As far as I can remember, Philaahzophy.com is not new to me. I think I’ve seen and mentioned this site on this blog way before when I had a grand review about THC’s lifetime Rudolf hosting plan last February (which is now unavailable — unfortunately). He was still positive to THC that time — far different from his views now.

On Philaahzophy’s latest post as I checked it entitled "Top Hosting Center Can’t Keep Own Website Online!," I believe Aahz missed to read something from his H-Sphere control panel. I am not sure if he is on Rudolf hosting plan or Speedy (I didn’t have interest to research) but I know he is one of THC’s customers and claimed that he used to be a "big fan" of the web host. His post was a bomb to THC and considering that THC announced the event prior to their downtime, this blogger once again shooted blanks.

While it is true that the official homepage of Top Hosting Center was down as of this writing, I wasn’t surprised. I’ve read yesterday from the company’s H-Sphere control panel news section that they are going to change their IP address as they’ve always done in the past months (this is something Aahz missed to read). I’m not sure how many hours had it been in downtime status but I have asked some friends abroad and they told me that they can fully access the website (which makes me believe that DNS information propagation is complete on some places). I don’t know if other THC users noticed the advisory but for sure it is conspicuous enough to get noticed. Since I’m in the Philippines and THC servers are in North America, I guess I will have to wait for the site to go up. It is a good thing that this blog or any customer sites (and hosting functionality) was not affected by their downtime otherwise it would be real shitty.  

As far as I know based on my working Cisco networking knowledge, changing an IP address does not take effect immediately and unfortunately domains undergoing IP changes will experience downtime. Changes that undergoes downtime include IP updates, IP transition from shared to dedicated IPs and vice versa, and name server changes.

To THC: Aahz May Be Right, But Not Completely Right

I do not say that Aahz is completely wrong. He was just shooting blanks on some ways; he may be right, but well, not completely right on his claims since I highly believe he missed the advisory. Plus, he could be on a shared hosting — and you can’t expect a dedicated server quality on a shared hosting plan!

Now this is for you THC: like what he said on his first post,  I agree that there have been quite a few times that THC had problems with their hosting services. Although they are fast in responding to support and delivering solutions to problems, complaints like from Aahz’s is a sign that THC needs to be consistent and make their impatient customers feel what a good host is. It doesn’t feel good to defend something that doesn’t deserve to be defended. Fortunately, THC isn’t as worse as Aahz described it based on my experience. He was a bit too extreme. Perhaps he needs to get a dedicated server. Believe me, you will never find a host that doesn’t experience downtimes especially on shared hosting.

Bottomline

If Top Hosting Center wasn’t good enough, as it never became a perfect web host, I would have flown to other web hosting companies. I’ve got lots of sponsorship offers for this blog from other web hosts yet I’ve denied them all because I like the way THC handles its hosting services. Plus, I don’t need to worry about a thing because they have backups accessible. An anonymous hacker tried to devastate this blog earlier this month and THC was very, very quick to restore my database. I’m sure other customers can have similar experience as THC’s support is just a matter of clicks away. In my case, I write to them via email but I can also use their live chat for basic issues and trouble ticket on my H-Sphere control panel as well.

Customer Service

There are quite a number of ways to reach ImHosted.com’s customer support and it starts on their website. Strategically, the support link can be found at the top of their website which can be easily seen and accessed by anyone. Like what most web hosting companies boast, ImHosted.com also offers 24×7 customer support — that’s good to hear for sure but it doesn’t surprise me anymore. Interestingly, their support center is quite appealing. They put everything what the customers would potentially need all at the same place which is really good: from online control panel documentation, ticketing support, login links, and even comprehensive tutorials. One thing that is a bit unusual to me is their live chat since they just use ICQ messaging client for it. No ICQ? No live chat support. Personally, I prefer a web based live chat that is one click away than using any messaging client that requires software installation. Overall, ImHosted.com support department is excellent. If you are an ICQ user, you’ll love it even more. I’ve been reading reviews from their existing customers that their support is first rate — so having a different style of live chat is therefore not a let down.

Hosting Plans

As of this writing, ImHosted.com’s front page presents their mega web hosting deal. They offer affordable web hosting services for only $6.95 USD per month comprising of the following key hosting benefits:

• 2, 500 GB web space (huge)
• 20,000 GB monthly bandwidth
• host unlimited number of domain names
• free 1 lifetime domain name
• CPanel control panel
• unlimited database, email and FTP
• SSH/Telnet support

It is best that you check the complete features of their competitive shared hosting plan on this page to find learn more. It looks good for me.

ImHosted.com also offers reseller hosting which is perfect for anyone who wants to start an  online hosting business. My current hosting company doesn’t have this feature yet.

Reputation

I’ve done some research about ImHosted.com and I found some good reviews from their existing customers on various web hosting review websites and web hosting forums. I learned that their stellar reputation was brought about by their consistent excellence of their web hosting services (good uptime, effective support and well-priced hosting). This positive reputation is a good sign that a web hosting company is reliable. So, if you are planning to get a hosting, ImHosted.com is worth a try with confidence.

Verdict

Looks like ImHosted.com a reputable web hosting company with affordable web hosting plan for everyone. For only $6.95 a month, you could start a blog that you can monetize or run good websites. Their hosting plan offers not just web hosting service, but an opportunity for anyone who wants to start making money online through online ventures.

If you already have solid plans on what online business you would like to embark on – whether you want to become a product reseller, a business blogger, or if you want to have an online presence for your services – then you are almost ready. Basically, you need first to find a good web hosting plan and a domain name from a web hosting company that suits your needs. If you know nothing about this, you can try the guys in the web host company this site is running on to help you with your needs. Just contact their support and you’re ready to go.

Now, the next step that I recommend is to find your desired website template. Just recently, I’ve come across DreamTemplate.com and guess what, they have everything you need to kick any business or personal website you want! Web templates are good if you do not have enough resources to spend for a web developer that will eat more of your time and money. Having web templates lets you start any online venture you want in no time as well.

For as low as $59.95, DreamTemplate.com lets you download over 300 free web templates and access thousands of professional, high quality templates that show off serious, corporate-level designs. When I say professional here, I am talking about how the design and web page markups are structured and polished to lean towards selling and customer impression. These are important elements for effective online selling and you need them to have an edge over competitors. When I was browsing their sites, I found that their web templates are SEO-ready which is good for online marketing. I am a web developer and web designer myself, so I can tell what’s good and what’s not.

I recommend that you start browsing their web templates library now and choose a template design that matches your products or services. By the way, they also offer PowerPoint presentation and Flash templates – good if you plan to start with a business team. If you have questions, they can be contacted easily through their support center. And to tell you, they replied so fast when I inquired them about their web templates offer! So, don’t miss it.

BlogRush is a cooperative syndication network launched by John Reese. Their web service binds the blogs of their members through their widget which displays five clickable blog post headlines. Each member earns one syndication credit every time the widget is loaded on their respective blogs. It also costs them same value to have their recent blog post title displayed on another member’s blog.

Basically, I signed up for BlogRush with good expectations that their web service would help drive traffic to my blog. Blogrush’s dashboard looks great for sure: the statistics and traffic charts look neat and attractive. Unfortunately I’m not charmed with the interface whatsoever, like other bloggers do, I want results for my efforts: quality traffic for my blog as promised.

In the first few months, I ignored that it didn’t bring traffic due to the fact that my blog was one-month old when I registered it to their service. In the following months, I read and followed lots of tips and articles from other bloggers who praised BlogRush – but none of them worked. Even though BlogRush’s idea of driving traffic from targeted audience is good, people seem not to care clicking their widget and prefer links and referrals written on the blog post itself.

My Personal Standpoint

No matter how much I think that my articles might not be “hot” in the eyes of BlogRush members, I personally proven that some of them were proven good – good enough to actuate a click. In fact, some of my articles got stumbled in StumbleUpon and that drove me enormous amount of traffic. I know that the BlogRush and StumbleUpon are two different web services that drive traffic. However, if the two web services are to compete each other in terms of traffic generation performance, no doubt I would abandon BlogRush quickly and hop right away to StumbleUpon (or any other social bookmarking or web service that would bring measurable benefits for me and my blog).

It’s good to note, however, that Blogrush is a free web service. I’ll leave them now my comments and hope they take all of them positively. The intent of their service is great, but it needs spark.

The company’s traffic ranking system has been widely trusted as a reliable indicator of website popularity and appraisal value. It was widely criticized as well by web professionals and bloggers saying that by installing Alexa toolbar, any webmaster can have good rankings quickly. This assumption tends to be true with my experience as Alexa rankings contradicts the site statistics I get from Google Analytics and StatCounter.

With the new algorithm and upcoming new features to be released soon, Alexa hopes that their detractors will shut their mouths off as their improved services now offer more accurate traffic rankings. However, they might as well get overwhelmed with negative feedbacks from millions of site owners who had their traffic ranks dropped down.

Let us say for instance, this blog dropped from 380,000 to 586,000. Now for a popular blog, JohnCow.com, had his rank down from 25,000 to 104,000 – fair enough to cause a heart attack.

If your sites dropped as well their ranks, send your feedback here and you’ll not be alone.

If you want to gain credible advices from experienced people in the web hosting industry, then there are no other good places than web hosting forums. There you can ask almost anything and get relevant answers from different people.

Even the people from hosting companies participate in forums to share their hosting experience, offer hosting solutions, and market their respective hosting plans and services.

Here is the list of the top three most useful web hosting forums that you can find on the Web. I strongly recommend that you register an account to all of them (yes, ALL) and participate with the hosting discussions. Do you know other great web hosting forums? Leave the links at the comments.

WebHosting Talk

WebHosting Talk claims to be the largest and most influential web hosting community on the Internet. Well, I don’t wonder why: try typing “web hosting forum” in Google search and it will list WebHosting Talk on the top spot. I’m certain that this website gets substantial traffic for its great visibility on the Web.

Anyway, anyone can register at WebHosting Talk. Underlining its claims, personally I agree that it is indeed the biggest forum that touches exclusively for web hosting.

WebHosting Talk provides special forums accessible only to its premium members. However, the main forums (and the most useful ones) are accessible to new, regular members. Those places are the perfect venues to gather advices relating to any web hosting topics or plans, learn from other’s experiences, and share your hosting ideas. WebHosting Talk is excellent because it has specific forums for shared hosting, dedicated servers, virtual private servers (VPS), among others.

WebHosting Talk has 181,329 registered members to date. Its forum’s index page has PageRank (PR) level of 6 and ranked #2,933 at Alexa.

SitePoint Forum

I first learned about SitePoint when I completed reading a PHP/MySQL web programming e- book I downloaded from a torrent site and published by them. Because that resource was excellent, I became skeptic about the authors and I ended up on SitePoint forums.

I’ve been a SitePoint member for almost two years and until now, I still find their website very useful to me as a web developer and an Internet enthusiast. They’ve got tons of tutorials and articles, blog posts, videos, books, and other resources not exclusively about web hosting but also other aspects of the Web.

The SitePoint Forum, in particular, remains my greatest point of interest. The forum is well-moderated and carefully divided into different sections arranged in a sequential manner of Web development. If you want to participate to hosting-related threads, you can find the section under “Host Your Site” which has three subcategories: Web Hosting, Server Management, Apache Configuration, and Domain Names.

As of this writing, SitePoint has 233,501 members who actively contributed to over 500,000 threads and over three million posts. The forum’s index page has a PR of 7 and positioned at #782 at Alexa. So, if you want to advertise something or ask help about hosting, you’ll get the best advice from the experts for sure!

Digital Point Forum

Digital Point Forum is another popular online discussion board where webmasters, marketers and advertisers converge. I come to this forum to get new trends in web development and analyze a web host’s reputation by throwing some questions.
Digital Point Forum has six major forum categories that cover topics from search engines, marketing and business to web development design and web products. The web hosting topics are discussed in “Site and Server Administration” under Design and Development category.

As of today, Digital Point Forum has 137,564 members actively participating to over 600,000 threads and over six million posts. Digital Point Forum’s home page has a PR of 6 and ranked #270 at Alexa.

What is JS-Kit?

I was intrigued when I found out that JS-Kit is not a set of WordPress or any blog platform plugin – and it’s not exclusive to blogs either – it works with any web page. JS-Kit is in fact, a package of web services that you can take advantage in many ways. It works similar to a widget. JS-Kit comprises of five different services that work amazingly with each other: Navigator, Ratings, Reviews, Comments and Polls.

The installation is flawless and very easy. You only need to insert the code snippet they provide for each service, and then load the page in the browser and poof – there you go. If you’ve ever tried using Google Analytics or StatCounter’s web analyzer codes then you’ll find the installation process similar.

One of JS-Kit’s weaknesses is that it will not run on websites that block JavaScript (since it is mainly powered by that scripting language). Therefore, there is no hope adding it on MySpace or Friendster which potentially could promote socialization.

JS-Kit Navigator

JS-Kit Navigator service provides a configurable widget that is implemented in a tab. When I run the page with the code for the first time, an admin console appeared and it let me configure how the service will look when the code is run. It displays basically three default tabs: Top, Hot and Best Picks – however, only one tab is required to be enabled for the service to work. I strongly suggest though that you enable all them for greater advantages. The caption of each tab is modifiable. However, for this review’s sake, I’ll use their default names.

In the Top tab, JS-Kit Navigator is able to show the most popular objects (or pages) using weighted average user ratings collected by the JS-Kit’s Ratings and Reviews services. It also able to gather the most active or “hot” objects measured by similar JS-Kit services in the Hot tab. On the Best Picks tab, site administrators can build custom views and put their own internal or external links for increased visibility to the website visitors. Finally, you can “viralize” your site contents with the “Grab It” feature – enabling your readers to embed the JS-Kit Navigator on any site on the Web.

The main advantage of this web service is that it can potentially increase traffic to the website. I could personally declare that with confidence because this so-called “widget” is very eye catchy (though some users would falsely identify it as one of Google advertisements). Its dynamic list generation is perfect for blogs and news websites.

Should you use JS-Kit Navigator? Well, JS-Kit’s Navigator brings no disadvantage so it is unreasonable if you don’t enjoy the blessings. If you have an extra ad space in your homepage, you can use the service, boost your page views and reduce your bounce rate. Just be sure to place it in a conspicuous place or anywhere above the fold.

To use JS-Kit Navigator web service, insert this code to any page you desire:

<div class="js-kit-top"style="width: 300px" title="Easy Site Navigator"></div>

<script src="http://js-kit.com/top.js"></script>

Learn more about JS-Kit Navigator here.

JS-Kit Ratings

It’s unfortunate for me that I learned about this web service too late. I’ve been using WP-PostRatings plugin for my WordPress blog for almost a month and I am still fairly satisfied with its performance. However, unlike WP-PostRatings plugin, which is rather specifically tailored for WordPress, JS-Kit Ratings web service goes beyond the boundaries. Aside from blog entries, it can also be used to let your visitors to rate merchandise items, services, pictures, and any other objects.

JS-Kit Ratings service presents benefits to visitors and web publishers. For visitors, it allows them to express their opinions through ratings to any associated object. For publishers, they can collect valuable stats about their audience’s preferences that may help push the efficiency of marketing plans. JS-Kit Ratings presentation is also customizable – however, only to a limited extent. It can show stars, and you can change its colors, but just stars. This limitation is the only drawback I found with JS-Kit Ratings web service.

Should you use JS-Kit Ratings? If you don’t have a ratings feature yet integrated in your blog or website, this web service is definitely a very good choice. The five star rating is very attractive and somehow entices the visitors to interact with your pages and rate your articles. If you ever plan to use this, I suggest that you use other JS-Kit services as well.

To use JS-Kit Ratings web service, insert this code to any page you desire:

<div class="js-kit-rating" title="" permalink=""></div>

<script src="http://js-kit.com/ratings.js"></script>

Just like that.

Learn more about JS-Kit Ratings here.

JS-Kit Reviews

If you feel that JS-Kit Ratings are not enough and you need to actually know what your visitors or customers have to say about a certain product or content, then it is where JS-Kit Reviews service enters center-stage. It is definitely the easiest code snippet I’ve seen in integrating reviews feature to any web page. I was amazed how the three lines of code could do such thing.

JS-Kit Reviews web service basically lets you interact to your visitors with its threaded comments. Like what I said, its deployment takes only a few minutes and then it will enhance your visitor’s site experience and potentially improve your page’s conversion rates. Its powerful moderation, spam protection and service statistics are thumbs up.

Should you use JS-Kit Reviews? Personally I don’t think I can take advantage much of this service on this blog. However, for merchants who sell products online, I highly recommend this service. It gives a chance to your visitors to leave reviews about the items you sell. The only missing part of this web service is that reviewers aren’t given a chance to leave their signature links. It could somehow boost the reliability of reviews. JS-Kit Comments web services, also shares similar shortcomings.

To use JS-Kit Reviews web service, insert this code to any page you desire:

<div class="js-kit-rating"></div>

<div class="js-kit-comments"></div>

<script src="http://js-kit.com/reviews.js"></script>

Learn more about JS-Kit Reviews here.

JS-Kit Comments

JS-Kit Comments amazes me in a way that it provides extended functionality with just two lines of codes. You will get a full-featured commenting engine to any page you want it to be applied on to. It lets visitors to leave comments without the annoying registrations or logins. Plus, JS-Kit Comments also lets commentators to upload their own avatar which is rather good.

A major drawback of the JS-Kit Comments web service is the lack of URL field for commentators. Though it surely fends off spammers, it would also discourage people (especially bloggers) to do some comments. I think that to grow a community we need to respect each other and at least have the courtesy to leave the link field optional.

Should you use JS-Kit Comments? Bloggers will be hesitant to try this web service as it easily gives the impression that it would not help or benefit their sites. For other website types that need a commenting engine, webmasters don’t need to find scripts anymore and take the hard road dealing with tricky database installations. JS-Kit Comments already provides you same functions with just – well – two lines of codes!

To use JS-Kit Comments web service, insert this code to any page you desire:

<div class="js-kit-comments" permalink=""></div>

<script src="http://js-kit.com/comments.js"></script>

Learn more about JS-Kit Comments here.

JS-Kit Polls

User polls are one of the efficient methods of getting opinions from users quickly. JS-Kit Polls service offers an attractive, simple-looking but highly customizable poll system. It lets web publishers modify existing polls on-the-fly without changing any HTML. After a website visitor casts a vote to the poll, JS-Kit Polls instantly shows a visual poll result which looks great – and I mean it.

I have decided to use this web service in my future blog posts. I believe bloggers can really exploit this in fetching their readers’ opinions about certain competing products or people. Perhaps I can do online election using this.

Should you use JS-Kit Polls? If you feel like you need this – why not? It invokes your readers mind to contribute some quick opinions. If you’re a blogger or writer, you could make new headlines with the final results of the poll.

To use JS-Kit Polls web service, insert this code to any page you desire:

<div class="js-kit-poll" style="width: 350px"></div>

<script src="http://js-kit.com/polls.js"></script>

Learn more about JS-Kit Polls here.

Are JS-Kit web services free?

As much I have dug the JS-Kit’s official website, I never found the word “free” there. However, I asked a friend who’s familiar with their services and I was told that their services are free. I personally hope that the people behind JS-Kit would clarify on their website whether their services are free or not.

TechCrunch, a popular tech blog, featured JS-Kit last year and described it as “Web 2.0 for the Lazy People.” Generally, I don’t have objection with that: with just two, three lines of code you’ll get extended features that will improve your website traffic, enrich your visitor’s experience and arouse their senses to interact with objects you put on your page. Truly, JS-Kit suite successfully delivers Web 2.0 “bling bling” services for everyone.

People’s first stop to join the Internet bandwagon is to find a good hosting company. Normally, most of them would consult Google (or any search engine) to find “reliable” hosting review websites. Given the thousands of sites that appear on search engine results page, not all review sites are reliable. People need to be careful else they could end up putting money on fraudsters’ pockets than enjoying its worth.

Honest web hosting review websites are expected not to accept money from hosting company clients for their opinions. Being an affiliate of the products they review, though actually allowable and legal, still certainly can cast doubt on the truthfulness of their say. Though many would defend that they are only paid by their writings, obviously it is some sort of advertisement and could influence the outcome of the review. Web hosting companies participating on these sites are willing to pay a good amount just to have a good spot on the page – shame on them for fooling people.

I recently found an interesting YouTube video on how to spot fake, biased hosting review websites. It shows that identifying biased reviews are not that easy to spot for normal Web users. Watch the video below and you’ll learn the hints and see the reality behind web hosting review websites. You will realize how “trustworthy” they are.

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I fully credit the person who made the video. If you benefit the advices of this post, and you’re one of those people who are looking for a good web hosting company, don’t get scammed! You may contact me directly and I will let you know a good host that I trust, and you can trust. Don’t worry, it’s free and unbiased. My judgments are based on my experience.

Recently, I found another free statistical tool that works similarly like Google Analytics. However, unlike Analytics, it does not work only as an invisible web tracker, but it can be configured to act as a hit counter too. It is also much faster and responsive, quickly loading than the Google counterpart. It accurately reports site statistics in real-time. The reportage includes popular pages, entry and exit pages, referring sites, keyword analysis, search engines, visitor information, paths and length, visitor map, among others.

It only takes four steps to get started with StatCounter. First, you need to register an account at StatCounter website. Then, you create a project for web tracking: it could be the whole website or just the major pages you want to comprehensively analyze. Finally, StatCounter gives you the snippet code that you just “copy and paste” to web page before the closing tag of the body. If you already experienced Google Analytics, you will observe that the application process is almost the same.

Bloggers who own sites powered by WordPress platform (like me) can also take advantage of StatCounter’s plugin. Like other WordPress plugins, this web tracker plugin is easy to install and use. Once it’s activated, it begins to track visitors from any page and reports more in detail the web traffic than any other WordPress statistics plugins.

Question: Can I put two web trackers on my web page? Yes. That is what I do with my websites. This website, for instance, is being tracked by Google Analytics and StatCounter. Each web tracker has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the weaknesses of one are complemented by the other. For Adwords users, Google Analytics may help you better in your web marketing; otherwise StatCounter offers more detailed web traffic report. The only minor rant I have with StatCounter free account is that its logs are limited to 500 entries only – but still enough for small to medium-sized websites or blogs. If you think your site is large, you can consider upgrading to larger log quota in various denominations. The cheapest upgrade is US$9 per month for 1500 log quota. But then again, I believe you’ll get the worth of your pay with StatCounter.

Click here to visit StatCounter website.

Talking about basketball, I found an interesting blog website recently with some NBA games posts: Sacred Hoops. By first impression, I could say that the blog articles were written by a basketball player otherwise an avid fan, considering that the articles are well-explained and detailed from start to end. It felt like I was reading a sports news article.

The article I read there was the Head Fake by Billups in Pistons-Celtics game which I quite enjoyed. It was nice opportunity for me because I couldn’t remember the last time I watched NBA games.

In Sacred Hoop’s About page I found this:

Sacred Hoops is designed for you to learn more about basketball, but just like in the book “Sacred Hoops” by Phil Jackson as he explains there is more to basketball than just basketball (You have to read the book it’s great). Here at Sacred Hoops, we offer basketball drills, basketball rules, coaching tips, basketball drills, youth basketball training, free basketball drills, and much more. This is why we say everything you want and more about basketball!

By the time of this writing, some areas of Sacred Hoops are still barren. I wish that the site owner would be able to provide more basketball articles for avid fans and basketball lovers and fill texts on some pages. Overall, with a Page Rank of 4, I’m quite positive that there are lots of users frequently accessing this website (including me).