Here is a little advice.  Web hosts don’t like it when you upload 5GB worth of personal backups on your web site hosting account.  Caught the discussion on this in a couple of places so thought I might weigh in from the web host’s side of things.

Now why shouldn’t you use your web hosting disk space to backup your personal documents and files?  It is your space, right?  Well yes and no.  You see, uploading or downloading large chunks of data to and from your hosting account can often cause the server in question to go a little, how do you say, bonkers?  You have time out issues, connection problems, server resources and a whole truckload of things to worry about.  Not to mention there is no real security there (unless you put it there yourself, and do you trust yourself with being your own security expert?). If these documents are important put them in the hands of somebody who will guarantee you’ll get them backed up right and backed up securely.

If I haven’t won you over yet - I am about to.  There are already services out there that specialize in this type of Online storage.  Web hosting in the traditional sense, from places like BlueFur, Lunarpages or the like are for web sites, scripts and things of that nature.  For personal backup and storage I could recommend going to a place like Amazon S3, Carbonite or Mozy.

I was starting to use Carbonite myself before my PC melted, and from what I saw I liked it a lot.  Definitely better than trying to FTP everything I have up to a web hosting account.

The thing to remember here is to always read your terms of service and acceptable use policy.  Web hosts often spell out what you can and can not do with that hosting account you bought from them in black and white.

A few week’s back there was a news story not many made much out of happening that I though I could at least mention here.  Hostopia will pay $1.6 million in cash for Tucows shared hosting assets.

That includes approximately 14,000 Domain Direct, NetIdentity ItsYourDomain.com customer accounts.

That is a ton of cash changing hands.  One has to wonder why Tucows wanted to get out of the shared web hosting game and what will they do now with this extra surplus of cash on their hands?  Colin Campbell, the CEO of Hostopia release the usual quote out to the public saying they had high hopes and more…

“Our plan is to provide customers with numerous upgrades and additional value-added services to earn their loyalty and continued business. Traditional web hosting is fast evolving to the SaaS (software as a service) model and Hostopia is perfectly positioned to offer these services to these customers.”

This is a big buyout for sure, and big congratulations deserve to be sent towards Hostopia for getting the deal.  If you were Tucows, what would you do now being the actual “cash cow”.

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.

Mention “top ten web hosts” lists in any hosting insider circle and you are bound to get a few girly giggles. You know why? 95% of the lists you find out there claiming to be a top ten list of the greatest web hosting providers known to man are crap. There are nothing more than a 2-bit scam to build up the webmaster in question’s affiliate account. So how can you tell the difference between the real top ten lists and the ones that are bought and paid for?

Look for Affiliate Codes

The first thing to look for is affiliate codes in the links. When you hover over the link for the web host on the top of the list, you should just see their domain name right? Say I am hovering over a link for Host Monster, I should see in my browser’s status bar that is is going to http://www.hostmonster.com. You know there is an affiliate code there when you see something trailing that address such as http://www.hostmonster.com/coupons/tophosts.php or something to that effect.

Sneaky Links!

Some top ten lists are getting sneaky though. They will link you to a page that looks like it belongs to them, but really they are hiding the affiliate code when redirecting you to the web host you are interested in. Very tricky indeed.

Ugly Web Site Design and Layout

Another sign that you are looking at top ten web host list gone wrong is the web site design and layout is ugly as sin. Need an example for that one? Check out web-hosting-top.com. Visually the layout here is bad enough to make any CSS guru die a little ‘bit on the inside. There is no color scheme, everything is too close together, you have random caps all over the place and different colored text. This page was not designed to be useful, it was designed to be at the top of Google. You want to know the sad truth? type in “top 10 hosts” into Google and you will find this guy is the third result down.

Prices for List Position

You can also keep an eye out for the obvious mention on their contact us or about us pages of how to get yourself on this list. Some places out there will go as far as putting up prices for position on the list they provide.

As you can see these people can get rather tricky when it comes to trying to make a buck out of your need for web hosting.

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?

Yes, Yahoo has jumped in on the unlimited hosting bandwagon. For $11.95 a month (plus a $25 setup fee) you can grab a shared hosting account with unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited e-mail storage, and 1,000 email accounts.

Now usually with an offer like this, I would be pretty mad because they are selling a service they can not possibly deliver. There is no such thing as unlimited anything in the web hosting world. Now why has Yahoo still not gotten on my bad side yet? Well, unlike other hosting companies they spell out what “unlimited” really means.

What is the Catch?

First thing first, they prohibit hosting any files that are not linked with your web site your hosting. That is a good thing. With unlimited disk space they spell it out like this:

You can now create as large a site as you like (you won’t face an upper limit, or “ceiling”), but we will place some constraints on how fast you can grow. In other words, you can add as much content as you want, but maybe not all at once. The vast majority of our customers’ sites grow at rates well within our rules, however, and will not be impacted by this constraint.

The explanation for unlimited bandwidth is also along the same terms. The FAQ for that says…

In most cases, if you use our service appropriately, visitors to your web site will be able to download and view as much content from your site as they like. However, in certain circumstances, our server processing power, server memory, or anti-abuse controls could limit downloads from your site.

So I have to give Yahoo’s web hosting division a pat on the back for actually putting it down in writing what unlimited means.

Looking to put up a simple site for free? One new service that caught my attention is Webnode. They promise that you can use your own domain, create an awesome personal page or blog, and that you can do this from anywhere.

In their pitch from the front page, that do make it sound worth looking into deeper for sure:

Webnode brings you a brand new innovative way of creating and editing advanced websites by just using a web browser. The system is very easy to use and is fully interactive. Real-time fast editing as you see it in the browser. By using Drag-and-Drop from the toolbar you can add new content such as polls, forums, articles, catalogues, widgets such as PayPal and much more.

Here are only a few of the many features they provide:

• Real Time Editing
• Drag and Drop Technology
• Gadgets and Widgets
• 40+ Design Templates
• Polls, FAQ’s, RSS, and Webmail

So where is the catch? I have yet to find one yet - but to monitize the service, I can bet they will be adding down the road higher disk space and bandwidth limits for a fee or other services to get you to fork over your cash. If your low on cash and want to build yourself a simple/yet pretty web site, Webnode is worth checking into.