You’re totally going to lose everything
That’s a teaser title. It’s meant to bait you and scare you into reading this post.
So yeah, you’re going to lose your wife because she’s sleeping with another dude or even another gal, or if you’re a girl, you’re going to lose your husband — unless you’re gay, or unless you’re just dating, and you can see that the permutations are sort of endless here, so we’ll leave it to “you’re fucked.”
That said — and this is really an insult-to-injury thing after learning that your old lady is shacking up with Florida from Good Times — the fact is that you’re going to eventually lose your data if you don’t back things up. Like, it’s only a matter of time.
But the good news is that backing up has gotten easier, as in you no longer have an excuse not to do it. Unless you’re so lame that you just wear a big lame sign all the time, you lame-ass lame-o.
But first, let me convince you that this is all necessary by recounting a few of my own real-life experiences:
• Several times, the database that holds all of my email in my email program has gotten corrupted. If you’re like me, losing email is like losing your wallet. It suuuuuucks, and I use my emai like a big to-do list. If I lose email, I have no idea what I’ve promised people, or what I need to do for work.
• One time, my blog got a virus. Yes, that can actually happen. And if you don’t have all of your blog posts stored somewhere, you’re pretty much screwed.
• Another time, I did something as innocent as made changes to a web page file for a client. Then I realized that I had changed the wrong file, and that I had saved the changes… so there was no way to recover the original file. I had to re-create the whole damn thing.
And lastly:
• If you’re on a PC, your computer is going to crash eventually, and you lose everything. Not so much on Macs. I’ve never had a catastrophic crash, but my Dad has them every few years. He says they’re delightful.
So.
YOU NEED TO HAVE EVERYTHING BACKED UP. You just need it. Computing without regular backups is like having unprotected sex in orgies filled with guys like Ron Jeremy: it’s just a matter of time before you get cannonballed in the nuts with some horrible flesh-eating disease.
Enter the best $5 service I’ve ever seen.
I recommend Mozy backup like I recommend myself as the recipient of large sums of cash. You sign up. You download a little file and you install it (for both PCs and Macs). You tell it what you want to back up. Then (this is the way-cool part), you schedule it to do these backups automatically, through your broadband internet connection, every night, or every day during an off time.
Every damn day, this little program uploads the entirety of whatever you want up to Mozy’s servers. It’s 64-bit encrypted, meaning it’s as secure and as private as credit card data. Nobody can read any of your files without you logging in and authorizing it — including Mozy. So don’t worry, your sex pictures with Grandma will remain your little secret.
What I like best about this (other than the fact that I don’t have to think about it) is that it’s OFF-SITE. When I used to back up everything manually onto DVDs or even CDs, I used to think, “What if my house burns down?” or “What if someone steals it all?”
You use Mozy and it’s nowhere near your house. You could have a catastrophic fire, go to a buddy’s house the next day and log in, release your files, and they’d burn them to a stack of DVDs and FedEx them to you overnight.
For less catastrophic stuff, you can log in from your own computer and download the files you want.
That thing I did where I changed the wrong file and didn’t have a copy of the original? That happened after I started backing up once. So I logged in and downloaded the backup copy that Mozy had made the night before. Sweet.
You need to do this.
It’s like $5.
And it’s unlimited.
I seriously have over 40GB up there. Sure, it took a month of on-and-off uploading (automated, but I’d stop it while I was working) to get it all up there, but it’s there: My music, my photos, my files, my email database… everything that isn’t system files and applications.
Now that it’s up there, nightly backups take maybe an hour and happen while I’m sleeping. It’s so badass.
You need to fucking do this right now. Seriously, it’s so brainless and easy and you’ll never lose data again. Do it now
. Now
. Now
.
Then, all that’s left after you’ve done that is the matter of backing up your blog, so that’s the subject of the following video. You can watch it once you’ve gotten your home files backup together. (Which you should do now.)
So here’s the vid. And Jesus does my headset suck. Sorry for the audio quality. I just can’t seem to make a respectable audio recording.
Got it? So take a few minutes to back up your blog, and then go get Mozy. Like, now. You’ll sleep so much better at night. It has saved my ass so many times.
How to send one domain name to another – in three different ways
Let’s say you’re into weasel flogging. I know a lot of you are into it, so it’s a good example. Maybe you’ve registered “weaselflogging.com” and have a blog there, all about the most effective and efficient ways to flog weasels. But then you decide to buy a second domain name — say “flogthatweasel.com” — and you want to point it at your weaselflogging.com blog.
So to summarize, you want both domain names pointing at the same blog. You are NOT trying to launch a new site here. I mean, nobody needs two weasel flogging sites. You just want your bases covered with two domain names.
You choices are:
1. Domain forwarding
When you forward a domain, you’re simply saying to the browser, “Oh, flogthatweasel.com. You need to head over to weaselflogging.com.” So when someone enters flogthatweasel.com into their browser, it just sends them to weaselflogging.com. They know they’re heading to the different domain name, because as the page loads, the URL in their browser actually changes to weaselflogging.com.
2. Domain forwarding with masking
“Masking” means you’re hiding the actual URL of the page you’re sending visitors to. In this case, we still want users to wind up at weaselflogging.com, but we want them to think they’re at flogthatweasel.com. So basically, the same thing happens as in #1 above, but this time the URL in their browser doesn’t change. Instead, it remains “flogthatweasel.com,” just as they typed it in.
(This is a really useful strategy for affiliate links. Let’s say you’re an Amazon.com affiliate and are constantly sending people to Amazon to buy a book on weasel flogging. However, you don’t want them to know that it’s an affiliate link. So what you do is you register a domain name like www.weaselfloggingbook.com and you forward and mask that domain so that it goes to your affiliate link. The visitor will think they’re at weaselfloggingbook.com, but they’re actually at http://www.amazon.com/books/category=rodent-abuse&subgenre=weasel-flogging&affiliate=8309302.)
The problem with the way that most registrars do masking (like GoDaddy’s forward-and-mask service) is that the URL in the browser remains flogthatweasel.com as the visitor clicks on links and views other pages. It won’t change to, for instance, www.flogthatweasel.com/contact.htm.
3. Mapping
I don’t know if this is the official term, but I think of option #3 (which solves the problem from option #2) as “domain mapping.” In order for this to work, you need to own both domain names involved. You can’t do what I’m calling “mapping” with an Amazon URL because you don’t own Amazon.com. But don’t you wish you did?
In this case, you’re telling the new domain to use the same files as the old domain name. You’re saying, “If someone wants a file at flogthatweasel.com OR at weaselflogging.com, look in this folder on my hosting service to find it.”
This will make your links work properly. They will behave in all ways as if they are two totally separate websites, but they will use the same files. So if you make a change to the contact page of weaselflogging.com, the contact page on flogthatweasel.com will change too.
Happy domain play. I know you love it.
Creating multiple websites on one hosting plan
I’ve been doing my $39 blog launches for a while, have had a lot of satisfied customers (and just check out my testimonials! Good shit!) and have gotten a lot of really positive feedback. When I do those launches, I like to use GoDaddy for the hosting, and for the $39 price, I require that people get GoDaddy’s “Deluxe” hosting plan. (And if I’m not setting up a blog for someone and they ask me about GoDaddy, I still strongly suggest the Deluxe.) The reason is that not getting the Deluxe is retarded.
Stick with me here.
I recently re-released my free blog launch e-book (you see it there in the sidebar with the blue cover) and changed the process so that instead of recommending GoDaddy, it recommends HostGator. (This had nothing to do with GoDaddy’s quality. They just kept changing things around and I was tired of updating the e-book… so relax if you have GoDaddy. They’re cool.) In the e-book, I recommend getting the “Baby” hosting plan, because not getting at least the Baby plan is retarded.
You want a hosting plan that allows for multiple domains. Let’s face it, website hosting has gotten stupidly cheap, so you’re paying a maximum of about ten bucks a month to have literally as many websites as you’d ever want on one hosting plan, without paying an extra nickel. So just get an unlimited plan already.
I’m going to draft a tutorial for this shortly that will show you in painfully simple detail exactly how to do this… like my iContact tutorial. (Or maybe it will be a video; I’m not sure.)
For now, here are the basics:
The below examples assume you already have one website rolling and just want to add a second.
ADDING A SECOND WEBSITE IN GODADDY
1. Log in to your account at GoDaddy and register the new domain name you’d like. You do this by going to “Register Domains” under the “Domains” tab in the green nav bar along the top. MAKE SURE YOU LOG IN TO YOUR ACCOUNT BEFORE REGISTERING THE NEW DOMAIN NAME!
2. Once you’ve finished registering the new domain, choose “My Hosting account” under “Hosting” in the green nav bar.
3. When your hosting account comes up, click “Manage account.” A new window should open.
4. Click the big “Your domains” button along the top of the new window.
5. Find the silver “Add Domain” button to the right, almost all the way to the top of the screen. Click it.
6. In the pane that opens, type in the new domain name you just registered, without the “www” at the beginning. Then, in the field that says, “Folder,” enter a name for a new folder to contain the domain. Personally, I just drop the “.com” and use that. Be sure to leave the “/” at the beginning. So for example, if I was using “cars.com,” I’d call the folder “/cars”.
7. Click the orange “OK” button. You’re technically done at this point.
8. But to add the site files, use the same FTP information you’ve been using to send content to your current site except that this time, you’ll be putting files in the new folder you created above. So if my first site was bob.com and I’d been using bob.com as my FTP hostname, I’d still use bob.com as my FTP host and would log in using FTP in exactly the same way but would now put my cars.com files in that new “cars” folder I created.
ADDING A SECOND WEBSITE IN HOSTGATOR
1. Log in to your HostGator control panel. You’ll find this info in the welcome email HostGator sent you. It’s also described in my blog launch e-book if you downloaded that.
2. Along the very top, there’s what looks like a search field, but it says “Register” above it. Use this to register your new domain name. Do not just go to HostGator and register the domain… YOU MUST BE IN YOUR CONTROL PANEL!
3. Once you’re done with that, return to the main screen of the HostGator control panel and scroll down until you find the “domains” section. It’s about 2/3 of the way down, below “Security” and above “Databases.”
4. In that section, click on “Addon Domains.”
5. Enter the domain name you just registered in the “New Domain Name” field.
6. The rest of the important fields will likely be filled in for you after you do that, but if they aren’t, just put the domain without the “www” or the extension (”.com”) in the subdomain/username box. So if I entered “cars.com” in the top box, I’d enter “cars” in the second. Then, in the “document root” box, enter “public_html/cars.com”, but of course put your own site in there instead of “cars.com.” Then pick a password and click “Add Domain.
7. You’re technically done at this point.
8. But to add site files, use your FTP program as such: In the “host” box, enter your new domain name. Then use the new username and password for that domain that you chose in step 6 above. So in my case, the username I chose was “cars.”
9. In contrast to the GoDaddy explanation above, you won’t have to put your files in any special folder. Just put them where it takes you when you log in using your FTP program. (This is actually just because you’ve already been taken to the correct folder automatically.)
In both cases above, GIVE THE NEW DOMAIN NAME TIME TO PROPAGATE. If I register sitename.com right now and immediately try to set it up and send files to it, it probably won’t work. New domains need time to “propagate” throughout the internet, and that time can range from 5 minutes to two days. An hour or two is typical, but sleep on it if nothing happens right away.
Questions? Leave them to comments so that I can answer them publicly for everyone!
