Image courtesy: cobrasnatch

Did you get mad after seeing this topic ? You might be. But it is true. I will let you know about a promo code which allows you to obtain 2 additional free lifetime domains apart from the usual free life time domain name you get. If this sounds interesting, please read the rest of this post.

Well you might be wandering which hosting company will give this offer. It is Dreamhost.com. By the time I’m writing this post Dreamhost.com had a Google Page rank of 8/10 and Alexa rank of 12,692 which is very high compared to many other web hosting companies. This blog is also hosted at Dreamhost which provides quite remarkable service and support. Followings are the basic features of their hosting package.

• 500 GB storage at sign up and automatically increase by 2GB every week. (Can you find any other hosting package which increases the storage weekly for free?)
• 5 TB monthly bandwidth at sign up and automatically increase by 40GB every week. (Can you find any other hosting package which increases the bandwidth weekly for free?)
• Unlimited MySQL database
• Unlimited email accounts
• Unlimited user accounts (Full shell/ftp)
• Free domain
• Unlimited domains and sub domains hosting facility (You can host additional 2 free lifetime domains in the same hosting package and any amount you like )
• One click install web applications (WordPress, phpBB, Advanced Poll, ZenCart, MediaWiki, Joomla, Gallery, WebCalendar). All these are automatically upgraded.
• 24-hour customer service (This is the best feature I discovered. When I submit an inquiry, I get a reply within few minutes. Really awesome!!)
• A very good WIKI which explain everything we need to know to host a website with them.

You will find detailed features when you visit Dreamhost.com. If you are satisfied with the features (You definitely will ) and when signing up, you will find a place where you can add a promo code as shown below.

Add BIGGIFT as the promo code. That’s it. You will get 2 additional free lifetime domains. Interesting Ha!.

Image courtesy: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

Videos embedded in the web pages are gaining popularity among the internet community and the business world. These videos are being used to conduct training and other educational purposes, entertainment, marketing, advertising etc. Embedded videos are more attractive and efficient in conveying anything to the visitors compared to the traditional text and images. Many web hosting companies provide video streaming facility with their hosting package. But most of them are not very user friendly and attractive. The next alternative is uploading the video to a third party website like YouTube and Metacafe and put their code in your website. The problem you face here is you have to do it under their restrictions like the video size and video quality. And you also have to rely on their storage capacity. I found a good software which helps to eliminate these issues and host your videos by yourself very easily. I thought that it will be better if I let you know about it also.

This is called “Easy web Video”. As the name implies it prepares videos for the web very easily. It guarantees that you can publish a video in your website within few minutes. Here’s an extract from the vendor’s site which shows it’s features at a glance.

Make any existing video file much smaller (file size) so it plays easily on your website…and without taking up a lot of space or losing its quality online, but keeps the original quality level.

Add buttons to your video like Stop, Play, Fast Forward, Rewind. You choose which ones to add.

Automatically generates the code you simply copy and paste anywhere you want your video to appear on any web page.

Automatically “Upload” your video to any web page with just one click.

Make it simple for visitors to watch, just press play! That’s it. There’s no need to download a large file or run a big program like Media Player, QuickTime, or Real Player. (Examples Below)

This software allows you to create videos with very attractive player styles according to your choice. All the future upgrades are free once you bought the product. It allows you to pay through PayPal which guarantees a secure online payment. It also has a very good customer support and gives away free two bonus products. Following is an extract from the vendor’s site which describes what you can do with this amazing software.

Place video examples of your product on your web page(s).

Email friends and family video of your holidays, with just a few clicks. (The 1-2-3 video email process is explained below.)

Email Grandma and Grandpa video of the kids playing soccer, baseball, or their school concerts.

If you don’t want to email videos you can place them on your personal blog if you have one.

Close the sale of your house or cottage faster by giving a video tour online.

Introduce your company personnel to clients with video for a more personal feel.

Add video to your eBay auctions and see an instant increase in high paying bids.

If you think this news is interesting, have a visit to the vendor’s website. You can find more attractive and important information related to this product there. I wish you good luck on your online video streaming .

Were you finding an easy way to build a website or build more and more websites without much of a trouble and with a click of a button? If the answer is YES, I encourage you to read this post. In this post, I will explain you about a new and very powerful software which creates websites easily with many features.

This software is called as “SiteBuilder Elite”. First of all let me tell you that it is not a FREE tool . But if you can afford to buy it, it will definitely reduce your valuable time and money on website development. Following is an extract from the vendor’s website which explains the scenario that most of us face.

Dear Friend,

Tired of spending, hours, days, weeks or months building a website, only to see a small return for it? Yeah, maybe you do it because you love your subject and want to share it with others. But wouldn’t it be nice if you made some money from it, even if only to cover hosting fees?

Building a quality website can take a huge amount of time and many people are frustrated at the low levels of money they earn from Adsense ads placed on their pages. That can be due to something as simple as the placement of those ads.

The most important thing about this software is that you don’t need to know anything about web design, HTML or any other web development language. You will just need a general understanding about websites and web hosting. You will find many posts related to that in this blog. The vendor of this software describes how simple is the software as follows.

Very simple. Each new website requires a little preparation - such as buying a domain name and web hosting (cheap options are covered in the manual), creating a header graphic for it, what colors you want and so on.

You will also need to create a list of keywords, each of which will become a unique page on your new site. Depending on the number of keywords in your list, your site can have 10s, 100s or 1000s of pages. How many is up to you. There are many keyword research tools available, both free and paid, which will give you the words and phrases people type in when they’re searching for something - the words and phrases your pages will be built around. (Keyword tool suggestions are provided in the manual).

Work efficiently and you can easily build at least one new multi-1000 page site a day.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so you probably want to see a site created with SiteBuilder Elite. I’ve created two versions of the site - a basic, no-frills version with no content except for RSS feeds and a more sopisticated version, where I prepared a header graphic, added some content (from free aricle directories) and ticked most of the options on the SiteBuilder Elite configuration screen. Your sites will lie somewhere between these extremes.

I have done some posts warning you about scams and fake software in this blog. You MUST always look and think carefully before you buy anything online. I ask you to do the same here. But you don’t have to worry about it very much as the vendor’s site provides two very good videos explaining you about the content of the software. I recommend you to watch both of them before you buy it. It actually explains everything very clearly. Have a visit to the vendor’s website if it is interesting where you will find whole details. Here is the link again.

Image courtesy: hostdime.com

Many people around the globe are willing to create a website and eager to host it. Some people go for free hosting services like Geocities offered by Yahoo. Some buy a hosting package and host it. Most of us first try to host a website in a free hosting service and after monitoring the success of the website, we shift for a paid hosting service. In this post I would like to explain you about the free web hosting services.

The most important thing you must remember is that there are no charity oriented services in the internet. There are many free services. But these free service providers don’t offer a free service if they don’t receive an income from the service by some other way. Therefore you must not think that even though they are free, they don’t have commercial purposes. For an example, when you host a website in Geocities, you will see advertisements in your web pages added by Yahoo. Some free web hosting services don’t put advertisements in your web page. But they show an advertisement page, before your web site appears.

Another thing is that you won’t get a desired URL for your web address. For an example if you host with Geocities, you will get a URL like www.geocities.com/<your website name>. And you won’t get a domain name you like. There are space restrictions also. If you are hosting a commercial or professional website, I don’t recommend a free web hosting service. If you are hosting a website for an experimental purpose or just for fun, it is ok to host in free web hosting service.

I have posted an article on selecting a domain name, which covers a large area on this. Here is the link of that post and please read it before you proceed with this article.

Picking a domain name is very important for your commercial website and you must do it very carefully as it contributes to your progress when your website grows. You must have some basic knowledge on branding and then choose a domain name which is highly brandable. Simply it means that it should give an impression about the product or service that you are going to market. It is better if you can have a short and memorable name if possible. Because it will be a successful approach if you plan to design a long running website. It is also a good approach if you can find a domain name which has your best key words. (I will explain you about key words in the coming posts). Always make sure that you have selected and reserved a domain name before you start on the development of the website and it is more convenient and time saving if you buy the domain name from your web hosting service as many services provide a free domain name if you buy a hosting package. Ex. Godaddy.com, dreamhost.com (where this website is hosted). This will also save time and money on domain transferring.

When registering your domain name, make sure that you register it with an ICANN certified registrar. Always try to buy a .com domain. If not possible try for a .net or .org domain. And there are many new domains like .biz, .tv, .asia available too. Non .com domain is better than a less memorable, less branding and longer .com domain. If you plan your business for a specific country like France, always try to reserve a domain name specific to that country like .com.fr or .fr .

After you choose a domain name and reserved it, Host it with a reliable web hosting company like dreamhost.com or godaddy.com. There are many hosting service providers for cheap prices but most of them are not reliable. You don’t have to worry about the price as long as you plan to start a commercial and longer running website as the payment amount for your hosting will be very small compared to the profits you gain from the website if you market it correctly. And always remember that to launch your website when it is fully completed. I see many “under construction” launched sites. This will definitely not make a positive attitude with your future customers. And if you plan to make a dynamic website (which shows dynamic content specific to a customer after some processing), make sure that your web hosting service provides the technology support in your hosting package. For an example, if you are using PHP as the programming language for your dynamic website, your hosting service must provide PHP support in your hosting package. This is also same for the database if you are using them (ex. MySQL, Oracle).

I hope that you learned some important tips on how to select a domain name, reserve it and host it, from this post. In the next article, I will explain how to plan your website design and the areas that you must concern in developing your website.