The internet world has provided a good source of income for a lot of people including me. However, the internet is not all about business and making money. This is also a place where you can meet new people and find friends from all over the world. And speaking of meeting people, I was very fortunate to have interviewed Stuart C. McHenry; the president of McKremie Web Hosting Solutions. Here’s my one-on-one interview with Stuart:

Joe: Hi Stuart! Can you tell our readers a little something about yourself and your company?

Stuart: Sure, I’ve been involved with the Internet since 1999 when my wife and I started a hobby website for her. About five years after that we started working on client web sites in the Marketing and web development areas. We had numerous request to host clients web sites and hosted a few on our own servers. In 2006 we decided to really focus on web hosting and make this our main priority and re-branded as McKremie, LLC.

Joe: How did you came up with the name of your company as McKremie?

Stuart: The simple answer is it’s a tribute to my daughter. Here is the long answer; we were looking for a unique word that didn’t mean anything to most people. We spent days if not weeks trying to come up with the perfect brandable name. I want people to think of one thing when they hear McKremie and that’s web hosting and our specific company.

When my daughter was little she could not pronounce our last name, like most kids that could not pronounce harder words. So instead of saying ‘McHenry’ she would say McKremie (Mick-Crem-ie) and we gave her that nickname. So when we were trying to think of the perfect company name we kept coming back to the name McKremie.

Joe: Well, that’s an interesting story. Moving over to the next question… What motivated you to start a web hosting company?

Stuart: I knew, and my clients at the time knew we could do a better job. There are tons of web hosting companies out there that offer support with their hosting accounts but when it comes down to it they don’t deliver. Prior to running a few dot com companies I spent over 13 years in the customer service industry. My experiences are invaluable and has shaped the outstanding service levels customers come to expect with McKremie.

Joe: What are the challenges of being the owner of McKremie Web Hosting Solutions and how do you deal with them?

Stuart: When we first started we could not offer the service level we wanted to provide. This is always difficult for a new hosting company starting out. It wasn’t in the budget to have support staff working 24 hours per day 7 days per week and we had to build up to that level. We focused on small business website hosting in our local markets at first. In December of 2007 we were able to offer 24/7 support both phone and email. This was the single biggest accomplishment to date for McKremie

Joe: With a saturated market and high level of competition in the web hosting industry, what do you think is the greatest advantage of McKremie Web Hosting?

Stuart: Customer Service! We strongly believe we need to be available when the customers need us. If they happen to need us at 3:00 AM in the morning, we are available to take their calls or answer their emails. Our servers are fast and our uptime runs high (99.9%+) but that doesn’t really set us apart from the competition, only our great customer service does. We recently just upgraded our support ticket software to better handle customer support issues. We are always looking for ways to serve our customer better and faster.

Joe: In your opinion, how did the global recession affected the internet industry, especially web hosting businesses?

Stuart: This is a hard question for me to answer, I know other companies are having a difficult time but our growth has been very good over this past year. Most of our customers hear about us from our current clients via word of mouth. I’m sure we would be even busier if the world economy was better but I cannot compare since we have such positive growth.

Joe: Aside from uptime, customer support is one of the most important considerations in choosing a web hosting provider. How can you describe the quality of McKremie’s customer support?

Stuart: Top notch support! We have support staff always available via phone or email 24 hours per day, 7 days per week and even on all major holidays. We often answer the phone within a few rings and emails are answered within minutes. As the President of McKremie, LLC I actively monitor support tickets to ensure high levels of service. You can read a few reviews for yourself and see what customers are saying.

Joe: What other services does McKremie offer aside from web hosting?

Stuart: We offer Web Design and Internet Marketing services. We currently aren’t taking any clients for marketing but may again in spring of 2009. We are excited to release a new service in a few weeks that we are calling Kizzog. Once we are ready to announce this new product I will be sure to let you know more about it.

Joe: I’m sure many of our readers now know more about McKremie. Now, why don’t you tell us something about your personal life. Like are you are married man, do you have kids and what do you like doing during your spare time?

Stuart: I’m married and have a daughter that is 9 years old. We enjoy traveling, snowboarding and just hanging out at the beach. We have three dogs a Saint Bernard, Golden Retriever and a little Maltese. The Saint Bernard weighs about 140 LBS and the little Maltese weighs just over a 2 LBS.

Joe: Thanks for letting us know more about you and your company. Is there anything that you want to add or tell our readers?

Stuart: Thanks Joe! Just want to let your readers know that we started a web hosting blog a few months back that talks about McKremie but also offers general web hosting tips and tricks that apply to most web hosts.

Well, there you go guys, the president of McKremie Web Hosting Solutions - upclose and personal. Overall, the interview was a great experience for me and we got to talk about both personal and business matters. Being the president of a web hosting company, it surprised me how friendly and accommodating Stuart is. It really gives me a positive feeling about a McKremie Web Hosting Solutions after knowing that headed by a great guy like Stuart.

The past 30 days have been crazy for me as I have been really busy with both my online business and my personal life. Because of that, I haven’t been able to update my blog for more than a month! Sad thing is it would probably take another month before I can catch up with the things that I’m scheduled to do. I just hope I can still find time to update my blog once in a while.

On the lighter side, I already have a few useful topics in mind for my future posts that will be helpful for both bloggers and SEO beginners. I’m all excited in writing them and sharing them to fellow bloggers. See you soon!

The official winners of the 68 Nuffnang Reviews contest have just been announced today and I’m very happy that my blog entry about NuffNang is one of them! I know that many Filipino bloggers joined and submitted their entries so I take pride in being one of the chosen ones among those entries. My thanks to the NuffNang team for choosing my entry. I hope to see more contests from you guys and expect me to join every time.

Though the winners of this contest will be rewarded cash prizes of 500 Philippine Pesos each, it is not what is really important to me. What’s more important to me is that people, especially my fellow Pinoys, get to know that JoedelSanvictores.com does exist in the blogosphere and that it provides good and useful posts especially to other bloggers.

I would also like to extend my greetings to the other 67 winners of this contest. Great job guys!

With my earnings almost reaching the five digit mark, September was indeed a great month for me. However, I have to expect the worst for the coming months because the result of the September pagerank update, the second PR update in the third quarter of this year, was not good for me. I will need to exert extra efforts in building the links of my blogs to increase their pagerank for the next PR update. Anyway, despite of the negative results the last update September was a good month for me in general.

Almost every stat of this blogging tutorials blog has increased in a month. My Alexa rank broke the top 1,000,000 two weeks ago and it is currently on 824,654 with 152 inlinks. There was also a slight increase in my Technorati rank from 30,951 to 29,120 and increase in Technorati authority from 165 to 168. Here are my blog’s stats from the 3 major search engines in the internet:

Google Stats for JoedelSanvictores.com:

Backlinks: 73 (dropped from 83)

Indexed Pages: 241 (increased from 123)

Yahoo! Stats for JoedelSanvictores.com:

Backlinks: 12,967 (dropped from 14,773)

Indexed Pages: 172 (increased from 136)

MSN Stats for JoedelSanvictores.com:

Backlinks: N/A

Indexed Pages: 83 (dropped from 245)

I managed to publish a total of 9 posts for the month of September 2008. This explains the increase in my indexed pages in Google and Yahoo. I don’t know what happened to MSN though. My feed readers and email subscribers count has now increased to 138. The increase in my subscribers is credited to the quality and usefulness of the posts that I have published.

We are now in the fourth and final quarter of this year. Though it is almost impossible to retain my earnings from the previous month, I hope I can still manage to earn anywhere near it.

Google pagerank is usually updated around every after 90 days and it has only been 60 days since the last PR update which also occurred in the third quarter of this year. Just a couple of hours ago, I found out that one of my blogs dropped from PR4 to PR0. Not convinced with what page rank the Google toolbar showed me, I used a few PR checker tools to recheck my blog’s PR. Unfortunately, I got the same results over and over again. I manually checked the pagerank of all of my blogs and overall, the result of this Google page rank update is not really good for me.

I actually expected the next update to occur around the end of October 2008. To be honest, I did not have enough time to make sure that my blogs retain their pageranks. This is the reason why most of my blogs’ PR’s dropped. There are no surprises though for this blogging tutorials blog as its PR remains at page rank 3.

Well, I guess owners of weblogs and webmasters can now start working for the next update. Let’s just hope that Google gives us a good Christmas gift for the next pagerank update.

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Waking up at 11 A.M. and not being able to find the sun up in the sky is not my ideal type of day. The rain is bashing our roof and there are no signs of it stopping at all. There’s no typhoon reported in the news last night so I think it’s just really the rainy season. Days like this just makes me miss summer more and brings me great memories of my past summer vacation in Boracay. Well, I never got time to blog about our Boracay experience right after it happened and today is probably the best time to do it. Well, I think it’s better late than never.

Our Boracay trip wasn’t actually planned. After having lunch one afternoon, Marvin and I talked about going somewhere relaxing for the summer. We both haven’t gone to Boracay so we agreed that it was the best place to go to. We both agreed that the upcoming weekend is the best time to go on a trip since most of our well prepared and planned trips almost always never push through. I immediately booked our flights with Cebu Pacific. That was the first time that I booked a flight online and fortunately, it was a breeze with Cebu Pacific. Their website and booking system is user-friendly and easy to use even for non-techie people.

Marvin, Dulce and I went to the Boracay trip. Upon arriving at the airport, we were already excited. We started to document our trip by taking photos of every good place we can spot. We arrived at Caticlan, the fastest way to Boracay, at around 1 P.M. and we were picked up by people from Red Coconut Resort. We hopped into a small boat and we can already see the beauty of Boracay Island even before we got there. Upon arriving at the resort we asked the person on the reception desk to arrange a banana boat ride for us. We just didn’t want to end our day without doing any activity. The banana boat ride was fun and exciting. It’s just too bad that we do not have any pictures of it. We returned to our room and took some rest. It was already dinner time when we got out of the room. After having a nice dinner at Red Coconut Restaurant, we explored the shores of Boracay in all stations. We had to return to our room early and get some rest for tomorrow’s activities.

We started early at Day 2. After eating a breakfast buffet at Red Coconut, we prepared for our island hopping trip. We got some snorkeling equipment and hopped into our service boat. We took pictures of every beautiful view that we see. Unfortunately, the battery of our camera died in the middle of our trip. Well, we thought if we let the battery rest for a while, it will be enough to take a couple more of pix for our next activity - parasailing. Parasailing is the most exciting activity that I’ve tried in my entire life so far. We were like on top of the world, flying and with the wind blowing up even higher. Our day ended with having a few drinks and chilling in a bar. We had to sleep early today so we can wake up early for an early flight out of the paradise.

Leaving the island was a sad moment but it only lasted until we had a small chit chat with a friendly and gorgeous flight attendant of Cebu Pacific. Boracay is definitely a great summer destination and we just didn’t get enough of it. The 3 of us agreed that we will definitely return to this island next summer.

Everyday, more and more people are becoming interested in making money online. Though the growth of internet’s popularity has been slow in growth in the Philippines, the number of Filipinos getting into online businesses is steadily increasing. I have been in the internet industry for more that 3 years and have been an internet freelancer for more than a year now. So far, making money online allows me to earn enough money to live a comfortable life. Here’s what blogging and other internet money making programs has given me so far:

Blogging saved a life twice. My mom was diagnosed with an ovary problem in December of last year and she had to undergo a minor operation. The result of the biopsy from this operation was not good and she had to undergo total abdominal hysterectomy by early this year. If not for blogging, we wouldn’t have enough money to pay for my mom’s operations.

My First Car (Nissan Sentra):

Six months after quitting my job from an internet company in the Philippines, I also managed to buy my very first car. It was a Nissan Sentra ‘97 model Super Saloon. Six more months later, I sold this car to Jeff for his second car and bought a Mitsubishi Adventure 2002 model (the toy for big boys as I call it) for an upgrade. I just bought my Adventure the other day and this is what inspired me to make this post.

My Mitsubishi Adventure… Yeah!!!

Currently, I am also making installment payments for a parcel of land in Tarlac. 3 more years and this land is going to be fully paid and officially become a property under my name.

The internet is a huge virtual world where you can earn real money. If you put your heart and best efforts in finding jobs and programs in the internet that really pay, you will definitely make good amount of money. Though this post is inspired by the recent purchase of my Mitsubishi Adventure, my purpose is not to brag about what I got but instead, to inspire and motivate people, especially my fellow Filipinos, to try their luck and venture the opportunities that the internet offers.

After making my post about my blog’s new wordpress theme yesterday, my new post got a few comments and one of these comments is posted by Jehzeel Laurente. Wanting to return the favor to him for taking time to visit my blog and commenting on my post, I visited his site and searched for a post of his to comment on. Scanning through his blog, his post about a program called NuffNang caught my attention. I read the blogpost, followed the link to Nuff Nang, read about the program and signed up with them.

Nuffnang is the first blog advertising program in Asia which was started in Malaysia by Timothy Tiah and Cheo Ming Shen in February of 2007. After the program’s success in Malaysia and Singapore, Nuffnang finally reached the Philippines last month (August 2008). More than just a blog advertising program that offers opportunities to make money online through blogs, Nuffnang Philippines is a place where we can show that the Filipinos have their place in the blogosphere.

What do I expect with Nuffnang?

This blogging tutorials blog is not really intended to make me tons of dollars and as much as possible, I don’t intend to publish sponsored posts in it. When I joined Nuffnang, my primary purpose was to get to know other Pinoy bloggers and be known to them as well. When I visited the official Nuffnang Philippines website, I noticed that they let the world know who their bloggers are. Well, I certainly want to be included in their list.

Every month, Nuffnang also features bloggers in their site. Of course, I’m also hoping that my name will appear inside this featured box in the near future.

So far, that’s all I have to say about Nuffnang Philippines. I will keep you updated with my thoughts and actual experiences about it.

Do I recommend joining the program?

Sure! Join the program. I don’t see any reason for you not to.

Not being contented with my weblog’s previous wordpress theme, I spent my whole day searching for a cleaner and more professional theme. My current theme, True Elegance, is a 3- column magazine theme with fully widgetized sidebars. I like this better than my previous theme because it maximizes the spaces in my blog. It is professional looking, customizable and has good advertising spots.

Here are the screen shots of my blog’s previous and current wordpress themes for comparison:

My Previous Wordpress Theme (Click to enlarge):

My Current Wordpress Theme (Click to enlarge):

Do you like my new theme or do you think my previous theme is better than the current? Do you have any suggestions for me on what features, widgets and plugins to add to my blog? Well, I’d like to hear comments for you about my new wordpress theme.