Sorry guys, earlier today around 12:00PM EST, the site went down for about 2 hours.  Due to that incident, along with other incidents in the past year, I decided to move the site and change providers.  This site used to be hosted by CookieHost, but now I’ve moved it to Hostmonster.

I chose to host this site with Hostmonster because of their great hosting package along with the fact that I also have other sites hosted with Hostmonster.  I can’t remember a time when any of those websites went down and my experience with their customer service was top notch.  Some other benefits include:

• Unlimited hosting space
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited domains
• Unlimited email accounts
• SSH access

Due to this site getting larger and growing in traffic day-by-day, I found it very important to ensure up time and availability.  Hopefully, this shouldn’t happen again.

The move is already done and hopefully everything is working.  If anybody finds anything wrong, please leave a comment!

I’ve been doing research on domain names lately and it hit me. .mobi domain names are going to be popular very soon. Look at prices for PDAs/smartphones, they are dropping rapidly. Right now the prices are free to $99 for an entry level device. For example, the Blackjack 2 and Treo Centro are two devices costing less than $100, or even free in some instances. With PDAs/Smartphones, the #1 thing people will want (besides the phone service) is a data plan. Without that, the phone is almost useless and functionality is reduced.

That’s when I got to thinking, “What do people need? What will people want?” The answer, a functional web page that serves a purpose. With that in mind, I decided to buy http://www.nettest.mobi and make it into a network testing site. You can ping, run a whois, check domain availability, etc. all on that page. You don’t need to download anything either. I thought it would be quite handy for IT professionals when they don’t access to a computer. I can even think of a few instances when I needed such a tool.

Another website I plan to build is http://www.birdguide.mobi for all of the bird watchers. Think about it for a minute. You’re outside with no computer, but everyone keeps a phone on them. Wouldn’t it be great if you could pull up a web page on your phone that had pictures and descriptions of the birds you were looking at? It also eliminates the need for a field guide if you’ve got an all in one reference in your pocket.

So, in order to succeed, I went from thinking, “I like this, I like that,” to, “What do people want? What do people need?”

Be sure to checkout http://www.nettest.mobi on your phone!