Not just any podcast, the Web Hosting Show is back this week for episode 165. What is lined up for this week’s broadcast across the web hosting world? Well we have a little scam brewing with one domain name register, and we also have a lot of handy FeedBurner tools I bet you didn’t know existed.

All that and a bucket of chicken on this week’s edition of the Web Hosting Show.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 165!
Running Time: 13 minutes | File Size: 5.66 MB

Here are just a few topics from this week’s episode:

• How to Read Bad Hosting Reviews
• Domain Hijacking, Not for Gangsters
• Best FeedBurner Analysis Tools
• Free Performance, Availability and Traffic Monitoring

Here are this week’s web hosting news headlines:

• Google to Build Data Centers that Float?
• EstDomains.com Involved in Hundreds of Online Scams?
• Hostway Gives Away More Apple iPhones
• GoDaddy Races Sing This Song, Doo-dah! doo-dah!

Web hosting world, you had better get ready cause we got yet another great podcast from pillar to post to share with all of you. Give a download, listen to it, and let me know what you think!

How would you like to be able to gain a ton of information about a web site, right from the status bar in Firefox?

ShowIP, an add-on for the Firefox browser, will deliver you not only the current IP address of a web site but a lot more helpful tools as well.  By left-clicking on the IP address in your status bar, you can select to:

• copy to clipboard
• whois lookup at whois.sc and dnsstuff.com
• test timing
• traceroutes
• trace the IP to the country of origin

Additionally you can copy the IP address to the clipboard.  If you need a tool to help you work with IP addresses and locations (as I know many web hosting workers out there do) this might be a good extension for Firefox to try.

You can pick it up on the Firefox add-on’s web site (just search for ShowIP).

I have always had a soft spot in my hosting heart for Joyent’s services because they are not afraid to try something outside of the box.  One good example of this would be the Connector service they provide.

It is a collaboration suit the provides cool features such as searching, tagging and RSS feeds they they say will make your life easier.

The purpose and point here is to have a one place stop for a team of people to meet together and post their work and ideas Online in the same spot.  Here is a little more about the product from Joyent’s web site:

The Connect app ties everything together. It’s a place where items from any of the other parts of the system — mail messages, contacts, events, files — can be collected into related groups. Smart groups in the Connect app pull in items from any of the other apps on the system, from any users, allowing you to easily manage the items related to a project.

They do provide a free service if you want to just try things out, and then they go up from there in features.  The set of tools they provide is well worth checking out for any team of people who want to collaborate online.

From coast to coast, and all around the web hosting world. I can’t promise you you’ll be a millionaire if you listen to this week’s show. I can’t even make you better looking. What I can do for you is to make everything from server farms to domain name registrations make a little more sense and I can do so with what some may say is a funny accent.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 156!
Running Time: 18 minutes | File Size: 7.85 MB

Here are just a few topics from this week’s episode of the Web Hosting Show.

• ICANN Wants to Give You .Anything?
• Where to go to Get 30GB of Disk Space Free?
• Free Billing Software for Web Hosting Resellers?
• Best Tool to Update Your Blogs?

Podcast Exclusive - Part 4 of Our “How to Purchase a Web Hosting Business” Series with Web Strategist Errett Cord. Download the podcast to check it out!

I’m back again, and sad to say ICANN is still turning down my application to be the official spokesperson for the organization. Maybe it is because I have no boobs? If I did, I know at least I’d get work from Bob Parsons. Time to start answering some questions, and to make some sense out of all this web hosting lingo.

URLmetrix.com brings in a quick and useful way to check your web site’s Online popularity via a slew of resources.  Wondering what your Google PageRank is?  How about your Google or Yahoo backlinks?  Check them all out on this one single web site.  Definitely a resource to bookmark.

Here are all the services they cover:  Your web page title, Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete rank, Quantcast rank, Technorati rank, Google Indexed, Yahoo Indexed, Google Backlinks, Yahoo Backlinks and Delicious Links.

For each thing it scores it will also give you a link to go get more information.

Ready for the Online tool that promises to provide you with the quickest domain name searching ever?  Domize.com is promoting themselves as the “better” instant domain search tool.  Do they live up to that hype?  Yes, they do!

There is no rocket science needed to use it either, which as you all know if something I like to see.  Just type in the domain name you have in mind and they will let you know if there is a .com, .org or .net version of that domain available to use.  Red means it is in use and blue means it is available.  If you hover your mouse over the red links, they will give you a thumbnail picture of that registered site too.  Find one you like?  Click on a blue link and you will be taken to GoDaddy.com to purchase.

All Domize traffic is secured over SSL, making sure your queries stay private and away from snooping eyes.

Another neat feature of this web site is you can search via your iPhone too.  Now why your searching for domains on your phone?  That is another problem I can even begin to get into here.  Nice to know though that if you get that big idea for the next great domain name you can check on it even if there isn’t a PC in sight.

So go visit Domize.com for more and let them know them know the Web Hosting Show sent you there.

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.