I’ve been through my fair share of hosts, free and otherwise. I’ve blogged about my previous paid hosting in this post. Surprisingly the paid hosts went down more than the free hosts. George attributes that to me buying paid hosting that he wouldn’t use even if it were free. Sound logic and unfortunately true. I’ve finally decided to buy decent paid hosting.
At first while searching around I couldn’t find any small packages, meaning, around 1 GB. I wanted a reseller and all those out there were either upwards of 5 GB or were atrociously costly for what little space they provided. I even created an excel spreadsheet (damn!) with all the details so I could look at the deals at one go.
I condensed that list to 6 hosts that I thought were worth buying from. Two hosts had awful reviews, another didn’t accept Paypal, one other had decent reviews but George didn’t like the domain name or the fact that they had spelling mistakes on their site. That left us with two more hosts that had few or no reviews of them. Luckily, I had tried them both out before. I had used one for about 7 days before I got pissed off with the support (I was on their free trial package, its possible they have different support for freeloaders) and the other host used to host the host where I bought my previous reseller from. A few emails later, I was all ready to buy hosting from the host that hosted my previous host (I like the sound of that). Come Sunday, I should officially be their customer.
Want to know which host it is? Well, y’all are smart enough. I left in enough clues for you to figure it out.
Marc’s blog seems to be sporting a few sponsored posts. While he’s cornered sponsoredreviews.com for himself, I thought I’d join in on the fun and went about searching for similar services. After a little searching around I found Smorty, a bright coloured, crisp looking site that has a very simplistic feel to it. All you need to know is right there on the homepage. Its a service connecting advertisers with bloggers and making sure everything goes smooth between them.
For the bloggers, what might seem interesting is the fact that they expect you to express your opinion and not push an advertisers product. They repeatedly emphasise on posting your opinion about any service or product. Their sign up is a single page and the whole process was a breeze. They took less than a day to verify my blog. My account already had 6 new offers under New Oppurtunities. The process here is that advertisers mention their offer and you select one that you’d like to write about. Once you submit your post it’ll be reviewed by both the advertiser and Smorty. Once its confirmed you’ll get paid within a week by Paypal. One thing to remember though is that there is a 400 word limit for each blog post. I’m not sure why they limit the amount of content. Also I was a tad disappointed with the offers. Almost all offered $6 for a blog post but since I’ve just started with them I’m guessing it’ll go up once I’m done with a few posts.
If you’re looking to be an advertiser then I guess you’re getting a pretty good deal. The testimonial page seems to rate them very highly. It seems like a great way to get high quality inbound links. Check them out if you’re interested:
Link: Get paid to blog
I wonder how long it’ll take for my post to get reviewed (Edit: It takes around 2 days). I’ll post what happens after I submit this blog post.
Edit: Haha… The post was declined because I linked to Marc’s blog. A rule I seem to have missed - “Post can only contain sponsors links”. Resubmitting post.
I’ve blogged about Radioverve before (here), while their site was not much to talk about before they’ve gone ahead and revamped the thing into a total kickass wordpress based website. Their integration of flash and AJAX with the wordpress theme is mind blowing. I really like their flash player and its intuitive interface. It all fits in quite well with their site. They’ve got loads of new content and they’ve split it up into different channels - Rock, Metal, Gospel, Jazz, Classical, Konkani, folk (yet to come) and their usual mishmash of everything. I find that especially convenient when I’m not quite into a song on one channel I just switch channels to something more interesting.
They’ve still got a few rough edges but none serious enough to spoil the experience. They’ve got a program schedule but in its present form I can’t see how its of any use. I’m not even sure if the program schedule is correct. Their rock channel schedule states that the LBG show should be playing at 10:30 pm but its 10:48 PM now and ‘Medicis - My World’ is playing (awesome song that. Gotta buy their album.) Also, it sounds like their promos have gone from bad to worse. It sounds like bloopers that they’ve taped and stuck in between songs, maybe its supposed to be funny but the humour completely escapes me. It gets pretty annoying after a while. I actually liked the Demon stealer records advertisement (a metal compilation of hardcore, metalcore and nu-metal - That guy had an awesome voice) better than the radioverve promos. Talking about promos, radioverve now has a badge that you can use.
And finally the one I think I’ll use - 
That large badge looks like its been badly cropped. Anyone willing to do the honours?
All in all its a good step forward and I’m sure everyone will appreciate the new content on radioverve. A few creative promos and a little tweaking with the site and they’re made.
