If you are looking for a new FTP client that has rave reviews, go check out AnyClient.  This program is a free platform independent file transfer application that supports all the major file transfer protocols.  You can transfer files via FTP, SFTP, WebDav, Amazon S3 and much more.

The program, in a whole, is really fast, clean and simple to use.  You simple install AnyClient on your PC or Mac, plug in your file information (user name, password, path) and you are done.  You can easily drag and drop files from your PC to your server (or the other way around) in no time at all.  AnyClient is a really great FTP client.

One unique thing the developer of this script offers is a free online version of the program you can use.  It is powered by Java, so it can be used from just about any browser out there.  If you want to download AnyClient and try it out, you can do so for free from their website.

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Many website hosts out there are using Twitter as a means to support their customers.  Due to the fact that sometimes waiting for a support ticket to be dealt with or for a phone call to answered is a pain, Twitter offers a quick and easy way to answer questions quickly and easily.   So, the only question web hosts might have now is how can you use Twitter as a platform for customer service?

What is Twitter?

First, let me cover the basics and tell you what Twitter is all about.  Twitter is an online social networking service that allows users to send and red text-based posts that are up to 140 characters. You can sign up for an account on Twitter.com and then follow people or brand names you like to get updates from or post your own questions, comments or anything else that might tickle your fancy.

Now that you know what Twitter is about, let us get back to covering it as a customer service tool.

Be aware of the fact that not every question or situation can be answered on Twitter.  Here are some situations where Twitter does come in handy:

• Basic Sales Questions
• Server  Outage Notifications
• Very Basic Support Questions
• General News or Links About Your Business

As you can see from my examples, you can not really afford to spend too much time on one single topic.  More complicated situations or answers should still be pushed to other forms of support (such as a help desk ticket, live chat, etc.).  There is only so much information you can share in 140 characters – so make every word count.

Tracking the Conversation

Twitter is also a great way to track what people are saying about you.  Marketing gurus would put this as, “tracking the conversation about your brand” or something to that effect.  You should track all the possible keywords that are related to your brand, such as your company name, any special names you have for your services and anything else that might be unique to you.  There are many tools you can use to get this done – so go out and have a look.

Once you notice that people are talking about you on Twitter, you can use the service to reply back to them.  For example, if somebody says:

“These guys totally suck, don’t host with them!”

You might want to reply back and ask:

“Sorry to hear you feel that way @randomtwitterguy.  Could you let me know what the problem is?”

This will hopefully open up communications between yourself and the angry customer, so that you can find out what is really bugging them.  You can also reply to any other statements or questions about what it is you do.  Make your replies personal, to the point and public relations friendly.

Share Your Twitter Account with Your Customers

You know the old saying about a tree falling in the woods, right?  Well, if you have a Twitter account for your web hosting company and nobody knows about it, does it really exist? Well, yes – it does but nobody cares if you fail to inform your customers about it.  Make sure you post your Twitter account on your website, forums, newsletters and anywhere else your clients might see it.  Not everybody is a big fan of Twitter – but you should be able to get the attention of those users who use this micro-blogging service as a part of their day to day lives.

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When it comes to searching for the whois information on a domain registration, I really love to use DomainTools.  It is simply the best online tool when it comes to finding out all types of information about a domain registration.  It is fast, reliable and gets the job done.  When it comes to any website service you use out there, can you really ask for more than that?

More times than not, when I am doing a domain name whois search, I will simply type this into my address bar:

domaintools.com/domainiwanttolearnabout.com

For me, this is the fastest way to find the whois domain registration information for that particular domain name (in this example, that would be domainiwanttolearnabout.com. You can also search for domain whois information right from their website interface too.

The only thing that I don’t like about DomainTools is their professional and standard memberships are really too expensive.  I wouldn’t mind paying them some money to get access to more tools – but $50 or $30 a month is way too much money to spend on this service.  The free registration gets the job done for now.

Doing whois searches is not the only service DomainTools provides.  You can get limited access to domain searching, domain suggestions, screenshot history, domain typo finder, domains for sale or at auction and domain monitoring.

Want to learn more? Give them a shot the next time you need to know more about a domain name at DomainTools.com.

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Looking for a new FTP client? WinSCP does a lot and is totally free to use.  WinSCP is a freeware SFTP, FTP and SCP client for Windows using SSH.  The main feature is the safe copying and transfer of files between your computer and server (or another computer) located elsewhere. 

Once you get this freeware FTP client up and running you should notice that the interface is much like any other FTP client out there.  These days, most FTP clients do their very best to match up with your standard Windows Explorer layout and WinSCP is no exception to this rule. 

Some of the features of WinSCP include:

• PuTTY Portable integration
• Graphical user interface
• Translated into several languages
• All common operations with files
• Support for SFTP and SCP protocols over SSH-1 and SSH-2 and plain old FTP protocol
• Directory synchronization in several semi or fully automatic ways
• Integrated text editor
• Support for SSH password, keyboard-interactive, public key and Kerberos (GSS) authentication
• Windows Explorer-like and Norton Commander-like interfaces

Lost once you finished the install? The WinSCP website has a lot of great information to help you get started. Every webmaster out there using a paid for hosting account needs a great FTP client to help them get the job done.  WinSCP goes above and beyond your average FTP client and delivers a ton of great features for free.  You can download WinSCP from WinSCP.net.

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Looking for a new FTP client? WinSCP does a lot and is totally free to use.  WinSCP is a freeware SFTP, FTP and SCP client for Windows using SSH.  The main feature is the safe copying and transfer of files between your computer and server (or another computer) located elsewhere. 

Once you get this freeware FTP client up and running you should notice that the interface is much like any other FTP client out there.  These days, most FTP clients do their very best to match up with your standard Windows Explorer layout and WinSCP is no exception to this rule. 

Some of the features of WinSCP include:

• PuTTY Portable integration
• Graphical user interface
• Translated into several languages
• All common operations with files
• Support for SFTP and SCP protocols over SSH-1 and SSH-2 and plain old FTP protocol
• Directory synchronization in several semi or fully automatic ways
• Integrated text editor
• Support for SSH password, keyboard-interactive, public key and Kerberos (GSS) authentication
• Windows Explorer-like and Norton Commander-like interfaces

Lost once you finished the install? The WinSCP website has a lot of great information to help you get started. Every webmaster out there using a paid for hosting account needs a great FTP client to help them get the job done.  WinSCP goes above and beyond your average FTP client and delivers a ton of great features for free.  You can download WinSCP from WinSCP.net.

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Many web hosts turn toward Fantastico to handle their automatic script installs, but did you know there are other script bundles that do the same?  Another very popular script auto installer is Softaculous.  This collection of scripts is ideal for any web hosting company that wants to offer a lot of “one click” script installs to their customers.

With this installed on your server, you can offer the ability to quickly install over 250 of the web’s most popular scripts. You have all the favorites like WordPress, Joomla, phpBB, SMF, Drupal, MyBB and more all ready to go.  They also do a much better job (in comparison to Fantastico) when it comes to interfaces too.  Everything is categorized, colorful and easy to use.

• Check out the End User Demo
• Check out the Admin Demo

Softaculous also works with all the most popular control panels, including:

• H-Sphere
• cPanel
• DirectAdmin
• Plesk
• InterWorx

If you are a web host looking to offer a different way to handle the automatic script installs on their hosting account, Softaculous is a great tool to look into.  You can learn more about them by visiting their website at softaculous.com.

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We have already covered some basic HTML tags you will use when writing your web page code. Here are a few more that you might find come in handy, when designing your own web page.

Image Tags

In HTML, when you want to call upon an image to be displayed on your web page, you need to use the img tag. This tag tells the browser and web server that you are going to put an image here, and then what follows src= is the direct path to the image in question.

Code: <img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com/yourimage.jpg” />

Horizontal Rule Tags

The horizontal rule is for making a nice separator between sections of your web page. It acts as a single solid line that can be placed anywhere on your web page. It looks like this:

Code: <hr />

List Tags

If you want to format a list of topics on a single page, then the list tags will come in handy. You would start a list with the <ul> tag and end it with the </ul> tag. For each item on the list, you will want to wrap it in the <li> and </li> tags.

Code: <ul> <li>item #1</li> <li>item #2</li> </ul>

Ordered List Tags

If you want to format a list of topics on a single page, and have them numbered, the ordered list tags should be used. You would start a list with the <ol> tag and end it with the </ol> tag. For each item on the list, you will want to wrap it in the <li> and </li> tags.

Code: <ol> <li>item #1</li> <li>item #2</li> </ol>

Link Tags

Links are used to help users go from one page to the next page. The basic link is started with the <a href=”"> tag with the page’s path you want to link to inside the quotation marks. Then you type in the text of the link, and close it out with the </a> tag.

Code: <a href=”http://www.somedomain.com/pageiamlinkingto.html”>This Text is a Link</a>

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When it comes to formatting a web page using HTML code, you can think of it (kind of) in the same way you would look at formatting a document formatted by a word processor. You have your headlines to show you where one section starts and stops. You have your paragraphs to break up blocks of text, and you have line breaks to show where there should be a new line started. Now I am going to show you how to get some of these things done using HTML.

Headline Tags

The main purpose of the headline tags are make the titles stand out on the page, and also tell the browser and visitors where the titles are. You can use <h1></h1> for the main title, then (if needed) <h2></h2> for a secondary title. The bigger the number gets, the smaller or less important the title becomes. Remember to use the headline tags for headings only. It is not a good idea to use them to make text bigger or bolder. Also, search engines look at how your headline tags are used to help index the structure of the content on your web pages.

Code: <h1>This Is My Title</h1>

Paragraph Tags

The paragraph tags are important because they show the start (

) and then end

of where a paragraph should be on your web page. Having a long page with nothing but unformatted text is going to be very hard for the reader to navigate through. You want to break up the web page with the paragraph tags to make the web page your working on more scan-able for the end user.

Code: <p>This will be shown as it’s own paragraph on my web page.</p>

Line Break Tags

What if you don’t want to go to a new paragraph, and instead only want to break of one line and move to the line right under it? That is what the
or
tags are for. You might see either used, however it might be best to start using
to future-proof your web page for browsers in the future (just in case support for
was ever dropped.

Code: I can put this at the end of a line to show where I want it to stop. <br />

Blockquote Tags

When text has been blockquoted, it is often indented a little – in comparison with the other paragraphs around it. So you get white space to the left, and the margins around the text are enlarged a little ‘bit to seperate it from the rest of the text.

Code: <blockquote>This text will be shown as indented on my web page.</blockquote>

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It has been over a year since we launched the Facebook fan page and it has been a real success.  At the current date and time, we have over 500 fans and we keep growing every single day.  Are you missing out on the fun?  All you need to do is head over to our Facebook Fan Page and click on the “Like” button on the top of the website.  Then post your Firefox comments, questions or just say hi to some of the other people who are following the Web Hosting Show on Facebook.

• Join us Today on Facebook!

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There are several HTML tags that can act as modifiers to how the web page looks visually.

First, let us re-visit the body tags. The body tags are there to tell the browser what part of the document is going to be visible to the end user when viewing the web page. This is marked up in your HTML code by putting a <body> where your web page’s content begins and a </body> tags where it ends.

How to Modify the Body Tag

So, any time you modify the body tags, you will be changing the way the web site is seen. There are several body tag modifiers you can use.

Change the Web Page’s Background Color

You can add bgcolor=”VALUE” (replacing VALUE with the name of the color or the HEX number) to change the background color for a web page.

Code: <body bgcolor=”white”> (this would make the background all white)

Change the Web Page’s Text Color

You can add text=”VALUE” (replacing VALUE with the name of the color or the HEX number) to change the background color for a web page.

Code: <body text=”black”> (this would make the text all black)

Change the Web Page’s Link Color

You can add link=”VALUE” (replacing VALUE with the name of the color or the HEX number) to change the color of links on a web page.

Code: <body link=”blue”> (this would make the links all blue)

Change the Web Page’s Visited Link Color

You can add vlink=”VALUE” (replacing VALUE with the name of the color or the HEX number) to change the color of link that have already been visited on a web page.

Code: <body vlink=”red”> (this would make the visited links red)

Change the Web Page’s Active Link Color

You can add alink=”VALUE” (replacing VALUE with the name of the color or the HEX number) to change the color of an active link.

Code: <body alink=”purple”> (this would make the active link purple)

More Helpful Body Tag Tips

You can use more than one of these at a time. If you wanted to, you could use more than one of these body modifiers at a time. you would just need to remember to put a space in between each body modifier. For example:

<body bgcolor="black" color="white">

This is how you would link more than one together, this would tell the browser to make the background of the web page black and the text on the web page white. There is no limit to the number of these modifiers you can use on the body tag, as long as everything is formatted correctly, the web page should come out the way you want it to.

Only add these modifiers to the opening body tag. It is important to note that you only add these modifiers to the opening tag <body> and not the closing tag </body>.

Where can I find the HTML color or HEX values? You can find these many places. One of the best examples, is on w3school.com’s HTML colors page here:

• http://www.w3schools.com/Html/html_colors.asp

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