I am not the one to tell you how to turn your basement into a datacenter.  In my opinion, that is the last thing you really want to do.  Sure it sounds like a fun geeky projects, and yes - maybe somewhere down the line you might be cutting a few percentages off your overall costs.

Is it all worth it though?

Services You Can’t Provide with Home Hosting

Looking at the services that a datacenter could provide that you may have trouble with, some of the most important aspects of hosting may be missing from your host it from home server.  People like having redundancy.  Are you going to be able to provide backup generator power, diesel generators, redundant routing and multiple carriers?

More Work for YOU!  (and explosive diarrhea)

Now not only are you managing your own hosting company, you are also in charge of keeping that machine updated, secure and running around the clock, 24/7, 365 days a year. Think of it as having to baby sit a child that you can’t take anywhere because it has unpredictable explosive diarrhea.   You never know when it might strike, and as far as taking care of a server goes - you never know when the worst might happen.

Professionalism: Who Would You Rather Do Business With?

The last point I would like to bring up is that people don’t feel comfortable with it, so don’t expect to get many customers to sign onto the deal.  If company A told me they were hosting out of their basement and company B told me they hosted out of a real datacenter.  I’m going with company B, and you know you would too.

The moral of the story is that people often greatly under estimate the time, devotion, costs and more that it takes to get this type or project up and going.  Between server security, updating the server, and administering it too your not going to have much time for anything else.  Best to go out and find a good data center or dedicated hosting partner to help you with that side of the web hosting business.

We will be short on a podcast this week due to the 4th of July weekend madness that has passed us by, but between your cleanup of fireworks and dumping out the barbequed leftovers please take a minute to take this short 6 question survey about the Web Hosting Show. 

Any and all feedback is appreciated and you know I am all about making you all happy so if there is something you like, hate or would love to hear about let me know.  Take the Web Hosting Show Podcast Survey!

If you have ever wanted to share your opinion to me about what I do this would be the time to do it.  Also happy post 4th of July to all of you and thanks in advance!

Humyo.com is a new personal file hosting service that is now giving away 30GB of disk space for free to people who sign up today.  The tag line here is “access your life” and they want you to be able to reach the documents and file you need anywhere at any time.

You receive 25GB for Photos/Music/Videos and 5GB for other files.  You can also play your music, watch your video and edit your documents from any location.  Signing up for the free version will also give you a 14 day trial of the desktop client they have which promises to make transferring data from one PC to the other a simple task.

Need to access your files on the go?  They have the ability to get to your files via your phone or PDA.  You can also e-mail your files without worrying about file size limits.  One more nice feature of the free service is you can publish your files on the Web from Humyo.  The only thing you have to live with would be the Humyo logo in the bottom corner.

Paid users of Humyo can also:

• File transfers to and from your space protected with 256-bit SSL encryption
• Allow colleagues to edit stored documents and upload files to shared folders.

Paid customers also get access to 100GB of disk space, and 100GB more can be added at any time for an additional $99.99 per year.  The regular price for paid users is $59.99 for the first year then $79.99 per year after that.

I got an e-mail last week, where Tom was wanting to know…

“Hi Mitch, love the podcast.  I have just started up a reseller account of my own but I am in need of some billing or shopping cart software that will make it easier to resell the hosting space I have purchased.  Any suggestions?”

Sure, phpCOIN is a great solution for this type of problem.  Some of the features it provides includes:

• Site Content - create and manage site information for easy display for potential and existing clients. The content is searchable with the “Search” module.
• Order Process - provide a configurable of forms for collecting client information during order process, and provide a single “paylink” at the end of the process to direct the client to third party billing. Search orders feature available.
• Invoices - provide a method of invoicing clients for orders / services in either a one-shot invoice, or as a recurring invoice. Search invoices / transactions feature available.
• Client Management - keep client information profile, order history, invoice / payment history, support help desk ticket history. Search clients feature available.
• Support - provide an integrated support help desk trouble ticket system. Search trouble tickets feature available.
• Contact - provide a means for clients to contact you (ticket system or contact forms) and for the admin to contact the clients

Point your browser to phpCOIN.com and visit the download page to pick up the full package, and then install on your own hosting space.  If you have any other alternatives for Tom when it comes to free billing software for web hosting resellers drop in a comment.

Here is an interesting idea.  Would you like to have the domain name yourname.yourbusiness?

How about firstname.lastname?

Well thanks to those wacky and crazy people at ICANN and a few bottles of expensive French wine, we might see that go into effect sooner than you would think.  In an unanimous vote held in Paris, France last week ICANN has given approval for new top-level domain names including multilingual ones.  No longer will you just have the traditional domain name extensions.  Now you could practically have anything dot anything registered once all the regulation and paper work has gone though.  Unless something goes wrong, this should all go in effect in 2009.

Dr Paul Twomey, the chief executive of ICANN had an interesting quote:

“Like the United States in the 19th Century, we are in the process of opening up new real estate, new land, and people will go out and claim parts of that land and use it for various reasons they have. It’s a massive increase in the geography of the real estate of the Internet.”

Yeah, you’ll be able to claim a part of it if your a multi-million dollar company or have a hidden stash of cash hidden under your mattress.

Don’t let your blood boil yet.  I highly doubt that your traditional top-level domains are going anywhere.  People already have in their head that a web site domain has to be something with a dot com behind it (or dot org, dot net, ect).  Also it isn’t like you or me will be setting up our own domain name extensions because the application fee to get it going will cost around $100,000 or more.

Programs that promised to help me update my blog stopped being interesting the first time I tried one.  Why?  None of them seem to do it all.  That was my point of view before I found Windows Live Writer and I have to say, I am happy that Microsoft was able to make me give this software genre another chance.

Windows Live Writer is great. All you do is plug in your WordPress (or any other CMS or blogging service you use) information, and it figures out and does that rest of the work for you. Then you can write you posts as you would in any other word processor-type program. You also can format images, save drafts, edit tags and categories and more.

Video: 2: Basic Authoring - Windows Live Writer

Download Windows Live Writer and give it a shot.  The icing on the cake is the various previews you can generate. You can edit and write via the standard interface or via an interface that gives the appearance that you are writing there on your own web site.  The Web Preview feature is also good to show you what the post’s format will look like once it goes live.  This is by far one of the best software packages to come out of Microsoft.

Not every web host out there has a multi-million dollar budget to spend on software, so I have come up with a few free alternatives for you to pass around your office next time your searching for the right tool for the job.

Foxit Reader (for PDF viewing) - Out of all the PDF reader programs out there, Foxit gets the job done and is not half as annoying as Adobe is.  If you want a PDF viewer that will not ask that you download updates for 20 other programs you do not have, Foxit is the best.

OpenOffice.org (for word processing, spreadsheets and more) - Microsoft Office is a program I have never really used.  Why?  I have always been a fan of the free alternative, OpenOffice.org.  This bundle of a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing and more might even be better than the expensive Microsoft bundle.

AutoHotkey (for helping with those quick responses) - In my bag of tricks, AutoHotkey is most likely to be the most used one of them all.  Thanks to a little simple script writing I can now type in a few characters instead of a two paragraphed e-mail each time I answer a customer’s question.

Thunderbird (for e-mail management) - I have tried a number of different e-mail clients and Mozilla’s Thunderbird wins out head over heels each and every time.  Manage multiple e-mail accounts and with the add-ons, you can build onto the functionality of the product.

Google Calendar (for dates and appointments) - Can’t tell you what I did for a calendar before Google’s came around because Google was the one who turned me onto using it.  Before Google Calendar I was stuck with ripped off sheets of paper with notes scribbled down.  After Google Calendar, I can quickly click a date, add a note and I’m done.

Now sure, those big web hosts might have the thousands of dollars to spend on programs but the budget web hosts out there have to count their pennies.  If you have any other suggestions feel free to leave a comment or drop me an e-mail.