1. Reoccurring Billing: This is standard not only in this industry, but every other monthly service I can think of. If I don’t want my cell phone, my cable, my land line, etc, I have to cancel them otherwise they are going to charge me. If they have my credit card, they are going to charge it for service. If they don’t they are going to send me a bill that I must pay or it goes to collections. This is nothing new, don’t be shocked when your service us up for renewal and you get charged. Give them fair notice if you need / want to cancel.
Bottom Line: It is normal for a provider to charge the card on file when your service is due. It’s nice if they send a reminder before they charge, but isn’t fraud if they don’t. (AT&T charges me every month, and they only e-mail me if there is a problem) If you no longer want service, cancel it before you bill is due.

2. Trial Periods: I’ve seen providers here being called “dishonest” and being ripped on in general for collecting credit card info when you sign up for a trial period. Then they bill you if you don’t cancel. This is the way 99% of trial offers work. I had a trial with Nextflix a while back, and guess what I had to give them my credit card upfront for my trial, even just for a streaming video account.

Bottom line: With Trial periods, expect to give billing info when you sign up, and expect to be charged when the trial is over if you don’t cancel.

3. No one has 100% uptime: No one gets 100% uptime. Not Google, Not Apple, no one. Even a 10 figure IT budget does not give you 100% uptime. Accept the fact that you will have a few outages here and there with any host.

Bottom Line: If you really need a high availability setup, expect to spend at least a couple hundreds bucks a month. Otherwise, relax, there is going to be some down time.

4. Tech support isn’t PC, programming, or Web design support: Tech support is for “Whats the path to Perl?”, “Can you reset my password”, “I’m having trouble changing the permissions on the server”. They are not there to teach you PHP, fix your database or repair your computer. Will I once in a great while ask them something that isn’t really their job “Hey, do you know what causes this SQL error?”? Sure, once in a while. Don’t abuse their support and most will be fine with helping you out if they can.

Bottom line: If your in over your head with programming or other technical issues, go find a programmer locally or on a site like elance. You can find competent (PHP, Java, AJAX, Linux) people out of the US for under $10 USD a hour.

5. Back-ups are your Responsibility: Any good host will back-up their servers. This back-up is generally used if their server crashes (disaster recovery). Some provider can restore your entire account from this back-up, but that is not generally the purpose of their back. Make your own back-ups. Small sites can be backed up to your home PC with something like Cobian. Cobian can be setup to automatically retrieve a copy of your site via FTP and do it on a set schedule. Best of all it is free. You can also use one of the dozens of online backup services for a few bucks a month. You need to back-up your databases also. Many programs can dump the database so you can grab it with your ftp backup. There are free scripts online that will dump any mysql database to a file and / or e-mail it you.

Bottom line: Stuff Happens, don’t blame the host if something gets lost. They are a hosting company, not a back-up service. It’s your data, back it up.

6. Be Fair: Give them a chance to fix things; Technical issues, billing, whatever. Most things can wait a day or two. If the issues isn’t resolved, consider asking for a manager, supervisor, or the owner to see if they will resolve the problem. Once you go online and start bashing them (they will see it, I promise they know what Google is and I bet they even know what Google Alerts are), they will be seriously unmotivated to help you.

Bottom line: The vast majority of providers want your business and will solve problems given the chance.

7. Unlimited isn’t really Unlimited: The term Unlimited is used as a marketing tactic. Nothing is unlimited, there is some kind of limit, no matter who they are or what they claim. Companies that offer unlimited are not necessarily bad and likely offer enough resources for most peoples needs.

Bottom line: Remember; there are limits to everything and…

8. You don’t need Unlimited: Most people are going to use a couple hundred megs of space and a few GB of transfer. A basic plan at most providers is going to give you something like 10GB of space and 50GB or more of transfer. If you need a lot more space or transfer than this, then very likely one of the following applies to you:

A. Are doing something illegal like file sharing
B. Are hosting Porn
C. Are backing up your computer to your web host
D. Are making enough money to buy a VPS or dedicated server
E. Are 1 in a 1,000 who need the space / transfer for some special need like hosting videos directly on your account

Bottom line: If your legit and legal chances are very good just about any entry level plan will meet your needs.

9. It might be your fault: If you use software like a forum, WordPress or other scripts that you installed, you need to upgrade these, sometimes frequently. Older versions of software can leave your site open to hacks. Unless you pay your host for managed service, it’s your responsibility to keep this stuff up to date. Also, choose a secure password, it’s not your providers fault if a hacker guesses your password and nukes your account. Also, many widgets and apps that you add to your site call on 3rd party servers,(which your host has no control over), these things can easily slow your site way down – and it is not your hosts fault!

Bottom line: If you don’t take basic steps to protect your account and keep it up to date, it may very well be vulnerable to hackers.

10. Time to move on?: If you have serious problems that you can’t get resolved or if your site is off-line for an extended period, move on. There are tons of providers that can have you up and running within hours or better. Sign up, load up the new host from the back up, switch your domain and your running on the new host. You can’t blame your host for having your site down for 2 weeks (well you can, but it makes no sense not to just move on), by the second day your down (at the latest) you should have setup your site on a new host.
Bottom line: No doubt, there are some bad providers out there and all you can do is move on. Once you have given your host a fair try, if they can’t or work fix the problem, just move on. Lots of people are happy to have your business.

Best of luck finding a provider that meets your hosting needs.

Source: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1018336

* 107 TRILLION emails were sent in 2010.

* There are 255 million websites…

* …and 88.8 million .com domain names.

* 1.97 billion internet users worldwide.

* 152 million blogs.

* 25 billion tweets sent in 2010 (!).

* 600 million users on Facebook.

* 2 billion videos watched PER DAY on YouTube.

* More than 3 billion photos uploaded per month on Facebook.

Online advertising is about $40 billion. That’s huge! How big relative to total advertising spending? Still less than 10%

PayPal processed $86 billion in online payments in the twelve months ending Q3 2010. That’s huge! How much did Visa and MasterCard process over that time? Several trillion.

How much revenue did Amazon do in 2010? Almost $25 billion. That’s huge! How much did Wal-Mart do? $405 billion.

Gone are the days when you forget to backup or run out of time to backup your precious data.

Think about this for a moment…

What happens when your web host has a failure and your account get’s damaged or worse case scenario, the web host loses everything.?

Do you rely on your web host to take backups for you? Check the fine print of most web hosts terms of service and they will state that they are not responsible for your data, even if it’s their fault. Great isn’t it.

So what’s the solution. Simple. Backup your data regularly.

Let me tell you how to do it on cPanel web servers, it’s quite labour intensive.

a) Go to your http://yourwebsite.com:2082 and enter in your login credentials.
b) Go to the Backup icon (will look different depending on your cPanel theme)
c) Click on the link to download the home directory backup (this will take all your files)
d) Click on the links to download your databases
e) Click on the links to download your email filters or email aliases

Now do that once a week or month for your home directory (files) and everyday for your databases like WordPress, Forums, Shopping Carts, Email Lists.

No thanks I have better things to do with my time.

That’s where Backup Smart comes in. It’s a desktop software application that runs on Windows and MAC OSX. It automates the whole backup process I’ve just outlined for you.

You just set it and forget it. Backups are done on a schedule set by you, it’s just so easy.

If you even have just one website with a database then you need this software to protect your assests. But if you have more than one website on different servers with multiple databases then this software is a huge time saver and you’ll wonder how you ever did without it.

Check out all the details at…
http://atorreso.backup-smart.com

To Your Success,

Anthony Torreso

So far I am pretty impressed with the performance of this VPS, what do you guys think?
I am going to try and update this post if traffic increases today.
*** Updated 3:25PM ***
I forgot to attach the switch port graph.

*** Updated 2:00PM Aug 14, 2010 ***

Traffic is only increasing over the last couple of days. Below is this weeks traffic graph.

*** Updated 8:30AM Aug 19, 2010 ***
Just burst to 12900 Reqs/Sec. Current RAM Usage 81MB, Server Load 1.3

The bandwidth for today before the move.

Now lets look at this weeks bandwidth.

Now some stats. Please keep in mind that on the busy days I have to suspend the site to stop it from overloading the server.

So today as I don’t want to close shop, but need to save some money I made some changes.
First I got another VPS just for this project. The VPS came from Ruby Ring Technologies I am using there VPS 1024 with GigE upgrade. However instead of CentOS with cPanel like before, I installed the LXAdmin option. At the time of this writing, which is now powering the image site, I am using all of 44MBs of ram. Check out Traffic Stats for more details.

What makes this such a great option is the very low memory usage and the Lighttpd WebServer that it installs by default.
Out of the box the VPS was screaming, however I new I could get some better performance out of it. By adding the following six lines to the lighttpd.conf file my memory usage almost dropped by 25% and my performance darn near doubled.

server.max-keep-alive-requests = 4
server.max-keep-alive-idle = 4
server.event-handler = “linux-sysepoll”
server.network-backend = “linux-sendfile”
server.max-fds = 8192
server.stat-cache-engine = “simple”

That was it, pretty darn simple.

Now this is just today’s performance, but I am hoping over the next few weeks to update this post with some more graphs and updates to see if it can deal with the load.

******** Update – July 22 ********

well it has been about 24 hours on the new VPS let’s see some stats.

First off Traffic:


Not bad seems we peaked out at 40Mbit, not bad at all.

Memory Usage:


Ok so were looking at 130 MB’s of RAM Used, could be a little better but not complaining as I am pushing out 40Mbits of traffic.

CPU Usage:


Yeah so that would be what 40Mhz, whoop dee doo.

Some awstats:

The award-winning muvee autoProducer is a program that automatically generates movies from your video clips. Version 5 of muvee autoProducer promises to be the ‘fastest, easiest and most fun way to transform your video and pictures into slick productions”.

At first glance it looks like just another regular DVD Authoring package. However it has many features that help it stand out from the others. Starting with the Video highlights its ‘magicMoments’ feature allows you more control over the video production. Basically you scroll through your video and give a ‘thumbs up’ to the parts you want to keep and a ‘thumbs down’ to the parts you don’t. Very easy to manage.

Other noteable features:

- tweak muvee: allows last minute edits, before producing. Switch out video segments with others you would rather include.

- Capture DV from Firewire connections and from USB webcams.

- All video formats are supported like: MPEG1, MPEG2, WMV, AVI, DivX, Mov

- Probably the best feature they offer is their bundled ‘Styles Collection’: choose from 24 Unique Styles for your video theme. 100’s more available.

- You can also use your Digital Photos in your Videos. Use their ‘magicSpot’ feature to pick a sweetspot on the photo to focus on in the video. Supports bmp, jpeg, gif, and tiff formats.

- Integrated DVD Authoring allows you to do it all here. Create, convert, and burn to DVD. You can even convert your mobile phone videos.

Fore More info :

http://www.desktop-video-guide.com/muvee-autoproducer-5-review.html

Read more: http://www.techno360.in/download-muvee-autoproducer-5-for-free/#ixzz0NWAWVeXm

How to Grab Free Muvee AutoProducer 5 License key?

1.First visit below any one of the German proxy websites

http://www.surf-proxy.de/

or

http://www.unblock24.de/

or

http://www.german-proxy.de/

2.Then enter following promo link www.muvee.com/de/pcwelt(Copy & paste) and click “Go” button
3.Now just enter your email address,name and click “Akzeptieren” button.

Download Muvee AutoProducer 5 for Free
4. Check your email, you should receive an email from from “webmaster@muvee.com”, copy the license key(very big).
5.Now download Installation file(105 MB) from below link
http://bit.ly/3wc80o or directly from here at http://anthonysblog.net/download/aP5.0_Full_16Langs_XP2K_5.0.9.9_1094-l0x0407.exe
6.Install it ,restart your pc,launch the program and enter your license key

Note: They are sending following Common license key “0002VB-8XHJGV-Q6MQ0G-FZJY5E-QP9W8F-GU9Y3J-P14NPD-9PWF21” to every one,so use it if your unable to register and get a key

Read more: http://www.techno360.in/download-muvee-autoproducer-5-for-free/#ixzz0NWAh1WIc

Original Article at http://www.techno360.in/download-muvee-autoproducer-5-for-free/