But the iTunes Store is not the only web-based product from Apple that integrates well with Apple’s other popular products. There’s also MobileMe.

This is a service that provides its users with the ability to keep their email, contacts, and calendar up-to-date on all their devices automatically. MobileMe also provides a suite of web applications that let users access their information using a web browser, share photos and movies, host a website, and use an iDisk for online file storage.

The Price Is NOT Right

Considering the great ideas behind it, I can’t help but wonder why MobileMe receives far less attention than it should. Even from Mac users.

Maybe the main reason for this not-so-successful marketing attempt is the fact that MobileMe is not a free service. After the 60 days free trial, users should spare US$ 99 for a yearly subscription fee.

Actually, there’s nothing wrong about offering a paid service. The problem is, with everything that is available today online (and offline), you could assemble your own MobileMe-like features for free. And free is hard to beat.

Here are some options that you could use to have the similar features of MobileMe without having to open your wallet.

Matching the offers

Let’s break down MobileMe’s offers and then look at ways to match them.

1. Sync your contacts and calendars

With the help of GoogleSync, you could sync your Mac’s contacts and calendars to your smartphone.

The first thing you should do is to enable Address Book’s and iCal’s ability to synchronize with Google Mail and Google Calendar. Open Address Book and go to its Preferences (Command + Comma). Click Accounts, and give a checkbox to the “Synchronize with Google” option box and click “Configure”

Fill in your Google Account’s data and click OK.

Do the same with your calendar(s). Open iCal and go to the Preferences. Click Account and click Add.

Choose Google on the Account Type, fill in your Google account data and click “Create“.

Your Google account will appear and you could edit the information if you want to.

The next step would be to configure your smartphone to synchronize to your Google account using Google Sync. The supported devices are iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile.

You can find the complete instructions on how to do this on the Google Sync page. Just choose the type of smartphone you have and click on the respective instructions.

Don’t forget to backup your data before and after the process. You can’t be too careful.

2. Access information online

If you set everything up right in the previous step, your information will automatically be available online through Google Mail and Google Calendar. So, no problem here.

3. Share photos and movies

You could use various online services like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums to share your photos and many other video sharing services like YouTube for movies. Alternatively, you could build your own Wordpress photo gallery for this purpose.

4. Website hosting

This is also something that you could build yourself. We’ve discussed about several places where you could host your site for free, a method to create your own self-hosted Wordpress blog, and create and publish your iWeb sites.

5. Online Storage

MobileMe provide its users with 20GB worth of online storage, but there are already many free online storage providers out there that offer even bigger (or nearly as much) storage space.

Unmatched offers

There are of course features of MobileMe that are irreplaceable, such as the ability to find a lost iPhone and secure it. The integration between all of the features is also a plus point for MobileMe.

After listening to a free audiobook entitled “Free” by Chris Anderson, I think Apple should change its marketing tactics for MobileMe to make the service more successful. Maybe the basic features of MobileMe should be available for free while users are given options to upgrade the services for a fee. But that is just my personal opinion.

Have you tried MobileMe? Do you know other free (and maybe better) alternatives?  Please share using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Sure, you can get tons of results from search engines. But most of them turn out to be more annoying than useful. In the end, the results that we can count on are those which come from peer recommendation.

So, to help readers with their web-building experiments (and for my own future references), I tried to compile a list of good easy and free web hosting services. Many of the entries are readers’ recommendations, others are the remainder of the search engine results after filtering out the unqualified ones.

The elimination process

Before revealing the list, let’s look at several factors that made a few services good enough to not be eliminated from the list. Please note that I’ve tried my best not to play favorites, but my personal opinion might differ from others.

First, the features that make these web hosting services easy to use. One service offers different arrangements than the other one. But the ones that we are looking for must have:

• an installer script (usually Elefante or Fantastico) for automatic installation of Wordpress (and other server-side applications)
• access to a control panel for easier web management
• the latest version of MySQL and PHP (at least not too old)
• FTP access to upload and delete files
• the ability to host our own domain (so we can use the CO.CC address or other personal domain).

Second, the free factors. Most of the time, free is not really free. Some services offer free hosting with ads, some take forever for the activation process, some others require users to make a minimum number of posts in some forum before becoming eligible for the service. The ones that we are looking for should be “as free as possible”.

Again, the list is compiled with “newbies” and “experimentations” in mind. For better features, bigger disk space, monthly data transfer (bandwidth), access to customer service and technical support, and peace of mind, you should go and get yourself a paid web hosting service. Try Resellers Panel for much cheaper resellers price.

The Survivors

Here are the ones that still stand after the showdown.:) In no particular order, of course. I’ll only mention the disk space and monthly data transfer for quick comparison purposes. Please refer to each service provider’s website for the full list of features as they will be too long to list down here.

Zymic

Gives you:

• 5 GB disk space per account with unlimited account per users
• 50 GB of monthly data transfer

XtreemHost

Gives you:

• 5.5 GB disk space
• 200 GB of monthly data transfer

Hosting-Engine

Gives you:

• 150 MB disk space
• 4 GB of monthly data transfer

Host-Ed

Gives you:

• 150 MB disk space
• 4 GB of monthly data transfer

Freehostia

Gives you:

• 250 MB disk space
• 6 GB of monthly data transfer

PhpNet

Gives you:

• 350 MB disk space
• 15 GB of monthly data transfer

000Webhost

Gives you:

• 1.5 GB disk space
• 100 GB of monthly data transfer

Footnotes

I hope this list can help you start your first (Wordpress) blog or website (or park some of the domain names that you have).

I’m sure there are more options lurking somewhere out there, but these are the best that I could find within a few days of searching.

I also found out that some of these services don’t last very long. Many of the links that I found are dead. I guess that’s another side of free services that can’t compete with paid ones.

If you know of other good alternatives, please don’t hesitate to share using the comments below.

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The problem is, the process of building your own self-hosted blog is (almost always) not free and is considered complicated. So most newbies will choose the easier path and never give themselves a chance to experiment.

I personally believe that experience is the best teacher (and that you should never consider yourself a cool person if you’ve never tried to “build” a blog).

So, if you are in an adventurous mood right now and willing to take up the challenge, I’ll show you how to easily set up a free Wordpress blog site.

Some of you might ask, “Why Wordpress?” I could go on and explain how cool it is, how it has grown from a simple blogging platform into an advanced CMS (Content Management System) and still stay simple and free, how you can expand it into virtually everything by adding plugins and themes; but to save you the time, I’ll just go with “Why not?”

Getting your own domain name

The first step in our little project is obtaining a domain name. But with zero budget, you shouldn’t expect to be able to snatch a dot com – or any other popular dots like org, net, name or tv. For this experimental purposes, we’ll go with a less popular but free alternative.

The free service that I always use for quick and free domain names is www.co.cc. This service will provide you with 2 free domain names (with .co.cc suffixes) for personal use. (But that doesn’t mean that you can’t register for more with different email addresses. Wink!)

Visit the site and search for the availability of your chosen domain name(s). I’ve registered buildablog.co.cc for this article so you can’t claim that one.

If your chosen name is available, please check whether it’s available for free because there are names which are not free. Then continue with the registration.

If you’ve been here before, you can log in with your account. Newcomers click “Create an account now“.

After completing the registration process, you need to set up your domain. This step should be done within 48 hours or they will delete the domain. So click the set up button now.

Finding yourself a host

To be able to set up the domain, you need a webhost. So, we’ll postpone the domain set up process for a while and find ourselves a webhost first. I stumbled on a service which provides free webhosting without ads called 000webhost. You won’t get premium features, but 1.5GB of disk space and 100GB of data traffic per month should be sufficient for our project.

Sign up for free hosting with your registered domain name from the previous step, and you’ll get the DNS addresses needed for the domain set up – both in the confirmation email and in the website. Armed with that information, we are ready to go back to our postponed task.

Please note that the host set up process could take a long time (up to 24 hours). So be patient here and refresh the page often.

Setting up the domain

Back at the “Manage Domain” page, choose the number one: “Name Server” option and write down these values:

- Name server 1: ns01.000webhost.com
- Name server 2: ns02.000webhost.com

Then click “Set Up“, and you’ll go into another waiting game.

Installing Wordpress

After the host and the DNS settings are active, we can log in to the cPanel to install Wordpress. You can log in using your email address and password.

Find the Software section inside the cPanel and choose Fantastico, then select Wordpress and provide the admin name with the chosen password. The Fantastico installation script will make the Wordpress installation easier by automatically building and linking the database for you.

You have to decide where you want to install Wordpress. If you leave the sub-folder blank, then Wordpress will be installed in the root folder: your domain name and you can access it using –> http://www.your-domain.co.cc. But if you put name in the sub-folder, then Wordpress would be installed in that folder and accessible via http://www.your-domain.co.cc/foldername

Customization and final notes

You can customize your Wordpress installation using plugins and themes and upgrade it to the latest build via FTP. The details of the FTP is available in the welcome email and in the cPanel. I won’t go into detail here because discussing that topic would require another one or two more articles.

With all that said and done, I have to emphasize that the free domain name and free hosting service will only go that far: as an experiment tool. If you want to do this seriously, you have to go with the paid service as they will provide you with more necessary bells and whistles.

But let me share one last trick here: you don’t have to settle with the price that web hosting company offer you. You can get a far cheaper price by applying for a web host reseller account. Normally, this kind of account is not opened to the general public and also not free. But I found one which is free for everybody to join called Resellers Panel. (The link will put me as your referrer, but you can go directly to their website if you want)

By applying to become a reseller, not only you can get the cheapest price for domain names and hosting but you could also start your own business by reselling the service with the market price.

Do you use Wordpress? Have you tried to install one on the web server? Share your experience using the comment below, and don’t forget to check out our article on installing Wordpress locally in your hard drive.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Finding the right hosting company is VERY important. Along with choosing the right domain name it’s the most important decision you have to make at the very beginning. It’s unfortunate but with the exception of a few hosts most of the hosting companies are pretty bad these days.

Why? The competition is so high and they charge so little that it becomes impossible to offer decent service and customer support.

MakeUseOf Recommends Pair

Here at MakeUseOf we use Pair and we are very happy with them. When you have a big website, a reliable host is an absolute must and Pair does it for us. It doesn’t mean we’ve never experienced any problems, we also do, but Pair has a really good tech support team. It’s very fast and in most cases reply to our concerns within about 10 minutes.

What Separates A Good Host From A Bad One?

• Server Speed: The good host never overloads its servers. That’s exactly the problem with most of the hosts. They simply host too many websites on a single server. The more websites a server has the less resources there are for your website.
• Good Uptime: That’s a defining factor that separates a good host from the bad one. It’s also directly related to the number of sites on the server. The more sites there are on the server the more problems the server is going to have.
• No Unlimited Offers: There is one common factor among poor hosts – they all offer unlimited storage, bandwidth etc. Don’t fall for it.
• Good Tech Support: No matter what company you’re going to host your site with, there will be issues, it’s part of the process. What makes a difference here is that those issues can be fixed rather quickly when the host offers good tech support. Which often means a direct access to support personnel and not call center reps who have no access to the server and has to make yet another call to get to the right people.
• It’s not cheap: I have yet to see a good hosting provider that is cheap.

When it comes to Pair they score quite well on the above criteria. So if you’re looking for reliable hosting company to grow your website MakeUseOf recommends Pair.com.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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If one site uses too many resources or a bad piece of code, it can crash the server taking down every site with it which in some cases can be thousands of websites. Wouldn’t it be useful if you could see what other kind of sites were on the same server as you?

You Get Signal has just the tool for this. It’s called a “Reverse IP Domain Check” and it takes a site URL or IP address and tells you all or many of the domains pointing to that server. This is a good way to check to see if your webhost or ISP is overselling or if there are very high traffic sites on the same server as you. By using this tool, you can see whether or not that $2 per month hosting plan based out of some guy’s basement in Russia is worth it or not. You will save yourself hours or potentially weeks or months of frustration from crashing sites and slow loading pages.

Although the “Reverse IP Domain Check” is an extremely useful tool for website owners, YouGetSignal.com also offers other utilities, some unique and some common. They offer the popular WHOIS Lookup Tool so you can check out who owns and manages a domain name, Phone Number Geolocator to find where a call originated, Port Forwarding Test to see if a port or ports are insecure on your computer, Visual Trace Route Tool to visualize the route of network traffic, and the nifty Network Location Tool to locate a physical network on a Google Map. YouGetSignal was originally created as a project from a Brigham Young University student but in my opinion is a very helpful collection of web tools in network and website management.

What web services or applications do you use to manage your networks or websites? Let us know in the comments.

(By) Nick Volpe is a freelance blogger and web guru from techNETWORK.US, a provider of tech news, open source software, web development tools, useful tips, as well as podcasts, tech videos, and much more.

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I have found numerous different file hosting companies, many of them that supply users with an extremely small amount of space or limited features. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Filedropper – Filedropper is amazing. All you need to do to upload a file is click “Upload” and select a file.

Many free file hosting sites give users the option to upload file of up to 100-150MB, yet Filedropper allows users to upload an amazing 5GB!

When you finish uploading a file, Filedropper gives you the link and the source code to add to a website, if you like.

2. Fileqube – Fileqube is another free file hosting site. It has an awesome site design that definitely shows it’s intentions. It is also extremely fast. When you upload a file, a link is provided to download the file, a link to remove the file, and HTML code to add to a website, etc. Unfortunately, Fileqube only allows for uploads of up to only 150MB, yet most certainly one of the best.

3. MyFreeFileHosting- MyFreeFileHosting has an interface similar to MediaFire’s. It includes the option to send an notification email to someone to tell them of the upload, tags to categorize the file, etc. Of course, after one uploads the file, links are given to allow for download and distribution. The maximum file size allowed is 100MB.

4. Fileden – Fileden is one of the most useful file hosting services. Users are allowed to upload files, without an account, of files up to 100MB, yet you are allowed to register an account for free as well and receive unlimited diskspace, unlimited bandwith, the option to create projects, the ability to replace files, file statistics, project statistics, etc.

5. Easyshare – Easyshare adds even more features to file hosting. Registering and uploading files occur quickly, with accounts allowing for downloading files multiple times. Unlike other free file hosts though, Easyshare pays users for their uploads. If your upload gets downloaded 10,000 times, you’ll apparently receive $20. If you have a personalized toolbar on your website, you can receive money from their uploads through that toolbar and if you refer another person to Easyshare you’ll receive 10% of their earnings.

Another neat thing about this site is the upload options. You can upload on the site from your computer, upload using an FTP server, upload using their free software, or use a remote upload from another server. The maximum file size for a free account is 100MB.

6. FileFactory – Filefactory is similar to all of the previous file hosts, except it supports the option to send a notification email to a person of an uploaded file. Unfortunately, Filefactory contains a large amount of ads if you do not receive the premium service. Yet, unlike the other file hosts, the maximum file size is 300MB which is a large amount per file in comparison. Similar to Easyshare, users are paid for each download they receive from a certain file.

7. Badongo – Badongo is an exceptionally neat file host, and I would most certainly rate it as one of the best. As a unregistered user, you are allowed to upload up to 4.8GB a day and as a free, registered user, 12GB a day. To make it similar to Filedropper, Badongo allows users to upload files of a maximum size of 1GB. When you register with Badongo you even receive an account that stores all of your files of course, but also allows users to create picture albums out of the pictures they store. This brings even more wonderful features to this awesome site.

More features include the option to create an MP3 player on your website by pasting code from your account, the ability to create slideshows from pictures with multiple effects, a file widget tool to place on websites, a desktop application for uploading files quickly, etc.

Now that you have seen some of the top web hosts, tell us what you use to upload and store your files online.

Will is a computer nerd and geek who runs his blog at Advanced Tech Solutions.

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WhoIsTheOwner – This service lets you quickly lookup who is the owner of the website. Such services also known as WhoIS lookup tools.

MyIpNeighbors – Ever wondered which other websites are hosted on the same server as yours? MyIpNeighbors can help you out. Not only can it give you a good idea idea about how crowded (reliable) your server is, but also explore the overall quality of ‘neighboring’ websites.

BuiltWith – Unlike the above tools, BuiltWith focuses on the website itself. With the help of BuiltWith you can instantly lookup all implemented technologies behind any website (Google, Digg, Reddit, Youtube, yourdomain.com, etc.). If you ever plan to replicate some website, this is the tool you need. Among other things, it will aso give you a basic SEO profile.

Did we miss something? Please share it in comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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