discussed that much. Email Hosting is certainly not as popular as normal Web Hosting, but people still use it.

Email Hosting is basically as it says - Its hosting your own Emails - So you aren’t using a free email hosting provider, you can make email addresses for your business or company. These sorts of email addresses are important for a business, free email providers look very unprofessional if you’re advertising them.

Obviously everyone knows what Web Hosting is - hosting for all of the website (Including emails, databases etc…). This probably isn’t anything new to you.

On the one hand, the Email Hosting is better because the price is more affordable generally - You’ll be paying less for the emails, and if you only need emails and not a website, then you would think that there would be no point in spending more on something that you don’t actually need, right? Email Hosting can be more reliable since there isn’t much storage.

On the other hand, the Web Hosting is better because even though the price will probably be more, you’ll probably end up with an unlimited amount of email accounts, and a lot more storage space. The best thing about this is that even though you’re only doing it for the emails, if you wanted in future, you could easily setup a website through it too, so it has more potential if you wanted.

In conclusion, Web Hosting is of a better value because you’ll have unlimited email accounts (Which some Email Hosting Companies don’t offer) and you’ll have a bigger storage space. Also, there are generally more reputable Web Hosting Companies than there are of Email Hosting Companies, mainly because Email Hosting is a lot less popular.