A friend, who runs a home-based online business, told me that with a few web properties and setting up even more websites that would generate additional revenue for him, he is looking for another reliable webhosting company.

According to my friend, although he is rather satisfied with his current web host, he is not going to put all his eggs into one basket. If you are a webmaster, I am sure that you would occasionally experience server downtime once in awhile. With the current set up my friend has right now where all his websites are hosted under one master account, he said that any downtime suffered drastically affects his online revenue and since he depends on this for a living, he can’t afford to not do anything about it.

That’s one smart move. Even for me, a small-timer, I have three different hosts so that if one goes down, I still have two live which would still be able to generate earnings, albeit lower. Since my friend is going to start new sites and not transfer his current sites to a new webhost and server, it will not be very troublesome.

I sent him the link to Web Hosting Choice so that he could read for himself and compare the top ten web hosting companies. While all of us are trying to save cost due to the lackluster economy, looking for a cheap web hosting plan is not the only consideration. We also need to look at other features like money-back guarantee, free set up, disk space allocation and data transfer and very importantly, we need a company that has 24/7 technical support and friendly customer service.

*** This post has been sponsored.

Remember the huge blunder that Google made when it first launched Buzz in February this year? Gmail users created an uproar upon discovering that their contacts have been shared among all their other contacts, if you know what I am saying. This really shouldn’t be such a big deal considering that we can see who our Facebook friends are being friends with, unless we want that concealed. Well, it’s the same concept, isn’t it?

Although Google subsequently made changes to Buzz and gave us the option to opt out of it and teaching us how to remove Buzz from our Gmail account if we do not wish to use it, after accidentally clicking that we are opting in to the service when it was first launched and we didn’t know better.

Whatever remedial steps that Google took wasn’t enough and the company was sued by a Google user, Eva Hibnick, in February. After so many months, a settlement has been reached and Google will have to pay US$8.5 million for their mistake. According to a copy of the settlement that was made public on Friday, proceeds from this settlement will be donated to internet privacy groups that have yet to be specified at this point. Well, that is whatever money is left after paying the lawyers. LOL

Dr. Chua Soi Lek, the current MCA President, or more popularly known as CSL, has denied that he has a new Facebook account and stresses that whoever posting under his name has impersonated him.

According to Dr. Chua, he did have a Facebook account last time but it was hacked and he had it closed soon after. From then till today, he has yet to see the need for a new Facebook account. Dr. Chua says that if and when he registers for a new account n Facebook, he would make an announcement.

I can certainly understand that there are people who are too free who would go around setting up fake Facebook and/or Twitter accounts of well known figures in society or celebrities but it beats me why anyone would want to impersonate CSL.

Facebook has introduced a new feature to selected users in the hope of rolling it out after finished testing it. This is a feature that allows people to subscribe to a particular profile or page on Facebook to be alerted of new status updates, edits to the profile or sharing of photos, videos, links, notes, etc.

I think this is good, though some people may not think so because it amounts to “stalking” but with so many “friends”, I really need some of them to stand out so as not to miss any of their updates. I think, though, that it would be better if we have an option to allow people to subscribe to us or not. And this means that we can view who are the people subscribing to our Facebook profile and/or page.

And if it’s not too much trouble, it would be best if Facebook allows us to opt in and out of being subscribed to so that whoever isn’t comfortable to have every activity being followed by “friends” could stay away from it.

Google has informed all their users that there is a new Google Privacy Policy with effect from 3rd October, 2010. As you know, Google has a multitude of web properties, some which a lot of us haven’t even heard of. One of the changes that Google is making is to streamline these policies that apply to individual website or service. Google informed that these 12 web properties that they own will no longer have their individual website policies but will be governed by the main Google Privacy Policy.

After going through the new policy, I have to admit that I cannot tell which new policy points have been included. To be able to tell, I would have to go through the entire current policy and who would have the time to do that?

However, the only thing that i could tell right now is that yes, Google seemed to really have streamlined the new policy from the current one. At least the new one which will take effect on 3rd October, 2010 seems shorter than the current one that was last modified on 11th March, 2009.

As you know, I have registered a .MY domain about a week ago. Although I have installed WordPress on it, I still have no idea what to do with it. Blog, I already have more than enough. I am thinking of setting up a website but what will it be?

Whatever the site ends up to be, I have started searching for website templates. I hope that looking at the many different templates online would give me an idea of what I eventually do with my domain. It has to be something unique.

Just now, I was informed that Dream Template is running an offer where one-year membership is now only US$59.95, which is a lot of savings from its normal price of US$149. As a webmaster and blogger who tries to set up each site with its own unique identity, I can say that this membership is certainly cheap considering that one quality premium template is usually sold between US$50 to US$70 and that’s considered low end already.

In addition to free downloads of 6000+ templates, members are also given access to nine other sister websites that offer premium templates, icons, graphics and everything that a webmaster needs, using the same login credentials.

Frankly speaking, anyone who is serious with making their online properties stand out should consider registering with Dream Template. There is no harm since they offer risk-free 30-day money back guarantee for people who would like to cancel their subscription for whatever reason. It’s their loss, then, since new designs are published every month.

*** This post has been sponsored.

As mentioned in a previous post, I registered a .MY TLD through a friend who holds a master business account with a web hosting and domain registrar company in the capital city. While I have registered all my domain names myself, this time, I had to go through someone to secure a TLD because registration for .MY domains is only open for businesses, from what I can tell.

So, registering for the domain was pain-free. However, when I wanted to point the DNS to my own nameservers since I already have hosting package with another web host, it took such a long time for this owner to take action. I know that it was a public holiday but isn’t customer service and technical support, especially for web based businesses, provided 24/7? If it isn’t, it should.

I am surprised that my friend, the account holder, do not even have access to the domain and he has to go through the office. Duh… I have set up websites and blogs for more than ten times and each time, my site was live within just hours. This one, I had to wait for more than 1.5 DAYS!

Although this company offers hosting at a cheaper rate than what I am currently paying, and I have considered migrating some of my sites to cut down cost, I have changed my mind because of this incident.