Well I must say its hard to get out of the summer lazy atmosphere. The weather down here in Mexico is basically the best in the world. We are in our rainy season so it’s nice and cool, mostly the rain occurs at night so we still get sunny days.

In any event I wanted to talk about the importance of having backups. Host Gator gets too big thumbs up. It seems they do a backup of their servers every Sunday which is a godsend for people like myself who don’t bother doing backups. On Monday/Tuesday some of you may have noticed that the site was totally down, will not down per say, just missing a ton of files so basically inoperable.

You see the problem was I was in FTP and wanted to delete a file folder, so I just deleted the whole folder. About 10 seconds after I did this I realized the selected folder was the base folder for this word press blog. Not knowing how to stop the delete I closed my FTP. As I had done many modifications to the wordpress files I knew reloading wordpress would delete a lot of information and formatting. So basically I had a catastrophic problem on my hands and the only saving grace was the database was intact.

So not knowing really what to do I decided to call Host Gator. I explained my horrifying blunder and was told no problem I could fill in the simple online form and they would restore the web site in 12-24 hours. Now there is a nominal fee of $15 for the service but it actually saved me God knows how many hours of restoring files by hand. Now as I am Canadian and did in fact learn the habit of watching the pennies I will start doing backups every week so that if I error again I can do the restore myself and save $15.

I was very fortunate as Host Gator does backups. Does your provider do that? If not do you do backups?

forex.earninternet.com reports on 1st Forex Affiliate Conference Review

Well I think this will be a short post, I’m still in the summer holiday mode. Although I enjoyed being in Vegas I must say I was very happy to get back to Mexico where it was much cooler. I gained a wealth of information and met with some key people in the industry. I will makes a more posts in coming weeks.

Some key things that came up.

Most important is all the information that I got confirmed my belief that for affiliate marketing in the investment / trading world Forex is where the money is.

The big talk was about the US farm bill that just passed. This really sucks. The USA at it again regulating, protecting their USA citizens. Basically what it is going to do is remove the small forex IBs and smalled forex brokers as they are talking a $20MILLION deposit to operate as a forex broker in the US. It seems the law is going to be enacted 23 Sept 2008 and it’s not yet clear exactly how it will be worded. The other problem is to be an IB it requires $45,000 deposit and yearly audits and very strict controls as to what is stated on web sites. The problem for affiliates is as of 23 Sept brokers will only be able to pay profit share to registered IB’s for US clients. So what will happen is the brokers and the IB’s will only be able to pay affiliates as marketers. This would be done as a cost per lead.

Thing is the BIG money is in profit sharing. Imagine getting paid a even a quarter pip on every trade for every customer you send to a broker! So I think what’s going to happen is more USA business will move to Europe and other countries. Also affiliates will target more outside the USA. In fact one of the large US-based forex brokers that was at the conference stated they were not accepting any new IBs at this time as they were going to wait to see how the new laws are written.

Several people at the conference where casino affiliate marketers and they shared their views about the effects of USA government intervention on the online gaming industry, and affiliate marketing of online casinos. Things will be somewhat different regards what will take place for forex affiliate marketing as the focus for the government is CONTROL as opposed BANNING as it is for online casino affiliate marketing.

So share your views. Do USA citizens need protection of their government to tell them where to invest or trade their money? And more importantly is this new regulation about protecting its citizens, or protecting the well-established forex brokers already in place and preventing new entry into the business?