What could be more stimulating than reading a web host review? How about a host vs. host comparison of two highly rated web hosts? This benefits webmasters who suffer the angst of having researched and narrowed their choices down to just two web hosts. If you’re in this difficult position and especially if you are considering HostGator, don’t flip a coin. Check out some host vs host comparisons:
This metallic web template is one of my favorite designs and I assure you that I have spent long periods of time starring at her silvery white metallic finish. This is also the last of six free website templates released for the Clickfire 10th anniversary. I have a feeling more free web templates are ahead.
Ten years ago on this day, I registered the Clickfire.com domain and began what has been my most satisfying website creation experience ever. When I started out, I truly had no idea what I was doing and where it would go. As I think about it, one of the most important things to me was to establish a web identity. I wanted a little piece of Internet turf where I could live and play and totally be my creative self. I want to put forth a little history of how things began and evolved over the decade.
Let’s dust off the old hard-drives and see what we can uncover from the Clickfire archives. Read more of this post »
Here are two more free website templates for all you site builders out there. These are styled as a directory template and a music template. Guess which is which :) Most any designing webmaster should be able to find a use for these templates, the anti table crowd excepted. Download, customize and enjoy. Oh and please comment here too!
Tired of web hosting reviews? Well, can I interest you in a free web hosting template then? I promise it is truly free and no pixels were harmed or code malformed during its creation. This template is valid xhtml 1.0 and css with original photshop psd inside. It is commented and contains SEO elements. You can see from the screen cap that it is businessy but also kind of gothic for lack of a better term–just in time for Halloween.
The web hosting template is part of a batch of free website templates we decided to give away in the countdown to our 10 year anniversary. Customize, enjoy, save precious time and build yourself a cool web hosting site. Post your comments below por favor.
Free Template anyone?
The August free website template is now live!
We rustled up some free website templates to give away as part of the Clickfire ten year anniversary countdown that climaxes this December. This month’s theme is gaming, a subject very dear to my heart and an intergral part of my Internet life. Customize, enjoy, save time and build out something cool. Post comments on the free gaming website template below.
Greetings fellow web hosting freaks of all shapes, sizes, bandwidths and disk capacities. I have never been to a web hosting conference and could not attend HostingCon this year held on July 23-25 at the Navy Pier in Chicago. My understanding of what takes place at these conferences is simply that a bunch of people who love web hosting get together and talk about web hosting. Simple enough description?
What’s the next best thing to being at HostingCon? I am excited that Douglas Hanna will be live blogging HostingCon 2007 for Clickfire this year! Douglas is armed with a Nikon D80 camera, a Palm Treo 700wx smart phone and a whole lot of knowledge and enthusiasm for the web hosting industry. Not only is Douglas going to physically be there, but he is speaking at one of the conference sessions. Douglas’ session will be on Wednesday July 25th at 4:30 and entitled: Customer Service as Your Competitive Advantage. Other hosting industry professionals will be speaking at sessions that I that I hope to hear about are:
Douglas has written several web hosting reviews and articles for Clickfire. He’s also written for quite a few well known web hosting sites. His blog is Service Untitled and he has a lot to say about the all important subject of customer service. He also interviews some well known execs from Dell, Best Buy, HP, Rackspace and elsewhere. I like to describe Douglas’ treatment of web hosts in his reviews here as “tough love.” I’d like to say thanks to Douglas and I hope you all enjoy the coverage.
10 years = 1 template per month
The other day I was digging through some memorabilia and what did I find? The original Clickfire.com domain registration invoice from Network Solutions. I took a deep breath and read the print that I received as an aspiring web designer in the late 1990’s:
Thank you for registering the Internet/World Wide Web domain shown above.
Your welcome! I reflected on the personal journey I experienced since registering this, my first domain. I won’t say anything more about the journey now except that it was worth it. I thought about how to best celebrate the ten years. I am sure there will be more manifestations of celebration but here is what I came up with for now: give away a free website template each month until December, the ten year anniversary of Clickfire. See July’s template below, a business website template.
I would also like to say “thank you” to the millions of Clickfire visitors who have arrived here for whatever reason over the years. If you have gotten anything at all out of Clickfire.com since going live in 1997, I ask that you to place a comment here and tell us. Let the celebration begin!
To the lazy, the budget conscious, the busy, the bored
A while back I had some web templates done up with the thought of selling them as part of a project that never materialized. Recently I started thinking about these templates just sitting there on my hard-drive not benefitting anyone. The more I thought about this, the more it bothered me. Not that they are the sexiest designs or most Web 2.0 looking graphics that you will see. They are simple, HTML table templates–not done with divs. But, they are what I would consider professional grade and not bad looking in my opinion. So, I decided to post some of the good ones so you can download and use them if you want. The designer who originally put the templates together for me didn’t code them with valid HTML/CSS, so I had to go back into the code and tidy them up. I have created a free website templates section where these and any future templates will be posted. Here are the first templates:
Really, why are you doing this?
It hurts to give these away, but it also feels good. There is an indescribable blessing that I’ve enjoyed over the years of having given away free stuff on Clickfire. As a Christian believer, I can’t help but recall scriptures like “it is more blessed to give than receive” and “give and it shall be given unto you.” Giving can be addictive, especially when site visitors write in and say how much they appreciate it or how something you gave away has helped them do their job easier.
A less dignified reason also comes to mind. There are one or two large template download sites that annoy me for reasons I don’t want to talk about. I will say that I have personally purchased web templates from one particular popular template site and found them painfully difficult to edit because of graphical slugs and other code anomalies, probably a result of someone trying to design a template to make a quick buck. So here am I having bought a template that is supposedly going to save time and money because I should be able to just change the “company name” text and throw this little baby online in minutes. Hours later I am starring into my screen wondering why I didn’t just design the site from scratch. To my recollection, none of the templates that I have used from this large template site have ever validated. Many seem heavy on Flash and not at all designed with SEO in mind. Oh, and the prices. Exclusive licenses can be 40 times the price of the regular cheap templates that they resell ad infinitum. Read more of this post »
The web hosts reviewed at Clickfire this year have been sorely lacking in ratings. The highly rated BlueHost and HostGator passed moons ago. I kept wondering when we would see another winner. Things have changed. Lunarpages has so far eclipsed the other web hosts reviewed here in 2007. Why? They have one of the highest bandwidth offerings I have ever seen, several distinct features not offered by others and a respectable 24 hour customer support. Excerpt:
The Lunarpages Web Hosting company got its name from a Star Trek episode. I am not sure which episode or series, only that it involved images of a moon, planets and lunar material, if that helps narrow it down. After discovering this trivial fact, I set out on mission to go where no reviewer has gone before: determine whether Lunarpages’ hosting performance is stellar.
I did some probing of Lunarpages and found that the company got its start in the late 1990’s giving out free web hosting on the planet earth. Even when Lunarpages began charging for hosting, the competition was no where near what we see in the web hosting industry today where we see hosts piling up like tribbles. Over the years, Lunarpages began adding dedicated, VPS and Windows hosting to their shared offerings. Lunarpages determined to grow at a slow pace rather than risk crossing the neutral zone at warp speed. Timing and business acumen seem to have been critical factors in the company’s growth. Lunarpages host review is here.
Been assimilated? Either way, I want to hear about your experience with Lunarpages.
What would a world without web host reviews look like? Honestly… I don’t want to know! We all need a web host and we often seem hasty to make decisions as hosting consumers. Just give me the login so I can start uploading the files for my new site! Well, I’ve learned a lot about web hosting both from my past mistakes and from evaluating hosts here. These few things come to mind:
It’s fascinating and at times entertaining to watch Douglas Hanna spring into action and pounce the daylights out of an over promising web host provider. Douglas’s background in customer service–the Achilles heel of web hosting–makes him a doubly dangerous reviewer. If there is a weakness, he’ll most likely find it.
Conversely, it is also a joy to find that rare host that goes the extra mile and delivers beyond their promise. I am perpetually looking for hosts like this. Must be the webmaster in me. The reality is that most hosts seem to fall somewhere in between the poor and outstanding.
Here are two fresh reviews from Douglas Hanna: midPhase and AN Hosting. Enjoy.
For those of you who haven’t seen an ad somewhere or experienced the company’s services, 1and1 is large domain, web hosting, and e-commerce provider. When 1and1.com stormed the U.S. back in 2003, I was one who signed up for one of the company’s free professional hosting package. Skeptical, I wrote this circa 2005/2006:
I signed up for a 1&1 (1and1.com) account a while back and have been evaluating their web hosting and domain registration service for over one year. A few observations so far are that the 1and1 web hosting speed and uptime appear good. Customer service is mediocre (that’s stretching it, really stretching it). The 1and1 web hosting control panel is slow and a seems underfeatured when compared with others like cPanel.
I am happy to report that I’ve noticed some nice improvements in speed, usability and backend processes in my basic 1and1 hosting account. I discussed some of the changes that are taking place at 1and1 with Joshua Sloan, Director of Online Marketing for 1and1 Internet Inc. and definitely agree with him that “1and1 has come a long way since first entering the U.S. market.” It’s always nice to see a company improving products and services. Someone at 1&1 is listening, I’d say!
I still have my original 1and1 hosting account and plan to keep it. Also, I am a big fan of the 1and1 domain registration service and plan to continue using it due discounted price $5.99 per year and free private registration.
Check out the 1&1 review. Have you tried 1&1 hosting ? What are your impressions?
It’s a beautiful, graphically optimized, fully validating sunny fall day outside. Why am I ablogging?
The new Clickfire site design is finished!
Some things about the new design that I really like are:
The Logo - Even though the previous logo went through some serious obsessive compulsive iterations, I am convinced that the new one is fresher, more cheerful and colorful. I admit an attachment to the heavy handed mouse and fire components, but I believe the less overt new one is going to better serve.
Code Improvements - No more table containers. To my surprise, I was able to drop the content into the CSS divs in my favorite WYSIWYG editor (the name begins with a “F,” not a “D,” by the way. I have cleaned up most of the old pages, some dating back years ago to when I first started learning CSS. The new pages are in XHTML and tend to have a better chance at validating. A few hybrid pages are still floating around.
Colors - It’s goodbye green, beige and black and hello red, green blue on white. I got complaints about the previous colors being to loud and this finally sank in. I struggled with going to a white background because white just plain hurts my eyes as do fluorescent lights and flash grenades. Toning down the contrast and brightness in my LCD monitor pretty much gets rid of the pain. I hope the new color scheme will improve the user experience. From what I’ve read, dark text on white backgrounds seems to be the preferred user interface scheme. Read more of this post »
I’m really excited about this new affiliate link cloaker tool because I haven’t found a tool that actually allows you to cloak an affiliate link while adding the Google nofollow attribute. So, this should be a quicker alternative to hand coding your affiliate links. I’ve tested this new link cloaker tool in both IE and Firefox with no probs. I consider the tool to be in beta, so if you find any bugs or ways to improve, please post. Read more of this post »
In case you’ve noticed the lack of tools due to becoming antiquated or unsupported, I’ve added a few “new” web design tools for the Web 1.0 crowd (which includes me, I suppose).
These are nothing new of course, but as Clickfire expands, I want to include the bread and butter as well as the hot sauce.
“Thank you for your order from BlueHost.Com! We are excited to have you as our customer! In order to ensure your happiness we will make every effort to give you the best support available. ” –excerpt from the BlueHost welcome letter Sun, 8 May 2005
I discovered BlueHost about 6 months ago and have been wanting to share some thoughts about this rising web hosting company that claims to have industry leading tech support and award winning hosting packages (what’s a host without an award). The feature that most piqued my interest was the ability to host six domains on one BlueHost account ($6.95 Per Month). BlueHost does this via cPanel control panel software. I set up a few domains and made a few customer service calls to Bluehost.com and overall received positive responses. I’m beginning to reach the conclusion that it’s beneficial to catch a web host while they are in the early stages of high growth.
We’ve now published a comprehensive hands on review of BlueHost. I’d like to think of the review as not just a snapshot, but ongoing. So if you’ve had experiences with BlueHost, positive or negative, please feel free to express them here.
On another note, Matt Heaton President and CEO of BlueHost Inc. began a blog a few days ago for the purpose discussing the Genesis of BlueHost and to write about some of the issues affecting the hosting industry in general. Matt’s first post has over 300 comments as of today. Nice batch of comments for a few days, I’d say!
Douglas Hanna logs onto an Easy CGI account, pokes around the “control panel,” uploads scripts and even calls customer service to test the product. I’ve posted his analysis of Easy CGI after the tires have been thoroughly kicked.
Easy CGI is by most standards, a fairly large host. Founded in 1994 as an ISP (the hosting section came four years later), they’ve prided themselves on providing word class support and services. At first glance, Easy CGI’s web site isn’t bad - it’s easy to navigate, easy to get information, and all of the things you’d expect from a web site. While EasyCGI.com not visually stunning, it does work.
Reselling web hosting yet? I first discovered reselling webhosting as a web designer needing an efficient way to get customer sites up and running. I must say that making the jump truly changed my webmaster life for the better. Derek Vaughan’s Tutorial/Article on how to Resell Web Hosting in Five Easy Steps explains the process from the ground up for those thinking of getting into reseller hosting.
It’s becoming impossible to ignore the growth of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Most major technology sites deploy feeds that users can grab and aggregate onto their own sites or feed readers. RSS feeds are of interest to webmaster and bloggers who want to give their sites more exposure. Usually, the way these directories work is that after submission, your feed sits in the directory until it’s updated, then the update goes to a “recent” page displaying a link to the post you just made. You can imagine how active feeds can gain a great amount of exposure this way.
If you hunger for place to submit your site feed, check out the RSS feed directories section I just added that gives webmasters visibility into sites that allow feed submission. I’ve checked each of these feeds to try and ensure they are the best quality. RSS feed directories are also helpful to announce new new blog sites. Webmasters of these types of directory sites fight a constant battle with spammer feeds (spammer blogs = splogs), so despite the goal of automation, they require human maintenance to assure quality. The RSS feed directory attempts to include only quality directories that allow free submissions and are well maintained. A nice listing of blog feed submission sites appears at RSS-Specifications.com. You can also “ping” your site feed at Pingoat, a very powerful and humorous tool for notifying sites of updates to your feed. Subscribe to our news feeds to get webmaster viewpoints, tools and content news and please post if you see a good feed I left out.
So you think you’ve “seen” every favicon out there? If you don’t feel like creating a favicon (the little icon that shows up in many browsers when your site is bookmarked), then you can take the easy route and go transparent. The neat thing about this one is that it blanks out the default Microsoft icon in Internet Explorer. It might have the effect of getting someone’s attention or at at the very least serving as a conversation piece.
Hi, my name is Emory Rowland. After nearly a decade of publishing viewpoints, tools and content at Clickfire, I decided to begin blogging in order to interact with Clickfire visitors about the topics we webmasters love to discuss. I hope you benefit from this blog. Most of all, I am excited about getting to know you!
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