Recently, I was looking for an online file sharing service that enables me to share large project files between my project team and I.

A friend told me to check out Driveway.com, it is supposed to be a new free web based service for online file sharing that specializes in large files.

I am one of those techies who love to test new software without looking at the manual, so I found Driveway.com to be easy and functional.

Love the ‘edit widgets’ for shares that can be used to edit the shared documents directly with a single click from desktop instead of having to edit, save and email it back.   Discovered that the edit share links are multi-user capable!  Cool feature.

I also was able to share files over 100MB.   Most email services have limits on file sizes in terms of file attachment.  With Driveway.com this limitation is no more.  BY using Driveway’s ‘Parkit’ links, file sharing for files up to 500MB in size can happen.  I was also able to post the ‘Parkit’ links on my project team’s blog.

I also was able to create traditional read only links to send large files and Driveway handled it with ease.  It only took me a minimum of 10 minutes to figure out all of the functionality of Driveway.
Because of Driveway functionality and ease of use, I give this service a double thumbs up.

My friend AndrewIanDodge of DodgeBlogium is trying to win a trip to the Superbowl and be featured in Superbowl ad.  He’s one of 10 finalists.

Please consider dropping by to sign up and vote at

http://www.fuelmyblog.com/index.jsp?t=mybowlad

The web is filled with all sorts of analogies of web business models applying real estate practices and models.  Buying a domain and building up a website is often times considered a ‘property’ and the sale of this type of property even goes through an escrow account.

Banner ads have their name derived from the physical banner advertisements that are prolific in cities and along the interstates in the US.

A website is called a site, just like a construction site is a site.  Its considered a place.  Although sometimes its called a web page.  Even the primary index page of a website is commonly referred to as the ‘home’ page.

Plus, in SecondLife you can go and build virtual buildings and land in cyberspace essentially using a graphic engine that is running on a domain hosting server.

So its probably no surprise to anyone that someone came up with the concept of leasing a domain.  Afterall, we already had free domains which is kind of like the homesteading principle used to populate the US in the 1800’s. 

LeaseThis.com provides people with the ability to lease a domain from 1 month to 24 months at a time.  You do not have to make a greater commitment and so this provides people with a new way of evaluating a domain name to see just how much traffic it can really pull in.  I suspect this could even become popular for people looking to sell or buy domain names. 

If you don’t trust the stats, then lease to buy and see if the stats hold up for you!

Bandwidth is an increasingly more important aspect or requirement for a hosting plan.  More companies more websites are utilizing video and audio and other services that sucked down bandwidth and bandwidth can be expensive if you’re not prepared for it.

Possibly even worse, having your website knocked off the web due to a lack of bandwidth could be something that sends your readers or your viewers or your customers away to a different location.  New paragraph so as you look at the many perks and benefits that come with a hosting plan you should definitely consider the bandwidth question and ask yourself if you plan on using your own videos or other types of services that might require people to download or stream content to their computers from your website.

The teaser rates that many hosting companies provide and the teaser benefits like a registered domain name offered up for free or even a set of personalized pens, which might look cute but at the end of the day they’re just cute and not necessarily practical nor do they necessarily represent what you really need to get the job done and make sure that your website is a success. 

A friend of mine once recommended Yahoo!  As one of the better hosting providers because they have a bandwidth pipe that is so large that they can handle almost anything your website might dish out.  In theory that’s a fairly good suggestion and if you’re looking to ensure that you’ve got enough bandwidth to cover the activity from your website a large large host like Yahoo might be the ticket.  Sometimes they seem to cater to small businesses and small non-technical bloggers, but they do have a very well-developed infrastructure.

I don’t have any experience with their customer support what comes to hosting and if any of the other Yahoo services are good example I would be scared to death of their customer service however if they got the bandwidth and they’ve got the uptime you may not need to call customer service all that much. 

Often times when we think about hosting, we think about hosting a domain are hosting a virtual server or hosting a website.  We often get stuck on the idea that a server is for hosting a website and we forget the server is just a server and can host many different types of functionality.

For example there are many companies that provide payroll hosting.  The concept is sound you take a third party and you have them run your payroll services through their servers and systems at some distance from your office or building.

This is actually a good way to protect your employees in case of an emergency area payroll can still be processed even if you’re building disappears under water.

Many companies still purchase their payroll software the old-fashioned way, but more and more Web applications and firms that provide Web services or even third-party services that can be managed online are popping up.

Each company is going to have their own needs and the choice to move to hosting your payroll online through a different company is probably going to depend on the size of your company and its need for scalability and flexibility.

I have come to realize that almost every host will eventually experience some downtime.  A host can only build and so much redundancy before the trip will witching hour will develop and everything will go wrong and their servers or site or all of the above will crash.

My own preferred post and one that I do highly recommend experience the bandwidth outage last night for about an hour and a half.  Initially I wasn’t certain if my own DSL connection was down or preparing to go down or if my host was down.  Sometimes my DSL connection starts to waver, I’ll start to the experience patchy browsing experiences for lack of a better word.  A bill to open one site but not another and then a few minutes later everything will crash and I’ll have to go reboot my router for my modem or something or in bad situations called my DSL provider and said on the phone for an hour half.

Last night my host went down, and initially I thought they were down and then I thought maybe my DSL provider was going down.  So I lost a few cycles troubleshooting things internally to my own systems before I was able to determine that my host was actually down.

In the past I’ve experienced this type of issue a couple times before and usually my host came up before I was done doing all the troubleshooting on my side and I was never sure if they had truly been down or if it was just something in my head or my system.  Unfortunately, my host was truly down at all by websites and all my customers websites were down as well while they were down.  Fortunately that happened in the bill of the night and most of my sites and my customer sites receive the majority of their traffic from the Western Hemisphere and so we don’t lose a lot of business and is not going to slow down my ten year plan on buying a luxury home or anything like that.

I sent off an e-mail to my host your my Yahoo account because my own e-mail was down along with the servers and by websites. 

What’s my Point?  – Does your Host have 24/7 Phone support?

my host has excellent customer service.  They are widely recognized as having excellent customer service.  Their prices are not the cheapest in the industry, but most people flock to them for their customer service.  They’re not the most expensive either it’s not like I’m paying a premium for that customer service.  I would consider their prices reasonable and possibly even cheap if you consider the fact that you can get someone on the phone typically in under a minute… IF… YOU… CALL… DURING… BUSINESS… HOURS!

My host does not have 24/7 phone support.

I can live with that, but you may not be able to and it’s definitely something you should consider.  I’m positive that there is a distinct trade-off between finding a host that does provide 24/7 phone support and one that does not.  My host is InmotionHosting, and you can find them at our list of hosts.  I have worked with iPower as well.  They do have 24/7 phone support, but it’s been my experience that you’re hard-pressed to find a person that knows what they’re doing two hours out of the day low loan 24 and if you do happen to find that person that knows what they’re doing during that two hour window, odds are they’re very overworked, very pissed off and not likely to be terribly helpful to you.

Maybe if you could slide them a $50 bill over the phone, they might be nicer but I doubt it.