If your memory serves you well, I am the same Clickfire contributor who brought you last year’s Norton AntiVirus review. So how much has changed in the world of Norton? Are the viruses smarter, bigger, badder? Has the virus software updated itself to match?

At just $39.99 – don’t be fooled, I think it’s really about forty bucks – the latest edition from Symantec’s jewel features two and three-year downloads as well as a five-user pack. The prices for these downloads vary up to $89.99 for said pack.

The major question today: is this really worth it, or are you better off downloading some junk antivirus for free from the Internet? Well, as time usually tells us, you get what you pay for. Norton Antivirus 2010 definitely continues the 2009 legacy and updates it with quick functionality and simple interface. In other words: it’s what we like seeing out of a piece of anti-virus software.

Norton AntiVirus 2010 and the Good News

You may recall a bit of a surprised, “hey-this-is-pretty-good” tone in the Norton 2009 review last year. Well, that’s pretty much what you’ll find this year. Symantec’s control of Norton AntiVirus has seemed to breathe some life into the series, giving it another ambitious update that makes the virus-crunching software worthy of carrying the “2010″ banner.

It’s a quick installer – probably just minutes for you, maybe even less – which means you can get cracking right away. Does the quickness end? Thankfully, no. Slow antivirus software program are any computer user’s pet peeve – especially when facing a deadline at work – and Norton does a good job of staying out of the way with a quick installation process, quick scans, and a relatively unobtrusive interface. Note that “relative” suggests a little something about the world of antivirus software, of course, but that’s not news to anyone.

Adding to the quickness is the general ease of the interface, which is great for computer simpletons like yours truly but not necessarily the premier package for the more ambitious among us. Norton even goes out of its way to work when you’re not working, activating itself for a scan when the computer goes idle. I’m not sure why every piece of anti-virus software does this, but now you at least know which program does.

On this interface you’ll find the customary scan options – quick scan, full scan, etc – that we’re all well familiar with. It’s been reported that quick scan can be done under 30 seconds. Excellent news if your computer isn’t already a little slow; but if it is, Norton is the least of your worries, really.

As CNet notes, Norton Antivirus is not exactly Norton Internet Security, so the “you get what you pay for rule” also applies to the reasonable $40 charge you can expect to see with the Antivirus software. But CNet mentions this amidst a favorable review, summing up:

Norton AntiVirus lacks the premium services offered in Norton Internet Security. These include a firewall, parental controls, Wi-Fi protection for unsecured hot spots, and identity protection including antiphishing tools and browser search result authentication for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Norton AntiVirus also offers only one license, instead of the three that come with its bigger brother. It does offer the same support network, lacking a searchable knowledge base but including e-mail, IM, phone support and the Symantec forums. The trial has been doubled from 15 days to 30. Norton’s recent approach to performance and its continued efficacy make Norton AntiVirus 2010 a must-consider program for its class.

Okay, so maybe a “must-consider” status from CNet is not exactly going to whip you into a Norton AntiVirus frenzy, but you can’t deny that many of the features look quite enticing over previous versions of Norton. We especially like the longer trial period – 15 days to 30. Nice.

Is There Anything to Complain About?

As a movie critic might tell, there’s always something to complain about. The lack of multiple licences comes to mind – sure, Norton AntiVirus is relatively cheap, but if that cheapness comes with pretty strict limitations, then it all starts to make sense. You can upgrade to Internet Security to get more licenses and you’ll save some money by buying in bulk – but only if you have bulk requirements.

Some of the issues come back to Symantec, however, as the AntiVirus software always seems to be solid these days in functionality and performance. Symantec’s support is not the best in the world, and though AntiVirus is a program that might not need a lot of support, customer support aficionados will not be the happiest of campers – but when are they ever?

The good news is that improvements have been made and Norton’s help page is as comprehensive as one could wish for. Thanks to the simple interface, you’ll be low on problems to complain about in the first place.

Relatively, these complaints don’t mean a heck of a lot compared to the positives of Norton. It’s not the most high-powered piece of software in the world, but it is a great an accessible way to fight viruses at home.

Is Norton AntiVirus 2010 a Must-Buy?

Considering you don’t have Norton AntiVirus yet and it’s already almost autumn, we can’t say that Norton’s 2010 is a must-buy. Like CNet said, however, it is a must-consider. It’s relatively inexpensive, easy to install, easy to run, and likes to stay out of your hair. If I had four characteristics I wanted out of an anti-virus software, those would all be finalists.

As for the power of the Norton software, you can expect high standards in this department. Norton has a strong reputation and we can’t see anything in the 2010 edition that will put a dent in that reputation.

Our conclusions: if you’re still hankering for a strong antivirus program, Norton 2010 is as good as any you’ll find. If you have trouble making decisions, going with Norton and forgetting everything for another year wouldn’t be the biggest mistake in the world. It’s the virus’ job to worry about the viruses, after all. Let Norton handle it.

Norton AntiVirus 2010

It’s enough to make Hillary Clinton shudder.

But what does it all mean? Are conservatives really that powerful and do they, well, have enough free time to actually influence how the Diggers of Digg interact and view their site on a daily basis? Is Digg – commonly thought to possess a left-leaning audience in general – really susceptible to this kind of manipulation?

Here are my thoughts. But first, the claims themselves:

The Claims

First, let’s address the heart of the issue: the claims being thrown around. According to Alternet.org – with bold font added:

One bury brigade in particular is a conservative group that has become so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours, regardless of subject material. Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content). This group is known as the Digg “Patriots.”

The Digg “Patriots,” of course, in quotes, because only true Patriots downvote right-leaning links!

The link to the Alternet post has earned tens of thousands of Diggs, putting it up there as one of the most popularly-boosted links ever to appear on the site. Under the link, you’ll find plenty of angry comments, including a “**** you” to our favorite Digger, clickfire. (Note: Check out Emory’s response here, in which he criticizes the guilt-by-association logic).

According to Digg founder Kevin Rose, Digg is “looking into it.” But that hasn’t stopped the news from making big headlines on the pages of social media sites like Mashable and Read Write Web and even ABC News.

To understand the claims, it helps to have a quick primer on what “digging” and “burying” is all about.

• Diggs are thumbs-up to a link – the more diggs a story receives, the higher chance it has on making it to the list of most popular current links, which you can find at the Digg front page. The more people like a link, the more popular it’s going to become.
• Buries are the opposites of diggs – the thumbs-down. When enough digg users “bury” a story, it gets just that: buried away, never to see the light of day.

Other features of Digg include the censorship of highly-buried links. According to critics, that’s exactly what the Digg Patriots were up to – using multiple accounts and other spam-like tactics to bury liberal-leaning links and get them censored away from Digg.

The Other Side of the Story and My Take

First off, a simple question: did the Digg Patriots really make Digg…more conservative?

Hardly. As RightWingNews notes,

It should come as no surprise to anyone that since Digg added the Political News and Political Opinion categories to the site, the membership is decidedly liberal. The addition of these categories prior to the 2008 election completely changed the tone of Digg forever. No longer was Digg known as a tech site. The front page would soon be populated with story after story bashing Republican and Conservative politicians and submissions glorifying left-leaning politicians.

Not only is the general membership of Digg overwhelming left-leaning, but the site administrators often make decisions that seem to favor liberal over conservatives. Again, that should come as no surprise as Digg founder Kevin Rose did little to hide his support for President Obama.

All the evidence you need for Digg’s general political left-leaning is to spend a few days at the site, viewing which political links become most popular and where the general tone of the comments suggest the majority of users are. It’s not a scientific poll, but needless to say if you’re a conservative, you’re probably not getting your news and links from Digg.

Which is fine. Some web sites will lean right and some will lean left. If the Digg Patriots were really censoring liberal links, then in my opinion they were wasting their time. According to Alternet.org, one of the conservatives wrote this, a kind of mission statement:

“The more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives.”

Really? You think the chips are going to fall that way? If the story of mass censorship on Digg is true, there’s a good chance that it represents the lower circles of thinking on the right.

But that doesn’t give these Digg Patriots critics a free pass.

Challenges to Liberal Domination

Go to a site like Reddit and you’ll find liberals posting links of FoxNews.com polls so they can spoil the results. Where is the controversy there? Where is the outcry against the liberals of Reddit?

Nowhere. Why? Because liberals feel justified in challenging mainstream popularity while refusing to accept similar tactics from conservatives.

This isn’t to claim that the Digg Patriots’ liberal critics are manipulators as well, but you really have to wonder about what gets them so peeved when an overwhelmingly liberal site like Digg – where you’ll find scant evidence of right-wing censorship by browsing their political categories – is manipulated by conservatives.

Are the conservatives wrong to do it? Probably. Do I expect liberals to hold to anything but a double-standard about social media manipulation? Absolutely not.

Liberals dislike conservative activists. Tea-partiers are denounced as “tea-baggers.” Ann Coulter gets pies thrown at her. Digg Patriots – while what they’re doing is indeed manipulation – are treated like they’ve secretly been running Digg for the past two years. They haven’t.

If liberals want me to side with them against conservative manipulation of web sites, they should also condemn liberal manipulation of web sites.

Further Reading, Viewing and Updates:

The Banned on the Web webcast featured several Digg Patriots including the Conservative Brawler blogger (see his coverage) who gave their side of the story, painting a very different picture than what was initially reported and spread virally.

A Digg Patriots’ ”investigator” is asked some tough questions by Andrew Sorcini, aka MrBabyMan on The Drill Down webcast.

The Social Blade Show interviewed a person from one of the teams, Jordan117 who helped review the information taken from the Digg Patriots’ Yahoo Group. In the interview, he stated that he didn’t think “releasing handles was a good idea” and describes the research process as ”chaotic,” in the “rush” to get the information out before Digg was “completely changed” (referring to the upcoming release of Digg version 4).

Google Voice is a way to have a new phone number with new features without changing your existing phone service, and it’s free. Simply put, it’s another surprisingly free cloud-based service that Google provides to its users.

Google Voice does have some competitors, at least in a certain sense. One of the main attractions of Google Voice is free calling and texting within the US, provided that you have an internet connection, a microphone, and speakers. Skype does one better than that, allowing you to make free calls with the same equipment to anywhere in the world, but there’s a bit of a catch. Skype can’t make free calls to cell phones, but Google Voice can.

That’s as far as competition goes, though, because most everything else that Google Voice can do hasn’t really been done before. Allowing you to have one phone number that will reach you through any of your phones and sending you emails containing written versions of any voicemail you missed are features that, so far, are unique to Google Voice, at least in the consumer space (and especially for free). And that’s not all that it can do.

But just because it can do a lot doesn’t mean that it appeals to everybody. While most people can appreciate the idea of one phone number, setting it up can seem daunting. Not because it’s hard, but because the average person isn’t going to understand how it works. Google does make the process fairly easy, but that doesn’t eliminate the appearance of difficulty before the user ever begins the process. On top of that, lots of people only have one phone: their cell phone. For those people, the biggest feature doesn’t amount to much at all.

Still, once someone dives into it, the most appealing features are easy to set up and enjoy. It’s some of the other stuff, the deeper features, that won’t draw your mother-in-law into creating an account. The ability to respond to the same text message either through your phone or through your computer is something that appeals much more to the tech savvy crowd. And for those people, it generally all boils down to what the system can do.

Well, what all can Google Voice do?

In short, a lot. Here’s a list of what it can do:

• Customizable multi-directional number forwarding
  • When someone calls your Google Voice number, you can have it forward to more than one phone simultaneously. When you pick one up and begin a conversation, the other phones stop ringing. This lets someone reach you no matter where you are with only one phone call. On top of this, the number forwarding will allow you to forward the number to specific phones, or even no phone at all, depending on who is calling or what time of day it is.
• Voicemail transcription
  • When someone calls your Google Voice number (which you pick out when you sign up for it), they can leave a message if you don’t answer. When they leave a message, Google Voice does everything it can to turn that audio-only voicemail into text, which it then sends to your email address. This allows you to see what the person wanted without having to make any disruptive calls.
• Personalized greetings
  • You can set it up so that different people get a different message when they reach your voicemail. For example, you can give a friendly greeting to your friends while still giving a professional greeting to your business partners or people who aren’t in your contact list.
• Sending voicemails to friends
  • If someone leaves a voicemail on your Google Voice account that is meant for you and someone else, or perhaps if you simply feel like sharing what the voicemail said, you can send the voicemail to a friend’s email account.
• Inexpensive international calling
  • For as low as $0.02 a minute for many countries, you can use Google Voice to make international calls through the internet or through your cell phone. They also give you a free $0.10 when you create a Google Voice account. I know, it’s not much, but it is a free 5 minutes to a lot of countries.
• SMS online text messaging and texting to email
  • You can view, and respond to, text messages that are sent to your Google Voice number either on your phone or online in your Google Voice account. If you want to, you can set it up so that the text messages are also sent to your email account. If you do that, you can respond to the text messages through your email as though it was a normal email. It will then be converted back to a text message and sent to the person who originally sent you a message.
• Call screening
  • You have the option of sending a caller to voicemail to see what they want to talk with you about before you answer. You can easily join the conversation whenever you want, or you can ignore it and keep the message in your voicemail inbox if you so choose.
• Blocking callers
  • If you want someone to stop calling you, you can easily block them using Google Voice. Once they have been blocked, if they try to call you again, they will get a message informing them that your number is “no longer in service”, which will only be true for them and anyone else you decide to block.
• Easy conference calls
  • If someone calls you while you are already speaking with somebody else, you can add them to the call to create a conference call by pressing 5. This way, not only is it easy to set up conference calls (you won’t have to remember long access numbers), it’s also free.
• BlackBerry, iPhone, and Android apps
  • You can make all of the above functionality even easier to access and use by downloading an application for your phone which will integrate Google Voice into your native dialing features.

All of these features, except for the phone applications, work for any phone that can normally make calls and receive text messages. And as an added bonus, if you ever change cell phones or service providers, it won’t matter if you keep the same phone number, because you can just change some settings in your Google Voice account to make everything work on your new phone.

It’s definitely all impressive in theory. It does, however, come with a few annoyances. The call screening ability means that you’ll always have to press either 1 or 2 every time someone calls. You can’t simply pick up, unless you turn off this feature altogether. And, of course, if everyone already has your current phone number, you’ll have to tell them your new Google phone number, at which point they’ll ask you why you have a new number. The last part is either good or bad, depending on your view. If you’re excited about Google Voice, then you probably won’t mind repeating the explanation to all of your friends. If you aren’t all that excited, it can definitely be annoying.

Still, overall, that is a lot of features that are all completely free. The positive aspects definitely outweigh the annoyances in this one.

Features and Pricing

InMotion Hosting offers a few different “Value Plans.” These plans are at the very bottom of the price range, and while they do provide very generous amounts of disk space and bandwidth for the cost, there are some limitations to consider depending on one’s needs. There are three different value hosting plans:

• Starter
• Basic
• Max

For this review, we are testing the Basic plan.

Often times the differences between a host’s plans in the same category are minimal, yet with InMotion Hosting it is very important to consider what you specifically need. One doesn’t really need to consider the amount of disk space and bandwidth as the amounts provided far exceed what the average hosting customer will use. InMotion Hosting has created hosting plans that selectively impose limitations.

For customers who might be new to hosting and are looking for a built-in website builder, it is important to notice that InMotion Hosting does not include this feature on their Starter plan, but it is available on the Basic and Max hosting plans.

For those interested in dynamic, database-driven websites, which would be any content management system (WordPress or Drupal, for example), it is important to note that the Starter plan does not offer any MySQL databases. Most websites today require databases to function, unless they are simply composed of static pages. The Starter plan also does not support Flash, so not only must pages be static, but it is also not possible to provide Flash content.

There aren’t many differences between the Basic and Max plans. The additional features offered in the Max plan include the ability to host additional domains, another database, additional FTP accounts, email SPAM protection, additional e-commerce features including the availability of a merchant account, website statistics, and access to raw log files. None of the value plans support subdomains, so it’s not possible to have something like help.example.com. All three plans permit PHP, Perl, and CGI scripting. For the average customer, the Basic plan would probably work well.

The monthly pricing for the three plans is $3, $4, and $5, respectively. The only billing cycle available for the Value plans is 24 months, so two years of hosting must be paid up-front. Most hosts offer more flexible billing terms than this, but this hosting is quite inexpensive.

InMotion Hosting provides a 30 day money back guarantee, which is comparable to many hosts. With the two-year billing cycle, if a customer cancels after that guarantee period they are not refunded for the remaining time. For example, if a customer cancels on day 31, they would still be paying between $69 and $115 for the other 23 months of hosting. Some hosts are willing to provide a pro-rated refund for unused hosting.

Although not reviewed here, InMotion Hosting also has other services including “business class” hosting, virtual private server (VPS) hosting, dedicated hosting, and web design.

Terms of Service

InMotion Hosting’s terms of service are quite standard. As I read through them, there were no terms that stood out or were in anyway abnormal; the content was pretty straight-forward. Like many hosts, InMotion Hosting does not permit pornographic material, IRC chats, torrent software, proxies, etc. to be hosted.

The 30 day money-back guarantee was not listed on their terms of service, yet it is expressed on the website. Generally hosts add this to the formal agreement, yet it for some reason is not present in the terms of use. The guarantee is detailed elsewhere as being limited to the first 30 days of service and no refund will be provided thereafter. There are certain things that are non-refundable, as usual, such as domain name registration fees.

Another thing to note is that there is no stated uptime guarantee. Many hosts will provide about a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Control Panel

InMotion hosting, like many web hosting companies, provides the industry-standard cPanel control panel. Upon logging in, the instance of cPanel provided looks similar to most any other. There are areas for managing preferences, mail, files, logs, security, domains, databases, software/services, and advanced features.

Using cPanel’s graphical interface makes it quite simple to manage everything including email accounts, files, website statistics, and databases.

Testing

After signing up, I received a handful of emails along with a phone call. Within about 10-15 minutes after placing the order for my hosting account, I received a phone call confirming my account. Since the domain I signed up with had the word “blogging” in it, the representative calling recommended that I consider upgrading to the business-level hosting as the Value plans were “about 50% slower” and he also noted that my plan only provides one MySQL database. I asked if it was possible to later upgrade and I was assured that I could.

The first email I received stated that my order was being processed and that I should expect an email or phone call to confirm it, which I did receive, as noted above. After confirming my account, I then received a welcome email with my account details and steps to get started along with another email serving as a receipt of my order. The welcome email was full of helpful information providing all account details, how to get started, and where I could go to find support. This information is invaluable for those who might be unfamiliar with hosting, and is useful for any hosting customer.

After setting up my domain name to point to my hosting account, I was able to begin using the service. InMotion Hosting, like many web hosting companies, provides a placeholder homepage before content is added. Luckily they leave the page ad-free with just a handful of links to their services along with the InMotion logo and a message stating “Website Coming Soon! Stay Tuned.”

The first thing I wanted to do was to set up a blog on my website. The Fantastico auto-installer is often available in cPanel. Using this interface, it is simple and fast to install various online applications including systems to facilitate blogs, classifieds, content management, discussion boards, and more. I selected WordPress and the option for a new installation. On the next page I only had to fill in a handful of fields and then I clicked to install my blog. After confirming my selections, my blog was instantly created.

Since InMotion Hosting does not explicitly imply a statement or guarantee of uptime, it is important to consider what customers can expect to get if they sign on. During the month before writing this review, my InMotion Hosting account experienced 99.12% uptime with about 6.75 hours of downtime over six different occasions. The longest instance of downtime was about 4.5 hours. This might be atypical since the uptime across five months was 99.78% and that same 4.5 hour instance was the longest during that period. Pingdom, an uptime monitoring service, was used to obtain these statistics. Many hosts guarantee 99.9% uptime, and InMotion Hosting does not demonstrate the ability to provide this, though their uptime is likely acceptable for most customers.

Here's what uptime looked like during the last month

6 months of uptime monitoring

Customer Support

InMotion Hosting provides 24/7 technical support. There are a handful of support channels available including phone, email, live chat, knowledge base, help desk, and forum.

Effective phone support can often be a very defining factor for a host. Just after noon on a weekday I called InMotion Hosting customer support. Immediately after dialing the number I was connected to an automated gateway informing me that I had reached InMotion Hosting and that my satisfaction was guaranteed. I pressed 2 for technical support and within less than 30 seconds I was connected to a representative.

The representative simply asked how he could help me, and didn’t require any upfront information regarding my account, which is convenient when you simply have a general question as I did. The representative was very easy to understand and I was very confident that he was in-house, or at least within the United States.

I told him that I had just set up a WordPress blog and was interested to know if I could redirect my domain name to point directly to the directory that my blog was in, as I had placed my blog in /blog. So I wanted it to redirect from example.com to example.com/blog, for example. He instructed me that what I wanted was found by clicking “Redirects” under the “Domains” section in cPanel and he then guided me through setting up the redirect. At the end of the call he asked for my primary domain name for “documentation purposes.” The call time was about 3 minutes and 30 seconds. I was quite satisfied with the phone support I received.

I decided to test out their live chat next. At about 12:30 PM the same day, I initiated a live chat with an InMotion Hosting representative. After inputting my name, email address, and question I was informed that there were three chat requests before me. I figured I would probably need to wait a few minutes, but it was only a minute later when I was connected to a representative.

I was first asked for my primary domain name. About a minute later the representative thanked me and then took another 30 seconds or so to inform me that I was describing what is known as “hotlink protection.” He then provided me with a link to a page listing the video tutorial for setting up hotlink protection in cPanel. The total length of the chat was approximately five minutes.

I watched the video tutorial and it guided me through enabling the hotlink protection. Although it might be frustrating to some customers to be sent to a tutorial instead of being instructed by the representative, the video tutorials are effective in showing exactly how to work with cPanel, and are likely much easier to follow than written instructions.

Conclusion

InMotion Hosting’s Value plans do indeed provide good service at a value. Ideally the required billing cycle would not be as long as 24 months as that is quite a long-term payment. It would also be nice if they provided an uptime guarantee, but they do provide about 99% uptime. With the industry-standard cPanel control panel and quality customer service, InMotion Hosting seems quite solid.

Pros: Good value, quality customer support via several channels?

Cons: Long billing cycle, no uptime guarantee

Bottomline: Solid host providing quality service at a good value

Rating:

Reviewer: Kyle J. Summers

http://www.inmotion hosting.com

Features

Their features are collectively similar, both of them offering the basics. There are, however, a few differences here and there between the two. Here is a list of differences in their features. As you look through the list, keep in mind that very every difference, there are 2 to 3 similarities between the two. So, even though this list might look long, it’s not actually THAT long. Also, keep in mind that this is only a comparison of each of their respective cheapest offerings, and that the differences tend to get even smaller as their respective prices go up.

Just a note: unspecified does not necessarily mean that they do not support it, it simply means that they make no claim to support it on their site. It does, however, mean that there is a chance that they do not support it. Furthermore, bolded items are more likely to be important compared to the other items.

As you can see, at least at the base level, IX Web Hosting definitely has a wider breadth of features. However, as our HostGator Review points out, they have all the essentials of a shared web host.

IX Web Hosting earns 1 point for having more features.

Pricing

To get detailed pricing for IX Web Hosting, you actually have to start the ordering process. This is annoying, but you can always start the order process and quit it once you find the information you need. It’s much easier to see HostGator’s prices, which is good, but doesn’t necessarily make them the best. Let’s see what the prices come out to:

It looks like IX Web Hosting wins for any long-term commitment. However, something important to note is that they are currently in a promotional period right now that shaves off $3.00 a month for the longer terms. So, the 3 year plan could increase back to $250.20 at any time, which would make HostGator the cheapest. They don’t provide all of their normal rates right now, so it’s unfortunately not possible to determine how expensive their 12 month option normally is.

Both IX Web Hosting and HostGator earn 1 point for being a better deal… sometimes.

Terms of Service

HostGator’s Terms of Service seems more strict than IX Web Hosting’s does. For example, it includes a fairly long list of topics that their customers aren’t allowed to host on their websites, including a few things that seem relatively harmless like investment sites and even some online games (RPG’s, a.k.a. Role Playing Games, and MUD’s, a.k.a. Multi-User Dungeon games, for example). They also have very strict guidelines about how much of the server’s resources you can use. For example, using more than 25% of a server’s resources for more than 90 seconds at a time can get your account suspended or banned, which is problematic since it’s impossible to actually know how much of the server’s resources you are using.

HostGator loses 1 point for being so strict.

Control Panel

Almost every shared web host uses cPanel as their Control Panel of choice. HostGator is no different, and they use a fairly standard cPanel configuration, complete with Fantastico, which is great for quickly installing a number of things (like WordPress). IX Web Hosting does not use cPanel, though. Our IX Web Hosting Review states that IX Web Hosting uses a variation of H-Sphere, which is old and kinda tacky, but performs all the essential functions in a straightforward manner. But, if you want a familiar Control Panel, IX Web Hosting is likely lacking in that area.

Familiar:

Unfamilar:

HostGator earns 1 point for being familiar.

Customer Support

Both HostGator and IX Web Hosting have excellent customer support. They both provide support 24 hours a day through multiple avenues, they answer questions clearly and quickly, and there’s not really anything to complain about. However, IX Web Hosting does get a slight 1-up for having a call center in the USA, ensuring that you can understand what is being said when you call them. So, in this area, IX Web Hosting does better… but barely.

IX Web Hosting earns 1 point for having a US-based call center.

The Final Score

IX Web Hosting: 3

HostGator: 1

It would appear that, as it stands right now, IX Web Hosting is the winner. Lower prices, more features, and their terms of service aren’t quite as strict. However, they may only be a clear winner while their promotion is going. Once that promotion wears off, they won’t have lower prices, and that could make the comparison that much more difficult. For now, though, I can personally recommend IX Web Hosting over HostGator.

–March 2010, Steve Miller

Visit HostGator or IX Web Hosting

The Yahoo Toolbar, of course, has a lot of features. Some of which you will probably expect by now. Bookmarks, Yahoo Mail, a quick Yahoo search bar, and quick links to a bunch of Yahoo websites (Games, Finance, Music, Sports, etc.) are all there right out of the gate. Another feature that is available immediately but isn’t enabled by default is the pop-up blocker, which is as effective as you would expect. It catches most, but not all, popups. Some features it provides are a little less expected, though.

The biggest new thing in Yahoo’s toolbar is the built in Anti-Spy tool. It’s not a full anti-virus program, so it’s not going to catch and delete a hardcore trojan virus sitting on your computer, but it will catch just about any spy-ware or ad-ware, which are generally used to spy on your behavior, sometimes to force specific ads on you and sometimes to attempt to steal private information from you (like credit card information). However, this anti-spy-ware program isn’t ready immediately after installing the toolbar. The first time you try to run Anti-Spy, you’ll be greeted with a pop-up that asks you to install the program. The installation is relatively painless, and once you install it, it’s good to go.

Installation is pretty straightforward. Just go to this address: http://toolbar.yahoo.com where you’ll find the Yahoo Toolbar download. Then, click the Download Now button to download Yahoo Toolbar. It will come up with a bunch of options that clearly states the changes it will make before you choose to install it. This is very important, because some toolbars won’t tell you that you are about to change your default search engine, and it’s not always easy to change it back.

Click the “I agree” button and it will install Yahoo Toolbar for you. Just follow the directions it gives you on-screen. There will most likely be a bunch of buttons to press if you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, but you can just keep clicking on “allow”, “run”, or “ok” and it should go through correctly. Sometimes on installation, Windows will think that it didn’t install correctly and ask if you want to re-install it. Don’t re-install it this way, it probably just isn’t done installing. This mess of pop-ups is probably the worst part about the toolbar, but these pop-ups are due to Windows, not the toolbar, so it’s hard to blame the toolbar for it.

Once installed, it will display a bunch of convenient options that allow you to customize the toolbar as you want it:

If you don’t know what you want yet, there is a + sign next to the buttons that allows you to easily add more anytime you want.

Yahoo Toolbar holds up pretty well against Google Toolbar. At it’s default installation, and without changing anything, Yahoo Toolbar actually has quite a few more things you can do with it. Granted, it’s pretty easy to add extra buttons or apps to either toolbar, but for the beginning user, they might just stick with what’s there to begin with, and Yahoo has more of it.

If you’re a more advanced user, almost everything that can be done with one can be done with the other, so it might boil down to which search engine you prefer. They both have plenty to offer functionality-wise.

Pros: Lots of functionality, anti-spyware program built in, customizable without logging in to Yahoo

Cons: Forces you to be stuck with a Yahoo search bar whether you like it or not

Overall: An excellent toolbar. Even if you don’t like Yahoo’s search, it’s worth giving it a shot.

Steve’s Rating: 5/5 stars.

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