Kavoir » Reviews

Invoicera Review – Online Invoice Software & Client Billing Software

Yang Yang — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:11:20 +0000

Let’s be honest here. One of the most dreaded dreams for any working professionals perhaps is generating timely and professional invoices. Important as they are for ensuring timely payments, it is a pain to sacrifice time and make an effort to track down all the details. If you are having a tough time preparing invoices and the accompanying reports, a valued solution that lies with you is Invoicera. Invoicera is a completely web hosted application that effortlessly works towards getting the invoice generation job done, in a professional manner.

A sturdy online invoicing and billing application, Invoicera provides you with a self explanatory user interface along with poignant and much sought after set of features and functionalities. Thus it seamlessly simplify and streamline the entire process of generating and sending invoices.

Language Multiplicity and Multicurrency support

This is a major factor, which gives Invoicera an edge over various other online billing systems in the market. Invoicera supports 11 different languages and more than 100 currencies.

Effortlessly Manage Your Clients

In the client section apart from managing and adding your new clients you can also view their account statements and create custom fields and entries which you deem necessary.

To overview the complete details of any particular client there is an automated Report generator, which gives you the ease of analyzing the dealings and business you have had with the customer.

Incredible Time Tracking

With its expert time tracking capabilities, you can be rest assured to track down every minute of your time that you have spent on the projects for your clients. It completely nullifies all the worries surrounding time tracking and you can easily keep a check on how much time you have spent on a particular project.

Template Customization Service

In case you are not technically trained in customizing the look of the invoice / setimate templates, Invoicera provides you with the option of Invoice Template Customization service. This will provide you with the expert services of seasoned technical experts and you can easily customize the look of the invoice that you send, as per the need of your business.

Schedule Your Invoices Easily & Charge Late Fee from Defaulters

A stand out point of Invoicera is that unlike other similar apps, with Invoicera you can easily schedule each of the invoices needed to be delivered. You can simply schedule the date and time on which you need to send out the invoices to the users and the intuitive online invoicing solution that Invoicera is, it will make sure that invoices are delivered right on scheduled time. Besides, with just a click of the mouse, you can add the late fee charges and get reimbursed for the same.

Other Benefits That Invoicera Offers:

Login and carry out some invoicing tasks wherever you have access to the Internet either via PC or laptop,
Flexible pricing depending on your usage levels,
Constant updates and support,
No large up front application costs,
Data security and backup

In Short

Invoicera is vast enough to confound all the different invoicing requirements of your web site and you assure yourself productive gains by availing its services. Besides, their customer support and related services are impeccable and unmatched. Thus if at any time you stumble, Invoicera provides you with enough options to continue the smooth sailing.

WordPress: Display Ads in Post Content and Only Display Ads in Old Posts

Yang Yang — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 04:57:02 +0000

The title pretty much says it all. It’s 2 of the most useful AdSense ads tips for bloggers in my opinion. Obtrusive ads have the unnecessary effect of driving away readers after they have found what they needed. Unless you have amazingly great content, the chance of them becoming a loyal reader is rather low when you have ads splashing into their faces – this is not something you want to do to your subscribed readers. On the other hand, you’d want to maximize your AdSense earnings by putting up ads on as many posts as possible.

Ad Injection (WP plugin)

This tiny little plugin, Ad Injection, gets it all. Very useful plugin for you to insert AdSense ads in your blog posts AND set a specific age threshold for the posts to display ads, so freshly published articles won’t have ads to drive your subscribers away. See detailed introduction here: Ad Injection for WordPress.

Just install it from the inventory (upload or install from within your WP administrator panel) and activate it. Go to Settings > Ad Injection > “Random ad (inserted randomly between paragraphs)” and insert your AdSense code there. Depending on how aggressive you are, you can use a variety of ad formats from Google. I used a 468×15 links banner on Health Not. Check out the screenshot below:

By default, Ad Injection inserts a maximum of 2 instances of the Random ad per post. This way, the ads are well blended in the content. What works a few years back with the 336 square ad format on top of the content is gradually dying out in CTR thus click revenues. You should try something new such as this.

Another useful option of the plugin is to set “Only show normal ads on pages older than xx (days) – only for single posts and pages”. This would prove very useful if you want a good balance between ad performance / earnings and user experiences. Only displaying ads on older posts are a pretty good idea for creating a good first impression to those who stumble upon your site.

Premium Magento Theme – Avalanche (Review)

Yang Yang — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 03:51:25 +0000

After digging into Magento for a few months and trying to start my own tangible business (I only deal with digital goods as of now), I failed in finding the perfect theme for my store. What I had in mind was a Magento theme much like Thesis for WordPress, the sort of theme that’s simplistic yet powerful, finely crafted and omnipotent (not just for a specific niche). Seemed most of the themes I could find were a bit too frivolous for me, until I found Jake and his Avalanche, premium Magento theme.

Jake was one of a few Magento experts who are true masters of the eCommerce platform. I first discovered Avalanche with awe and thought, that was it – that was exactly what I wanted. With a few improvements it’d be the perfect theme for my store. I contacted Jake immediately with some of my ideas and he got back to me and greatly appreciated my feedback. He adopted and implemented my suggestions the next day. Those were some great ideas such as a mega / exploded menu option for the top navigation. It used to be 3 options, now there are 4 – it’s all yours to choose from in the Avalanche configuration panel.

I bought the Developer License for $399 that night. It was a remarkable experience. We exchanged quite some emails about how to make the theme better. Not every vendor takes customer suggestions so seriously, let alone a customer-yet-to-be; and it’s not every day you find a developer who so vigorously and wholeheartedly keeps refining his product.

The installation was a breeze. Had some minor problems as I was not quite experienced with Magento yet and emailed Jake for help and he got back to me within 1 hour. Every time. That’s the kind of support lacking in the official Magento Go team.

The Avalanche theme has lots of backend options that you can tweak to customize the look and general texts of your store. Cloud Zoom in place. Breadcrumbs are enhanced. Colors, typography, banners, featured products, AJAX quick views, cutting edge CSS3 features and many more.

As of now, I’m very much impressed in all regards, though I’d say it’s more of a theme for digital niches such as technology and electric products. The black and white theme may not suit every customer base (may not yield the best conversion rates in some niches). You need to tweak them a bit, unless Jake can come up with an overall color themes switcher in future updates. For now, we are stuck with color switchers just for borders, links, and action buttons – they are actually pretty nice with gradients, you should try it!

There could be more improvements and I’m sure Jake’s already started working on the next version. By far, I think he’s making the best premium Magento themes.

My 4.9/5 for Avalanche Magento theme.

Shopify Review

Yang Yang — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 06:51:27 +0000

When I was trying to find an eCommerce solution for my wedding dresses store, I tried Shopify for 30 days and then been a paid customer for 10 days before I canceled my plan (NOT in a negative manner). Have something to say about them so I come up with this brief review, which, hopefully can be helpful to those who are in search of a fine way to build online stores.

What I like about Shopify

Beautiful. Anyone who has used Shopify would agree that it’s the a beautiful and graceful eCommerce solution. People behind it are working their heart out. The free themes available for you to choose from for your store are eye-candies, simplistic and highly brandable. They SHOULD make more of them, though. Currently there are only about 10 free themes. If you want more, you’d have to pay. Commercial themes at their theme store cost about $100 – $300.
Proactive and personal support. I got emails offering to help from their support team every once a few days ever since my trial sign-up. Friendly, helpful and very personal. Of all the companies that I dealt with, Shopify is the only one that proactively asked me if I needed any help, REGULARLY. WiredTree comes second by asking for my feedback every 3 months. Magento Go comes last by offering unparalleled ridiculous support.
Very easy to use. It only took me a few minutes to set up the whole store with an attractive look and add the first product. The control panel was intuitive and texts (tab names, section titles, field names, etc.) were straightforward. I didn’t have to think to do something. It’s simply there when you need it.
Unlimited bandwidth. I specifically asked about this offer in one of the emails I exchanged with Chris, my client representative at Shopify, and he assured me that this was as TRUE as it’s promised. I never had the chance to have an online store that got hit by 100,000 unique IPs per day so I don’t know. But I sure like it. Who wouldn’t.
Premium yet affordable. While it may seem that a month-to-month SaaS eCommerce solution would cost more than buying a permanent license that could be hosted on your own server, it may not seem so when you scale up. When you hit the mark of 20,000 unique IPs per day and got over 20,000 products in your store, Shopify’s offer of $179 / month for unlimited bandwidth, storage and SKUs is simply irresistible. With licensed shopping cart software that’s hosted on your own server, you would worry about security and upgrade (it can be painful, believe me) which take time and money. However with Shopify, you don’t have to worry about them at all because underneath details are all taken care of. You get a store that’s silently self-evolving without your custody.
They refund. This is the single most valuable thing in any business. I was charged for the first month before I realized that I would be charged after the end of the trial period (30 days). After corresponding with my support staff Chris, I was able to get my money back without a hassle.

What I don’t like about Shopify

First off, they didn’t make it clear that I would be automatically signed up with paid membership and be charged for a month after my trial period ends. After talking with Chris, it seemed that the terms were in there, in fine print, and I needed to click to open the complete, tedious terms and conditions to find it. Well, I believe it would definitely be much more customer-friendly to get the text in the sign-up page in large print, like what Microsoft did with Office 365 so I know I have to cancel my trial contract to stop them from billing me when it ends.
Shopify doesn’t have effective product filtering. Or they probably have it but it takes quite some work to have it up for my store. For instance, the left side “Narrow Your Choices” product filtering at Zappos Women’s Clothing. I asked Chris about this and he said they had it and could give me an example store that had it. He never did.
Custom made products that are made to order are not well supported by Shopify. For example, a store that sells custom tailored wedding dresses where customers can freely select any of all the possible combinations of options: “Color”, “Size” and “Belt Color”. With 15 possible colors, 15 sizes and 15 belt colors, there would be a total of 15 x 15 x 15 = 3375 distinct combinations of product options (“Color”, “Size”, “Belt Color”) for each wedding dress. The problem with Shopify is, they treat every product as in the inventory rather than custom made, therefore I have to add all 3375 distinct combinations of product options one by one for each of the products. It’s simply an unrealistic job.

All after all, Shopify is among the top 3 most usable and beautiful online store solutions out there after I tried many of them. I would definitely recommend it to people I know and would very probably use it for some of my future ecommerce projects.

4.5/5.

Magento Go Review – Sucking Support & $99 Ripoff for SSL Setup

Yang Yang — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 07:40:54 +0000

I officially signed up with Magento Go‘s Going Places plan for $25 / month and paid $99 for my SSL to be installed. It’s been 3 days and I wish I had better things to say about them.

And this is my review.

Uptime: 4.7 / 5

It’s too early to tell because I’m only with them for 10 days (in trial for 7 days). Sometimes it’s a bit slow. Magento is known to be resource-intensive. But as of now, Magento Go has been constantly up and responsive for me.

Price: 2.5 / 5

I would have given them 5 / 5 if I don’t have to pay $99 for my SSL to be installed – yes, that’s JUST for the installation service, not the SSL. You have to provide your own SSL certificate purchased from a CA to them. And this didn’t turn out to be very pleasant. I’ll come to that later.

The $1 million stimulus package that they promised to discount the monthly subscription fee by $15 for a year hasn’t been activated for me – and I contacted them about this twice – got NO responses of any kind. Waited nearly 24 hours and still no emails. So I logged back in to see the tickets. You know what I found? The tickets are all DELETED, like it’s never happened before.

What kind of support does that?

So the $1 million stimulus program is pretty much false advertising. Chances are, you won’t get it. Or you will. We are totally at their mercy.

Features: 4.1 / 5

~~If you are ever building an online store, once in your life time, you should use Magento Go. It simply makes sense.~~

After trying a few more online store builders, I think I’ll unsay the above saying.

Everything seems good, if not great. There are some parts that can be improved, such as the theming system, backup system, etc.

Their top plan for $125 / month offers a tingling of just 32GB monthly bandwidth. Anyone with decent SEO skills would easily hit that mark in half a year, especially if you’ve got lots of large images for the products. And extra bandwidth are charged $10 / GB. Pretty expensive. AND they don’t even have a bandwidth meter where you can see how much you’ve gone so far. So good luck…My tip is to use external website for hosting the product images.

Otherwise, Magento Go is simply NOT an . Be prepared to pay premium when you are locked in with them.

Support: 0.8 / 5

Appalling. If you are ready to pay $xxx per month for the top plan, you would probably be treated much better. But that’s just a theory.

I opened a total of 9 tickets, they DELETED 3 of them and responded to 3 of them.

They sent a very important message to *my* email. I didn’t receive it. Because that’s NOT my email, not even close. How hilarious is that!

Ticketing system is very hard to use. You would view the message and then click “Back” to return to the previous page to reply to it – if you have to quote something, you click “Forward” to view the message sent to you and then click “Back” again to continue writing. Very user-UNFRIENDLY ticketing system.

I posted a “Problem” message to the collaboration site (a collaboration support community to help dilute the workload of the REAL support team) about how my SSL hasn’t been installed after paying $99 and why my tickets got DELETED in the ticketing system. You know what they did? They changed the “Problem” status to “Question“. You know, it doesn’t look pretty in red.

Quick Facts about Go’s Support

People love interesting facts. Here are them.

A total of 3 tickets that got NO responses and simply got DELETED:
1) A request for installing my SSL attached with my certificate files from GeoTrust
2) A request to be enrolled in the $1 million stimulus package they promised – $15 monthly discount for next 12 billing cycles
3) A question why my store home page doesn’t display the newest products after I added them in the backend – tried 2 different approaches but none of them worked.
After I complained about the SSL installation, they claimed to have sent an email to me at yanghit (@@@@@) gmail dot com. Apparently I didn’t receive it. Because that’s NOT my email, nor anything close.
For me, their support turnaround is about 12 hours, sometimes as long as 3 days, IF they respond at all. (I just recalculated the actual turnaround based on tickets’ and questions’ time stamps)

12 Hours Support Turnaround

Any support turnaround that’s 12 hours or longer is just unacceptable for mission critical sites such as eCommerce stores. Ordinary content sites have an eCPM of about $5 – $50 per thousand visits, however, online stores generally averages $200 – $2000 per thousand visits. Every hour of problem or down time causes substantial loss; the greater the traffic & conversion rate, the greater the damage.

People who choose Go are generally not technically oriented and would require a lot of help along the way. It would be a very painful experience for them should something get haywire yet they can’t get anything done in 12 hours.

Magento Go has got to seriously work on that.

Busted?

They got a final score of 60.5 / 100. Merely passed.

I will keep you updated on my experience with Magento Go. Even though their support isn’t the best in the world, I’d still recommend them to you. Hopefully they can see this review and give their support department a revamp.

I would love to see Magento Go becomes the go-to brand for online eCommerce solution. However, as of now, you would be better off with CE and do your own hosting, if you’ve got some technical nerves. In this case, I would like to recommend the Avalanche Magento theme.

What other folks are saying…

Seems I’m not alone on the bad experiences with Magento Go:

Update: I submitted a ticket and a *problem* at the collaboration site asking for a refund of the $99 SSL setup fee and they finally got back to me, addressing a question I asked 23 hours ago. After a few more tickets (each taking 2 – 3 hours for them to respond), my SSL is finally up and working.

Review: Why I love WiredTree hosting

Yang Yang — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 02:49:51 +0000

This is the second time I wrote a review of WiredTree and also the second time to have signed up a VPS account with them. The last time it was a 512MB VPS (VPS512) that has now been upgraded to VPS1000, doubling everything, RAM, disk storage and monthly bandwidth (tripled!), yet the price tag stays the same. Here are a few coupons that you can use to get 50% off the first 2 months should you want to sign up. The old coupons you may find elsewhere for VPS512 AND VPS 768 have been invalidated.

Okay, to the review part. After about 2 months I feel I should start using the VPS – I admit it’s a impulsive buy, just can’t resist the monster upgrade and 50% off offer – and the primary domain I provided when I signed up with it was somehow randomly picked, and now I want it changed into something else. So I sent the support team an email.

Note it’s about 2:30 A.M. CST. One of them, John, quickly responded to my help request, in less than 10 minutes, did the change and taught me how to debug DNS myself with a free tool intodns.com which by the way is a very cool tool.

The tool showed that I still needed to set the name servers for my domain at the registrar. I didn’t know how to do that so John asked me which registrar I was using, searched for the documents for me and then sent me the exact steps I needed to follow to accomplish the task.

Blah blah blah.

Things kept going wrong because I had no idea what I was doing with the DNS. I wanted to use my own name servers. It was after about 20 emails that I finally got everything in place and the domain started working. They responded to EVERY message in less than 5 minutes. And it’s about 4:00 A.M. CST.

End of story? Not.

I suddenly changed my mind that I wanted to completely re-provision the slice, using the new domain / host name in the first place, because, you know, I have obsessive disorders that knowing the old domain is still somewhere in the box makes me uneasy. I could still find the old domain listed via traceroute and reverse-IP lookup.

So I’m compelled to send another support ticket. John kindly asked me why I needed to do that and I told him I just wanted to, because I feel compelled. He then suggested me that I back up everything I can and let him know when I was ready.

After about 5 hours, the rebuild was done. I had a brand new slice that was as new as just born. Not sure how much time they spent in the 5 hours just for easing my compulsive mentality, I am sure grateful for their dedicated support.

5/5.

Find more reviews of them here: http://www.wiredtreereviews.org/

SEOmoz Pro Review – Bad Bad Bad

Yang Yang — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 02:29:19 +0000

So I’ve tried the Pro version of SEOmoz, an online SEO software application, for a few days and I think I’ve got to write a review. This would turn out to be very ugly.

Many years ago the features that this system brings to the table could have been useful for the SEO novice, but today almost everything that it does, other systems do better. In addition, most of the tools you need to duplicate this product are either free, or very inexpensive.

One of its primary features is that it crawls your website weekly, and lets you know if you have any broken links or other issues with your site. If you have a Google account, you can simply register your URL with them, and use their free webmaster tools to do the same thing, and it does not cost you $99 a month like this product does. Here’s the link for Google Webmasters Tools http://www.google.com/webmasters/.

The next claim to fame that this item promotes is on-page optimization. This is a very simple concept to understand and implement. There are many articles on the internet that you can read for free that will tell you exactly how to do this. And it’s quite easy.

Essentially, it just comes down to using your primary keywords in the title and a description of that post. There are a few other things you will need to do besides what was mentioned above, but not too many. Lots of WordPress plugins have been created to help you in this regard. Simply search for ‘wordpress SEO plugins’. Some of them are totally free while some of them may charge a humble one-time fee which is exponentially lower than $99 / month. And they do the job very well.

Thirdly, it keeps an eye on your competition for you. Great, like you could not just use Google, Yahoo, or Bing to accomplish the same thing. It will also tell you all of your competitor’s backlinks for only $99 a month. If you would like to find out that very same information, there are tons of free ways to do that. Just google.

The final item they would like to impress you with is that the software will continue to improve and evolve over time. Well, for $99 a month it better, because it is pretty close to being useless right now.

The only thing I appreciate is their blog. It’s the best SEO information outlet I’ve seen. No one ever comes close. You would learn a hell lot more about SEO from there in an hour than from any other sources combined in a whole year.

For this review of SEOmoz Pro, the paid SEO productivity application, we give it a big fat zero stars, with 5 stars being the best. What else can we say about this thing, it is pretty much as bad as it gets. There is nothing that it does now, that cannot be accomplished for free with another application, or by researching a few articles on the internet. But if you don’t mind spending a *premium* price for a premium *looking* application, by all means, go ahead and sign up with it.

Microsoft Office 365 Review & Screenshots – What will you get?

Yang Yang — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:18:24 +0000

Office 365 is a set of team collaboration / productivity web applications for professionals, businesses, government agencies and education institutions. It currently offers 3 different plans:

For professionals and small businesses, $6 / user / month, basic features
For midsize businesses and enterprises, $12 and more / user / month, advanced features
For education

And I signed up with the first one which is meant for individual professionals, or businesses / organizations with up to 25 employees, at $6 / user / month. For now, I have yet to reach the end of my first month, and I have only one user in my organization which is myself. So this review would be pretty straightforward and very limited to those who are looking at the multi-user features in team collaboration / communication.

You will need a credit card to sign up. To verify the credit card, They billed me $1 when I signed up and that’s it. So I guess they bill clients at the end of every month instead of at the beginning.

What I get for $6 / month?

For $6 / month at Microsoft Office 365, I get these cool stuff:

Online web applications of Microsoft Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. You can create documents, edit and save them in your favorite web browser, and publish them to your team site so you and your colleagues can collaborate on them. You can also upload existing documents from your computer to Office 365.

Shared documents:

Word web app:

Excel web app:
Instant communication tool Lync 2010 enables you and your team members to send instant messages, easily set up online meetings and perform PC-to-PC audio / video calls.
SharePoint Online. A public company website at http://yourcompany.sharepoint.com/ that you can edit from SharePoint. The default theme looks like this:

You can re-create your public website by 3 editing panels, namely Home, Insert and Design:

From the content navigation sidebar on the left, you can add new content and remove existing content to the Recycle Bin: pages, documents, images, etc.
And as always, you can also add your own top-level domain to SharePoint, from the Admin panel, rather than using a subdomain of sharepoint.com.
Other than a public website, a private Team Site is pre-configured and ready to be edited when you (as the administrator) first sign in. This site is used as a portal for all team members where you can list contacts, shared documents, calendar entries / meeting schedules, announcements, discussion posts, and so forth. Much like editing the public website, you can freely edit the Team Site as if it’s a web page: lists, tables, images, links, etc.
Exchange Online. Emails hosting under the domain @yourcompany.onmicrosoft.com. Likewise, you can add your own domain for the emails thus having @yourcompany.com hosted at Office 365. Everything looks like the desktop applications. You would be using a very similar online version of Outlook (web app) and it’s very intuitive. The learning curve is minimal.

A calendar (Week view): (also are Day view, Work Week view and Month view)

User self management:

Organization management:
Full administration panel and organization management features:

Some quick facts about Office 365

It bills you at the end of each billing term. For instance, if you started the plan on Jan. 15th, it would first bill you $1 to verify credit card and then $6 / month each month on Feb. 15th and on.
If you cancel the subscription, your subscription will remain active until the end of the billing term.
You get 99.9% uptime guarantee.
You can add multiple domains to your service. The default one is yourcompany.onmicrosoft.com for email and yourcompany.sharepoint.com for team site / public site.
You can use different plans / multiple subscriptions under one administrator account.

Official tours

For administrators: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/videos/office-365-for-professionals-and-small-businesses-a-tour-for-administrators-HA102653442.aspx?redir=0

For users: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/videos/office-365-a-tour-for-users-HA102657904.aspx?redir=0

Prova.fm, the Design Contests Platform – From Outsource to Crowdsource

Yang Yang — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 03:09:19 +0000

When you need something done, design contests are a much better way to get the quality and diversity you need than traditional design outsourcing because you get multiple submissions from various designers who are after the bounty prize. It may be a little more expensive than when you hire just one designer, but the quality and diversity you get will definitely justify it. Not to mention the time you will save for communications with the one designer as well as later revisions.

Prova.fm is just such a contest platform that enables you to get what you need without spending an arm and a leg. You can get all the talents working for you on a single project by launching a contest. Be it print, web, audio or video, you can get all the input in just a few days and then decide which one you’d like to accept as the winner so that the designer can claim the prize you are paying. It’s perfect for a logo or advertisement banner design.

My WiredTree Review and Some Discount Coupon Codes

Yang Yang — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 02:34:35 +0000

Update: Here’s my most recent review of WiredTree.

I had an enjoyable experience with WiredTree (Some Coupons) half a year back when I was starting a joint venture with one of my friends and needed managed VPS hosting. Joe Doss was very helpful in answering my concerns and questions before sign-up. After testing out their demo download and ensured of a good data center and smooth Internet connections, I decided to go with them.

I went with the $99 managed hybrid plan. I was then pretty new to VPS hosting / dedicated hosting where you are in control of much more stuff than when you are with shared hosting. Though they are all very well managed at WiredTree (click to activate coupon), it’s still a bit overwhelming with all the options and different control panel sections. I asked questions. A lot of them. And they responded to my support tickets within 15 minutes EVERY time, no matter when you submit them. I dealt with not just one of their support staff but quite a few of them and they are all quick, polite and to the point. When I search through my Gmail inbox, there are a total of 60 conversations (hundreds of messages back and forth) I had with them in a short matter of less than one month. They were professional and kind in every message they addressed to me.

The hosting part of my joint venture was absolutely awesome. If it weren’t the decision to abort the project with my friend, I’d trust the most important of my sites to WiredTree. So when I told them that I had to close the contract and leave them after just one month, I was kind of upset for them because they have been so nice to me. They replied to my request to close my hosting account with complete understanding and even offered me refund for the remaining days of the month (it wasn’t a full month, just 20 days or so), I asked them to keep it.

As for uptime and server performance, I didn’t set up any 3rd party monitoring or pinging service but as I was working furiously on the project in the 20 days, accessing my websites at WiredTree thousands of times and hundreds of hours, I have not seen the slightest of indications of slowness or down time.

4.8 / 5 from me.

WiredTree Coupons

You can get very nice discounts by using one of these coupons of WiredTree when you host with them, such as extra 50% RAM, extra 50% bandwidth or lifetime 20% off. Just enter the code in the Coupon Code text box and hit Update Total button on the order page. All coupon codes listed there are confirmed to be working as of today, except V768-333333 that may be unreliable.

Thesis Theme Review – Don’t just create good products but irresistable ones.

Yang Yang — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 02:10:37 +0000

Merely good product is far from enough. To rake in profits in the magnitude vast majority of us can only dream of, you need an irresistible product – just like Thesis Theme. Think of something you’ve purchased that’s been insanely useful, beautiful and user friendly and then double it.

iPhone has proved it all. It converts massive numbers of mobile users and introduces a grand new era of mobile computing. The best part is that it easily compels all the users who now desire more to put everything Apple releases in future on their must-buy list. I can’t think of anything else in the IT world in the past decades that has come up even close. The products have not been released nor announced yet. However, that’s the kind of appeal irresistible products create.

Free 2GB HTML static web pages hosting

Yang Yang — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:56:22 +0000

For every free Dropbox plan, it comes with 2GB online backup storage that has a public folder in which you can publish HTML web page files that are publicly accessible around the Web. It will give you a URL that you can hand out to your friends so they can view the page on the Web anywhere anytime.

Basically, a free static HTML web hosting space (with potentially unlimited transfer).

Simply download the software and sign up with them, put the HTML file in the “Public” folder of your specified Dropbox directory. After a few seconds’ synchronization when there finally turns up a small green tick at the bottom left corner the file icon (which means the synchronization is successfully completed), right click on the file, point to “Dropbox” for the submenu and select “Copy Public Link”. Now you have the public URL address of the page.

Paste it into the address bar of your favorite browser, bravo! Now you have your own HTML web pages freely hosted on the Web! Check out what I’ve published on Dropbox!

The brilliant part is the ease of the hosting. Just create more web documents such as audio files, images and HTML pages, put them in the “Public” folder and you will have them online in no time because Dropbox automatically synchronizes everything you put in the folder. Want to modify the existing files, fine, just do it, save the changes and Dropbox would also automatically synchronize the update to the remote server.

Dropbox is not just a public host though, it’s easy to use and rocks as a photo gallery, online backup storage, file sharing and synchronizing machine.

Hawkhost review

Yang Yang — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:51:03 +0000

It’s the first time I move kavoir.com to another host from Dreamhost (the last move to Linode was about some of my other sites). The entire move was great except that I was not quite familiar with cPanel and choked a little bit on the transfer and setup of all the interconnected files and database that had been spawned for the last 2 years.

The fact that Hawk host is using Litespeed instead of Apache caused some minor incompatibility issues – at least so it seemed – about which I contacted the support team. They got back to me after approximately an hour, friendly and helpful. The results are positive and problem successfully solved.

Though you will not find parallel documentations with Litespeed against Apache, they are generally interchangeable and Litespeed can handle about double or even triple the traffic of Apache with the same server resources (their official comparison). I think that’s one of the top reasons why Hawk host has been able to offer such a budget hosting without compromising the performance and reliability.

After confirming the domain was resolving to the new IP of Hawkhost, the next thing I did was to examine the loading speed of Kavoir. Results are shown below by Internet Supervision:

The speed test stats were quite impressive, averaging at about 450 Kbps, the highest of all the stats I got from Dreamhost, Linode and Pair.com (though very incomplete to compare and give final judgment of the overall serving speed of these hosting providers).

All the reviews I found about Hawkhost on the web and WHT have been rather positive and purchase-encouraging. Search and read, so you know if you want to try them out with a few of your low traffic websites.

I’ll keep you updated for the months coming.

Dropbox review – the most intuitive online backup storage, data synchronizing and files sharing software

Yang Yang — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:09:20 +0000

I’ve tried quite a few online backup services to back up my valuable website data – you just can’t imagine what a nightmare it would be to lose all the files that you’ve been working on for the last half year – I even created my own backup programs that automatically syncs and stores designated files across multiple hosts, however, Dropbox has been the most intuitive application so far.

It’s revealed by Dropbox that backup shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

They’ve got a very slick clean style, both the application as well as the website are so designed that anybody can figure the whole thing out at a glance of 5 seconds. And that’s it. Everything you need to ever know is merely a folder named “My Dropbox”. Thus it goes incredibly breezy on first time users, doing the job perfectly and silently even when you have forgotten it.

Install and forget.

Working from the desktop of Windows, Linux and Mac, Dropbox is not just an online data storage provider, it’s also at its best as a data backup system, files sharing wizard, automatic synchronizer, way-back time machine and free file host.

Offsite remote data storage: this goes without saying. All files and data you put into the “My Dropbox” folder is automatically and quietly transferred to and stored at the their central server securely.
Backup system: intuitively, after you have hit the save button, the document has been backed up on Dropbox servers. Otherwise, just drag and drop anything you’d like backed up on the remote server so a local hard drive crash won’t make you go nuts.
Files sharing wizard: all the files and media (music, videos, photos etc.) can be instantly accessible and downloaded from the central servers across all the computers and mobile devices such as iphone that have Dropbox software installed.
Automatic synchronizer: editing a document, saving it in the “My Dropbox” folder of your office PC and you can continue working on it after opening it from the same folder of your home Mac. The next day, you just open the same file in your office PC and it’s exactly the same file! Basically, any changes you made to those files are instantly synced to the server, thus across all computers of the sync software installed.
Way-back time machine: Dropbox keeps historical versions of your files for 30 days by default, so that you can undo any changes or deletions you regret.
Free file hosting: simply put any file into the “Public” folder and you will be given a public web address (URL) to hand out to your friends and everyone else so that they can view and download it.

Try them for free for 14 days and be ready to be impressed.

RackSpace Cloud Hosting Launched!

Yang Yang — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:22:06 +0000

Dating back 1 or 2 years ago when RackSpace acquired Mosso, it has long been preparing to start its own cloud hosting business. Now here it is, Rackspace has officially launched the RackSpace Cloud from Mosso:

http://www.rackspacecloud.com

All hosting service packages remain fundamentally the same with those of Mosso: Cloud Sites, Cloud Servers and Cloud Files. While the old company Mosso’s domain mosso.com goes under, all existing traffic is being redirected to the new RackSpace domain rackspacecloud.com.

I’m currently hosted on their Cloud Servers plan, a great deal considering the fact that you really don’t need much support at all because of their remarkable network and underselling hardware. You can feel the responsiveness and robustness when you are developing and debugging on their servers.

However on the other hand, I don’t have any experience with Cloud Sites, one of the best high end cloud hosting you can find anywhere, I guess. The ultimate benefit is the ease to scale, use whatever you need at any time without having the hassle to move things around and interrupting website performance.

Well, here’s a coupon promo code of RackSpace cloud: (Reveal Code) should it interests you to give cloud sites a try. They have a 30-day unconditional money back policy and with the coupon you can still cancel anytime in the first 30 days to get a full refund. So absolutely nothing to worry about.

If you do go with them, feel free to leave a review of Rackspace cloud and let more people know how they come out.

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