Last month, I decided to try a new hosting company. Since this isn’t a money making site, I looked for some low cost hosting. My first try wasn’t successful. They only supported one domain and the subdomain feature didn’t work well. I quickly got a refund and kept looking.

Then I found HostZilla – a cloud hosting company. And the best thing – They have a FREE service.

The free account is UNLIMITED domains, bandwidth, and email accounts. They have cPanel and all the usual free web applications.  But the account is limited to 100MB of disk space and 32BM of RAM for your php scripts.

The disk space would work for one simple site, but for $15 a year you can upgrade to unlimited disk space. (Yea!)

The RAM is only a issue if you run alot of plugins. Keep them simple and get a memory info plugin to track how your site is using memory and all will be good.

I’ve been using them for a month now and LOVE it. (esp the price!)

They also have a full service “Premium” hosting service that starts at $4.49 a month.

Check them out – www.hostzil.la

----- From dcj21 Consulting - Making the Net work

Last month, I changed my domain registrar from GoDaddy to Domain.com

It was time to renew and I wanted to find a lower cost solution. All those superbowl commercials must be keeping the old guys from lowering their prices.

At the recommendation of Hak5, I changed to Domain.com and am very pleased with the service and ease of their software. And the price was right too. What’s cool is you can setup name servers to point to your hosting, use URL forwarding to redirect the domain to another site, and have separate email forwarding.

They have a sale for domain transfers – 20% off  -so get moving !
Make the switch! Transfer your domain for just $6.99* and add a year to your registration

----- From dcj21 Consulting - Making the Net work

To do a password recovery of BackTrack 5 VM image

1. Power off the image and edit the .vmx file for the vmware image in notepad and add a 15 second delay for the bios prompt.
Add bios.bootDelay = “15000″ to the end of the file.
2. Power on the image and press ESC to show the boot menu.
3. Insert your BT5 Live CD or configure VM to use an ISO image as the CD. Other Ubuntu Linux Live CDs may work.
4. Select Boot CD from the boot menu
5. Boot the Live CD in Text mode
6. Once the bash prompt shows, use fdisk -l  to show your drives. Usually /dev/sda1
7. Make a mount point – mkdir /mnt/vmdisk
8. Mount the vm disk - mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/vmdisk  (replace /dev/sda1
with your drive’s info)
9. Change shell root – chroot /mnt/vmdisk
10. Change the root password – passwd root
11. Confirm the change is saved to disk – sync
12. Reboot the image – reboot

Now you should boot into your VM and be able to use the new password.

After this is working, you may want to change the .vmx file to reduce the
boot delay down to a smaller value like 5 seconds (5000)

----- From dcj21 Consulting - Making the Net work

16 Things it took me over 50+ years to learn

By: Dave Barry, Nationally Syndicated Columnist

1. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative the same night.

2. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings.”

3. There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.”

4. People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

5. You should not confuse your career with your life.

6. Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance. (This one is very important.)

7. Never lick a steak knife.

8. The most destructive force in the universe is gossip.

9. You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.

10. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

11. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age 11.

12. The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep inside, we ALL believe that we are above average drivers.

13. A person, who is nice to you, but rude to a waiter, is not a nice person. (This is very important. Pay attention. It never fails.)

14. Your friends love you anyway.

15. Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.

16. Thought for the day: Men are like fine wine. They start out as grapes; and it’s up to the women to stomp the crap out of them until they turn into something acceptable to have dinner with.

Dave Barry’s 16 Things at Snopes

----- From dcj21 Consulting - Making the Net work

I’ve added a new WordPress plugin to my favorites list – Simple URL.

Simple URL is a plugin that lets you do redirects and URL shortening using your own domain name. You can use this to shorten or hide ugly URLs for your affiliate products, shorten URLs for pages on your site, or just make easy to remember URLs.

So instead of this:

• http://30dcinc.net/scripts/click.php?a_aid=dcj21&a_bid=e4e2dbe1

You get this:

• http://dcj21.net/go/challenge

----- From dcj21 Consulting - Making the Net work

My favorite SEO plugin for WordPress has left beta status and is now version 1.0. Yoast WordPress SEO is  now a full realesed and stable product. If you’ve been waiting, now it the time to install this plugin on your site.

This plugin enables all your SEO features for your site and gives you a screen on your edit post page to configure your meta variables and see recommendations on how to improve your results. It creates your site maps, notifies Google, and updates your Google and Bing webmaster tools.

I’ve used it for months and have been quite happy with it.

Read more at Yoast’s Blog site

And, the cost is only a donation. Use it and if you like it, click the donate button.

----- From dcj21 Consulting - Making the Net work

After using ListWire for a few months, I’ve decided to give MailChimp a try as my mail list server. MailChip is a professional mail list server and does not make all your subscribers watch ads for other mail list like ListWire does.

MailChimp is free for sending upto 12,000 emails per month to upto 2,000 subscribers .  Try it yourself-Test MailChimp

I’ll be testing the features and forms over the next few weeks and will post a review here for you.

----- From dcj21 Consulting - Making the Net work

I received an email this week asking how phpList was able to track when some one opened an email. I thought it was a good question to cover the answer here.

When we use mail list software like phpList, ListWire, Aweber, MailChimp or others, there is a ‘tracking’ feature. This tracking is different than your office email’s Read Receipt. Read Receipts are little email like messages that are sent from your readers computer back to your email. It works in a office, but not so well out on the internet.

The tracking feature of most mail list systems use a small html image embedded in the email message. When your subscriber reads the email, their email software does a html request back to the mail list server to display the small graphic image. Usually this image is a small 1 pixel white square that the reader will not notice. The html code in your email message has codes that let the mail list server know what message it came from. the mail list server then records the message as read.

The html graphic works very well, but now may email clients block images for your emails. You have probably seen the message asking you to load graphics on emails before. When you answer no or don’t load images, the mail list software will not be able to mark the message as read.

For more information and examples, check out this YouTube video on How eMail Tracking Works.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

----- From dcj21 Consulting - Making the Net work

ListWire, the free mail list software I now use, has new training (for Free!)

The “Unofficial” List Wire Video Course

----- From dcj21 Consulting - Making the Net work

The past few months, I have tested AWeber, ListWire, and phpList for my mailing list services.  Now, I’m ready to document why I made the switch.

phpList Mailing List Software

phpList is a  free, open source mailing list software you install on your own server. ( see phpList postings for more info) phpList is great for tech savvy users and has the advantage that you are in full control. You can import users and not have to force them to confirm their subscription, which is great if they confirmed elsewhere.  Unfortunately, phpList is missing an important feature for Internet Marketers, auto-responders. You can’t set up a series of email to be sent to each new subscriber. phpList is also missing support and isn’t seeing much new development.

I used phpList as my mail list server for a year, but decided because of the lack of auto-responders and new development, I need to look at other mail-list services.

AWeber Mailing

As part of a training class I was doing this spring, I subscribed to AWeber’s mailing list service. Aweber is very easy to use, well supported and has the auto-responder feature. AWeber integrates into WordPress very well with their subscription forms plugin. AWeber has extensive training that follows you thought the process of setting up your subscribers and mailings. However, importing is difficult with Aweber. To import a list you have to submit the list, give a explanation of where you got the list, wait for a Aweber employee to review the list and then go through the confirmation process.  Aweber also costs money, $20 a month.

ListWire Mail Server

Another mail list service I tried this spring is ListWire. ListWire is a full featured mailing list service with subscription forms, WordPress integration and auto-responders. ListWire training is thin, but has a strong user community that provides good support. (including a great user manual and new video training). ListWire does not support subscription list imports. You need to send your old mail list a subscription request email from your normal email account. But the major plus, ListWire is free.  The downside to free, is that your subscriber will see a “offer” from the site a the end the confirmation process.

Recommendation??

So after testing these  mail list services, I have decided to go with ListWire. I don’t have a large mailing list and  mailing list are not a large part on my Internet Marketing strategy, so free is better and I don’t mind the presentation of a offer during the confirmation process.

However, if mailing lists are an important piece of your strategy and having a very positive online image is important, I would suggest going with AWeber.

As for phpList? Only if you love to tinker and don’t need a auto-responder feature.

----- From dcj21 Consulting - Making the Net work