One of the easiest ways to save money on your hosting costs is by pre-paying for your web hosting. You can easily save $30 or more just by paying for a full year’s worth of hosting as opposed to paying from month to month. You also have to deal with monthly invoices with month-to-month billing cycles. A2 Hosting wants you to not only save by pre-paying, we will even give you an added bonus for avoiding month-to-month billing cycles. Check out the two money saving options available during the month of May.

Option 1: Extend — Paying for your hosting on a monthly basis? Extend to a 6-month or longer billing cycle on your next invoice and we will give you a $5 free service credit! Besides saving cash on your hosting bill, you also get the added convenience of not worrying about those invoices every month. To extend your billing cycle:

1.) Submit a billing ticket
2.) If you have more than one package, include which specific package you would like to extend
3.) Include what length of billing cycle you would like to extend to
4.) Mention code Stimulus1 to receive your service credit

Option 2: Extend & Upgrade — If Option 1 isn’t for you, Option 2 might do the trick. A2 Hosting will give you a free $10 service credit if you upgrade your hosting package and extend your billing cycle to 6 months or longer. For example, if you are a Shared Discount customer who pays monthly, upgrade your account to a Shared Small Biz account on a 6-month billing cycle and you will not only receive a $10 service credit, but you will also save on your monthly hosting costs. Customers who are already on a 6-month or longer billing cycle can also upgrade their account and earn this $10 service credit. There is no additional fee to upgrade. To upgrade your package and billing cycle:

1.) Submit a billing ticket
2.) If you have more than one package, include which specific package you would like to upgrade
3.) Include what length of billing cycle you would like to extend to
4.) Mention what hosting package that you would like to upgrade to
5.) Include coupon code Stimulus2 to receive your service credit

View the following links for details on available billing cycles and package pricing.

• Shared Hosting Packages
• Reseller Hosting Packages
• VPS Hosting Packages
• Semi-Dedicated Hosting Packages

Hurry and upgrade your account to save today! Customers may upgrade more than one package and receive a service credit per each package upgrade. You may only use one A2 Hosting Stimulus Plan option per individual package upgrade. This offer ends 5/31/2008 and is only available for current packages belonging to existing customers. Option 1 is not available to customers who already have a 6-month or longer billing cycle. This discount is not available retroactively.

Have you ever visited a site that has a link that you want to go to but when hovering your mouse over the link, the link at the bottom doesn’t look anything like the link that you actually want to visit? It has definitely happened to all of us and many times the concern is that by clicking that link, your computer will get some sort of virus. While it is possible that the link could cause harm to your computer, chances are remote. Many times those links are re-directs with media codes to track where the click came from because the link is some sort of advertising.

If anytime in the future there is a link that you want to click but are concerned the link won’t take you to where it says it is supposed to, use this re-direct checker. Copy and paste the link into the text box before clicking it and select “Check Redirects”. The re-direct checker will tell you where the link will actually take you. Sometimes there are a few re-directs, so you might want to check the resulting link again to see what the actual link is.

The U.S. government has called for economic stimulus. A2 Hosting has an economic stimulus plan of our own. Your tax refund and economic stimulus checks are in the mail. Spend that extra cash at A2 Hosting and save a bundle.

Purchase a year’s worth of A2 Shared Discount Hosting and pay less than $36 this year for your hosting, total. Pay up front for your hosting and forget about those annoying monthly invoices. Make sure to use the coupon code forums15off to take advantage of this 15% off discount, expiring June 30, 2008.

And because this is our discount package, we’re not skimping on the features either. There’s no set up fee and enjoy 10 GB of disk space and 10 GB of monthly disk transfer. At A2 Hosting, you’ll always get the latest and greatest Linux technology including cPanel 11, PHP5, MySQL 5 and much, much more.

I’m a huge fan of innovative sites. I love when someone takes a worn out idea, revamps it and turns the idea upside down by putting a personal creative touch into it. There are tons of personal resume sites on the web. The majority of these sites are I’m sorry to say, boring. These sites merely are resumes, but online. If you really want to be discovered by a company, it is necessary to go above and beyond the typical resume site. That’s because companies are looking for individuals who think outside of the proverbial box. I found a resume site that does just that.

Check out Duckies For Hire. At first glance it gives you somewhat of a chuckle, but then you realize the amount of thought that must have gone behind the site. The quote that really pulls you in is “crack team of affiliate marketing ducks with a unique skill set.” There is even a profile for each of the ducks under the About Duckies section. I love it.

From the navigational panel, you can see what the creator of this site brings to the table via her resume, the projects she has worked on, her credentials and some pretty influential quotes from powerful industry people.

If I owned a company and had to put together a team of people, someone who thought like this would definitely be the centerpiece of the team. As it is, I don’t think the creator of this site will be in the unemployment line for long at all. There is no doubt that someone is going to snatch her up quick.

I’ve been struggling to make Firefox my default browser in Vista for months, until I triumphantly found a solution yesterday. What’s the big deal? I cannot tell you how frustrating it was to have links in email and instant messages open in Internet Explorer. Not only did they open extremely slowly, but if it was an important link, I would have to copy it, open up a Firefox window, paste the link and then bookmark the page. Doesn’t sound that bad, but try it for a few months and please tell me that it isn’t annoying. I’m all about saving time and I hardly use Internet Explorer as it is.

Most of the solutions involved:

1.) Open the Start menu

2.) Select Default Programs

3.) Select Set your Default Programs

4.) Select Program access and computer defaults

5.) Select the Custom drop down

6.) Select Firefox as your default browser

This solution may work for some, but unfortunately Firefox doesn’t even show up as an option for a browser on my computer. I couldn’t select it if it wasn’t even available. Here was the solution that finally worked.

1.) Open the Start menu

2.) Select Default Program

3.) Select Associate a file type or protocol with a program

4.) Scroll down to “URL” and select Firefox

Just like that and poof…this frustrating problem disappeared. Hope it works for you because from the looks of searching around on Google, I am not the only one experiencing this problem.

I had been looking forward to Google Ad Review Center capability being added to my AdSense account for some time. I had anticipated this tool by logging into my AdSense account daily, hoping that I could opt in. The review center was finally added this weekend, but it isn’t what it was cracked up to be. It doesn’t include the features that I thought it would include and it virtually is useless to me. All the Ad Review Center does is let you review companies that have specifically chosen to advertise on your site, allowing you to allow or deny those companies. I thought it would let you choose blocks of categories of sites and competitors that you do not want ads appearing for. The Ad Review Center does give you more power over the ads that view on your site, but the boost in power is marginal at best. Bummer!

I also tried the Ad Preview tool which allows you to view potential ads in bulk and block up to 20 competitors at a time, but AdSense only filters 200 companies total, which we have already done so this tool isn’t useful to us either. I have to say that I am quite disappointed and hoping that Google AdSense increases their ad filtering capability, and fast.

Since I’ve given some love to Google in the past, I decided to send some Earth Day love to Yahoo. One reason for the Yahoo love is that their Earth Day logo blows Google’s out of the water this year, plus the A2 Hosting Earth Day tip comes straight from Yahoo.

Yahoo has a database of what are called Reuse Groups. A Reuse Group is a network of people who could throw away items that are still useful, but prefer to post their items to the Reuse Group interface so local people can search the database for free items that they need or want. Instead of these items piling up in a landfill, they can be “re-used” by others who still find them useful.

For example, let’s say that you have two quality bikes and you were going to throw away one of them because you no longer use it Since the bike is in good shape, you decide to post the bike on the reuse group database to find someone that would use the bike instead of having it waste away in a trash dump. Everyone essentially wins. Making Yahoo’s Reuse Groups even more user friendly is that there are a number of groups in every state, making it easy to find a local one.

Just like how A2 Hosting re-uses our own servers, we urge you to find others to re-use the items that you think are junk, but could be useful to others. Earth Day is the perfect day to get involved in a re-use group today.

The motto at A2 Hosting is “Leading Edge Hosting. Exceptional Support.” We are the hosting company that will give you the dependability that you want and the reliability that you need. Boasting a 99.9% uptime guarantee, we are everything you look for in a Linux Host.

To give you a kick start in regards to hosting your site with us, we wanted to offer you our Spring discount. Use the coupon code A2spring to take advantage of a 14% off discount. This discount expires 4/30/2008.

We suggest checking out our Small Biz Shared Hosting package. You will receive 250 GB of Disk Space, 250 GB of Data Transfer and the ability to host unlimited domains. All this and more for a low, low price.

Small Biz Shared Hosting

250 GB Disk Space
250 GB of Data Transfer
Host UNLIMITED Domains
PHP 5.2.5
MySQL 4.1.x or 5.0.x
Apache 2.2
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 $6.95/mo

I’ve been busy this week writing tons of web hosting content so I decided to take a bit of a break today and write something a little off topic. Besides, it is Friday.

About two years ago, one of my best friends referred me to the site gmap-pedometer.com/. I am a runner and was having trouble coming up with long routes and knowing exactly how much I was running. I didn’t want to constantly map out 15 mile routes in my car because let’s face it, gas is expensive and I didn’t always have the time to do it. This is where this site comes in handy.

Taking its cue from sites like Google Maps and Mapquest, Gmap-Pedometer allows runners, walkers and bikers to map precise routes and know the exact distance of those routes. It is also a great site for those who want to find the absolute shortest route to work, school, etc.

Not only is this site extremely useful, but it is simple to use. You just point and click on the route that you would like to create and it tells you the distance. It is such a simple idea. Though it says it is powered by Google, I’m not so sure because it is registered to a company called “Groovy Designs”. This is a perfect example of a great idea that was monetized. The bulk of the site is the map, but there are relevant ads and I suspect that the owners of the site have earned a nice chunk of change from these ads.

With the partnership between A2 Hosting and RatePoint, a third party testimonial company, I was out searching for cool web tools that could work in conjunction with RatePoint. I came across a RatePoint Firefox plugin. The tool allows you to rate RatePoint companies directly from your browser and you never have to go to the RatePoint testimonial input page. It sounded useful and very convenient, so I decided to give it a try. I downloaded it, installed it and restarted my browser. I clicked the RatePoint button on my browser toolbar, but unfortunately I received a message that the plugin was no longer supported by RatePoint. The message was as follows:

“As of December 18th, 2007, RatePoint is no longer supporting the RatePoint People Powered Ratings service in order to focus on our RatePoint platform for online businesses and consumers. We appreciate your support during this transition, and hope that you will continue to use RatePoint services wherever you find us on the web. To check out the RatePoint Consumer Approval Program, click here.”

I will continue to look for supporting RatePoint tools, but for the meantime feel free to review A2 Hosting. The rating process is already very simple; I just thought I would try to make it even easier.