Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Black Friday Savings on Web Hosting

Hostgator Black FridayOur web hosting partner, Hostgator, is offering a special Black Friday savings of 50% off everything! That means you can get the same professional grade web hosting that we use starting at as little as $0.99/month! We’ve been using Hostgator for several years now, and love everything about them. Their service and support has always been exceptional, and the already low prices are just insane during this one day only sale. So if you’ve been thinking of setting up a hosting account for your new website, or even switching web hosts, now is the time to do it! Visit Hostgator to set up your account today, and save 50%.

Our review of Hostgator

host-gatorWe recently decided to give Hostgator’s web hosting a test-drive, after hearing Donna Fontenot (@DonnaFontenot) rave about how great they were. Was she right? You be the judge. During that time, we launched well over a dozen test sites and called Hostgator’s support team with a variety of technical issues (all intentionally caused by us). We were surprised at how much effort it took to actually make something go wrong, but even more surprised at how quickly they fixed it. If you’ve ever had to call technical support for a web hosting company, you know how much of a nightmare that can be. They are a reliable hosting company with courteous and knowledgeable staff, and their prices are outstanding. Also, it’s worth mentioning that they even offer a 45 day money back guarantee and 99.9%...

Google and the death of privacy

top-secretA lot has changed since Google first started gobbling up market share from some of the most established search engines. Today, the tables have turned and Google is the proverbial 800 pound gorilla, doing everything in their power to prevent erosion of their market share. They do have a unique advantage, though; the massive amounts of data that they collect through the many services that they offer. And much to the dismay of privacy advocates everywhere, they are leveraging this more and more every day. If you’ve ever used searched for something using Google, they have that search stored away in their massive data centers, along with a history of any sites that you visited as a result. Do you use their handy toolbar or browser? Did you know that allows them to monitor every single...

Fight back against hackers!

Fight Back Against HackersAnyone who’s had a website for more than a few days has probably had their site hacked at least once. Aside from the obvious annoyances, this can actually hurt your organic ranking and bring your website traffic to a screeching halt. The good news is that Donna Fontenot has come up with a pretty solid solution that notifies you when any files on your server are modified in any way. Her tool won’t stop hackers, but it will notify you if they change any of your files so that you can fix the problem before it has any impact on you. I highly recommend that you download and install MonitorHackdFiles and if you can, help her spread the word about it too.

Microsoft bids $45 billion for Yahoo!

yahoo-logo2Microsoft made a $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo! on Friday, which could make both companies a slightly more competitive against Google than they currently are. While combining the two companies in any capacity would certainly shake things up a bit, chances are that it wouldn’t have a significant impact initially, because collectively, they would still only hold a little less than 30% of the market share, while Google dominates with over 65%.  

Avoid Network Solutions like the plague!

network_solutionsIt’s recently come to my attention that Network Solutions is engaging is some pretty unethical business practice, and they’re using your time and work to profit from it! It works like this. You visit Network Solutions to see if a domain name that you’re interested in buying is available, and as luck would have it, the name you want is. So you’re about to register it but you then find out that there are companies like Go Daddy who offer the exact same product at about one third of the price, so you hop over to their website to buy the domain, only to find out that it’s no longer available. Why? Because when you entered the domain search at Network Solutions, they registered it for themselves so that you would be forced to buy...