The other day I was chatting with Alex from Sliqua.com and he was telling me about this awesome billing service I had to check out. FreshBooks.com promises to deliver you painless billing. The real question is, can they deliver?

FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service for small, medium and large sized businesses. You let them manages the invoicing and billing side of your company and you can get back to running the actual business side of things.

The nice thing is that it is not just for web hosts. Anybody can use their service. It will allow you to manage invoices, track expenses, track your time, accept various payment methods, sent invoices by snail mail and generate reports. It does a ‘bit of everything.

Depending on how many clients you need to manage, the prices go from $14 a month to $149 a month, so they are very flexible in that regard to meet your needs.

I think this service would be perfect for any web host, web designer, freelancer or anybody that needs to manage multiple clients giving them money. Check them out at FreshBooks.com and let them know that the Web Hosting Show sent you there.

There are tons of goodies on and about the web hosting world if you know where to look Online. Here are a few gems I scrapped out of the blogging dirt this week.

The Hosting Industry Organization

This new virtual posse of the hosting industry promises to be a socialized group of hosting professionals. Based off a list from LinkedIn - there are many that have already joined (including yours truely) and I am looking forward to seeing what becomes of this just budding project later on down the road.

New Blog! Web Hosting Topics Rocks!

Here is yet another good hosting blog worth subscribing to. Brought to you by the same folks as the DAW Web Hosting Blog and HostingBookmarks.com it promises fresh content for the web hosting addicted. Yes, that would be both you and me!

Blog.Verisign.com? (I didn’t know either)

Did you know that VeriSign had their own collection of blogs from insiders in the company? The company is based around providing secure SSL certificates so, I mean, how exciting can the blog be? Well I was delightfully surprised by a few so the list here is well worth checking out.

Have you found any hidden treasures in or on the web hosting blogs out there? If so drop me an e-mail or leave a comments and let me know about it.

No, that is not a typo with the name or the offer. The people at myy.name wish to host for the web entrepreneurs out there for free.

Here are the features of the free hosting plan:

100MB storage
1000MB/month bandwidth
1 hosted domain (or a myy.name subdomain)
10 FTP accounts
5 MySQL databases
100 e-mail accounts

Nothing to sneeze at when the price tag reads “Free!”. They also promise no ads, no hidden fees and instant activation. So if you are in the hunt for a new free hosting solution you might want to give myy.name a visit.

Back in October I shared with you my thoughts on AOL’s tucked away file hosting service, Xdrive. Here recently that have finally got around to meeting one of my demands - a handy desktop client that will make working with your free 5GB of space a lot easier.

With Xdrive Desktop Lite, you can easily upload files and folders right from your hard drive, desktop, USB device or removable storage drive directly into your Xdrive web storage space.

This new lightweight application is using Adobe’s new AIR technology to deliver a program that should work on either Windows or Apple machines.

In the future releases they are promising:

• Configuration and controls for the Xdrive AutoCopy feature
• Synchronize between local files and those stored in your Xdrive account: Made a change to a local file? Xdrive Desktop Lite will automatically upload the new version to your Xdrive account so you always have the latest version available from anywhere you have an internet connection.
• In addition to a wide range of enhancements to the Xdrive Desktop Lite client, the Adobe AIR platform will allow us to present virtually all of the desktop functionality in a robust web application.

If you pupued the idea before, give Xdrive.com another shot if for no other reason than to just test out this new Xdrive Desktop Lite product.

Tired of hosting your own billing software, or maybe you don’t have the time or manpower to manage your invoices on your own? I’ve been tipped off to an awesome service that will handle all your financial management and I’ll tell you and only you about it on this week’s edition of the Web Hosting Show.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 144!
Running Time: 11 minutes | File Size: 4.83 MB

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

• FreshBooks Offers a Better Billing Solution!
• Another Web Hosting Union to be Organized?
• Xdrive Delvers a Delightful Desktop Client!
• Know Anybody who Does Plesk Shared Linux Hosting?
• Another of the Free (no string attached) Web Hosting Deals!

The tower of podcasting power, to sweet to be sour, funky like a money the Web Hosting Show is ready to go. Got tons of new stuff to share with you and send your way, so why haven’t you started downloading yet?

Taking the week off from production this week due to some personal issues and needing a ‘bit of a break, but while we take this one week hiatus I thought I could get beg you (the best listening audience ever!) to go Digg the Web Hosting Show over at Digg.com. You can find us over at their podcast section or you can find the Digg button on the bottom of WebHostingShow.com.

Also while your there, feel free to digg a few past episodes too. Once you have done so, be sure to drop me an e-mail at mitch@mitchkeeler.com (with your digg username) and I’ll enter your name into a special giveaway I’ll be setting up for next week’s show where I’ll give one lucky person $5. That is like an entire month’s worth of hosting if you know where to look. Vote early and vote often!