If  you have been using Bravenet to host your business or personal website because of its free hosting, you may have gotten an unpleasant email recently.    An email sent yesterday by Bravnet News states the following,

“We have come to a time where we need to better define our Free Hosting services. With millions of members building free, ad-supported sites at Bravenet, we have been buying tons of hardware to store, backup and serve all of your sites to the world. In fact, it has been hard to keep up with all the storage required!”

Bravenet pricing model has been revised as follows:

“For a limited time we are offering you, as a valued Bravenet member, our 1,2 and 5 year Professional Hosting service for only $3.99 per month when you pay for at least a year (our regular fees are: $12/month or $99/year). If you want to really take advantage of this low price, you can sign up for 2 years, or even 5, and lock in the special price long-term!”

In other words, we didn’t really think this all through, (or maybe they did), and now we have to change our business model and charge you for what was previously promised for free.I just checked their home page and they are still offering Free web hosting?  Also, would you sign a 5 year contract with a company, as indicated above, when in the same email, they are telling you that they have changed their minds on their past hosting fees?

The moral of the story is that you get what you pay for.  If your website is important to  you, then it’s worth paying a reliable and reputable company to host it for you.  In addition, when you use free hosting for your website, what kind of message are you sending to your clients?

Please post notes of any other web service companies that you know of that have done the same.

If you are looking for a free software that will help protect your computer, I highly recommend this product Comodo.  You can never be too safe and this company offers free internet security, antivirus, firewall, malware protection, disk encryption and backup.

I recently made a purchase on ebay (which I rarely do) and used my Paypal account (which I rarely do).   About a week later, 3 mysterious charges from Paypal showed up on my First Bank checking account.  They were all for small amounts ($10-$15) so I wouldn’t usually pay attention to them.  I happened to be balancing my checking account that morning, so I did pay attention to them and logged onto my Paypal account immediately.

Paypal Account Information

When I looked at my Paypal account online, I noticed 3 charges from Europe for Skype on my account.  I wish I were leading the jet set life and traveling all over Europe, but those were definitely not me.  I tried to dispute the charges in the Paypal Resolution Center, but Paypal had already taken care of it.  They were all showing “Refunded” status.  I think it’s great that Paypal caught them right away, but it would have been nice if I had been notified right away too?  If I hadn’t caught the charges when I logged onto my First Bank, I would have never known.  I would have never known that someone had somehow gotten my password.  When I called the customer service rep at Paypal, he assured me that as long as I changed my Paypal password, my account would be safe.

After I got off the phone with him, I started thinking and became too paranoid to believe that Paypal rep, so I closed my checking account immediately with First Bank and opened a new one.   First Bank was great and took care of everything right away.  I had a new account in few minutes and First Bank’s customer service was working on transferring all incoming/outgoing charges on my old account so that nothing bounced during the process, but also so that no more charges could be made on the old account. 

After I had all of that resolved with First Bank, I tried to change my password for Paypal online, but so far have been unable to.  According to their online instructions, I am suppose to login, go to My Account, Profile and then click on Passwords.  There isn’t an option for Passwords under Profile? The Paypal online instructions for changing a password seemed incorrect.  I don’t know if they recently changed the navigation of their website, but something wasn’t working right there?  I emailed customer service and should receive a response in 2-3 days.   

Paypal Change Password?

I am not sure why Paypal never notified me?  If indeed the customer service rep was correct and I had nothing to worry about?  Or if they do not want to alarm the public everytime this happens because it may cause them to be a little freaked out about internet cash transactions?

I will probably use Paypal again in the future if I ever decide to venture on ebay again, but I will have to make sure I keep a close eye on my accounts.  First Bank also suggested that I link my PayPal account to a savings account instead of my checking account in the future to make it more secure.

For the past couple of months, I have been trying to figure out why clients with Comcast email accounts were not receiving my emails.  I did not receive an error message or any kind of undeliverable message.  The emails just vanished into a dark hole.  After searching on the Comcast website under email problems, I found this information:

When I try to email a Comcast.net address, I get a bounce back message containing a 554 error message, which links to this page.  (The problem is that I never got a bounce back message…I just received frustrated phone calls from clients wondering why I hadn’t responded to their email.)
 
Answer:  You have been blocked from emailing the Comcast network because we have determined that your mail server does not properly identify itself when attempting to connect to the Comcast mail servers.  This process is known as Reverse DNS and associates your mail server’s IP address into a domain name for Comcast to know who is attempting to send email into our network.  Individuals who send spam commonly hide their Reverse DNS to avoid being detected when sending email. 

How do I get this resolved?

Your mail server’s IP address is not blocked by Comcast.  As soon as your mail administrator properly configures Reverse DNS on your mail server, you will be able to email the Comcast network again.  When contacting your email administrator, you should include the error message contained in the email that alerted you to this problem.  This error message contains important information to help your email administrator resolve this issue. 

If you have your own private email account and are having similar issues, you might want to try this fix.

If managing all of your daily Tweeting and friends on Facebook has become overwhelming and too time consuming, you might want to download this free application, TweetDeck.  It gives you a quick snapshot of all of your daily updates and helps you organize them into columns so that you can see what you need to in a quick snapshot.   I know my Twitter home page has so many updates on it that I can’t even find messages from my friends anymore.  This program is a good way to fix that.

NetworkedBlogs.com is a Facebook application that helps you promote your blog.  Essentially, when you sign up, it will ask you to follow 5 other blogs.  There is a long list of categories and languages, so you will have no problem finding that meet your requirements.  You may enter in a profile about your own blog to add to their list.  The hope is that new members will see your blog in their directory and choose to follow you.  You will also see a list of blogs followed by all of your friends on Facebook.   It took about 5 minutes to set up so I would say it’s worth your while.