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TheRugged.com

Posted by: JABacchetta

TheRugged.com has launched!

Men’s Online Magazine (Now Hiring)

Posted by: JABacchetta

i7o Media Unveils New Men’s Magazine

We’re finally ready to launch our first major project! A men’s online lifestyle magazine targeting men ages 18-34. Head over to the site and subscribe now. You’ll be the first to know when we officially launch!

The Rugged will feature articles related to health, fitness, finance, relationships, sports, style, tech toys, and everything else men love! You’ll also be able to check out some great recipes, learn how to make drinks, ask questions, join the debates, interact in the forums, and even be entertained by the daily bits.

Eventually, we’ll be ‘competing’ with large sites such as AskMen, MadeMan, Spike, FHM, and others in the men’s lifestyle niche. We don’t plan to stop there. We’re going to take this brand and drive it into other men’s products/services as well. More on that at a later date. For now, check out a teaser shot:

Website

Looking For Partners (Joint Ventures)

Email “partner at therugged.com”  (replace “at” with “@” and remove the spaces) and give us the info!

- Investors

- Advertisers

- Related publishers/sites

- Models

- Guest Authors

- Interviews

- Writers

- Anyone who believes we need to connect

We’re Hiring Writers (Both Men and Women)

We’re looking for writers who are interested in developing a long-term relationship. We want great writers, and we want them to stick around. We feel that our pay structure reflects that. Pay is negotiable, depending on skills, article quality, and the ability to generate buzz and readership.

Base Pay: $3 per 100 words. We plan to gradually increase this figure, upwards of $10 per 100 words as the magazine grows. Articles will typically stay at around 400-600 words. Although there will also be the occasional 200 word news articles, and even 1000 word pillar articles.

Bonus: If your articles are hitting the front page of social media sites, it won’t go unnoticed. You’ll be awarded bonus pay for such achievements – upwards of $100 depending on the success of the article.

Revenue-Sharing: We want our success to be your success. Therefore, writers will share a percentage of monthly revenue.

Additional Opportunities:
As the magazine grows, one of the first priorities will be to increase the pay and opportunities for our writers. As mentioned, we’ll also be looking for senior editors, and even community managers in the future.

Topics

Keep in mind that this is a men’s magazine, not wikipedia. Every article should be engaging, and entertaining. A perfect example of what we’re looking for is the publication; Men’s Health. With that said, we’re looking for writers to take on a variety of topics including:

Health & Fitness

Power & Money

Sex & Relationships – Looking for articles that are a bit more sophisticated than what you might find in say, FHM. This can be a bit tricky, but if you’ve ever read Men’s Health and FHM, you see the difference in the target audience. FHM targets teenage boys. Men’s Health targets men starting careers. Our target audience is more on par with Men’s Health.

Sports – We’re looking for broad topics here. A bad example would be a complete run down of a baseball game. A good example might be something about the Brett Favre controversy, or a hyped up UFC fight. Anything that interests the main stream, and not necessarily specific sports gurus.

Style – Clothes, hygiene, etc.

Tech – Concept cars, smart phones, gadgets, toys, video games, the web, etc. Again, we’re looking for broad articles covering the juicy stuff, not technical pieces.

Controversial Rants – We plan to have a section that is purely controversial. Your job will be to generate debates among our readers, in an educated, witty, humorous, open-minded way. We stress “open-minded” because we do intend on having political debates. If you find it hard to agree with views from more than one news station, then you’re probably not what we’re looking for in this particular section.

Requirements

- Excellent English writing skills (grammar, spelling, sentence structure).

- Be able to format an article for the best possible readability. Know when (and when not) to use bullets, sub-headers, etc.

- Be capable of extensively researching a subject, and portraying authority.

- Engaging writing style (this might include witty, humorous, personal, ability to connect with readers).

- Be able to produce content that generates buzz, and is worthy of being linked to.

- One article per week when necessary.

- Respond to comments.

- Respond to a monthly Q&A (regarding your expertise) sent in from readers

How To Apply

Email partner @ therugged.com (remove spaces) and include the following:

- Name, age, sex, location, and an avatar (photo of you).

- Let us know which topics you’d like to write about.

- 3 sample articles that you’ve written. If they haven’t been used/published yet, you may even be paid for these, if hired.

- Reason(s) you would be perfect for the job. Maybe you’re passionate about a specific topic, maybe you already have experience with online writing, maybe you know how to use WordPress, or maybe you’re good at marketing. Whatever you think we should know!

Best Web Hosting (Our Recommendations)

Posted by: JABacchetta  /  Comments: 1

Best Web Hosting

Liquid Web

The Good: Superior reliability, excellent support, and options…many options! They offer shared hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated servers.

Want to add 1GB of ram without upgrading to the next (tier) package? Maybe you want to upgrade the processor, or add a gigabit uplink port? No problem. Liquid Web offers the best scalability.

The VPS, dedicated servers, and upgrades are competitively priced.

The Bad: Their shared hosting packages are expensive and don’t offer as much as you’d expect at those price points.

The Ugly: Hell, we can’t think of anything. Liquid Web has a solid reputation.

Host Gator

The Good: Host Gator is by far the absolute best in the shared hosting industry. Fully managed servers, fast, reliable, great prices, and the best support we’ve seen. Call, or use the online live-chat feature and get a response within a few minutes.

Host Gator is very fair, and unlike other shared hosting providers, will not bother you over minor issues such as wordpress plugins that command too many queries.

The Bad: Although we’re a fan of their shared hosting, they don’t offer any virtual private servers. They do have dedicated servers available, but the options and scalability are severely limited.

The Ugly: Again, they are the best as far as shared hosting goes, but that doesn’t mean shared hosting doesn’t come with its trade-offs.

Since you’re sharing a server with others, if you go over the resource limit, you’re going to effect everyone on that server. Therefore, they reserve the right to take your site offline and even ban you if you’re causing other sites to slow down.

Host Gator is pretty lenient; allowing you to use up to 25% of server resources for 90 second bursts. Some claim to have had sites with near 100,000 uniques per month running on a Host Gator shared package.

However, large traffic spikes are what you need to worry about. If you’re constantly hitting the front page of Digg, you’re going to want more than shared hosting.

Media Temple

The Good: Awesome control panel, and the ability to do just about everything through the iphone enabled panel. Media Temple offers something that no other provider can at the moment. The ability to handle traffic spikes from sites like Digg, for only $20 a month on their grid service.

The Bad: Going from their $150 a month DV server, the next tier available is the Nitro package, at $750 a month. That’s quite a big jump. Sure they offer ala carte upgrades in between those two packages, but you’ll pay way more than you should for them.

The Ugly: Their grid service experienced a very significant amount of downtime earlier this tear. Many sites were down, and email unavailable for hours (some report days). Everything seems to be under control now, after they upgraded the system.

Known Host

The Good: Great prices, very reliable, good customer support, and sky-high approval ratings. They offer many packages including hybrid servers, which are a lot cheaper, and even outperform some dedicated servers. Click a button and upgrade your packages instantly.

The Bad: Some upgrade options are limited, but not a big deal for 99.9% of webmasters.

The Ugly: We say “good” support and not “great” because they don’t offer a phone number on their website. All support is handled via email.