Clickfire Viewpoints, Tools and Content for Webmasters

You’re tired of playing Team Fortress 2. Endwar has been delayed and you don’t like zombies. You still don’t own a machine that will run Crysis. Your new year’s resolution of 1080p is threatened by a world economic downturn. You are faced with having to frag more with less. You may be able to purchase only one game. What will it be? Better take off that headset and put on your consumer hat for a sec.

1. How old are the kids?
“Daddy, can I play?” Everything in society must be done “for the children.” This rule applies to PC game consumers, not just politicians. If you’re a parent who can’t say no, check the ESRB rating on the game’s box or online for content involving violence, sexual themes, language, etc. Now let’s move on.

2. Does the game meet the system requirements?
Perhaps the most important consideration before purchasing a PC game is deciding how well, if at all, it will perform on the gamer’s machine. This subject should be a no-brainer, but often gamers get so excited by the colorful graphics on the package that they overlook the fine print. Most games list a “minimum” and a “recommended” system. The more a system exceeds the minimum machine required to play a game, the better. A machine at or above the recommended requirements will allow a player to maximize the gaming experience with the highest speed and graphical detail.

3. What are the reviewers saying?
Before buying a PC game, it’s best to find out the impressions from others who have experienced the game. If for no other reason than fear of reader ridicule, most game reviewers will not put their names on an article unless they have thoroughly scoured the game for both its strengths and weaknesses. Make sure that the reviewer looks critically at gameplay, graphics, sound, and multiplay. Screenshots, especially if not resized, often speak louder than the review itself. Beware of reviews that spend lots of time discussing how wonderful the introductory video is.

4. Is a demo available?
Never buy a game without first downloading the demo from the developer or publisher’s website. Demos are always free and give the consumer a taste of the game’s features. A publisher will want to show off just enough of a game’s prowess to make people want the full version. A bad demo can be permanently removed from a gamer’s machine and obliterated from his mind forever with virtually no risk.

5. What features does the game have?
A PC game’s developer and publisher normally tout the key features of the product on their websites. A new title should have at least the standard features as well as a few unique ones. Try to compare a game’s features to those of other games in the same genre. First person shooters seem to struggle with the ability to come up with something different than plain run and shoot deathmatch.

6. Does the game have multiplayer support?
The multiplayer feature is not mentioned on the box. I’m sure the game supports multiplay, the publishers just forgot to mention it. Didn’t they? Please tell me they forgot! Please!

You probably have some friends who are strictly single player types and others who are online players. Feel sorry for both. Maximize the fun by taking what you learn in single play to the multiplay milieu where you build competitive skills with others. The multiplayer aspect adds longevity to a game. There will probably be hundreds of people still deathmatching on Half-Life 2 servers a decade after the popular first person shooter was released. Sadly, some games either don’t offer Internet play or offer a package that is unplayable over the net.

7. Did you check the return policy?
Most retailers don’t like accepting returns of opened software. If you don’t want to be laughed out of the store, check the retailer’s return policy before doing business with them. Buy only from stores that allow exchanges of opened software or who issue credit for returned software. You may be willing to pay more if you have the safety net of a return policy.

8. How many clichés did you spot?
Whether you find yourself at a software store or a voting booth, the most important point in cutting through cliché is look at an organization’s reputation for telling the truth. Here are some classic eyebrow raisers:

• “Jaw-dropping graphics”
• “Unparalleled realism”
• The (insert weapon name) is “powerful” or “lethal”
• The new terrain engine has been “built completely from the ground up”
• “The campaign is the heart of the game” (= no multiplayer)

9. Is it in the ”bargain bin?”
How about 2 for 1 deals? Rarely do you get two truly good pc games for one price. Heck, rarely do you get one truly good PC game for the price. Ask yourself what the reason for the discount offering is. In other words, is the store overstocked or is the game in the clearance section because it didn’t sell well. Sometimes you can find two good classic games for a good price, if nostalgia is your interest.

10. Is…was it vaporware?
The game developer has been working on this much-anticipated sequel for three years. Doesn’t this portend a high quality title when released?

Developers who make us sit through years of hype before releasing their title can rarely fulfill our hopes. Too often these long awaited and much talked about revolutionary titles don’t meet expectations or disappear in a disappointing cloud of vaporware. The degree to which game-related software and hardware technology changes in just one year often sends developers back to the drawing board. Then there’s the annual graphics card turnover and oh, don’t forget Moore’s law. In short, if it’s been hyped over the years, take an extra close look before buying.

Finally, it’s tough, but wait. If you read reviews that report problems with the PC game you want, give it some time. When the fix comes, check the gaming forums and see if it worked. It’s always good to let a game circulate for at least a little while before buying.

I have been and playing around with this WordPress theme for a long time and am finally ready to release it. I call it “Biruality,” which means “blue” in the asian languages of Indonesia and Malaysia. The theme is a simple, 2-column layout. I love the look. It’s clean and fast. The design was conceived by Sergios Singeridis and tweaked by me.

DOWNLOAD BIRUALITY WORDPRESS THEME

Please post comments and bugs you may find on the theme here. I hope you enjoy!

Legal: the WordPress theme is of course free to use and released under the GPL license (opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php). The theme is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty or implied warranty of merchantibility or fitness for a particular purpose.

Interview with LocalPrice.com Startup Founder: Rob Shields

Rob Shields of LocalPrice

LocalPrice is a privately held Atlanta-based startup founded in 2008 by Rob Shields. Rob has 10 years of broad experience working for internet companies. He agreed to answer a few questions about his work for LocalPrice and the ideas that power this online local service price comparison shopping site.

Thanks for taking time out to talk about what you are doing with Local Price. Can you start by giving us some background on yourself and how you came to be involved with this interesting startup?

Growing up in Western Kentucky, I worked for my father’s stump removal business. As soon as I could drive, he turned it over to my brother and me to run. We’d market our services by taking a business card and sticking it in the door of any house we saw with stumps in the yard. On the back of the card, we’d write something like:

“2 stumps in front yard removed: $40.”

I was always amazed by how effective this was. As soon as people saw a price, they were far more interested in the service. This was a lesson I took to heart. Since then, I’ve spent most of the last 10 years working for companies offering consumers online personal finance solutions. Most recently, I was responsible for new products at CheckFree Services Inc.

So when I came up with the idea for LocalPrice, I drew on my early experience marketing the stump cutting business. Given how difficult it still is for consumers to get a quote for most services, I felt that LocalPrice could act like the business card quotes we gave. By giving customers pricing information that is hard to find elsewhere, we’ll encourage consumers to buy when they may have never otherwise considered it.

What does LocalPrice offer?

LocalPrice allows online shoppers to compare local service providers based on price and other objective criteria. Let’s say you are shopping for the latest flatscreen TVs online, you’re probably aware that prices and feature comparison information is widely available. By contrast, if you are looking for services like: Atlanta home security systems, Atlanta locksmiths, granite countertops, movers, dentist in Atlanta, lasik surgeons, etc. it’s not as easy. These services are provided by small, local businesses who generally don’t list their prices online. So getting a few quotes can require hours of time. Surprisingly, no site offers price comparisons of these services. LocalPrice is the first.

How is it different from other service comparison sites?

Unlike Kudzu, Yelp and other sites offering subjective consumer reviews, LocalPrice compares providers based on price and other objective criteria that matter most to consumers making a decision.

I routinely monitor the 20 or so web host reviews posted on Clickfire and adjust pricing and feature data as it changes. This can be a pain to do manually and sometimes it takes a while. How do you ensure that visitors get fresh data?

The service providers you see listed on LocalPrice are responsible for the pricing and other data listed on the site. It will be the responsibility of each service providers to ensure that this information is current. Fortunately, pricing information for services is typically more stable than that of products. So there is not a great deal of churn in the data.

Tell us a little bit about how you came up with the idea for LocalPrice.

Early this year, my wife, Allie, was getting quotes on replacing the shocks on her car. The shops she called gave her quotes that were all over the place. When she told me about it, I wondered whether any site allowed users to do comparison shopping for local services. I was surprised to find that there weren’t any. In fact, I found that there was very little local service-pricing information online. Like Allie, folks shopping for local services have to make many phone calls to get information. It’s a very inefficient process. I came up with LocalPrice as a solution. Through LocalPrice, folks shopping for a service can get a ball-park estimate from a number of top providers instantly.

I know that some of the local business portals here in Atlanta and elsewhere struggle when it comes to organic search. Will you be utilizing SEO for LocalPrice? What promotional techniques are you currently using to spread the word?

We are using modern SEO techniques to optimize LocalPrice including the basics like good copy, Metas, linking, sitemaps, and other essentials. We are also looking at the promotion of LocalPrice in a more holistic manner in that we are looking at more than just the traditional SEO techniques. We are promoting the site through social media, blogs, shared advice via articles, and most of all, old fashioned world of mouth.

What are some of the pitfalls and successes you’ve encountered so far with your new business venture?

When we launched the site, we really didn’t have any ideas how businesses would react to us requesting that we place their prices next to those of their competitors on a site open to anyone. Most of the businesses we list on LocalPrice do not list their prices on their own web site. We’ve been surprised to find how receptive businesses have been to listing with us. We continue to get more and more businesses requesting a listing.

As far as pitfalls are concerned, there have been many. But I guess that this is the nature of a startup. Fundraising in an economic environment like we have today would probably be one that readily comes to mind.

Recently there have been some big downturns in the economy. People are losing jobs, 401ks are dropping, and the future is uncertain for many at home and in business. Is the current situation on Wall Street and Main Street affecting your business?

It is affecting us in a number ways, both good and bad. As the economy worsens, consumers are more interested in saving money and I think that this increases interest in sites like ours. However, as a business that will eventually be supported by advertisers, I believe that we will have to work even harder to prove our ROI to service providers that advertise with us.

If I own a business how can I get my business listed on Local Price?

If you have an Atlanta area service business that falls into a category we either currently cover or will cover - see the “Services” section of our site for a list- fill out the “List Your Business Form” for a free listing.

In this article, I explain the Clickfire web host review methodology wherein reviewers:

• log in and evaluate each host
• Install scripts, upload files, test speed
• Interact with customer support
• Report strengths and weaknesses
• Rate each host

We review all sorts of products and website apps here at Clickfire, essentially anything of interest to someone who wrangles with websites. And by review, I mean our writers give a general critical assessment of what they have experienced themselves or uncovered from their investigations and research. This might include a features summary, comparisons, how to, downloads and recommendations with or without affiliated advertiser links. There is no set methodology for writing reviews. The form is up to the writer and how they want to present and the readers judge accordingly.

Why Web Host Reviews Must Be Different

Ever wonder why you haven’t seen a web hosting review site with no ads? Web hosting providers are extremely competitive. Many have found that the affiliate advertising model works well for growing their customer base. A website owner recommends his host to visitors and in return receives a referral fee. Larger hosts that have grown because of the success of the affiliate advertising model can offer more bandwidth to customers due to volume purchasing. The host offering the highest bandwidth and most disk space has an easy time selling. Who wants the VW when you can have the Ferrari for the same price?

With all the big bucks being offered for acquisition of new hosting customers coupled with the ease of cut and paste affiliate advertising, it is easy to understand why web host reviews tend to raise suspicion among consumers and invite criticism from website owners. This is why we place our web host reviews in a class of their own with a separate set of standards and review process.

A few things to get out of the way

• The hosts reviewed at Clickfire are typically shared web hosts that use a control panel user interface like cPanel (cpanel.net). I have used this type of software successfully for many years and it speeds up administration and cuts cost for the weekend website wrangler.
• The lowest priced hosting package is normally selected for review.
• We don’t review reseller hosting separately. It is my belief that most hosts that offer reseller accounts use the same servers, support and standards as with regular shared accounts. So, as a rule of thumb, the qualities or deficiencies of a provider’s shared hosting package should translate to its reseller side fairly well, if they offer both.
• I don’t personally endorse any one host over another. Reviewers can say what they want (more about these guys later). Readers use the reviews as tools to help along in the decision making process.
• Clickfire is not a promotional site, but a content site that uses affiliate advertising to earn revenue (in case you haven’t noticed the ads). Clickfire is my 10 year plus labor of love. I like making money. But, I don’t feel right about hyping products just to gain ad revenue.
• Reviewers control the ratings. I don’t try and get them to change their reviews. If there is a particularly egregious rating given, I do reserve the right to ask for reconsideration. I don’t change reviews based on requests from web hosting companies—believe me, I have been asked on more than one occasion!

Who are the web host reviewers?

I will tell you that it is horrendously difficult to find a suitable web host reviewer and if you even think you may be cut out for the job, please contact me after reading ahead. To provide the best results for site visitors, web host reviewers must abide by these web host review guidelines. I have performed a few hosting reviews myself and you may find an exception or two, but by and large the people performing the reviews have to meet these qualifications or it doesn’t work.

Independent – We contract reviewers and pay them a set fee. No questionable relationships or under-the-table-deal-making occurs. No one working for or affiliated with the company being reviewed can review that company’s host. No one affiliated with Clickfire or who might benefit from skewing a review is allowed to write web host reviews.

Knowledgeable – Reviewers have to know the inner workings of web hosting providers from the technology to operations. Reviewers have to know where the potential weaknesses lie and where to look for them. For example, in the review of BlueHost, the reviewer phoned in to ask about support for mod_security, Ruby on Rails, PHP 5 support and whether or not he should use localhost as the host name with the script he was trying to install.

Experienced – Reviewers have to be skilled in the ways of web hosting. This means hands on experience working with website files. Many have worked in the web hosting industry or own their own sites and work with hosts regularly.

Honest – We love reviewer opinions! But, I didn’t work this hard to build a site for fellow website owners to then have someone ruin our credibility by distorting the truth. I check for plagiarism and have no sympathy for violators.

Critical – Reviewers have to call it like it is. If a host sucks, say it. If there is an issue with a host, we want to shine the light of truth upon it! Critical skills must go beyond looking at the control panel features. We ask reviewers to look at any possible areas of consumer dissatisfaction and often that includes delving into the host’s terms of service agreement.

Communications Skills - Reviewers have to be able to ask the right questions when performing tests and making inquiries to customer service. For example, in the HostGator review, the reviewer lists his chat log with customer support where he asked about a particular kind of delivery option for overseas customers.

The web host review process

1. First, I sign up for an account with a web host.
2. Once the service is active, I contact an independent reviewer and negotiate a price for the review. I mentioned that we pay web host reviewers, but they have to meet a our criteria such as having Web hosting industry experience, hands on hosting skills, critical abilities and not having an affiliation with the host being reviewed.
3. Once we agree on the price, I send the login info and the reviewer begins to evaluate the host. Usually, the reviewer looks first at the control panel and tries to assess how it stands up for usability.
4. Then he starts installing CMS scripts and working with files to test functionality and speed.
5. The reviewers can look at any feature or aspect of a host that they want and be as critical as they want. For example, some reviewers look within the fine print of the terms of service, a favorite hiding place for policies that can affect buying decisions and harm consumers.
6. Next, the web host reviewer contacts the host directly without the host knowing that they are being reviewed. I ask all reviewers to do this because hosting support is such a big issue with webmasters. The reviewer reports on all this and gives Clickfire readers his assessment based on his personal experience–key point here.
7. Each reviewer is required to list specifically what he believes are the pros, cons and bottom line based on what he has seen.
8. Finally the reviewer is required to give his rating of between 1 and 5 stars.
9. If the host has an affiliate program, I usually install their referral code to recoup expenses (signup, paying the reviewer) and hopefully make a profit.
10. Lastly, the web host review is published at Clickfire where users add their own comments and the web hosting companies respond if they so choose.

The whole review process from start to finish can take several months, but it’s worth it. I believe that using a methodology like this with standards and guidelines in place, readers can take away something of value that helps them make the right decision as consumers. The best hosts get new customers. I earn money to review more hosts and develop other content for Clickfire which is less monetizeable but more fun.

Tired of Digg and StumbleUpon? Yahoo! Buzz (aka Y! Buzz) is one of the newest contributors to the social media circuit and deserves a few points for creativity. Instead of allowing users to play the system by submitting articles and then begging for extra clicks, Yahoo Buzz makes the choices based upon what’s been getting the best results on their search engines.

So here’s how it works:

1. Yahoo Buzz keeps tabs on the most popular items being hunted down via the Yahoo Search Engine. They list the hottest articles and blogs.
2. You log into Yahoo Buzz, using the same Yahoo! account name you already have, and read the articles. If you like it, you “Buzz up,” and if you really don’t like it you can give it a “Buzz down.” If you don’t care either way you should just leave the article alone.
3. The stories that are the most popular based on Buzz votes, end up at the top of the list on Yahoo Buzz, and also end up on the Yahoo! home page, giving them even more visibility and prestige.

Other social media sites may give users more control by allowing them to submit whatever content they like as often as they can but, in the end, visitors end up voting for the best of the worst - in other words, they have to sort through pages of junk to find a decent article.

Yahoo Search as a Popularity Factor in Buzz

Yahoo Buzz forces users to vote for the best of the best by limiting the articles they see to those that they already know are popular on the internet. The concept of posting already popular articles on Yahoo Buzz rewards those who have already done a lot of hard work by giving them a little extra visibility, which will in turn result in additional well-deserved web traffic.

Yahoo Buzz Widgets

The folks at Yahoo Buzz have done a lot of work to make Buzz as accessible as possible. They’ve developed Buzz Widgets that you can place on your own website or blog in order to allow visitors to see what’s hot in the news, and they have a specialized version of the Buzz website specifically designed for readability on the ever popular iPhone.

Internet markets should pay attention to Yahoo Buzz as well. Want to know what the public is really looking for every day? Get your typing fingers on over to Yahoo Buzz and take note. Yahoo Buzz, even in beta, is about to take the internet by storm!

Douglas Hanna visited The Planet Hosting’s corporate headquarters in Houston, Texas and brought home some great pictures of life in a full fledged web hosting facility including these datacenter images. Check out those beautiful server racks!

Who would think that you could do the planet a favor by purchasing web hosting? Well, that’s the premise that ThinkHost, an Oregon-based web hosting, has based its business on. The company touts three core values:
honest, integrity, and trust, with environmentalism thrown in for good measure and good marketing.

The story of ThinkHost is simple; the company realized that web hosting is bad for the environment (data centers take up a lot of energy) and decided to do something about it. Their solution? Run all services on 100% renewable energy. They also plant a tree for every new customer. The result? A “green” hosting company that actually helps, instead of devastates, the
environment.

Putting the aspect of green hosting aside, though, ThinkHost offers competitive plans and quality service. Their standard plan offers 100 GB of disk space and 1000 GB of bandwidth, along with some nice features like PHP 5 and Ruby on Rails, for $7.95 a month (assuming you pre-pay for two years). If you only want to pay for a six month period, the cost will ramp up to $19.95 a month.

In addition to providing standard hosting features (unlimited databases, unlimited email, etc.), the company includes a variety of software and services with its hosting plans, ranging from a call with a business consultant to discounts on environmentally friendly paper products.

ThinkHost customers are offered a custom control panel. The control panel isn’t as powerful as cPanel, but it gets the job done. It’ll work for a vast majority of web sites and allows for fairly complete management of a particular web site. Those use to cPanel may experience a bit of a learning curve, but again, it is a manageable change.

Those seeking phone or IM support should look elsewhere – ThinkHost offers neither. To test their email support, I submitted a simple question to their support team using the company’s online helpdesk at 2:30 PM on a Sunday. I received a response 20 minutes later. The answer to my exact question was actually available in the company’s knowledge base and that’s what the company sent me. However, the answer was appropriate and did answer my question.

The company offers a 120 day money back guarantee and a 100% uptime guarantee. The 100% uptime guarantee isn’t exactly “no strings attached, though. It only applies if you submit a ticket to their support team to report the problem and it doesn’t provide you with a full refund if your web site goes down for a few minutes. However, the offer is unique and the money back guarantee period is one of the longest ones in the industry.

ThinkHost prides itself on being a “green” host. If that is of value to you, the company is a great choice. The company offers relatively competitive hosting plans with enough space, bandwidth, and technology to
keep any webmaster happy.

It’s not that often that one gets the opportunity to chat with a leading figure behind some of the most powerful SEO tools in use today. Well, it’s one of those special days for me because I was able to get inside the mind of Gleb Suvorov of SeoDigger.com, SeoQuake and AdsSpy.com. Like many of us, he has a passion for SEO that you will see in the answers to these questions about the tools. Okay, folks, let’s take it away…

Thanks for taking the time to do an interview at Clickfire. I am always fascinated to learn about the people behind successful software tools and what makes them tick. Can you start off by telling us about yourself and your role and your company?

I have been in the Internet business for about five years. I started in Internet advertising, and then became interested in SEO. In the SEO Quake Team my role is best described as product manager.­ I coordinate the team, do research, talk to our users and bloggers, and come up with new ideas for our products. Most popular ones are SeoDigger.com (reverse Google index), SeoQuake (SEO extension for FireFox) and AdsSpy.com.

I’ve used your tools both at home and professionally. Who are the typical users of your software?

Well, I would say there are 3 groups:

1. Professional SEO employees and freelancers who use our products regularly. We appreciate the feedback that we get from these people and we use it as a main source of ideas for improving our products.
2. Small group of advanced webmasters people who know how to set parameters for SeoQuake, use SeoDigger API, and other ultra-advanced functions.
3. Beginners - bloggers and webmasters who use our products from time to time to check their stats.

SeoDigger is my favorite tool of all. I’ve always wondered how you are able to have so much search data at your fingertips for so many sites. Can you say anything about how you obtain it? Do you collect it yourself or use third party data? Or is that top secret?

No top secret at all. A while ago we invested some time into building a database of 60 million keywords (partly acquired from third parties, partly gathered ourselves). Every 3 or 4 weeks we make 60 million requests to USA version of Google.com. In this way we SERP for first 20 positions for every keyword in our database, which is then used to build a reverse index. After that it’s simple, ­you type in a URL and get your report.

My complaints about most online tools are that either they don’t work or they simply don’t do anything useful. How do you overcome these two challenges?

Our rule of a thumb here is that we develop tools that we can use ourselves. We also do a lot of preliminary testing–we talk to people and see if they find our tools useful. If end users don’t like it, we keep it for private use.

Can you tell us about the new AdsSpy tool? How is it different from other “spy” tools that we see tauted around the Internet?

AdsSpy shows you all websites associated with certain AdSense, Google Analytics or Affiliate IDs (including Yahoo, Chikita, Amazon and others). If you know a site where Google Ads are displayed, you can see other sites that belong to the same webmaster. I would say the main difference is that AdsSpy does not involve spyware. We use only publicly available information. In fact, AdsSpy is a niche search engine. It searches javascript codes­–we check IDs of Google SERP top sites based on SeoDigger.com statistics. There are a few tools with similar functionality, but AdsSpy has biggest database of publisher IDs and domains (Total domains: 1 260 992 |Total UIDs: 638 310). So far, we’ve scanned about 15 million sites.

I have to admit, I felt a little violated when I input one of my sites into AdsSpy and immediately saw a bunch of other sites in my AdSense network show up. Do you get any complaints from webmasters about sharing this type of information? If so, how do you deal with it? Can webmasters prevent their data from being accessed via robots.txt, for example? Of course, I want to be able to see my competitors but I don’t want them to see me

We had a lot of negative feedback at the beginning, but not any more. We believe that Ids is public information, and the only thing we do is aggregate them. We do not use read robot.txt. To my knowledge, there is no legal way to prevent crawling if your site is listed in Google and you are using AdSense or other system (except code modification which is forbidden by Google policy). But things change, and who knows, we might delete your sites from our system

AdsSpy is a break from being a pure SEO tool like SeoDigger and SeoQuake. Everyone seems to have a social media tool or widget or plugin these days. I can’t keep up with all the Twitter tools out there. Do you foresee your team developing any other types of tools or do you plan to stick with SEO tools in the future?

All our activities are concentrated around SEO, web research and statistics. AdsSpy.com is in a way another facet of SEO ­knowing what exactly your competitors do and who they are. We have also experimented with social media. We worked on an analogue of Digg for SEO news, but we did not get much positive feedback from users and closed the project. This year we plan to make some major enhancements to SeoDigger, add a couple of new functions to AdsSpy.com and open one or two new services for competitive intelligence and SEO. Now we are gathering feedback from our users and SEO professionals to find out their needs. We welcome any suggestions.

I always like to ask the people I interview to reveal something fun or interesting about themselves. What do you do when you’re not working?

Surprisingly, SEO Digging is not the only kind of digging in my life. I do some amateur archeology / treasure hunting like searching for old coins and things like that. Offline digging has much in common with SEO research–you browse through tons of maps, use special equipment and your brain to find interesting dependencies. Sometimes all your effort is only to see that somebody else did it better. But when you succeed at last­ it is so much fun!

If you’re looking for the Dotster 15% off coupon code, it’s just “clickfire.com”

Dotster.com doesn’t hide the fact that it is a domain registrar at heart. However, like most domain registrars, it has realized that the domain business is an intensively competitive, low margin commodity business. Also like most domain registrars, Dotster has entered into the equally competitive, equally commoditized, but far more profitable web hosting business.

Dotster Plans

Dotster’s space and bandwidth allocations for its shared plans are moderately competitive, but the plans do require a closer look. Those used to normal cPanel oversellers will notice a difference in Dotster’s plans: the company limits the number of email addresses and mailbox sizes. For heavy email users, this can be a serious problem. They also limit FTP accounts, databases, domains, and the like. It’s important to consider what extra features your web site will require before choosing a host like Dotster.

In addition to its standard plans, Dotster offers VPS hosting running on both Linux and Windows platforms. Email hosting is also offered and some plans come with and even focus around a SiteBuilder that makes it easy to create a simple web site.

Dotster adopts the standard industry practice of encouraging customers to pay in advance. They allow pre-payment of up to five years in advance, representing a 30% savings over the yearly plan. Comparatively, though, the savings that Dotster offers for paying so far in advance are relatively insignificant. This also means that you don’t have to pay too much extra if you want to signup for a shorter period of time.

As the plans get more expensive, the payment schedule gets more flexible. The most expensive plan (which is $25.95 a month when paid monthly) allows you to pay monthly, quarterly, yearly, every two years, every three years, and every five years.

Dotster uses a custom control panel. From the control panel, you can manage essentially every aspect of your account (including domain names). The control panel is surprisingly intuitive and offers all of the expected features. Email, FTP accounts, databases, etc. can all be managed as expected from Dotster’s custom control panel.

Testing Dotster

Upon testing, FTP speeds seemed to be reasonable and comparative to those of other hosts. The control panel loaded quickly and without errors.

Support at Dotster does not seem to be a top priority or a competitive differentiator; it seems to be more of an after thought. The company has an extensive knowledge base and provides support via a helpdesk, live chat, and the telephone. However, live chat and telephone support are only offered on weekdays during normal business hours. I sent a simple request to the company’s support team at 2:15 PM on a Sunday and received a reply Monday night at 8:03 PM. When it takes more than 24 hours to receive an email response, that does cause concern.

I was skeptical when I signed up online for a free subscription to Website Magazine offer oh, I guess about 2 years ago. Like every other free magazine I have ordered online, I fully expected to meet the same fate as the credit card apps and seminar invitations that fill the trash can next to my snail junk mailbox. After all, why would any webmaster want to read a magazine when they can read hundreds of great webmaster resources online?

Here’s the offical line from Websitemagazine.com:

Website Magazine is the one magazine to focus exclusively on the business of running a website: tips for successful websites, solutions for enhancing website traffic, the latest Internet industry trends and statistics, as well as news analysis on the Internet industry.

By providing a broad scope of useful articles and tapping premier talent in the industry, Website Magazine covers all the elements that together make websites successful: search engine optimization and marketing, website design, content management, blogging, E-commerce, online advertising, email marketing, analytics, web software and applications, customer service/customer relationship management, web hosting, mobile web and more.

Surprisingly, when the magazine arrived, I found the articles to be well written and the caliber of the writers to be at expert levels. I learned some things from Website Magazine. Not only that, but I discovered a few interesting items that I hadn’t come across before, not even online. My image of the web as superior to offline media was pretty much shattered. I was not surpised to hear that the Website Magazine subscriber base more than doubled in 2007.

Now I find out that Website Magazine has an affiliate program that pays 2 bucks per lead. So now I have a cool free product that I have personally benefited from and that I can share with Clickfire readers and get compensated. Everybody wins. Unspeakable coolness. If you like Website Magazine and would like to sign up, doing so through our affiliate links on this page will support Clickfire. If you join the affiliate program and use it on your site, let me know how it goes! Good luck.

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