Archive | April, 2008

Troubleshoot Your Hosting Woes – Episode 148

Apr/14 in All Posts, Web Hosting Podcasts

From coast to coast, and all around the hosting world we all have times where we contact support and they say that nothing is wrong. Today I’ll show you how to paint a better picture for support of your hosting problems as well as…

Well a lot more hosting podcast goodness right here on this week’s edition of the Web Hosting Show.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 148!
Running Time: 16 minutes | File Size: 7.10 MB

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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

  • DemoWolf Introduces Subscription for Flash Tutorials!
  • Learn to Gather the Right Info Before Contacting Hosting Support!
  • cPanel Releases a Virtual Private Server Edition?
  • Find a Web Host that is Perfect for Your Blog!
  • Hosting Spotlight Shines on Dan “W3Counter” Grossman!

I really do appreciate you listening to episode 148, and this week we have tons a various content on board and ready to go so that you too can learn to become a better web hosting guru. From experts to novices, everybody is welcome because I think all can get something out of today’s broadcast.

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Make Your Own Huge E-mail Box with cPanel

Apr/11 in All Posts, Web Hosting Tutorials, Web Hosting Tutorials

more-disk-space We keep hearing about Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail all fighting it out to provide you with the largest e-mail inbox. If you have a web hosting account though, it is very easy to beat all of these providers and give yourself the e-mail disk space you really need.

Now this might be a little different depending on the cPanel skin you are using, but it should work generally for any and all.

Step one would be to login to cPanel and go to your mail settings (usually you can just click on the “Mail” icon to get you there. Next you will want to go to:

Add/Remove/Manage Accounts

This is your Mail Account Maintenance page. Here you can see all the e-mail accounts you have created. If you have not yet created one go to “Add Account” to do so. Here you can fill in the name you want to use (the thing that going before @yourdomain.com), your password and the Quota. By default the setting should be 10 Meg. This stands for 10 Megabytes.

Now it is time for some math. To make things easy, let us say you wanted to bump your e-mail quota to 5 GB of storage.

1 gigabytes = 1,024 megabytes

Using Google, you can do the conversions quicker. Just type into Google “5 GB to MB“. The answer you need to type into cPanel’s quota box would be “5120” which is 5,120 MB. If all goes well you should see the message:

The e-mail account (your e-mail address) with the login (your login) and password (your password) with a quota of 5120 Megabytes was successfully created.

To change that later on, just go back into your Mail Account Maintenance screen, find your e-mail account and click on “Quota”. See, now you know you don’t need a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail in your life to have a larger online inbox.

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Which One, Reseller Plan or Affiliate Deal?

Apr/10 in All Posts, Shopping Advice, Web Hosting Tutorials

Now if you listen to the podcast here, you are more than likely more knowledgeable than the average Joe on the street about web hosting. One question I see come up a lot for hosting insiders or web designers that have friends and clients who need a place to host is which way should they go to get it done?

To give you a summary of things, there are usually two routes you can take. You can purchase a reseller account from any web host out there that you choose or you could decide to go the affiliate route and resell a web host’s shared hosting plans. So when should you do one over the other?

Reseller Web Hosting

If you want to act as your on “mini” web hosting company, then I often suggest going with the reseller hosting plan option. For much cheaper than it would cost to rent out a data center and worry about all the legalities of starting a business you can act as the web host for your friend or clients. You charge them some to help pay for the reseller hosting account and they go to you with their support questions. This is also a great way to beta test becoming a real web host too.

Affiliate Hosting Deals

On the other side of the scale, as an example lets say you don’t have a lot of free time but your friends are always looking for a suggestion as to where they should do their web hosting. Now if you have no real need to support them 24/7 and you would rather get them the web site hosting they need and be done with it an affiliate plan might be the thing you need. Many web hosts have them (just have to look around) and they will pay you a “finder’s fee” for bringing in new hosting customers to them.

Now I know somebody out there might suggest VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting or a dedicated server but those both might be out of the budget of your “guy on the street”. In conclusion, if you want to be a web host yourself for your clients and friends – get a reseller hosting plan. If you want to hook them up with hosting and then be done with it, a good affiliate deal with a web host you can trust might be the better way to go.

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Domain Lookups in Firefox

Apr/09 in All Posts, Downloads, Web Hosting Tutorials

Need a quick and easy way to do domain name lookups without the fuss of finding a good Online whois resource or domain name register? I have yet another solution to solve this problem (found via the FEGB) – and this one is for Firefox fans. The Domain Lookup addon for Firefox is a free tool to help Firefox users to find quality domain names. It works with all your favorite domain registers and TLDs (top level domains).

Quick Domain Lookups

Once installed the addon to your browser gives you access to one click domain name searches at your favorite register. All you do is select some text in your Firefox window and hit the keyboard combination (Ctrl + Shift + D) or select it from the right-click menu. One of the really neat features of this extension is that it will strip out any non-standard characters and triggers for a domain search and also will work with GoDaddy, Moniker, Network Solutions and over 30 more.

Simply put, it is one of the best domain name lookup add-ons you can install for Firefox.

You can download this addon right from the developer’s web site at DomainLookup.org.

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Updating Your Terms of Service

Apr/08 in All Posts, Beginner Help, Web Hosting Tutorials

I received an e-mail from a soon to be web host the other day, and they asked:

“How often should I look over my terms of service?”

Most people think a terms or service and acceptable use policy are things that you should put up once and then forget about. We could not be further from the actual truth of things though. Sure you don’t need to review it daily, weekly or even monthly. I would suggest reviewing it once a year though to make sure all your ducks are in a row.

Has your business model changed? Maybe you started offering new plans or features you didn’t in the year before. If so this might be the time to include something about them so nobody will say they were not featured or told about when it comes to these new things you are offering.

Have bad things happened? We often learn from our mistakes – and if any have been made you should update your terms of service to reflect them so they don’t happen again. Maybe you had somebody not aware of the DMCA or you had somebody hosting a kind of script that ate away at your server resources?

Cover all the basics! Here are some of the basic things you should make sure you cover in your terms of service or your acceptable use policy.

  • Spammers are not Welcome
  • DMCA and Copyright Notices
  • No Breaking the Laws
  • Terms of Cancellation and Suspension

Last but not least you should make sure you have something in the bottom of the terms of service that says something to the effect of, “We have the right to change this at any time for any reason. As soon as it gets updated, the new policy will be in place. Please check this page often for updates”. This covers your bases for quick changes you need to make.

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The Hosting Express – Episode 147

Apr/07 in All Posts, Web Hosting Podcasts

Here to help with you hosting needs no matter if you are a web host yourself, or only a user of the service that make the Web go around. Today’s show will be focused on some often ask for questions and services that people have request from me from time to time.

The Web Hosting Show, podcast 147 is now on the air.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 147!
Running Time: 14 minutes | File Size: 6.29 MB

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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

  • Make Gmail Jealous and Increase Your E-mail Disk Space!
  • Domain Name Tool Extension for Firefox?
  • Which Do I Need? An Affiliate Deal or Reseller Plan?
  • How to Create and Review Your Hosting Terms of Service
  • Windows Webmail Done Right with SmarterMail 5.x

Time to take a trip on the web hosting express. I am your hosting train engineer here to help you choo-choo your way to a better web hosting and web development experience. So all aboard who are coming aboard as we head down the rail to Hostingtopia.

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More from Web Hosting Day 2008

Apr/05 in All Posts, Web Hosting Videos

The WHIR TV team has done a lot of great coverage for Web Hosting Day 2008. I thought I would share some of the content with you since you, much like myself probably were not able to attend the event.

videos removed the WHIR

Hopefully the WHIR TV team will be keep putting out more great coverage from these events that not all of us might have the pleasure of attending.

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Web Development Cheat Sheets

Apr/04 in All Posts, Online Tools, Web Hosting Tutorials

mod_rewrite_cheat_sheet_thmb_5 I am about to let you in on a little secret. Now see, you might look at your average web hosting guru and say, “Wow, he knows a lot about web hosting – I want to grow up and be like him some day”. What they don’t tell you is that all the best workers in the web hosting industry cheat.

Ok, maybe they don’t cheat in the literal sense but they do use cheat sheets. These are documents or images that have a lot of information packed into them so that when the question comes up all they have to do is pull up the right cheat sheet and they are good to go. The best place to get a lot of these digital life savers is ILoveJackDaniels.com.

Just point your browser in that direction and click on the “Cheat Sheets” link at the top. Here are a few of my absolute favorites that I use day to day doing tech support for others:

The one I get the most use out of might be the Mod_Rewrite Cheat Sheet. All are available as PDFs or PNG files to download. For any web hosting worker tuning in I would suggest you make a cheat sheet folder on your PC and save at least the ones I have mentioned here. There are many others too you might get some use out of.

Who says cheaters never win?

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Share and Host Large Files

Apr/03 in All Posts, Free Hosting, Web Hosting Tutorials

file-dropper-hosting File Dropper makes it easy to share and host your own files Online without the need of your traditional web host. They are a totally free service that just kind of came out of nowhere with what they are offering. All you do is upload your file, and then share your personal link with those that want to download the file.

What is the upload limit? Right now it is 5GB. According to the about us page, the goal of File Dropper as to create a fresh alternative to sites like MegaUpload and RapidShare. They do not wish to reel in users and make them wait for annoying countdown times. (Insert Yippee Here!) They do not hide their download links and they will not aggressively place ads all over the place.

As long as the file is still being downloaded, they will never take your files down. Now if a file is uploaded once, downloaded once and then not touched again for six months then you might see them taking it down to make more room for other material. That is totally understandable. Also, it goes without saying that copyrighted or illegal material is not allowed and will be removed.

How are they going to make money? That might be the next question you were curious about. Well, you can do the free file hosting as much as you want and that is open to anybody. If you sign up though you get a few more perks.

  • 99 Cents Plan – 5GB File Size, Direct Linking for Images, Share Files with Others
  • Silver Plan – 10GB File Size, Direct Linking for Images, Share Files with Others
  • Gold Plan – 25GB File Size, Direct Linking for Images, Share Files with Others

There is also a Free Trial plan that will let you test out the back end to see if you really want to pay to get a little more bang for your buck. All in all File Dropper seems to be doing everything right. Go give FileDropper.com a visit and let them know that the Web Hosting Show sent you there.

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WordPress 2.5 Comes Out to Play

Apr/02 in All Posts, Downloads, Web Hosting Tutorials

WordPress 2.5 has finally been released! Now before getting into the praise and changes, I just wanted to give the WordPress team credit for one thing. Out of all the major WordPress upgrades I have done, this is the first time nothing has screwed up after I made the move. Big congrats to the entire WordPress team.

WordPress 2.5 Screen Shot

This release does a lot for the visual aspect of WordPress and well, to put it in terms that everybody can understand – everything is a lot prettier. The entire interface has been redesigned, and it shows. Not only a visual update, it also looks like they did a lot to add functionality to the new admin section to where the important stuff is biggest and in your face while the not so important stuff is tucked away so that when you need it you can get to it.

When writing a post they have added a few new key features that are really exciting. The new “Add media” section allows you to quickly pull in audio, video, and images to your posts without doing a wacky dance to figure out the right special plugin code you should be using.

I just recently started using Windows Live Writer to do all my publishing to my various Web projects, but this latest WordPress release makes me want to go play with that interface some more instead. If you have not upgraded yet then you really have nothing to lose.

Note: Also be sure to check out the new WordPress.org too. It has been redesigned to match the new WordPress interface.

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