At A2 Hosting, we have issued a brand new coupon code for forum users that will cut an additional 15% off of our already generous prices.

Use the coupon code forums15off at the checkout to take advantage of this huge discount. This coupon code expires June 30, 2008.

We know that you take your hosting seriously. We do too. At A2 Hosting, we truly care about the success of our clients’ online presence. We offer many types of support including email, phone, online knowledge base, and real-time chat. Our team of hosting experts is committed to your success and satisfaction.

I get about 10 Spam comments on this blog everyday when I log in to write on it. I could ignore them, but that means that I would miss the well intentioned comments. It had become a job to sift through all of the long and disgusting Spam comments. On the weekend, I would have to go through 30-40 comments. Larger blogs most likely have a lot more. I didn’t want to shut off comments because I want this blog to be interactive. I decided to research Captcha to prevent spammers from hitting this blog. I came across reCAPTCHA and haven’t had a Spam comment in 24 hours. I have to say that I am quite happy so far. To add this to your WordPress blog, follow the instructions below.

1.)    Download the zip file.

2.)    Unzip the recaptcha folder into your WordPress wp-content/plugins directory.

3.)    Activate the plugin on the Options | Plugins Management page of your WordPress admin site. A web form will prompt you to enter a public and private API key. You can sign-up for the keys here, and then enter them in the text fields to activate the plugin.

4.)    The reCAPTCHA widget should now appear on the comments page.

I have mentioned some of the best ways to stay current regarding the latest A2 Hosting news. Some of the sites you can visit are our customer forums and the A2 Host Post, our monthly newsletter.

The most convenient way to get the latest technical updates is by subscribing to our A2 Hosting Forums RSS Feed. This way, you can read all of our technical updates right in the convenience of your RSS feed reader.

It looks like there may be a new solution that Google is rolling out to make competitive ad filtering with AdSense a lot more specific, and a whole lot better. This new solution is called the Ad Review Center. According to Google, the Ad Review Center will allow publishers to “…manually review all ads placement-targeted to your site….” I hope this is as good as it sounds. The new solution is being rolled out slowly, so it hasn’t been added to our account yet. I wrote to Google requesting that they add it to our account, but haven’t heard back yet. I will certainly write my review of the Ad Review Center when the time arrives.

I received an excellent question the other day. I was asked if someone owns a domain, do they need web hosting to build a website/store. When I was exposed to web building for the very first time, I wondered the same thing. The answer is yes, you do need web hosting even if you have a URL if you want to build a website. Web hosting gives you place to put your website. If this doesn’t quite make sense, read the analogy below.

Let’s say that you are going to start a business that sells dog leashes. You name the business and purchase the domain name “Leashes Are Us” and purchase the trademark. Let’s think of this as purchasing a URL. You have the business name, but you need some place to put your products, right?

Since you need a store, you purchase a building and stock it with your dog leashes. Let’s think of this as your web hosting. Just because you had a business name and trademark, you still needed a place to put your store in order to sell the dog leashes.

 You can purchase you domain names and web hosting at A2 Hosting today.

I just wanted to post a quick note about our new affiliate coupon that you can use in order to promote A2 Hosting. The coupon code is below:

Save 10% off all A2 Hosting packages with the coupon code tenoffa2. Expires 6/30/2008.

Semi-Dedicated Hosting plans from A2 Hosting offer great flexibility for those who need a higher percentage of server allocation, but don’t quite have the need for a dedicated hosting account. With our Semi-Dedicated plans, you will be sharing a server with only 10-20 other accounts, far less than that of a shared hosting account. Our Gold Semi-Dedicated package offers 200 GB of Disk Space, 800 GB of Data Transfer and allows you to host an unlimited amount of domains.

You will enjoy free setup with Semi-Dedicated hosting packages and if you act fast, you can take an additional 15% off of our Semi-Dedicated packages and all of our other hosting packages with the coupon code a2forum0308. This coupon expires on 3/31/2008.

Highlights of our “mid-size” Semi-Dedicated package - Gold Semi-Dedicated Package:

200 GB Disk Space
800 GB of Data Transfer
Host UNLIMITED Domains
PHP 5.2.5
Apache 2.2
MySQL 4.1.x or 5.0.x
PostgreSQL 8.2.x
Ruby on Rails 2.0
SSH/Shell
Subversion/CVS
cPanel
SSL, FTP, Stats
Free Auto-Install Blogs,
Forums, E-Commerce and more!
From Just $146.95/mo

I just wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a happy Easter from A2 Hosting. I also wanted to re-present our discount shared hosting package.

Receive 10 GB of disk space and 10 GB of monthly data transfer at A2 Hosting when you purchase the Discount web hosting package. You get all of this disk space for just $3.45/month. The discount package comes with all the bells and whistles of Linux hosting, and even a bit more.

10 GB Disk Space
10 GB of Data Transfer
PHP 5.2.5
Apache 2.2
MySQL 4.1.x or 5.0.x
PostgreSQL 8.2.x
Ruby on Rails 2.0
SSH/Shell
Subversion/CVS
cPanel
SSL, FTP, Stats
Free Auto-Install Blogs,
Forums, E-Commerce and more!
From $3.45/mo

I came across a site today that I wanted to plug both because it is unique and because it supports a good cause. The site I am referring to is Ship To Troops.

Ship To Troops is an affiliate site that promotes merchants that have great prices and discounts that ship to APO/FPO addresses. In turn, they are supporting troops and their families. Not only do they focus on merchants that ship to these particular addresses, but they also donate 20% of their commissions to Operation Homefront. This is an organization that provides emergency assistance and morale to our U.S. troops and to the families they leave behind, as well as wounded soldiers when they return home.

A2 Hosting has announced that they are now helping to set up sites to be PCI compliant with scanning services other than ScanAlert. Prior to this announcement, A2 Hosting only provided setup support for ScanAlert scans, which offers 1 year of absolutely free PCI compliance scans for their customers.

A2 Hosting does reserve the right to charge additional fees if their support staff has to do more setup work than what is normally done when setting up a site with the ScanAlert service.

Visit A2 Hosting’s PCI Compliance page for additional information.