The 2 Best Webhosting Services for Your Business

If you haven’t already tackled the chore of finding the right web hosting service for your new business you’ll want to figure that out shortly. Over the last 10 years we’ve used almost exclusively one great hosting company for business and personal websites we’ve created and spent a few thousand dollars with them while developing about 100 websites over the years.

Godaddy webhosting and domain service is the company that we’ve used the most and the one that we strongly recommend to new business owners that are thinking about having a website to go along with their new business.

Why Godaddy?

Godaddy has been in business at least 10 years – possibly even from 1997. In the late 1990′s is when we started using them. They are currently the largest domain registration company in the USA and their hosting must be catching up as well.

They have very inexpensive website hosting plans starting at about $50 per year for generous amounts of bandwidth and server space for your files. You can host video, audio, and every other kind of file. The base-level price package includes a service that is perfect for most business owners – but, you might want to upgrade to either Deluxe or Premium hosting in order to get even faster speeds for your site, more bandwidth, and more server space.

When registering your new business domain with Godaddy you can get your (.com) domain name for just $1.99 if you buy the hosting package at the same time. So, for just about $53 you can have your domain name and a year of hosting.

Godaddy has a full plate of add-ons that are well-priced. Email, dedicated IP addresses, private domain registration, starter sites, and they have literally anything you could want – they are a full service company in every respect.

Which is the other company you’d recommend?

BlueHost.com. We’ve been testing Bluehost for over a year now and found it to be quite a good company for web hosting – especially for WordPress blogs which they’ve positioned themselves to be the number one hosting company for. Bluehost has an easy to understand control panel and very helpful support – via chat. We’ve used their chat services about 6 times to ask various questions and always come away with the right answer.

The Best, Easiest, Ultimate Part-Time Online Business?

The weak economy can be made less harsh if you do something today. Choose a business you can start part-time online. Who knows, maybe it takes off and you decide next year to make it a full-time effort. Maybe next year you’re working for yourself instead of tied to a job where someone pays you – you pay yourself.

If you made a couple hundred dollars per month for spending some time getting your online business going – would that be something that makes sense? How would $300 or $600 per month extra take care of some important needs you have right now?

There are some part-time online businesses that are relatively easy to start and get up and running. Probably you won’t choose one of these businesses I list below – but maybe they’ll give you an idea for your own online business.

Here is an opportunity you should consider:

Sell Information – right now the information market is booming. There are websites offering “how-to” booklets for many topics – but, guess what? There are thousands more NOT being made. Find a need and create a how-to book for that niche and you can charge $4.95 to $14.95 for an eBook on that topic. Do you know how to teach someone to play the harmonica? Ukulele? Use some software program? Know how to shoot video? Can you write about some area that you can’t find information on? Do you have tips for saving money? Fishing tips? A fishing guide to your local area? The possibilities are almost endless. Chances are you know something you can write about.

Don’t worry about not being a PhD in the subject. Don’t worry about not knowing everything – study the topic even more and become an expert. Learning makes you an expert.

If you want, you can even interview an expert to create your e-book. You could interview a group of experts. You could amass a collection of articles and facts about a topic from many different publications and put it together as the ultimate guide to something. Selling information for your part-time business site is probably the easiest way to get started online and get some income. How much you build it up depends on how serious you are about marketing it. Adam Short is one young entrepreneur that has 90 websites selling information guides. He makes a couple hundred to a couple thousand per month. Per site. He’s making good six-figure income per year this way. Best part is – once it’s setup he does very little – the business runs itself. It’s one of the few businesses that are truly hands-off once finished.

Briefly this is how it works:

You build a small website – use Google’s “Site” to create them if you wish. You add a lot of information about the small niche that you’re targeting. Say it’s “Betta fish”. Adam Short did this exact topic. Give away a lot of basic information about betta fish. But, on every page allude to the fact that you have the ultimate guide on betta fish that nobody else has. You have THE authoritative guide on betta’s. You’ll sell it on the site for just $14.95, or, more importantly – you’ll give them 10-14 days of tips about betta fish if they join your email newsletter.

Your email newsletter, automated by Aweber.com, sends them a tip per day – and about every three days – also has a hard sell on your ebook contained in the email. This is an awesome way to create sales. Giving free information and building credibility and trust and then asking for a sale for the ultimate product.

Summary
Take advantage of the fact that about 92% of surfers go online looking for information. Many will pay for information about a small topic they can’t get anywhere else. If you only had a customer each day – and made $10 per day – that’s $300 per month.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

5 Things Everyone Should Know About Their Computer

Here are 5 things that you really need to know about your computer if you have a business (or not)

1. Passwords – “turniphead” is not a good password, someone could figure that out after a 1-day effort. Some people thing hackers have better things to do – but, really they don’t. What could be better than secretly getting access to your email address which would then lead to your paypal account, and other accounts? Can you say, “Payday”?

Many companies have begun allowing all kinds of characters in the password. You might be able to use: !?&[}:;’> in addition to alphabetical and numerical characters. Use them! They make guessing your password that much more difficult. If you include a word – don’t capitalize the first character – capitalize one of the others like marTin, it makes it much harder to guess.

Use numbers, punctuation, lower and upper case letters for every password and you’ll be much safer. Change your password to something you could never remember and nobody could ever guess… like: “uvU6tT*41hEzi_GZ{}p″. Use the maximum characters allowed. Some password fields allow you to use a space – use it!

You’ll never remember a password like that – so what wil you do? Create a Word document with password protection. Put every password in that Word doc that you have. Choose a complicated password to protect the document that you can REMEMBER and never forget. Hide that Doc file in a directory on your computer than nobody will look at and call it something that has nothing to do with “passwords”.

Next, and this is important too – when you sign into your accounts open your Word doc with the passwords and highlight and copy the password. Paste it into the form field for password. Typing your password leaves you open to keyloggers that store every character you type. Next crucial part… Signing into your accounts, whatever they are. Open that Word doc and copy the password and paste it into the password form field. Never type out your password because keyloggers can grab it.

You might think your passwords are pretty safe. They never really are. These tips will give you a new level of password security – but they’re not infallible. Change your passwords often from a computer with full virus, spyware, malware protection.

2. Never Lose Another Word in Your Computer – Keyloggers can record every keystroke you make and store it for you so you can go back and look at the log later to recover what you lost. So, keyloggers YOU use are great – if someone else is using it to gain access to your personal information – they’re not so great. Read this article I wrote a few months back to learn more:

Keylogger Article >

Here’s a keylogger you might try:

http://www.tucows.com/preview/301938

3. Email Link Dangers – Don’t ever click on a url (hyperlink) you received in email asking you to sign into some online account you have.

Instead, open a new browser or tab and enter the https:// version of the site you want to sign into. Gmail, Paypal, Ebay and other companies support the “s” on the end of Http and it will ensure you’re using the site you think you are.

4. Backing Up Your Data – Backup crucial information at least daily, and in multiple ways. Burn a DVD, CD, use USB hard drives, email files to yourself, and copy to multiple computer hard drives. There’s no reason anyone should ever lose all of their crucial data because they should have it backed up multiple ways. Don’t trust any one system! Duplicate backups – if you make DVD’s make a dvd of your dvd backup – I do! I think I’ve not lost anything of importance in a very long time because I tend to be a bit overly cautious about backing up my crucial data.

5. Anti-Virus Program – Use Norton, McAfee, AVG or other well-known antivirus program. You definitely need it. Preferably you set it so it gets updates daily and scans daily when you’re not using it. I strongly suggest buying Symantec’s Norton 360 v2.0 computer protection package to protect your computer, and your life really. It’s a great investment – insurance for your online and offline life. If someone steals your identity you’ll wish you had spent the money to get it today.

Microsoft offers a Malicious software scanning tool that’s free to use. AVG has a free option that’s pretty good too.

Using a computer and losing data or being taken advantage of can be a horrifying experience. Get up to speed with these 5 things quickly so your business doesn’t suffer in the future.