Firefox

I’m sitting on hold with my website hosting company, Bluehost, waiting for tech support. Here’s a company that impresses me with its customer service, and here’s why:

Every Malaysia blogger have had thanked Google at some point of their blogging journey (or career). Now, it’s my turn finally to be able to thank Google for their monetary donation in supporting my annual domain and website hosting.

I mean, $2500 is a lot of money and this guy even needs people to chip in to subsidize his website hosting. My own hosting was only $10 a year and it’s now even free and here’s this guy asking for donations and then saying that he would give away $2500. He has got to be kidding. I was even telling a friend that if he really has a winner, we won’t even know if the $2500 is in American Dollars or some other weak currency.

In December 2004, I migrated this site to PagesGarden, a website hosting service. With that move, I now had access to AWStats, a useful service for understanding usage of one’s site. Here’s what AWStats has told me for 2005:

The very popular (and very affordable) GoDaddy website hosting company offers an excellent place to host your Wordpress blog. However, there is one problem; GoDaddy has mod_rewrite enabled, but it refuses to rewrite to php files. This illustrated guide will show you how to make search engine friendly URLs work with GoDaddy, without using mod_rewrite.

Before we rolled out Exchange, our email was hosted by our website hosting provider - specifically, Net1Plus, a local company. Net1Plus is a great company, and I have nothing but praise for their services - which I also use for this site (StarKeith.net. Their web servers run a sweet version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which means that email is handled by stable, proven Linux-based software. The only time there’s a problem is when a server is down (which is rare, and Net1Plus queues the mail while the server is down so we don’t miss anything), or when there’s some sort of DNS problem (which is even more rare). We occasionally have problems sending mail because of authentication problems - most email services these days have systems in place to deal with spam and have some way of not being an “open relay” - but in general (and especially since we moved to our new office with it’s static IP address) things have been peachy-keen. Which is good, because email is arguably the most important piece of software in our office - or in any modern office these days. When email doesn’t work, people get grouchy - in the same sort of way people get grouchy when the phones don’t work, or when the power goes out. These are the sorts of things that you need to have working - and that when they don’t work, nothing can get done. They’re important - you expect them to work 100% of the time, and by and large they do.

Most website hosting companies will have their packages grouped by the various things they offer, of course the more you get the larger the price will be. The basic package is usually around 25MB of web space. This is how much space the hosting company will allow you to have on their web server. This is with shared hosting. There will be other websites also on this server with you, each with their own packages and amounts of space.

With a paid LJ, paid website hosting, and now a paid Flickr account, and most of my blogs on Blogger (which I don’t want to move and I actually have put one on hiatus to make things a bit easier on me), I have no interest in a paid WordPress account. I had hoped this free account, despite the limited choices in templates and the inability to customize worth a damn would still be a worthwhile blogging platform but the frustrations are really getting to me. The pages are the one way I can customize this place and add versatility here, and they simply don’t work.

I've casually used Google's Adwords over the last few years, mostly to have some familiarity with how the system works. Being that my main business is Website Hosting, unless you're the el-cheapo hosting provider, this type of advertising has proven to be pretty much useless. Now that I'm also promoting my music CD, I've taken a renewed interest in the program.

One way to know if you site is running is to use a third-party solution. There are many companies that will check your site, some are free. 2 that are good are: www.internetseer.com and www.watchmouse.com. Both offer limited free services, checking your site every few hours, sending you an email when it goes down.

Last March I attempted to apply for a Google Adsense account and what denied because I was not 18 years of age. Since I was unable to use Google Adsense, I researched and found an alternative. This alternative was called TextAds and was similar to the idea of Google but not as advanced. TextAds had businesses apply for advertisements, the businesses looked through a database and found which site they wanted to advertise on. TextAds was certaintly not as advanced as Google Adsense because it did not display relevant ads, it displayed whatever ad someone wanted to display. After, not using TextAds, because of the lack of technical support and the non-user friendly interface I decided I would wait for my birthday. Well, upon turning the age of 18 I immediately re-applied for the Google Adsense account and was accepted. Within the past week I have made enough money to pay for my website hosting for the next 2 months.

Website hosting is becoming the proverbial Gillette razor — given away to sell razor blades. Companies offer low priced hosting packages, in order to sell additional services and products.

JamRoom is a Musician's Website Manager for independent musicians and composers to help them EASILY present and sell their music online to their fans and friends. Since its inception, JamRoom has become much more. Internet Entrepeneurs, such as SunFields, are now using JamRoom to offer full service music hosting to a growing market of musicians who want to share their artistic vision online. Similar to services such as mp3.com© and Soundclick.com©, JamRoom can manage the songs, lyrics, information, images and data for all your music business requirements on one dedicated server. Since JamRoom can be customized to such a great extent, it has become the perfect choice for those who want to ensure their site has a personalized look and feel.

As a direct consequence of these control policies, all ISPs and ICPs in China must police themselves in order to operate. For example, the most politically active spaces online are online forums like bulletin boards and chat rooms. Because of the government regulations, all web hosting services must hire moderators in order to keep their sites’ content acceptable to the Internet police. In addition to human censors, all website hosting services have also installed keywords filtering software. Posts on politically sensitive topics, such as Falun Gong, human rights, democracy, and Taiwan independence are routinely filtered. A list recently obtained by the China Internet Project in Berkeley found that over 1000 words, including “dictatorship”, “truth”, and “riot police” are automatically banned in China’s online forums.

Also, thanks to whoever it was that has a pending referral through Dreamhost for website hosting. I REALLY appreciate it. They really do offer a great deal at under $8 a month. I can’t say enough about how great their support is, or about how easy it has been to use all their one-click set ups for stuff like this blog and for my forums. They’re truly a SUPERIOR webhost provider. So thanks again. And if anyone else is thinking about finding a host for their site, or switching hosts……..then by all means, click on that...

Yesterday, GoDaddy.com, to avoid being de-credited, discontinued offering private .US domain name registrations.

Existing private .US registrations owners will have to decide between losing their domain or making their personal information public. GoDaddy.com will also notify its customer base next week, that those who have purchased private .US registrations will have to make a choice by January 26, 2006. They will have to decide between having their personal information made public, or, canceling their domain name(s).

I have been trying out DreamHost (www.dreamhost.com) as the host of this blog for several weeks. Up to this point I have been impressed with the ease of setup, making configuration changes, the extra goodies they have (for example, the WordPress blog software) and the extra space (see below).