I almost forgot to wish everyone a happy Leap Day from A2 Hosting. It only comes around once every 4 years, so make the most of it! I also want to wish a heartfelt Happy Birthday to all those “Leaplings” out there who were born on a February 29th and only get to celebrate their true birth date once a year. Enjoy!
Archive for February, 2008
Just a heads up that this month’s A2 Hosting newsletter has just been posted. Topics in this month’s newsletter include:
- Reminder to join the A2 Hosting affiliate program and to complete the customer survey
- Information about LxAdmin and VPS accounts
- A2 Hosting’s dedication to Green Web Hosting
- The consideration to offer Xen VPSslices in addition to OpenVZ VPS
Do you ever look at a website and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” or “I wish I knew that existed before…”. Enter the site Prosper.com.
This site is essentially a money lending network with borrowers looking for loans, except instead of borrowing from a bank, anybody can lend money to those seeking the loans. This is how it works:
1.) A borrower creates a listing of how much money they need, why they need it, includes their credit information and set an interest rate at how much they are willing to pay for their loan.
2.) Anybody can be a lender. Lenders look at the listings and make bids as low as $50 and set their own interest rate based on the information provided from the borrowers.
3.) Prosper combines all of the bids with the lowest interest rates into one easy loan.
4.) The borrowers make payments to Prosper who in turn deposits the payments into the Lenders bank accounts.
Obviously people who are looking to borrow money would be interested in Prosper because they would be able to get a lower interest rate from a bank, especially those with poor interest rates. There are a lot of people just looking to borrow money merely to improve their credit ratings.
Lenders like Prosper because of the huge returns they can earn with their money. Of course there is some risk for the borrowers, but you can look at the borrower’s circumstances, credit rating and income statistics and make very smart financial decisions on who to lend to.
Here is an example of someone that I would look to lend money to. There is a gentleman who needs a home improvement loan. He has a near perfect AA credit rating, a ridiculously low rate debt-to-income rate of 5% and is willing to pay out 14% on the money borrowed. That is one safe investment with an extremely high return.
Smart People Alert!
Here is where I believe members of the site are extremely money savvy. There are people with high credit ratings looking to borrow money at about an 8% rate. In turn, those people use that money to become lenders to other prosper borrowers to earn higher returns on their money. Essentially they are taking the money that they borrow at an 8% rate and lend it to others at a rate of 20%. They are doing essentially nothing and making money doing it. Sounds like a good job to me!
I thought I would share a few basic HTML codes today. I know there are tons of web editors on the market, but it is still important to learn the basics.
<strong>Makes words bold</strong>
<br> - This is called line break. Makes text go to the next line, essentially like hitting enter in a word processor
<p> - Basically the equivalent of <br><br>
Hyperlinking - <a href=“URLGoesHere.com”>Name Of The Website Goes Here</a>
Adding An Image - <img src=“URLOfTheImageLocation.com”>
<em>Makes Text Italicized</em>
<u>Underlines Text</u>
<font Color =“#00FF00”>This would make the font green, based on the color code</font>
I recently came across a site called Love My Flash that specializes in flash templates for Myspace. Frequent readers of this blog know that I am a huge fan of free services like this. I thought it was about time to update our A2 Hosting Myspace page with the aid of Love My Flash. If you look at the cached version of this page, you will see that I hadn’t done much with the page. I just threw up some basic content on the page and didn’t even change the original template. It was just flat out boring. I have to say that I am pretty happy with how the new page turned out. If you are a member of Myspace, I invite you to add us as your friend.
Manage your VPS Hosting account with the world’s lightest control panel, LxAdmin. This efficient web hosting platform is included with our CentOS 5 Host-In-A-Box OS template. LxAdmin’s easy to use interface allows access to all of the key administrative features like Login Management, Shell Access, Resource Plans, Domain Configuration, File Management, FTP, Backups, Databases, SSL Certificates, and more.
At A2 Hosting, our VPS hosting packages start at just $13.95/month and include huge dedicated RAM limits, enormous disk space limits, gigantic monthly transfer rates and much, much more.
Take an additional 15% off our VPS hosting packages, as well as all other hosting packages, with the coupon code a2forum0308. This coupon expires on
I came across a cool site yesterday. It is somewhat useless, but fun nonetheless and certainly worth a peek for a few minutes of mindless entertainment. Google Fight allows you to input two separate search terms and these two terms will fight to the death (aided by a cool little animation) based on the number of search results that can be found in Google. The term with the more results is the winner. For example, I set up a fight of arch enemies Donald Trump vs. Rosie O’Donnell. Looks like the OJ Simpson fight vs Homer Simpson is quite popular as well.
We received a call today regarding our A2 Hosting merchant accounts. I thought today’s post would be an explanation of what a merchant account is.
A merchant account is a type of bank account obtained from a merchant processing bank that gives a business the ability to accept and process credit cards from customers for payment for their products and services. In short, merchant accounts are necessary for online credit card processing and payment. Obviously the merchant account for a normal store differs from an online store. Online stores use a payment gateway for their e-commerce sites.
The features of the A2 Hosting Merchant Account are:
* 24/7 Tech Support from E-Onlinedata
*All major credit cards are accepted
* Receive instant activation for your Internet Certified Merchant Account
* Offers real time processing Payment Gateway
* Virtual Terminal (API) for Mail Order and Phone Order key entered sales
* Easy integration for hundreds of shopping carts and software systems
* Capable of eCheck processing
* Real time online reporting as well as transaction management
*All of the funds received are deposited into a checking account that you choose
* Processing of American Express and Discover cards by request
To sweeten the pot, you will receive 250 individual transactions for free each month and it costs merely $.05 for each additional individual transaction.
I was playing around with some HTML last weekend, and though I’m sure that this tip is widely known among web editors, I thought I would share it because it is a mega time saver.
Let’s say that you have an image that you want to place on your website. The normal HTML code to place an image onto a website is:
<img src=“http://a2hosting.com/image”>.
Let’s say for arguments sake that this image is 50X50, but you need this image to be 60X60. Instead of resizing the image in a photo editing program and then uploading the image again into the image directory, you can easily resize the image directly in the code. The resized image HTML would be:
<img src=“http://a2hosting.com/image” width=”60″ height=”60″>
There has been some confusion about what sort of control panel is used to manage A2 Hosting’s VPS accounts. Unlike the shared hosting and reseller accounts that are managed with cPanel, the VPS hosting accounts are managed with LxAdmin. Take a second to check out an LxAdmin demo.
There are two different types of LxAdmin, but the VPS accounts are run using LxAdmin Host-in-a-box because it is the world’s lightest control panel, meaning it doesn’t take up much space at all. It uses just 9MB RSS and 15MB of memory usage on a bootup.
LxAdmin utilizes lighttpd and djbdns. Lighttpd is a web server designed to be fast, secure, flexible standards compliant and is optimized when an environment is speed critical. Djbdns is a security aware domain name system (DNS). DNS translates hostnames such as http://adventuresinhosting.com into IP addresses.
