I don't really talk about WordPress lifetime dealfor themes and plugins is simply because not all lifetime deals are worth the money. More importantly, there is no point for us to invest into a theme or plugin (for a decend amount of money) and get burned in the end.

But, apart from all the bad things that may happen, there are also some great WordPress lifetime license for themes and plugins that I would personally recommend.

These tools had become apart of my daily routine in crafting the best WordPress experience for my readers (that's you).

What you will find next are the lifetime license for themes and plugins that I recommend you to get it right now.

WordPress themes with lifetime licences

There are quite a few WordPress themes that come with lifetime license. These are great themes that I personally use for my personal business, marketing agency and my reseller hosting business.

WordPress plugins with lifetime licences

Finally, WordPress plugins — I use WP plugins to speed up my website development projects on WPMaven.net and some of these plugins below are the best in kind.

Seriously, you can't go wrong with them!

Typically, I try to avoid controversial posts like this but I think it is important to answer those questions that had been lingering in your minds. In today's post, we will do a quick discussion on local web hosting vs international web hosting. Which is the better choice for you and your website business?

Uncovering the myths

Living in Malaysia is just like living in any parts in the world. There are local web hosting companies and at the same time, international (big names) web hosting companies that paste their ads everywhere on the Internet.

A quick guideline in comparing local web hosting companies to international ones are:

Advantages using local web hosting companies

It varies from people to people, project to project but for me, I would go for local web hosting companies if I am on a tight budget and doesn't have much requirements.

For example, Malaysia is blessed with a large number of web hosting company such as Exabytes. It offers very affordable web hosting solutions — minus all the addons and crazy (time consuming) setup process.

More importantly, local web hosting companies charge you based on your local currency, not USD or Euros (which can save quite a bit in the exchange rate).

Advantages of using International web hosting companies

International web hosting companies are not bad to be honest. Sure, you are most likely to pay slightly more but they have bigger names and brand reputation to take care of. However, my experience with international web hosting companies been great all this while — especially with managed WordPress hosting such as Kinsta and WP Engine.

Apart from that, international web hosting solutions are best when you have website visitors from around the world (and not just from your country) as they have various datacenters that you can choose from.

Choosing between local web hosting and international web hosting

I hope you find this article intriguting and useful. If you are looking for a reliable web hosting solution in Malaysia, Exabytes is an excellent choice to go. If you are looking for international web hosting, I can't help but to recommend WP Engine.

The internet has revolutionized the way we operate businesses, how we consume information and music, and how we communicate. However, this was not the case two decades ago. The internet was created in 1989, and ever since, it has gone through a period of transition. 

This article will continue to explain in detail how the internet has changed in the last two decades to understand how everything came to be as it is now.

Social Network in the early 2000s

By 2001, Wikipedia was already emerging as a top online hub for information. It grew even more once Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 came to the public domain.

However, one of the most notable improvements was experienced when Apple was able to lay a foundation for its steady growth, as we see today. iTunes came in to allow subscribers to download their favorite commercial jams legally and make 250,000 sales in just a day. This brought to a halt the reign of the Walkman and the disc. People were now able to download infinite songs, and they did not face the risk of scratching disks and skipping tracks anymore.

Skype was also invented as a way through which users could call each other for free on the network. However, there were more developments at hand, and soon, the platform was developed for messaging and videoconferencing. Beyond videoconferencing, this technology found use in the medical industry, allowing physicians to treat their patients from afar.

By 2003, Linkedin and MySpace were launched, giving rise to social media sites as we know them today. Later in 2004, one of the most revolutionary social media sites, Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg. Today, Facebook owns WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, making it a social media giant.

The Smartphone Revolution in the Mid-2000s

Before, internet users could access the internet through dial-up connections. However, this was a slow and excruciating process. For instance, a 6 MB picture could take up to 15 minutes to download. Today, it takes approximately 2 seconds. The smartphone revolution began with the development of YouTube and, subsequently, the blogging culture.

YouTube was developed in 2005 as a video-sharing website, thanks to the growing popularity of audio-sharing that provided a foundation. Google later purchased YouTube for an astounding $1.65 billion.

Twitter began as a microblogging site and allowed for an instant wider reach to an audience. As Facebook opened its doors to the public domain, the first iPhone was released, revolutionizing the internet as now, people could access it on the go.

People no longer had to be on the desktop to access the internet, and apple tapped into its growing market by launching an App Store that contained up to 500 applications.

Android was founded in 2003 and later bought by Google. Android soon had an app store after the launching of the iPhone, too, allowing users to download applications and perform different tasks.

Social Causes 

The internet has also been used for social good, especially in the 2010s. After the discovery of social media, it has been used as a tool for encouraging social change. From as early as 2011, there have been online protests organized through social media, including the Egyptian uprising and protests that helped oust Hosni Mubarak, the dictator president of Egypt. In the same light, online hashtags were used to highlight the plight of Nigerian girls kidnapped by the Boko Haram so that they could return home.

It is also in the 2010s that there has been a rise in the vlogging/video blogging culture during this time, and these kinds of bloggers cover content from all niches, including cooking, fashion, beauty, travel, and much more. The result is a multi-billion dollar industry that is quickly changing how advertising works.

The Internet and Business

Businesses have recently embraced the power of the internet into their operations. Two essential functions that are now carried out over the internet include cloud storage and online marketing. Consumers tend to look for brands online and do not necessarily have to walk into a brick-and-mortar store to get what they need. Brand messages are delivered through mobile phones and browsers anytime and anywhere. Businesses have learned to exploit these platforms and are now sending commercial messages to get noticed. It is now common to see an advertisement just before reading a news story. The print industry as a medium for publication and dissemination of information has declined because of the presence of information online.

Businesses have also changed the way they collect and store information. Instead of stocking piles of paper in a warehouse, data is processed differently. Email marketing, social media, and cookies help businesses collect data that helps companies understand their customers. Data protection laws have come up, as a result, to help protect consumers and activities as well. Business processes such as data storage are now done on the cloud, which has helped businesses to operate more efficiently. 

There are companies out there that focus their attention on offering managed IT services customized to a business's needs. You can click here to have a detailed understanding of how companies can benefit from these services. Some of the services beneficial to companies resulting from the internet business revolution include enhanced cybersecurity, maintenance of IT systems, electronic recycling, and cloud services. These solutions ensure that a business can be operated from anywhere, and the data will be safe. This improved efficiency and convenience make companies more likely to buy these products.

There have been more tremendous changes in the last two decades. One of the notable advancements in the wake of the 21st century was the development of social media platforms. Today, the social media movement has become a force that cannot be stopped. Smartphones also came in and revolutionized how we accessed the internet, and now, people can connect only with the touch of a button. The internet has been a driver of social change and has impacted how businesses are conducted, and data is extracted and stored. Further changes of the world we know today are yet to come.

AhrefsBot is a web crawler that powers a link database for Ahrefs online marketing toolset. The bot constantly crawls the web to fill their database with new links and to check the statuses of the previously found ones. In other words, AhrefsBot is a bot that is primarily used as a backlink checker.

It is common to see AhrefsBot in your Google Analytics data especially when your site is generating a good amount of traffic and your competitors are planning your traffic/doing keyword research on your site.

In the next few monutes, you will learn everything about Ahrefs bot and how to easily block AhrefsBot.

Introduction to AhrefBot

According to ahrefs.com, every 24 hours the bot crawls over 6 billion web pages and updates Ahrefs’ index every 15 – 30 minutes.

Link data collected by Ahrefs is used for a variety of purposes and for digital marketers to plan, execute, and monitor online marketing campaigns.

Some people claim that Ahrefs’ web crawler is a bad bot that does not respect the robots.txt file and bypasses disallow and allow rules. However, Ahrefs disputes this claim by saying “We absolutely strictly respect robots.txt: both disallow and allow rules. Please see https://ahrefs.com/robot for full transparency on our crawler.”

The bot can also use up your website’s bandwidth and make your website slower. Another concern with the bot is that it is used by spammers that participate in referrer spam indexing in order to spam your website with unwanted referral traffic.

Other people have reported that the company behind the bot is known to be dishonest and provide misleading support to those who have questions about the bot but we cannot validate these claims.

How to block AhrefsBot quickly?

There are two ways you can block AhrefsBot. First, robots.txt and the second is .htaccess files. It is important to note that by blocking AhrefsBot, it will not negatively affect your ranking (if done right). However, it might lead to a reduced opportunity to be able to score some paid sponsored post opportunities.

More importantly, you want to block AhrefsBot because you want to avoid your competitors from doing research on your site.

Method #1: Update robots.txt file to block AhrefsBot

By default, the robots.txt file is a permission file that allow or disallow cralwers to crawl a website. By adding simple code to the file can stop bots such as AhrefsBot from crawling your site.

Here's how it is done:

User-agent: AhrefsBot 
Disallow:/

Method #2: Block AhrefsBot using the .htaccess file

This method is a powerful and effective method to block other bots from crawling your website. Using .htaccess file, you can easily determine which bot to filter out from accessing your site. For this method to work, we will be blocking the IP ranges that AhrefsBot uses.

Add these details below to your .htaccess file. You can find your .htaccess file at the root of the files of your site.

deny from 173.199.64.0 - 173.199.127.255

Apart from that, here are other IP ranges that are often used by Ahrefs (and something you might consider):

54.36.148.0/24
54.36.149.0/24
54.36.150.0/24
195.154.122.0/24
195.154.123.0/24
195.154.126.0/24
195.154.127.0/24

It is important to understand that Ahrefs may change the IP's from time to time. If that happens, simply add the same code to your .htaccess file with the updated IP addresses but keep this range in there.

Bonus: Blocking Ahrefs Bot

Here's another nifty trick to block Ahrefsbot from scouting your site.

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/robots.txt$ 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*AhrefsBot.*$ [NC,OR] 
RewriteRule ^.*.*

Summary:

I hope you find this tutorial on how to block AhrefsBot easy to follow and effective. If you need any help, feel free to reach out to me using the comment form below!