All my sites are completely hosted in Canada now. Woohoo!

Last June 2016 I moved one of my hosting accounts from Bluehost (affiliate link) to SKGOLD (affiliate link) Hosting, here in Canada. I documented this and mentioned which sites were moved in this blog post www.hart-empire.com/2016/06/24/tip-how-to-fix-an-error-occurred-while-processing-this-directive/.

Well .. I had 4 other accounts at Hostgator (affiliate link) that were expiring all around the same time at the end of the year December 31, 2016, and my goal to move them to Canada was the same. Beginning November 15, 2016 I started to move each of these account to the Canadian hosting company SKGOLD finalizing my choice on Black Friday November 24, 2016 when they were offering a 2-for-1 hosting sale for the first year! Since the move .. I haven’t really done anything, except clean up the four accounts with respect to plugins, loading times, and other fix other issues that may have come up after moving .. since, one of the accounts was my bloated “PetLvr” (LVR) group of sites that have been going on since May 2005 and has over 6,700 posts and a huuuuuuuge database!

I am also in the process of converting most of the sites from blogs – which, my blogging hasn’t really really much to talk about in the past few years – to “E-commerce Stores with Blogs”. I have been testing platforms and cleaning up old stores in my “Shops of HART Market” stores, and testing new themes. I also noticed that in doing many of my clean up and changes that some (or, all of a few certain regular themes that I have been using) appear to be broken. My plan is to first decide on the BEST theme to use, that mimick’s my entire HART EMPIRE NETWORK philosophy, and standardize one theme for everything! At least, that is my plan.

In the meantime .. I hope you are patient with me … my goal is to have everything ready by “Back To School” time … (I am an accountant during the day and gearing up for income tax season and year ends).

PS: And, speaking of moving 100% of my 57 sites and domains from Bluehost/Hostgator to the Canadian Server SKGOLD HOSTING … if you are looking for some helpful advice on making the move yourself .. here’s a site and person that got in touch with me and has a site just willing to do that! His guides and reviews are very helpful or, at least gives you something to think about when pursuing more information.

One caution, as pointed out in the disclaimer of his website:

Disclosure: Our website receives compensation from the companies whose products we recommend and because of it, we are able to provide Free help with setting up your blog. We tested and used most of the web hosting sites and domain registrars recommended here.

( i.e. most links related to hosting and domain reviews are affiliate linked, and they will make a commission if you sign up through their links, and will generally override previously clicked links or referrals from other sources before you click over here. Don’t get me wrong – this is common around the internet to help support bloggers and website to providing and maintaining information, like this, that is generally helpful and useful and around when you need it!)

Check them out! If you chat with anyone from that site, or with their Social Media accounts … tell ’em HART sent you!

firstsiteguide.com/change-hosting/

“…. the guide intended for web newbies to explain the terminology, issues and procedures they need to know in order to successfully transfer their website from one host to another.

I have been on the internet and with websites since March 1995 and blogging since May 2005. I started small with local hosting platforms, and then expanded each to a point where I consolidated all my sites and blogs to a super dedicated server in May 2007. By 2012 I began to downsize and broke up my dedicated server into 5 separate and smal and cheaper shared hosting accounts … one at BLUEHOST (affiliate link) and four at HOSTGATOR (affiliate link). Both Bluehost and Hostgator (and a bunch of other hosting companies) are all owned by the same “Endurance International Group” and that always irked me.

My Bluehost server holds about 20-25% of my sites, and expires July 29, 2016 but I decided to move all my sites to Canadian servers when one of the sites had a little traffic this month and Bluehost deactivated my account. It turned out to be an old plugin I had (Spam Karma 2) that I never removed that was causing the problems and my account was reactivated right away – but, with the US Exchange rate rising .. I finally decided to move my sites back to a Canadian Hosted server. My Hostgator sites are not renewed until December 31, 2016 so I plan to just move those over the fall at the convenience of my time.

SKGOLD HOSTING aka CANADIAN WEB HOSTING

After review and talking to various other people I respect, I decided to go with SKGOLD HOSTING (affiliate Link). If you want to read up on the, and considering your own move of servers .. check them out: www.skgoldhosting.com/about.html (no affiliate link)

These are the sites I moved … how are they doing? I notice they are not slow or downtime like they were on Bluehost … but – I just got them migrated today 😀

1800hart.com
1800hart.tv
2yrd.com
62-151.com
abitpac.com
andyouwill.com
andyouwill.net
andyouwill.org
battlingforhealth.com
battlingforhealth.net
battlingforhealth.org
bettesinger.com
callhart.com
hart-empire.com (this site)
hart-empire-network.com
hart-network.com
hartleybsinger.com
hbsmc.com
jmskwared.com
singer-empire.com
singer-network.com
the-singers.com

MIGRATING TO ANOTHER SERVER IS HELL

Migrating to another server is hell .. if you have to do it yourself, or expensive if you have to pay another to do it for you. However, if you have access to the cPanel .. (and especially if you subscribe to a daily backup application like “Site Pro Backup”) the cPanel has an option to make a FULL CPANEL BACKUP. What this does, is creates a backup in a .tar.gz format of all your files, databases, settings, add-ons, and well, everything! that is in your old server, that your new server can come and scoop and download and install into the new server.

For my Bluehost account – it took about 48 hours to get their technical support to finally make a good and full cPanel backup that wasn’t corrupt and was in a compressed mode (which took extra time) and ended up being about 15.13 GB in size. Restoration on the new server took about 4 hours to download in the first place, and that was about midnight … and by 10am this morning most of the sites were up and running.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

I was finding out that when I went to about half of the sites .. I was getting the above message – especially when I tried to log in to the dashboard of my wordpress files to update plugins and such and give a good test.

Here is how to fix this problem:

* Make a backup or in your FTP program rename your .htaccess file to something like .htaccess-before-move-hosting
* Go to SETTINGS.
* Go to PERMALINKS.
* Notice which settings you have – (usually “postname” or “month/name”)
* Choose PLAIN and common settings for Permalinks and SAVE.
* Then, re-select your original “postname” (or whatever) setting and SAVE

That’s pretty much it. What this does is create or overwrite the existing .htaccess file and make it work with the server and site. You should be cautious however, and compare what was created with the .htaccess-before-move-hosting file, to see if you need to add or modify the existing file with extra security and safety features.

Your Welcome!

HART

~~~~~~~
image source: Wikipedia

If you’re an affiliate marketer then you understand the fact that the more products you have to promote, the better commission cheques you’re going to receive at the end of every month.

If you’re used to promoting one or two programs at a time, it’s time for you to explore a new option which will allow you to increase your profits more than you ever thought possible.

The world of internet commerce has created more opportunities for affiliate marketers than any other program ever has – the opportunity to have an entire ecommerce online storefront, full of products you can make commissions off of, all based in whatever niche you choose!

Building Your Own eCommerce Online Store

Having your own ecommerce online store is actually much simpler than most people think. A way to build an affiliate ecommerce store is by using data feeds. Data feeds make it possible to display products from one or more merchants in the same web site.

Data feeds are similar to the RSS feeds used by blogs – an ecommerce store set up by a traditional offline business will place descriptions, pictures, and prices of their products into these feeds, and then affiliate marketers can incorporate these feeds into their own ecommerce store and make a commission off of each product sold.

You can either build your own online store, or you can utilise the services of an ecommerce solutions company like Datafeedr.com who will walk you through all the steps and support you as you get your online presence built.

We recommend using the services of an ecommerce solutions company when building your ecommerce online store, simply because they already have all of the software in place to set up your data feeds.

Data feeds are the lifeblood of an ecommerce online store, as they are the ecommerce software that adds new products for you to promote to the site. Adding products manually to your ecommerce online store is certainly possible, but it is a very time consuming process.

Data feeds take all the guesswork out of adding new products to your ecommerce online site, making it easier for you to make better profits with a wider selection to offer your visitors.

What Are You Waiting For?

There’s never been a better time to build your own ecommerce online store, full of products that you could be making generous commissions from for every sale.

The folks at Datafeedr.com have millions of different products that you can choose from for your ecommerce online store; and are ready to help you get your web site up and running in no time!

Watch the video at Datafeedr.com and see how easy it is to set up your own affiliate data feed stores.

Please check out the Shops @ HART Market … which are built using the Datafeedr system!

e.g.

– Petcare.HARTmarket.com
– Lingerie.HARTmarket.com
– TurtleLvr.com
– beefjerky.HARTmarket.com

In anticipation of HART’s New Computer expected to arrive July 17, 2012 … I hope to resume with “The HART Podcast” series! My first podcast #000.1 was June 18, 2008 and my last podcast was #000.4 March 4, 2010. I know that doesn’t sound like a “series” but, I hope to get this going again, since I have purchased a new microphone, headphone, and web camera and an *awesome* Dell Computer with 16GB RAM memory!!

PS Thanks for visiting, and here are a few gratuitous French Maid pictures I found on Flickr

Anyway … I figured rather than include music I do not have the rights to include in a podcast, and have no sound … I thought I would try and pick some “sexy” background music to make ME more interesting! Thanks to google search, and me being an economical type of Future Podcaster … I did find and purchased two different tracks from MelodyLoops.com that I plan to incorporate into each and every podcast. Maybe I’ll put one at the beginning and one at the end? Or, maybe just loop them over and over until the podcast is over? They only cost me $10.00 USD each, and I thought that was a reasonable price for a “Melody Loop”. What do you think?

Let Me Know In The Comments Which You Prefer Best!

1. ‘Only Trust Your Heart’ by Mike Nowa

This track is 00m:31s and is looped into a 10 minute track below:
[audio: melodyloops-only-trust-your-heart-10m.mp3]

Single Loop
[audio: only-trust-your-heart.mp3]

2. ‘Mountain Blues’ by Pavel Svejentsev

This track is 01m:12s and is looped into a 10 minute track below:
[audio: melodyloops-mountain-blues-10m.mp3]

Single Loop
[audio: mountain-blues.mp3]

You can listen to my previous Podcasts here: The HART Podcast” series //

So?
– Which one was your favorite?
– I looped them into 10 minutes to be sure to give you a listen to how it would sound over and over and over again! Did you get sick of one or both or none of the above?
– What if the first (without loop) started each of my podcasts, then the second looped over and over until the podcase was over?
– comments? suggestions?

PS – do you podcast? What do you do for background and/or intro music? // Thanks 😀

Dell Desktop #1

In October 2002 I purchased online a “Dimension 8200” Computer from Dell Canada. It was a super computer, because, if memory serves me correctly, I took the online price of about $1,700.00 and aggressively upgraded it into a super duper $4,500.00 computer! I took the 4 year option and my final payment was in October 2006.

Dell Laptop #2

In June 2007 I purchased online a “Latitude D820” Laptop Computer from Dell Canada. It wasn’t a super laptop-computer, but I did take the cost from about $999.00 to about $2,400.00 before taxes mostly getting more memory and storage space plus, a few accessories. I also took the 4 year option to lease instead of buy.

In both cases, I was happy with my purchase because I needed the computer or laptop desperately for my busines, which I couldn’t afford to outright buy at the time, and both have served me well! In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have extended it to 48 month terms, because DELL CANADA FINANCE charges you 28.99% annual rate of interest in their amortization and you almost end up paying about 70% more for the cost of the product in the long term. However, I write off my lease payments for income taxes and if I didn’t pay Dell .. who else would I pay? Capital One? Revenue Canada?

Best Buy Desktop #3

Somewhere in between these two purchases, late 2003 or early 2004 … I purchased a second computer for the house. We called it the “SIMS 2” computer, and I would also store backups of my work on it. It was:

HP Compaq Presario Computer
AMD Anthlon(tm) 64 Processor +3500
2.19 GHz, 960 MB of RAM

>> nothing special It was configured for a multi-media enviroment and had 180 GB hard drive.

Well … On February 27, 2007 My first Dell Dimension 8200 Crashed and that being the day before deadline of T4 Season (February 28th) I switched computers and started to use the Compaq Presario as my main computer. In June 2007 .. I actually went online to the Dell site to purchase a suitable (read: “Better”) desktop computer for my home office, but instead was starting up with the blogging since mid 2005 and trying a new business plan to me more … ‘roving’ so I thought a laptop would serve me better than upgrading to a new desktop, and so I did.

Well … this Compaq Presario works – but, is a nightmare for me. The 960MB Ram is just not enough with the Facebooks, Pinterest, Empire Avenue, and MS DOS and other G/L Accounting programs I use, not to mention when I use Open Office or Excel or Word Processing programs. However, the absolute worse is my Zone Alarm anti-virus/spyware control program I use (which is free from my ISP) and it is constantly checking and updating for new virus definitions and such. Basically, a full scan of this computer with this 1GB RAM and 2.19GHz processor takes about 13 hours to complete, so in the meantime .. every single file viewed uploaded downloaded clicked on is checked by the anti-virus program and causes memory up to almost half my RAM. It’s just crazy if I accidentally try to click a new tab or try loading another program in the middle – and didn’t notice – and keep on clicking and clicking and making things worse! I always get the white screen of death and time out. It’s Nuts!

I can’t tell you how unproductive it is … but, even my wife knows it is horrible, and most of the time she is just loading her GPS Watch results onto the Garmin site!

Well .. It’s About Time I Bought Another Desktop Computer #4!

I just purchased a new computer from Dell Canada online .. leased over 3 years. Here are the specs!

225-2645 XPS 8500
313-6138 NO SPEAKER REQUESTED,DIMENSION
317-9193 3rd Generation Intel Core i7-3770
317-9212 16GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz
318-1677 16X DVD+/-RW
318-1872 XPS 8500/ black Chassis
318-2249 Integrated 7.1 with WAVE MAXXAudio 4
320-3038 AMD Radeon HD 7570 1GB GDDR5
320-3151 Dell ST2420L 24″ Full HD LED Monitor,CDT
330-1158 DELL USB 6-BUTTON LASER MOUSE,I/S/XDT
331-5795 US Power Cord
331-5886 Localization parts-English/French
331-6145 XPS localiztaoin parts
331-6146 Dell KB213 Wired Multimedia Keyboard
331-6149 SHIP,XPS,L10,FXCN,8500,DAO
331-6176 DELL RESOURCE DVD,BACK-UP,XPS8500
342-4107 2TB SATA Hard Drive 7200 RPM
410-0547 ADOBE ACROBAT X READER MLANG,CDT
410-0571 MCAFEE 11, 36 MONTH, CDT
421-5693 Win 7 Home Prem 64 SP1, Eng, No Med,CDT
421-7190 Dell SRV Software 1703
421-7997 No PDVD
421-8242 Software Cycle 23
430-3628 Integrated 10/100/1000 Ethernet
430-4735 DW1703 802.11b/g/n, BT4.0
410-0450 MICROSOFT OFFICE STARTER 2010,CDT
954-1820 PPS TECH SPT,XPS DT,BAND 1,INIT YR
992-7983 HW WRTY+SVC,XPSDT1NBDM1,UNY,INIT,REL
992-8003 NBD OS,XPSDT1NBDM1,UNY,INIT YR,REL
009-6800 SHIPPING FEE
950-9797 NO WARRANTY,YRS 2/3(DIM,INSP,NBD)
Subtotal: $1,364.99
Shipping and Handling: $0.00
GST/HST: $68.25
PST: $95.55
Total Price w/Discounts: $1,528.79

Basically … it is an “out of the box” Canada Day Special where they gave me 25% off the price (originally worked to $1,819.97 less 25% = 1,364.99) plus taxes. Shipping is free! The “Basic” model was about $800.00 but, I took the best “out of the box” option of the bunch:

Intel Core i5 >> upgrade to Intel Core i7
8GB RAM >> upgraded to 16GB RAM
1 TB hard drive >> upgraded to 2 TB hard drive!

E.T.A. for shipment … July 17, 2012!

I’ll post pictures once it arrives and I unpack the box!

I happened to mention that my birthday was July 11th and, it would be a great Birthday Present to myself if arrived by then, but Dell said “highly unlikely” … oh well 😀

I think I can honestly say that not much has been happening here since my last post in 2011 … although, I do have a few sites in development (SportsHEN.com) and working on rebuilding and redesigning ecommerce stores HARTmarket.com/shops .. Shop @ HART Market.

Meanwhile .. I will try to get back to posting more about the inner works of the HART-Empire Network starting in July 2012.

HART

ugh.

Back in February 2011 I moved PetLvr.com/blog/ “blog” and merged that into PetLvr.com “community blog and forum”. Because I’ve been blogging since 2005 and had almost 4,500 posts in the archives of PetLvr + the Community blog … I used a special export plugin and downloaded one month at a time. This assured me all of the posts were complete, as well as the images were moved/merged in tact.

Well .. after I looked at the merge, I had over 6,900 categories and about 8,000 tags. As an example, I had the category “.: Pet Health Care” 589 times in the category list, with slugs ranging from pet-health-care, pet-health-care-1, pet-health-care-2 etc etc to pet-health-care-589.

This has been quite painful, because at the time all I could find was one wordpress plugin that merged categories one at a time … it’s called Category Merge. It works fine, but from March 2011 to October 2011, in my spare time, it has taken me down to about 2,400 categories left to merge. Quite annoying, but hoping no one would notice.

But A New WordPress Plugin Worked Miracles For Me!

It’s a miracle ~

Term Management Tools

Search for “Term Management Tools” in your Add-A-New Plugin feature in your dashboard.

How this works: Got your Posts in your dashboard, and just edit categories like you would normally would, and select the categories you want merged by ticking the box. Then, at the top select from the drop menu “merge” and type in the display name of the category you want (or the same name in my case).

It took me 14 minutes to merge the remaining 2,400 categories into the final 260 or so categories that exist!

Now … if you know about this plugin already .. you’re a lot smarter than I am .. and *geeesh* why didn’t ya tell me about this 8 months ago!?!

Currently, I have 40 Shops @ HART Market (multisites) under the domain HARTmarket.com. In addition to these Shops, I have embedded stores within 3 of my sites .. PetLvr Store, And You Will Store, and the Battling For Health Store. Finally, I have 5 individual domains with e-commerce stores on them similar to the rest .. of which 2 are jointly presented with other people and 2 are basically crappy test sites that I meant to test but haven’t gotten around to!

With all these stores of mine, you would think that I am making tons of money .. but I am not. In fact, quite the opposite … I’m making tons of nothing!! Well, I do make a little 🙂

It’s hard NOT to make ~something~ because I am an approved publisher of almost 600 vendors. Most of my stores have been created with the Datafeedr Plugin, which makes it easy to blend a variety of many vendors into a specialized and concentrated store. I’m pretty much hooked into all the major companies … Shareasale, Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, Linkshare, Medhealth, Bridalux, Pepperjam, and Clickbank .. as these are the companies that the Datafeedr program supports that I am approved publisher and the vendor has an updated datafeed in place.

I have quite a few other companies that are not part of these affiliate network .. you see for these companies and those vendors who I am approved vendor, but they do not have an existing datafeed .. well, I have a bunch of rotating 468×60 banners everywhere being randomized, based on the blog your are on!

By the way … I just figured out why that damn AJAX error was on my sites recently … and fixed it. It was the Tweetboard twitter script that appeared on the left side of each site. No one was using it anyway, so I just removed it and everything should be okay now. Sorry everybody 🙁

Success and Failure

For me .. I have to say .. I’ve had the worst success with Linkshare and Pepperjam and Commission Junction … and I still have a HATE-ON for Clickbank (see archives)! I’m actually getting a fair amount of clicks on the CJ products and banners, but no one is buying – and it irritates me to death that I can only see a decent webpage ONLY if I have my Internet Explorer up – instead of using my trusty Firefox broswer.

All affiliate earnings that I have received since 2008 however, except maybe one $75 cheque from Linkshare, have been from Shareasale. I haven’t really applied to many Google Affiliate Network vendors, although I was approved for about 10 vendors. Quite honestly, I don’t know if I have been generating traffic or clicks to the sites because I haven’t logged in there for ages … well, until this past week that is.

My Downsizing Strategy

I have decided effective July 1st, 2010 to stop promoting everything but Shareasale (SAS) and Google Affiliate Network (GAN) products in my stores. If I concentrate on SAS sales .. less choice should gear towards reaching their payout thresholds faster. Adding GAN will be nice, since I get a couple ‘hun per month anyway from Adsense and they pay out regularly on the 26th of the month directly into my bank account – so that’s a bonus!

Besides downsizing the vendors .. I also plan to downsize the products. Currently, although I personally like concentrated sites of similar products .. it seems to be the general consensus that my having anywhere from 300 to 10,000 products in one single store is not good – and, I shouldn’t have more than 50-100 top primo selected products!

So .. with the existing shops that I do have, I will be modifying each store (probably in alphabetical order) to only the top selected products and categories.

My Upsizing Strategy

So my existing 40 Shops @ HART Market should hopefully have no more than 100 products in there by the end of July. However .. there are are many opportunities out there and I also plan to continue growing with more stores. Some may only have 5-10 products, and others may have 25-50 or so and I still have about 60 ideas from when I first started that I could create with up to 100 products in them.

I will be sticking to my original gameplan .. to keep adding new stores until I hit 50. Then, I’ll either start another domain and community of shops .. (if it affects CPU resources on my server that is) or continue to 100 shops.

Other Wishes and Dream Cookies

Well .. if I can manage the above by the end of July 2010 .. I also want to clone myself, figure out a way to work 40 hours in a 24 hour time period, stop all war and bring peace to the world, feed all the hungry children save all the unwanted pets … and well, winning the lottery would be nice too.

And Now For Something Completely Different

… no, not Monty Python .. South Park’s “The Dreidel Song” of the episode of South Park episode “Mr Hankey Classics” (hopefully I can get the SHOPS @ HART Market back on track by Christmas!

I have added the Smooth Slider plugin to this blog. You can too .. if you go to your wordpress dashboard “Plugins” section in the sidebar, “Add New”, and then search for “Smooth Slider”.

The smooth slider is that featured box above the title of the posts. If I think a post is informative for others, or extremely interesting (opposed to just being a waste of cyberspace and me ranting and raving about nothing) then I will attach the post to be displayed in this section. I have tested several sliders and other featured content gallery type plugins because on Battling For Health blog .. everytime I try to reinitiate a paid plugin that I bought called “Action Popup” … I receive error messages on the page – something to do with the Ajax or java or some stupid thing. I know that this plugin does NOT fix that problem, but of all the features of the other plugins and sliders .. I liked this one the best and is simplest for my needs.

I’ve recently added a new wordpress plugin to my blogs … called “AmazonFeed“. You need to be an affiliate of Amazon, and get the Amazon API code and the Amazon Secret Access Key from Amazon Web Services .. plus your server requires the module “MCRYPT” which allows AmazonFeed to encrypt communication with Amazon as per Amazon regulations.

Check out the bottom of any post!

I have set up the plugin to find either (1) Books or (2) All options .. books, videos, electronics, and software and appear at the bottom of each post, search based on my existing tags used in the post. Check out my tags, and the “Related Amazon Items” below … are they relevant? I didn’t check before posting….

Here’s some information from the Plugin Author’s website but, all you have to do is search in your dashboard under Plugins / Add new / search for “AmazonFeed”.

I installed it on Tuesday, and already I have had over 65 clicks and earned $2.30 commissions on my BFH site (yeah, i know doesn’t sound like much but, it’s greater that $0.00). I’ve had less luck on my PetLvr site, but only because most posts recently are about WHS and tags include dog names, instead of pet rescue, or pet adoption etc. I’ve modified my usages sinced Tuesday on that :D. As for this blog, I just activated it prior to publishing this post.

Description

This plugin will allow you to turn your WordPress website or blog into a money making machine while at the same time offering valuable additional related materials to your visitors. It will automatically search for and display products from Amazon.com which are specifically related to the topics you write about. Once you install the plugin, you simply have to decide if you want to show products related to your Categories or Tags and the plugin can do the rest. All you have to do is continue writing about your favorite subjects and the plugin will offer related products to your visitors.

Even though it is capable of being fully automatic in this way, it also includes powerful controls to tailor exactly how it functions. You can customize the keywords used for searching on any given post or even disable the plugin completely. You can also customize the heading that is shown, the number of results shown and many other aspects of how it functions.
Features:

* Automatically load category or tag related products from Amazon.com.
* Earn rewards as an affiliate, simply by entering your affiliate tracking code.
* Provide valuable additional content to your visitors on the topics of your posts.
* Total control to tailor results for any given post.
* Excellent content caching for lightning fast response times.
* Ability to disable related products from being displayed at all on any given post.
* NOT JavaScript based, meaning it is not hidden from users with no JavaScript capability.
* Easily managed sidebar widget support.
* Many more great features you’ll just have to explore.

More Information:

For more information about this plugin, visit the plugin homepage at: www.warkensoft.com/products/amazonfeed-wordpress-plugin/