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There has been a lot of talk lately about how this current downturn that the worldwide economy is in is not going to be going anywhere in the near term.  The Western big business philosophy is to recoil and wait for people to start buying again.  The Eastern and entrepreneur philosophy is that this is the time to buy good business cheap and manoeuvre yourself into an incredibly profitable position.

Online Meeting Software

One of the methods that I have been using lately to limit my travel both for personal work and with my day-job is running online meetings using Go-To-Meeting.  I chose Go-To-Meeting by default since it was the program that the company that I work for was using.  I got to play with the software before getting it myself to use for my own meetings, it isn’t that my side projects are to the point that I do a lot of travel meetings, none actually, but it did add a very advanced communications channel.

I don’t just use the software because it is what I started with, but don’t take my word for it there is a decent go-to-meeting review here. One of the tools that I have used a lot when working with designers is the ability to take over the others mouse and keyboard to better explain what I am looking for.  This is almost impossible to do over the phone, and it is very slow when you try it by email.  Using a messenger service is faster, but it is still much slower than using GoToMeeting.

Try out GoToMeeting for 30 days free and if you click here you will also get $10 off when you order. 

You have to CLICK HERE, to be sure that you don’t miss out.

My father finally got high speed at home.  Now it is not like they were avoiding it, it was simply not an option until a WiMAX provider came around.

So I asked him if he has cancelled his dial-up and he said no.  Why?  Well it is because he has had the same email address from the very beginning (10+ yrs).  You know the one, user@serviceprovider.com, and it is the one that everyone has.  He has signed up for some free web accounts since, but most people on his mailing list don’t have them.

I told him that there is an easy way to ease people into using the right email, and it is really easy if you use Gmail.  So if you don’t have a Gmail account, get one.  You will need it for the rest of this tutorial.

This post will describe how to:

1. Add a POP Account to your Gmail
2. Add a signature to all your emails so that people know to update their contact information for you.
3. And that’s it.

Adding a POP Account.

Since you probably use Outlook, Thunderbird or another email program to download your emails from the ISP servers, you most likely use POP to access them.  So go into the email settings of your program and write down your POP server.  It will most likely be either mail.serviceprovider.com or pop.serviceprovider.com.

You will also need your username and your password.

Now sign into your Gmail Account and go to Settings > Accounts

And click Add a mail account.

Fill in the email that you are planning on getting rid of in the future.

This is where you need to dig out that information that I mentioned above.  You are going to want to click the Label Incoming Messages check box.  This will allow you to keep track of the people that are still emailing you to your OLD email address.

Now you simply click the Add Account button and you should be done.

Next you are going to make sure that every time YOU send an email you will be from your NEW address.  To do this you go back to the Accounts tab and activate the radio tab with “Always reply from default address” just make sure that the Default address is the one that you plan on using.

Setting up a Signature

Now you are going to Settings > General and modify your signature.  You are going to want your signature to be clear that you are going to be changing your email address and in the near future you will not be able to receive emails from the old one.

Now What

Well that is pretty much it.  You are going to want to keep your old email active for a month or so.  Monitor the old email label and remind people that are still emailing you to the old address.

If you have any questions ask them in the comments, and I will do my best to help you out.

And if you have other ideas on how to do this let me know in the comments.

Choosing the company that will be hosting your website is one of the most important decisions that you will make regarding your web property.  If you are building the site for a business, whether the online presence of your brick and mortar business, or  a completely online business, then you want to make sure that your website is available when your customers want to use it.

There are some things that you should look for in a host.  I am going to list my preferences as as it goes with control panels as such as I feel that they make the running of a website site easy enough for any one to do.

Customer Service

The hosting company should have multiple ways for their customers to contact the people that they need to.  The company should have a phone number, online "chat" support and a ticketing system as a minimum. 

I suggest trying to chat with the "live chat" a few times to ensure that there is someone there.  It is not acceptable if your site is down by no fault of your own and there is no one online to chat with you in real time.

Uptime

The host should ensure 99.9% uptime as a minimum, and there should be refunds given when this is not reached. 

Before you just take that number you see on the homepage for granted, read the fine print.  If the hosting company measures the uptime over the past year, then your site could be down for 8 hours continuously and as long as the host had a good record up till that point then you are not going to get any refund.  If the uptime is measured monthly you have a better idea on the consistent integrity of the host.

What HAS to be included

There are some things that HAVE to be included in the hosting package before you get started, and this doesn’t matter what the price point is.

Disk Space:    At least 1gig

Bandwidth:    100 gigs

FTP Accounts: Unlimited

Email Accounts: Unlimited

MySQL Databases: Unlimited

Website / Ftp Statistics

And CPanel for the backend control panel

What you should look for

Above I mentioned some items that you should have no matter what hosting company which you decide to partner with.  Below are some additional options that all good hosting companies offer with their packages.

Addon Domains – This is one way to have multiple websites with one hosting account.  You can add a domain within the control panel and it will be completely separate from the way it looks from the outside world.

Fantastico – This is an amazing tool.  It really simplifies the installation of some of the most popular scripts that you will want to have installed on your site, including Wordpress, Drupal, phpBB, etc.  You can install the scripts with 3 clicks of the mouse and then upgrade them with a single click when updates become available and highly recommend it.

phpMyAdmin – This is another tool that I don’t think that I could live without.  phpMyAdmin is a user interface for working with mySQL databases.  If you ever have to dig into the database that drives your site then this is something that you need.

No Contract – There should not be a minimum time period that you are going to be with the hosting company

Money Back Guarantee – There should be a limited time money back guarantee for the service that you are subscribing to. This is important because you want the chance to test the waters without committing.

NO SET UP FEES – For a shared hosting account the company should not charge setup fees.  I have run a reseller host in the past and know that there is only 5 minutes of time to set up a new account, and that is if it is done manually.  There is many tools available to automate this, therefore you should not have to pay extra to have the privilege of using someone’s service.

Conclusion

So what does all this mean? 

It does seem to be a lot of information, but it is usually easy to tell a good hosting company from a fly by night.  One is the too good to be true promises.  These are teasers and are there to get you to sign up and hope to get some money out of you before you wise up and move on.  Early in my online career I was caught in these promises and moved hosts a lot.  It is not fun moving your website, and if you don’t do it just right there is going to be some downtime associated with the move.

If you want my recommendation, I use Hostgator.  I have used them for the last couple of years and they meet all of my recommendations and a lot more.  They are a large hosting company with a lot of servers that are spread over multiple datacentres.  And there CEO is still very involved with their customer service, and not just the big accounts, all of them.

Your comments

So for those that have been around for the last while, what do you think?  Who do you use and why?  Is there anything that I missed that you think is required?

One of the first things that have to be decided when you are getting ready to start a website, whether if it is for a personal site, business site, or a hobby site is whether you are going to host the site yourself and or a hosted service.

If you are building a blog type site this is not as critical at the start.  You can easily start your site on a free hosted blog site and then if you feel it necessary you can more to a hoste solution with minimal headache.  Just make sure that you have your own domain so that you don’t lose too many links that you have built.

Difference between the two. Hosted like going with a host like Hostgator and between a hosted, wordpress.com, blogger, etc

 

Advantages of the hosted service.

• Don’t need to have any programming experience
• Don’t need to worry about keeping the programs up-to-date
• Minimal backend work needed
• Usually lots of easy to installed themes, and styles
• Security, hosted services are typically very secure.

Disadvantages of hosted service

• You don’t have control of what is used for the site
• You can’t customize certain aspects of the site
• Even though there are plugins and extensions available what you can do with the site is limited.

Advantages of using a host

• You can pretty much put anything that you want online
• You have much great control of the way the site looks and interacts with your audience
• You can use the host for your FTP, email, and many other services that the hosted version does not have
• There are many “unlimited” hosts that allow you to store large amounts of data at no extra cost.

Disadvantages of using a host

• If you are not careful, you may find that the site is down more than it is up.
• Customer service may be a nightmare (Although Hostgator is an exception to this.  They have done everything they can to make my life on their servers enjoyable) .
• There may be bandwidth limitations.
• The cost can be huge if you have a popular site with little revenue as the bandwidth charges can get expensive.
• You are responsible for ensuring that your site is secure.

Conclusions
It really depends on what you are planning on using the site for.  If you are only interested in a content site or a personal site that you can communicate with family etc.  They a hosted service, or using many different hosted services to serve the purposes that you need for them. 

This can include services like Wordpress.com, Flickr.com blogger.com, etc.  If you are interested in having a custom site programmed, want to have a email address with your domain or want to have the choice of how the site works.  If you want to have full control over the type of content, visitors, the script on the site etc then you are going to be looking for something that is hosted.  The other thing that you have to remember is that if you want to ensure that you have FULL control over the content of the site then you want to fully control the host.  The hosted services typically have a TOS stating that they do not assume any risk if you lose everything.

Thoughts?

So you know what I think, what do you think?  Let me know in the comments below. 

Cheers, JM

I spent about 15 minutes this weekend trying to figure out why my image align isn’t working with new Wordpress.  It looks cool, but I just couldn’t get it to work without doing it my hand.  Then today I was catching up on my reader and found a great post from Daily Blogging Tips .  Here they explain exactly what you have to do to get your image align to work in Worpress.

It is really simple really, you just have to add the following to your stylesheet.

img.centered {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

img.alignright {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 0 2px 7px;
display: inline;
}

img.alignleft {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}

.alignright {
float: right;
}

.alignleft {
float: left;
}

It is that simple.  So now get out there and fix it.  And add Daily Blogging Tips to your reader.