As many of you know I work my “day job” I guess you could call it, at Lunarpages and I often get asked questions about if somebody’s web site is up or not. Now more times than not it is often something to do with the web site owner’s side of things. Either their ISP is being a ‘bit wonky, they need to refresh their DNS or some other solution. One quick and easy way to tell if your (or any other) web site is down is downforeveryoneorjustme.com.

I know the URL might be a little long, but this tool is an awesome one to keep in your web hosting tool belt. The simple interface just has “Is ‘text box here’ down for everyone or just me?”. You put your domain name in the text box and hit the linked “or just me?” text and it will spit back a yes or no answer.

If you want an even easier way of using it, just type in their domain name, put a slash in there and then your domain name, such as:

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mitchkeeler.com

There you have it, instant site checking. Some people have reported problems with false positives - but with a little fine tuning I am sure this web site will become an instant classic for those of use who need to keep tabs on if a web site is up or not.

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.

Creating a htaccess file is not exactly what I would call a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon. You have to search the Web for the right “code” to slice in there (if you don’t know it by heart) and also you run into the problem of getting the special code wrong or pointing into the wrong spot.

htaccessEditor.com solves the problems and pains with creating your own htaccess file by giving you an easy step by step wizard to creating your own Online. The only work you have to do is select the parameters on the left and fill in the empty text boxes. Once you are done, copy and paste the code into your own htaccess file, upload it and you are done.

The tool provides code for just about every htaccess tweak, tip and service you could need. It covers error pages, access restrictions, redirects, default pages and more. There is one more service that does this sort of thing out there if htaccessEditor.com doesn’t do the job for you. The .htaccess file generator has a ‘bit of an uglier interface but it too will get the job done.

TIP: If you browse to htaccessEditor.com and see a bunch of funny text - click on the drop down box in the upper right side of the page and select “English”. That one scared me a few times.

Spotlight this week for the most innovative and fun to use web hosting tool goes to YouGetSignal.com. This site is not only visually appealing - but it also delivers you some awesome tools to boot. The most impressive of them all would be the visual trace routes.

As you can see the Visual Trace route tool is where the most fun is. It goes from hop to hop showing you how it goes and where it goes. Other tools they provide include:

• Port Forwarding Tester
• Network Location Tool
• Phone Number Geolocator
• Reverse IP Domain Check

All in all a great resource for any web hoster, network freak or regular interested person should have in their networking toolbelt.

One of the tools I use most often in my day to day web hosting work is Pingdom Tools. The full page test that they provide is second to none when it comes to an awesome way to see what might be slowing a web page down. They also have ping and traceroute tools too, to help any webmaster see where the bottleneck might be with your web site’s loading time.

Full Page Test

The full page test gives you stats and information from images, CSS, javascripts, RSS, flash, frames and more. It gives you a visual representation of how the page is loaded in any web browser. Every test also shows statistics about the web site in question such as the number of objects, total loading time and the size of the objects.

Ping and Traceroute Tools

These two tools you have seen time and time again on all kinds of different network tool web sites. The difference between what Pingdom does in comparison with everybody else is their visual representation is a lot easier to understand. With pinging it gives you 5 tests to look at, as they ping the web site in question and then it takes an average of the scores. The traceroute tool gives you the number of hops, the max response time and the average response time as long as a neat bar graph visualization of it all.

This is one URL that any hosting worker or webmaster should have tucked away on their tool belt.

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.

Need your hosting news, links and reading with a ‘bit of a twist? Now I have covered other social hosting sites before - but I think the one that gets it right thus far is HostingBookmarks.com. The main pitch and reason for HostingBookmarks.com to exist is to “share hosting experiences” or at least that is what the graphic on the front page would have you believe.

There is much more than your average social voting link site here however. They have categories for just about every hosting topic under the sun. General hosting news, hosting experiences, e-mail, domains, tutorials, events… the list could go on and on.

Here is a little more information about them by them:

Hosting Bookmarks (HB) is a place where anyone involved in web hosting is invited to shared knowledge and experience. We welcome professionals to bookmark good content and consumers to share their experience with various products, services and companies. Our objective is to organize various web hosting related topics and knowledge into a database, and to build a valuable reference network based on social communication.

They also invite anybody and everybody who is interested to sign up and give it a shot. I’d love to see this web site take off in popularity so I am inviting you all to bookmark it and use it often. The great thing about a social hosting tool like this is the more people we can bring into the fold the better it will become.