tech, simplified.

Under the Hood of Techinch.com

It’s been an exciting year for Techinch.com, going from a brand-new blog in January to having over 10,000 in a little over 8 months.  We’ve outgrown our first hosting plan, tweaked the theme, joined a new ad network, and more!  Here’s some of our recent changes:

New Hosting

imageWeb hosting can be an infinitely frustrating thing to get figured out.  There are thousands of hosting service, and for every one you can find reviews that say they’re the best service in the world and even more that say they’re the worst service in the world.  This makes it almost impossible to find out if a hosting service will be really good.

Techinch.com experienced outages, often for several hours a week,  almost ever since it was launched, so when I received an email from our old host saying that the site was using too much system resources on a shared account, I knew it was time to look for a new hosting service.  I considered several, all of which were personally recommended to me by collegues and friends, including Media Temple, Rackspace, and DreamHost, as well as several hosted services such as Page.ly and Squarespace.  In the end, I ended up going with DreamHost, and it has worked out great so far.  Their support has been first-rate, we’ve had almost no downtime, and the site is loading faster as well.  I plan to review DreamHost’s service soon, but if you’re looking for webhosting, go ahead and give them a try.  During my search for a webhost, though, the support was great from many of the companies, and Media Temple especially does an awesome job at Twitter support.  If I ever need a more advanced virtual server, and can afford it, I definitely would give Media Temple a try.

New Ad Network

imageEver since I started Techinch.com, I wanted to be able to run ads on it that were useful, stylish, and still paid.  I was inspired by The Deck ads, which I’d noticed on FeedDemon, 37signals’ Signal vs. Noise blog, and Daring Fireball, among other apps and sites, and wanted to do something similar on my sites.

I was thus very excited that Techinch was accepted in the Yoggrt ad network in August.  You’ll notice the Yoggrt ads on the top right corner of Techinch’s sidebar … just a rectangle image ad, with a text description underneath.  The ads look very nice, and are often for services and products you’ll find interesting.  I find myself looking at the ads to see what new awesome products are being advertised, which is so much better than Adsense which left you wondering what old, stale junk was being advertised.  We’re proud to be part of the Yoggrt ad network, and hope to grow together.

By the way, if you happen to be looking for a great way to advertise your new webapp or stylish, modern PC app, Yoggrt would be a great network to run your ads on.  It currently gets over 1 million impressions per month across the entire network, which includes a variety of sites including T3chH3lp, another awesome tech site you should check out if you haven’t already.

New Site Features

Although the site itself hasn’t changed much over the past few months, I’m constantly making little tweaks to the site that should make it more fun and useful.  Some of the changes include:

There’s more to come, too.  Stay tuned for more awesome content, tips, reviews, and giveaways from Techinch over the upcoming months!  And thanks for reading; you’re the reason this site exists, and I never forget that.  If there’s anything you’d like to see reviewed more or need to learn how to use, please mail and let me know or send me a tweet or DM, and I’ll try to get it covered.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.