Tag Archives | resources

CP Site Saver

cP Site Saver

I have touched on the topic of backing up your web site time and time again. With each article or podcasts I always seem to get the same remark.

“Well, thats great – now can you make it easy?”

For a long time I’d say no. Making it easy means doing something such as cron jobs and scheduling and a lot of other things that regular people don’t want to take the time to do. Now my new solution for the easy way out it going to be…

“Go buy CP Site Saver, it is reeking of awesomeness!”

CP Site Saver is the first tool for backing up your cPanel powered web sites that I have seen that actually works. No need for filling in confusing settings and geeky details. The whole process takes a matter of minutes and then your good to go.

The interface is simple, you just tell it your hosting login information and database details and then hit the backup button. The quickness and simplistics of it all are really amazing. My beef with many programs like this is there are 200 boxes you must fill in and keep updated. CP Site Saver just get the basics and lets you relax while it does the hard work.

When your all done, you’ll also be able to unzip you backup and have a look through it. What does CP Site Saver need? Well, it might be more of a flaw in cPanel rather than their product but I would really like to be able to say, I want to backup everything but that one folder. Also I wish there was a better control on having it startup with your computer (give me a yes/no box on that choice). Those are the only “nit-picky” issue I could find though.

Now there is a price tag on all this bliss, but $49.95 isn’t asking too much when you consider the time you will be saving.

Download the free 10 day trial and give it a shot. The trial will only allow you to work with one web site and one database backup. That should be enough to sell you though on this awesome service.

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Free Web Site and Blog Hosting

I would argue with the fact that the best things in life are free – but free things are pretty good, got to give them that. If your low on cash or your not ready if you want to start paying for web hosting yet I have two great ways you can get your foot in the door without any cost at all to you.

Freewebs Free Hosting

Freewebs.com – Free Web Site Hosting

Freewebs.com if probably my top choice for people looking for free web hosting. It is what Angelfire and Geocities were many years ago. They actually also offer much more than these previous titans ever did. You get 40MB of disk space with their free option and 500Mb of bandwidth. That might not be enough to launch the next great Web 2.0 application but it is big enough to do a web site for your friends and family to enjoy.

One thing I was really surprised to see was that they allow you to point a domain name at your account too. So your not stuck with the freeweb.com/myname domain path. If you want to upgrade instead of moving to a traditional web host there are options to do that too.

Sign up for Freewebs.com!

WordPress Free Blog Hosting

WordPress.com – Free Blog Hosting

Now what are you to do if you need a place to write about your current passion? There are a million and one different blogging services out there, but the most impressive of the bunch is WordPress.com. You get stats, pretty themes, and almost everything you’d get when installing WordPress on a standard hosting account.

Upgrades (if your ready to move past the free service) works on credits. Each credit costs $1 and then the services you wish to upgrade cost a certain number of credits. For example, the 1GB space upgrade is 20 credits for a year. You can also put your own domain on the blog too.

Sign up for WordPress.com!

So lets go back to that whole “the best things in life are free” saying. If I were to rewrite that old phrase now, it might be worth saying, “The best free things are the ones you can upgrade later on if and when needed”. For some reason though I don’t think that would look as great on a coffee cup.

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Hosting’s Hidden Deals and News

If your not subscribed to Hosting Hoopla, this is some of the stuff you missed in the past week. Want to get it as a daily round up in your inbox?

Subscribe to the link list via E-mail!

No reason to make the same mistake twice though, subscribe to the Hosting Hoopla RSS feed so you can stay up to date with the latest and greatest happenings around the wild and wacky world of web hosting.

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Get Your Blog Backed Up

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 118!

Backup Your ArchivesThere are a lot of blogs out there, many more than you could count on your hands.. even if you have that freaky four extra fingers on that left hand of yours.

With that many blogs out there, there is a lot of backing up that needs to be done. BlogBackupOnline.com will do it for you.

You’ll hear no argument from me that backing up a blog can be very complicated and tedious. Having an external hosting account to do this on can be a lifesaver. At this time they support these blogging platforms:

  • Blogger
  • WordPress
  • TypePad
  • Friendster
  • LiveJournal
  • Serendipity
  • Windows Live Space
  • Movable Type
  • Terapad
  • Vox

They also provide a restore solution as well. With many of these online backup solutions they have an easy way to upload, but not such an easy job downloading what you’ve backed up. I’m happy to see they have this under control as well.

Backing up your blog is free while they are still in Beta. The bottom line is the storage space though. You get 50 MB of storage space is allocated to your account.

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Unlimited Stoarage at Allmydata.com

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 117!

Backing up is hard to do – no wait, that was breaking up. Backing up is not that hard to do but for some reason we still do not like to take the time to do it. That is where cheap Online solutions come into play. One of those solutions out there for you right now is Allmydata.com.

All My Data Hosting Backup

Here is a little more information about the company and team from their about us web page.

Allmydata was created for all of us who have lost important information due to disk crashes, viruses or even a mere computer replacement. Allmydata was created for all of us who have given up on backing up our computers due to the cost and complexity of current backup solutions: external drives, tape drives and complicated online solutions.

Allmydata promises you “unlimited online storage and backup” but what is the price? All you have to pay is $4.99 a month. That’s a pretty good deal in my book. They also offer a Windows only desktop application to make your backing up a little easier to do as well. Overall it looks like a great way for anybody to keep their important files backed up just in case the worst might happen.

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What is Reverse IP Lookup

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 116!

Reverse IP LookupFinding out who you share your web hosting space with, if you are on a shared hosting plan can sometimes be a good thing.

It lets you know how many other people are on your server and it also gives you a few other URLs to check it something on your own domain isn’t working right. There are at least a dozen good reasons why you might need to know this information.

One Web Hosting Show listener named Neal writes in with this question.

Hey Mitch, I ran across you site while looking for some info. I’m trying to find a way to put in a web hosts company name and get a list of all the sites hosted by them. Is there any way to do that? Thanks! – Neal

In this case, what you want to do is a reverse IP lookup. This looks at your domain’s IP address and then goes out to the Web and sees how many other domains share that IP address. These would be your neighbors on that server. Now in the case of our listener’s question he would need to figure out a way to find all of the IP addresses this web host in question owns.

That might be a harder and a stickier situation.

Some web hosts own one or two servers.

Others own two hundred or three hundred servers.

As you can see this might be a pain in the rear job if you really got serious with it. One tool I can suggest to you to get the job done is found at SEOLogs.com. There you can do the lookup for free. Another good source is DomainTools.com. If the list is too long they do charge you for accessing it.

Either way you go you should be able to get the job done. Now you can see who you share your web hosting with.

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Free Hosting With a Twist

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 115!

When it comes to hosting these days, you really have to pick up a more interesting business model if you want to succeed out there. For folks wanting to start a business – but might not have the capital to put up for advertising and marketing just yet – life can be tuff.

I got an e-mail the other day from Stanley, a Web Hosting Show listener and the guy in charge of All or Nothing hosting. He wanted me to pass the word along to all of you that he would be happy to host free clients, artists, designers, programmers, coders, who are in desperate need for hosting and end up stuck with craptastic free solutions.

What does All or Nothing provide that the crappy hosts might not? He promised e-mail, control panels, MySQL databases, PHP support, ect. Sounds like a good deal for free right? Well I have to ask the million dollar question after this point – where is the catch?

It is ad supported hosting. You live with them making a buck on your web pages – and you get free hosting that is better than your average free web host out there. Not too bad. Also if you can stay active in their forums then you might be able to ditch the ads all together. So that is a nice alternative to have as well.

So if your wallet is empty and you want to setup a new web site, give the folks at All or Nothing Hosting a call and be sure to let them know that it was the Web Hosting Show that sent you there.

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SEO Rankings and Score

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 115!

I am a web hosting professional I would say, or at least I play the part each week on this podcast. Nevertheless, I want to help you out with an often asked question that I get sent my way. Everybody wants to know how to be the best out there in the search engines. I have a few resources that will help you all get off on the right foot.

Getting ahead of myself though, first – here is the question everybody seems to be asking.

Search Engine Rankings“Where’s a good web site our source where I can get more information about my SEO rankings and get advice on how to make it higher?

I’d really like to optimize my web sites but don’t know where to start.”

Here Come the Tools!

I have a not one great source for you to check out – actually I have two! The first would be popuri.us. It gives you backlinks and information on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and everything in between. They even give you a widget that you can share on your web site and show off your numbers.

The second resource I have for you is WebSiteGrader.com. It gives you more output options than you could ever want or need. It tells you how you rank in just about every way, shape or form out there on the Web. It also hands out advice on how you can get yourself a better “grade” too.

If you want a good resource to read up and learn more about the search engine optimization business – check out SEOChat.com. It is probably one of the best resources on any and all SEO issues.

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OneDump – Free Audio, Text and Image Hosting

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 114!

When it comes to free hosting, OneDump hopes to have all of your bases covered. They deliver audio, text and image hosting for free.

The service, like many of the ones that came beore it, is very straight forward and simple to understand and use. A part of me would like to say they have an army of midgets in Singapore doing all the hard labor but they just would not be true.

So what are the rules of the OneDump service? You are permitted to upload upto 10 files at once, with each not exceeding 5 MB. It also supports these file formats:

jpg, jpeg, gif, png, bmp, tif, tiff, swf, txt, wmv, mp3, doc

OneDumpYou can use the service without feeling the need to register, but if you do sign up you can keep track of your uploads, view statistics of each file, add and edit captions to your uploaded data, create folders, and more. With the Quick Send feature you can also e-mail files into the service as well. This is a pretty neat addition that you do not see other free file hosts doing that often. As long as you follow the terms of service, they say there is no limit to the free files you can host here.

All in all, I would say they stack up with some of the best out there – they just need a good user base to get them going strong.

They have a lot to deliver, now they just need the audience to make all their hard work worth it.

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Web Host Lookup Tools

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 114!

What is the Web Host?Haven’t you ever wondered to yourself who was hosting that web site you just visited? Maybe there was something about the server quality while browsing that you really liked?

Maybe your just a nosy person that likes to know what is going on in the dark side of server administration. You want to know things you’re not suppose to know, right?

No matter what your reason is, WhoIsHostingThis.com should answer any and all questions you might have.

So how do you use this fabulous tool? You type in a domain name, hit the button and then they tell you something to the effect of, “ThisDomain.com is hosted by ThatWebHost.com”. Then you get links out to visit each. It is simple. It is straight forward. It gets to the point. I love it.

Now for some fun, lets just type in a few random domains and let see who hosts them.

- Digg.com’s web host is show up as Digg Inc. I am guessing that they probably own their own servers in this case.

- TechCrunch.com’s web host is Media Temple. No real suprise there as they do a lot of the popular blog hosting out there.

- Google.com is hosted by Google.

As you can see this can become very addictive. This is a very neat and unique tool that I expect to see copied (now that it is out) hundreds of more times by other people with web host tools and services.

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