Product Review: iPowerWeb web hosting

Posted on November 13th, 2005 in Internet, web hosting by Oz

About the company: “IPOWERWEB, Inc., The Power Behind eBusiness ™, is the worlds leading eBusiness Website Hosting provider. Our Internet based end-to-end solutions enable small and medium sized enterprises (SME’s) to build, promote, manage and profit from their online presence.”

The big pitch: Serving over 300,000 members with affordable, reliable web hosting solutions. Completely reloaded! More space! 10,000 MB Hosting, 2,500 Email Accounts, Website Builder, Free Domain, Host 6 Domains in 1!

Ipowerweb.com is a web hosting service that offers a variety of web hosting plans. Each web hosting plan ranges in the levels and variety of features included - for example, the different website hosting services include: domain registration, web hosting, windows hosting, and dedicated server. iPowerWeb reaches out to the average internet surfer that wants their own website, while also serving top level e-commerce businesses that need a dedicated server.

Domain registration starts as low as $2.95 per year, and the web hosting service starts as low as $7.95 per month, both of which are very affordable rates when it comes to web hosting services. There is a $30 set-up fee, but that is waived if you pay for a year of hosting in advance, which is fair enough.

You may think that since the price is so affordable that there aren’t many features available, but you’d be completely wrong. The $7.95 per month web hosting service is called “Business Pro”, which offers the following features: 10,000 Megs of disk-space, 2,000 Email addresses, Secure Socket Layering (SSL), CGI-BIN, MySQL, and unlimited email. Plus you get free setup, dynamic content, and a marketing package. thrown in to the deal You can find more technical details on their website, because frankly there are way too many to list here.

If you aren’t familiar with what is required to create your own website and deal with web hosting issues, then you will be happy to know that iPowerWeb.com has an extensive customer support center. This customer e-service allows you to ask questions, provide feedback, and learn about additional features without racking up big tech support fees. In addition, iPowerWeb offers an interactive tutorial site which demonstrates how to setup and configure your website, so even a dummy can do it.

The Product Trends rating: iPowerWeb can meet your web hosting needs whether you want to create a new web domain or transfer your current domain to their services. You can transfer your domain name for free and take advantage of their content and promotion packages within 24 hours - not a bad deal at all. Five stars! — Reviewed by Jillian Dobbs

To try iPowerWeb for yourself, click the image below:

Product Review: Dotster Domains and Hosting

Posted on September 21st, 2005 in Internet, web hosting by Oz

About the company: "With nearly three million Internet domains, Dotster, Inc. is one of the largest ICANN-accredited domain name registrars in the world. Launched in 2000, Dotster was among the first to offer long-term registrations and discounted pricing. Customers now turn to Dotster for its ability to deliver creative, marketable, and hard-to-find domain names through its proprietary NameSpin and Namewinner services. Dotster offers superior online account management tools and dedicated support from its customer care team in Washington state. The company’s services include web hosting, DNS management, website development and marketing services, and partner programs."

The big pitch: Transfer your domain to Dotster for $8.95 and get one year of free web hosting. Hosting packages start at $8.95 per month, whois privacy for $2.99 per year.

Dotster has grown pretty damn fast over the last few years, and at first glance it’s hard to see why. They charge a little more per month than other web hosting outfits, they charge for domain transfers, which other companies do for free, they charge you a few bucks to keep your whois details private, again something that others do for free (and Dotster did for free not long ago), and their domain registrations, at $14.95 per year, pale in comparison to the $3 and $2 registrations you can get from hosting chop shops like GoDaddy.

So why are people using Dotster when they’re not scraping the bottom of the barrel on price?

Well, for starters, the company does what it promises. The basic web hosting account brings you 3GB of bandwidth, 100MB of storage, up to 50 email accounts and nifty extras like personal photo albums and web blogs, spam filtering and virus protection. They also offer Linux hosting, which people who are sick of Microsoft’s continual security issues and bug problems seem to think is a big deal.

Dotster domain registrations include free URL forwarding, free domain parking, free SpamShield, free TransferLock, and free ownership transfers, additionally, you can have 25MB of MySQL database space, chat server software, shopping cart scripts, content management scripts, online calendars, blah blah blah.

But, see, here’s the thing… the first rule of picking a web host is to know as much as you can about that webhost up front. Who are they? Where do they come from? What’s their business model? Will I spend money on ten years of domain registration, only to find the company goes bankrupt next June? Will they charge my credit card for all sorts of things I didn’t ask for?

I’m not saying any of that applies to Dotster, but without some detailed company info on their website (and there is none that I could find), it’s hard to tell people to send their money there. What’s the size of Dotster’s pipe? What’s their uptime? Sorry folks, but I have no idea, because they don’t make the info clear.

Clearly lots of people aren’t too concerned about that, since Dotster looks after the hosting of 3 million different accounts, but AOL has millions of users too and you wouldn’t find me recommending them for an ISP.

So where do we go from here? Should you move your website away from GoDaddy to Dotster or not? Well, there are things that work in Dotster’s favor. From consumer reports, we’ve noticed that although the company doesn’t make a phone number available to customers, they do respond to customer service issues in a helpful way (just via email, so hope you’re not in a hurry). Their control panel is a breeze to use, something that GoDaddy could learn some things about, and they deliver what they say they will, unlike the much-maligned Verio web hosting company.

One potential snafu with Dotster is that, if you want to take your website away from them and put it elsewhere, they’ll expect to be paid $25 for the privilege. Though they’re not the only ones that do this kind of thing, it is, to our way of thinking, utter and outright extortion.

So should you use Dotster? Well, we’d lean towards not, at least not right now. Sure, you should move your site away from GoDaddy pronto, but we’re not entirely sure that Dotster is the way to go, unless of course you’re okay with long, long term deals that might be a little bit more expensive than the other guys, but are easy to use and won’t break your website in the meantime.

If you want to leave your website in one place for a few years, definitely go with Dotster. But it you’re one of the many that want the option to leave if things take a negative turn, we’d suggest you keep looking.

The Product Trends rating: A good, solid option, but the lack of company info, lack of support phone number, and sneaky fees that you’re hit with once you’re stuck with them is a definite red light. Be assured, those negatives are minor issues when it comes to your web hosting/domain registration experience, but they’re worth noting. The Product Trends Magazine rating on Dotster is three stars.

To try Dotster for yourself, click the image below:
$14.95 domain names from Dotster

Product Review: Pixagogo Online Photo Storage

Posted on September 16th, 2005 in photos, web hosting by Oz

About the company: Pixagogo offers an easy way to upload your photos to our secure data center and share these photos with friends and family, simply by sharing album links. By sharing these compact private album links instead of photos you by-pass e-mail technology limits and you avoid having to resize your photos. That means that viewers will be able to see your photos in all their full-resolution glory and have them printed if they like.

The big pitch: Unlimited photo storage for just $5 per month, create albums, share them with friends and family, order prints - all with a 15-day free trial!

We’re in the digital age, my friends, and that means that a growing number of people - most people in fact - have digital cameras that they take a multitude of pictures with. Friends, family, special events, sports, girls, guys - we snap whatever takes our fancy, and we keep on snapping because nowadays you don’t need to pay to get a roll of film processed to see your happy snappys.

And that’s great, because now the memories that would eventually yellow and fade are with us forever! Or are they…?

Whenever you see a big disaster on TV, be it a flood or a fire, the survivors always talk about how they grabbed their photos before they left the house. Or they talk about how they didn’t get their photos, and now they’re devastated. But in the digitial age, it’s a lot easier to lose your photos - one hard drive crash or virus and your memories are gone forever!

Thankfully, you can avoid that kind of heartbreak, by storing your pictures online through a third party service, like Pixagogo. Not only will that protect your images forever, but it will also stop you from being the ‘Annoying Photo Emailer’.

What is an Annoying Photo Emailer? They’re the family member or friend who thinks everyone in the world has a cable internet connection and thus should have their inbox filled with 600 large pictures of your newborn son, or your cat, or your ingrown toenail. Such people are a giant pain in the backside, on a par with telemarketers and lawyers, and if you happen to be one of those people… Just stop it. Stop it RIGHT NOW. You’re VERY annoying.

So how can you share your pictures with people you care about without overloading Aunt Millie’s email inbox? Simple. Get a Pixagogo account today.

Pixagogo will take as many pictures as you want to upload, as big as you want to make them, and for as long as you want to keep them. You use your Pixagogo account as a giant storage container for your digital images, and when you’re done uploading them, you can then put them into albums that your friends and family can look through free of charge, without any downloading of their own.

Here’s how it works: You download a tiny program from Pixagogo that sits on your desktop. Whenever you want to store images, you just drag them to the Pixagogo Uploader and it does all the work. Then, when they’re stored, you arrange them however you want, in online albums that are easy to personalize to suit whoever you want to see them.

Then, instead of sending 5MB of pictures to everyone you know, you just send them an email with the link to your album and they can look to their heart’s content!

Also, if you see images on your albums that you want real life prints of, you can order them direct from Pixagogo for less than 20c per image!

In addition, if you have your own website but have a lot of pictures to put on it, Pixagogo allows you to link to your pictures, so you can use your account as a tool for your online business ventures, at a cost far below that charged by many hosting companies.

Think about this now:
* You’ll never lose another photo to fire, flood, or computer crash.
* You’ll never have to sit for half an hour while your photos are emailed out to friends and family.
* You’ll never again wonder where the photo of Weird Uncle Phil is stored on your computer.
* You’ll never again wonder how to store images for your corporate website.
* You’ll never have to pay $30 to get prints for relatives that you’re not even sure they want.

Pixagogo does all the hard work for you, and in our experience, the software is simple and easy to install, the process in easy, and what’s even better - the pricing is dirt cheap. Just $5 per month, and you can upload as many pictures as you want. That’s right - upload ten pictures or 10,000 - it’s your choice.

And if you’re not convinced, Pixagogo offers a free 15-day trial during which you can try every single feature without limitation. Don’t like the service? Cancel it. But we’re convinced that, like us, you’ll think it’s well worth the $5 per month (or $50 per year) and will see this as an invaluable service that can protect your memories forever.

There are plenty of ‘photoblogs’ and ‘free picture’ archives out there, and all of them have limitations on how you can do things. Yes, sure, there are no-price options, if you want your pictures to have watermarks on them, or if you want relatives to have to register with a website to see them, or if you want to delete pictures to make room for more.

But Pixagogo just does what you want it to. It never says "file too large" or "storage space full". Just upload your pictures, arrange them as you like, send the link to whoever, and get the prints that will look best on your living room wall in a nice frame delivered to your door.

Pixagogo takes the usual credit cards, but it also takes Paypal, which makes it very easy for the user, and seriously, who amongst us doesn’t have a spare $5 floating around in our Paypal account?

The Product Trends rating: A great service, and once that we fully recommend. Five stars. Try the free trial for yourself. What have you got to lose? …Except your reputation as an ‘Annoying Photo Emailer’.

To try Pixagogo for yourself, click the image below:

Pixagogo - Your Pictures Online

Product Review: Blue Host Web Hosting

Posted on September 14th, 2005 in Internet, web hosting by Oz

About the company: Bluehost has been providing hosting solutions to thousands of business and personal web sites since 1996. Our internet hosting package helps businesses and individuals get high-powered service at a fraction of the cost.

The big pitch: $6.95 p/month web hosting, with free set-up, no hidden fees, and a free domain included.

Finding the right host is like finding the right girl – you can just never tell whether you have the right package until you try it out in person. Thankfully, there are hosting service companies out there that have attained a high level of reputation, while also charging reasonable prices and offering decent packages that will suit most any business. Bluehost is one of those companies.

The standard Bluehost package at the time of writing is a 4gb hosting space upon which you can host up to six domains, receiving 2500 POP/Imap email accounts, 100gb per month of transfer bandwidth, Secure Socket Layering (SSL), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), server stats, CGI, PHP, MySQL, and support for 2000, 2002, and 2003 Microsoft Front Page extensions.

Now, if all of that technospeak is a little confusing to you, we understand – take it from us when we say this is a decent package, for a very nice price, which has enough extra features that you can grow into the account as you get more and more familiar with running a website as a business.

Bluehost also offers new clients a content package, promotional package (search engine submissions etc), a free eCommerce/shopping cart system, free blogs, IRC chat, messageboards, and all of that comes with real life actual toll-free customer support.

They support international domain names, email autoresponders and forwarding, up to 20 subdomains, up to 1000 FTP accounts, web-based email, server side includes, customizable error pages, form–mail scripts, survey/polls, web auctions, Flash support, Real Audio support… Seriously, the more you read about Bluehost’s set-up, the more obvious it becomes that they believe in offering you everything you could ever want, even if you’ll never use it.

Their system uses high performance Xeon servers and a customized Apache web server, and the network is not only hooked up to a UPS Power back-up AND a Diesel back-up generator, but they also have mirrored storage backups and 24/7 network monitoring by trained staff.

Clearly, this is a hosting set-up that leaves nothing to chance, delivers a good-sized account package, and won’t be asking you to ‘upgrade’ your account to get features that should be standard.

If you’re tired of AOL-like systems like GoDaddy that are aimed at the bottom end of the market, and you’re sick of being continually nickel and dimed for features by company’s who offer cheap accounts but cost you plenty on the backend, then Bluehost is for you .

And if you have no idea what the hell we’ve been talking about for the last ten paragraphs but you’re looking for a good, cheap, realiable place to put your new website, then Bluehost is for you .

The Product Trends rating: A big, fat five stars. We have no issue at all with the way Bluehost does business, and in fact we wish others would follow their example. Very inexpensive, very good.

To try Bluehost for yourself, click the image below:

Bluehost Web Hosting $6.95

Product Review: PowWeb Web Hosting

Posted on September 10th, 2005 in Internet, web hosting by Oz

About the company: PowWeb is one of the few web hosting companies that stands on our own two feet. We develop our own custom web hosting software and automation tailored directly to our customers’ needs. Our entire infrastructure was built and developed in-house by our programmers and developers to cater to our satisfied customers. We manage, own, and operate our entire network and all of our equipment.

The big pitch: 5000MB web storage, 300GB transfer, free setup and domain, and load balanced servers for just $7.77 per month. And they offer a 30-day guarantee!

Finding the right web hosting for your website can be a real drag. You read a lot about one company, they seem great, and so you move your website to them, only to find the hype was all smoke and mirrors and now you can’t transfer your website for another three months. Ack! So it pays to read product reviews to see what other people think of the hosting company you’re planning on using.

We took a good long look at PowWeb and were surprised to find that it didn’t seem to have nearly as much smoke, and no mirrors that we could see, leaving services like GoDaddy in the dust in terms of uptime, value for money, and flexibility.

PowWeb is a member of the Better Business Bureau, so you know they’ll engage only in ethical business practices (which a few other companies I could name could learn a thinig or two about), and they offer, in their words, "Everything you need for only $7.77 per month" - including a free domain name. Good deal.

One neato thing PowWeb does is ‘load balance’ their servers, meaning your website won’t just be one one machine, but will be hosted on five different servers. That means if one goes down for whatever reason, the other four can take the burden of expanded traffic on without any interruption in service. Most hosting companies will put your site on just one server, which means you could well see your site disappear on a Friday afternoon and have nobody there to reboot it until Monday morning. Not good!

Another great thing about PowWeb is that they have staff monitoring the system 24/7, so if there is a problem, there’s someone there to fix it. Along similar lines, they’ll give you free email or phone customer support, with toll-free numbers to make it all cheap and easy.

Lastly, PowWeb creates its own hardware and software to suit its own needs, so bugs that appear in server software that brings down networks across America don’t necessarily hurt your website on their servers.

The Product Trends Rating: As always, try before you buy, read up on everything and be sure that PowWeb suits your needs, and if you’re still in doubt, make use of their 30-day money back guarantee, but if you’re looking for an opinion on whether we think you should try it out, we give PowWeb a big thumbs up. Four stars

To try PowWeb, click the image below:

PowWeb Hosting - $7.77/mo.

Fine-tuning your website: Web counters are your friend.

Posted on September 8th, 2005 in Internet, web hosting by Oz

When your business is getting people to come to a website, read your content, and buy your stuff, you need to have the tools available to you in order to allow you to fine-tune every aspect of that site. To go on gut instinct is just not good enough, and many millions of ecommerce ventures have crumbled because decision-makers decided that they could ‘guess’ where their site was going wrong.

The cold, hard fact of the matter is - every website needs help. Whether it’s your text that doesn’t properly sell your product, your design, your hosting, or your content, there’s always something that could be better - always a tweak that could be made to make all the difference.

As an example, when we created an unofficial blog for the Vancouver Canadians minor league baseball team, we thought the traffic we were getting was pretty decent, considering the niche market we were in. But soon the traffic was stalling, and no matter how much PR we did, and how many search engines we submitted to, we couldn’t get the daily traffic to rise.

Tough break for us, and for most other website owners who go through the same issue, whether they realize it or not. But we weren’t content to just let things slide. We knew there was something we could do to make a change in our traffic - we just didn’t know what.

Until we installed a free web counter from RiteCounter.com.

Now, we’re not making a cent of plugging RiteCounter here - it’s just a damn fine (FREE) service that helped us make simple but radically effective changes to the way we do things.

RiteCounter isn’t just a web counter that helps you keep track of how many of your cousins and school buddies are visiting your Anna Kournikova tribute page - it’s actually a suite of server analysis tools that go deeper than you could ever personally go by just looking at server logs.

Ritecounter counts:

Daily/weekly/monthly/yearly visitors
Hourly performance
Live visitor tracking
Visits per domain
Access time per visitor
Daily statistics
Page impressions per visitor
Most popular pages
Entry/exit pages
Most commonly searched phrases/words Visitors by country/continent
Top referring search engines
Operating systems
Screen resolutions
Browsers used
Visitors by country
…and much more.

It tracks an unlimited number of pages, can be completely invisible if you want it to be, it uses no banners or third party ads, and the company doesn’t sell your information on to mailing list companies. You get a weekly email that shows you all the important stats, if you don’t have time to keep up manually, and there’s a large maximum log file size so you don’t have to worry about losing precious information when the data rolls in.

Added to that, it took us two minutes to sign-up, add the counter code, and see our first handful of statistics, which is just incredible in an age where you spend fifteen minutes just signing up for a Hotmail acccount.

There isn’t any catch, and that’s ultimately what sold us. This is simply a good, free service with no hidden extras and no hassles. And in using the tools that make it run, we determined that the people coming to our website were looking for content that we didn’t have a whole lot of. Certain pages were hit a lot, but our front page was lacking that content that people were searching for.

By moving some of that content to our front page, as well as tweaking other small things, such as screen resolution size and making sure our advertisers catered to those niches more closely, the traffic began to ramp up, the time people spent on the site increased, and commissions and profits from advertising and affiliate programs began to improve accordingly.

Since then, we’ve made more changes - we optimized to take advantage of the increase in Firefox browser use, we provided content for specific locations that was being looked for but not found on our site, and we improved navigation so that you can get to every page from every page.

Traffic numbers haven’t looked back since. RiteCounter is responsible, and we recommend it to all our users.

Top Keywords associated with ‘HOSTING’

Posted on September 5th, 2005 in search engine optimization, seo, web hosting by Oz

One of the most intense industries to have sprung up around the high tech world in the last few years is web hosting. Hosting companies provide server space where companies can put their websites, buy domains, and get connected to the online world.

So what phrases involved in hosting are the most searched for online right now? Here’s the Top 20:

1. Web Hosting
2. Hosting
3. Web Hosting Provider
4. Domain Hosting
5. Domain Registration Hosting
6. Email Hosting
7. Free Web Hosting
8. Web Hosting Service
9. Affordable Web Hosting
10. Cheap Web Hosting
11. E-Commerce Web Hosting
12. Image Hosting
13. Provider Hosting
14. Web Hosting Company
15. ASP Hosting
16. Reseller Hosting
17. Dedicated Hosting
18. Server Hosting
19. Business Web Hosting
20. Adult Web Hosting