In the global economy, the mobile professional carries many hi-tech tools just to keep the competitive advantage over their competitors.

Following are some of the tools that I carry in my black bag:

• High end laptop with max. wi-fi scheme;
• Secure Digital SD Card;
• Portable hard drive;
• Data compression tools;
• Backup software
• DvD software;
• Pdf reader;
• Data encryption software;
• Digital Camera;
• High End Mobile Phone;
• Portable Color Scanner; and
• Global Positioning System (GPS).

People asked me, “why do you carry so many tools!? My usual response is: “… ‘Proper Preparation Prevent Pissed Poor Performance’. It is better to go into a situation, over prepared than other under prepared.

As a mobile professional, I have collaborated with many people with many types of collaboration software. Because everyone is different, I have to adjust to the technical needs and capability of the different individuals

Following are some of my favorite collaboration tools:

• Hushmail (www.hushmail.com) for confidential messaging
• Web Ex (www.webex.com) for video conferencing and on-line meetings
• Skype for long distance calling
• BoxesOS (www.epazz.com) collaboration software for bringing a small business together.  They offer a total hosted solution and a free 30 day trial that can be setup with existing software and systems.

It does not matter what tools you use. It is more important that the tool you utilizes works well and you have the skill to use it.
If you are mobile professional who has many clients, it is important that you have the best toolset that accompany your client base.
In a future article, will touch on other tools that are necessary for the mobile professional

Google launched an innovative new tool.  Its Google Site Search for Small Businesses. 

What is it?

Its the same search tool that Google is made out of.  Its also the same search tool that Google has offered through Google Adsense Search for a long time.

What’s the difference?

Nothing that I can see.

Google Site Search enables a small business to provide their visitors with the ability to search the site they are looking from or search the internet.  They offered

When is it right to use Google Search on your site?

Most sites are looking to make their sites stickier.  It doesn’t make sense to put a function on your site that sends people away, possibly to a competitor.  Most sites with shopping carts like this site that sells tonneau cover and other accessories for cars and trucks offers a search function that doesn’t use Google technology.

When do You Use Google’s new tool?

Not Here – Now if that same site had used a Google search button it would allow people an easier out from their website with little to no benefit.

Not Here – Other sites that earn money from Adsense probably wouldn’t want to use the new function either as they don’t earn any money from it.

Here – but Why? - So that really only leaves that odd site that wants to share their traffic with Google and not earn anything in the exchange.  Why do something for free when you could earn money doing it?  Regardless, Google still leaves their ads mixed in with the results.

As you look to increase your title relevancy of your website, you need not worry too much about your domain name. 

Your domain name could be xyz.com and your domain title could be “ABC Information and Sales”

To give you a real life example take a look at MoreMouse.com, they focus on Orlando rental home and condo sales and leases.

With a name like MoreMouse and a focus on Orlando you might be thinking a disney theme, but they are working to focus on real estate.

Site Title

Orlando Vacation Homes, Florida villa, condo and town house rental – Lowery’s Vacation Homes

That’s a long title, but for title relevancy Whois scores them a 100%!

Note that when you look at the actual site, you won’t see that long title provided for the search engines.  Instead they use a graphic image.

So they enjoy the best of both worlds.  Good site title, simple domain name and a graphical image on their site to convey who they are and what they are about in a simple way.  (note the  repetitive use of the domain name in the graphics.  You do want people to remember how to find you!)

 So once you have a domain and a hosting plan what do you do now?

Fortunately, many hosting plans come with a number of packages that you can install straight from the plan to get a simple website, forum, blog or eCommerce site up and running for free.

Eventually, you will need to do some customization on the actual code.  This is not as difficult as it may sound, but you will need the right tools to access your files or to start learning html or PHP.

There are many free to cheap text editing tools out there that can do the job.  I’ve tried many of them myself, but ultimately, I ended up going with Dreamweaver (actually a bundle including Dreamweaver – Studio 8).  However, you do not have to spend a few thousand dollars to get some great capabilities.

UltraEdit13.10a is available as a free download for 30-45 days and you can buy the software after the fact for about $45.  You could use notepad even, but there are a number of tools in editing or text editing programs that will make your coding life much much easier.

Read more on: 

UltraEdit 13.00a: The Consummate Programming Editing Tool at Top 10 Tech Software

 Several times over the years I have occasionally gone to a hosting companies’ registration page and typed in a domain name to see if it was available.  Maybe I had an idea for a domain or a site or something. 

Often times these companies will show you 10 other alternate or similar spellings for the same domain encouraging you to pick something or pick lots of related ’somethings’.

A few times I have looked at a domain like this with a name that was unlikely to mean anything to anyone else in the world, and when I came back to purchase or register the domain name a week later, it was no longer available!

Originally, I chalked this up to chance, but it happened a few too many times.  I eventually came to the conclusion that something was up.

• maybe someone hacked the hosting companies registration tool
• maybe someone hacked my computer
• maybe an employee at the hosting company was sifting through aborted registrations looking for the next hot thing like Paris-In-Prison.com

I never thought (originally) that the hosting company might be buying up these domains themselves.

Well it was revealed about a year ago that Dotster a company that functions as a registrar, a place you can go to register a domain, also registered domains for themselves.  They were a domain registrant and their own registrar.

Neiman Marucs litigated against Dotster for registering more than a dozen domain names that were similar to trademarks that Neiman Marcus owned.  Plus they provided evidence that Dotster had done the same thing with hundreds of other domains for unrelated companies.

They brought complaints that Dotster would taste a domain by registering it through themselves and testing the traffic.  If there was no traffic, they would cancel the registration within a 5 day grace period and not pay anything for the registration.  (anyone can do this, but I do not advise it.  Dotster had an advantage because they were a registrar themselves and could hit the registration pipeline easier and not have to sit on hold for an hour to cancel early.

What does this Mean for Average Webmasters?

Do Not test the waters of a domain name through a registrar’s site. 

How to avoid having your future domain name stolen by your Registrar

1. Type the domain name into Google and see if it works. 
2. If it doesn’t (no page and no ads load up) then go to your registrar and register the domain on the spot.  Do not pass go, do not delay, do not abort the checkout.
3. Just Buy it!
4. If you change your mind about the purchase, you have 5 days to abort your purchase after the fact.  Use it.

Example

Let’s say that you want to sell swiss army watches online.  You want your site to have an e-commerce name so you decide eWatches.com would be perfect. 

You type http://www.ewatches.com into your browser and if nothing comes up you go to your registrar and register the site right away.  (It will only cost between $1 – $7 depending on who you register with and what types of incentives they offer).

You get the account setup, buy a bunch of product, hire a crack web designers to put together a hot and efficient shopping cart and you sell swiss army watches like there is no tomorrow.

But watch out for your registrar or hosting company.  They may purchase a domain name that is similar, like ewatchs.com.  They will taste the domain and see if anyone is trying to find your site and mis-spelling the domain.  They’ll park the site with ads and try and get your would have been customers to click on ads that might even take them to some other site that sells swiss army watches.  (Could be anyone on the net too, The Dotster litigation showed the Dotster engaged in this activity, but they are definitely not the only ones.  Thousands of people do this every day.)

Conclusion

Buy your domain right away when you visit a registrar.

Consider (very carefully) buying up all the alternate spellings for your domain name as well.  You can establish a 301 redirect and send any potential customers to the right address if they mis-spell your URL.  That’s more business for you and your registrar or host won’t be taking some of your traffic.

Subscribers May Request a copy of the Complaint from Neiman Marcus against Dotster via email at

info@top-5-hosting.com

No Uptime hosting appears to be one of the most honest and possibly cheapest hosting companies around.

They offer a $2 per month hosting plan that is out of this world!

For $2 per month you get:

• 200 KB of Storage
• 10 MB of Bandwidth
• PHP 4, 5 and 6
• MySQL, SQL and Oracle
• Dedicated Dedication
• Host Up to 6.8 Sites
• Free Identity Theft

They have some great upgrades available too!

With their “Take My Money Plan you get 2 Glow Sticks and a Free Broken Toaster and much more for $20 per month.

Resellers will be please with their “Resell-Our-Crap plan”.  $200 a month gives you Ruby on Railroads, 10 Bytes of Bandwidth and Steve Ballmer.

All of those plans are very affordable, but if you are strapped for cash today, you can always stop by and visit our sponsor for a payday loan and take a few bucks to get your new site going.

Phone Support 24/8

Their phone support seems to be typical for all hosting companies.

Other Services

Customer Testimonials

Their customer testimonials will keep you hitting the refresh button over and over again to cycle through all the great things that people have to say about No Uptime Hosting,

Like

No Uptime used my credit card to buy porn magazines. This service is a sham!

and

Harry Kornes writes:
Exceptional service for an exceptional price. My only complaint is that technical support told me to fuck off when I called them, but everything else has been great.

Affiliates?

My only complaint is that I can’t seem to figure out if they have an affiliate program . . .

POWWEB Hosting provides hosting solutions with a shop based in California.

They offer decent support and software offerings (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and more) at cheap hosting prices.   Their primary plans for a 1 or 2 years hosting package with a free domain registration costs $5.77 per month with no setup fees.

*note the cute girl in their advertisement.  I’m not pointing that out to be crass, just pointing it out as cute girls seem to be a theme in hosting sales (GoDaddy Superbowl commercial example) 

Don’t let the Cute girl distract you from the July sale ($4.77 per month on a hosting plan normally $5.77)

Pros – Price

Those prices are charged a year at a time, so don’t expect to see a $5.77 charge show up every month on your credit card like this is an Audible subscription or something.

Here is what the 1 and 2 year charges will actually look like.

$69.24 for a year is not too bad as far as prices go even cheap prices.

Cons – Support and Complaints

Doing a little research I dug up a review by a blogger that had a nasty run in with POWWEB back in 2005.  Long story short, the blog experienced a SQL connection issue (happens all too frequently sometimes – especially with WordPress) and POWWEB tried to shut down the site.

*SQL connection issues can severely drain the resources of a server, which could impact other customers.

Our blogger tried to contact POWWEB and had some trouble getting through, so they through up a splash page on their site and invited their readers to call in to POWWEB.  (Kind of gorilla like, but I could envision myself doing that with iPower when they do something stupid next time)

When Customers fight with their Web Host – Everyone Looses

So POWWEB must have gotten slammed and they deleted the blog and all of the blogs posts.  Ouch!  Definite mean streak.

The blogger moved to a different host and now has a blog article in the top 5 of Google pointing out this lack of customer sensitivity from 2 years back.

Other reviews have mentioned issues with canceling an account.  When you cancel a registration or hosting service you need to do it in advance before the renewal takes place otherwise you will get that full 1 or 2 year renewal all over again.  This customer claims that they followed the policy and received a credit card charge anyway.  So they had to process a chargeback on their credit card for the $37.  (I suspect that POWWEB probably paid their employees more than $37 to deal with the credit card merchant services and the customer. 

The reason why the customer is always right is really a cost issue.  If you try and prove the customer wrong or even do prove the customer wrong, its probably going to cost you more than if you accept that the customer is right, even when they are not.

Overall Perspective

POWWEB seems to offer some affordable rates.  They have had a couple nasty customer run ins, but I’ve seen the same type of thing at many other hosting companies.  I’d give them a neutral rating as customer service is more important to me than saving a few bucks a year, but if you are looking for cheap rates, this may be a good fit.  Maybe you can park some of that money saved on hosting into some cheap Las Vegas Real Estate. Las Vegas has been hot for real estate but the mortage industry shake up is shaking a number of people out of their properties and creating a short term fire sale in Vegas.

Tell us your POWWEB Story

If you have had direct experience with POWWEB hosting, email us your story and we’ll publish your review with a link plug to your website or blog.

Over the past few weeks my hosting company, InMotion Hosting has gone through a couple different upgrades that resulted in a few minutes of down time on my virtual server. 

Oddly enough, the first time, I did not notice a disruption at all.  They had fore warned me about potential downtime (15 minutes possibly during a 4 hour window).  A few days later, I did notice a 10 minute disruption however.

Then this week they went through another 4 hour session and warned me of a 15 minute window of potential downtime again (maybe a cold boot or something).

This time the downtime happened right when one of my articles was under review by a customer and that triggered an error email showing up in my Mailboxes.  Email inboxes that is. 

All in all, I do enjoy working with InMotion.  They at least forewarned me of the upgrade and potential downtime which is more than I can say for other hosting companies I’ve worked with.

In the physical world of ‘Real’ Estate, physical properties are often times listed and ’sold’ by professional sales people known as realtors.  A realtor can often times help make a sale happen for several different reasons:

1. They are distanced from the emotional connection of the property
2. They can bring a resource of prospective customers to the property
3. They have access to escrow agents
4. They bring financing contacts and services to buyers
5. They help advance the negotiations in a professional manner
6. They have access to title professionals and legal representatives
7. They even help people shopping for the property find just the right place

Websites like Sedo.com and many smaller sites like Performancing function like a multi-listing service enabling 1,500 domains per month to sell for about $3m per month.  They have 350,000 members and 7,000,000 domains in their system available for sell.

That is a lot of transactions and potential properties and so it makes sense that the web real estate business will likely advance in a direction where more sales and buyers agents specialize in helping people fine just the right property for their needs, manage the escrow process, possibly even connect financing to the deal.  Some day we might even have federally backed mortgages for websites and web domains.