Using a good web hosting provider ensures that your website is running smoothly and do not face any down times or server side problems.

But before you choose a hosting provider, you must research and compare all the companies out there. The following points should be closely compared while choosing a web hosting company:

• Is the hosting company a reputed one ?
• What other users are saying about the company ?
• What are the different plans available ?
• How is the tech support of the company?
• Which sites are using the same hosting company for their websites?
• What are the user reviews, goodwill and customer feedback of the hosting company?

To accumulate all the data about the different hosting providers is really a tough task. You have to search Google, go to the forums and interact with different people to know the inside details of the hosting company.

One site which makes the research much more easier is WebHostingRating.com. WebHostingRating is one of the world’s largest independent web hosting directory which contains detailed information of all the major hosting providers at one place. You can read the user reviews and customer feedback of all the popular and trusted hosting companies from a single website and don’t have to look here and there and collect information.

The site also has some useful hosting guides which will help you choose the perfect web hosting company according to your needs.

Let’s see the various sections of the website in full detail.

Compare the Plans of Different Hosting Providers

On the home page of WebHostingRating.com, you will see a brief comparison of 10 major hosting providers, as shown below:

The above table compares different aspects such as the basic pricing plans, space and traffic. There is a user rating column which lists a link to reviews page written by real users who are using the same hosting provider for their website(s).

The comparison is very handy and you can compare different companies at a glance. If you want to compare the plans of two or more companies, simply select the corresponding check boxes under the compare section and and hit the “Compare plans” button placed at the bottom of the table.

The result will be something like the following:

No doubt this is useful, because you can compare all the aspects of two hosting companies side by side. It would be a lot more easier on part of customers to first compare the plans, features and then choose the company that suits best.

Know the Complete Details of a Specific Hosting Provider

If you are interested in a specific hosting company and want to know the complete details, simply perform a search at the search box. WebHostingRating.com contains the details of all the major hosting providers, so you will surely find the company you are looking for.

On the company page you will find lots of details about the features the hosting company provides. This includes server information, domain features, email features, site management, scripting, security, ecommerce, site building tools and site statistics.

The page will also list the different pricing plans and user reviews about the company. This is extremely useful because you can read the reviews and know what other customers are saying about the company. After reading the feedback, it would be lot easier to decide why you should choose this company as the hosting provider of your website.

Search Using the Catalog

Another useful feature is the “Search Host Catalog” section placed at the sidebar of WebHostingRating.com. It’s an advanced search which lets you pick certain attributes and then search the website for companies that matches with your chosen attribute. There are two attributes – price range and the location of the hosting provider.

For example: If you want a hosting company from North America and in the price range of 5-10$ a month, you can simply define the attributes in the “Search Host Catalog” section and search for the hosting company which satisfies those conditions.

Hosting Guides

The Hosting Guides section of WebHostingRating.com consists of useful tutorials and articles about Web hosting. If you are facing any problem regarding the technical aspects of your website, these guides will be useful.

In addition to the tutorials, the hosting guides section also consists of articles about the current trends in the web hosting industry. Following these guides and articles, you will find the answer to commonly asked questions and problems.

Video Tutorials

The Video tutorials section is one of the very informative sections of WebHostingRating.com. Sometimes you may have to spend a lot of time fixing bugs, you may mess your website’s settings or get into other problems.There are a lot of tutorials on the web but you have to read long pages of content which might not be the easiest way to find a solution you are looking for.

To make it straightforward for you, WebHostingRating presents a full list of Video Tutorials. There are a lot of categories – from CMS to C panel from FTP to Gallery, from WordPress to Plesk – everything’s under their grip.

All the tutorials are listed in the left sidebar, pick a category and view interactive video tutorials for free.

Submit Your Hosting Company to WebHostingRating.com

If you have a hosting company and want to get listed in the WebHostingRating.com directory, go to the submit page and enter all the details and whereabouts about your company. The team of WebHostingRating.com will review your service and add it to their directory.

It’s a great way to gain exposure and targeted customers because WebHostingRating is the place where lots of clients are coming everyday.

All in all, WebHostingRating.com is a useful source of information for anyone who is interested in web hosting. If you have a website and want to change your hosting provider, make sure you read the reviews about the hosting company at WebHostingRating.com and then come to a decision.

WebHostingRating is one of the world’s largest independent web hosting directory which contains detailed information of all the major hosting providers at one place. You can read the user reviews and customer feedback of all the popular and trusted hosting companies from a single website and don’t have to look here and there and collect information.

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One of the best online data backup options available is IDrive.  It is an online service that offers different paid packages for online data backup. Additionally they have a free evaluation package which provides up to 2 GB of online storage. While on the free package, if you refer five people and they start using IDrive too, your 2 GB storage capacity is upgraded to 10 GB.

First you create an evaluation package by accessing the site’s “Features” page. Then you open the “Download” page and get the IDrive software sized at nearly 9 MB. 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows are supported. The Download page includes other support details as well. Optionally you can download the IDrive plugin for Internet Explorer.

After installing the program and logging into it, this is what the program’s main window will look like:

You can choose which folders get backed up to your IDrive account by checking and un-checking the folders in the central pane.

The buttons in the bottom right of the program let you backup your data, schedule a future backup, and enable a timely backup process.

Other tools (available on the top) let you test your bandwidth and restore timeline.

When your items have been backed up to IDrive account, you can use any computer to log in to the IDrive website and access your backed up files.

As you can see, the functioning of the site is quite simple and will appeal to inexperienced and professional users alike. You can visit the IDrive website @ www.idrive.com

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It is the latest trend in the web hosting industry that involves the use of eco-friendly methods to avoid losing valuable resources and to protect the environment from further destruction.

Why it is Necessary to Go Green

The effects of global warming are already upon us, and the impact is overwhelming because most people have not been very conscious about the environment. If we do not take the necessary steps now in order to protect and save whatever is left on the planet, we and the future generations will have to deal with the devastating effects that climate change could bring.

So what makes web hosting “green”? Unlike typical web hosting, green web hosting takes steps that help web hosting companies in reducing the negative impact to the environment. They can use energy-efficient servers, plant a tree on behalf of a client or for every hosting plan sold or run servers and data centers using alternative energy sources. If the web hosting companies make use of renewable energy sources, this will make a huge difference in the world.

Web hosting companies may charge more for green web hosting, but when you really think about it, you are doing something great for the planet so it’s worth paying the extra money. There are many companies that offer affordable web hosting with reduced impact to the environment.

It is good to know that people are now pushing for a greener world. Different businesses and organizations are spreading the word that now is the time to take an active part in saving the planet. Since the World Wide Web reaches a large audience, it is an ideal avenue for increasing awareness on the harmful effects of global warming and the steps that we can take in order to reduce the impact. In the web hosting industry, companies are playing their part and are slowly becoming aware of the importance of going green. The simple act of having green web hosting is one of the many things that a site owner can do to show support in the environmental efforts. For web hosting companies, one way to join this noble cause is to get Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). Also called Renewable Energy Credits or green tags, these are non-tangible commodities that can be sold and traded, serving as proof that you have purchased renewable energy. Another way is to generate power directly from renewable sources such as wind and solar.

These are just some of the many web hosting companies which have gone green in an attempt to minimize environmental impact:

• iPage (http://www.ipage.com/ipage/index.bml) – offers affordable hosting packages and purchases renewable energy credits to offset carbon emissions of their offices and data centers
• Super Green Hosting (http://www.supergreenhosting.com/) – makes use of energy-efficient green servers; a carbon neutral project, which means that your website will not have any impact to the planet
• FatCow (http://www.fatcow.com/) – offices and data centers are 100% powered by wind energy
• Award Space (http://www.awardspace.com/) – a green web hosting company that uses wind energy to run servers and associated platforms
• HostGator (http://www.hostgator.com/) – all its shared and reseller servers are 130% powered by wind energy
• GreenGeeks (http://www.greengeeks.com/) – offers affordable hosting plans and purchases wind energy credits to offset energy consumption; reconfigures servers to make them more efficient and consume less energy
• HostPapa (http://www.hostpapa.com/) – affordable hosting that makes use of 100% renewable energy for its offices and data centers

The Future of Green Web Hosting

The number of websites continues to grow by the minute, and it shows no signs of stopping. Just imagine how much electricity web hosting companies use to run servers and data centers day and night. This is detrimental to the earth’s atmosphere. There’s no better time than now to act and do everything we can to minimize the harmful effects. Green web hosting involves the use of natural resources instead of electricity to run websites. This practice will do wonders in safeguarding the environment. Going green may be a bit more expensive than the typical web hosting package, but just bear in mind that by setting up your site with green web hosting, you are contributing to the efforts of protecting our planet.

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You are welcome to share more useful iPhone clients that will be helpful for our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well.

Google Mobile App

You can download Google Mobile App to your smartphone to search fast. It will allow you to quickly navigate to other Google services, such as Maps and Gmail etc.

eBuddy

With eBuddy you can have one single buddy list with all your friends from multiple IM and social accounts. eBudd also made it easy for you to manage your buddy list, add new buddies, organize them in groups, sort by account, or search your list.

Photoshop

It’s easy to use the Photoshop.com Mobile App on your iPhone. Simply drag your finger to crop, adjust color, apply effects. You can crop, rotate, change color with just a touch, give an extra glow with Soft Focus, apply one-touch effects like Warm Vintage and Vignette etc.

Skype

You can download the iPhone App and then sign into Skype from any WiFi zone and reach friends and family free with Skype-to-Skype calls.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is your mobile browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now on Twitter from your iPhone or iPod Touch. TweetDeck shows you everything you want to see at once, so you can stay organised and up to date no matter where you are.

Yahoo Messenger

Take the Yahoo Messenger anywhere on your iPhone. This will help you to share photos, emoticons and links, right from your iPhone and it will alerts you when a new IM arrives, even if you’re not in the app.

Facebook for iPhone

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. Facebook for iPhone will help those people to stay connected when they are away from their computers but would not like to away from facebook.

Waze For iPhone

Waze is a free social mobile app that enables drivers to build and use live maps, real-time traffic updates and turn-by-turn navigation for an optimal commute. 100% powered by users the more you drive the better it gets. Join the community of drivers in your area today.

Gmail

You may have Gmail via mobile anywhere with you.

Evernote

Evernote for iPhone lets you create notes, snap photos, and record voice memos that you can then access any time from your iPhone, computer, or the web.

Dropbox

Dropbox is the easiest way to store, sync, and, share files online. You can access your Dropbox on the go and download files for offline viewing. There is an option to sync photos and videos to your Dropbox and to share links to files in your Dropbox.

AIM

Connect with friends and family and keep track of status and presence updates in real time. Just sign in using your existing AIM, AOL, .mac or MobileMe name, or register for a free screen name right to your device.

Hootsuite

HootSuite for iPhone is the only Twitter app that lets you view statistics. It’s also the only one that lets you schedule your tweets in advance. With HootSuite for iPhone, you can send tweets to multiple accounts simultaneously, from the palm of your hand. But that’s not all.

Google Earth

With Google Earth for iPhone and iPod touch, you can fly to far corners of the planet with just the swipe of a finger. You can explore the same global satellite and aerial imagery available in the desktop version of Google Earth, including high-resolution imagery for over half of the world’s population and a third of the world’s land mass.

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Adobe BrowserLab

An easier and faster solution for cross-browser testing. You can preview and test your web pages on leading browser and operating systems. This will help you get your results in real time, from virtually any computer connected to the internet.

Notable

Are you stuck sharing feedback in text documents and email? Notable makes it possible to put your feedback directly on the webpage, highlighting your points exactly. With Notable you can quickly and easily give feedback on design, content, and code on any page of a website or application without leaving your browser.

Google Calendar

With Google’s free online calendar, it’s easy to keep track of life’s important events all in one place. With Google Calender, you can let your family and friends see your calendar, and view schedules that others have shared with you. You can get event reminders via email or have text messages sent right to your mobile phone.

Wix

With Wix you can create a free website or make free MySpace layouts and Flash MySpace layouts. It’s the simpler, faster, better way to build & design on the web.

Zapproved

Zapproved is a lightweight Web tool that makes group decision-making faster, easier and more accountable. It is a unique solution that introduces peer-to-peer and organizational techniques to improve the process of building consensus.

PhotoSnack

With PhotoSnack it’s easier than ever to upload photos, create great photo slideshows, and share them with your friends and family. And by the way, it’s free.

Office Live

You can use this service for free online storage and document sharing. You can store files up to 5GB, and share with anyone, and collaborate on a single document. It will allow you to view Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint files from your Web browser.

Concept Feedback

ConceptFeedback could be a great idea for marketers, designers and developers, provides a free and simple tool for getting third-party reviews on design concepts. Concepts may be posted publicly or privately and can include websites, logos, advertisements, videos, and more.

DimDim

DimDim is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees.

Photoshop.com

This is your online photo sharing, editing and hosting resource. You can upload, organize, edit, store (up to 2GB free) and share your photos.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that saves you time and makes you look professional. This is so easy to use, it saves your time and gets you paid faster. You’ll actually love invoicing. You can keep track of your expenses, for both projects and yourself and easily re-bill clients on project expenses.

Glasscubes

Glasscubes brings together a collection of online collaboration tools which facilitate better team working and improved communication. It will help you to replace email or existing methods of collaborating by using their online collaboration tools that simply enable users to improve how they work together. Glasscubes is perfect for small/medium size organizations, teams and people organizing projects.

Remindo

With Remindo you can connect, share and collaborate with your team and clients. It will help you to create your company branded intranet in minutes and access it from anywhere on the web. Use it free for up to 3 GB of storage.

HootSuite

HootSuite is the ultimate Twitter toolbox. With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success. HootSuite lets you manage your entire Twitter experience from one easy-to-use interface.

Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer is a brand new interface, as well as the engine, all rewritten from the scratch. Rapidly increased precision and color space conversions, better preview, enhanced scheme creation system, unique scheme IDs and permanent URL of the scheme.

Mint

Mint is a modern, powerful, easy and secure web–based solution for online financial management. You can register anonymously using any valid email address, and then add the log–in information for the online bank, credit union, credit card and investment accounts you want to consolidate in Mint.

PDF to Excel

You can use PDF to Excel to quickly and easily create highly, editable XLS files, making it a cinch to re-use tables and spreadsheets from PDF files in Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs, and WordPerfect Office. Best of all, you can do it entirely free.

CeeVee

CeeVee is really easier and smarter way to create and share your résumé with anyone. It can simplify the process of posting your resume online.

Kuler

The web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.

PHPanywhere

PHPanywhere is a new online service that’s changing the way people develop on the web. They enable users to develop and maintain their php/html projects online using any standard web browser.

Zamzar

Zamzar is dedicated to helping you transform your songs, videos, images and documents into different formats. You can easily convert 1GB file. Its gives you 100GB inbox to store your files.

WhatTheFont

For using WhatTheFont font recognition system, Just upload a scanned image of the font and instantly find the closest matches in their database.

TimeBridge

TimeBridge is a web application that makes it incredibly easy to schedule and lead great meetings and follow up after you meet. This could be your best tool for calendar-wrangling, agenda-making, note-taking, team-motivating and a secret weapon in the battle against workplace inefficiency.

Quicken Online

Quicken Online simplifies Internet banking by automatically organizing your financial accounts “ including checking, savings, investments, loans and credit cards “ in one place. You can use Quicken Online to easily and automatically track your spending so you know very easily where to save and when to spend and the best part is, it’s free.

CodeRun Studio

CodeRun Studio is a cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE), designed for the cloud. It enables you to easily develop, debug and deploy web applications using your browser.

CoTweet

CoTweet is a platform that helps companies reach and engage customers using Twitter. You can manage up to six Twitter accounts through a single CoTweet login and assign tweets to your colleagues for follow up. Finally, a way to Get Things Done on Twitter.

Creately

Creately is an Online Diagramming and Design is a joy to use. Its designed for ease of use and collaboration. It takes ‘easy’ to a whole new level by intelligently adapting to the kind of diagram you are drawing. Creately has been designed so you can draw just about anything, fast and easy.

Bidsketch

Bidsketch is an application that lets you create, track, customize, and design beautiful proposals. Multiple ways to present your proposals ensure clients get what they want. You can export to PDF or share online. Every client gets a portal that lets them view and comment on their proposals.

Facelift Image Replacement

Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors.

Go2Convert

Go2Convert is a set of free web based tools that allow you to convert, resize a picture without having to install any software on your computer. It is not meant to be a complete Image editing software package. It is meant to be an easy to use solution to convert, resize your pictures and digital photos without the need to learn a complex software package. Once you convert, resize an image, you can choose to copy image’s URL or download it directly to your computer – It doesn’t get easier than that.

Taweet

Taweet is a social calendar and event promotion application for Twitter. Taweet adds a whole new dimension to your Twitter experience.

Colorjive

If you’re wondering whether it’s a good idea to paint your kitchen red, you can test it with Colorjive. It just takes a few clicks. You don’t even have to pick up a brush. You can paint virtually with Colorjive. They have got thousands of colors for you to choose from. They have a basic account that is absolutely free. With a free account, you can upload a single photo, paint three objects in that photo and save three different versions.

Verb

Verb is a user focused task management and sharing application. If you have things that need to be done, then this is for you. Verb was built with individuals and small teams in mind. It is the perfect solution for freelance designers and coders who want to manage themselves and their collaborations.

247webmonitoring

Having a good uptime is essential for the success of your website. 247webmonitoring will monitor it 24X7 from their servers and notify you whenever it goes down. This will check your website every 15 minutes to know it is up. They will send you notification by email or SMS when it goes down. So you can quickly fix the issue and you can stay happy. This way you can relax and focus on your core business. In future, you will also find out how fast your site is from different location.

Tracer

Tracer is a brand new way to generate more visits and page views. You can get credit when content is copied from your site. It will help you to measure and understand user engagement and Improve your search engine ranking.

Wordoff

Wordoff is simple and useful web tool that lets you remove unnecessary tags and styles from HTML code. Most of us have to cleanup the HTML code manually in our working life. This web tool defintely help all of us in that situation and you also find this worth bookmarking.

Timetonote

Timetonote is a web based collaboration tool that helps you and your team keep track of all interactions with customers, leads, or anyone important to your business. It helps you keep track of your contacts information and of what needs to be done next about them. With Timetonote, you know who you’ve talked to, what you talked about, and what you need to do next.

MyFontbook

MyFontbook is an unique online font viewer that helps save designers time by providing a number of tools to view installed fonts quickly and easily. Unlike a classic font management tool, MyFontbook is platform independent and can be used freely through any web browser.

Remember The Milk

An intuitive interface makes managing tasks fun. You can set due dates easily with next Friday or in 2 weeks. It has an extensive keyboard shortcuts make task management quicker than ever. Remember The Milk allows you to receive reminders via email, SMS, and instant messenger (AIM, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Skype and Yahoo! are all supported).

ShowDocument

ShowDocument is a free service for online meetings with fully synchronized co-browsing of any document. It is a quick and simple way to share a document with other people at the same time. It is a web collaboration platform that lets individuals have a free online meeting. It is an alternative to various commercial desktop sharing applications. One can easily upload any file and during the session mark it up with a pen or a highlighter tool in addition to a text box tool and eraser.

Preezo

Preezo is an Ajax web application that gives you the power to create and share professional quality presentations over the web without software or plugins.

ViewLike.Us

This is a brand new site that allows you to check out how your website looks in the most popular resolution formats. It’s all powered by Ajax & PHP so no need to download anything. Using ViewLike.Us is perfectly free.

MyFax

MyFax Free lets you send a fax at no charge through the Web to 41 countries including the US, Canada, most of Europe, China, Japan, and South Korea. MyFax supports 178 files types including files created by most popular word processors and graphics programs.

Shareflow

With Shareflow you can share your team conversations so everyone involved can clearly see what’s being said, and you can all get more done. The more you use email, the more work you create for your team. Important information gets lost in the shuffle. The Shareflow bookmarklet gives you one-click access to post content from the web to any of your flows. You can use the bookmarklet with Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Mail, and Gmail to share your email on a flow. Create multiple flows to organize different projects or teams. You can add or remove someone at any time and invited members can create their own flows, so different teams can work amongst themselves.

Mockingbird

Mockingbird is an online tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application.

Present.ly

Present.ly is an award-winning microblogging platform that keeps your company connected in real-time. Increase your team’s productivity by posting updates, sharing files, exchanging ideas, and more.

Moogo

Creating your own website with Moogo is incredibly easy. Moogo offers you a simple way of creating your own easy-to-update website with style even if you have never created a website in your life before. Moogo is perfect for individuals, small businesses, clubs and organizations, sport teams, real estate…or making a website for your band or your pet.

Typetester

The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems.

Pict

Pict is a free image hosting service that lets you upload and share your images with one click.
You can upload images up to 3.5Mb, JPG/PNG/GIF formats supported, it has automatic image resizing, multiple uploading & much more.

Clicktotweet

Clicktotweet is the best, easiest and simplest way to promote your stuff on Twitter. Now, whoever clicks on the link will have the message automatically added to their Twitter status box, then they simply click to tweet.

Task.fm

Task.fm is a realy simple reminder and task management tool. Just use task.fm to create reminders that can be dilivered via sms, email or voice call. Task.fm is smart enough to understand your natural lnguage so you don’t need to bother entering daters manually. Instead, just type something like “meeting with bob next Tuesday at noon” and they will pick out the date, time and event automatically. You can create reminders on the task.fm site, through email or Twitter. Task.fm is free and allows you to create an unlimited number of reminders.

Font Burner

Font Burner is the easiest way to add great fonts to your website. Just pick one of over 1000 quality fonts, add a chunk of code to your site, then sit back and admire your beautiful typography.

Live Mesh

With Live Mesh, you can synchronize, share and access files with all of your devices, so you always have the updated copy of your files. It’s very simple and easy that you can now access your files from any device or from the web, easily share them with others, and get notified whenever someone changes a file. The best of all this service is powered by Microsoft and absolutely free for everyone.

Ta-da List

Ta-da List is a simple tool that lets you create to-do lists. It’s really useful and absolutely free. Ta-da List is the web’s easiest to-do list tool. You can make lists for yourself or share them with others. It couldn’t be simpler but Ta-da List is the web’s simplest and fastest to-do list maker.

Friendpaste

A fast service where you can copy/paste your code, recipe, anything else and give the link to your friend.  You can select your preferred languages and possibility to edit pastes. This service support for a large number of syntaxes that you would need.

Tweepler

Tweepler Is an easy, more enjoyable way of processing your New Twitter Followers. View a list of New Followers and classify them in one of two “Buckets” Follow meaning you wish to follow them back and Ignore meaning you don’t wish to follow them and want to archive them out of the way, reducing clutter.

Cozi

Cozi is a free web service that helps families manage crazy schedules, track shopping and to-do lists, organize household chores, stay in communication and share memories”all in one place.

Server Check

Server Check is the online server checking resource. You can check if a website is working or if a server is offline, lookup a server’s IP address, search for other domain names and websites hosted on a server.

twitterfeed

Twitterfeed is a free service that will automatically tweet any post directly via your rss feed on twitter that you publish on your blog.

Box.net

Box.net’s online file storage makes it easy to securely share content as a link or a shared folder with anyone inside or outside your company. This will help you create an online workspace where you can share project files, add comments, assign tasks, start discussions or create new content.

EmailTheWeb

EmailTheWeb is the only web-based service that allows you to email any web page to any one. The entire web page is emailed in a flash and is captured as it is now. Your recipient will see the same exact page as you.

Cometdocs

Cometdocs is a one of its kinds free online document conversion interface that offers a large set of document conversions that can’t be found anywhere else online. Its unique features include on the fly OCR conversion capabilities, over 50 different conversion options and proprietary XPS and PDF conversion abilities that retains formatting, images and text in the selected output format. And best of all its available free of charge for everyone.

Ronin

Ronin is a flexible application designed for creative professionals looking for an easy, affordable, web-based way of managing clients and invoices. You can send invoices and estimates in multiple currencies. The dashboard provides an at-a-glance summary of account activity for all of your staff users. Quickly access existing invoices and create new clients. Manage your account with simplicity.

Browsershots

Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server.

Tweetafile

The only thing that people can do through email that they can’t do with Twitter is send files. Now with TweetaFile, you can. Pictures, videos, documents… whatever you want to share with your followers or individuals, you can do it with Tweetafile.

imgur

imgur is the simple image sharer. It’s the best way to host your image, and is always completely free. Sharing your images has never been easier.

formatpixel

Create your own online magazines, fanzines, brochures, catalogs, portfolios and more. Using the formatpixel online editor you too can design page based projects, layout text, upload your own images, add interactivity and customise their appearance.

DocJax

DocJax is a search engine for documents, which allow you to search documents and e-book from everywhere, preview them and even download them for free.

Checkvist

With Checkvist you can easily work with multiple outlines or hierarchical to-do lists. Extensive use of keyboard navigation and shortcuts allows you to create an outline exactly with your typing speed.

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LayerOnline web hosting was designed from the ground up to be digg, slashdot and stumbleupon effect ready. We understand the needs for speed and uptime of website users. Our web hosting is able to outperform our competitors by 60 times or more, and able to maintain 100% uptime even under digg effect. How do we do it? In this article we will explain some of the technologies we use.

Under the Hood

LayerOnline uses many optimization technologies, the most noticeable ones are FastCGI, PHP Opcode Cache, and HTTP Compression. We also offer many features such as free DDOS-Protection, unlimited inodes and we are one of the greenest hosting companies.

FastCGI

There are three ways of serving PHP webpages under Apache Web Server:

• CGI/suPHP
• Apache PHP Module
• FastCGI

With CGI/suPHP method, a PHP process is called each time a php page is hit, and quit after the page is served. This means for each php page hit, it requires one PHP process. Each PHP process takes quite a bit of memory and is slow to initialize. The constant running and quitting of PHP processes also stress the server, making it slower. The CGI method doesn’t scale well since if there are 100 page requests at the same time, there would be 100 PHP processes running, and 1000 PHP processes if there are 1000 page requests, which will soon cause memory errors and eventually bring down the server. With PHP running as an Apache module, there is only one PHP engine per Apache process, so no need to run another PHP process, hence saving some memory. However, there are also issues with this approach. Some PHP extensions are not made to be thread-safe and can cause problem in this setup, also if the PHP engine crashes, it would bring down the entire Apache web server because it is part of the Apache process. Running PHP as a module also means that if Apache is serving a long PHP request, it cannot serve other HTTP requests. Also if you don’t have any PHP-based websites, you still need to load the PHP module in each Apache process, wasting memory.

FastCGI solves both problems of CGI/suPHP and Apache PHP module. FastCGI serves PHP pages from a PHP application server seperated from Apache. Apache serves all regular HTTP requests and passes all PHP requests to the application server. This setup is the most efficient since FastCGI process is always alive and ready to serve, offload the heavylifting work from Apache. Therefore in this setup, Apache server is more stable, uses less memory and can serve more HTTP requests faster. This is the method which LayerOnline uses.

Unfortunately, most hosting companies are still in the CGI/suPHP era, because FastCGI is expensive and complicate to setup. Since the CGI/suPHP solution doesn’t scale well, to prevent the servers from overloading and crashing, these hosting companies need to quickly suspend users with the most PHP processes during peak load, cause loss of money and troubles for the website users.

If you like to see some benchmark numbers for FastCGI, you can check out Brandon’s blog.

PHP Opcode Cache

Each PHP page must be compiled into machine code before it can be executed. This compiled binary is also known as the opcode. Without a PHP opcode cache, the compiled binary is simply discarded after execution, and must be recompiled for each page hit, resulting in wasted CPU cycles. There are three main opcode caches in PHP world: Eaccelerator, APC and XCache. LayerOnline supports all three. In LayerOnline’s setup, Eaccelerator is loaded by default, APC and XCache are loaded on-demand by the applications. These opcode caches are compatible and can accelerate all PHP applications. For popular PHP applications such as WordPress and Drupal, they go even further by detecting and integrating opcode cache’s APIs to accelerate many of their internal functions.

HTTP Compression

All major web browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Opera support HTTP compression which can download web pages at up to 90% faster. However, the web server must support this technology. There are two types of HTTP compression methods: gzip and deflate. LayerOnline support both of them. Many popular PHP applications are able to make use of this technology and therefore able to send the web pages at a much faster rate. LayerOnline servers also cache all the cacheable compressed pages in memory so no CPU cycles are wasted.

The Result

So, do all these speed optimizations really improve ranking? Do they really pay off? If they are as good as LayerOnline claims to be, how well do they do for LayerOnline’s own search engine rankings? Does LayerOnline really offer the fastest blog hosting? Well, check out our ranking with the following keywords in Google, Bing and Yahoo:

fastest blog hosting

fastest forum hosting

fastest php hosting

fastest web hosting

fastest wordpress hosting

fastest joomla hosting

fastest drupal hosting

fastest phpbb hosting

fastest vbulletin hosting

fastest ffmpeg hosting

fastest green hosting

fastest <keyword> hosting…

Try your favorite search keywords relate to hosting above, chances are LayerOnline is either 1st position or within the first page. Wait, there is more, try some search phrases related to hosting speed, reliability and features, such as:

highest performance <keyword> hosting

fastest <keyword> webhost

100% uptime <keyword> hosting

green hosting <keyword>

reliable <keyword> hosting 100% uptime

ffmpeg hosting <keyword>

free ddos protection <keyword> hosting

…

You can probably come up with hundreds of them, too many to list here. That’s one page against millions of keyword optimized homepages and subpages, and those hosting companies with higher page rankings. Not bad is it? So what Google has to say about LayerOnline? Try these searches:

fastest reliable <keyword> hosting

cheapest fastest <keyword> hosting

cheapest fastest reliable <keyword> hosting

world’s cheapest fastest reliable <keyword> hosting

So there you go, according to Google, LayerOnline is world’s cheapest, fastest and most reliable blog/web hosting. Well, with less than $2/month and $6.99 domain names, FastCGI, 100% uptime guarantee and all the fantastic features, you be the judge.

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SmashingApps and FileBanker are teaming up to do their part for the environment. Average American consumes more than 700 pounds of paper per year, highest compared to anywhere else in the world.  Hundreds of thousands of trees are cut down per day to support the consumption of paper that can be easily avoided.

SmashingApps believes that we can change that by helping people save and share their documents electronically instead of printing them out each time.  We do not want you to print so much so we are offering 500 GB file hosting accounts for free at FileBanker. You will need to enter “smashingapps” in the promo code field. You can use these accounts to share all your documents without ever having to print anything.

Climate Change is a global issue and adapting green habits is good for the environment, but who knew it can get us great deals too. Here are some great environmental benefits for us if we always remember these to follow in our daily life.

• Turn off lights, computers and other appliances when not in use.
• Use compact fluorescent light bulbs to save money and energy.
• Plant trees to shade your home.
• Use solar power for home and water heating.
• Ask your employer to consider flexible work schedules or telecommuting.
• Install a low-flow shower head.
• Copy and print on both sides of paper.
• Unplug seldom used appliances.
• Use e-mail instead of paper correspondence.
• Buy products that you can reuse.
• Buy rechargeable batteries for devices used frequently.
• Buy the right amount of paint for the job.
• Use a ceramic coffee mug instead of a disposable cup.

All you have to do to get your free 500 GB file hosting accounts is to suggest that how to stop Climate Change by going Green and make a promise to follow this.  When giving your suggestion and making a promise please post a link to this post.  You can make it in any of the following ways…

Post it on Twitter, post it on your blog, or post a video of it on YouTube, or create a picture and post it on Flickr. Actually the promise is to do one green thing and share that message with all their contacts. You can make your promise anyway you like as long as we can verify it and don’t forget to follow us on twitter.

Once you have made the pledge post the link to your promise in the comments below and sign up for your free file hosting account using this form you will need to enter “smashingapps” in the promo code field. The last date to create your free account will be Friday, November 13, 2009.

Here are some sample promises you can post on twitter

* I promise to turn off lights, computers and other appliances when not in use. Do you?
* I promise to copy and print on both sides of paper.  Do you?
* I promise to buy recycled paper if printing is really necessary.  Do you?
* I promise to avoid miss-printing and if happens I will keep that pages for rough drafts. Do you?
* I promise to use e-mail instead of paper correspondence. Do you?

My Promise

I promise to turn off lights, computers and other appliances when not in use. Do you? http://twitter.com/SmashingApps/status/5573822809

Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

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You are welcome to share if you know more free web hosting services that are really useful and our readers/viewers may like.  Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

FortuneCity

At FortuneCity, You can get 1 GB of storage, web and FTP access, an easy blogging tool, online file manager, unlimited bandwidth on Fast and reliable servers.

110mb

110MB free No-Ads hosting account to create and host your personal and business websites. It  has PHP 5 support, detailed site traffic statistics, 600+ file type support, XML support and much more.

Zymic

Zymic is one of the most reliable and feature packed free web hosting services on the net. This free hosting features include PHP/MySQL, free domain names, Ad-free hosting and an overly generous disk and transfer allowance. Zymic.com’s free web hosting is ideal for personal and business websites.

Tripod

Tripod’s entry-level plan lets you discover the fun of site-building for free. With 20 MB of disk space and 1 GB of monthly bandwidth this could be your best web hosting. You can build and publish your pages using the popular Microsoft editor and Choose from over 10,000 images, including photos, clipart and other site essentials that are all free to use.

Brinkster

If you are tired of Google ads and all other outsourced solicitations on your free website? Brinkster would be the best choice as free web hosting. Whether you’re a homemaker, a small business owner or a savvy developer you can have a free website.

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You are welcome to share more Useful WordPress Plugins That Probably Are Essential and our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. Using this plugin you can automatically optimizes your titles for search engines and generates meta tags automatically. IF you are beginner, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install and get relax.

Automattic Kismet

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down to approve or disapprove them to publish on your blog.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. With this plugin, you can save up to 80% Bandwidth via Minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and RSS feeds.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. An advanced and versatile algorithm that is using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more
related posts and less if there are less.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress

Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to mobilize your blog in minutes. Every single mobile device is detected and all aspects of your blog are tailored to the visiting handset. Sites aren’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator but instead use the features and functionality that advanced phones offer.

ShareThis

The ShareThis WordPress plugin provides a simple way for users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send a link to your post via email, AIM, Facebook, Twitter and more.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

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You are welcome to share more useful and free web tools that would be helpful and our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

Office Live

You can use this service for free online storage and document sharing. You can store files up to 5GB, and share with anyone, and collaborate on a single document. It will allow you to view Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint files from your Web browser.

My Phone

Microsoft My Phone syncs information on your mobile phone to a storage space on a web site hosted by Microsoft. If your phone is lost or stolen, or if you upgrade to a new phone, you can easily restore the contacts, calendar appointments, photos, and other information that you stored on My Phone to a compatible new or replacement phone. Most phones that run the Windows Mobile 6 operating system are compatible with My Phone service.

Live Safety Scanner

Windows Live OneCare safety scanner is a free service designed to help ensure the health of your PC.

SkyDrive

Windows Live SkyDrive works well on any Windows or Macintosh computer with Firefox 1.5 or higher, or Internet Explorer 6 or higher. 5 GB of free online storage, available from any computer with Internet access. You can create personal, shared, and public folders and you can decide who has access to each folder.

Office Live Small Business

Office Live Small Business provides your company with everything needed to create a professional web presence for free, including easy-to-use website design and management tools, and 100 email accounts. You also get a free suite of professional business applications that will allow you to manage customers, projects, and documents and easily share information with employees, customers, suppliers and vendors. All this is security-enhanced, managed, and maintained by Office Live Small Business.

Live Sync

With this service, you can keep important files up to date on all your computers, PC or Mac. This will also help you to share folders to sync files with friends or coworkers very easily. There is an option to sign in to the Sync website for remote access to any computer where you’ve installed Sync.

Silverlight Streaming

Microsoft® Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live  is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications. The service offers web designers and developers a free and convenient solution for hosting and streaming cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences and rich interactive applications that run on Windows and Mac.

The Microsoft® Translator

The Microsoft® Translator is a free online translation service for worldwide web. You can type or paste text on the site that you want to translate and choose your translation language before you click translate. The Microsoft® Translator webpage widget allows you to bring real-time, in-place translations to your web site as well.

Live Mesh

With Live Mesh, you can synchronize, share and access files with all of your devices, so you always have the updated copy of your files. It’s very simple and easy that you can now access your files from any device or from the web, easily share them with others, and get notified whenever someone changes a file. The best of all this service is powered by Microsoft and absolutely free for everyone.

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