Monthly Archives: October 2008

What to look for in a hosting company

October 26, 2008 in Hosting by CEO/Founder, Supreme Center Hosting  |  Comments Off

Type “hosting” at Google and you will find that there are currently 439,000,000 results for the search term … you should not have any trouble finding the perfect host for you and your website. However, its always best to start by asking friends or family who may already have a website who they recommend. A good review from someone you trust is far more valuable than reviews from people you don’t know. Visiting the countless hosting review sites can be a little daunting and the fact is, you will find that many of them “recommend” the same 5-10 hosting companies. The reason being is hosting companies pay for the reviews or for featured listings.

Before you decide on a host make sure that the host trustworthy and reliable, it is always worthwhile noting how long the company has been in business. Unfortunately anyone can set up a web hosting company, unless you ask the right questions you will not be able to judge the competence of any hosting company.

If you are new to websites and web hosting in general, it would be wise to host your sites with am established web hosting company. They are capable of dealing with less technically adept customers and are willing to go the extra mile. Due to their size, an established host is normally more flexible when it comes to upgrading your hosting plan, providing a payment plan of your choice and they have more servers available than the smaller hosting companies. It may also be wise to pick a host that may offer some support for the application that you may plan on using. Most hosts will not provide support for third party applications such as WordPress, Joomla or osCommerce, so you may not have them to rely on should something go wrong – Supreme Center Hosting is one of few hosting companies that provides limited support for many open source applications. Some hosts will even provide free professional installations of popular applications. Another suggestion would be to choose a host that may offer additional products and services such as SSL certificates, website programming or even managed services – you never know when you might need additional services and your host will normally give discounts to their customers for additional products or services they might need.

When looking for a host, first decide how much disk space and bandwidth you might need. Although this is not normally a deal breaker as you can always upgrade your plan should the need for more space or transfer arise. However, you do want to make sure that the host you plan to use and the plan you choose has the correct specs for the application you plan to use – you don’t want to choose a unix host when you plan on using an application that is coded in ASP.

If you are currently hosting a website and are planning on moving to a new hosting provider, it might be wise to look for a host that can help you with the transition. Many hosting companies, such as Supreme Center Hosting, provide free transfer services for customers who are using cPanel. This makes the transition that much easier and you will have less to do in order to get your site up and going with your new host.

It’s all in a name

October 26, 2008 in Domains by CEO/Founder, Supreme Center Hosting  |  Comments Off

To do business on the Web, you will need at least one domain name. You may want to use your business name as your domain name, or you might pick a new domain name that you think will attract people to your website to purchase your products or services.

What to consider when choosing a domain name:

* Descriptiveness – The ability for the domain to be associated with content
* Length of Domain – Length in terms of characters in the domain; a long domain name can actually hurt your chances to resell the domain for a good price should you choose to later on. It also increases the chance that an Internet user will have a hard time remembering that domain
* Number of words in domain – Try to keep the domain name to one or two words. Again, this can actually hurt your chances of reselling the domain for a good price and increases the chance that an Internet user will have a hard time remembering that domain
* Applicability – Is the name generic (can it be applied to a variety of institutions, individuals and businesses)?
* Trademarking & Brand – Does it serves as a strong trademark & brand?
* Dot Value – What is the extension – .biz, .com, .info, .net, .org, .cc?
* Hyphenation – Does the name contain hyphens, such as e-Domain.com? Once again, a hyphen might be a great idea to you at the time you register the domain however, you limit the ability to resell the domain and the chances the site visitor will remember the domain, and
* Abbreviation – Is anything abbreviated, such as eDomain.com? Tyr to choose a domain that does not contain any abbreviations

One thing to consider is that the best domain names are short, unforgettable, ingenious, and easy to spell and pronounce. Also, simple domain names that describe a business’s products or services are easier to market. Choosing a domain name such as EasySoftware.com to describe your software business is much better then a unique name such as xanji.com, bamzu.com, or google.com. These unique names require extensive marketing efforts to attract customers since the domain names have nothing to do with their principal products or services.

One good approach is to choose a domain name that suggests a websites product or service, but isn’t too commonplace, such as ink.com or inc.com. Domain names like these are suitable for trademark protection and customers should be able to easily remember and correlate the name with your business.

Another good strategy may be to use one distinctive domain name, such as cream.com, and one basic domain name, such as soda.com, to represent a site that makes or sells cream soda.

Finding a Name That Hasn’t Been Taken

The hard job when picking a domain name is finding a name that is available as millions of domain names have been registered already. For example, if your business name is Fragrance Direct, you will find that FragranceDirect.com has already been registered. In that case, you will have to choose a different domain name or pursue other options for securing the domain name you want. You can see if the domain is actually in use and, if not, you can request that the name be transfered to you. This sometimes requires that you purchase the domain name from the domain owner. Whenever possible, get a domain appraisal prior to inquiring about purchasing a domain.

The best way to find out whether your business name is available is to do a domain name search. Type the name you want, select an extension and click search. You will then get a message alerting you to whether or not the name is available. If it is unavailable, you will be presented with a few suggestions that can be registered. Do not get discouraged. As I stated earlier, many millions of domains have been registered and you may not find the one you want at first.

Creating a domain name to brand your site

If you are creating a site that does not need to have a targeted name, and you can not think of a unique name yourself, a good source for brand-able domain names is Namevo. They have a slew of domains that are registered and available for sale. You can pick up a great brand-able domain for as little as $100. These type of domains are great for portals, search sites, an entertainment site and even perfect for eCommerce websites.

Creating a name for your website can be tedious. Use your head, do not rush into things, consider my suggestions and get a domain appraisal prior to registering or purchasing a domain name.

CRE tells community to get Fucked

October 26, 2008 in CRE Loaded by CEO/Founder, Supreme Center Hosting  |  Comments Off

Not long after posting my previous message, Sal the “Evil Greedy Overlord” banned me from the forums once again [truth must hurt]. This was after he acted like a child and replaced my forum avatar with a picture of a troll with purple hair just because I have the temerity to tell the truth. Just today, a new forum member contacted me via our web sites contact us form and brought my attention to CRE’s new business model… telling the community, their client base, to get F@#$ed.

You would think that considering the downward spiral that CRE is in, they would refrain from treating those who are using the application [and any potential users] disrespectfully. Below you will find two recent posts by CRE employees.

The following was posted by maestro:

“i find it completely dis-heartening that so many outside the CRE “CoRE” can so easily get into such pissing contests, no matter who started it, and then have the balls to use the very forum they seem to detest to tout “Their New Cart” i dont mind it being done of course, everyone is entitled to it. Just seems to me if you want your own cart version you should start your own forums too and stop bashing the very foundation that so many of us have not only helped to create, but have profited from over the years! If you dont like the way CRE is handled/run/managed then apply for a job and DO BETTER! or get F@#$ed! it would also be respectable to completely 100% cease and desist using, developing for, and profiting from any CRE based code, especially if you insist on “slamming” that very code! Just my two cents worth on all the flaming content of this post. maestro (Gerald Bullard Jr Jacksonville, FL)“

Another CRE employee, datazen, was just as unprofessional:

htimmes,

You are correct, I find it hard to believe that you alone fixed over 750 bugs. Perhaps in your 10 year old mind you counted to 750 but I still find it hard to believe that you alone have made a better version of CRE.

You assume we only use FireFox but in fact we test with the top 90% of all used browsers.

Safari and Chrome are not one of those yet but of course your 10 year old mind already knows this so I am simply repeating myself.

I have noticed by most of your 25 posts that you are not contributing to the better cause here – you are doing nothing more than trying to cause breaks in the community floor. This is simply not needed.

If you did in fact fix valid bugs, donate them to the community as we all did and still do. Help CRE become a better product. If you want to get paid for your work, apply for a job with CRE (minimum age is 16).

Quote::
Sal, During our discussion, you said you will put an end to having your staff criticize me?

Oh, but it’s ok for you to continue??? WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

What a fraking baby!! Go cry again to Sal – perhaps he will fire me and hire you in my place!

_________________
Scott Logsdon
Software Development Manager
Chain Reaction eCommerce, Inc.

I was not surprised to see that Sal Iozzia never made mention to the fact that his employees [datazen & maestro] were acting the fool by making fun of forum members and telling people to get F@#$ed. No apology for the position someone in his employ took or for how this employees treated customers and forum members. The “Evil Greedy Overlords” only response was:

As much as I would love to never ban a forum user – it just is not possible.

I stated that I would not CENSOR anyone. And I have not. I have taken action to police the community from those that want to harm it.

I did not say i would never ban anyone again, read the post again. We are here as a community to make CRE great. To make a great open source product that is powerful and meets our needs. And to do that we need order and stability. Not chaos and flame wars.

As for censorship, you can read every word of every passionate or flame baiting post of recent days. None have been censored. We do reserve the right to edit a post and remove links to websites that are essentially spam advertisements.

Also the work in underway to reinstate forum signatures. More on that in another post.

Our problem on the forums now is a good problem to have. Sparks will fly, I have been challenged both by the community and internally within the development team, quality of our product is important to everyone. I believe that CRE Team and CRE Community will be better for this energy, this passion. As long as we always come back to respecting one another.

If you’re reading this far into this thread and still wondering if CRE is the right place for you. Well I can tell you this. CRE Loaded is hard at work making our product great. And the community is hard at work adding value and helping each other out. The volume of energy you find here is directly proportional to the value and potential everyone perceives to be in the product and in the community.

Thanks for your support of CRE Loaded!

_________________
Regards,
Salvatore Iozzia
Founder and Chief Visionary Officer (Evil Overlord)
Chain Reaction Ecommerce Inc.
Makers of CRE Loaded

What, nothing to say about maestro telling the community to get F@#$ed? Nothing about datazen calling a forum member a ten-year-old? I dare ask:

1. Where is the professionalism?
2. Who does the hiring at CRE?
3. Who is running the show?

Personally, I don’t find any of this hard to believe. If I were a nieve person I may not have believed it if I had not read it all for myself. Is it any wonder why things are so bad at CRE that end users are desperately trying to find something to replace CRE with? Can the entire CRE crew be that oblivious to what is going on that they compound the issue by continuing to treat what customers they do have left as though they did not need them?

CRE Loaded just got worse

October 20, 2008 in CRE Loaded by CEO/Founder, Supreme Center Hosting  |  Comments Off

I could all out flame CRE Loaded and Salvatore Iozzia here today but what good would it do? I doubt very highly that it would make any real difference to the current CRE Loaded open source model. Fact is, I had plenty to say in the “Sal’s Message to the Community” thread at the CRE Loaded forums regarding past and current issues, and it seems Sal is oblivious to the opinion’s that were offered. He somehow managed to muster up enough backbone to to create the post, while flip flopping on the entire issue. The entire post looks like it was pulled out of a page from the past with many of the more well-known forum members taking a whack at Sal’s pride.

By know it is probably obvious that I am not new to CRE Loaded. I started using it back in 2003-2004 when it was still in [bug filled] version v6.15. I even did work for Sal [installations, contribution additions] while I was upstarting my hosting business. That was until he screwed me out of $500 for worked I performed and about the time that David Graham, of the osCommerce University, suggested that Sal start selling CRE Loaded. I remember having a chat conversation with David regarding sale of the open source application but was never aware that he suggested it [or I am getting too old to remember]. I gently poked David in the aforementioned thread by saying “If your suggesting that you persuaded Sal to sell CRE then, Shame on you! It was you sir who created the Ugly Monster!” His response clearly showed that he was as pissed as I… “Yeah, well, I never intended anyone to mislead the public about the GPL and its implications either. Which is why EOS itself is free and will remain so.” What? is it possible that Salvatore Iozzia could mislead the end user? Sure it is. I read posts by Sal, and his now world famous moderator Gerald, regarding the GPL license. It was clear to me that what they were trying to do was mislead the lesser informed end user that they really were not permitted to do anything with CRE… but pay for it.

Now this brings up a new question… what exactly was the end user paying for? That ultimately is a very good question. At this point, I have no idea. David Graham recently blogged about this in his post “CRE Launches New Open Source Model” and stated that “My original concept when proposing CRE Loaded commercialization was to charge a standard fee per copy distributed with a 30 to 90 day support window, following which support could be obtained on a contract basis.” Okay, so the end user was paying for support? Hmmm… having had conversations with owners of other companies that were using, or had clients using CRE Loaded, this was clearly not the case. Apparently, support was one thing that was missing from the $200 price tag for Pro and $300 price tag for B2B.

Okay, so what do I think about all of this? What was missing from the launch of the new model and CRE 6.2 was Value-Added Services. By definition, it would be the term for non-core services… services that add value to a standard service offering. This could be any number of things. Using CRE as an example, the value-added services could be Support, plugins, templates, etc. As an active supporter of Open Source applications since 2003, we offer web site hosting and hosting services for a variety of open source applications and provide value-added services such as free professional installation and free support for a variety of issues that a customer my experience while using the application. We also provide web site programming services for these applications at a nominal [and below industry standard] fee.

So my question is… why is it that Sal thought it a good idea to sell CRE when he could have offered additional value-added services at reasonable rates? These services could have been any or all of those mentioned above. Support/Maintenance contracts could have been offered to those who either do not have the experience necessary to modify code or just did not want to. Plugins, that could not be found for free at osCommerce.com, could have been developed in-house and sold in the CRE store. Same goes for custom templates. Any service or a combination of services could have been offered to the CRE end user, whom I might add would have been more than happy to pay for. However, the “Evil Greedy Overlord” could not help himself. He not only put unreasonable price tags on the open source application, he charged 2 arms and a leg for additional services that really should have been part of the “support” the end user was supposed to get.

So what have we learned from all this? Never, and I mean never pay for open source applications. The whole idea behind open source is that the source code should be free. This does not mean that everything should be free [contributions, support, templates, hosting, etc], but that the application itself should be free. Granted, the GPL license states that you can sell the code. That is correct, sir. Let’s use Linux as an example. Linus Torvalds wrote and released Linux as open source and it can be found everywhere for $0. Why is it that Red Hat is selling it then? Well, they are not selling the Linux source code. What they are selling is value-added services in the forum of features that can not be found in the original source, support and improved & robust versions.

Finally, we have also learned that you can’t trust anyone who calls themselves the “Evil Overlord.”

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