Whoops! A bunch of our blogs are still on a shared host, and I guess they were putting too much load on the server. Without warning, I’m staring at a “Your Account Has Been Suspended” message! We are getting ready to move everything over to a new dedicated server, and as such, a few things have slipped through the cracks.

If you’re running Wordpress, it’s vital that you keep up-to-date with plugin updates. WP makes it easier than ever, since it now tells you when a new version is available for download! Our “excuse” was that we had 25 blogs running on this host, and going through each one and updating the plugins was very time consuming. Whoops!

Another HUGE oversight was not installing any sort of caching. Most people use WP-Cache, and it works very well for the most part. But for whatever reason, when I setup these blogs way back when, I didn’t enable WP-Cache. (I think it was screwing up one of our counters – A stupid reason not to run caching, in retrospect..)

I discovered WP Super Cache awhile back.. This is WP-Cache on steroids! We had a story picked up by a major news media source, and it resulted in 18,000+ hits in 24 hours! It was chaos, and our server became COMPLETELY unresponsive. I was able to enable WP Super Cache, and the situation was quickly contained.

At that moment, I should have gone out and installed it on all of our other sites. But with a thousand other things going on at the time, I put it on the backburner. Big mistake! Luckily, I was on the server when we got shut down, so I was able to contact support, find out what was going on, and address the issue immediately. But what if this happened next month, when I’m down in Punta Cana without Internet Access? I’d be SOL, as I’m the only one who knows anything about the servers – The rest of my staff just writes..

So learn from my mistakes, and protect yourself from future issues.. Update your plugins, and make sure you’re using caching so you don’t piss off your hosting company!

Recently, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been posting as often as I usally do. I’ve been working on a number of projects, and I’m just totally burned out! So, I’m taking the day off. A simple concept, but one that the work-for-yourself crew doesn’t get to enjoy as much as they should. Eventually, you get to a point where you’re completely lost and unproductive. That’s where I’m at now.

So I’m just going to relax, watch a movie or two, read some magazines, and chill. I won’t be able to escape work completely, as I’ll still have phone calls and e-mails to deal with, but I’m not going to spend 12 hours in front of the computer screen!

If you’re feeling worn down, and a little out of sorts, take a day for yourself.. You probably deserve it!

On Tuesday, June 24, from 12PM – 7PM EDT, Dotster will be giving away 50 FREE, .COM, .NET, or .ORG, new domain names on a first-come, first-served basis, at the top of every hour.* During the giveaway, click on the banner on the homepage and enter your email to see if you have won 1 of 50 domains given away that hour. If you did not win, you can keep trying at the top of each hour through 7PM EDT.

* New .COM, .NET, or .ORG domains given away each hour are good for 1 year registration, are limited to 1 domain per customer and are not valid with existing domains. Free domain coupons are valid through midnight, 7/02/2008.

Season 2 of Bravo’s hit series “Flipping Out” returned last night with everyone’s favorite obsessive-compulsive house-flipper, Jeff Lewis. He’s a character for sure, but you’ve got to respect his abilities!

As some of you know, I’ve been flipping houses (foreclosures, estate sales, short sales, etc) for the last 2-3 years. The real estate market took a REAL ugly turn earlier this year, and I got stuck with 2 properties still on the books. It’s not a big deal right now, I’m just renting them out until the market recovers.

But Jeff’s got millions of dollars tied up in his properties, so I was anxious to see how he handled the real estate downturn. He’s taken a similar approach to me – Working on other things to bring in money while weathering the real estate shit-storm.

In his case, that means working for someone else – Which should make for some great TV, as he’s a total control freak! Be sure to check it out, every Tuesday night at 10pm on Bravo!

Wishing all the fathers out there a Happy Fathers Day!

An enterprising company has taken the fractional jet ownership concept, and modified it for exotic cars! Extreme Car Share is an exotic car club exclusively providing fractional ownership of exotic and luxury cars to their members. Your membership represents a time share in a collection of exotic cars, gaining access to a rich variety of today’s top exotic and luxury vehicles that alternate on a monthly basis.

As one of their “lucky” members, you will have exclusive access to a different exotic car for five days every month on a rotating basis. Your dream car will arrive at your doorstep ready to go, freshly detailed and with a full tank of gas. After your drive date, to include Friday, Saturday and Sunday, they pick the car up and prep it for the next member.

Their collection of cars is rather limited right now, but as the company grows, I’m sure they’ll add more cars to the stable. They currently offer a Ferrari F430, a Rolls Royce Phantom, a Lamborghini Gallardo, and a Bentley Continental GT Convertible!

When I first heard about this concept, I was pretty psyched. I don’t put a lot of miles on my cars (a benefit of working from home), and exotics depreciate QUICKLY. A few years ago, I bought a Porsche 996TT for around $150K.. Over the next three years, I barely put on 15K miles. When it was time to sell the car, I was lucky walked away with $80K! That car cost me $23,333/yr to drive. That breaks down to almost $64/day. (And that’s not including insurance and maintenance!)

So begs the question – How much does the Extreme Car Share cost? They’ve got a number of different options. An annual membership costs $7950 + $1695/month. So you’re paying a grand total of $28,290. If you don’t need the full 7500 miles annually, you can step down to the 5000 mile plan, which saves you $6000, bringing the total down to $22,290.

The Full Term Membership program includes five full days of drive time, including a Friday, Saturday, & Sunday every month for a full year. This comes out to 60 drive days annually.

For those on a budget, they also offer a One Weekend Every Month Membership, which gives you the car for one weekend a month for 9 months. This plan only costs you a grand total of $16,005.

An interesting concept for sure, but it’s just not for me. I’m sure it’ll do well (especially in the land of idiots, Los Angeles), but after crunching the numbers, it just doesn’t make sense to me.