If there is one single and important reason to buy your own domain name it’s to obtain and retain a unique email address that can’t be taken from you. If you think you’re current email address is safe then think again because in today’s economy no company is immune. It also means that current companies might be shut down their email hosting services to weather the economic storm. Over the years there have been several companies that have shut down their email hosting services or switched them to pay services.

Getting a domain name and getting an email host is incredibly economical these days. Here are a few major domain registration companies listed here that will help you get started with getting a domain name.

Godaddy

Go Daddy is an Internet domain registrar and web hosting company, which also sells e-business related software and services. In early 2009 it had reached nearly 30 million domain names under management.

Dotster

Headquartered in Vancouver, Washington, Dotster has established itself among the world's largest domain name registrars with more than 3 million domain holdings under management and servicing hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide.

Overview

While a podcast is really nothing more than a packaged link to a web page with sound or video embedded into it the idea of setting up the page, embedding the content, and publishing it in one step is relatively new. A godaddy podcast hosting service or a “blogcast” as they have branded it has been around since 2006 about the time that the term became popular.

Why Use it?

Some could say that YouTube is a podcast hosting service minus the ability to upload sound bytes but then again a video file can hold sound bytes all the same. The main reason to use a hosting provider for hosting your podcasts is the simple fact that you won’t randomly have your content combed and changed while Google uses audible magic technology to find copyrighted content uploaded by you.

In a trend that’s changing the landscape of hosting companies like Amazon.com and Google have provided services which allow you to store data on their distributed networks. They’re called file hosting services but the possibilities are a bit more expansive than that. I’ll come back to the details of these two services later but to illustrate how they are being used Tom Evslin has detailed how he has used Amazon’s S3 hosting service to host a fully functional web application. While it’s not possible to use traditional development tools like the lamp stack  it is possible to write applications that don’t require a database and feasible to store data in XML files which are accessed using javascript code on the client side. These hosting services might not replace traditional hosting services anytime soon they certainly have their place.

In order to better understand these hosting services and to get an idea of why they are attractive here are some details on the two major players Google and Amazon.

Google App Engine

It’s the google network infrastructure with a pay as you grow pricing structure. If you’re a developer then you can use their hosting service apis which leverage the python language. So instead of paying a monthly fee that you may or may not be taking advantage of you play a small price for cpu cycles, bandwidth, etc.

Amazon S3

It’s a bit less complicated than Google’s app engine but Amazon has provided an api that anyone can access to create interfaces to their api. The EZS3 service parks itself on top of the API and allows you to easily access your S3 storage. Looking at S3 hosting from a marketing point of view it makes a lot of sense to host your video on their servers rather than on traditional hosting services.

It’s becoming less and less important which programming language you use in the background given the popularity and exponential growth of ajax libraries. A programmer could simply create an ajax interface that reads and writes data to and from XML files hosted on either of these hosting services and at the same time provide a feature rich and modern web application.

I’m not a fan of putting labels on things including this Web 2.0 business but I do like to think about things in terms of versions being a software developer. I’ve been involved with some form of web hosting related work since 1995 and have seen the industry evolve quickly every step of the way.

I like to think of the hosting industry as the construction company industry that builds new buildings for the general public to use. In addition to building the houses they are, if they are a good construction company, thinking about how they can improve the stability and longevity of their buildings. I’ve seen a few hosting companies that are creating grid computing platforms which promise improved stability but what about improved accessibility. It’s worrisome to think that Google is one of the few companies that enjoys the benefits of distributed hosting across the globe although they have allowed people to piggyback on their own network and systems using Google App Engine.

So why are the traditional hosting companies so behind? I’m sure it has a lot to do with the cost of implementing an extremely reliable, scalable, and easy to use system. Google has plenty of buying power and surely one of their first priorities as a business was building out a distributed network that would ensure instant access to their products. The current slew of hosting companies can’t compete with that unless they actually invest money in building distributed networks along with grid computing methodologies. In essence Google is a hosting company but they are using unconventional methods from the point of view of old school hosting companies. There’s the App Engine and Google Apps which are certainly not unrelated technologies knowing how Google takes on the same mantra as Microsoft and tries to integrate their apps in order to streamline software usage processes.

So is Google the future of hosting as a whole? I’m not so sure about that as the price for dedicated hosting goes down there’s nothing stopping traditional hosting companies from creating their own distributed grid environments and sell their hosting services at a reasonable price.

I'm sure that you've heard the catchphrase Information Is Power before. On the Internet the wealth of information can lead to the hampering of the power contained in information but many websites are able to harness this power properly. The following list is a collection of websites that truly achieve greatness in this regard.

WikiPedia

It's a collection of facts that are reviewed by 75,000 contributors so the scrutiny placed on the articles by the contributors as well as the visitors increases the power of this information. It has been touted by others as a resource to reckoned with by schools and people alike.

Google

It's a search engine and if you haven't heard about it then you probably just logged on to the Internet. This powerhouse search company has the ability to make information their master and at the same time allow you to harness it for your own uses. If you dig deeper you'll see that Google has a huge influence in the real world as well as on the Internet.

WikiLeaks

Coming off the coat tails of WikiPedia this website is about exposing information that should never have been exposed in the first place. From their about page: Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. It is so powerful that the law has come after them.

Amazon.com

A valid question about amazon.com is why are they the king of online shopping or even more? It's likely due to the level of information that they provide about a vast array of products that anyone can sell. To support this belief is the fact that they have a product search engine of their own. Amazon.com is one of the few companies that can help their competitors and still maintain their business.

So what do all these sites have to do with hosting? The fact is that anyone can come up with an idea that harnesses the power of Information to improve their business. It all starts with a shared web hosting account and a little imagination.

The team over at LunarPages held the third part of their wordpress theme contest series. The contest itself spanned over a three month period and had particular rules that all contestants had to follow.

In the end it came down to three major winners and here are their reactions.

• First Prize - BlogDesignStudio
• Second Prize - SimplyWP
• Third Prize - ThaSlayer

It's great to see hosting companies getting involved with the design end of things more often than not the design part is something a customer must take care of themselves.