I received a newsletter from TM this afternoon where they are running a promotion for cheap webhosting, charging only RM199 per year, instead of the usual RM299 per year.

I think that RM199 is pretty reasonable for a 12Gig webhosting space and unlimited email accounts. My own package right now is RM180 per year already. I wonder if TM has more features than what I have right now. I never bothered to ask, or compare, though.

TM says that they could activate a webhosting account within 24 hours and for subscribers who do not have a domain name registered yet, they could do it also for RM50 per year for a .com or RM80 per year for a .com.my domain name.

Only think I am concerned about, picking a webhost, is if personal technical support is provided. I don’t know much about webhosting and the technicalities that come with it so will occasionally have to S.O.S. my webhost. That’s why I always go with those that my friends recommend.

If you are a user of Google Calendar, you may want to take note of this alert. Apparently, phishing email purportedly from Google regarding re-verification of Google Calendar has resurfaced.

Right now, it’s unknown how many people have gotten caught by such a phishing mail but I understand that the email and “Google Calendar” verification website are pretty believable because the email has the real name of the recipient except that the website is peppered with plenty of grammatical errors. This itself should be a pretty good give away.

Anyway, if you have received such an email asking you to verify your details once again or risk having your account terminated, I suggest that you log in to your Google Calendar straight from your browser and not via links that come in via email. If there are any system administration messages, you should see it when you log in to your account.

I read in a webmaster forum that many members have been complaining about receiving irrelevant Google Alerts for their specified keywords. This became more pronounced over the holiday. Some members claim that these are from spam pages that have no mention of their keywords at all.

Well, I used to subscribe to Google Alerts too until I kept receiving alerts for old pages that do contain these keywords, but these are pages that I have already seen before subscribing to the alerts. When I subscribe, I had the logic that I would only be alerted to NEW web pages mentioning my specified keywords moving forward but unfortunately that did not happen.

It got so bad with the old webpages that were no longer relevant, especially with coupon codes of particular merchants, that I decided that I could do without these alerts. After all, they don’t help but just wastes my time checking those old alerts. LOL

I guess this is just one of the many Google products that is good but flawed even after so many years.

My friend, a problogger in Malaysia, once taught me that the art of gaining traffic from organic searches is to keep blogging about the keyword of the day. Duh, I tell you, I know that but I am certainly not as dedicated as her. Plus, I am not into stuffing my posts with the same daily keywords multiple times in short paragraphs. Bleh.

Anyway, the other day, I was pretty surprised that it seems like the whole web world was searching for pictures of Obama shirtless. I know, I know, he is going to be the President of the United States next month but what’s the big fuss of him shirtless and so what that there are such pictures, or not, of him on the web? I’d rather see photos of Amy Winehouse topless anytime.

As a blogger for about three years now, I am sometimes surprised with the curiosity of web users who at the same time, all want to see or read about the same thing. LOL I know, I sometimes do that as well when curiosity gets the better of me but this time, I don’t have the urge to see Obama shirtless photos at all. Do you?

Finally, I have some good news to share. I have resolved the problem with this domain reseller and have taken control of the domain name. However, I am totally dissatisfied with the way this fella handled this problem, without an apology at all.

Even though the fees were all paid for by my friend, the real domain owner and I am just the custodian, I still feel cheated by this domain reseller for forcing me to renew it through him.

In the end, I had to pay about RM50 more than necessary but that’s not all. I now have to wait a few more months before I can transfer this domain name from my GoDaddy account to my NameCheap account. I want it to be with NameCheap because that’s where all my domain names are and it would be easier for me to keep tabs of them and their expiry.

All in all, it took about a month for this issue to be resolved in between this time frame, the blog was down for about two weeks from the date the domain name expired until it was renewed.

This means that on top of losing RM50, my friend also lost his revenue from the blog. Tell me, would we still want to be their customer or recommend friends to shit service like this?

A couple of days ago, I felt that Streamyx was seriously slow for me. I did not know why I had no problems with some websites while there were some others that would take long minutes to open the page and some would not be able to load at all. I thought that there was a problem with my browser so I cleared my cache and temporary internet files and all the other junk that accumulated through days of being on the web.

There was still no change and it was the same even when I used another system to get online. I thought there was something wrong with my broadband connection but since I could access some websites, I decided not to call the Customer Support line.

I suffered from this slowness for a day or two until a friend told me that there was a fault with the underwater cable network that Streamyx uses. So I went to the website of Streamyx to check, which I nearly could not open as well.

The notice on the website of Streamyx states, and I quote:
“…..circuits fault on Southeast Asia – Middle East – Western Europe 4 (SMW4) submarine cable network between Palermo (Southern Italy) and Alexandria (Northern Egypt) linking Malaysia to Europe.”

Even though this fault looks like it will only affect web traffic to European based websites, because of this, TM has channeled traffic from this through alternate routes, causing congestion even to websites hosted in North America.

Well, TM says that they are striving to rectify this latest by 31st December, 2008. I hope that it would be before then or I would lose all my hair on my head! GGGrrrrrrrrr