Finding a reliable, free host is very difficult. Conflicting reviews across the internet and on the web hosting forums always confuse the seeking customer. Today, I just wanted to tell you about a great, new Free Web Hosting site called InsaneGB. You know they provide excellent free web hosting because it’s owned by my good friend Nomar from 9MB.

What do you get?

If you sign up (for free) at InsaneGB.com, you will get:

• 5GB Web Space
• 20GB Data Transfer
• UNLIMITED MySQL Databases
• UNLIMITED Addon Domain Names
• UNLIMITED FTP Accounts
• UNLIMITED E-Mail Accounts
• cPanel

Did you notice it says free cpanel? It’s hard to find free cpanel these days… I pay like $20/mo on my dedicated server just to get it. This size hosting package is perfect for someone running a couple of blogs. You get unlimited databases and addon domains, so the number of sites you put in your account is endless. You can either sign up with your own existing domain, or you can create a free subdomain (such as mydomain.insanegb.com). This is great for those of you on a strict budget and want to create sites without purchasing a ton of $10 domains.

No Ads!

Finding a free webhost that doesn’t litter your site with advertisements is pretty rare. Well, InsaneGB is completely ad free! Another solid reason why you should go sign up.

Sign Up Process

The signup process at InsaneGb is quick and easy. You go through a couple of steps on the form and then your account is created automatically. No waiting around for someone to flip the switch. You can have your website up in 10 minutes.

Support

With InsaneGB, you get 24/7 support. They also have a support forum where members can interact with other to get live help and hosting tips.

All in all, InsaneGB is a great free hosting company. They give you a solid starter package with 5GB disk space absolutely free, and best of all there are no crazy ads or pop ups. If you’re in the market for free hosting, you have to check them out. Even if you have current hosting, why not sign up for an account and use it for test sites and backups?

I’ve been tracking DerekBeau’s progress in the development of a Free PPC Campaign Builder Tool for a week or two now. The tool lets you build targeted, long-tail AdWords campaigns in record time. All you need to do is provide a keyword list, set some options, write some text ads, and this tool will do everything else for you. It is basically a free version of SpeedPPC.

Derek got the idea to create a free tool for everyone to use because he didn’t want other people to spend nearly $500 for a tool that should be free in the first place. I’ve already downloaded the tool, but haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. I’m posting this from Katie’s computer, so I likely won’t get to mess with it until tonight when I get home from work. However, if you can test the tool on Derek’s server here.

I think it’s pretty cool that Derek took almost 15 hours of his time to create a free tool for everyone to use. Be sure to head over to his blog and check it out.

I came across a post on Digital Point saying there’s a great new way to increase traffic to your blog. It’s called BlogRush, and it’s completely free. You may have seen it by now, as many other bloggers are testing it out. Look on my sidebar, and you will see a new widget that says “From the Blogosphere”. What BlogRush does is publish 5 new posts from other related blogs, hoping you will send traffic to them.

For more information on how it works, click here to watch the video. Below is an excerpt from the member dashboard on how you get traffic to your site:

In our video we mentioned that you earn a 1:1 ratio of syndication credits on your own traffic, and any direct referral’s traffic (such as “Bob” in the example video) and any direct referral’s referral traffic (yes, that sounds confusing!) such as “Jen” in our example. We also mentioned that you’d also earn credits based on activity through 10 generation levels. Here’s the breakdown of our formula:

Your Traffic = 1:1 1st Generation Of Referrals (Directly From You) = 1:1 2nd Generation Of Referrals (i.e. Jen in the video) = 1:1 3rd - 6th Generation Of Referrals = 1:4 7th - 10th Generation Of Referrals = 1:8

1:1 means you earn 1 syndication credit for every 1 impression of the widget by your own traffic or by any users located on the 1st (direct) or 2nd generations. 1:4 means you earn 1 syndication credit for every 4 impressions of the widget by any user located on the 3rd to 6th generations. 1:8 means you earn 1 syndication credit for every 8 impressions of the widget by any user located on the 7th to 10th generations.

When all of this math is added up, it leaves 1 headline space available out of every 10 that are served. This means that BlogRush uses 10% of the headline spots (5 headlines in each widget load) to monetize the service. We currently have plans to sell these extra credits to any user that would like to purchase additional credits — this is one of the ways we will pay for the service.

I’m not sure how well this will work on my blog, but at this point I’m down to try out anything new. If it does actually send me new traffic and new RSS readers, I will use BlogRush on all my blogs. With sport niche blogs, this program could work very well.

This isn’t a paid review or anything… I just wanted to give props to a website I’ve been using quite a bit lately. It’s PDFOnline.com and it converts all types of files into PDFs for free and instantly. This site can convert .doc, .jpgs, .txt, .html, .gif and just about everything else. It’s freakin’ awesome!

You upload your file, and they email you instantly with the pdf file. So why is it free?

First of all, it costs us very little to run this service. Developed using easyPDF SDKâ„¢, PDF Online server can process thousands of PDF conversions per day (with 99% success rate) and runs 24×7 with no human operator.

Secondly, it’s our way of saying thank you for helping us improve our easyPDF SDK’s performance and value to a level no one, not even Adobe®, can match.

This service is great or those of you wanting to create e-books and having them protected in PDF format. I still don’t know how to convert a .doc to a .pdf using Adobe Acrobat on my PC. Thank god for this website that does it all for me for free.

A lot of scripts, like Wordpress, have great SEO right out of the box. You don’t need much tweaking to get a blog indexed quickly in the search engines. However, if you’re starting a site from scratch, or not using a script with well designed SEO, then you will need to make changes so the spiders find you and rank your site well.

Last month, Small Business SEM wrote an article called How to SEO your site in less than 60 minutes. I’ll outline below a few of the first steps you should take as suggested by Matt McGee. For the full list of steps and details, check out his blog post.

1. Visit www.yourdomain.com.

• A. Does it take you to somewhere else? Visit yourdomain.com. Does it automatically forward you to the www? If not, then you need to do a 301 redirect. Search engines might consider your site as 2 seperate sites (dupe conent).
• B. Review site navigation. Textlinks are the best. If you have flash navigation, search engines might have a tough time finding their way around your site. Included in site navigation is your URL structure. How long are your URLs? Do they have keywords in them?
• C. Review home page content. Do you have an adequate amount of text? Are your keywords placed in the text copy? Do you have a sitemap?
• D. View the source code. Check your meta description and meta keywords.

There are 8 or 9 other steps you need to take to ensure your site is properly optimized in under 60 minutes. So be sure to check out the rest of them.

Win 6 months of Free Hosting, 2 domains and more!

Our friend Nomar is running another contest on his new webmaster forum 9MB.com.

The prize: 6 months of free hosting, which includes:

 • 300MB storage
• 20 GB Monthly Bandwidth
• 10 POP e-mail accounts and 20 e-mail forwarding aliases
• 1-Click MySQL Database Installs
• Easy-to-use Plesk Interface
• Webmail access to your e-mail
• Web Traffic Monitoring
• E-mail screening to block viruses and minimize spam
• Unlimited Sub Domains

You can host 2 websites on this hosting package. This prize also includes wordpress install and support.

Because you can host 2 websites on this package, 9MB.com will sponsor 2 domains of your choice (it has to be a .com, .net, .org or .info). This makes the prize worth $ 100

This prize is a complete package to start 2 new sites. 9MB is quickly becoming a hot new forum. They already have 100+ members and 5,000 posts in just around 1 month’s time.

To check out the complete contest details and how to win the prize, click here.