As some of you will know I run my own dedicated server (at great cost to myself each month). Due to this I generally have a lot of free space on my webserver and I decided to take this chance to run a little competition for Entrecarders so that they could win themselves some free hosting.

I know this is a long post but I have tried to break it up into sections. If you are entering please be sure to read the terms and conditions at the bottom of this post for full details.

I will run this competition at least once; if it goes well and there is enough interest I may run this again but we will see how we go.

The Prizes

There will be a total of 5 prizes available – each of which will be an allocation of webhosting on my server.

1st Prize:

• 12 months webhosting (longer if I have the resources available, at my discretion)
• 1 GB webspace
• 10 GB transfer/month
• Unlimited email accounts
• Unlimited MySQL Databases
• R1Soft Continuous Data Protection – backups taken hourly
• Free .com, .net OR .org domain name (you will need to sign up for an account at NameCheap.com, subject to availability).

2nd Prize:

• 12 months webhosting (longer if I have the resources available, at my discretion)
• 750 MB webspace
• 7.5 GB transfer/month
• Unlimited email accounts
• Unlimited MySQL Databases
• R1Soft Continuous Data Protection – backups taken hourly
• You must supply your own domain name.

3rd, 4th and 5th Prize:

• 12 months webhosting (longer if I have the resources available, at my discretion)
• 500 MB webspace
• 5 GB transfer/month
• Unlimited email accounts
• Unlimited MySQL Databases
• R1Soft Continuous Data Protection – backups taken hourly
• You must supply your own domain name.

How To Enter

To enter into this competition you must meet the following conditions:

1. Be a current Entrecard member, displaying the EC Widget on your blog
2. Be an active and regular blogger (no blogs that have not had a post in over a month)
3. Be willing to host (at minimum) an active blog on the web space if you win.
4. Agree to the Terms and Conditions at the bottom of this post.
5. Write a post on your blog linking back to both this post and my blog (SecludedHabitat.com) answering the following:
   • Why you want to win this competition?
   • Why you feel you deserve to win the free hosting?
   • Why you have not got paid hosting previously?
   • And finally how would having your own hosting enable you to enhance your blog or service to the community?
6. Leave a comment here linking back to your post to let me know you have entered the competition.

The competition opens as of today and entries will close at 11:59 PM Australian Eastern Daylight Savings Time on October 26, 2008. Winners will be decided and released on this blog by 11:59 PM AEDST on November 9, 2008 at the latest (its Uni exam time around then, that’s why a couple of weeks are needed).

Terms and Conditions

As I am not a web hosting company at all, purely offering some spare space on my dedicated server, the service offered is “no-frills” I will ensure that the server stays online and backups are taken regularly. If any additional server-side software is required this will be considered on a case-per-case basis. Basically, this means that you are responsible for the correct operation of any and all software (such as Wordpress – and other PHP software that you wish to use) and no additional support will be provided. The prizes offered are not transferable and not redeemable for cash.

This competition is not a game of chance, each entry will be thoroughly considered by myself and each person’s merits evaluated. The winners will be chosen based on my personal opinion of each person’s entry and my decision will be final and no further collaboration will be entered into.

Factors that will be considered in my decision include but are not limited to: desire to grow in blogging, wish to include features that are not available on free blogs, inability to afford paid hosting, the desire to provide a service or product to other bloggers (such as Wordpress plugins, any falling into this category must be free and open source) and finally how long blogs have been established. Each of these factors will not have equal weighting and may contribute differently depending on each entry submitted.

This competition is only valid in countries, states and territories where law permits it to be so.

This competition may be terminated at any time if circumstances arise that are outside of my control.

And FINALLY – any content hosted on the free sites must be legal, not defamatory or racist and so on and so forth. All copyrights must be observed and any breeches will be investigated and result in immediate termination of the hosting with no penalty to myself. No adult content or IRC may be hosted on the webspace and anything you do host must also fall under the terms and conditions of my webhost as stated in the appropriate sections of the DedicatedNow terms of service.

Good Luck

Good luck to you all, I look forward to reading your submissions.

Stuart

So firstly, I have been aware for some time that visitors using Internet Explorer 7 have issues when viewing my blogs. The issues that have arisen are mainly that some images display slightly out of alignment. Due to this, and due to the fact that in a week or so I will be releasing a massive tutorial on my GeekyHabitat.com Blog (read more about that below) I decided that it was time to get this fixed.

As I have no idea on how to do this myself (believe me I have tried), I decided to post a request for assistance on RentACoder. In short RentACoder is a secure environment for anyone from Joe Average to a large organisation to connect with programmers from around the world. I am pleased to say I now have a gentleman from the US working on the issue as I write this (ok… ok he is probably in bed now, but you know what I mean). So I hope this will be all resolved in the next few days. So if you are a fellow blogger and need some help getting some things worked out on your site I would really recommend a look, so far I could not be happier.

Onto the changes on Entrecard, as most of my reader base will know Entrecard recently partnered with SezWho. SezWho provides services for people to vote on comments and posts on blogs (and other services such as forums as well). For the full details please see this post on the Entrecard blog.

This was one of the main reasons I decided to get the Internet Explorer images issue fixed up, because it is also affecting the voting stars, so please bare with me while I get this fixed up.

Finally, the much awaited (and anticipated) OpenX tutorial is nearing completion. For those of you that don’t know I have been writing a tutorial on installing, configuring and using OpenX, the open source advertising management solution. I even had a staff member from OpenX comment on my GeekyHabitat blog as they are eager to see the tutorial as well (which I thought was really cool). I have worked on this solidly for pretty much the whole weekend. I have completed Parts one through three and estimate that there will be a total of six parts.

So if you have one or more blogs or websites keep an eye out on GeekyHabitat in the coming weeks for this full blown tutorial.

I would love to hear your thoughts on any of the site news, and especially the new Entrecard and SezWho partnership.

Stuart