I’ve mentioned it before that you shouldn’t use free hosting for any of your websites. It’s too risky to lose control of your web properties that way. And this is a lesson being learned the hard way by 73,000+ blogs that were wiped out overnight. They were hosted for free with blogetery.com. It appears that there were some illegal activities going on (the details are murky at best) but the fact is the U.S. Government shut blogetery.com along with the 73,000+ “free blogs” they were hosting.

These are people who had AdSense sites, review sites, and more but in order to save a buck they decided to use a free hosting service which is a big mistake. It’s also amazing how clueless blogetery.com’s owner was about how to run a hosting business. You can learn more about that from the thread he started at Web Hosting Talk. This guy was clueless and totally oblivious of his responsibilities as a host. Anyone can lease a dedicated server and open shop and you don’t want to trust your business to someone like that.

But as Internet marketers you should also stay clear of more established companies like Google Pages, Blogger, and WordPress.com. Blogger has shut down very popular blogs without notice.

These type of sites don’t like or understand affiliate marketing so it’s just best to go the self-hosted route so you can have more control over your web properties.

It’s also easy to backup your sites this way so if something does happen you can easily be back in business. Installing a WordPress blog on your own domain is very easy with cPanel so make sure you use a host that offers it (especially if your not techie). I recommend Host Gator. In this video you can watch how easily I install a WordPress blog on my own domain in about a minute.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As bloggers we now have more garbage to deal with while managing our blogs (think spambots and spam comments) in the form of for pay comments. I found about this new “service” when Teli Adlam blogged about it recently.

It appears there is a company out there called Buy Blog Comments where you can as you can guess, buy blog comments. Starting at $25 you can buy 100 blog comments with the idea that the backlinks they provide will boost your SERPs and all that other good stuff quality comments can bring to your blog. The problem is the quality of these paid comments.

I left a comment on Teli’s blog about how much quality can you expect at around a quarter per comment – well she has now updated us with examples of these quality comments.

Even if Buy Blog Comments owner want to provide quality comments in reality you get what you paid for. If the company charges $24.99 for 100 comments you’re paying about .25 cents per comment. The Buy Blog Comments website says it has hired folks to leave these comments so even if they are paid half of what they charge (very doubtful) these “professional” blog commentators are getting paid almost .13 cents per comment.

The quality poster that would be willing to work for such pittance won’t attract folks that write well or who would even care to leave a quality comment or even read the post they’re commenting on. Throw in the 48-hour turn around time they offer you now have extremely low paid and over worked folks leaving all these comments.

Black hatters who use these type of services might not care about any of this but as Teli mentioned in her blog what about the blogger who is on the receiving end of these worthless comments on their blogs?

Buy Blog Comments uses a database of blogs in specific niches that they can spam but I’m sure they’re not asking the blog owners permission to be in this database they use. At the very least they should offer an opt-out feature for bloggers to chose whether or not they want to receive fake, paid comments on their blogs but that probably won’t happened.

If you have a blog be on the lookout for these type of comments and mark them as spam or at least delete them. It’s not worth having comments don’t add anything to your post.