If you upload videos to any or many of the free video sharing services such as YouTube or Revver, you maybe wondering how many people will ultimately see your videos?

Well TubeMogule those amazing gurus that developed a way for people to upload the same video to many of the sharing services through one upload has gathered up a great deal of data crunched the numbers, paid a statistician to tell them what was what and programmed a very simple little tool that can help you predict just how many people will view your video over its life cycle.

Simply plug in the number of days since you published the video, then enter the number of views that it has already received and it will calculate the predicted number of views the same video will likely get over the entire year.

The tool is designed to predict videos that are not one offs, such as a home video of your kids playing on their new swing sets.  This is targeted more towards videos or producers that have some level of following and will likely get at least 1,000 views out of their video in a year or better.

Price definitely should not be the only reason to make a hosting choice on the internet, but I would like to illustrate the high rates being charged by IPower in contrast with the lower rates charged by GoDaddy.

Note, I do not recommend either host despite their wide spread popularity.

GoDaddy simply put, charges $3.99 for Protection Privacy versus IPower’s $8.99.

If you have multiple domains, that is a marginal difference of $5 per year per domain.  For site owners with a single domain, that probably isn’t too much to pay, but for many small businesses selling products online or even small to large publishers with multiple domains the charge is not scalable.  Multiple domains are commonly purchased by many small businesses looking to help their customers find the right web url even if they type in the wrong address.

For example if you are looking for travel guides and you type in shermanstravel.com you will go to the correct site for travel guides, but if you type in shermantravel.com and drop the s, then you will not.  So it can be common for a company to buy both domains and redirect the mis-spelled version to the proper destination.

What makes it worse is that IPower is basically suckering in long time existing customers making them pay these automatic higher rates without as the default, forcing them to opt out manually. 

This week I received a troubling email from IPower hosting, which is likely the new last straw in my relationship with them.

They sent me the following message about one of my domains:

Your “Your-great-domain.com” domain name has a June renewal date and is enrolled in our domain privacy service, which protects your identity by keeping your contact information from being published online.

To ensure that Your-great-domain.com remains protected, we will automatically initiate a one-year renewal of the domain privacy service on June 26. We will charge $8.99 to the credit card we have on file for your account to renew this annual subscription.

So now that they have changed their pricing policy to charge $8.99 for domain privacy through Who Is, they are now going to automatically charge me for this brand new fee, unless I change something in my account.

I will change my payment settings, but this is a warning to anyone that has a number of domains with IPower to transfer out of them as soon as possible or manually change all of your domain settings (very tedious if you set up accounts with them before their system upgrade and account consolidation – I’d rather stick my head in the hot sands of Death Valley hoping to discover the best acne treatment known to man, while literally burning my face off to spite myself).

If domain privacy, and the cost of that privacy is an important issue for you for domains or a series of domains, you may have been stung by IPower’s recent Price Hike for Domain Privacy.

They raised their WhoIs Privacy Registration fees from $0 up to $8.99 for each domain.

That is a huge price hike, especially if you manage a basket of domains.  For a business that has purchased domains for its primary business selling farmhouse sinks with names across the multiple extensions (.com, .net, .org, .info, .tv, .biz etc) not to mention picking up the commonly mis-spelled domain names relative to those same domains, $9 per domain can turn into a large yearly bill.

Dotster however this month is emphasizing both cheap transfers ($6.99) plus very cheap WhoIs Privacy rates of $1.99!

How does WHOIS Privacy protect you?

It provides you with a completely private registration by providing our information in the WHOIS database, rather than yours. No more sales phone calls, junk mail, SPAM or any other unwanted attention due to your domain registrations ever again.

DOMAINPRIVACY199 – $1.99 for a new Domain when you buy WHOIS Privacy (MyDomain and Domain.com).

DOMAINPRIVACY499 – $4.99 for a new Domain when you buy WHOIS Privacy (Dotster.com).

Act now. This limited time offer ends June 30th, 2008 at midnight Pacific Time!

In our Previous Article, Scan Those Flyers Before You Fly from Your Next Web Conference, we promised to provide you a tip that would help you save time if you took our advice and scanned conference flyers and information before you flew home (saving money on your baggage and saving all of us money on future flight prices).

So here’s the tip

When you scan those flyers in there are two simple tools that can make all of that information on those flyers indexable so that you can find it in a quick search from your computer without having to do a lot of work yourself.

The tools are OmniPage 16 and Google Desktop.  Google Desktop is free and odds are you probably are already using it.

OmniPage 16 costs about $150, but can be extremely useful.  It is basically an Optical Character Recognition program.

In the old days, you could run documents through a scanner and the OCR would convert those pdf images generated into text.  These days in addition to generating a word or text document from a scanner, you can also do that with a digital camera!

The program recommends a digital camera of 5.0 megapixels, but I have generated text documents of 98% accuracy using a 3.2 megapixel Cannon elph.  I do recommend a better camera, but if you have an older camera, just make sure your resolution is maxed out, and that you try and fill the image with the document or text. 

These days there are even a few camera phones that are offering 5.0 megapixels, so you could potentially see a day, where you could snap the picture with your camera phone, email it to yourself and run the image through the OCR when ever you like.

TIP The program does have a great function that scans all the files in a bin.  So if you hit a trade show and walk away with a few hundred pictures of flyers and things, just have your computer run through the files in a bin some night while you are sleeping!

This is also one of those tips that anyone that attends conferences can utilize.  Web developers tend to be up on the latest software and technology, but this can work whether you work on the internet, or in consumer electronics or even if you are a drug rep attending the latest weight loss drug convention getting wired on Phentermine in between dinners wining and dining medical professionals.

Here is an extremely useful tip that WILL save you money during your next conference.

This tip can really be applied to any conference or trade event.

Before you pack all those flyers and information packets up into your suit case, be aware that all that paper will make your bags heavier and will likely force you to either check your bags (and pay one of those new fees that range from $20 – $100 dollars) or it will increase the amount of fuel the airlines burn flying you and your stuff to your next destination which will drive airline rates up in general for you and for everyone.

There’s a simple technology fix to this problem.

Scan that stuff in to your computer!

Its never been easier.  For one thing, the easy convenient and low tech way to do this is to simply take a digital picture of all those pages.

You can do this one page at a time or set your camera on the highest resolution, layout all those flyers on your hotel bed, and take a single picture.  Then later on down the road you can crop the individual items into single pages.

Alternatively, before you even carry that stuff back to your room, making your back, shoulders and feet groan, ask for a digital copy at the booth, or take your picture at the source of the offending handout provider!

If you are made out of money and you do like lugging lots of stuff around then I’m sure you will be just fine investing in some Johnston and Murphy luggage and organizers and paying a small fortune to fly a dead tree or two around the country in your bags.

But I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that when you get that paper pile back to your home or office that it will just sit there for a while until you ultimately recycle it anyway.  In my next article, I’ll share a complimentary tip to make the scanning of this paperwork actually useful for you in addition to a money saver. 

It is not even July and you may not be thinking too much about Christmas, but if you are hoping or planning to launch a Christmas themed site for a campaign or for a long term run, you best get the site up now.

It takes time to get a site indexed, the links and traffic built up, and more and if your site is not up now (june before Christmas), then you will behind the eight ball going into the holiday season.

Consider that to get the site going you need all of the following items running at full strength by October 1:

• Site Built
• Site Designed
• Site Indexed
• Heavy deep links built up in SERPs
• PPC campaigns running and tuning taking place
• Affiliate Campaigns running to build track record for primary campaigns in October
• Viral Campaigns running and tuned (Videos Don’t just happen by themselves in the wink of an eye!)
• Blogger Buzz Building campaigns Should be Planned now and Organized for launch in August at the latest

and much much more!

Keep in mind that Christmas is not the only thing that needs to sell in the fall.  The fall is also one of the prime vacation seasons for areas including Monterey, South Florida, the Caribbean and even Hilton Head rentals so if you are planning a site for this type of seasonal event, then my short tip to you is “Launch Now!”  Sites do not grow over night and sites definitely do not grow in a test environment either.  You can perfect a site on a test box, and launch to a miserable failure if you do not pay attention to all the other things that make a site successful.  Get it out there and impress people with your improvements if you like. 

Why do you think Google rolls so many things out in beta????

They like many companies realize that you have to be out there, even if its in a crappy beta form or else your perfect website will be dead before it launches.

Godaddy.com this week offered up if you items in their latest newsletter that indicates some interesting deals going into the summer.  First off they are offering a 15% discount off any purchases over $50 in value.  This discount can be applied to anything from domain name buyers to hosting services to site builder is in much more.  There are offering a special coupon code for this which is gdp0615c.

Go daddy is also offering a domain special on .MOBI domains.  They are offering these at just $7.99.  Now don’t get me wrong, I have no idea what you’d want with one of these domains, but if you know the odds are you probably realize it was a pretty decent buy on any given domain that’s not a .info domain. 

I have yet to look into the market research and try and determine why a .mobi domain would be of any real functional use.

Dan Richfield of Easy CGI Hosting seems to have a good concept of what people need in a hosting provider.  They need everything. 

That is some people want for example Linux servers and other Windows servers.  A hosting company that can provide both solutions as well as good customer support could definitely be a valuable resource for webmasters and site owners.

New technologies, such as Virtualization will help hosting companies survive the current economic downturn, says Dan Richfield, president of the Web hosting company and Microsoft partner, Easy CGI (www.easycgi.com).

“Hosting companies that survived the last downturn in 2001 – 2002 learned their lessons well. They’ve not only adopted new, more flexible hosting technologies, they’ve also streamlined their operations, standardized their services, and have learned the importance of responsive customer service.”

…

“The key is to be flexible about providing hosting plans that give customers what they need. At Easy CGI, we are driven by what our customers want, rather than trying to force them all in to one mold. That’s why we were one of the first companies to offer a full, competitive range of hosting plans for Linux as well as Windows.”

“Some of our customers want the very latest Windows Server environment, the moment it becomes available. Others are content to stay with older, more familiar technology. We give both of them what they want. Through our close ties with Microsoft, we were able to offer Windows Server 2008, a full month before it was generally released. But we continue to fully support earlier versions.”

PR-USA.net

Easy CGI seems to be positioning themselves to accommodate the needs of everyone from businesses to virtual reality start ups to bloggers and specialty sites selling a cat condo for finicky feline lovers.  Ala carte options that enable people to choose their own services to meet their needs at reasonable prices seems to be a good solution, and check out that bandwidth ->  3500 GB for $7.96 /month!

Dotster Hosting is offering a Promotional code for 20% off Hosting.

Order 1 year or more of Linux or Windows shared hosting plans that include our acclaimed, next generation SiteBuilder, and get 20% OFF. All plans feature tons of disk space, bandwidth, email accounts, anti spam filters and much more.

For as low as $4.20/month* you can enjoy the benefits of the award winning hosting plan and get an ideal tool to build your website.

SiteBuilder makes building your site simple.

Choose from over 300 modern-looking template designs, upload your content, create a blog, set up a simple e Shop, get a RSS feed, and much more.

Use coupon code 20OFFHOSTING at checkout. Valid on Dotster, MyDomain and Domain.com

Whether you are building a blog, a business site, or even Lasik landing pages, this is a great deal.

In case you missed it, this POWWeb’s half price hosting special is ending this week.  They have been offering web hosting at just $3.88 per month.

That’s a great price and can save you or your business quite a bit of money.  With the savings you can buy a better web site template or get your father a father’s day present with vehicle tracking service or just put an extra few gallons of gas in the tank.

So first IPower raised their domain renewals from $6.50 to $6.85.  No big deal.

Then they doubled their rates, by charging people $7-8 for WhoIs privacy protection when it used to be included with domain purchases and renewals.  Ouch, Who-is going to pay for that after getting it free (and still getting it free at many other hosts!)

They separately upped the rates on .US domains also from $6.50 – $6.85 to $15.95.  Ouch that smarts!

Well, this week when I went to renew a few domains, I noticed that without any apparent notice or warning, they had upped the rates on their regular domains (.com, .net and others) to $7.5.

Now, I’m pretty sure the price of gas has nothing to do with the delivery of my domain renewal notices, so I can’t see any reason why they would raise, re-raise and raise again their rates in about a 6 month period, unless there was some bigger problem in the company. 

That’s my best guess!  If you have a better guess, let’s hear it. 

In the meantime, domain rates are still not terribly expensive, but if you own a large number of them, you might have to consider moving your domains elsewhere or taking out a free mortgage loan or something to pay up on the renewal rates.