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Just a few years ago, things were simplistic on the internet – you often had just a single password to store for your email account. These days however, it’s not remarkable to have 10 or 20 passwords for countless online services that you’re a customer of. And you can predict what happens : A good many people are inclined to use the very same password over and over. Some individuals may not think their Facebook account as being hugely important, but it is if you’re using the same password as you are for your PayPal account. Of course, the convenience of having to remember just a single password is tempting, but what happens if an individual gets their hands on that one password? That’s right, they in theory have their mitts on all of your accounts that use that same password. And if you think they can’t know what other services you’ve joined, it isn’t essential. They can launch programs which examine tens of thousands of services against your account name/password pairing that they already have.

This is an issue we all have to address, but it can be solved. The truth is, it’s not essential to store each and every username/password. Why? Your browser can remember this information. Be it your Twitter login or Email password. Just ask your browser to store each account name/password, and then setup a master password just in case an individual gets hold of your computer. Physical access to your computer will still require knowing the master password to gain access to all the other passwords. In other words, you can sign up to hundreds of services, and only need to actually remember one single password : your browser’s master password (achieving what you desired to do in a safe way – needing just one password.

Regarding passwords themselves, make them long and random, for example 8JJJfrfrt65K which is a mix of lower and upper case characters and numbers. Since you don’t need to remember them, be as obscure as you like. Whatever you do, don’t use dictionary words as your password, as these are elementary to identify for 3rd parties.

Choosing a budget web hosting company can be overwhelming. In fact, choosing any web hosting company can be a challenge due, in large part, to the fact that there are so many of them. Do a search for “web hosting” with the quotes around the keywords on Google, and it’ll return over 5 million documents! That doesn’t mean there are 5 million web hosting providers but there very well could be at least 1 million! That’s a lot of web hosts. How can you choose one that meets your need?

What is Budget web hosting anyway?

Budget web hosting is generally defined as any hosting service that is below $10 per month. The budget comes from the low price. Now, most companies in the budget web hosting category only offer one year plans. Most budget web hosting companies however, will quote you the monthly fee you would pay if you divided the annual fee by 12 months. Keep that in mind when you are comparing one company with another. The other thing to look out for is the setup fee. Do they charge you a setup fee to get started?

Evaluate your general impression of the company.

The first place to start evaluating budget web hosting companies is their front page. Does their website give you a sense that they are professional? Is it easy to find all of the information you need? Take a look at their contact information. Do they list a physical address, an email address and a phone number to contact them? If they don’t provide any contact details, that has to throw up a red flag. If you run into problems setting up your website, and you have no proper contact information, how are you going to get service from that company?

Do they have a toll free support number?

Does the budget web hosting company provide a toll free number for you to contact them? If they are based in Atlanta, Georgia and you are in Seattle, Washington, you don’t want to be paying long distance to them if you need to get them on the phone about a concern you have. A toll free number also speaks to their willingness to deal openly and honestly with their customers.

What kind of guarantee do they offer?

Choose a budget web hosting company that offers a good guarantee. Most budget web hosting companies don’t openly publish their satisfaction guarantees. If you have to look in their terms and services agreement to find out where they stand with regard to giving you back your money if you are not satisfied, you should look elsewhere.

What is the uptime guarantee of the site in question?

Uptime guarantee refers to the amount of time the server is live and serving your web pages. An uptime guarantee of 99% means that the host guarantees that their servers will be up and operational 99% of the time. Over the course of one year, 99% uptime would represent a downtime (the one percent) of around 87 hours in a year or an average of 7 hours per month. An uptime of 99.9% would involve only 8 hours of downtime for the entire year.

What kind of after sale support can you expect?

While there are many other factors you could consider, the final one I will deal with is after sale support. What kind of resources do they make available for you. Find out if the budget web hosting company offers free scripts. Do they have any marketing tools they can make available to you? What kind of support for setting up your account can you expect from the budget web hosting company? All of these factors must be taken into consideration.

Just because a company offers a budget web hosting service, doesn’t mean you necessarily have to compromise on features, quality or service. All three will only be found, however, if you make sure to do your homework to find a budget web hosting company that is a good fit for you.

This article was written by Joe Duchesne, president of http://www.yowling.com/, a business web hosting company that specializes in helping online business owners increase their website traffic. Copyright 2004 Yowling. Reprint Freely.

What is a web host?

A web host is a company that provides web space for individuals and organizations on a server. A web host also provides Internet connectivity, usually in a data center.

What is FTP?

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, which is a procedure that allows a computer to transfer data and other information to another, via a network such as the Internet, as long as the computers permit FTP access. FTP can be set up anywhere, between voice servers, Internet hosts, and game servers.

What is DNS?

DNS means domain name system, a ‘virtual phonebook’ that translates domain names such as www.badminton.com to IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, say 192.168.1.1. Networking equipment, such as routers and switches, requires IP addresses instead of domain names to exchange information within the network.

In web hosting, the most basic type of service is web page hosting. In this type of service, information is either downloaded or uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to or from a server.

Another type web hosting, which runs through DNS servers, is called DNS (Domain Name System) web hosting. DNS web hosting is highly recommended when the provider has multiple servers in different geographical locations.

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Chances are you have already seen hosting offers like this: unlimited bandwidth for $3 a month. If you haven’t, you’ll probably see it soon somewhere. It may be unlimited bandwidth, mailboxes, space or whatever; I titled this tutorial “unlimited bandwidth” because it’s the most common option.

Now you would be stupid not to sign up for this service, wouldn’t you? Imagine that: UNLIMITED bandwidth. No matter how many visitors your site has, how popular it might become, you don’t need to worry about your bandwidth because you can have as much of it as you want.

If you think that way, I don’t blame you. I used to think the same. However, when I tried few of these “unlimited” offers, read and thought about them a while, I came to some conclusions. The most important one is: don’t get lured!

There is never unlimited amount of anything. For example, typical hard disks are now 80 or 120 gigabytes. They will become bigger and bigger, but there is no “unlimited disk”. If you run out of space, you simply need to buy another disk, that’s it. With bandwidth it is about the same: an Internet connection for your host can have 10MB/s or higher throughput, but it is never an “unlimited” one. There is a point when you just can’t push it further. So the truth about these offers is that they are talking about UNMETERED bandwidth. Unmetered means simply “we don’t measure exactly how much you use it”. And that’s all.

Well, you might think: “Okay, it is unmetered then. Still good: they don’t measure it so I can use plenty of it. They won’t notice since they do not check it.”

Wrong again. Think again about resource limits of the server machine your site is on. The computer probably cost $2000 or so (if it cost less, it will be slow as a cow), and the Internet connection may be something about $500 a month. Now there’s the cost of electricity, technical support, collocation facility rental, and so on, and so on. So to make decent profit from your $3 per month, the company is about to put 500, 1000 or even 2000 people on the same computer. Other way it will simply not be worth it.

So there you are, hosted on a $3/month host with 1000 other people. Imagine that your site is becoming popular (or maybe you have big files for downloading), and you get more and more visitors. The same happens to other websites on your server. What’s the result? Simply, the server is working more and more slowly. So does your website. Remember, the Internet connection, server CPU power, disk etc are not unlimited; the same amount of them must be divided between more and more page requests. Even if your site worked great when it had 10 visitors a day, you cannot expect that it will continue to do the same with 10.000 visitors. It simply will not.

So what is the hosting company going to do? They will select websites which eat up the most bandwidth (or CPU power), and tell them to go away. Don’t believe it? Read carefully terms of service you agreed to when buying the host. Buried in fine print, there is a clause saying: “we reserve the right to cancel your account if it uses too much server resources”. They will make good use of it, you can be sure. And don’t expect a refund when they close your account. You will not get your money back, because you violated their TOS – by using too much of your “unlimited” bandwidth! That’s how it looks like in reality. I didn’t invent all this – it happened to me many times.

Of course, there are some real unmetered bandwidth hosts. They don’t cost $2 or $3, but rather $100-$300 per month. If you buy them, you are usually the only person utilizing the server, and then you can really use its full processing power and bandwidth. For $5 or less don’t expect anything even close to that.

Michal Pleban is a webmaster with many years of experience. His latest site is 11send: http://www.11send.com/ – a free website for transferring, sending & emailing large files easily.

Modern Mass Transit is making it easier for commuters, especially with the latest inter connecting wireless technologies. Many buses, commuter trains, shuttles and even trolley cars now have WiFi wireless computer access so no one is out of touch during the travel time. This is being done now in Baltimore to NY trains and in Sacramento to San Francisco Trains thanks to Amtrak. After all we now have WiFi hotspots at McDonalds, Kinko’s, Book Stores, Starbucks, Airports and hotel lobbies already.

By having these amenities we can get people to stay out of their cars and enjoy the commute and or take a high speed train on their next trip; not to mention save the gasoline which is approaching $3.00 per gallon. Once the system is built the operational costs are relatively low considering the costs of expanding airports which tend to have cyclical trends during boom and bust years and thus hard to manage your ROI, with gates becoming empty and then new gates which need to be built in the up cycle. One only has to follow the sector rotations of the airline industry and take a trip through the California desert and look at Billions of dollars of Airliners sitting hibernated which may never be used again. Between the cutthroat price wars, Bankruptcy tactics and now era of International Terrorism we need to rethink our transportation strategy to include other redundancy methods, which can deliver the speed and comfort that we use to have in Commercial Aviation.

We have only a couple Nationwide Bus Companies that deliver people across the country. We need to insure buses are safe also in the era of International Terrorism and at the same time we need to increase usage and ridership. New interconnected wireless technologies can do both. Since you are already on the Internet you can send video feed back to the command and control for the mass transit system and constantly monitor.

Providing amenities to commuters and safety at the same time will bring riders back and let’s face it no one wants to pay $85.00 each week to fill up their SUV with gasoline. Now is a good time to coax the public back to the mass transit systems we have already set up and improve the economies of scale to make those old embellished proformas used to float the bond measure a reality. Can technology really do all that? Perhaps it can. Think about it.

“Lance Winslow” – Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/