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Free Web Hosting!
While my preferred and recommended solutions for free web hosting are Google and Zoho, if all you want is a simple personal website, then check out the offering from Webs.com.
Webs.com will let you build and host a web site for FREE. (The basic service offering is free but at the end of the article I have provided a fuller discussion of pricing and other product options.) First lets focus on the basic offering which is an ad supported free solution. Remember the objective is to have a free site and despite the “cost” of having ads, the free solution from Webs.com is very attractive. Webs.com provides a number of very stylish and easy to use templates to help one get a nice looking web site up very quickly.
The free website process starts with the user providing a name for their new website. Webs.com prompts a user through the process of setting their website through a series of very easy to follow fill-in the blanks steps. Simply answer the questions and click the various options and in less than 10 minutes one can have a very crisp and interesting site up and live on the Internet.
After the initial site is built there are a number of wizard based tools to facilitate adding additional pages and content as well as updating the look and feel of the site. All of the provided templates support a host of site options. One’s site can have blogs, pictures, guest books, and a number of other typical full and feature rich web site options and pages.
While I strongly recommend Google or Zhoho for web site hosting because they offer so much more than simple web hosting, using Webs.com is a nice solution if you are looking to have just a website. Furthermore, in the event you decide to grow your site, Webs.com has all of the muscle and features to allow one to turn a free site into a full blown Amazon.com site if that is where you want to go. Besides, like Tek4Free.com promotes, it is hard to beat the price: FREE!
Pricing And Service Options:
Webs.com offers free hosting through an ad program, an add free solution for $14.95 per year, an enhanced add free solution for $99.95 per year. In addition there are a number of premium solutions offered which dramatically increase the bandwidth and disk space provided. The ad supported free offering does not permit private domain names, i.e., it uses a name you provide in front of webs.com so a site would be TekByBob.webs.com. If you require using your own domain name, the $99.95 enhanced solution or any of the premium product offerings will be required.
Free Flash Drive!
Think of how many times you stop and pull out your nifty keen flash drive to capture a piece of data that you need to move to some other system! Flash drives have become indispensable for moving data from system to system. Flash drives are the modern day floppy disks and they are so prevalent an convenient that people carry them on their key rings. Now you can get a free flash drive and it is much better than carrying it in your pocket: ZumoDrive is a virtual flash drive and it is available anywhere to any device.
ZumoDrive is an Internet based storage solution that behaves and acts very similar to a flash drive. While they offer various sizes of their product for a per monthly fee, 10GB of storage starts at $2.99 per month, their base product offering is a 1GB solution and it is FREE!
In exchange for providing a name and email address, one can sign up for ZumoDrive and download a very small piece of software that allows one to create their own ZumoDrive. The data stored on the ZumoDrive is encrypted, backed up, and accessible from pretty much any device that can connect to the Internet. There is nothing more convenient than a flash drive, except for an Internet flash drive from ZumoDrive.
Seriously Time To Consider ZOHO!
Some time back Google and ZOHO did the business marriage dance. Nothing ever came of the dance but I am guessing that given the incredible solutions ZOHO has to offer, ZOHO is happy to be the masters of their own destiny! ZOHO’s suite of web based solutions are impressive and compelling enough that ZOHO will be a very successful web application provider.
ZOHO offers a comprehensive set of applications that range from the must have, i.e., email, word processing, spreadsheets, etc., to enterprise solutions like CRM, project management, and an online database that supports creating your own web applications.
Using an Outlook type of interface, ZOHO has done a nice job of organizing the web browser interface into an all-in-one application repository that makes sending an email, writing a document, or building a spreadsheet a single click exercise. For those users who find the highly flexible but seemingly disconnected feel of Google Apps difficult, ZOHO is a very compelling alternative.
In the same spirit of Google’s “free” approach to web applications, ZOHO is “free” too. ZOHO offers a free single user solution, a free business solution, and a paid business solution. ZOHO’s paid business solution provides an organization with the ability to have a completely hosted offering that uses your own domain name, i.e., you can host all of your web and email presence under your existing “company.com” Internet domain.
What is extremely nice about ZOHO’s paid business solution is they don’t actually charge for their services until one goes beyond 10 users. That means an organization with 15 users gets 10 accounts for free and pays for 5 user accounts.
The many other ZOHO applications are offered in varying mixes of free and paid services. Typically most of the ZOHO applications can be obtained for free at a low, typically 3 users, user count with fees being charged for those users that go beyond the base free offering.
ZOHO has done an incredible job of using the Google Gears API’s to create off-line options for all of the typical office automation applications. ZOHO’s ability to support off-line usage should quell the web based application nay-Sayers (even though the off-line debate is more distraction than substantive).
Provided below are a number of very useful links to resources on using the ZOHO suite of web based applications. If you are one of those web based application holdouts or nay-Sayers, do yourself a favor and give ZOHO a serious look. If you happen to be one of those Google Apps users who has struggled with the “disconnected” and too web look and feel, ZOHO is very likely going to appeal to you.
Regardless of which type of technology consumer you are, ZOHO is an extremely compelling solution for moving your technology requirements to the web!
Noted ZOHO resources:
* The Ultime Guide To ZOHO
* ZOHO User Groups
Think Web For Software
Listen, I do it all the time myself; I need a solution to do something like generate thumbnail images for my pictures, or I need a utility to monitor a count down process and instantly I pop open Google and search away for an application to solve my need.
Now in the MAC world I have grown quite accustomed to the very inexpensive nature of utility applications. It is fairly common to be able to buy a nice and useful MAC application for $10. (Yet another reason to pick a MAC over a PC… I know, not the right argument!) But with the economy the way it is, it really can be financially imprudent to be dropping $10 every time I need a little application.
So what is the fix (apart from the obvious choice of “stop buying so much software”, as my better half reminds me!), THINK WEB for the solution / utility your after.
Here is an example: I needed to be able to generate thumbnails of the various product logos I review for web postings. Simply by habit of being ignorant about my financial waste (it is never too late to change), just like that I had opened Google search and was cruising through a host of applications that I could buy to solve my problem. Well to mend my approach I decided to try a different tact; I closed the Google results window and started a new search: “web based solution for creating thumbnail images”. Bingo, just like that I found a glob of web based solutions for creating web thumbnail images vs. downloading an application. (I ended up using, QuickThumbnail.com)
When in doubt, don’t hesitate to use the web to find the software solution you need. Save yourself the cost and complexity of managing yet another piece of desktop software!
Google Apps - Now A Business
The last time I wrote an article I noted that my ongoing stream of Google Apps articles would be forthcoming. I also noted that I had been consumed with needing to focus on earning a living. Darn I still have not won the Lottery!
Things change fast, not as fast as Internet Time but still fast enough. I have taken the many hours of work getting very smart on the various offerings from Google and started a new company that is focused on Google Applications as well as helping organizations move their business to Web based solutions. You can read about it at OMBNexGen.com.
In the mean time I am going to continue to write articles for Tek4Free but I will leave the Goolge stuff to OMBNexGen.com where you can follow our efforts to make a go of the incredible Google products as well as continue to learn about what Google is offering.
Please keep coming back here to learn about the many web based tools, services, and applications you can obtain for FREE and that will make life easier and fun.
Slight Delay In Articles
Work life has been quite intrusive on my FREE time, while there are some great FREE Tek solutions, life is not FREE however! That said, the ongoing updates to the Google Apps articles will be posted soon. Thanks for your patience.
Technorati Tags: sitenews
Part One - Two Google Apps Offerings
While most of the world knows Google because of their extremely powerful search engine, few people know that Google is an application company too. Given the enormous development resources as well as financial resources available to Google, it should come as no surprise that Google has been developing a host of Internet delivered web-based applications. What is a surprise is just how good those applications are and better still, how inexpensively Google has priced their applications. (A site change has been made and now there is an entire section devoted to Google Apps. Please find the full original article at this link!).
Switching To Google Apps
Starting Tuesday, July 10th, 2007, Tek4Free.com, in conjunction with TekbyBob.com, will be presenting a series of articles covering the use of Google Apps. The series will cover not only the product offerings within the Google Apps solutions but also how an individual and or organization can move their existing Office Automation to a completely web based solution.
Perhaps the most exciting and interesting aspect of the subjects covered in the series of articles is the incredible cost savings that can be achieved by moving away from the monolithic Information Technology solutions offered via the Microsoft model. The significance of Google’s offerings through the Google Apps products is highlighted by the recent acquisition of Postini by Google. That acquisition along with a number of other recent Google purchases should be giving the technology world a big wake up announcement that Google is no longer a search and advertising company. In fact, one could easily argue that Google is about to become the biggest as well as the richest application company in the world. For further information and news regarding Google, please make sure to check out the NEWS page of Tek4Free.com.
In the meantime, don’t forget to return on Tuesday, July 10th 2007, to start reading the very useful series of articles on Switching To Google Apps. You will not be disappointed!
MindMeister.com
An important aspect of Tek4Free.com is the effort to provide information on where, how, and what is available as a free software application and or web based service: Here is one of those applications, read on for all the details! Read more
The Internet Is Dead!
Years ago I had the opportunity to work as the Chief UNIX Engineer for a rapidly growing Mainframe software company. I had been hired to be part of a team that was responsible for moving a large MVS application to UNIX and to change the application architecture from a centralized, dumb device system to a distributed smart device (think desktop computers) system.
This effort was happening in the twilight years of the pre-Internet boom days. In the midst of our multi year effort to move the software to UNIX and PC based workstations, the Internet exploded upon the world. Like most tek’s caught up in the frenzy of the multitude of possibilities the Internet appeared to be offering, I had the misfortune of being told I was an idiot by the Chief Technical Officer of the company because I had suggested that we should consider making our application an Internet based solution. His words, his rant, his painful dressing down and assault on my intelligence was captured forever in my memory through his foaming and rabid response to my suggestion: ” Are you stupid, there is not enough bandwidth to make the Internet worth anything. The Internet will go nowhere, it is a technology that is dead on arrival, the Internet is dead!”
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