“What features do they provide and what is the right bandwidth and disk storage that I would need? What do some of these features mean and do I need them?”

“Am I going to be okay with a shared hosting plan or should I go ahead with a dedicated hosting plan?”

These are some of the questions I received as people asked me to help them choose the right hosting company.

Choosing a right hosting company is an important part of building your online company. Before building a website, you need to make sure that you have a good hosting plan that supports what you want to do.

With the increase in computer technology, various web hosting companies are offering some amazing deals. You can now get more than 300 GB of storage, and 6000! GB of bandwidth with a shared hosting plan. My guess is that less than 1% of the websites actually need as much storage space and bandwidth as what these hosting companies are providing, but it doesn’t hurt to have these features.

When you are looking for a good web hosting company, look for the below items

1. Hosting Features - Make sure they offer the features you need. For example, do they allow you to install certain softwares you need (PHP-nuke, Wordpress, etc)? Fantastico is a great neat program that allows you to install various scripts very easily. A few web hosting company offers Fantastico.
2. Bandwidth and Storage - Make sure they give you enough bandwidth and disk storage. This probably is not going to be an issue for many web developers. Unless you expect more than tens of thousands of people visiting the site every single day and your site is loaded heavily with videos and flash, you will be okay with normal hosting plan. I know of a site that attracts more than 30,000 unique visitors a day and the shared hosting plan does more than fine in handling all the traffic.
3. Unlimited Domain - Find the web hosting company that allows you to put unlimited domains in ONE hosting plan. This will save you lots of money.
4. Domain Registration Fee - Web hosting companies offer different rates for domain registration, ranging anywhere from $6.95/yr to $24.95/yr. If you are going to host multiple domain names, make sure you select a hosting plan with cheap rates for domain renewals.

To help people find the right web hosting company, my friend and I created a website with a free evaluation test that will pre-select the web hosting companies that meet your criteria.

The name of the site is: Top-WebHosting-List.com. Visit the site to find web hosting reviews.

1. Once you become a member of Orovo (which doesn’t cost anything other than having your vitamin or another product auto shipped), Orovo will allow you to buy their products at pretty much the manufactured cost. Their goal is to make Orovo a ‘Costco’ of helath and beauty products, offering their products orders of magnitude cheaper while maintaining or exceeding the quality of their competitors.
2. Orovo uses Internet Marketing as well as “man to man” marketing to sign up its members. When the company brings in members through internet marketing, it also helps existing members to build their downline.
3. Orovo compensates their members for referring other members. If you sign up 6 people under you, you would be making about $60/month. If you sign up additional 6 people under each of the 6 people directly underneath you (total of 36 people), Orovo will send you $312/month. It uses a 6 x 6 matrix and you can earn up to $40,000/month (assuming you have 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 people underneath you).

Now, what’s really interesting about Orovo is that people that sign up through their Internet Marketing will automatically be put under your name (giving your commission) even if you don’t do any work! Usual hassle with trying to sign up people underneath you won’t be necessary if you join early. This is indeed unique.

If you are interested in making some side money AND getting high quality health and beauty products at low price, check out Orovo and sign up. If you know me personally and would like to sign up under my line, you can go to http://www.orovo.com/choim and click on ’sign up now’. I signed up with Orovo last week and will be getting my commission pretty soon.

Now, the founder of the company being a good friend of mine, my blog post may be somewhat biased for sure, but their company is definitely interesting and you should at least check it out. They are growing very fast and I believe they will hit it off big.

To see an example of how FCKeditor works in BoomYEAH, visit a sample homepage (AAA Insurance) in BoomYEAH and click on ‘Write a Free Description’.

You can also run a demo of FCKeditor on their site:

It’s been a difficult journey as the company went through a lot of ups and downs. Recently, we finished incorporating approximately 28 millions business listings for all 50 states (before, we were only open in Utah) and decided to focus more on recommendations.

It’s interesting how you start a business and end up with a business that has a different feel and look. The site BoomYEAH went through a lot of changes, although the purpose of the site has never changed.

We first started out with a very basic design (the design I came up with after I came home one day and sketched using MS paint), went through a major evolution last summer when we decided to add complete listing and did so for Utah, and then went through a second evolution (just very recently) where I believe the site became really Web 2.0. Before the second revolution, we may have thought the site was Web 2.0, but it really wasn’t.

Now, the site uses a tagging system and will soon go into major marketing and sales campaigns. Although the local market has been a hard market for many entrepreneurs, there is definitely a need to build a better system to help internet users find local businesses. Our goal with BoomYEAH is to provide tools for those that are looking for local businesses and also provide tools for local business owners to reach out to those who are looking for local businesses online.

Yelp, Insiderpages, and Google of course are doing a fantastic job, but we believe there are more that we can do to help both internet users and business owners.

If you have any suggestions on how the ultimate yellow pages should be, please leave your comment here. Perhaps, with your help, we can solve some of the frustrations in this market.

If you’re interested in downloading a FREE script that does that, please visit: http://phpclasses.mediast.com/browse/package/3895.html

As I was looking for programs to use for BoomYEAH (Interactive Yellow Pages), a website that I own, I found a neat free php script that does that. It works well.

Let me know if you also find this program useful. Other sites charge $40 to $300 for a program that does exactly this.

I’ve installed probably hundreds of computers and every time I’ve installed a new operating system, I’ve debated what anti virus program I should install because none of them I found to be working very well.

This all changed when one of my good friend Jordan Dayton told me about a FREE anti virus program called Avast. This program completely sold me! It’s completely FREE and absolutely RELIABLE! Now, I tell every one I meet about Avast and how they MUST install this anti virus program in their computer!

Download FREE Anti virus program AVAST (Home Edition)

When you install Wampserver, it will install the latest Apache Server, PHP, MySQL, and even install PhpMyAdmin for you.

Use WampServer and MySQL Administrator together to quickly install localhost to your computer.

To learn more about WampServer, visit http://www.wampserver.com/en/

Here is a brief description about MySQL Administrator from their website:

MySQL Administrator is a powerful visual administration console that enables you to easily administer your MySQL environment and gain significantly better visibility into how your databases are operating. MySQL Administrator now integrates database management and maintenance into a single, seamless environment, with a clear and intuitive graphical user interface. By using MySQL Administrator you will be able to:

• Achieve higher database availability through improved management
• Reduce errors through visual database administration
• Lower database administration costs through improved productivity
• Deliver a more secure environment through easier privilege managemet

MySQL Administrator enables developers and DBAs to easily perform all the command line operations visually including configuring servers, administering users, and dynamically monitoring database health. Other common administrative tasks such as monitoring replication status, backup and restore, and viewing logs can also be performed through the MySQL Administrator graphical console.

You can find more information about MySQL Administrator by going to MySQL Administrator.

With TeleFlip, you don’t have to send 10 messages at a time. You also don’t have to worry about what phone service provider the person receiving the message has (Verizon, Sprint, Tmobile, etc). That’s right. With Teleflip, you can send unlimited text messages for free and not worry about their service providers.

With this site, you can send a text message to anyone (regardless of who their service provider is) by sending an email to ‘phonenumber@teleflip.com’. It finds the phone service provider of the phone number and sends the message automatically.

For example, if you want to send a text message to 123-456-7890, send an email to 1234567890@teleflip.com. If you want to send multiple text messages, just send your email to multiple email addresses (formatted just like the number in the example). It’s the best tool I’ve found so far in sending bulk text messages.

For a few months, Google would not index our pages (even after our company website has been up for more than 9 months). We eliminated all the ‘javascript links’ and after about a month or so, Google started indexing our pages like crazy.

Regardless to say, our traffic through Google skyrocketed. It may be that our company site was still in the Google Sandbox but more likely, I believe it was the elimination of Javascript links that helped the indexing process. (Visit BoomYEAH - a better way of finding local businesses to see my company’s website).