Welcome to Smuggle Me

I recently purchased a scooter to get me to and from work. I’ve always loved scooters. In fact, I first purchased one when I was 17 and since then I’ve had a scooter except for a couple years when I lived in Hawaii. However, there are a few things people should know when purchasing a scooter.

1. There is absolutely nothing COOL about riding a scooter. You have to be able to accept the fact that when riding a scooter you are not doing it to be cool. The coolest thing you might be able to do with a scooter is get a hot girl to ride on the back. The first time I hung out with my wife I took her to a restaurant on my scooter. However, I’m pretty sure she didn’t marry me for my scooter. In fact, I’d probably say that she married me despite my scooter.

2. Remember and repeat to yourself over and over that while there is nothing cool about riding a scooter, you are getting 100 miles per gallon while everyone else is filling up their SUV’s with thousands of dollars of gas each year. Cost is the BEST reason to ride a scooter. The savings are fantastic.

3. Parking’s not a bad second reason to have a scooter.

4. If you ride a scooter then you have to realize that you can’t go as fast as everyone else. In fact, even if you are going over the speed limit, cars that see a scooter are going to speed up. People who see a scooter on the road think that they have to go faster than a scooter. There’s some internal need for people to feel like they are going faster than a scooter. Speed goes out the window and passing the scooter is people’s only objective. I know it’s true, because when I’m driving a car I do the same.

Before you buy a scooter, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. Some people just can’t handle the power of a scooter.

I’ve talked to a number of people recently about hosting their website at home or on their own server in a data center. I personally think that doing so is a pretty big mistake. I think that getting a shared host is the best option for 90% of consumers. In fact, most businesses wouldn’t need more than a shared hosting service like Hosting Zoom either.

Here are a couple reasons you might think about when deciding to use a shared hosting service or not:

High Availability
A shared host often uses clustered failover to handle the failure of the server. If you have your own server your more than likely don’t have this level of reliability. If you do have clustered failover then you should stop reading this blog post altogether. It’s not designed for you.

Improved Performance
In a shared host environment they have designed these servers to handle high volumes of traffic. Their netowrk pipe is designed to handle large amounts of traffic.

Patching the Server
Patching and securing a server is not a trivial thing. Let them take care of that while you just take care of driving more traffic to your website.

Much more could be said, but that’s a start.

Hosting Zoom is an example of a company that’s using this clustered failover hosting technology. Pricing starts at $7.95/mo. It still amazes me how low such a robust technology costs these days. For that price all website data including email, web, and databases are mirrored in real time and in the event of a server failure our system will route all traffic to the available server within the cluster keeping your website online until the problem is resolved.

Why then did you want to host your own server?

I’m a complete and utter stats addict. I admit it and I’m proud of it. When I get to a computer the first thing I have to do is check the statistics on at least 10 different places. Each of those places requires me to change at least a couple filters to know how it has changed over time. Most importantly, I want to know how people have found my various blogs and if someone has written something about me recently.

BAStats is by far my favorite stats program. BAStats is a wordpress plugin that gives the best wordpress stats I’ve seen. I think there are some pay plugins that can compete, but of course I’m not going to pay for something that isn’t any better than BAStats which I get for free. The referring pages it lists are invaluable to me as a blogger.

I also love checking AWstats from my host. It is a great way to get a broad overview of what’s been happening with your website over time. It’s a great filler that I check probably every couple weeks or so. It amazes me how referrals to your website can add up over time.

Google Adsense is next on my list. It isn’t a stats package in the standard sense, but it has some great statistics on how well your Google ads are doing on your website. It’s a must check to keep track of how much money my website is making me and also to see how many people are clicking on the ads and relatively how much each click is making me. Thankfully, I’ve been seeing a little higher pay out for my standard blogs recently and so I haven’t had to rely on my Electronic Medical Record blog for all the revenue.

I’ve also been messing around with eBay’s affilliate program on commission junction. The stats in commission junction are a pain in the butt to navigate, but I do like to see the total amount people have purchased on eBay from my site.

Well, there are plenty more, but I think that’s a good place to start. Feed your stats addiction. You’ll like stats. I know you will!