Last week I did an emergency website fix for a new customer.  I hadn’t built the site and wasn’t familiar with its functionality.  As I worked on their payment page, I realized what I was looking at.  The page collected credit card information and then emailed the credit card details to the website owner.  The [...]

I am one of the luckiest people I know.  I get to live my dream, working from home while I help people make their dreams come true, because of the Internet.  Proposed laws threaten our ability to make a living on the Internet, express ourselves on the Internet, do research on the Internet and touch [...]

As readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of BlueHost website hosting.  They have great technical support.  They have reliable servers with a 99.9% network uptime guarantee.  They allow you to host multiple sites with just one account.  Their control panel allows you to quickly set up a WordPress blog, a phpList newsletter [...]

I’ve written about CafePress shops before.  They’re fairly easy to set up and it’s one way that website owners can make money online.  The CafePress interface allows you to make a wide variety of products.  There are t-shirts, greeting cards, water bottles, Thermos containers and even thongs.  Too much information?  Sorry.  The point is that [...]

A few years ago I wrote a post about Pingdom.  (See below for a copy of the post.)  Pingdom monitors your websites to make sure they’re up and running.  It’s a great service and I still use them today.  I see that they now offer a free account for monitoring one website or server. Is [...]

I recently moved a customer’s PHPlist installation to BlueHost. As you may know, BlueHost (along with Hosting.com) is one of my preferred hosting providers. The move itself went well.  I installed PHPlist via the Simple Scripts installation process.  I exported the list from the old system and imported it into the new system.  I copied [...]

I can’t believe it’s November already and, gulp, time to start thinking about holiday shopping.  You know what my biggest gift-giving problem is?  The “small” gift.  You know, something thoughtful to give your hairdresser, cleaning person,  petsitter, pen pal, closet organizer, cubicle mate, etc.  These are the women in your life you want to recognize, [...]

I recently received this comment from a reader: I bought the book that you wrote with Skip McGrath about how to make money blogging and it is GREAT! I now have my own blog and I was hoping you could answer a question for me. (I have been using your blog for reference and it [...]

As you may know, HostMySite  has purchased Hosting.com and is now doing business as Hosting.com.  I’m a bit nervous about this change.  HostMySite is the best website host I’ve ever worked with.   Will the change mean that uptime, customer support and technical support will go downhill? Until recently I was hopeful that my worry was [...]

HostMySite.com, one of my favorite hosting companies,  acquired Hosting.com in May. I’ve been a little nervous about what the acquisition would mean for customer service. One of the great things about HostMySite was that customers never had to wait on hold. You just called and you talked to a technical support person. No weird music.  [...]