Thanks for taking the time to give the Clickfire visitors some behind the scenes insight into yourself and HostICan. Could you start off by introducing yourself and telling us how you came to be where you are at HostICan?

Thank you for giving me this interview. My name is Denis Motova, I’m the current affiliate manager at HostICan. I have been with HostICan since day one, so you may call me an “Old Hand”.

I’ve worked in the QoS (Quality of Service) side of the house for a while, and then finally moved over to the affiliate sector (when they needed more help). I have been working there ever since, providing our partners and affiliates with assistance as and when they need it.

Do you have a sense of who the typical HostICan customer is? Is he/she a corporate tycoon wearing a three piece suit sitting in his office suite or a pajama clad weekend webmaster kicking back in a loft?

From what I’ve seen most of the customers seem to be web savvy webmasters, or folks that are new to the web.

This is great; folks that are new to the web are the next generation of customers and webmasters. So it makes me happy to see / hear that new folks are going online to further expand their new or existing business.

How does HostICan serve the needs of the average webmaster?

HostICan is one of a few companies that I have worked at / for. In my experience it is also the best one I’ve ever worked for. The company constantly innovates, and works on new features and ideas.

We have a new feature set coming out that will expand the customers tools by about 15%, which will allow customers to achieve their results faster without having to really dig deep to find an answer to their questions.

There are many more features that will be provided, they are currently in development but, they will be out very soon… which is going to make a lot of customers very happy – I saw them in an internal demo at the companies show and I said wow! Literally.

I suspect that a lot of webmasters who have been able to monetize their sites with low cost shared web hosting are moving to dedicated hosting. I hear HostICan has a new dedicated product coming out. Can you tell us about the product? And, will it have cPanel?

Yes, the rumors are true. We do have a new product coming out. Its something that I have been reviewing from time to time, and I must say I’ve very excited about it.

Its going to focus on a certain market segment and allow us to expand our presence in that field while providing high quality service, that HostICan has become known for.

Yes! cPanel is one of the many options that this new product will have. We will support approximately three different version of the product on release with different options, but cPanel will be front and center.

Let’s talk a bit about the HostICan affiliate program. I know you recently migrated from Commission Junction and created your own program. Some affiliates are fans of the big networks. Why the move and what advantages does the current HostICan affiliate program offer over your competition?

Yes, this is true too. In my personal experience I have found that CJ (Commission Junction) is a great network. However, they don’t deliver the affiliate or the merchant the results that an in-house program can.

For example, CJ charges 30% commission on top of what you pay the affiliate, so if you pay the affiliate $100 per sale, you have to pay $30 to CJ meaning that you pay $130 total.

So instead of paying CJ 30% why not just give it directly to the affiliate? I think that would be much better. Hence I decided to take the program in-house as I feel that we can offer better value working directly with the affiliate.

One of the advantages of working directly with HostICan is we can provide higher commissions that we would be able to provide on a large network, and can provide higher performance bonuses to top performing affiliates.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that we provide FREE iPods to our best affiliates to show them how grateful we are for their support.

Where can someone sign up for the HostICan affiliate program?

Signing up for the HostICan Affiliate Program is easy and quick. Simply go to http://www.hosticanaffiliate.com and click the large “Sign Up!” button… and you’re on the way to making money!

HostICan seems to be pretty serious about capturing market share and growing aggressively. Where do you see HostICan going over the next few years in terms of growth?

Although it’s hard to tell the future, I look forward to HostICan growing in its current market share and being able to provide even more tools and features to its subscribers and allowing them to continue to grow their business. One thing we strongly believe in at HostICan is that success of our customers is our success.

Everyone seems to be discussing the business practice of overselling, ad nauseam, these days. Do you have an opinion on overselling? Does HostICan do this and if so how do you ensure that customers get their due disk space and bandwidth in times of high usage?

While I can not say that overselling is bad or good, we must really look at the cause of the problem rather then the façade.

When shared hosting started out originally, the offers where 10 – 50 MB (back then it cost from $15 - $70/mo) for one shared hosting account! But as we started getting more and more into PHP, XML, AJAX, JavaScript, the needs started to grow and expectations started to rise from customers.

Then we hit into a “media” age where music, movies, and things like this needed to be incorporated into websites, which drove the space and requirements even more…

So many hosts now rely on overselling their plans to be able to add more customers into their servers to make up for the lower prices and constantly growing cost of server software and hardware.

There are a couple of ways overselling, the light weight version and heavy version. Its ok to oversell a little like 2 – 3 more accounts per server, but not 100’s of accounts.

At HostICan we use a SAN network where the data is stored in a large array of hard drives, which allows us to add more drives and easily expand our hard drive capacity as much as 50% at one time.

You seem to have a lot of energy and enjoy your job. What do you do for fun? Not that web hosting isn’t fun

Yes, I really enjoy my job. After all, if you don’t enjoy your job, you can’t expect to be very good at it, especially in such a highly competitive industry.

For fun, I enjoy playing golf and tennis, and do some wakeboarding (when I get some time, and its not freezing outside)

Once again, thanks for having me on, I really appreciate it.

Retsambew Dash Klat for Charity

“You heard about retsambew dash klat for charity?” Bo Lynn asked.

“No,” Skippy said. “What’s that?”

“It’s between a guy and a girl. They get together real close and surf the Internet together. If the right search comes up, it’s like magic… whoa, well, that’s about all I can say right now. Trust me. It’s good,” Bo Lynn explained.

“Where do they do this retsambew charity thing?” Skippy demanded.

“Anywhere,” Bo Lynn said. “It’s best if it’s dark though, I heard.”

“Tell me more!” Bo Lynn insisted.

“They sit next to each other, mashing and pulling on the keys together while they search, post and submit links. Pretty soon they’re all hot and sweaty and sticky-like,” he said. “When they find it, the girl screams “retsambew dash klat for charity!” Then, it’s over. They start the same search again the next day. It’s supposed to go until September 1st.”

“How come they do this retsambew dash klat for charity thing?”

“Just for fun,” Bo Lynn replied glibly. “A guy up in New York was the first to try it. Now everyone’s doing it. You have to use something called Google. I know because I saw my brother and sister-in-law find it one time on their computer. He’s caught up in it too. He calls himself a “webmaster.” I asked him to explain and he said I’d understand when I got older.”

“I still don’t understand what retsambew dash klat for charity means. Where can I try it? Do I have to go to New York” Skippy asked?

“No, you just have to type it in Google and see if it comes up in the right place,” Bo Lynn said. “Tell you what,” Bo Lynn said. “I’ll bring my brother’s laptop tomorrow. Meet me in the bathroom at first recess.”

“It’s the biggest and best. You’ll see,” Bo Lynn said.

“Man, I can’t do this.”

“Why not?”

“What if my Dad finds out? He told me to stay away from Google. I didn’t know it was a little web site, though.”

“He won’t find out.”

“But what if he does?”

“He won’t know what Google really is.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s mostly young folks who use Google. Can’t you see how simple it looks with just the letters G-O-O-G-L-E written there? It’s like a kids toy, so, parents shouldn’t care. But, the truth is there’s a lot of stuff behind it that parents don’t like. You know how your dad hates computers.”

“Yeah, but he was young once too, and smart. He got my Mom to marry him when she was only sixteen.”

“Where did you hear that word, son?” She asked.

“In the neighborhood.”

“From whom?”

“Bo Lynn.”

“It must be a bad word, then.”

“I just thought you might know.”

“Well, I might. Any clues?”

“He said something about a guy and girl who surf the Internet together real wild and hollering until they find it. Said it goes on until September 1st.”

“I do ever declare,” she said, intrigued.

“Bo Lynn acts like it’s catching on pretty big.”

“Tell me more, Skippy.”

“That’s about all I know.” “You sure? Try to think.”

“Well…It takes something called–”

“Yes, Skippy. What?”

“Google.”

“Hubert,” she repeated. “Put down that monstrous dictionary. I need to ask you something.”

“I am listening, Francine,” droned Hubert, her husband, continuing his lexical perusal.

“You ever heard of retsambew dash klat for charity?”

“No, Francine.”

“I hadn’t either until Skippy mentioned it. Apparently, it’s some new Web site youngsters play with. A boy and girl embrace each other and roll around in a frenzy while typing some gibberish into an Internet device.”

Hubert whisked off his glasses and looked at Francine, then put them back on, then took them off again.

“Seems to be a great deal of ruckus involved,” she resumed. “I don’t know what to make of it.”

“What on earth is the objective?”

“I’m not sure. Skippy wasn’t either. That’s why he asked me.”

“Sounds a bit violent for child’s play. And dangerous.”

“I’m afraid that it might spread to the neighborhood.”

“Who informed Skippy of this practice?”

“Skippy heard it from Bo Lynn.”

“Bo Lynn!”

“There’s something else,” Francine inhaled deeply. “It’s a web search piece, some sort of frolicsome tool both participants use. It starts with the letter G.” She paused.

“What is it?”

“I can’t recall. Gargoyle or GirlGirl or something like that.”

“Changed your mind, I see. Figures. The more you dwell on retsambew dash klat for charity, the more it grows, until you have to face it. I know. I know.”

“I can’t get it off my mind.”

“I’ve got an idea!” Bo Lynn said, convincingly. “Let’s try it on Lucy.”

“What do you mean?” She asked.

“I think that I have determined the significance of retsambew dash klat for charity.”

“No one at bridge last night had heard of it. What do you think it is?”

“I studied a few psychological journals and took notes on the relationship of the Internet and youngsters coming of age in modern society. The consensus is that there is a link between the erratic behavior you described and certain primitive practices found in adolescents.”

“Yes. Go on.”

“The G word that Skippy mentioned may be grammatical gender, the activities that distinguish organisms on the basis of their reproductive roles. Add this to the orgiastic grapplings and groanings, and we stumble upon a very ancient human function. Francine, retsambew dash klat for charity is the very act of sexual intercourse. We used to do it ourselves.”

“Hubert, don’t be silly.”

“I am quite serious, Francine.”

“They don’t sound like the same thing. Besides, children don’t know about such things.”

“They must have discovered it somehow.”

“Not retsambew dash klat for charity. It’s something new. They’re not the same.”

“But they are, Francine. The characteristics match.”

“I don’t think you and I have ever retsambewed.”

“What is it?” She said, approaching.

“We need your help.”

“I’m in a hurry,” she complained. “What do you two want?” “We found this new thing for fun.”

“What’s it do?”

“It’s on this Google thing. If we search Google together, we’ll eventually find retsambew dash klat for charity.”

“What do you mean?” She said. “I’ve gotta go.”

“No, wait! You’ve probably never heard of retsambew dash klat for charity, but it makes everyone close.”
“What’s the purpose?”

“I don’t know exactly what is for. It’s the latest thing. It’s more fun if we do it together.”

“I don’t mind. Just tell me what I get.”

“Now, Skippy! Google it!”

All three watched in silence as Skippy held the laptop in his shaking hands. He tore open the main search page and then paused and tried to type the words retsambew dash klat for charity into Google search box.
“Do it, Skippy,” Bo Lynn exhorted. Skippy’s hands shook more intensely.

“I can’t spell it!”

“Go ahead, before she leaves,” Bo Lynn said.

Skippy tried to grip and unfurl it, but his wet, waggling fingers were unable.

“Don’t be afraid!” Bo Lynn yelled.

Finally, after typing frantically, Skippy was able to get the correct words in the Google search box: retsambew dash klat for charity. Grinning, he extended the laptop monitor toward Lucy.

“Sorry, boys,” Lucy said. “I’m in a hurry. See you later.” She dashed off, ignoring the the Google search results for the keyword phrase.

“Lucy! Come back!” Bo Lynn yelled to her disappearing figure. “Lucy!” Skippy echoed.

“Silly girl don’t understand its power yet,” Bo Lynn concluded. “One day we’re gonna retsambew.”

“It’s just Google, Dad,” Skippy said, stretching the laptop monitor to his gaping father.

“What’s going on in here?” Francine demanded, entering.

“Skippy’s holding some kind of technosexual device,” Hubert warned. “Be careful.”

“Mama, you told me to bring it to you.”

“The retsambew dash klat for charity thing. It’s right there at the very tip top of Google,” she wailed. “Hubert, you were right.”

“We tried to find retsambew dash klat for charity with Lucy,” Skippy admitted, “but don’t worry, it didn’t work.”

“Oh my!” Francine shrieked. “I’m calling Lucy’s parents right away.”

“Listen to me, Skippy!” Hubert instructed. “I want you to take that laptop and slowly set it down on the kitchen counter– here’s some wax paper–then I want you to scrub your hands in the sink with detergent and water. Hard! Son. I’ll call for help.”

Both HostGator and HostICan offer shared and dedicated hosting. HostGator also provides reseller hosting and HostICan provides Virtual Private hosting. The offerings of each host are summarized below:

HostGator

Shared: Linux (and Windows was coming soon at time of writing)
Reseller: Linux
Dedicated: Linux (Red Hat and CentOS) and Windows
Control Panel: cPanel for Linux, Plesk for Windows

HostICan

Shared: Linux
Virtual Private Servers: Linux and Windows
Dedicated: Linux and Windows
Control Panel: cPanel for Linux, Plesk for Windows
Merchant Accounts

If you are in need of a specific type of hosting the above information is helpful in deciding which host to choose. For example, if there is an interest in reseller hosting, the choice must be HostGator because HostICan does not provide this service.

Bandwidth

One of the main things that sets HostICan apart from their competition is that they offer unlimited bandwidth on their second tier plans. They offer two tiers of hosting plans in each hosting category: The first tier is limited bandwidth, and the second is the unlimited. HostGator only offers unlimited bandwidth on their highest shared hosting plan, but not on any other plans. Therefore if unlimited bandwidth is of value on VPS or dedicated plans, HostICan may be the choice to make. Unlimited bandwidth from HostICan can only be used for website related content, so the bandwidth cannot be used to host a download site. HostGator does not allow torrents.

Support

Support provided can often set two hosts apart. In the case of HostGator and HostICan, both hosts provide 24/7 support via toll-free numbers and email. Live chat is available from HostGator around the clock, but is provided by HostICan only during certain hours. Take a look at each host’s respective reviews individually for more information regarding the quality of support each host provides.

Money Back Guarantees

There are other important concerns when comparing hosts such as uptime and money-back guarantees. Both HostGator and HostICan guarantee 99.9% uptime. HostGator “eats up” the competition with their money-back guarantee of 45 days while HostICan provides the industry standard of 30 days. Both hosts also offer rewarding affiliate programs.

Conclusion

When choosing between HostGator and HostICan it will likely come down to what services each offers as they are both quality hosts. The specific numbers for price, disk space and bandwidth change often so check them out right before you are about to buy and see where each hosts stands for what you are looking for. If you need virtual private hosting, the choice has to be HostICan, but if you need reseller hosting you have to go with HostGator. Although you are bound to be satisfied with either host, the details can often be the difference between simply being satisfied and being happy with a host.

WWW.HOSTGATOR.COM vs WWW.HOSTICAN.COM

A lot of we hosts often like to spruik their services, and allot do give more than most hosts. But people are often left scratching their heads, and are left wondering more often than not, “What am I getting for the money I pay?” Web Go started fielding these questions from existing customers and potential customers from all over the world. We were left about as stumped as they were, we couldn’t understand why some people might perceive our company as not providing more services and utilities than what was already on offer. We then decided to change all that, admitting that the great service, and excellent reliability probably wasn’t enough. We agreed there was something missing and we wanted to share the success of our business with our loyal and new customers. So starting out in December 07 we started offering free domain names to new and existing customers on the proviso that a new account would be opened or an existing account that stayed with us past 3 months was eligible. The results really speak for themselves. We noticed new and existing customers coming in and sharing in the fruits of an industry that is sometimes reluctant to give more.

Has your web host given you a reason to stay with them? If not, why not? Web Go is committed to providing excellent service, excellent reliability, value for money, and above all a free domain name for new, transferring and existing customers. On top of all of that Web Go still provides its services to Australian’s and people from all around the world at true value for money prices and our unrivalled genuine customer service is one our proudest achievements.

 Where does Web Go profit from all of this? We don’t. Web Go has always seeked to ask why the current industry is getting away with what we like to call, “Highway Fork Robbery.” It came as no surprise that a few close competitors started offering the same thing very quickly. As a result we have changed to a small degree the industry here in Australia, and are determined to do more. Competition needs to provide not just rock-bottom low prices with little or no customer service, or slow and jam-packed servers. It needn’t cost the earth either, but in our experience we believe any web hosting company should back up their services with offers, coupons and free trials, as well as special discounted rates for pensioners. Above all, the need to offer more has never been greater in the current economic climate. Whilst some companies may be doing it tough, the giving can result in good dividends to ride out the wave of cash flow and other related problems.

The benefits of giving a service, such as free domain names have never been greater. Customers who receive them are grateful, and more often than not customer retention will go up. In Web Go’s experience the time is right to start offering domain names at no charge. For the industry to improve and take on the 21st century challenges that lie ahead particularly in high-tech, every stake holder must choose to either move forward with innovative ideas like this one, or be left behind.

Each host offers various shared, virtual private server, and dedicated hosting plans. Lunarpages also offers reseller hosting, while HostICan does not. The offerings are summarized below:

Lunarpages

Shared: Linux and Windows
Virtual Private Servers: Linux and Windows
Dedicated: Linux and Windows
Reseller: Linux
Control Panel: cPanel for Linux, Plesk for Windows
Sitebuilder plan

HostICan

Shared: Linux
Virtual Private Servers: Linux and Windows
Dedicated: Linux and Windows
Control Panel: cPanel for Linux, Plesk for Windows
Merchant Accounts

Bandwidth

A big difference between the two hosts is that HostICan provides “Unmetered Bandwidth.” They define this as no restrictions on bandwidth or how an individual uses it. In HostICan’s terms of service, they do restrict the use of this unlimited bandwidth so that it may not be used for the purpose of providing a download service for movies, torrents, images, etc. They require that the unlimited bandwidth be used for website-related content only. HostICan offers two tiers of hosting, with unmetered bandwidth only available on the second tier plans. Since Lunarpages only offers one plan in each hosting category, HostICan’s unmetered plans are not compared below.

Shared Hosting Plans

The shared hosting plans at each host offer similar features. The pricing on the most basic plan may even look identical ($6.95 at the time of writing). Yet look closer and you will find that the pricing stated at each host is for their longest billing cycle. At the three month billing cycle, Lunarpages is two dollars cheaper a month, and they offer much more disk space and bandwidth than HostICan (1,500 GB vs. 600 GB and 15,000 GB vs. 6,500 GB, at time of writing).

VPS

When it comes to virtual private hosting, Lunarpages offers more disk space and bandwidth and charges less for any given billing period. Lunarpages offers one plan each for Linux and Windows VPS, while HostICan offers the choice between two.

What about Dedicated Hosting?

It is more difficult to compare the two companies’ dedicated plans because their pricing, disk space and bandwidth vary widely. On their first tier dedicated plan HostICan provides more than three times as much disk space, three times as much bandwidth, twice as much memory, and about the same processor, but for $100 more a month. On HostICan’s second level dedicated plan you get their advertised “Unmetered Bandwidth” and roughly the same disk space and memory as Lunarpages for $30 more a month than Lunarpages. If the unmetered bandwidth is valuable to you, it may be good to choose HostICan.

Both hosts state that they provide 99.9% uptime. While HostICan guarantees this, Lunarpages only makes a promise that their uptime is within these limits. If uptime is critical, it may be worth going with HostICan as they back their claim with a guarantee.

Lunarpages wins on shared, virtual private, as well as dedicated hosting when it comes to price. If unmetered bandwidth is of value, then it may outweigh the cost savings to go with HostICan. Both hosts offer common features with their hosting, yet they do each have a few of their own unique offerings that may make up your mind for you. For example, if reseller hosting or a site builder is of interest, choose Lunarpages as HostICan does not provide these services. If a merchant account would be of value, go with HostICan.

The quality of hosting is bound to be good whether you choose Lunarpages or HostICan. Yet it’s likely you will find that those small details can really make all the difference.

www.Lunarpages.com vs www.HostICan.com

Free web hosting has been around just as long as paid hosting. If you think back 5 or 10 years (maybe even further), you can probably remember playing around with some free web hosting. I can very clearly remember my first web site from the late nineties, hosted at Angelfire. I later “upgraded” to Tripod and eventually found a free cPanel host. The cPanel host disappeared and I made the leap to paid web hosting. I haven’t looked back since.

Free web hosting hasn’t changed too much since it first started. The technology has improved, but free web hosts still offer far less space and bandwidth than most paid web hosts. Many of them still place ads on your free web sites. Others make you post on forums and become active in order to qualify for free web hosting. The exact offers differ from host to host, but there are common themes. Some major hosting companies (Lunarpages is probably the most prominent) started off as a free web hosts and then moved to paid hosting exclusively.

The adage of “you get what you pay for” seems to apply in web hosting. There is a huge difference in the level of service and support you receive from a paid versus a free web host.

Most free web hosts don’t offer any sort of company-provided support. If support is offered by free hosts, it’s usually very limited and very slow. There is not a reputable paid host that will require ads to be placed on your site, but many free hosts do.

When looking for a free web hosting company, the most important thing to consider is the reputation of the hosting company. Free web hosts come and go a lot. If one of them happens to go while you are hosted with them, your web site (and the time you spent creating it) could be gone forever.

If you see a free web host that offers some really nice features and plans, be skeptical. Providing high quality web hosting for no money is obviously not a sustainable business, so there is almost always a catch if the offer seems too good to be true. Free web hosts that actually offer an upgrade to paid hosting or that show ads are probably safer since the companies actually have business models and income to pay for expenses like servers.

Like with paid hosts, hosts that have been around for a while are a safer bet than those that are brand new. You want to see a company with a hopefully positive track record before deciding to move your web site. Free web hosts are a lot more likely to disable your site for no reason, so be sure to keep frequent backups of your work. If you don’t, you risk losing your data. Be sure to login to your account regularly because many free web hosts will disable accounts that they think are inactive.

With free web hosting, keep in mind that you don’t “own” your URL or web site address. Since most free hosts let you use a subdomain (i. e. freehostclient.clickfire.com) or a folder on their site (clickfire.com/freehostclient), they maintain ownership over your URL. Unlike with a top level domain (clickfire.com), you don’t own this URL and can’t take it elsewhere. If you build a popular site using freehosting.com/freehostclient as your URL, you have to stick with freehosting.com in order to keep that URL. Some free web hosts will let you use a paid, top level domain name (clickfire.com), but may charge extra.

Freewebs is a well known and reputable free web host. You can use their tools to create a full featured web site very quickly. The company has a nice wizard and set of WYSIWYG tools that non-technical web site creators can use to create a web site.

All of the free sites feature banner ads above the main site, but for $1.25 per month, you can upgrade the package and have the ads removed. Some of the features included:

• About 300 free templates
• 0.5 GB of bandwidth
• 40 MB of web space
• Site Builder
• Ability to easily add logos, edit header and footers, etc.

Before making the decision about which free web host to go with, Google the company’s name and try to find information about them. If they’ve been around a while, there are probably plenty of stories and experiences (good and bad) from current and previous customers. Like with any major decision, you want to do your research and be well informed beforehand.

Free web hosting is good for those looking to experiment with web hosting and the process of web site creation and maintenance. If you need a web site for your business or for something important, then it is worth the money to upgrade to a paid web host.

Features and Pricing

HostNine provides flexible choices offering four different plans for both shared and reseller hosting, and three plans to choose from for dedicated. These plan offerings allow customers to select the option that suits them best, without having to pay for space and bandwidth they don’t need. While many hosts offer large amounts of space and bandwidth that many individuals will never use, HostNine offers a realistic amount that is adequate for most. For example, at the time of writing, the basic shared plan included 5,000 MB of disk space and 100 GB of bandwidth. This is sufficient if the plan is not being utilized for video or volume image hosting – which many hosts that offer large plans block anyway.

Shared

The shared hosting plans offer quite a bit less space and bandwidth than the competition, but again the allocations are suitable for the average user. Although it does seem that they could provide a bit more for the price, what they charge is definitely acceptable for what they offer, as they provide countless features.

Reseller

The reseller plans at HostNine include a unique feature. HostNine allows a customer to choose where they would like a reseller site to be physically hosted. A site may be hosted in one of eight U.S. or three global locations. Therefore, it allows the ability to manage multiple servers from one control panel. This relieves a reseller of the risk that all of their sites will go offline due to one server failure as sites are hosted across multiple servers. This is just one component of Reseller Central, which is HostNine’s proprietary reseller control panel. The reseller plans, like shared, offer slightly less than the competition in terms of disk space and bandwidth.

Dedicated

HostNine also provides hosting to those in need of dedicated servers. They have three different dedicated plans which are very comparable to those of other hosts, and which offer a good deal of features for the cost. The dedicated plans include WebHost Manager, the industry-standard control application for dedicated hosting administration. The dedicated plans are available with three choices of operating system: CentOS, RedHat, and Windows.

If the reason behind using a reseller or dedicated account is to resell hosting, a nice feature of HostNine is the ability to receive a complete reseller solution. They provide customers with ModernBill billing software, as well as a merchant and domain reseller account. Therefore, an individual is ready to effectively resell hosting without having to acquire the ancillary services elsewhere in order to do so.

Terms of Service

To demonstrate their responsibility for customer satisfaction, HostNine provides a 30 day money back guarantee on shared and reseller hosting, but not dedicated. The policy was once for 45 days, but has since been changed – a possible sign that too many customers cancelled between 30 and 45 days of service. When canceling an account, if it is canceled no sooner than 15 days before the next billing cycle a customer does not receive any penalty and they only lose the hosting fees that have already been paid. Therefore, if a customer thinks they may cancel for whatever reason, the monthly billing cycle should be selected as HostNine does not offer any discount for the selection of longer billing cycles. That way the customer would not be losing three, six, or twelve months of hosting that they prepaid for.

HostNine also guarantees industry-standard 99.9% uptime. In general, their terms are commonplace. They do explicitly state server limitations that users may not exceed, yet these are very reasonable. They do impose a “250 email limit per domain per hour” that applies to both shared and reseller hosting. Most individuals will fall well under this limit, yet this may pose a problem if the plan is to use the account to provide a help desk to service customers, or support a community – any situation where large volumes of emails may be sent or received through the server. In that case, it is required to make use of a dedicated plan, as their this email limit is not imposed on their dedicated hosting.

Control Panel

To allow a customer to effectively administrate their hosting account, HostNine provides the user with the industry standard cPanel control panel. cPanel allows for the easy administration of files, email, databases, domains, security, and more of the hosting account. It a commonly used application and provides excellent management features.

Reseller account customers are provided with the aforementioned Reseller Central control panel. This allows resellers the ability to easily manage their clients and control the sites they host.

Dedicated accounts are provided with the sister application of cPanel called WebHost Manager (WHM). WHM makes it just as easy as cPanel to manage an entire server and the hosting accounts that are served by it.

Testing

My tests of HostNine were favorable. My test site opened fast. When uploading a file, FTP responded quickly with the server. In a website speed test by HostPulse the test site ranked 10th among other hosting, with an average ping time of 21ms. On a traceroute test it required eight hops to reach the server, which compared to other hosts is good. During another speed test the speed of a page with a large amount of text yielded a rate of nearly 1,000 KB/s.

Customer Support

HostNine states that their sales, billing, and technical support services are provided 24 hours a day. Their toll free number is prominently displayed across their site. Some hosts force their customers to dial a local phone number, but HostNine does not. Although they claim 24/7 support via phone, live chat, email and instant messaging, I tested it on multiple occasions and found that it is not true 24/7 availability.

On one of my tests, I made a phone call at 9 PM on a Sunday. I was presented with a professional quality recording identifying the company as HostNine. After selecting the support extension, some annoying triumphant music filled my ear. After some time, the song replayed, and I waited, and it replayed yet again. Eight minutes went by before the system disconnected me and I was left without any service. I waited eight minutes only to be hung up on. It didn’t give me an option of any sort, or tell me to check the web site; I was just left staring at my phone! So much, I thought, for the 24/7 support via every possible medium. The instant message support was not available at that time either. So I tried the Live chat at 9:12 PM on that Sunday night. My approximate wait time was 4 seconds – perhaps I would get someone to answer my late night question. I had chatted with a sales representative half an hour earlier. This time I was connected to someone with that same name. Perhaps the support was understaffed that Sunday night? Maybe they just had the one guy at the time (the representative I later contacted could not say how many employees HostNine has on their support team).

After being connected with a representative this time, it took him 11 minutes to respond to my basic question with its obvious answer. He may have never responded if it wasn’t for me asking “Are you there?” after the first five minutes, which seemed to wake him from his late night slumber at the help desk. I do assume the support is in-house – he did have an American name and a good control of the English language.

The phone number, the live chat link, the screen names, and the email are all there, but it doesn’t mean you will get a timely response to any of them. They are available for you to contact 24/7 but it doesn’t mean you will get a response within a reasonable amount of time.

Later that night I tried sending them a support email. I sent the email at 9:28 PM and received a reply a 9:34 PM. That response time is good, but the reply was made by the same representative that managed the chat.

On a later date, I tested the phone support again. This time it was on a Saturday at around 3 PM. I placed a call at 2:57 PM and was connected after only a minute of hold music. The technical support representative I spoke to was clear, polite, and answered my question promptly without placing me on hold. This demonstrated to me that support is good during the day, but should not be relied upon late at night.

The overall support experience was good – though it was not truly provided 24 hours a day, seven days a week as claimed.

Conclusion

HostNine, as a whole, is a good host. They provide a good featuring offering for a competitive price and offer a wide array of services. They are especially a good choice for resellers as they provide a convenient, total solution through their Reseller Central control panel and merchant, domain, and billing services. The support is good, but is not available around the clock as claimed.

Bottomline: An overall good host backed by good support (when available) and a promising service
Pros: The ability to host sites on multiple servers with Reseller Central, complete reseller package
Cons: Support is not truly provided 24 hours a day as claimed, disk space and bandwidth is slightly more expensive than competition
Rating:

-Reviewed and tested by Kyle J. Summers

www.hostnine.com

At first glance, the Chemistry.com website looks like just about every other online dating site, but look closer and you’ll see multiple references to Dr. Fisher. By clicking on these, you can find out more about Dr. Fisher’s connection with Chemistry.com, her research, and her methodology for online matchmaking.

Well, I’ve gone ahead and done that for you. It turns out that Dr. Fisher hasn’t just endorsed the site in return for plugging a book; she is actually quite involved with the direction Chemistry.com has taken. Dr. Fisher has designed many of the questions for Chemistry.com, not only taking into account the usual personality, interest, and demographic questions, but also questions involving genetics, hormones, and other physical characteristics.

You also have the opportunity to view videos of Dr. Fisher’s answers to frequently asked questions. I must say she comes across as a lot less nerdy than that Dr. Warren from eHarmony. But enough about her; let’s move on to the sign-up process.

Chemistry.com Sign-up

The sign-up process in one of the most in-depth ones out there, but you’ll probably find it fun and enlightening if your goal is to be matched up with people on more than just the simplest of criteria. If you’re looking for the basics, there are always sites like Date.com and Matchmaker.com.

You’ll be asked some unusual questions like these:

• Is your index finger shorter or longer than your ring finger?
• Which of these smiles are fakes?
• How do you feel when you see a public display of affection?

I don’t want to influence anyone’s possible answers by explaining what they can reveal about one’s personality, but I will say that these questions combined with the more traditional personality questions really hit the mark on assessing my personality. In fact, I had my fiancée take the test, and her resulting personality type matched the one that Chemistry.com says fits me best.

After you finish filling out your new profile, you’ll see that Chemistry.com has a link to your top five matches. Some of my top five matches didn’t sound too appealing to me, but maybe Dr. Fisher knows what’s best for me. The only way to know for sure would be to meet the matches in person. Of course, Great Expectations is the matchmaking service best known for doing that.

There is no search function. Chemistry.com picks your matches, and the only way to get more is to rate the ones they’ve already brought your way. That’s good for increasing the level of feedback, but it’s bad for control freaks. Also, the only way to do any of this is by first subscribing, and the costs are pretty steep, especially when there is no way to tell how many members are in your area. Costs range from $49.95 a month for one month down to $26.65 a month for six months. That is about twice the cost of Yahoo Personals and a little more than Perfectmatch.com’s price of admission.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, an online dating site like Chemistry.com best fits those of us a bit on the detail-oriented (some might say anal-retentive) side. People simply interested in a quick sign-up and search are less likely to join, increasing your odds of being matched with like-minded singles. Therefore, if you’re the type of person who lacks patience and planning regarding the online dating scene, Chemistry.com won’t be your bag. In fact, you probably couldn’t remain undistracted long enough to finish reading this Chemistry.com review. Hey, look at that colorful ad in the margin!

Cartoons are popular, and can be used in magazines, books, newsletters, newspapers, catalogs, greeting cards, brochures, direct mail pieces…you name it. It’s been happening for many years. Along came the Internet and the explosion of the electronic information age. Now the use of cartoons in any electronic format has been elevated to yet another level.

Gag cartoon humor and the Internet have developed a symbiotic relationship which supercedes many other forms of visual conveyance, whether it be a story on a web page, a blog item, an Intranet article or specific area in a website devoted to cartoons or humor in general. Cartoons lend themselves well for this medium.

Dan Rosandich

Cartoonist Dan Rosandich took control of his existing archive of cartoon panels and categorized them into a searchable database, so that publishers and other professionals can easily locate the type of cartoon they might be looking for. Whether it’s a medical cartoon or a cartoon relating to pets, Dan makes appropriate gag panel cartoon humor available. Dan makes appropriate gag panel cartoon humor available. Visitors can sort through an archive of over 3000+ cartoons at Dan’s web catalog, by clicking the daily web cartoon at the top of this article.

Professional web designers can also use the daily web cartoon offered by Rosandich, which updates automatically via php script at 2am eastern time 24/7/365 and all that’s needed is a simple line of code to paste into your HTML. Dan guarantees all cartoons scheduled are 100% family friendly and the daily image is a static 500 pixels wide, but the height varies from day to day.

Custom cartoons & humorous illustrations are also a specialty. Some of the other uses where cartoons are also popular are PowerPoint presentations, email templates and email “blasts”, ezines, electronic newsletters, ebooks and for web templates. Dan also launched several new sites which can be accessed at http://www.danscartoons.com/web_sites.htm and he has introduced a free kid’s coloring book site at http://www.coloring-booksforkids.com

HostGator (review) is a cPanel shared, reseller, and dedicated host based in Houston, Texas. The company hails from South Florida (hence the gator part) and moved to Houston in September 2006. HostGator is fiercely independent and uncommonly straight forward with its business and business practices. Their servers are leased from The Planet and are located in Texas.

1&1 Internet (review) claims to be the world’s largest and fastest growing web host. The German company is owned by United Internet AG, a conglomerate that serves as an ISP to more than two million German customers. The company’s newest datacenter is in Kansas City and they own or operate 4 others. 1&1 offers a lot of services ranging form exchange hosting to dedicated servers.

Which company you go with should primarily depend on what you’re looking for. 1&1 doesn’t offer cPanel and HostGator does exclusively. HostGator doesn’t offer SharePoint or Exchange hosting, but 1&1 does. The differences in services, addons, and incentives between the two hosting companies are huge – and change frequently.

Here is an overview of the services offered by each host:

HostGator:

• Domain registration
• Shared hosting (Linux only. Windows coming soon.)
• Reseller hosting (Linux only)
• Dedicated hosting (Managed. Linux only. Windows coming soon.)

1&1 Internet:

• Domain registration
• Email hosting (Exchange and regular)
• Shared web hosting (Linux and Windows)
• VPS hosting (Linux and Windows)
• Dedicated hosting (Managed and unmanaged. Linux and Windows)
• Eshops
• SharePoint

The pricing and plans from both of these web hosts are competitive. You’ll get more space and bandwidth than you could ever need for a reasonable amount of money. Like most web hosting companies, 1&1 and HostGator encourage you to signup for months and years in advance by offering discounts. They guarantee their uptime (99.9% at HostGator; 99.99% at 1&1).

One thing to keep in mind is the size of each host. 1&1 has over 3,000 employees. HostGator’s head count is around 150. There is going to be more personal attention with HostGator and you have a chance of talking to the same representatives. HostGator is largest enough where you don’t have to worry about it disappearing, but it is not huge like 1&1.

Both companies provide 24/7 support via the phone and over their respective helpdesks. Both 1&1 and HostGator have good reputations as reliable hosting companies that back their services. Both hosts offer sitebuilders with their shared hosting plans. HostGator offers a 45 day money back guarantee; 1&1 offers a 90 day money back guarantee.

You can’t go wrong with either 1&1 or HostGator. If you’re looking for a keep it simple type web host that offers good service at a reasonable price, go with HostGator. If you want more bells and whistles in terms of marketing and software extras or if you have requirements beyond standard web hosting, you probably want to go with 1&1.