We 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% uptime guarantee, so if you’re in the market for a web host, we recommend that you give them a try.

A 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 thing you do online? But that’s just scratching the surface though, because they are also collecting data from Gmail, Google analytics, Google Docs, and their new mobile phone and operating system, to name just a few.

Eric Schmidt recently told Maria Bartiromo during an interview that “Judgment is important…If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Ironically, this statement is coming from the CEO of a company shrouded in secrecy.

So while Google has been enjoying an increasing market share year after year, that may change before long. The early-adopters (people on the cutting edge of technology) who Google has always focused on, are rapidly changing their opinion of the search giant. More significant is the fact that long-time partners, such as Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler, are telling people to steer clear of Google. As Microsft’s Bing steadily gains market share and their partnership with Yahoo! gives them even more traction, they will become a greater threat to Google, forcing them to either change their practices or be knocked from their lofty throne.

If there is anything to be learned from Microsoft’s history, it’s that while people love to see a passionate company grow from a tiny start-up to become an industry leader, they are just as eager to watch them fall when they become greedy, hypocritical and arrogant. Time will tell whether Google payed attention in class.

Anyone 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 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%.

It’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 it from them rather than another, more ethical domain registrar.

You may ask yourself why a company would resort to these types of extortion tactics. The answer is quite simple – they are selling the same exact thing as their competitors at three times the price. Congratulations Network Solutions, you’ve won the dirtiest registrar ever award!

Here is a rather extensive list of web 2.0 links. Some of these applications or services can be used to help grow your business, some can be used to make daily tasks easier and some, well, some are just useless.

If you’re trying to get up to speed on HTML in a hurry, a few hours on HTML playground will definitely help to get you there. It lets you learn by doing, and it’s also is a great reference source for those of you that already have the basics down pat.

Need a quick way to help choose effective color combinations? Check out Adobe’s newest tool, Kule. For the particularly color-challenged, you can use it for all sorts of color related decisions in your life,?like choosing the right tie, paint or drapes.

The Justice Department has ruled that Google’s complaint regarding the default settings for the search box in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7?do not violate their antitrust agreement with federal and state governments. Google claimed that the default settings in Internet Explorer favoring MSN Search would give Microsoft an unfair advantage. Ironically, this is exactly what Firefox?does for Google in their browser’s search box.

We’ve been using the beta version of IE7 here for a while, and while it offers a lot of features that none of the other browsers out there offer, the current beta does not live up to the reputation that Microsoft execs have built up for it?? especially in terms of it’s utilization of RSS. The new browser has made up for a lot of previous shortcomings, but I’m a bit disappointed in the way that RSS ended up being implemented. It seems to be more of an afterthought than anything.