There are probably more web hosting services out there than there are beanie babies, making the task of finding a good service a really daunting one at times.

A site called Web Hosting Unleashed however aims to make the process of finding a hosting service much easier for you. When I accessed their site, the first thing I noticed when I loaded their main page was the SPEED. Usually hosting review sites are bloated with ads, scripts and whatnots, which makes the load time almost unbearable at times. Not so here, and believe me, this was a welcome relief.

The first thing my eyes were drawn to after the page loaded were a few hosting banner ads, which I immediately suspected of being affiliate links. I started thinking, “Oh great, not another one of those sites,” by which I meant spam sites that were light on content and heavy on the affiliate links. As I dug further though my suspicions melted away and I was convinced that this was thankfully a legitimate website for once. Yay!

Navigation is made easy via the use of menu tabs, though I would get rid of the redundant navigation links contained at the footer (the links at the header should be enough). I’m of the mindset that every link takes you to a different place, and for those visitors who treat links the same way, redundant links will probably only confuse them more, as well as unnecessarily adding to the site’s overall “busyness.”

After surfing around for a few minutes, it became clear that the best offerings you’ll find here are the extensive listing of coupon codes available for hosting services you sign up for, and the user reviews you can find for any hosting service you’re interested in. Due to the site’s longevity (they’ve been around since 2002), there are already many reviews available that you can sift through and read, even for hosting companies that haven’t enjoyed much exposure.

I would have like to have more control over how reviews and other listings were sorted, but this is a minor inconvenience, and there are enough tabs and choices to choose from to help you find the relevant information you’re searching for. They are constantly redesigning the site though, so it’s possible more sorting options will be offered later on.

There is also a guide section that has a surprisingly long list of helpful articles and tutorials to help you get started, and a blog that provides the latest news and coupon codes relating to the web hosting industry. If you’re a beginner who is just getting started looking for a hosting solution, their article, “9 Tips For Not Getting Screwed By Your Web Host” offers some of the best advice I’ve seen to avoid getting ripped off or hosed by a hosting provider.

Overall, I’m pleased to have discovered this site, and have bookmarked it for the future should the time come when I have to find a new hosting service myself (which hopefully won’t be any time soon).

Previously I wrote a piece about my suspicions on a series of websites I think are scams. So what happens? After proofreading my post, I happened to noticed that Google was displaying contextually relevant ad links… to one of the VERY SAME SITES I was writing about and suspected of being a scam.

Only me.

I immediately went to my Adsense account and had these sites’ links filtered out. Adsense however only allows you to filter out at most 300 links. And there’s what, a bazillion illegitimate websites out there? So what’s to stop another scamming site from advertising on my blog, especially if I’ve maxed out my blacklist?

Here’s Google’s answer: Absolutely nothing. Even worse, Google makes mad money off these seedy advertisers and businesses, so they’re not going to be in any hurry to clean up their links and do some form of serious quality control. It just wouldn’t make any business sense to them, ya know?

Unfortunately, the type of ad links that get displayed on my site is going to reflect on me, whether I like it or not. If a guy clicks on an Adsense link he sees on my site and purchases a product as a result, only to end up being the victim of a scam, that’s on me. I do feel I have a certain responsibility in granting advertising space only to those businesses I feel offer quality products and operate with at least some measure of integrity. That’s part of why I dropped Go Daddy as an affiliate, since they refused to even look into these websites that I suspected were trolling for suckers they could rip off.

So, after a little bit of soul searching I decided that I will no longer use Adsense, and will be removing all the code for it from my blog by the end of the day. My readers deserve better… (all three of you).

In the meantime, I don’t suppose anyone knows of any other service that also serves contextually relevant ad links, but where I have far more control over what gets served? …….. yeah, didn’t think so……

Yes, I know, it’s been a month since I last blogged. I’m aware of that. No need to keep reminding me. Shut up already.

After such a long hiatus, I’ve come to the realization that I’ve lost my blogging mojo. I have some suspicions about why this is so, but I’m pretty much stumped as to how I can get myself going again, if ever. I used to blog up a storm in times past, but now I just don’t have the passion for it that I used to.

I think part of it is that I’m pretty much all talked out (after having vented for so long on just about everything and everyone). I’ve blogged about my personal life and the traumatic experiences I’ve had in the past, about religion, politics, romance, the legal profession, and whatever else tickled my fancy. Then I just grew tired of it. No matter what I did, any blog entry I made felt flat and boring… like the one I’m writing now.

But rather than give up (because I truly enjoy writing), I’m going to turn over another leaf and try again, this time with a more candid emphasis on my personal life, and perhaps a little dabbling in fiction here and there.

I’ve also cleaned up the blogging backend, dropped a bloated plugin that seemed to slow the load times here, and brightened the text a little bit for easier reading.

So, a new year, a new slate. Let us see what 2007 has in store for us.