The modem isn’t anything too exciting, I was just looking for an upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 from the old Surfboard modem. The RT-N53 is a little more interesting, including an upgrade to true dual band, 4 separate networks across the 2.4GHz band and a very interesting design.

When they finally came out in support of SOPA legislation I decided it was time to move our domains over. I looked through a few different registrars such as NameCheap. I didn’t find what I was looking for until I stumbled upon iwantmyname.com.

IWantMyName is about as basic as a domain registrar can get. Their user interface is simple, easy to use and there are no advertisements (…GoDaddy). I emailed them twice for simple support questions and they fixed my issues quickly.

Help Glenn with a Donation

It has to be cost effective
We wanted to keep the total sum of our backup solutions to under $20/month. Our current server snapshop backup solution costs us around $10/month, so that left us with about $10/month as a budget.

It has to have great customer service
Because we would be setting this up ourselves I wanted something tried and true, with the customer service to back it up.

RSync.net

After researching, we kept seeing RSync.net pop up in our searches. RSync.net is basically an offsite, platform agnostic, file system you can access server to server. They tout that there are no licensing fees, setup fees or contracts.

Priced at $0.80/GB for the basic plan meant they would meet our budget. As a note, you are required to purchase at least 7GB of storage per month, so the minimum plan basically works out to be $5.60 for 7GB of monthly storage.

I went ahead and put an order in for 10GB/month, at a cost of $8.00/month. Later that afternoon I had a very detailed welcome email from them in my inbox. The welcome email gives you login details for your account, connection details for SSH, rsync, scp, sftp and WebDAV. It’s really well detailed.

Customer Service

At one point I needed to ask a few questions about creating the backup script. I wrote a quick email to them, and I had a prompt and complete response back the next morning. They seem eager to help and I have no doubt they would help with anyone setting up any type of system.

I have nothing but good things to say about RSync.net. It’s a perfect example of a business who knows what they do and they do it extremely well.

[hl-lightred]Placement URLs must be provided in a valid URL format[/hl-lightred]

I double and triple checked the list to make sure there wasn’t any URL that would be throwing Google off. The list was perfect. [hl-yellow]As it turns out, AdWords only allows you to exclude URL’s that are two levels deep.[/hl-yellow] For example:

• http://www.wedriveleads.com/exclude/test/ (perfect, no issues)
• http://www.wedriveleads.com/exclude/test/onemore/ (no good)

If you need more options, read through the AdWords exclusion support page.

I Need to Exclude Deeper URL’s Though?

Well, this is tough. From the research i’ve done, I don’t think it’s possible (please leave a comment if I am mistaken). For most clients this isn’t an issue, the ability to use two folder levels should be plenty. I am sure there are some users out there who would benefit from having the ability to go deeper though.

One large limitation of the old system was that it didn’t display all the outlines of shapes you had created. You had to click on the area to see the shape, and you could only view one at a time. That has changed and you can view all your target outlines at once. It’s a really nice upgrade to quickly see what your coverage map looks like.

As you can see from the photo, we use several custom shapes to target locations in this campaign. As noted in a previous post, Google is removing the ability to use AdWords custom shapes. You’ll see under each custom shape it says, “Featured Removal Planned”.

There’s a slight learning curve in choosing a location in the new system. Usually you could just select from a list of countries and drill down to a state, metro or city. Now you must type in a state, metro or city and Google will auto-suggest what it believes you are looking to add.

All in all it’s a really helpful and welcome change. It’ll make geo-targeting in AdWords far more efficient.