1. Create an icon based upon your logo
2. Name it “favicon.ico”
3. Park your favicon in your website’s root directory.

Pretty simple, right? Yet you or your web developer unknowingly may be costing you missed sales and promotion opportunities from some of the newest ways consumers can search or access websites.

Screens Are Getting Smaller

The truth is that while flat panel computer screens are getting larger, mobile Internet devices are getting smaller. And with the small mobile devices, gone are the days of twenty 150-character website hyperlinks being displayed on a screen. Suddenly, with the onslaught of these small mobile devices and with their miniature display screens, there is much less room to display links to your website.

But even online, one company, IconDrive.com (http://www.icondrive.com), is counting on you to name your favicon “favicon” and park your favicon in the root directory of your server. IconDrive.com has created its iWebGPS Navigation service as a new way for computer users, and soon mobile device users, to access and search your site… And it only uses your favicon to provide the link to search or access your site, displaying nearly 70 website links on a miniature screen.

Favicons Done Right

In the most simple terms, the favicon of your website is like a logo on your company car or delivery van. Displaying your logo on your company vehicle will expose consumers to your business as you drive your company car around the city. This exposure is designed to help increase the likelihood that some of these consumers will see that same logo on your store or office sign and decide to stop and do business with you.

But the logo-based favicon is the only part that the big guys get right.

Favicons Done Wrong

Where they go wrong is the odd naming and parking of the favicon. It’s not so much the companies that make the two mistakes, but their irrational web developers. I’ve seen large companies with favicons given all kinds of mysterious, encrypted, coded names that are placed deep within folders. Worse of all, some of these web developers connect the favicons to session ID numbers, which expire at the end of a user session – along with the favicon.

The biggest problem I find with the utilization of favicons is that large corporate sites that should have favicons, don’t. And many large corporate sites that do have a favicon bury them deep into folders and irregularly named. Here are a couple examples:

PayPal’s favicon is located deep within folders and irregularly named…
http://www.paypalobjects.com/WEBSCR-580-20090611-1/en_US/i/icon/pp_favicon_x.ico

PremierCard has a favicon for one site…
http://www.premierclassic.com (http://www.premierclassic.com/favicon.ico)

…. but not for the other…
http://www.mypremiercreditcard.com

Then, many medium and smaller sites just don’t understand that favicons are like a business logo on a business card or outdoor sign. Done right, favicons provide quick identification of a business’ website. And only with a favicon can your web site be included in services like IconDrive.com’s iWebGPS service.

Keep It Simple

So if you wouldn’t hide your store or office deep in some crunchy dark alley, don’t hide your favicon. Keep it simple and remember that in business, location is everything. It will help make sure that services like IconDrive’s iWebGPS Navigation service can find your favicon to display it to the world and make your site a favicon-click away.

Enter Ning, the latest monosyllabic contribution to the feisty and social Web 2.0 world.  Ning isn’t a social network, it’s a network of social networks, and by signing up, you are given free reign to create one of your own (think yoursitehere.ning.com).  It’s certainly a clever idea and has real potential, but does it deliver the goods?  You’re about to find out.

How to Sign Up With Ning

Ning, like all other things Web 2.0, is simple, fairly easy-to-use, and has gigantic, boldly-colored buttons.  The attraction, however, is a little different from your Twitters and your Facebooks:  instead of looking to join up with a social network, you might actually be looking to start one.  And lest you get confused, there’s really only one place to go once you’ve taken a look at the main page.  (Note:  You can, of course, join other peoples’ Ning networks, but at this point, do you really care yet?)

Above: You can see the Web 2.0-ness by looking at how big the "Ning" is

Clicking “Sign Up” puts you on through to Ning’s registration page, which is actually just as simple - your name, e-mail, and password are all you need to get started.

That’s it.  A few clicks of the keyboard and you’re essentially signed up - and you’re all set to create your own social networking hub.

Before you start freaking out about how building your own social networking site will require outsourcing to Web developers, troublesome lawsuits after you make your first $5 million, and users complaining about your Users’ Rights list, you should know that the social networking site you actually build isn’t quite that sophisticated.  Sure, there’s a high level of customization possible, but it follows Ning’s template, limiting you to what Ning decides to provide.

And what does Ning provide?  Well, because you’re building off of a template, getting started is as easy as filling out two blank boxes.  I decided to dub my social network “Dan’s Social Network” in order to avoid any confusion as to whose social network I was building.  Ning supplies a pretty handy “yournamehere.ning.com” subdomain for you to get started, and if you want to get started now, you simply have to click “launch.”  I don’t know if they could make this any more simple, but if it was, I think it would just be called “N.”

One benefit to the .ning.com domain name?  You can pair it up and form a word, ala del.icio.us.  You do have to supply at least six letters in order for your domain to be valid, but the “ning” can work with words like “run.ning” or “tan.ning” as long as you add words before them.

And that’s it.  It took me a whole five minutes to sign up and launch a social network on Ning, and you can do it even faster if you concentrate.  If you really want to, you can go register on Ning, set up a social networking site, and come back to read this article within a couple of minutes or so:

How to Customize Your Ning Site

You can see the social network I created here; it’s not exactly the most powerful social network that’s ever been built, and in fact I don’t really provide an incentive for you to join, but it is cool to have one.

Once you’ve created your social network, Ning allows you to customize it to your heart’s content - at least, within the confines of its template system.  What does the template include?

• A wall of “latest activity,” ala Facebook, notifying your members what’s been going on in your social network
• The ability to upload both photos and videos in tabs on the upper menu bar; what good is a social network if you can’t upload the pictures that you posed absurdly for because you knew they would end up on a social networking site?  You can also integrate these features with Flickr if you already have a large library of photos you want to simply move to your Ning site
• A members list
• Google Adsense on the right:  this one confused me.  After some research and help from Just Make Money Online, I found out that you have to pay a fee of $19.95 per month if you want to run your own ads on your social networking site.  Quite honestly, that seems perfectly fair if you’ve got a large one and plan on going somewhere with your Ning.  But if you plan on spending money on your social networking site, who’s to stop you from going out there with your own domain and creating one?
• Like a Wordpress blog, you’re free to choose from a number of templates for your Ning.  The great thing here?  You can go in and edit your CSS template by hand if you need to, giving you a high level of customization I didn’t anticipate.

ConclusioNing: How Does the Site Stack Up?

Overall, I found myself surprised by the ease-of-use and basic function of each social networking site you could create.  I was a little disappointed to see the AdSense on the right, but if you’ve got a need to create your own Web 2.0 Supergroup and don’t want to do it by spending a lot of money, Ning’s got you covered.

If you want to hear more about Ning, check out Ning chief Gina Bianchini talking about creating your own social network:

Also see examples of Ning social networking sites on the Ning Blog

Web.com is a host providing a wide range of solutions for individuals looking to begin a web presence with simplicity in mind.

Features and Pricing
Web.com provides web hosting, email hosting, as well as domain name registration services.

Their web hosting selection consists of both Linux and Windows web hosting, along with a separate eCommerce distinction. All hosting includes unlimited storage space and bandwidth; a free domain for the first year; site statistics; a control panel; unlimited email accounts; site builder tools; support for PERL, Python, and PHP; FTP access; and an unlimited number of MySQL databases for Linux or MS SQL for Windows.

Like many other hosts, Web.com also offers free Google AdWords and Yahoo Certificate advertising credits. A $50 credit is given for each service, resulting in a total of $100 that can be used to promote one’s website with these two ad services.

Web.com does also offer some eCommerce features available as ad-ons to one’s standard hosting account.

The Linux and Windows hosting are priced equally at $11.95/month.

While many hosts only limit their email and database storage by the total storage space, Web.com restricts email storage to 10 GB and database storage to 1 GB overall. For most individuals, this is unlikely to impose a problem, but for some it very well may. If an email account receives a high volume of large attachments, if there are many email accounts, or if databases contain thousands of entries collectively it may very well be possible to reach these limits.

Terms of Service
Web.com’s terms of service, for the most part, are largely generic. Yet there are a few things to keep in mind. For one, domain names registered through Web.com are automatically renewed unless this renewal is deactivated at least thirty days before. It is often possible to decide not to renew up until the renewal date, but not with Web.com. Web.com also states in their terms that they “bear no responsibility or obligation to notify” an individual of the date their domain name will expire. The registrar may still notify the customer, but if they do not, then the customer may very well be left unaware if they do not acknowledge the renewal date. This may result in paying for the renewal of a domain they no longer wish to have.

Like various other hosts, Web.com forces a default page upon customers before their site is active with content. This contains advertising of products and services related to the domain name and promotion of their hosting service through a link to their website. To many, this may be greatly unwanted as it can initially drive traffic from the domain to third-parties and even competitors. This is a standard practice, and can be disabled through the control panel.

Their cancellation policy is not made explicitly clear in their terms of service. I did find some record of the procedure in a knowledge base article though. The article informed me that cancellation must be made by phone, yet the instructions for entering the prompts were likely outdated as they were incorrect with my experience. I did happen upon a prompt connecting me to the billing department for cancellations.

Although the article stated that requests for cancellation must be made “at least 30 days prior to the renewal date on the account” (in effect prohibiting someone from canceling a new account), I faced no problem. Luckily the representative I spoke to appeared to be in-house and was therefore straightforward and easy to understand. I received a ticket confirming my request and my account was cancelled without any issues.

Control Panel
When I logged into the control panel, the first thing I noticed was a giant banner ad down the right side of the page for a company selling business cards. Generally individuals don’t appreciate seeing advertisements within a service that they pay for and I surely did not. Along the bottom of the control panel homepage I was greeted by “Special Offers!”, a.k.a. more ads! This ad-ridden mentality exists across every page of the control panel that I saw.

The control panel is not the industry-standard cPanel, but rather a proprietary, or simply less common, piece of software that to me seemed sparse in functionality, only covering the absolute basics. This includes pages for domain administration, password protection, user creation, database management, site statistics, and email.

Testing
The sign-up process was guided, quick, and easy. At the end, I was informed that “within one business day” I would receive an email with instructions. Within minutes I had received the email and it provided me with information for getting started.

After that I was required to agree to the terms. I then proceeded to test out the control panel.

I visited the email section. I discovered through setting up an email address that it appears the email username must be unique to the entire hosting base, not just the individual account, although the email address itself does not have this limitation.

I then wanted to upload a homepage for my site to replace the Web.com default ad-covered page. I had to dig a bit and then discovered the information was in another email. Web.com sent me three different emails in all for my account setup. I was able to log-in to FTP without any issues using the information provided. My site responded quickly when I tested it for the new homepage.

Customer Support
While I was looking at the Web.com hosting plans page, I had a question so I decided to engage in the online chat.

I found the chat to be rather unprofessional, with an automated response initially when you first open the online chat window. It as if you are getting one of those spontaneous chat windows when a website doesn’t want you to leave, especially given the title of the window: “Wait before you go!” It’s as if they are using a bit of software designed for proactive marketing to handle their site support.

The representative in the chat was unnamed, and the one I chatted with was very short with their responses.

The representative responded within 30 seconds or so initially, although their answers thereafter were not very constructive.

When asking what PayPal gateway they specifically used (PayPal has two “Payflow” gateway plans, “Pro” and “Link”) they told me “PayPal” and that I would have to ask PayPal for more information.

This didn’t actually answer my question. I then proceeded to sit for several minutes while the agent did who knows what. After I clarified my question, they didn’t inform me they whether or not they were researching it for me. Five minutes went by and I gave up on their online chat.

Most individuals don’t wish to sign up and then find out later about the true specifics of a feature. Yet this seems to be the case for Web.com.

I also asked the representative a question regarding the 1 GB limit on databases and 10 GB on email and asked if this was total or per database and account, respectively. He informed me it was per database, yet it turns out it is in total, which makes a significant difference in the offering. That can be quite limiting. Unfortunately, I was also misinformed about the email accounts as the 10 GB is the overall limit, and not per email account.

I attempted to call customer support at 10 PM on a Thursday night and discovered that their support services are only available from 8 AM to 8 PM. After being funneled through several prompts, I was greeted by a message stating this and asking that I leave a voicemail to which they would respond within one business day. A 12 hour time-span of service is a reasonable amount of time to be available, but in an industry where 24/7 support is often the standard, especially at their price point, it is a bit discouraging. What is a bit frustrating is that these hours are not made explicitly clear across their website, so one may very well only discover it when calling.

Besides the misinforming online chat and the twelve-hour phone support, a customer is left to submit a ticket. The ticket form has a very comprehensive slew of options to narrow down the topic. I decided to test out the ticket support, so at 10:18 PM on that Thursday night I sent a ticket in regards to the question I had involving the PayPal payment gateway. I was informed that I would receive an email when there was an update.

At around 9:30 AM the next day I received a reply back to my ticket, with it being marked as “resolved.” The response stated “Thank you for contacting Web.com Sales Department regarding your account. Please contact me directly so that I can explain the service.” I didn’t understand how the service offering could not be explained in writing, and I preferred not to have to call them in regards to it, even though there appeared no other way to actually answer my question.

At around noon the next day, I decided to call their customer support to see if they could clarify the online chat representative’s misinformation for me in regards to the storage limitation.

When calling I was presented with a myriad of options. I went through three or four prompts before it began ringing through, only for me to be presented with another prompt. It seems like Web.com has consolidated several services and is attempting to provide support for all of them together, though lacking cohesion in doing so. I was provided prompts for services I wasn’t aware of, and which may have left some callers confused.

Once I was connected to a representative, I had a simple question that was not specific to my account, yet they had to look up the account. They required the phone number, which then required me to check which number I used to sign up.

The representative was somewhat hard to understand and did not seem to fully grasp what I was asking. I had a feeling they were outsourced, yet I initially gave them the benefit of the doubt since the accent wasn’t too extreme.

At the end of the call I asked where the phone support was located and the representative informed me that it was in the Philippines. I had to confirm this because the pronunciation was not very clear. Unfortunately, like with many outsourced support options, the quality of Web.com’s phone support can suffer due to the communication difficulties inherent to such outsourcing. Also, if I understood him correctly, the representative said his name was Phil. So I was speaking with Phil from the Philippines, which I highly doubted was correct.

The representative’s answer in regards to the database storage limit appeared to be consistent with the service, yet their consideration of my email question seemed misunderstood and the answer therefore inconsistent. They kept reiterating that the size of email attachments should be lower than 10 MB when I kept asking about the 10 GB limit imposed on email storage, not attachment size. At the end of the call, I was still left without a clear answer and it was one of the longest support calls I have made for such a simple support issue. It took ten minutes of going back and forth, trying to make myself clear while gathering some sort of understanding from the representative.

Conclusion
Customer support can really make or break a web hosting company as customers can often turn to a live person for help with their issues. Unfortunately with Web.com, their support isn’t at a competitive standard for the price they charge. It really does impose a disadvantage, and although outsourcing can be successfully implemented for some companies, Web.com simply isn’t one of them.

If their support was of a high quality, it may have justified the price given their only adequate service; yet, it really was not.

Web.com, although providing a functional service, does not stand as a competitive entity in the web hosting industry.

Pros: The service works, there is at least the chance of potentially receiving support
Cons: Answers provided to questions are inconsistent with what the service actually provides; outsourced support that is difficult to understand; limits on both overall database and email storage
Bottomline: Web.com is a company providing a functional service that is poorly supported and largely uncompetitive in its offerings.
Reviewer Rating:

DZone is one of the few social media sites specifically for developers. It’s a great place to get your finger on the pulse of web development and build your knowledge about the latest in the field.

I recently had the pleasure of learning more about the man behind DZone, Rick Ross. Thanks, Rick for taking the time to let Clickfire readers get to know you.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and how the idea of DZone got started? How did it go from simply being an idea to a functioning social media site?

Matt Schmidt, Mike Urban, and I were sitting in my study taking about what we liked and didn’t like about the various services like Delicious, Digg, and other social bookmarking sites. We loved the concept of “collaborative filtering” where the community is empowered to choose what will get promoted, but none of the major sites really served the specific needs of technology developers very well. With typical programmer hubris we convinced ourselves that we could build something like that in a week. Famous last words! We got to work, and about six months later we were ready to begin testing the service. If we had realized how complicated it would be to do a good job, then I don’t know for sure whether we’d have built it. I’m glad we did.

We actually launched DZone.com three years ago this week! We hit the front page of Digg the very first day, so our newborn baby got a real test. It was a “sink or swim” moment, and fortunately we didn’t sink! I was proud that our new service was able to handle the load and continue operating smoothly. Of course, Digg and DZone have both grown a lot since then, but I’m still confident that we’re up to the challenge.

You’ve probably had a lot of experience in noticing which trends develop in these types of social communities. What are the types of posts that find success on DZone? And what are the topics that don’t seem to fly?

This page shows the most popular links at DZone in the past 30 days (by votes), and this other page  shows the most popular links in the past 30 days (by clicks.) As you can see, the lists are not identical, which raises a question about what constitutes “success” for a link at DZone?

I tend to think real success is a combination of both votes and clicks, and links that reach the highest success usually have a clear, strong headline that leads to a story with broad appeal and relevance. In truth, it is not possible to spend too much time choosing your articles headline/title. This single factor has more power to get your link noticed than anything else!

On a different level, the trend that is most on my mind is people’s tendency to slip into the role of passive consumer, failing to recognize that even a small amount of active participation will have a huge impact on the site. We’re actually working on a new program to encourage active voting participation among DZone members. The program is called “VALUED” and stands for “Vote A Link Up Every Day.” If our members vote a link up every day, even just one link, it’s active participation that every social bookmarking system needs. Without this active participation, the entire system has less energy than it should to really get the best links posted on the front page.

Web developers are probably aware of plenty of Web sites that are out there that cater to them. What need does DZone fill that separates it from other sites built for Web developers?

That’s an easy question. DZone Refcardz, our series of technical cheat sheets, definitely separates us from other sites for Web developers. We commission bestselling tech authors and top experts to create 5-6 page quick-reference guides on all the most important topics for developers and designers. They are professionally edited and designed, and subscribers can download them for free in Adobe PDF format. For just over a year we have been releasing a new one each week. With over 50 topics now available I wouldn’t be surprised if DZone Refcardz has become the world’s largest collection of professional cheat sheets. The momentum behind Refcardz is really starting to build, and we’re quickly approaching our one-millionth download. For developers who can’t afford the time or money for a whole book, DZone Refcardz are a great alternative.

DZone advertises itself as providing “fresh links for developers,” and its link queue features constant link-sharing. Essentially, DZone could be described as a “Digg.com for Web developers.” Is this a fair description, and if not, what separates you from Digg other than your focus?

While DZone.com is a social bookmarking site for Developers, as Digg is for other topics, DZone in entirety offers so much more than that. For starters, DZone Snippets offers thousands of freely shared source code examples. Our topical zones on Architecture, Agile, Java, CSS, and more offer excellent feature articles and presentations. Also, DZone Refcardz, mentioned above, go far beyond just social bookmarking.

DZone definitely seems to have its niche carved out well - users know what they go to DZone for and what kind of topics they can expect NOT to find at DZone. Does working in such a strong niche serve as an advantage and if so, is it simply because Web developers are more active Web users?

Our laser focus on developers and designers is our core strength. We evaluate each and every link submitted to our system to consider whether it is appropriate for our core audience. If it’s not, we nuke it. DZone users expect our content to have this focus and it is our goal to make sure we satisfy that expectation. There are a million places to find links of general interest, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find anywhere better than DZone if what you want is developer links.

Any Web developer knows that building a new type of Web site from scratch isn’t always smooth - there are always some obstacles to be encountered. What are some of the obstacles DZone has encountered, or is still encountering?

A major obstacle has been the “passive consumer,” as discussed above. Another obstacle is that people don’t realize how worth while it is to put a little effort into writing effective headlines and summaries and making sure what you have to say is attractive to your intended audience. For example, someone actually posted a link today with a one word title “webinar” and a two word description. This may have been a great webinar, but nobody is going to respond to such a poorly crafted submission. I believe that the effort you put into your presentation pays for itself quickly.

On the technical front, we’ve run into the obstacle of getting people comfortable with using unfamiliar tools. To move the state-of-the-art forward, we really need to deliver tools that operate differently than what people are accustomed to right now. Human beings don’t like change, which creates significant barriers to the option of new features. We can build it, but will they use it?

What role has DZone played in spreading any popular memes online? Have you spotted any particular viral links that might have gotten their start at DZone?

There have been several occasions on which we have seen that a link will appear first on DZone and then subsequently make its way to reddit, Digg, delicious, Slashdot, and more. Good information moves very quickly through multiple channels and we’re proud that, in many cases, this information starts at DZone.

We probably have a good idea of what drives DZone’s popularity, as well as the popularity of social media sites as a whole. But what kind of business model have you adopted behind the scenes in order to support the site?

We are never shy about sharing a mantra we learned a few years ago on a visit to Microsoft: “This is a business.” In fact, we have shortened it to just TIAB, and everyone on the DZone team knows it means we have to earn our keep every day. We offer lots of different ways to create value for our sponsors, and we work hard to do a great job without compromising our members. Developers are more technically savvy than the average internet user, so they have a high standard of expectation and low tolerance for nonsense. Whether it is white papers, banners, text ads, or email newsletters, we pride ourselves on working creatively with sponsors to help them reach this difficult and demanding audience.

Mozy Online Backup Pricing

Of course, why not start with the most pressing issue:  pricing. How much will this set you back?  You’ve already heard me refer to Mozy as reasonably-priced, but what exactly constitutes reasonably-priced in the world of data backup?

I signed up for the $4.95/month option, but there are other ways to tackle it:  you can go for a full year at $54.45 or two years at $103.95.

Not too shabby - just a few Washingtons over Carbonite’s $54.95/year package.  Carbonite does offer the 15 day free trial.  What’s Mozy’s response?  Offering up to 2 GB of backup for free. Tough to make a call between the two at this point.

I personally chose the $4.95/month option and enjoyed their quick, easy download.  I was able to get to the “Account Created” screen only a few pages away from the main page and it took just one click to get started by downloading the software onto my computer:

I selected the button that nearly says “Download for the Win” and got started in a flash.

Installing Mozy Online Backup

This being my first experience with using online backup software, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the installation process.  Did Mozy need to get into every folder in my computer, throwing its tentacles around my every file?  Did it need to plug in to my passwords?

As it turned out, the installation wasn’t quite so scary, and it installed much like any other program or game would install itself on my computer.  It wasn’t long before I was looking at the opt-in screen and was ready to type in the username I had already supplied when I downloaded the software.

At this stage, it was difficult to tell if the potential lag was due to my computer’s own problems or due to the Mozy software itself.  I’m going to give Mozy the benefit of the doubt since it looked like it was my computer that locked up and slowed Mozy down in the process.

The one thing that Mozy did seem a little slow on was logging me in.  I saw a lot of this:

Should Mozy take this kind of time to log in automatically every time you start up your computer, it wouldn’t be the greatest pleasure in the world.

Backing Up with Mozy

With very few problems so far, it was time to examine the meat and potatoes:  after all, Mozy’s here to backup files, not dazzle me with pleasant downloading experiences.  So how did Mozy fare in this stage of the game, especially for an admitted backup-software rookie?

First, it wanted me to start off with a bang - backing up all of the files that I presumably did not back up in the dark days before I downloaded Mozy.  This was a nice little ice breaker, except that I wasn’t exactly sure what to do.

As I would find out, Mozy was actually good at finding things like “Word processing documents,” bringing much of the files together to one place so I could have them all backed up if I needed to.  Even so, I trepidaciously moved on without allowing it to do any backing up yet.

From there, Mozy would reveal its Home bar, which is a bit graphically challenged and utilitarian in nature but actually does seem to provide some good options.

As you can see, some of the toolbar options - like Schedule, for example - are actually exactly what the doctor ordered from a backup system.  You can customize your backups to reflect the amount of work you do on your computer - it might help to be mindful of the kind of lag this can create on your computer, however.

An interesting function of Mozy was a customization of your backup process that lets you choose how much your backing up actually effects your computer’s performance.  Want to get it all done at once while you’re sleeping?  Set it that way.  Working while you’re backing up?  Set it to allow your computer to run faster.

It wasn’t long before this rookie figured everything out and backed up his first file - admittedly, I didn’t give Mozy a big challenge here (1.3 KB is about as small as files get), but it did run smoothly.

After backing up my minuscule file, I was able to go ahead and find where to restore it should I need to restore it.  Quick, painless, and fairly easy.

Conclusions on Mozy Online Backup

Overall, Mozy seems to be a Spartan, no-frills program that doesn’t try to take up more of your computer’s memory than it has to.  For about 5 bucks a month - and around 50 bucks for the full year - it could be well worth your money if it saves even just a few of your important files.

Pros:

• Quick download, fairly easy to figure out the first time
• Lets you browse your files with the standard browsing or by their customized file folders
• Choice between a faster computer and a quicker backup
• As stated, the price is reasonable

Cons:

• Doesn’t exactly guide you through your first file backup
• Can be a bit difficult to find your files at first

Overall, I’d say the positives outweighed the negatives.  If you want your online backup to be fun, you should probably be playing a computer game instead.

Mozy.com Offer: 2 GB of backup for free

Sometimes, some of the most interesting companies aren’t the ones with the Googleplex’s - they can be found everywhere.  That is, if you know where to look - like if you’re looking at BlueHost, for example.

If you’re an avid fan and reader of Clickfire - and who isn’t? - you’ve already come across our BlueHost Review:  you’ve read about the functionality, the pricing structure, and the glory of its “top-of-the-line control panel.”  You’re already aware of the features, but what about the behind-the-scenes action that seems to be driving this company and its founder, Intern-entrepreneur Matt Heaton?

Let’s dig a little deeper into this Web hosting provider known as BlueHost and see what else we can dig up.

#1:  BlueHost Does Not Host Porn

I know I’ve already lost the pervs with this one, which is actually a great reason to start with the BlueHost dirt - or lack thereof.  This is in direct contrast to HostGator which, as we noted previously  (for more comparisons between the two, check out the post, BlueHost vs HostGator).

What’s the relevance of not hosting porn?  Well, if you’re like the Clickfire reader known as Jon (you can see his comment at the top of the “BlueHost vs HostGator” comments section), you’ve lost international contacts in China because China blocks domain hosting companies that host pornography like HostGator.  Not good if you’re doing a lot of business in China - but good if you’re interested in BlueHost.

BlueHost is actually strict enough about this rule that it might suspend your site for a little while if a little porn finds its way onto your forum or blog comments - so be careful about what you let seep through.

Said BlueHost President Matt Heaton on his blog:

Bluehost does not and will not tolerate adult material of any kind on our servers. Sometimes profit comes second and personal responsibility and ethics come first. I am not telling other hosts to not provide adult hosting services, but I wish that they would come to that conclusion on their own.

Well said.

#2: BlueHost is Not Matt Heaton’s First Success

The aforementioned man in charge of BlueHost, founder and President Matt Heaton, is no stranger to cyberspace.  The thirty-something businessman describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur” and the claim stands up to the toughest of scrutiny.  Heaton opened Computer Warehouse when he was 21, which became a bit of a computer chain, added “Free50″ later on, founded HostMonster, and then, in 2003, added BlueHost to his resume - though I’m guessing he doesn’t exactly need to use it often.

By the way, he also speaks Mandarin, has five children, and has been a nationally-ranked ping pong player.  Maybe he’s preparing for a run for Dos Equis’ next “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign.

Hey, speaking of running for things…

#3: BlueHost Played a Part in the 2008 Presidential Campaigns

Heaton donated $500 to the Mitt Romney 2008 Presidential campaign, which in and of itself isn’t a controversial thing.  The move, however, raised a few eyebrows when an anti-Fred Thompson Web site known as “phoneyfred.org” showed up - and had been registered with BlueHost.

Said Politico:

The owner of the web-host provider used to launch an anti-Fred Thompson website is a donor to Mitt Romney’s campaign.

Matt Heaton, President and CEO of Utah-based bluehost.com, gave $500 to Romney in June.

Until earlier today, his company hosted the domain “phoneyfred.org” that included a trove of personal and political opposition research on Thompson.   But after I disclosed the anti-Thompson site just after Noon, the site came down.

Heaton declined to reveal who purchased the domain name.

“I can’t give out any information about site ownership,” he wrote in an e-mail.  “I don’t know why it was taken down either. That isn’t something I deal with and is also information we wouldn’t be providing to anyone but the site owner.”

Maybe this didn’t have a big impact on the campaign, but you have to admit it was interesting to see a Web hosting company walk into the fray.

#4: BlueHost is Hosting Over 1.5 Million Domains

…at least, according to Matt Heaton’s blog.

Congratulations to us!  Our organization is now hosting more than 1.5 million domain names and nearly 2% of all domain names in use on the whole internet.  I think that is amazing.  Thanks to everyone that uses and recommends our services.  Hope to post when we reach 2 million real soon!

2% of a market might sound like a small number, but how would you like to handle 2% of the domains registered on the internet?

According to Heaton, the initial goals of BlueHost were actually to reach only approximately 20,000 domains.  You don’t need a calculator to tell you they’ve already well surpassed that goal, now getting something in the neighborhood of 850 signups per day - perhaps much more.

#5: BlueHost Is Built on a Foundation of Success

As already noted, BlueHost is not the first successful brain-child of founder Matt Heaton - in fact, it’s only the more recent in what appears to be a very successful timeline of events in the young business leader’s life.

Some of the other ventures Heaton has pursued include Computer Warehouse, Free50, HostMonster, and even other non-business pursuits like missionary work in Taiwan.

But that’s not all.  Heaton has also written software to track Web traffic stats (”freestats.com”), improved it (”sitetracker.com”), started FreeServers.com, and started 50Megs.com.  How’s that for real-world experience?