From the first time I ever heard about Fantastico, I always thought about the traditional magician pulling rabbits from his hat.  Who would have a clue that a few years later on down the road I would have a chance to speak with one of the magicians behind the magic at Netenberg to find out more about this favorite cPanel addition.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 168!
Running Time: 8 minutes | File Size: 3.33 MB

On today’s show, I got the chance to speak with Aric Pedersen, who works tech support for the Netenberg company.  If you have ever wondered how Fantastico got started, or how you could get your own scripts included in this legendary cPanel add-on, this podcast is for you.  We also cover other services Netenberg offers to the hosting industry, Fantastico 3, as well as what make Fantastico unique in comparison with some of the other “one-click” install scripts out there.

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We all need smarter tools to get us through the day, and one company has made a name in providing those smarter tools to each and every one of you.  What is their name?  SmarterTools Incorporated!  From webmail tools, to statistics, they offer many tools that are leaps and bounds above the competition.

So if you want to know more about this company and the tools they provide, stay tuned - because this will be your kind of podcast.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 167!
Running Time: 9 minutes | File Size: 3.82 MB

On today’s podcast I am lucky enough to have the Vice President of Business Operations of SmarterTools Inc, Jeff Hardy.  From going through their services to ask him why he thinks these tools would be helpful to your web hosting or small business, I promise to leave you at least knowing more about this excellent web services company.

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Any web host will tell you the hardest part about the web hosting business is finding a team of support people that care about your clients as much as you do. You want to make sure they are in good hands. One company that promotes themselves as those good hands to trust is Bobcares.

They specialize in support for small, medium and large hosting companies.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 166!
Running Time: 10 minutes | File Size: 4.44 MB

On today’s show I am luck enough to get to talk with the co-founder and Director of Bobcares, Sangeetha Naik. Want to know what they are all about, who they get the most business from, and how they feel about their type of services versus freelance contractors, this is the podcast for you.

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There is a company out there providing for free, performance monitoring, availability monitoring, and traffic monitoring?  Yes, there is.  Mon.itor.us might have a silly name, but it delivers awesome and free monitoring tools for your web site.

Here is how the web site describes the services they provide:

We provides a “24 x 7″ network and web site monitoring service to help its users quickly identify faults and deficiencies to ensure continuous operations of their IT infrastructure and maintain business operations that provide the ultimate web experience.

From within an Ajax-powered dashboard, you can check server performance and availability, generate uptime reports, track visitors, CPU, memory and other system resources you need to know about.

Mon.itor.us is currently monitoring over 134,000 web sites right now, and I am sure there will be many more to come in the future.

So you want to gain a little more information about your FeedBurner powered feed?  There are several free tools from around the Web that will allow you to do just that.  Here are three out there that Google hasn’t provided to FeedBurner users yet.

Blog Perfume’s Feed Analysis

With the toolset that Blog Perfume is providing, you can see some details statistics on just about any FeedBurner feed.  You can see the number of subscribers per month, the hits, subscribers and views from a day to day basis, the number of subscribers depending on the day of the week, and more.

Example: Web Hosting Show’s Feed Information for the Past 6 Months

Yoast’s Feed Circulation Graphs

Yoast takes a simpler approach and just gives you a graph based on the number of subscribers that you have.  Type in your feed name (what follows after the feeds.feedburner.com/) the time frame and the width of the graph.

Example: Web Hosting Show’s Subscription Number Graph for 6 Months

Feed Compare

This one might be my favorite of them all.  Feed Compare takes your subscription numbers and compares them with anybody else who uses FeedBurner to power their RSS feeds.  You can give it up to four feeds to compare too.  You can view stats for up to 1 month to 24 months, so there should be no concern about getting the big picture when it comes to this alternative FeedBurner stats tools.  For example, you can see the Web Hosting Show’s RSS feed and The WHIR’s RSS feed are pretty close in comparison.

Example: Web Hosting Show’s RSS Feed vs The WHIR’s RSS Feed

For many of these tools, you must have awareness API turned on for your feed in question.  If your trying to look at data from somebody else’s feed, and you get an error - this is probably the reason why.

Domain hijacking is not something that happens when you drive into the wrong side of town.  No gang bangers here, trying to jack your vehicle for financial gain.

Domain hijacking is the process by which domain names are stolen from the rightful registrant.  The way to pull it off is to trick the domain name register into allowing the hijacker to change the registration information so that they can steal control of the domain name from the legitimate owner.

The most recent case of domain hijacking I can remember, is what happened to graphic designer, David Airey.  A domain name thief gained access to David’s e-mail account, then used that account to gain access to his account with his domain name register.

Reverse domain hijacking is another shady practice you have to watch out for in the web hosting world.  It is the practice of unseating domain name registrants by accusing them of violating weak or non-existent trademarks as it relates to the domain name they want to take from you.

This is a fight to look forward to when your company and another company might share the same want or need for a particular domain name.  Back in 2002, Nissan Motors, the Japanese car manufacturer, was suing Uzi Nissan, the then current owner of nissan.com for $10 million.  As you can see, they had conflicting interests here.

The thing that can be remembered in both of these situations, if be very careful to monitor your domain name registrations and be sure your own information as it relates to the registration is secure.

We have all done it.  We went out to see what reviews we could find on or about the web hosting we have now or the web hosting we are interested in picking up?  Then you see it.  A big, bad and nasty negative review.

As your palms get sweaty, you think to yourself, “Should I read it?”.  Well, I am here to tell you that you should, but take it with a grain of salt.  A healthy dose of skepticism never did any harm.

After reading a bad review, the first thing I want you to remember is that every coin has two sides.  Your only hearing from the ticked off customer in many of these cases, and you don’t know what they did to to the web host in question.  Something else I have learned over the years of working in the hosting world is that happy people usually don’t post reviews.  If you are happy, and you know it you usually don’t do squat.  Is it beyond belief?  Well, when was the last time you wrote Oscar Mayer to tell them you love their baloney?  I promise you though that the guy who found a human finger in his baloney wrote them a nasty letter.

Not to say there is anything wrong or bad with leaving good reviews.  Heck some of those are the ones that really make people excited, due to their lack of actually happening.  It is kind of like finding a duck dressed up like Abraham Lincoln.  You don’t know how he got there, he probably won’t come back again, but he did put a smile on your face.

So remember, not all bad reviews are as bad as they seem.  Sure, they may be rooted in some truth, however you should get a wide variety of opinions to see if this was just one guy out of the blue having problem, or if you can spot a trend.