Web hosting providers have become, more or less, a commodity - they’re all over the place. On one hand this is good - you have lots of options. On the other hand, it makes the decision a bit more difficult since it’s not that easy to know which web hosting provider is a good one. As the saying goes “on the net nobody knows if you’re a dog” - it’s easy to put together a nice web page, have attractive pricing and call yourself a web hosting provider. Nobody will ever know that your hosting servers are actually in your basement.

Let me give you a piece of advice - if you want to spare yourself trouble in this area in the future, then stay away from free web hosting providers or those that call themselves cheap web hosting providers. As it’s true in all areas of life, it’s the same here - you’ll get what you pay for. You might pay a very, very low monthly fee or be promised a ridiculously large space or bandwidth quota but when trouble hits you’ll find that nobody’s home - good luck then.

Something like that happened to me a few years ago when I was hosting with one of those ‘budget’ web hosting companies and I certainly ‘paid’ for it. One day, out of the blue, the company just decided to close its doors - “business wasn’t good” - and we, the customers, were all stuck trying to find a new web hosting plan virtually overnight.

I learned my lesson. With the next one I decided that price alone won’t be the deciding factor. It’s certainly important to not pay more than you have to but I was now looking for a good track record and a company that had some history.

That’s how I eventually found 1&1. At its origins 1&1 is a German company that eventually became one of the leading web hosting providers in Europe. In 2003 it started an aggressive expansion in the United States with a very interesting offer: it invited U.S. users to try its services free for 3 years - that’s how confident they were that those customers would stay as paying customers after that.

I’ve been a very happy customer with them for the last 5 years. I have a variety of sites with them, including this blog, and I can tell you that they certainly lived up to their promise of reliable hosting.

Let me give you some stats about them so you can see that they’re not kidding around:

• 3,400 employees including 250 developers and administrators
• 5 datacenters across the world
• 40,000 servers
• 7 million customers
• 9 million domain names registered by those customers through 1&1
• 24/7 phone and email support for all their customers
• an excellent FAQ area for those who like finding answers on their own
• a full list of web hosting services: domain registration, personal web hosting, business web hosting, Linux and Windows plans, Microsoft Exchange hosting, dedicated and virtual servers, ecommerce web hosting, SharePoint hosting … you name it, they have it - if you have a need in the web hosting area, they can take care of it

This year their parent company is celebrating 20 years in business - how many web hosting companies can make a claim like that? For this occasion they’re offering 50% off regular prices on pretty much their entire service offering.

Am I saying that no other company out there is a reliable web hosting company? No, not at all - I’m sure that there are others out there that offer good services in this area. But, if you’re looking for a stable and financially secure company with a reliable track record for which web hosting is THE business, not an after-thought, then look no further - 1&1 is certainly that company… and you can be sure that they’ll be around in the future.

I’ve been a happy customer for 5 years and I look forward to many more years of reliable service from them.

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I personally believe that one should only look at ways to increase personal productivity once the list of tasks was properly inspected and that person is convinced that each task, once completed, will bring that person closer to his or her personal goals. It really makes no sense to try to be more productive in doing things that will only sidetrack you from your goals - I think we all can agree that it’s so easy for such ‘junk’ to-do items to appear on our task lists.

I personally read many books and web articles on the topic of personal productivity. Many people out there claim to have come up with the ultimate system for helping you get things done. Much of what I read on the topic I forgot already - it’s quite obvious then that such advice is only useful and has a chance of working when you’re actually ready to put it in practice.

Here are two rules I’ve been trying to follow lately to help me get more out of my time:

1. Redeem the time by dividing larger tasks into smaller parts that can be completed when time is available.

I personally would prefer to work on something from start to finish and not be interrupted. I really don’t like loose ends that result when I have to start various tasks without completing them. Well…that’s what I’d like - but life certainly doesn’t work like that. It’s very rare when I can say “here’s a two hour block - go ahead and do task A”. Life just isn’t partitioned like that - interruptions are a fact of life. Therefore, when will that two hour task actually get done?

Let me give you an example. Say you place an order for pizza delivery, and you have 20 minutes until it gets there and you can start eating. What do you do in those 20 minutes? I would often consider that as wasted time - not really long enough for doing anything important - and would probably just go to digg.com (fill in your favorite time waster website) to see what’s happening in the world. I just let go of twenty minutes in which I did nothing that brought me closer to my goals. This was mainly because I considered that time period as not long enough to fit any of the tasks on my list. If I had divided, in advance, a larger task into smaller parts with concrete goals, maybe I would have actually been able to work on something important during that time.

I’d just like to clarify here that I’m not proposing the idea of multitasking - this is not what it’s about. Multitasking is something that’s better left to the CPUs in our computers. If anybody says that they can handle 2 phone calls and 3 emails at the same time I think they’re just deceiving themselves. The act of context switching - moving from one task to another - can be time consuming and should be kept to a minimum.

What I’m proposing here is a way to make the most of those 10, 20, 30 minute intervals during the day when we might actually be able to get stuff done if our big and important tasks would be properly divided into smaller parts.

2. Try not to handle the same issue more than once.

This is actually a rewrite of a suggestion I saw somewhere on how to be more productive when dealing with email: do not handle the same email more than once. The idea is this: when an email comes into your inbox, do one of three things:

• if it’s junk, delete it and get it out of there
• if it’s something you can deal with relatively fast, then do it right away and get that email out of there
• otherwise, if the email pertains to an issue that would take longer to deal with, quickly file it away into a special area and deal with it later

The idea is to keep the inbox clean at all times - treat the inbox as a routing station not as a collection area. This way you’ll quickly know what you still have to work on.

I try to take the same approach when dealing with my to-do list. Once I have a good set of priorities and tasks (I’m done cleaning the junk), then I try to first get done those things that can be taken care of quickly. This way I can quickly get the satisfaction of actually getting some stuff done. For the longer tasks, I’ll quickly divide them into smaller parts (see above) and then file them away for when time will become available. What I try to avoid here is having to constantly look at task A and ask myself how I’d go about doing it. I should only have to do that once. After that I’ll divide it into smaller parts and work on those individually. If I don’t follow this principle, then I would just get discouraged about my productivity since I’d keep looking at the same long task that won’t change and won’t go away.

There it is - I hope you’ll find this information useful.

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So, what exactly is domain tasting?

It turns out that when you purchase a new domain name there is a grace period of 5 days during which you can go back to the registrar from which you purchased the domain, and get back a full refund for the price you paid for the domain, should you choose not to keep it.

Sounds innocent enough … however, there are plenty of people and companies out there who figured out that this policy is actually a big loophole that allows them to make some money. What do they do? They register all kinds of domains that they really have no intention of using for a business or for a real purpose (such as adding meaningful content), fill up the pages with ads (mainly Google AdSense), and then wait for people to stumble across those domains and hopefully click on some ads. To give you an idea of the extent of this practice, here’s a statistic from the CEO of GoDaddy, one of the biggest registrars out there: by February 2007, out of 55.1 million domain names registered, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept.

If the domain tasters see a good stream of ad revenue coming in during this 5 day grace period, they keep the domain. Otherwise, they go back to the registrar, get their refund, and go ‘taste’ another domain … thus the name ‘domain tasting’. Domains that are usually successful in this scheme are expired domains that still have links in the search indexes, domains for misspelled products and so on - you get the idea.

What I didn’t really understand is why would Google allow AdSense to be used on such domains to begin with. I know that when you initially get an AdSense account Google is pretty good about checking the domain, making sure it’s valid and so on. However, once you do have a Google AdSense account, it’s much easier to use AdSense ads for that account on new websites. According to this answer in the Google AdSense FAQ it’s quite simple to add new sites to an existing Google AdSense account, much simpler apparently than it is to actually open an AdSense account to begin with.

So, as part of this change in its policies, Google will simply not serve AdSense ads on such sites that were registered for less than 5 days.

I applaud this change on Google’s part. Since domain tasters rely heavily on AdSense ads to make their money during this grace period I think that this change could bring the practice to a halt. This would mean that the rest of us might actually be able to find a decent domain name when looking for one, not to mention that hopefully a great number of ad-filled junk domains will simply go away. By stopping this practice Google is willingly saying ‘no’ to part of its ad income (keep in mind that Google gets paid from its advertisers for all those ads displayed on such domains) so I’m glad they’re doing something positive with the great power they have over how we use the Internet.

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Now, there are still plenty of people who are happy enough with the old telephone system and that’s fine - but, among my tech-savvy friends, I know many who gave it up long ago and either rely on just their cell phones or jumped head first in the world of VoIP.

For a variety of reasons until now I didn’t seriously consider either of those two options. For one thing I have a DSL connection at home with AT&T and, as far as I can tell, I can’t separate the phone service from their DSL offering meaning that I need to have phone service with them in order to get DSL. I heard some rumors a while back that the requirement was supposed to go away but I have yet to see that.

The cell phone, at least based on my usage, is not quite ready to replace the analog phone at my house. I just don’t want to sit there counting how many minutes I have left or have to make calls only after certain hours - just won’t cut it for me.

As far as VoIP options go, I think there are only two serious contenders: Vonage and Skype.

I tried Vonage a while back and wasn’t very impressed with the quality, not to mention that since I have to pay for regular phone service anyway (even without any extras) their unlimited plan for $25 a month is not exactly that great of a deal.

Skype would be a possibility - their $3 a month pro plan for unlimited domestic calls sounds intriguing. The main problem I have with it is that it’s all done through the computer - if I want to call using a device that actually resembles a phone (i.e. not just some headset with a microphone) then I’d actually have to invest in special phones that would work with the service.

A few weeks ago I came across another company that shows great potential in this area: MagicJack. They’ve actually started their VoIP service some time around April, 2007 but somehow I never heard of them until now.

What makes their offering so interesting? Two things: they have a great, simple product and they appear to be backed by a reliable company.

MagicJack is a small USB stick - one end plugs into a USB port on your computer and the other end has a regular phone jack into which you can plug ANY analog phone. Once you connect it to your computer it will automatically install some small software it needs for its operation - that’s all there is to it.

It costs $39 for the device and it includes the first year of service for free. You get UNLIMITED local and long-distance domestic calls along with all the usual features such as caller id, call waiting, forwarding, and voicemail. After the first year the phone service is $20 per year.

You might say that it sounds a lot like Skype and you’re right in a way. However, the fact that I can plug in any existing phone I might have makes all the difference to me. I could plug in the base for my cordless system and I’d have instant VoIP on all the cordless phones in my house. It’s brilliant in its simplicity.

The company behind MagicJack is called YMax. One of its founders is a known telecom exec by the name of Dan Borislow. Another thing that sets YMax appart is that it is actually a certified exchange carrier in almost all the states. This means that it actually owns the physical lines over which many of the MagicJack calls travel once they enter the phone system, and that allows it to be very competitive in its pricing.

All in all I think it’s something worth checking out. I actually just purchased the unit, and I’m waiting for it to arrive. If it works as advertised, then I’ll probably be able to get the plan on my regular phone down to the basics, just enough to have a line that would allow me to have DSL service.

I just hope that the MagicJack business model is sustainable in the long-term since they do appear to have a great product. I would hate to see them go the way of SunRocket, another VoIP provider that had to close its doors not long ago.

If you happen to be using a MagicJack, please leave a comment here - I’d love to hear your impressions about it.

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Here are some of my favorite ones:

Google Toolbar - Google is of course THE search engine to use and this toolbar will bring much of the Google functionality within the browser itself … the easiest way to search

ColorfulTabs - I just can’t remember what browsing was like before Firefox introduced tabs. Tabs are indeed a great feature but keeping more than a few open will make it a bit tough to find the right one when needed … this extension should help

Tab Groups - if you think tabs were a great idea, then check out this extension … it allows you to group together tabs based on whatever criteria you want. If you’re a power user, then this extension is a must.

FoxyTunes - it allows you to easily control your media player from within Firefox … why toggle between multiple applications when you can do it all from within the browser?

JSView - if you’re a web developer, then this extension should save you some time … it will enable you to easily see the source code for all the css or js files referenced by the page you’re currently looking at

StumbleUpon - a few years ago one of my favorite sites was a site that would send you to a randomly selected site from an internal list of links - it was a neat way to discover new sites that one didn’t know about. The problem was that you had no idea what type of site you might end up on and whether it would be even remotely interesting to you. StumbleUpon fixes all that as it will learn what you like and help you uncover new sites based on your interests.

ColorZilla - if you come across some interesting color on a site and you’d like to use it but you have no idea what the color code is, then this is the perfect extension to have around … you can easily find the color code by pointing to that color on the page - of course, all from within the browser

IE View - Firefox is the best browser out there but sadly some sites still make use of technologies (such as ActiveX) that only work in Internet Explorer. If you ever come across such sites that you have to use, then this extension will allow you to easily open an IE browser directly to the page in question.

Web Developer - this extension is a must if you do any kind of web development. It has so many features that it’s not easy to even list them all … best to just install it and try it out

These extensions are just some of the ones I use almost on a daily basis. The Firefox community created thousands of such add-ons - take some time to check them out, install any that seem interesting or useful to you, and make the most of Firefox.

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I know though very well that desktop-based news readers, such as those from Newsgator, have their own advantages. I recently came across a really great article at LifeHacker.com that goes into great details about the advantages and disadvantages of using a web-based news reader, such as Google Reader, versus a desktop-based application.

So, take a look at the article below, especially if you’re still not sure about the best way to follow your favorite news sources and blogs:

The Web-Based vs. Desktop-Based Newsreader Showdown

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There is, however, another way to build a business which still revolves around eBay but which doesn’t involve you selling a single thing in the eBay marketplace.

This “other way” opportunity is based on the eBay affiliate program and a great tool which makes entry into this opportunity not only possible but also super easy. This tool is called “Build A Niche Store“.

Now if you don’t know – an affiliate program enables you as an individual internet entrepreneur to promote the products of a company in exchange for a commission on all sales that you refer.

You are basically operating as an internet middleman and connecting internet browsers to particular products and companies through you own network of websites and marketing methods.

The idea of an affiliate program for eBay was not really a new concept for me - I know that a lot of big sites, such as Amazon or eBay, have an affiliate program where they pay you for the traffic you drive to them. eBay though just didn’t strike me as a good possibility to look into since eBay items, by their very nature, are very dynamic. The longest auctions on eBay last for 7 to 10 days - to build a site based on affiliate links to eBay listings would mean that I would constantly have to keep refreshing that site to keep it up-to-date with the latest listings. This is exactly there “Build A Niche Store” helps - but more on that later.

If we return to the eBay affiliate program, eBay actually invites you to promote all of the product listings in the eBay marketplace and in exchange for your efforts will pay you up to 75% of the revenue they make from each
sale you refer plus up to $35 for each new active eBay member you refer.

You can read about the eBay.com affiliate program here

What this means is that you can earn up to three quarters of eBay’s revenue simply for connecting people to the products listed in the eBay marketplace. Not only do you get to partner with the best branded marketplace in the world, you also get access to and control over ALL of the products listed in this marketplace. The eBay product inventory becomes YOUR product inventory and yet you do NOT have to stock items, deal with customers, organize shipping or process refunds.

You are no longer limited to selling only those products which you can buy and sell for a profit margin. You can choose ANY niche market and promote those eBay products relevant to your chosen niche outside of the eBay marketplace, funnelling targeted traffic through to eBay and into your own affiliate commissions.

Golf clubs, sewing kits, laptops, dog collars, diamond rings, Florida real estate…you name it.

If you know eBay you know how BIG it is – there are NO limits.

At this point you might be thinking - well this sounds interesting but in reality is there any money in it? Well, here’s the shocker – eBay’s top affiliates make over 1 million dollars a month. That’s right – 8 figures a year without stocking, selling or shipping a single thing!

Now eBay does provide some basic free tools to help you succeed as an eBay affiliate and build an affiliate business BUT it has been the development of a tool outside of eBay that has really opened this up as a legitimate business opportunity.

The tool, as I mentioned earlier, is called “Build A Niche Store” and what it enables you to do is build eBay affiliate websites targeted to any eBay niche you want. These act as the medium through which you funnel targeted visitors to eBay.

Here are a couple of examples:

Race Car eBay Affiliate Website
Golf eBay Affiliate Website
Steam Showers and Saunas

As you can see, these are professional looking websites that contain all of those eBay products related to their target niche inside a searchable store format, each of which automatically contains your eBay affiliate id.

These stores then automatically update as new products are listed for sale and old listing expire from the eBay marketplace and the software has built in development features which enable you to create new store pages, add content to these pages, create content pages, modify your template etc etc.

Basically, in the space of about 10 minutes (once you are familiar with how the software works) you can create a fully functional eBay affiliate website targeted to the niche market of your choice.

Your store content is all search engine friendly which will provide the foundation for attracting targeted traffic from the search engines and you can then use the development features to attract more targeted visitors which will in turn mean more eBay affiliate commissions.

It really is a brilliant concept and I’ve been hearing great things about the guys behind the project and the member forum which you get lifetime access to when you purchase the product.

Build A Niche Store comes with a step by step user manual which will walk even the most technically inexperienced through setting up their eBay affiliate website, 9 professional template layouts which can be customized (from inside your admin panel) to match your target niche, lifetime member forum access, comprehensive product support and possibly most importantly – an UNLIMITED domain license which means you can build as many of these niche websites as
you want for the small one time fee.

Think about how many niches eBay caters to!

How big could your eBay affiliate business be?!

This product gets my full recommendation – check it out today…

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My first RSS news reader was AmphetaDesk - it’s probably the grandfather of RSS readers. It was quite a neat idea back then to have one application where you could read news and stories from many websites instead of running around the web to see the latest articles on each separate site. I think it was an application that was ahead of its time - not too many people knew about it, but it made such a big difference for those who discovered it and learned how to use it.

Not too long after that I discovered a number of web sites that allowed me to read aggregated news directly on the web - I’ve mentioned these in a different post. They were a great resource but they had one major drawback - I didn’t have much control over which sites they pulled feeds from. It was nice to have a quick place to look at news stories and posts but I soon realized that I wanted more control over the content.

Once I started this blog I realized even more that I needed a better way to follow all the blogs I wanted to read for inspiration and ideas. I had a few Windows-based RSS readers that I tried over time but, for one reason or another, I really wasn’t impressed with any of them. In some of the earlier versions of these apps there was one thing that always bothered me - while I was able to control the various RSS feeds, I felt that the user interface lacked a bit in giving me good control over how I read the posts, which ones I wanted to revisit, and which ones I could let go. I never really knew for sure what posts I read and what I still had to look at.

I finally decided to try Google Reader since I read so much about it on the web - and I also liked the idea of having a good web-based RSS reader that I could access from all the computers I use. Well, as soon as I started using it I noticed something odd - as I was browsing around the various feeds, articles were just mysteriously disappearing. It didn’t take me long to figure out that Google Reader was trying to get cute on me and by default was marking articles as read as soon as I looked at them. That was exactly the problem I had with some of the Windows-based RSS readers that I tried earlier - nice feature for those who need it but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

As soon as I realized what was going on I started looking for a way to turn off that feature. I found it eventually under preferences, in the section called ‘Scroll tracking’. Now I can mark articles and posts as read on my terms - moving around subscriptions doesn’t mark posts as read just because I look at them. That’s the way I like it

Such a simple concept yet it’s probably what enabled me to get attached to Google Reader. There are so many other things to discover in there - I read a lot about the various keyboard shortcuts - but for now I’m quite happy to just be able to follow my favorite blogs with a user interface that works the way I want it.

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Well, before you think that your attic is full with things that nobody could possibly ever need, remember the old saying: someone’s trash is somebody else’s treasure. You just need to find that somebody who could treasure the things you want to give up and allow you to make some money in the process.

eBay, of course, is just the place for this. If you have an eBay account (and even if you don’t have one yet) and think that you couldn’t possibly have anything that someone would want, think again. I recently came across this free e-book from Scott Foster where he gives examples of 91 common everyday items that you can sell for some nice profits on eBay.

Here are some quick examples to give you an idea:

• Cast Iron Skillets
• Two Color Golf Balls
• Dealer Manuals For Vehicles
• Time Life Book Series
• … and many more

You could have hundreds of dollars just laying around in your garage or attic - get the free e-book from the link below and see if you have any hidden treasures that you might sell on eBay:

Overlooked Treasure — Great Profits from Everyday Items!

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Many of us look at our ISPs (internet service providers) and expect them to save us from the spam avalanche. Unfortunately, I’m not so sure it’s the ISP’s problem to begin with. I see it more as a case of ‘your ISP won’t help you if you don’t help yourself first’. Why do I say that? Because in my opinion we, the internet users, are often too eager to give up our email address to anybody who’ll ask for it.

Here’s a simple scenario: you’re online browsing and you come across a site that promises you a free e-book on a topic that interests you or maybe free access to a members-only area that contains some information that you might actually want. What’s the catch? You have to sign-up for the free information with your email address because they’ll send you everything you need via email. So you happily give them your email address, get the promised information, and then a week later you notice that the level of spam email in your inbox is higher than normal. Coincidence? Most likely not…

Now, I’m not saying here that every site out there that gives away stuff via email will necessarily give away or sell your email address to spammers. I’m sure there are many legitimate sites out there that have the proper privacy policies in place and actually follow them. That’s not the point - the point is that I should not even have to care about this if I’m careful. Whenever I come across such sites and I want the info they have I don’t even bother trying to see if they have a privacy policy in place or if they appear to be a legitimate site with a good history. That’s not important - I’m not there to enter in a business relationship with them by paying for a product. I’d probably be more careful in that case. They want to give something away for free via email and I’d like to obtain that without compromising my email address.

What options do I have? Here are two quick ideas that will save you from a lot of possible spam in the future:

1. Use a separate email address
This is a very simple approach since it’s so easy to get an email address with one of the many free email services such as Yahoo, Hotmail and even Gmail. When I come across a site that needs my email to give me the promised information I just give them this separate email address instead of my main one. Once I submit the request the web sites are usually pretty good about responding right away via email so I can quickly check if I received what I was looking for. It doesn’t matter to me how much other junk mail gets collected in this particular inbox - I don’t have to deal with it. I only check it when I know I’ll receive something I’m interested in and that’s that. Spammers can send spam to that email address all they want - it won’t really affect me since I won’t have to sit there every day looking at it.

2. Use a disposable email address
This approach is similar to the one above but it can sometimes be even simpler. What do I mean by a disposable email address? There are free services out there that create an email address for you on the spot without you actually creating an account, having to remember a password and all that other work. It’s a quick temporary email address that you can use right away to receive that one email you’re waiting for and then you can just forget about it. Here are two such services:

• Mailinator
• 2Prong

So there you have it - if you want your email address to stay private and not fall in the wrong hands then be careful who you give it out to. Once it’s out there, it’s much harder to clean and control what comes to your inbox - a classic case of ‘prevention is easier than treatment’.

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