About

Getting Derailed

I was supposed to be working on a different website, an experiment in affiliate marketing, but I got completely derailed. Everything was so slow it was unusable. Hence, a simple redirection website (this one) just didn't work. I needed to stop everything and address the problem of speed.

My Name is Matt

I am a retired insurance mathematician. Insurance is all math. Somebody has got to do it.

About speed and the tools to get there.

When your website sucks how do you make it unsuck?

The short answer is to dump WordPress and go to HTML/Javascript. The long answer is getting your own Virtual Private Server (VPS.) My VPS plan costs about as much as a regular shared plan, or about $10 per month. Unfortunately, a VPS means you get to play Linux administrator. And given that cPanel costs $180 per year on top of the $120 I'm paying, I now get the fun of installing and configuring a free cPanel alternative called Centos Web Panel (CWP.)

Some trials and tribulations

It's taken me a few weeks but I'm almost completely done configuring CWP. The last remaining issue is that my e-mail ends up in the SPAM folder. Go to the Blog section to see some articles about the issues.

For the record, I finally did get that redirect page going: https://redirect9.com/c/.

There's a flatfile forum here: https://redirect9.com/a/.

I'm currently using RainDrop.IO for my bookmarks on tools and other interesting things .

The Future

How can I develop affiliate websites that are fast, make money and not too expensive to develop/operate?

I'll be writing about those issues in the future. Currently, I'm working backwards: what affiliate plan pays at least 20% commission and is interesting to me? The next issue is a free funneling system. I'm looking at Mautic . That requires PHP/MySQL. I don't have Softaculous (one-click installs), so I have to do it myself. Note that ClickFunnels is at least $97 per month. It's probably a lot better than Mautic but free beats $97/month for now.