I think I mentioned this once before, but for the last few weeks, I’ve been contributing posts on blog design to BlogHer’s How to Blog Better series. Since some of these posts might be helpful to our clients and readers, I thought I’d toot my horn a little and link them up!

• How to Change Your Banner for Wordpress.com
• How to Change Your Banner for Blogger.com
• The Non-Designers Guide to a Blog Design Theme
• How to Create a Simple Banner Using Photoshop (Video Tutorial)

In the coming weeks, I’m going to cover how to create a seamless background pattern, some “do’s and don’ts” in blog design, Twitter background design, best practices for ad placement in design… and, hopefully, more!  Is there anything you’d like to know how to do or know more about? I’m open to your ideas! Let me know in the comments here or on Twitter.

Speaking of BlogHer... are you going to BlogHer ‘10 in NYC this August?  We are!  Kathy and I both will be there and we’d love to meet you. So look for us [in the lounge] or let us know you’ll be there so we can look for you.  It’s my first trip to New York, so I’m really looking forward to it. Hope to see you!

Just about everyone and their hairdresser’s granny has a Gmail account (Google’s email service). It’s free, it’s web-based so you can access it from anywhere, there are tons of applications that work with it, it (usually) blocks spam like a champ and it holds a boatload of archived email. What’s not to love?  We highly recommend Gmail as an email service and if you can get the name you want, it’s a good companion account for bloggers, if for example, you’d like to keep your “real life” email anonymous.

But what if you want to present a more polished web presence? What if you’re using your website or your blog for business? It usually looks more established to send and receive email using your domain name.  It carries a bit more grativas.  Would you hire a realtor who’s email address was .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) (or @gmail.com or @yahoo.com or any other free service).  You might, but that realtor would probably appear more “pro” by having an email address like .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), don’t you agree?

Sometimes clients will ask us to forward the emails from their website email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) to their free web-based email address. That’s an alright solution, but what happens when you want to respond to that received email?  It will come from your @freeservice.com address instead of @yourdomain.com.  And that breaks the tone that we set by sending to the domain name to begin with.

So, how do you send and receive email using your domain name?

Well, you can always check your email using webmail, accessing your email via your web host’s control panel.  They generally provide one or more options for reviewing your mail.  Again, this is an alright solution, it’s web-based, but… ehhh, the interfaces aren’t that nice and they’re not as robust as using something like a desktop-based email program (or “client”, as they are often called, that lives on your computer as opposed to on the web), say Outlook, Thunderbird or Mail for Macs.  But did you know that you can use your trusty Gmail account to act just like one of the usual desktop-based email client?  You can check your Gmail and send/receive your domain email all in one convenient web-based location. No matter where you are, if there’s an internet connection, you can access your email (especially handy if you’re in a serious relationship with your iPhone or Blackberry).

Follow the steps below to make your Gmail account do more than just receive chain mail and jokes about kittens from your Aunt Edith.

Step One: Get a Gmail account if you don’t have one

You can sign up here. Pick a name that you like or that corresponds to your business or use your own name if you want. Whatever blows your dress up.

Step Two: Make sure your @yourdomain.com email address is set up.

We can’t account for every web host’s mail set-up, so we recommend contacting your host directly if you have any questions about this. But usually, you login to your host’s control panel and find the ‘email’ section. If your email account is not already set up, go ahead and do so and make sure to write down your password, especially if they randomly assign one using a bunch of crazy numbers and characters. You’ll never remember that and you’ll need it later on. If you’re allowed to choose your password, go with something you’ll remember, but be sure to keep it secure.

Step Three: Make sure you have all your host’s mailserver info handy.

This information is usually provided when you initially sign up with your host.  Again, contact your host directly to get this information if you’re unsure. It’s usually something simple like mail.yourdomain.com. You will also need the SMTP information from your host; usually it’s the same as the mailserver information: mail.yourdomain.com, but your host may have something specific that pertains to their servers, so be sure to ask.

Step Four: Set up your @yourdomain.com email within Gmail.

This is where the magic happens. I’ll bullet-point things to keep it straightforward. I could yap all day.

• Log in to Gmail
• Choose “Settings” from the upper right hand corner of the screen.
• Choose the “Accounts and Import” tab in the yellow area of the screen
• Choose the “Add POP3 Email Account” button in the middle of the screen. A pop-up window should open.
• Enter your email address (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) and click “Next Step”.
• In the next window, fill in the appropriate information.  The ‘username’ will most likely already be filled in for you. Many times, the full email address is required here, as well, so if you hit a snag with just the username, enter the full email address. (i.e., instead of “yourname”, you’d put “yourname@yourdomain.com”—with “yourname” being, obviously, whatever the name is that you chose for your email account.)

  

  The “POP Server” field may automatically fill in the logical choice as mentioned above (mail.yourdomain.com), but if yours is something different, enter the correct information in that field. You probably will not need to change the “Port” drop-down unless instructed by your host. You can choose to leave a copy of the emails you retrieve on the server for safekeeping, but Gmail has so much server space, we generally don’t check this option. We also don’t usually check “retrieve mail on a secure connection”, as many hosts don’t support this option by default.  You can choose to label your incoming messages from your particular domain account or any other label you like to help sort and organize your domain email from your regular Gmail.  And, if you so desire, you can immediately archive your mail and skip the inbox entirely, though we don’t recommend this unless you’re a power user and know what you’re doing.  You wouldn’t want to miss something important; you can always archive it with one-click later on.

• Click “Add Account”.
• Congratulations! You can now retrieve your domain name email using Google.  But you probably want to *send* from that account, too, so on the next window, when it prompts you with, “You can now retrieve mail from this account. Would you also like to be able to send mail as .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)?” choose YES, I want to be able to send mail as .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). and click “Next Step”.
• The next window will ask you to name this account. This is the name that people will see when they receive email from you, so be sure to name it something appropriate. Your first name, full name or business name are usually acceptable. If you’re going for anonymity, use your blog name or your screen name. It will ask you if you wish to use a different reply-to address, but this is usually not necessary for basic users. Click “Next Step”.
• This is where it can get a little confusing. You have two options: send through Gmails servers or send through SMTP servers (usually your website host’s mailserver).  The former is only slightly easier to set up, but you’ll still always have “Gmail” in the received email somewhere, so we recommend using the SMTP option.
• The SMTP information (smtp.yourdomain.com) will most likely already be filled in for you. If your hosts provides you with something different (as discussed in Step Three), use that instead. Again, it’s usually the same as mail.yourdomain.com.  Enter your username (same principle applies from above—it’s likely they’ll need your full email address here instead of just the first part) and your email password that you set up in Step Two. Do not check the “Secure Connection” option. Click “Add Account”.
• The next screen alerts you that you’ve been sent a confirmation email to the email account in question, so you’ll need to access the domain name email account using the web host’s control panel or webmail interface just this once.  When you get the email, click the confirmation link or copy the confirmation code and paste it into the field in your pop-up window and click “Verify”.

That’s it!  Ok, so it seems like a lot of steps, but once you see the ‘wizard’, you’ll see it only takes a few minutes assuming you have all the information you need at the ready. 

If you get stuck or you need further trouble shooting, here are some reference links:

• Getting email from other accounts
• Adding a custom ‘From’ address
• Leaving a copy of the retrieved message on the server
• Labels and Filters

We hope this helps!  Happy Gmailing!

At least once a week, someone asks about categories and how they work, what tagging is or why tagging is important and how they differ from categories.  Chapter 10 in The IT Girl’s Guide to Blogging with Moxie covers a lot of this info (and more), if you happen to have a copy handy (or if you feel like getting one *cough*). But, we thought it would be helpful to explain it here, in nutshell layman’s terms using food analogies because… well, we like food.

Categories

First, let’s start with categories.  In terms of blogging, categories are a way for you to organize your blog entries.  If you think of it in terms of a file cabinet, the category would be the drawer you keep that entry in.  You might “file” your blog post in the “Family” drawer, for instance.  Or “Recipes” or “Work Life” or “Ask Jenn!” (if you have an advice column feature) or whatever it is. 

Tips

It’s not recommended to create new categories for each post, to have many similar categories or to make categories longer than 2-3 words as it starts to become cumbersome and the archives become less of a usability tool, more of hindrance. Of course, you’re free to tell us to step and do whatever you like, but we’re just straight shootin’ here, folks.  Lengthy, cheeky category names were all the rage in ‘03, but these days, user efficiency and search engine indexing take precedence. Less is more.

Benefits

It’s direct, familiar, fairly simple organization.  What’s not to love?

Tags

Tags are similar, yet… not.  Kathy puts it really directly in Chapter 10, so I’m just going to rip her off here:

A tag is a simple keyword (or keywords) that’s used to associate or describe the content of something, such as a blog entry, a video or an image.  You are identifying the item with relevant keywords to describe it in simple terms.

I often explain it to people like this: categories are broader, feature-specific headings and tags are more definitive, more topic- and post-specific.  So, for example, if you write a blog entry about a quiche recipe you just tried, you might categorize that entry “Recipes” with a subcategory of “Breakfast” and you might tag that entry “recipes, breakfast, quiche, eggs, brunch”.

Now, let’s say after you post your fabulous quiche recipe, a month later you to go to a restaurant for lunch called Eggs Forever and have quiche.  You might organize that entry by categorizing it “Dining Out” and tagging it “lunch, quiche, Eggs Forever”.  If a user clicks the tag, “quiche”, they will get a cross-reference of posts—both your breakfast recipe and your lunch experience because they’re both tagged ‘quiche’ regardless of what they’re categorized.

Benefits

Aside from the aforementioned cross-referencing, tags come in handy when search engines come a-callin’.  When bots and spiders from search engines like Google and Yahoo are sent to index the content on your website, the tags, as well as the content of your entries, helps them organize and rank your blog depending on what people search for.  So, if someone goes to Google and searches for ‘awesome quiche recipe’ (without the quotes), your entry might rank well because you tagged it “quiche” and “recipe” and said “awesome” twice in your post, along with multiple mentions of the word “quiche”.  If you didn’t tag it “quiche” and “recipe”, Google might still bring it up for someone’s search, but perhaps not in the first page or two.

Tips

It’s encouraged to use tags over and over for more focused organization. For example, if you tag your quiche recipe “quiche” and then post an entry 6 months later and tag it “quiches”, you’re not going to get all the quiche entries when you choose either one.  If you tag them both “quiche”, you’ll get both quiche entries.  The tagging features aren’t smart enough yet to differentiate plurals, for the most part. It will recommend a similar tag to you as you start to type your tag into the field so you don’t end up in that predicament, but ultimately, what you tag is what you get. So make sure to consolidate similar tags into one and/or break apart certain tags for best referencing (i.e., “cocktails” and “cocktail” or “chicken recipe” might be “chicken” and “recipe” instead).

It’s also recommend, as with categories, to use limited words in a tag. You can have spaces in your tags, but that doesn’t mean you should write a novel. Keep it succinct.  Under 5 words is encouraged, 2 to 3 is recommended.  On some community websites it’s considered “cool” or “in” to use the tags to write pithy things or little sentences like “side notes” instead of putting it right in their primary text. (Flickr is an example.)  These are sometimes funny and that’s ok, too. If that’s how that community rolls, that’s cool… it’s just not particularly helpful from a usability standpoint.

We also recommend, and we say this with love, that you don’t go nuts with the tags.  A handful is generally considered reasonable, but under 10 most definitely.  There’s nothing more annoying than reading a lovely blog entry only to have it capped off by a 10-line paragraph of “relevant” tags that don’t really help their search engine ranking despite what the blog owner may think.  At a certain point, Google starts ignoring duplicate keywords.  They’re no fools.

Again, keep it focused.  If your post is about the previously mentioned lunch out at Eggs Forever, you’d want to tag it as I mentioned above, “lunch, quiche, Eggs Forever”, not “review of local restaurant Eggs forever, best quiche I’ve ever had, lunch with Jane”.  Why? Well, unless you plan to have multiple entries with “best quiche I’ve ever had”, it doesn’t really help anyone in terms of site organization.  Such wording could potentially help someone on a search engine looking for “best quiche” but we all know the best quiche is your recipe. Duh!  But, if you hang with Jane a lot, you might want to add “Jane” to the list of tags.

Blogger and Their Platform-Specific “Labels”

Google’s Blogger is a popular choice for bloggers seasoned and new alike. Inherently, their chosen method of organization is not evil, but it can pose some challenges.  With Blogger, in lieu of tags or categories, they choose to use what they call “labels”.  They are treated like tags, for all intents and purposes.  In our professional opinion, all of the rules and guidelines for tags would apply to Blogger’s labels with one exception.

Benefits

Since there is no differentiation between categories and tags, the organization is pretty straightforward. It’s all the same thing, easy peasy.

Caveats

Because everything is all the same thing and people tend to abuse them with too many or too wordy labels (tags), it can get a little out of control.  Everything is lumped in together and therefore, can take more time to sift through.

If you’ve chosen Blogger because it’s free, you’re new to blogging and just wanted to get your feet wet, but intend to move to another blog platform like Wordpress or Movable Type in the future, take heed:  your Blogger labels will import as categories in Wordpress, not tags.  Your labels also import into Movable Type as categories, not tags.  So this could pose a problem if you’ve been a little label maniac.

Tips

Keeping that in mind, you might want to consider labeling your entries more broadly, like a category.  But if you and Blogger are BFFs and you never intend to leave, then we recommend labeling as you would if it were a tag.  But, as we said, don’t go nuts. Ultimately, if you do migrate to another platform like Wordpress or Movable Type and all your labels import as categories, you can always go back and add, remove, delete and otherwise edit the categories of your entries at your discretion. So all is not lost!

You definitely don’t need to choose between categories and tags… some prefer just categories, others just tags, but sometimes it’s best to take advantage of both.  For some blogs, tagging can be more of a frivolous addition, like if you blog about your day-to-day, random thoughts that are just fun and recreational jabber (like mine), but if your blog is information-specific or receives a great deal of traffic, such as a blog about real estate or cooking or if your site is a community atmosphere where many people congregate, tagging can be really useful for your readers.

The choice is yours how you organize your blog, but these are some basics to help you get an understanding of what each term is and what it does along with some tips and recommendations to get you off on the right foot.  If you have questions about this entry, please leave your thoughts in the comments and we’ll do our best to respond as soon as we can. 

And, after all those mentions of “quiche”, if you’re really here looking for a quiche recipe, I’m not the type of girl to leave you hangin’.

Leek and Mushroom Quiche [Quiche aux Poireaux et Champignons]

Adapted from Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking

I tried this using a premade pie crust instead of the pate brisee dough that she used in the original recipe. I don’t have that kinda time… and if you don’t either, it worked just fine, though I’m sure the pate brisee has delicious merits. Here’s the recipe for the quiche innards, borrowed from the inimitable Smitten Kitchen.

• 3 to 4 leeks, white part only, sliced
• 1/2 cup water
• Salt
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 5 to 6 large white mushrooms, sliced
• 1 tablespoon port
• 3 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups whipping cream (Deb: I use whole milk)
• An 8-inch partially-cooked pastry shell on a baking sheet
• 1/4 cup grated Swiss cheese
• 1 tablespoon butter cut into pea-sized dots

1. Preheat oven to 375°F.
2. Boil the leeks over moderately high heat in a heavy-bottomed, covered saucepan with 1/2 cup water, two tablespoons butter and a teaspoon of salt until it the liquid has almost evaporated. Lower heat and stew gently for 20 to 30 minutes until leeks are very tender. Put them aside in a bowl.
3. Add a tablespoon of butter to the pan along with the sliced mushrooms, 1/4 teaspoon of salt and port. Cover pan and cook over moderately low heat for 8 minutes. Uncover. Raise heat and boil for several minutes until liquid is completely evaporated and mushrooms are beginning to saute in their butter. Stir cooked mushrooms into leek mixture.
4. Beat the eggs, cream or milk and seasoning in a large mixing bowl to blend. Gradually stir in the leek and mushroom mixture. Check seasoning. Pour into pastry shell. Spread on the cheese and distribute to the butter over it (Deb note: I’m not sure if it’s because I accidentally took it out a minute or two early, but I found the butter to leave a slight greasiness on top, getting in the way of a cheesy crust, and might skip it next time). Bake in upper third of pre-heated oven for 25 to 30 minutes until puffed and browned.

Enjoy!

Due to a security vulnerability in a 3rd-party Wordpress plugin called Wassup, one of our clients had their site hacked and their RSS feeds inserted with warez links and spam-like info.  We recommend that if you are running the Wassup plugin, you deactivate in the plugin in the Wordpress control panel and find an alternate source of stats tracking.  We like Mint!

How to deactivate & remove your Wassup plugin:

1. Go to your Wordpress Dashboard.
2. Find “Plugins” on the left sidebar and drop the menu open by clicking the arrow on the right that will appear when you hover over it. (It menu may already be visible.)
3. Choose “Installed Plugins”.
4. From the list that loads on the right, find the Wassup plugin and click the “Deactivate” link on the right.
5. If you also have VSTATS plugin installed,we recommend deactivating that as well.
6. Once that’s done, log into your server using FTP (or if you manage your files via server control panel interface, that’s fine, too) and go to /public_html/wp-content/plugins/ and remove the entire /wassup folder, as well as the vstats.php file.

Now, just because you have this plugin, doesn’t mean your computer has been hacked, it just means it’s vulnerable to it.  So deactivating and removing the plugin should resolve the issue.  If you are one of our clients for whom we installed this plugin and for some reason, you feel your site has been hacked or otherwise compromised by Wassup (bear in mind we’ve only received one report), please contact us and we will do our best to assist*.  (More information)

Thank you!

* Please note that Moxie Design Studios™, it’s designers and/or contracted developers are not liable for damages caused by a third party plugin security vulnerability, nor the existence of the vulnerability itself. Plugins and software related to Wordpress are open source, as well as free, and there is an element of risk to any Internet-related endeavor.

We are often asked about hosting — who does it, how it works, how much it costs, who do we recommend, etc.  We work with a handful of trusted hosts who have affordable beefy packages that can comfortably accommodate our typical client project.  We will discuss those more later on, but first we wanted to share a few do’s and don’ts for helping you select a web host, especially if you intend to have us work on your project.

1. DO your research.

   You wouldn’t look up “apartments” on Google and sign a year lease with the first complex or building you came across, would you? Probably not.  Similarly, don’t just look up “web hosts” in Google and pick the first one you stumble upon.  With minimal effort, you can find a web host that offers reasonable rates in a variety of packages and doesn’t make your designer or developer want to throw fruit.

   Alternately, we don’t recommend you buy the web hosting package your domain name registrar hocks because you’re overwhelmed by their marketing. It may not be the best deal or the right kind of server for your project.  For example, if you buy your domain with GoDaddy (who we love as a registrar), you’ll most likely be bombarded with several opportunties to purchase one of their hosting plans or to upgrade to such n’ such or add-on this or that.  Scroll to the bottom and click the blue link that says “continue” or “skip”. Get right to the shopping cart, buy your domain and move forward.

   Ask around, who do your friends use? Who does your designer like? Google them and look for reviews. And, if it turns out that the registrar’s hosting package is the right one for you, you can always choose it later.



DO take note of the website.

Does it instill confidence? Does it look professional? Well-designed?  Does it load quickly? All of the things are factors you should consider. If it loads slowly, chances are your site will, too. Is it professional-looking and designed well?  It doesn’t have to be fancy, but is it easy to find what you’re looking for?  Does it look like it’s made and maintained with care? If so, that’s a sign the company takes care with their business and care about how they are perceived.

If you email them with a question, take note of how long it takes them to respond as it might be an indication of how quickly or slowly your support tickets might be handled. New business is usually top priority so if a representative is slow to respond without good reason, keep looking. Also check office hours: is their support available 24 hours? If not, are they in your time zone or within reason? Check if they offer support or customer service by phone. With a web-based business, we understand the desire to keep the phone to a minimum, but if the sky is falling and there’s a hosting issue we need to address, we do a little jig when we see a phone number listed on the site.

DON’T be tempted by the cheapest price.

Have you ever bought a pair of shoes at Payless?  Like, vinyl knockoffs of the $400 Italian leather ones you really want at Nordstrom? They may look similar, but after one or two jaunts about town you have big red blisters and your feet smell like a cheese shop.  Don’t let your website smell like a cheese shop… well, unless it actually is a cheese shop, in which case you don’t have time to deal with sub par web hosts — you have a cheese shop to run!  Don’t buy cheap knock-offs that give you trouble — wait until Nordie’s has their Half Yearly Sale.  Everybody wins.

In case that whole cheesefoot analogy was a bust, here’s the deal: choose the best host for the best price.  The best bang for your buck, if you will.  You can find web hosts for as low as a $6 or $7/mo that still come with all the bling you could ever want or need for your average web project. And don’t forget to check if the price is yearly or every two years, as some hosts offer even more cut-rates if you purchase two years in advance.

DON’T choose a Windows server.

For the love of the deity of your choice, please… look for the words Linux Operating System or Unix Operating System.  We’re going to hear it from all those Windows server lovers out there, but this is more of our personal preference: Windows servers are a pain in our collective ass, frankly, and we don’t like to work with them. If you ask around, you might hear something similar from a colleague or two… surely we’re not alone. We won’t go into detail about why we don’t like them, other than to say from an administrative standpoint, we feel Linux/Unix servers are more client-friendly.  And again, we won’t throw fruit. Much.

DO check under the hood.

See what they have to offer. Most hosts will have a ‘services’ or ‘packages’ or ‘features’ page that explains what is included in their hosting.  We prefer hosts that offer the control panel called CPanel. It’s probably the most popular interface for server account management out there, so it’s very easy to find a host that uses it.  You may see some hosts that offer a “control panel”, but while CPanel is a control panel, not all control panels are CPanel.  *sigh* If only they were…  We like CPanel a lot because it’s a very straightforward interface that allows clients to manage their own server-side stuff, like email accounts.  It also makes it easy for the designers and developers (that’s us) to manage your databases, export/import and back things up, as well as other administrative stuff like domains and subdomains.

Look for how much storage the host offers, how much bandwidth they offer and how many email accounts you can have. Most hosts offer a ridiculous amount email accounts, but it’s good to check it as some hosts don’t offer email servers at all (which is bizarre, but it’s been know to happen).  Believe it or not, you can find hosts that offer unlimited storage (the amount of space you have to keep your stuff, or as we put it in Blogging with Moxie, the apartment or condo you’re renting) and unlimited bandwidth (the amount of traffic your site can receive), along with a bunch of other stuff that you may or may not use depending on the kind of site you intend to have.  Here’s an at-a-glance list of things we look for in a web host:

• MySQL databases (you’ll need at least one if you intend to run any blog software)
• Linux/Unix Operating System
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Generous storage or unlimited storage
• Email accounts are included (this is pretty standard, but worth checking)
• CPanel control panel interface
• Fantastico or Simple Scripts (these are packages that offer a generous amount of free programs and scripts that may or may not be of use to your project. Not all the offerings in these packages are gems, but a few, like Wordpress for blogging and Open X for ad management, come in handy and make installation a snap)

DO pinch pennies

These are hard economic times, my friends. We totally understand the desire to save a few clams, so once you have narrowed down your selected web hosts based on confidence, quality, customer service, bells & whistles, bandwidth and storage… then compare price.  Among them you should be able to find one that suits your budget.  And once you’ve chosen that web host, Google the name of the webhost with the words “coupon code” and see what comes up. There are often promotional codes or offers available out there for a specific webhost and all you have to do is go look for them!  You could also ask your developer, designer or friends if they have an affiliate account with your chosen web host so they can get a referral bonus or possibly you some kind of discount. But don’t go backwards and pick your host because you have a coupon.  See #3!

As we mentioned, there are a few web hosts that we work with currently and have in the past that we recommend to our clients.

• Fat Cow - They have all the bells and whistles that we like, plus their rates are surprisingly inexpensive. They do not run CPanel, which kind of goes against our preferences, but what they do run is a very similar-style interface and is quite user-friendly.  They offer phone support and live chat as well as a support ticket system and they give you unlimited everything. Yay for that! Caveat: They do have some fine print to their “unlimited” packages so it’s important to read this info. If you have a very large site or community, you might want to go with another host. Bonus: They’re green!
• Hostmonster - We love that everything is unlimited, they have a phone number and have an ever-so-gracious and patient support team. They also run CPanel, if I’m not mistaken.  If you have not purchased your domain name yet, you get a free one with their hosting account. This kind of goes against what I said in #1, but in their case, we will make an exception. They’re not aggressive about their marketing loopholes like some hosts.
• Hosting Matters - They’ve been around forever and also run CPanel. Their support staff is very attentive and we’ve hosted with them for many years. Caveats: no phone support and they don’t generally have unlimited packages, but the packages they do have are very reasonable.  Bonus: If you purchase through our link, Hosting Matters can offer you a special rate for unlimited packages, especially for our clients. Thanks, Hosting Matters!

To give you more choices, we asked our friend and colleague Mel of Emtwo Web Studios who she liked and she offered up these options:

• Surpass Hosting - Sayeth Mel, “I’ve used them since they started.  But I like the fact that they have good customer service - they respond quickly and try to fix the issue as fast as possible.”  That sounds good to us, too. We also noted they’re $4/mo, offer 24 hour email support and have a live concierge chat available.  Nice!
• Insider Hosting - Their hosting is a little more, but they do offer a phone number, which is a perk, though it’s not toll-free.

Both hosts offer MySQL databases and a CPanel interface.

...and now for a few web hosts we DON’T recommend:

• BlueHost - We’ve seen mixed discussions about BlueHost around, but there are often mixed feelings about hosts. There was a time when Blue Host was not in our favor, but in the last year or so, they’d improved their features, so we thought they had improved, but we find their support team to be condescending and less than helpful, the load time on their sites is slow and their uptime is spotty, which their support team insists is *your problem* and not their hosting.  We were fans… but now… not s’much.
• Thinkhost - We had such high hopes for this company. Their green mission is admirable and we love the idea of promoting an eco-responsible business. But the interface looked like something they hammered together in the backyard, the support was spotty and the server load time really did make it feel like it was run by windmills. We’re not alone in this experience. Walk on by.
• ValueWeb / Hostway - According to Kathy, their server can be slow at times and while they claim MySQL databases are included, her client had to upgrade their account in order to access it. Their support is quite slow and Kathy said she “had to sit on the phone for an hour just to get a subdomain added”, which is something you or your designer should be able to do in a snap with CPanel. To top it off, their basic packages start at $13.95, which is not so much a value, in our opinion.
• GoDaddy - While they’re a fine registrar, we’ve had similar problems with server administration. You aren’t able to manage the databases or subdomains on your own account, you have to call support to get anything done. And while my experience with their support staff has always been pleasant and courteous, this is something you really should be able to manage on your own.  We also don’t love their guerrilla marketing tactics, slamming you with page after page of buy-ins and add-ons just so you can buy a $10 domain name. As we said, we like them as a registrar because we’re familiar with their set-up and our clients are familiar with the name, but as a host, they leave something to be desired.
• DreamHost - This company seems to be pretty popular but both Joelle and I have had miserable experiences with using their services.  Their support is “eh” at best, their server’s can get pretty sluggish and we’ve both experienced significant downtime that lends itself to a lot of hair pulling and aggravation.  There’s better hosts out there.  See above.

We hope this info has been helpful and that you’ll feel confident about your choices when you’re ready to purchase web hosting…like you’ve splashed on a little Jean Naté.

Happy Hosting!