Your Community Needs You!
Our new President, Barack Obama, has challenged all of us to do something positive in our communities. Regardless of your individual political views, this seems like something we can all agree is a good idea.
So, in the spirit of moving forward towards a brighter tomorrow, I’ve decided to give 1 to 3 months of free web hosting to any eVerity customers who go out and do something positive in their community, and who are willing to document it through pictures and videos, which may be posted on this blog.
This offer does not apply to customers/organizations who already help their communities, unless they do something above and beyond what they normally do. The whole point is to do something unusual, something that may be outside your comfort zone, to make a difference.
Here are some ideas:
1. If you are a web designer, you could set up a web page for a local non-profit agency.
2. If you are an accountant, a lawyer, etc., you could do some pro-bono work for someone who really needs your services but can not afford them.
3. Make birthday cards for, or spend time with, the elderly.
4. Run or walk in a charity race with friends.
5. Explore history by interviewing a nursing home resident about how they grew up.
6. Help cook and/or serve a meal at homeless shelter.
7. Help with repairs at a local homeless shelter.
8. Assist in a shelter day-care room, taking care of children while parents look for jobs.
9. Volunteer to help at a Special Olympics event.
10. Bring toys to children in the cancer ward of a hospital.
11. Build a ramp for a person in a wheelchair so it is easier for them to get in and out of their house.
12. Clean a neighbor’s yard who can not do it themselves.
13. Visit a rehabilitation center. Learn about patients with special needs. Volunteer to help.
14. Plant a garden or tree where the whole neighborhood can enjoy it.
15. Adopt an acre of a park or a mile of roadside to keep clean.
16. Clean up trash along a river or in a park.
17. Clear a new trail at a nature center or park.
18. Rake leaves, shovel snow, clean gutter or wash windows for a senior citizen.
19. Deliver meals to homebound individuals.
20. Offer to pick up groceries with/for a senior citizen.
21. Help senior citizens in your neighborhood obtain and install locks or smoke alarms.
22. Teach a senior friend how to use a computer or the Internet.
You can do something through your church or with another group. It doesn’t matter, so long as you are willing to post some pictures and a story that others will hopefully find inspiring.
Rules: It does not matter what country you live in. The credit can not be applied to more than 1 web site per customer. Total credits can not exceed $30 per customer. In most cases 1 month will be given, but in especially extensive situations up to 3 months credit will be given. If you have paid the year in advance, the credit will be applied towards future purchases.
The goal is not to pay you for your services. It is just a small incentive/reward for something that you would hopefully already want to do anyway, and that would inspire others to get involved in their communities as well.
Send your stories to james at everity.com
Why eVerity Does Not Offer Unlimited Hosting
“Unlimited” hosting has recently become wildly popular in the hosting world. Companies big and small offer “unlimited” disk space and “unlimited” bandwidth because it works great for attracting new customers. You really can’t blame new customers for falling for a gimick they don’t understand.
If hosting were really unlimited, then for $5.00 per month you could host a site like Google or Yahoo that would get millions of hits per day. You could become the next YouTube. You could set up a forum with hundreds of thousands of users. You could host the next big social networking site like MySpace or Facebook. You could become a billionaire with only a $5.00 per month investment. Even if your dreams are more realistic, it is still nice to think that you have “unlimited” capacity, so on the surface it sounds like a great deal.
I keep putting “unlimited” in quotes because it is not possible. There is no such thing as an unlimited hard drive or unlimited bandwidth. There are physical limits to everything. In the case of “unlimited” hosting plans, there are also hidden “fine print” limits. For example, they can terminate your site for any of the following reasons:
-You store a backup of your data
-There is a spike in your web site traffic that uses more than X amount of server resources, even if the spike only happens once and only lasts for a few seconds.
-You upload more than X number of files.
-You host content for someone else, or you upload any files that are not directly related to your site, or accessible by following links from your home page.
In other words, even though it is advertised as unlimited, it really isn’t. If you use a lot of disk space, bandwidth, or resources, you run the risk of being kicked off their system.
You don’t have to settle for this. The good news is that you don’t need unlimited space. 98% of web sites use less than 1 GB of space, less than 5 GB of monthly transfer (bandwidth), and less than 1% of server resources (cpu).
If you choose a hosting package with realistic, published limits, then you don’t have to worry about all those other restrictions that are hidden in the fine print of “unlimited” hosts, or hosts offering ridiculously high numbers. For example, eVerity’s Standard Package is big enough for 98% of web sites, and you can use it any way you want so long as your site isn’t doing anything illegal or causing excessive load on the server.
So, in closing, eVerity does not offer “unlimited” disk space or transfer because it seems unfair and dishonest, and because I don’t want our customers to have to worry about a bunch of fine print or cryptic terminology.
Maybe the day will eventually come when all hosts offer unlimited packages, and I will have to reconsider. For now, I feel like the current way of doing things results in a much higher quality service overall.
Domain Registrars who Steal Domains from their Customers
The first serious blog post is on this topic because, believe it or not, it is a real concern. I get support tickets about this all the time, so I assume it affects a lot of people.
You can go to the web site of pretty much any domain registration service provider (including www.eVerity.com), and type in a domain name to see whether or not it is available. Some major registrars (I will not mention any by name) will show the domain as being available, but then immediately register it. To the customer who was interested in purchasing the domain name, it continues to be appear as available, but from everywhere else on the net it appears as already registered. In this way, these companies are forcing you to buy the domain name from them, often times at inflated prices. One popular registrar (again, I won’t mention it by name) will label these types of domain names as “Premium” and will charge 3 to 10 times the normal price because they know you really want it.
If you don’t purchase the domain from them at the price they are demanding, they may put it up for auction and sell it to the highest bidder, or if you are lucky, release it back to the general public within 5 days.
You can avoid this trap by being careful where you go to check for domain name availability. If you search through eVerity, for example, we will keep a list of every domain you look up: one column for those that are available, and one for those that are not. If you are logged in when you look up domains, we’ll store these lists for you as long as you want. Its pretty helpful, and best of all, we won’t register any domains unless you ask us to. This service is free, even if you are not a paying customer.
Hello world!
I decided to keep the default title of “Hello World.” It is fitting for a first post, don’t you think? I guess its time for eVerity to have a blog. I would like this blog, as much as possible, to be relevant to hosting, and to contain information useful to eVerity customers.
That said, sometimes issues of interest will come up that are not directly related to web hosting. Opinions on those issues will differ. Please remember that an opinion is not necessarily right or wrong, and is based on an individual’s life experiences. If you feel the need to disagree with something that is said here, please do so respectfully.
There are so many topics to cover…
The companies out there that steal domains from their customers.
The massively oversold servers being peddled by other hosts.
Marketing and Search Engine Optimization Strategies.
The importance of downloading backups.
And whatever other issues pop up in the mean time.
Ok, so I guess the first post should be to introduce you to eVerity. The story begins way back when I was in college. How I miss those days, lol. I was your typical computer nerd, taking classes to learn C++, Java, Perl, etc. PHP hadn’t really caught on yet. (Yes, I’m that old, lol.) I wanted a “real” hosting account to test out the things I was learning in school, not unlike many of eVerity’s current customers.
So, I signed up with a cutting-edge host. My first hosting package was $7.95 for 10 megs of space. At that time, 10 megs was considered a super big mega plan! How would I ever use that much space?
I built a web site for my family. Then I started building sites for other people. In those days, it was a big job to build a site. I had to hand-code all the HTML. In PhotoShop, you had to manually splice each graphic, and write code accordingly so that it would line up seamlessly in different browsers. It used to take me a few hours to do what you can now do in 10 minutes with pretty much any web design software.
Anyway, I read a lot of books and learned how to make sites user-friendly. In fact, this became my focus. I am self-taught in that regard, of course, because in school they didn’t really teach programmers how to see things from a user’s perspective, which is kind of sad, but I digress. I began looking into the possibility of charging for my services, but didn’t know what to charge.
What I found was appalling. I spent the better part of an afternoon searching the internet for professional designers. The best I could find was charging $80 per page, and his portfolio was horrible. He probably spent no more than 15 minutes per page, on average. Worse, he was charging $25 /month for hosting.
You have to remember that a lot of people at that time didn’t even know what the internet was, but had heard that a web site would help their business, so they were understandably gullible. Still, I was mortified to see them being taken advantage of to such extremes.
At that point, I saw a business opportunity. How could I not? I talked to some people, and decided to start a web design business. I could make sites that were much better than my competition, and for much less. My prices were very reasonable, and still resulted in a huge profit. The business never really took off the way I had hoped. People were so used to being ripped off that they would sooner overpay an inferior designer than risk going with the “cheap” guy.
Regardless, I stuck to my morals, and the business grew, albeit slowly. The hosting side of things, however, was a much more steady and reliable income. I noticed that people kept their hosting with me, even when using a different designer. They said they liked the way I did business, and they liked my dedication. In reality, I give credit to my reseller host at the time, because it had good performance and great uptime.
Long story short, in 2002 I changed the name to eVerity and decided to focus on hosting. I don’t even get involved with web design these days, as the hosting side of things takes up all my time.
eVerity is not a big company. My goal is not to get rich or take over the world. My biggest pleasure in life is helping people, teaching them something new, getting them excited enough about technology to learn on their own, and seeing them realize their dreams.
The internet is one of the most amazing technologies of our time, and its potential has not even begun to be realized. Introducing people to it, and helping them get the most out of it, is just plain exciting. (Did I mention I was kind of nerdy?)
In the overall scheme of things, eVerity’s role in shaping the internet is a tiny speck, like a grain of sand lost in a massive beach. Still, it is a grain of sand that has been a major positive influence for a lot of people, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.