Ever heard of Dan Grossman? I just happened to stumble across his blog via WebHostingUnleashed.com. he is the owner of Awio Web Services LLC. You might not know that name, but you should know the name W3Counter! That is one of the many services that his business owns. Need some inspiration for yourself? Check out this small part of his bio page:

Awio is a one-man company — forming a company was more about convenience and tax benefits than necessity. I’ve developed and operate all of the websites on the Awio website, with dozens more having been built and sold to new owners. I’ve been creating successful websites since Website Goodies in 1997. I am self-funded, reinvesting only profits from current sites into new development. I take on all roles including software design, development, testing, system administration, accounting, marketing, order processing and customer service.

He is a guy after my own heart, living the freelancer’s hosting dream. Check out his writings and posts at: http://www.dangrossman.info/

If you know of anymore hosting or web development insiders that have awesome personal sites or blogs, let me know.

What makes a web host a great place to host a blog? Well these days just about any hosting account is ready, will and able for a good ol’ WordPress install or two.

Easy One-Click Installs?

Look at what scripts and software they have ready to install on day one. Do you have one click install access to WordPress, b2evolution, Nucleus or others. These are some of the more familiar names you might see tossed in with Fantastico, and addon for cPanel that gives you easy one click access right from your hosting control panel.

Disk Space and Bandwidth for Blogging?

Next thing you will want to check out is the disk space and bandwidth limitations. If your just starting your blog out - do you have enough room to grow? If your blog is already established then do they have enough disk space and bandwidth to support you for a long period of time.

Server Resources for Peaks in Traffic

Server resources also come into play when it comes to blog hosting. Just in case your article gets dugg on digg.com or hyped up on any of the other big social news and link sharing sites, can your web site take the punch in traffic? This is something you should discuss one on one with your web host - but it most cases (unless the host isn’t that established) you should be OK in this department too. If using WordPress there are also addons that will make sudden growths in popularity more bearable, such as the WP-Cache addon.

Truth be told, you might have to suffer through a few web hosting lemons before you find the web host that is best able to deliver you the best blogging experience. It never hurts though to have a check list like the one above before you start shopping so you know what it is you should be getting.

Having issues with random downtime or errors with your web site, but every time you contact hosting support they say:

“Well, all is fine on this end - nothing we can do.”

If you find yourself in these shoes, what you need to do is paint a better picture of the problems when they are happening so they will have more information to work from when it comes to troubleshooting your mysterious issue. It really comes down to the fact that you need to help support so that they can help you.

Step 1 - Clear Your Browser History and Cache

Before making notes for support I want you to clear out your browser history and cache. This may sound silly but you would be surprised how many times it can fix the problem any hosting customer might be having with their web site. Often times, the browser is still pulling up old information it has saved to the “memory” if you will, and not going out to the web each time to look for the new information. You might also try to clear your DNS information too, but that is often only used for new hosting accounts with a new domain or hosting accounts that have recently had the domain name changed.

Step 2 - Record Your IP Address

First thing you need to do is make record of your current IP address. If you are unsure how you can find your IP address a simple Google search for “what is my IP” will give you several Online resources that should get you that magical set of numbers that you desire. If all else fails, just bookmark whatismyip.com.

Step 3 - Do a Traceroute to Your Domain

Now the next thing I want you to do is do a traceroute to see where the bottle neck might be. We covered the basics on how to do a traceroute a few weeks ago. For those of you still not sure here is the “quicky” version:

1. From the Start menu, select “Run…”
2. When the run box comes up, then type in cmd
3. When you get the command prompt, enter tracert yourdomain.com
4. Hit the “enter” key on your keyboard and wait.

That would be for Windows XP and Vista users. Apple users can find the traceroute tab under the Hard Drive icon > Applications folder > Utilities folder > Network Utility program. When it comes to Windows, some people are confused on how exactly to copy and paste the traceroute information into a text document or e-mail to support. The best way to go about this is to right click on the command line window (anywhere in the black part) and select “Select All”. Then to copy, hit the Ctrl + C keys on your keyboard. Then you can right click with your mouse, and select paste to paste it into your text file you are saving this information to.

Step 4 - Try View Your Web Site via a Proxy Service

Now that you have that information collected, I would like for you to try to view your web site via a proxy service. This checks your web site from another server’s location from somewhere else in the world. If you can’t pull it up from the proxy service or your own regular browser experience, there may be something wrong on the hosting side. If you can’t pull it up on your PC but you can pull it up via a proxy, there might be a few thing wrong. It could be:

• A Network Issue Between Yourself and Your Service
• Your IP Maybe Blocked from the Server
• Might be a Problem on Your ISP’s Side of Things

Here are a couple of proxy services to try:

http://www.megaproxy.com/freesurf/ or http://www.proxify.com/

Do these suggested things each time you notice the problem, and this way you can paint your hosting support team a better picture of what the problem is. This is no knock on the hosting customers out there, but sometimes they don’t realized that a tech support’s best chance to get a problem fixed is having tons of good information passed along so we can recreate the problem on the server side of things.

If that can happen, and they can rebuild the events from the information you pass to them your web site will go back up a lot quicker.

The king of control panels (cPanel) says soon that there will be a new prince in their kingdom. The most popular web hosting control panel out there today has announced that they will be releasing a new VPS optimized cPanel. Now news yet if it will get a new name, but it should fit right in with the cPanel and WHM (Web Host Manager) relationship.

Why upgrade? Looks like they are mainly wanting to provide VPS hosting clients the same feature rich functionality of cPanel and WHM while helping to reduce memory usage by up to 60 percent for VPS accounts. Another nice perk about this newest version of cPanel is it will lower the costs hopefully for cPanel powered VPS hosting as right now most VPS customers have to pay the dedicated hosting license fees to use it. Also due to the earlier mentioned cut in memory usage, web hosts should be able to reach a higher account density per machine. So how can you lay your hands on it right now?

The word is that cPanel will offer this newly upgraded VPS version for free for its customers, probably while they test it out.

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.

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.

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).

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.

You can download this addon right from the developer’s web site:

http://tools.qualitynonsense.com/domainlookup/