I’ve been on the lookout for a place to find free blog pictures, and it looks like I may have found something that works for me. While I’ve found other services that offer blog pictures, every other service I’ve found has had some kind of fee or restriction.

Acobox allows you to choose from a wide variety of images (there are lots of images, but I would still like to see more added to certain categories, especially the abstract and technology categories).

Acobox also takes care of the licensing and other unsavoury issues so that all you need to do is select an image, copy the code, and paste it into your post. You don’t even need to host the image yourself, Acobox hosts the image for you.

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Let me first say that I’ve been with BlueHost since I started this blog. While it’s had its ups and downs (and at several points I certainly would say I pretty much hated them as a webhost, due to a bout of downtime around last December), they haven’t really been too bad to me overall.

I say this because there are lots of webhosts out there that are just terrible (I won’t mention any names, but I’ve heard horror stories from more than one person who either lost their site completely or had endless downtime. For this reason, I’ve been trolling sites Web Hosting Rating, checking out which hosts people have had particularly bad experiences with.

While I don’t feel it’s really fair of me to start naming names here, you can take a look for yourself and see which sites have really bad reputations for webhosting.

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Yes, I know I’ve complained about BlueHost before. But I was taking a look at Web Hosting Geeks today (I often like to check that I’m getting the best deal on things that I can be, as my hosting term is coming up soon), and I noticed that BlueHost is really a much better deal for webhosting than anybody else (you can see the BlueHost review here).

I should also mention that despite the problems I had with BlueHost, they are an extremely WordPress-friendly host. While I was a bit hard on BlueHost before, they made it up to me over the past half a year — keeping up with their promise of reliable service and almost constant up time.

So while it’s good to point out when a business is doing poorly, it’s also good to point out when they’ve done right by their customers (or in this case, customer). I’m now convinced that BlueHost was going through some serious growing pains at the beginning of 2008, but has since expanded their operations to deal with the influx of new customers.

And if you do happen to be in the market for webhosting, I would seriously recommend checking out a site like Web Hosting Geeks. One of the things I like the most about Web Hosting Geeks is that they don’t just offer glowing reviews of the webhosting companies — they also provide some honest opinions about where the companies come up short.

This is just a short post to let you about a useful site I came across today. I’ve complained about my web host before — and I’m sure there are many others who feel my pain (my host actually ranks quite well for customer service, so I can’t even imagine how bad the bad hosts are). If only I had heard of Web Hosting Geeks.

Web Hosting Geeks provides reviews of companies that provide web hosting services, and rank the companies based on the features they provide, (as well as bonus features like free domains and unlimited websites or bandwidth).

If you’re in the market for a web host, I would seriously suggest checking this site out. It’s a great way to get a side-by-side feature comparison for a bunch of different hosts, not to mention comparing prices.

And in case you’re wondering, my host (BlueHost) actually ranks #2 at Web Hosting Geeks. Go figure.

So I’ve decided to try out PayPerPost – with the intent of determining whether I can provide readers with products and services that will be of value.

Before deciding to sign up, I took a look at what kinds of opportunities were available through the site. I noticed that there were quite a few opportunities for social media and social networking sites, which I think would actually be of interest to my readers.

PayPerPost has also come up with their own word of mouth ethics, in order to disclose when a blogger is making a sponsored post. I think this maintains the validity of word-of-mouth marketing as a way to get your message across.

More importantly with word-of-mouth marketing though, is the fact that those conveying an advertiser’s message have to be cognizant of what they provide to their readers. While PayPerPost has a certain responsibility to their advertisers and publisher base, it is really up to each individual blogger to maintain their own honesty of opinion.

PayPerPost is not really much different than any other commitment that people have as individual bloggers – I would imagine for instance, that most bloggers would not want to say something negative about the company they work for.

So all that to say that if I find something cool on PayPerPost, you’ll hear about it. Otherwise, it’s business as usual around here.