Looking for Off Shore Hosting Alternatives

If you are thinking of starting to get familiar with website design, blogging or internet development then without a hosting platform you cannot start.  When I first started using the Internet the prices in Ireland were very high so I had to look offshore to the US mainly.  Dreamhost were one of the best prices with as very good reputation and I have been using them now for over 4 years without any problems.

Since then Irish companies like Blacknight have become very competitive but I still use Dreamhost for sites  that I want to target US customers and for quick sites and for experiments as I like their control panel and I can have a domain and hosting usually up an running in a morning.

I use DreamHost for a lot of my sites.  They have a great support service,  excellent pricing and a real easy control panel.  They offer one click install for a large array of blogging platforms, applications and tools.  The link above is an affiliate link so if you click on it I do make some money but I would not recommend them if I was not a fan.  I have over 30 sites with them and so far have not had any problems other than ones caused by myself.

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WordCamp Ireland – Roadtrip

I am off to WordCamp Ireland tomorrow run by Sabrina Dent and gang.  Really looking forward to it!!  It is a great opportunity to meet up with web designers from Ireland and beyond and listen to some great tracks and speakers. I plan to heckle from the back of the talks about Drupal of course and will probably eventually be thrown screaming out into the streets as my goodie bag is ripped from my fingers.

Check out the website to see what you are missing and the great speaker list.

I am bringing my 10 year old son with me as he will enjoy it as well as it is kid friendly allegedly (until I get thrown out :-) ) and it is chance to have a road trip with him.  We are bringing two Twitter people with us that I have never met so I have the Mace in the glove compartment !!

But the 20 minutes of hecklingwill be worth it.

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Onetouch Computers in Cork

This is a shameless promotion of Onetouch computers in Cork.  I met Glenn Fitzpatrick the other day and he was a great help for me with some of my PC and network questions.  He has a new website coming on line in the coming days but if you want to contact him he is available on info@onetouchcomputers.ie 

Drop him an e-mail he also does great deals on laptops and PCs – hmmm…

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Remember those who do not have a Contact Form

You may find this hard to believe but a lot of people do not regularly use e-mail.  So though you may put contact details on your website or blog that point to an e-mail link, the person in question may not have access to an e-mail program or even be familiar with how to use e-mail.

This may seem strange to someone who checks e-mail regularly and it is part of their life but tons of people do not use e-mail AT ALL.  So a simple contact form on your site can make all the difference to the number of contacts that you get.

There are also lots of people who have e-mail who never use it and rearely check it.  In a recent club newsletter I sent out using mailchimp I noticed that only about 30% of those on the list actually read or opened it.  So you need to be aware of this when dealing with people you want to contact.

There are lots of free or low cost e-mail programs that will handle this type of form easily.  Google will show some excellent one (I am not going to do this here).  But it is important that people find the form easy and not too many fields as all you want is to make contact not get their life history.

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