When moving from house to house, you have to pack up all of your belongings in the old house before you can move, right? The same could be said when you are moving from web host to web host.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 137!
Running Time: 8 minutes | File Size: 3.29 MB

The first and most important thing you can do is backup your web site and get it ready for the move. Remember to grab all of your static files. This would be all of your non-dynamic pages, images, templates and more. The exact files that you do backup might change depending on how your site is setup.

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Google Calendar (or as the cool kids say GooCal) is a great way to get your web site’s back end organized. It has the easiest interface to just drop in reminders and schedule repeating tasks. Personally I use it to remind me when my timesheet/invoice is due so I remember to send it in to get paid.

Logging into Google Calendar, adding a task or reminder is easy to do. Just click on the date and type in the item you need to remember in the “What?” box. Later on, you can click that same item to edit it further - such as set it to repeat every x amount of days or weeks.

For Web Hosts and Hosting Workers:

• Mange project start and stop times
• Figure out when your next invoice is due
• Schedule staff meetings and share it with your support crew

For Web Hosting Clients and Customers

• Setup a reminder for your next hosting billing date
• Notify yourself of when your domain name registration is up
• Write down server maintenance times from your host so you don’t forget

Google Calendar is one of those tools I use for just about everything. Don’t forget to try out some of the alternatives like 30 Boxes, Yahoo Calendar and Kiko then stick with the one you like best.

Have a static web site, but you still feel the urge of having an easier way to manage your data? WordPress is a perfect tool to get this done if your not afraid to do a little tweaking and thinking outside of the box.

You can get this done in four easy steps:

Step 1: Find a WordPress template that you like, and remove the blog related content in the sidebar (or wherever else it is posted). If you can create a WordPress layout by hand you might be better off.

Step 2: Login to the WordPress administration interface and go to Options, then Reading. On that page you can set your front page to be a static web page instead of the default blog list that you get.

Step 3: Mange all the pages on your site, by going to Write and then Write Page inside of the WordPress administration interface. To edit your creations later you can go to Manage and then Pages. From there you should get a full list of the pages you have created.

Step 4: You might have to go in and edit your template files ago to make sure you are linking to all the pages you have created. Since most sites done this way will be pretty small, you can get away with making these links by hand. I am sure there are automatic ways of doing it too using the list pages tag from WordPress. I would not bother though unless your just looking for something to tweak later down the road.

Personally this interested me at first because I wanted to know if it could be done. Now that I have done it with my own personal web site, I have found it to be an easy way to make edits and changes to my little biography on the Web. Another neat perk about doing this is you can work in WordPress plugins into the mix and get some awesome dynamic interaction for a static web site.

Have a look around, web hosting is getting cheaper and cheaper by the minute. Have you ever stopped to think what price you are really paying though when it comes to these discount prices? Now I am not looking to paint every low cost web host with a broad fraud brush.

There are some providers out there that have the business plan in place to handle it. They just might be harder to find.

Do You Pay for it in Perks?

Some web hosts will get you in the door with the low prices, and then when it comes to addons or accessories to your shared hosting account they stick you with the true costs of hosting. This can often happen with upgrades for JSP and ASP support and other upgrades some, but not all, will need.

Keep an Eye on How Long Your Signing Up For!

For an example, lets say Dummy Example Web Host is offering you a hosting deal you can not beat. It is $3.50 a month for 500 GB Disk Storage and 5 TB of Bandwidth. Now when you get on the order page you notice that this $3.50 a month price is only good if you sign up for the 10 year hosting plan. To get this, you must pay up-front: $420. Now if you know they are good then you have no worries but if you have no history with the company do you really want to sign up with them for the next decade? Better yet - will they even be around that long?

The one thing you have to remember (and I have said it time and time before) you have to do you homework when it comes to signing up with any web hosting company. Don’t be fooled by the special deal - and find out if they really are the best of the best or just another guy with a server in his basement trying to make a buck.

Do I Blame the Web Hosting Companies? No!

I can not blame the web hosting companies, because they need to compete with the next guy down the street and make money while doing so. Thanks to the fact that we have so much competition out there for the proverbial bottom dollar; almost everybody undercuts and over-provides. The secret of cheap hosting is to find the one that does so the best.

From time to time, I get a damned good e-mail that I have to share. This one from Phil asks a question that I thought was well worth looking into:

Hi Mitch, great podcast I try to download each show weekly. I was bitten by the RegisterFly.com problems a while back and today while browsing to their web site it looks like they are still in business? How can this be?

RegisterFly’s demise as an ICANN accredited register was one of the biggest hosting stories of last year. These days you don’t hear much about it though. Technically, yes - they are and can still be in business.

Look Back at the RegisterFly Mess

Back inn 2007, ICANN launched an investigation of RegisterFly since there were a lot of allegations they were sticking it to the customer. With other issues and lawsuits that followed, the RegisterFly co-owners Kevin Medina and John Naruszewicz had a breakup of their own. The road was rocky, the public was mad and then it was made known by an unsealed class action lawsuit that there were claims RegisterFly defrauded customers trying to register or renew domain names.

According to Wikipedia, one of the early lawsuits within RegisterFly was pretty hilarious.

Meanwhile RegisterFly filed suit against Kevin Medina, alleging he had stolen company funds for a $27,000 escort service, a $6,000 liposuction procedure, a $10,000/month penthouse apartment in Miami, Florida and a $6,000 chihuahua dog.

March 31, 2007 was the date that ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) removed RegisterFly’s ICANN accreditation and told them to take the ICANN logo off of their web site. Skipping ahead though the legal mumbo-jumbo they could no longer act as a domain name register themselves and had to give up the domain name registrations they had done to ICANN. GoDaddy and other companies stood up and offered the RegisterFly refugees a home for their domains and that pretty much catches us up to the present date and time.

So Why is RegisterFly Still Around?

Well, this message from Robert O’Neal, Chief Executive Officer for RegisterFly should give you a candy coated reason:

We are an authorized reseller of domain names, the same as we have been for 6 years prior, this has not changed. We are NOT OUT OF BUSINESS as the message may imply to some.

So they can’t act as a domain name register themselves, like a GoDaddy can but they can resell domain names to you, like many web hosts do out there though a reseller service. This is how they did business before becoming an accredited register. So technically they are no longer a domain name register, they are just reselling somebody else’s registration services to you.

Got a little ‘bit of something for everybody on today’s show. From a recap of RegisterFly’s mess to the price you pay for really cheap web hosting the shock and awe Web Hosting Show campaign starts right now. No caucus needed, but plenty of topics that should stir debate.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 136!
Running Time: 15 minutes | File Size: 6.80 MB

Here are just a few topics from this week’s episode of the Web Hosting Show.

• How can RegisterFly keep registering domain names?
• Tip on how to use Google Calender to organize your hosting mess!
• Mitch’s web hosting new year resolutions!
• Learn how to create a static web site using WordPress!
• What is the price you pay for your cheap hosting plan?
• No midgets and/or fairies were harmed in the production of this podcast!

From coast to coast and over the seven seas the Web Hosting Show is back to broadcasting the feel good web hosting talk, tips and so much more. Little known fact - but in 2007 the show you are listening to right now was downloaded by people in 160 different countries!

With the new year here and not much else going on, this makes for the perfect time for web hosts to review their support pages and see what needs to be improved on.

Traveling from web host to web host looking for news and information I see a lot of people who don’t do much as far as support pages go. On the other side of the scale, you also have hosts that push out so many support pages that there is no way they’ll be able to keep them all up to date.

How Do You Find the Problem?

Check out your web site statistical information (one of my favorites to use is Google Analytics) and with your support pages see where you are getting the most hits. Now navigate yourself to a few of these pages and see if there is anything that could be improved on or updated.

Another thing you could do while support might not be so busy is to surf around your support pages to make sure there are no broken links. Now these are sometimes harder to find - but the worst thing you can do to a customer looking for help is lead them to a dead end.

Is There an Easier Way?

Now with both of those suggestions out of the way, we can make your job easier. How can you do that? Well, time to include a link leading to a contact form at the bottom of each of your support pages saying something to the effect of:

“Dead link? Out of date? Send us an e-mail and let us know!”

This will give your customer, clients and visitors a way of contacting you to let you know you have some work to do. Getting even a little more fancy, you could setup a special address for this and have it forward over right to your designers or a specific part of your support team so they can get these fixed as soon as they come in.