As you may or may not know my actual business that I run from home has to do with affiliate marketing. If you’ve never heard of affiliate marketing that’s ok. Basically I sell stuff on behalf of other companies through websites that I build and promote. I never handle any products – I just “arrange” the sale and get paid a commission for that. The commission is between say 5% and 10% per sale.

A really, really critical part of running an online business is having great web hosting. Why? Because folks if your web host is offline your websites are offline and you’re not making money. It’s a very simple equation but something that people overlook all the time when they’re setting up their first website.

What most people want is the cheapest web hosting possible. Mistake! With web hosting if you pay peanuts you get monkeys – a cheap web host will normally cause you more problems and cost you more money than you ever could have imagined. Trust me there’s nothing more frustrating than looking for technical support that just doesn’t exist. Tick tock – every hour of downtime is costing you money. Bad mojo!

So who do I use? Well I have a few web hosts that I use but the one that consistently keeps me smiling in terms of features, support and uptime (the opposite of downtime and a hugely important shopping factor!) is Hostgator.

Hostgator have served me very well over the last several years and are currently top of my lists of web hosts that I use (and I have several web hosting accounts).

So what do I like about Hostgator?

Fast hosting

Great set of features
(including the Fantastico package of applications.)

Very well priced

Everything from beginner hosting to dedicated servers.

Great support

Very little downtime

So if you’re looking for a great, easy-to-use and reliable webhost then I can put my hand on my heart here and recommend Hostgator!

Ok folks. Something is going on here. Twice in the last 24 hours I’ve been contacted by friends who have just been infected with a new strain of computer virus. One female friend just reinstalled Windows Vista and was done with it (drastic to say the least but she’s stubborn and hates asking for help) and the other friend is leaving on holidays today and is going to have to leave her computer unplugged and locked up until she gets back. Why? Her 15 year old son managed to download a really nasty virus from a porno site that’s designed to steal credit card numbers and other financial information.

Am I bothered that friends called me for help with this type of computer problem? Not at all – I’m a total nerd at heart and always will be to some extent.

No my problem is that these people were using freebie anti-virus programs that are months out-of-date and of absolutely no use in stopping an actual virus. All for the sake of a few dollars they’re willing to risk losing hours of time (in one case a lifetime of digital photographs) and frustration just because they’re too cheap to go and buy a decent anti-virus and firewall solution.

The attitude I see is “It won’t happen to me because I don’t download pirated movies/mp3s/games”. That’s about as shortsighted an approach to computer security as I can think of. It’s just plain dumb to be blunt.

What I can’t understand is that these people have zero clue about the risks they’re taking getting hit with virus and spyware infections. Viruses don’t announce their presence on your system like in those dumb hacker movies – there’s no skull and crossbones on your screen. No cryptic messages or any of the other nonsense that Hollywood would have you believe. The best and most dangerous viruses are the ones that do their very, very best to stay hidden.

Listen up folks. If you are not using a firewall package AND anti-virus software then I can promise that you are going to get hit with a virus and probably a nasty one at that. You cannot use one and not use the other. You’d also be wise to download and run Spybot or Ad-Aware at least once a month also to clear up spyware problems.

If you’re happy to risk financial disaster and identity theft then continue on taking risks online. Soon enough you’ll become a statistic with the rest of the “It won’t happen to me because…” crowd.

Worst part is that I’ll probably wind up writing Part III of this series…. shame.

It never ceases to amaze me how little thought people give to the safety of the data on their computer. They’ll continue hoarding personal files and information on it with no thought given to data backups, anti-virus or firewall software. For months (or even years) they use their computer always assuming that viruses, spyware, hacks and hard drive crashes happen to other people – most of it is just hype to sell software and external hard drives right?

Wrong.

It’s always the same. The same people who assume “It can never happen to me” are the exact people who get caught with their drawers down. One recent example is of a friend I chatted with on MSN one night recently. A few minutes later her MSN sends me a link with a virus in it. Luckily enough my anti-virus software caught it. Sadly for her that virus had been sent to all her MSN contacts and everyone in her Outlook address book. She’d been using a free anti-virus package which simply hadn’t been protecting her PC properly – something is free for a reason; usually because it’s not very good.

She then said “I’d die if I lost all my college work on this laptop”. So I asked “So you’ve got all your files backed up right?”. Her reply? Go on guess what she replied? “No I don’t have them backed up”.

DOH!!

This is an intelligent young woman training to become a teacher. Her laptop was expensive and her school work is priceless (she could never have replaced it) yet she’ll use a free anti-virus tool and no backup system! Does that make sense to you? It certainly doesn’t to me.

She was lucky – the virus didn’t destroy any data so she won’t have to drop out of college. Luck was on her side this time and the fact that the following day she went and invested in Norton Antivirus on my recommendation. She also got herself signed up Mozy Online Backup and invested in a USB memory key to store her data on.

She had to spend some cash yes but now her lifes work is protected.

You’re either protecting your computer data or you’re not. Period.

There are times when we can’t always work from the comfort of our home office – not ideal but it’s a fact of life for many of us. There’s a ton of choices for how we’re going to handle this working away from. You can just work from a cybercafe if all you have to worry about is just basically checking your e-mail. I use a service called Spamarrest for filtering my e-mail for spam and it allows me to monitor up to 5 mailboxes from one single account – this is ideal for me as I have several websites that I run and it just saves a lot of time and headaches.

For those who demand a little bit more power and facilities then a Palm or PocketPC would be ideal. These are great if you need some basic word-processing, presentation or spreadsheet functionality and are also great for calendaring your working day, week, month or year. Many of the new, high-end smartphones (50% cellphone and 50% PDA) now have many of these features included so it might be working checking with your cellphone provider to see what the latest models look like.

Now we come to the last step – the laptop. If you want to bring your computer “with you” then a full blown laptop is the only way to go. At the moment I own two – an IBM T60 and an old IBM T20. Why IBM? They’re as tough as old boots and do exactly what I need them to – although the T20 is more of an ornament now to be honest but it comes in handy around the house lol I just happen to like IBM laptops. Period.

Modern laptops are fast, sleep and powerful creatures which can easily take advantage of cables or wireless networks and handle all but the most crippling of applications (and yes even a few games…when you’re unwinding *ahem*). If you’re just travelling for a few days then a PDA/Blackberry/Smartphone should be enough. If you are, however, going to be travelling a lot of expect that you might be well then invest in a laptop and just save yourself all the stresses and hassles that you’ll have otherwise.

Hyphenated or dashed domains have long been the favourite of Internet and affiliate marketers. Why? Simply because it allowed them to pack the domain full of the primary keywords for their market. When this all began it was used responsibly by sensible marketers. They saw the benefit of including maybe one keyword in their domain. The search engines didn’t complain and everyone was basically happy.

Then the spammers got hold of it and have now abused it to such an extent that search engines like Google and Yahoo are now beginning to filter hyphenated domains from their search results. This is a case of cause and effect but the funny thing now is that the search engine spammers are whining because of this yet they caused the exact problem they’re now complaining about. The irony eh?

Read the full article here.

You’ve done all your brainstorming and come up with an absolutely brilliant domain name that both brands your business and let’s people know what you sell or represent. The next step is finding someplace to host your domain name. Having your own website or web based business is a two step process.

1. Register domain

2. Host domain

After you register the domain name it’s normally “parked” with the registrar. Parking means that the domain registrar will put up a temporary page for you saying that the domain has been registered but nothing has been done with it yet. 99.9% of all domain registrars offer this facility free of charge. This is fine as a temporary measure but the sooner you get your hosting sorted out the better; especially seeing as how most registrars make money from advertising on parked domains. Yup. Really.

Read the rest of this article on web hosting.