New Orleans Internet Marketing

About a year ago, I got my first Hilton Honors credit card for my business and started making the most out of the money I spent on advertising by getting rewards points that went towards hotel stays at any Hilton resort. It’s worked out so well for me, that I now use another HHonors card for my personal expenses as well. I try to pay any bills I possibly can with the credit card, and I end up getting at least one free hotel night every month! Since I was never the type of person that was good at saving money for vacations, this has worked out very well for our family.

With the monumental rise in gas prices this past year, credit cards with gas rebate rewards have become increasingly popular. Keep in mind that there are many cash-back reward cards available, and they typically give you 1% - 2% cashback on any purchase. Well for gas, your savings can be much higher. Some of these new gas rebate cards are offering as much as 10% off for an introductory period! The Discover Open Road and BP Visa offer 5% for the life of the card. These are huge savings (0.20 per gallon on $4 / gal. gas) compared to traditional rewards cards. It really makes it worthwhile to get one just for fueling up, especially if you’re someone who drives a lot.

To help make these cards more available to the public, this weekend I launched Gas Rebate Credit Cards.com, a site with the top gas credit cards and my other favorite rewards cards as well. I plan on keeping it updated with the best cards as they become available, so check it out if you’re in the market for a rewards card!

It’s no secret that I’ve been a big fan of LiquidWeb’s dedicated servers since I started using them last year. I got my invoice this month, and read a little further down the email where I was surprised to learn that they now have Zero Latency, Solid State Drives available for their dedicated servers! “What is that?” I first though. I put 2 and 2 together, because I know what latency is (and “0″ is a good number when you’re talking about it), and I know what “solid state” means (usually refers to circuitry as opposed to moving parts), so it became clear that they’re offering these brand new solid state drives (SSD) on their servers. Wow!

What’s the Big Deal?
One of the biggest bottlenecks on a computer is the hard drive. If the PC needs to access your hard drive, it slows things down considerably. This is why having enough RAM can speed things up significantly - with RAM, you eliminate the bottleneck of having to search and rescue data from a spinning hard drive. Well, Solid State Drives work like RAM. It’s like replacing your hard drive with a giant RAM chip :) the data becomes instantly accessible to the processor.

Can you imagine how great this will be for websites? Especially forums like mine. It should make them blazingly fast.

I had to call LiquidWeb to find out more. I talked to one of the sales guys, and he confirmed that “yes, the solid state drives are available for the dedicated servers, and LiquidWeb is currently one of only a few dedicated server providers in the world that have them available.”

So the almighty “RackSpace” doesn’t even have these things yet, and when they do get them, RS customers should be prepared to whip out their pocketbook. LiquidWeb will do the upgrade for $150 / mo. right now, with discounts for volume. Not cheap by any means, but I would imagine that it’s a nice performance boost for database driven sites. While it’s not in my budget right now, I can’t wait to try them out. Hopefully anyone with experience with them will post a review.

For more info on LiquidWeb, click here.