No Contract Needed!

My Wife and I went looking for new cell phones. Our contract was up, 2 years ago, we never renewed because they didn’t require it, and plus we weren’t sure if we wanted another contract. We were with the same company for over 10 years, so we weren’t sure if we wanted someone else. Anyway, we wanted new phones with better text and web access. What we really wanted was to get on Twitter and Facebook with our phones, plus a few other sites. But we didn’t want to purchase a $600 Blackberry. So in order to get free phones we would have to enter into another 2 year contract, which we weren’t ready to do again. So we decided to look at all the major cell phone providers, you know who they are, before we agreed to another contract. We even looked at Boost Mobile, a new provider in our area. Boost didn’t require a contract, we could get a Blackberry for $150 bucks, and all data plan that includes everything for $60 a month per phone. Which we both like because we can get on the web, get some great free apps, and get on Facebook. They even provided a way to reload your account, it’s called Re-Boost. Re-Boost is a way to reload your account to fund your plan. I will end with this, these guys, Boost Mobile, are worth considering for our next provider. I will be reading more about them to make sure their the right fit for us.

I just read an article online that states that the Blu-ray Disc Association recently started to license their technology to Chinese manufactures. You all know what that means, Blu-Ray players for under $100 bucks. I hate to say it, but that’s when I’ll get one. If we could build these players and sell them at a much more affordable price I would have gotten one a long time ago. Right now these Blu-Ray players are selling for more than $200, which is way to high in my opinion. And the disc’s cost about twice as much as the standard DVD, why? I once heard that making a Blu-Ray disc was cheaper than making a standard DVD. The same happened when we went from a VHS tapes to a DVD, it was cheaper to make the DVD. At the time they where selling the DVD for twice the amount of the VHS tape. If these makers would stop being so greedy we wouldn’t need Chinese manufactures to get the pricing under control, and people would by more things made in the USA. I really feel that if the maker of anything would charge reasonable prices for their products we would be much better off than what we are now. The greed needs to stop!

For most of you I’m sure you’ve had problem with your hosting provider, I know I have.  When the time was right I made the move, to another provider, left the other one behind.  And if you’re seriously looking for a new web site hosting provider as well you need to do a simple search via your choice of search engine.  I would recommend doing a search for “website hosting.”  Once you find someone you like check to see what other’s are saying about them.  They may have a good rating in some areas, and a bad rating in others.  There are people out there that love to rate everything they buy and use, so you will find something.  I base all my purchases based on customer service, then price.  Something may look good and cheap, but could cost you more down the road.  Another thing you can do is find a site that based their findings on customer satisfaction, affordability, reliability, uptime and technical support.  Anyway, you should have no problem finding a new provider, hey, some will even more your site over for free.

One of the most asked questions I receive is – Is getting free hosting really a good deal?  We’ll, I really don’t know, I’ll leave it up to you (readers) to answer that after you read what I have to say.  Ok, if you like having those annoying banners or pop-ups on your site?  Or if you found a free hosting provider that doesn’t have the banners or pop-ups but has given you next to nothing in space and bandwidth.  Which if you use up all your space your site stands the chance of going out.  Now, on the other hand you can purchase a hosting account from some really good providers out there.  I have found some hosting providers that charge between $1.99 to $8.99 a month for services.  All of these provider offer different packages you would need to research.  Remember, your website is yours, take control on how you want it to be viewed by the rest of the world.  If you don’t really care about the banners or pop-ups, go with the free hosting.  If you hate the banners and pop-ups and you think your viewers will as well, purchase yourself a good hosting account.  That’s all I have to say on this subject!

How about that, one of the biggest hang out spots for hackers got hacked. The site, which I’m not going to name, because you should never visit a hacker site, was hacked by the user “Catch Them.” He gathered the full list of registered users, all their passwords, and even their email addresses. Then he or she posted the gathered information on the Full Disclosure security mailing list. This person also posted screen shots of the hack job, including their user list. I guess things really do come full circle. I read the site has been in and out, but not fully sure, I didn’t visit the site. Hacker sites provide information to people to use against good people. And sites that provide tips to hack others should be removed. And we can only hope that this one stays down for good, but the chances are it won’t.

I have a few questions for all of you. Are your fed up with your hosting provider? Does your site have a lot of down time? And do you feel that your hosting provider could deliver much better customer service? If you answered yes to any of these questions you need to seek out another provider, fast.

If you’re business website constantly goes down it will cost you money, and customers. If you’re a site owner, business or personal, you know how hard it is to find reliable web hosting, which is very critical to your business. As most of you know, when your site goes down you just want to pull your hair out. You purchase a plan, your promissed up site time, then out it goes, drives me nuts. So do what I did, research, research, and research your next provider. Call them, talk to someone on the phone. Most of these providers don’t offer toll free numbers, but that’s not a big problem. They just want to reduce the calls for low level questions. To avoid phone charges, call from your cell phone. I know I’m running on here, but I can’t stress enough, call your provider, and research them. Good luck on your searches.

For doing one of the biggest scams around the world last year, Intel Corp, the biggest chip maker will pay euros $1.06 billion in fines. That comes out to about $1.44 billion is U.S dollars. Intel had used illegal sales tactics to stop other chip makers from coming to market. This hurts us, the consumers, we had a cheaper product to buy but couldn’t, because Intel paid them off. One of the other chip makers paid off was AMD, which should be fined as well. After all they took payment to delay computers with their chip in it.

The European Commission stated that Intel broke the law. That law is the EU competition law. They simply paid another maker not to sell their product, which is breaking the law, so now they must pay. About 2 years ago Microsoft pulled the same scam, they where fined euros $899 million, which I think their appealing. I’m sure Intel will appeal as well. Other country’s around the world are fining Intel as well. They better just pay their fines and move on, after all they took advantage of every consumer out there. If they pull this scam again their going to be unable to sell their crap anywhere, and that would be the end of them.

As I look back over the years of the internet I can’t think of a better deal than the deal that just formed between Microsoft and Yahoo. This deal will hurt Google in many ways. Google will never say it, but it’s going to hurt their bottom line. Microsoft has their new search tech site bing.com, which is much better than Google’s search. In case your not sure what this deal details between Microsoft and Yahoo I’ll tell you. It’s very simple, Microsoft will be handling the search side of Yahoo, that’s it. Microsoft has the money to bring new tech to the world. And Yahoo has the people, which make for a perfect match. This deal is great for the world marketers. This will drive down advertising prices from Google and other online search engines. I just hope this 10 year deal last for a very long time. What I think will happen in the end is that Yahoo will build up their other businesses and then sell the whole company to Microsoft for billions.

Just this morning I had a problem with all of my blogs and my wife’s blogs. All of my regular sites where working just fine, just wordpress software wasn’t working correctly. So the first thing I did was picked up the phone and placed a call to my hosting provider. And to my surprise I was able to speak to a tech right away, no waiting. They pin pointed the problem and helped fix it, sort of. I had to rename a file to get the blogs working until they fixed the problem on their end. But once the problem was fixed I was able to rename the file back. I’m not going to recommend them just yet, so I’m leaving their name out of this post. I would like to work with them a little longer before I recommend them. I would recommend that if you find a company that answers the phone on the other end stick with them.

Most of you already know that I had problems with my web hosting services in the past. My sites would always go down for hours at a time. One time my sites went out for two days. I would send email after email and never got a response. As you can imagine this was very frustrating. And the thing that made me the maddest was I felt trapped. Because feeling trapped meant that I was going to need to start all over again. And I was also afraid of losing some of my site information. But I’m here to tell you not to be afraid and make the move if your hosting provider is failing you. The move wasn’t that bad at all, matter of fact it was pretty easy. So I did a little work and found a hosting provider where you can get reliable web hosting. The web hosting company I came across tonight can meet all your business needs. This web hosting site also offers some of the best ecommerce web hosting I’ve come across. And on top of providing all their great services, you can really depend on them. So don’t be affraid, do your research, and make the right choice.