What is a website host, and why do you have to pay hosting fees for your website? Website hosting is essentially renting a home on the Internet Freeway. The files used to build your website need a place to live on the Internet, so we rent lodging from a website "host." Just as some people prefer a one-bedroom apartment to a 4 bedroom house, depending on what functionality your site may need (streaming media files, shopping carts, etc.), we select a host and service package that offers the technologies to meet your site needs.

Your actual Internet Freeway address provided by the host is a long series of numbers called your IP address. It comes in a form similar to "123.4.56.789". Since that series of numbers and dots is difficult to remember, we use domain names, e.g. www.yourname.com. When you purchase your domain name and your web hosting, your webmaster will configure the nameservers. Those nameservers are big databases that associate your domain name to your IP address, allowing you to advertise your website address as www.yourname.com instead of 123.4.56.789.

You can read more about domain names here.

Your domain name is your presence on the Internet. My domain name is "ReevesDigital.com". No, the capitalization doesn't make a difference, but it does make it easier to read when it's written. Your domain name can be used for both your web address (www.reevesdigital.com) and your email address (info@reevesdigital.com).

Your domain name needs to be registered, and registration terms are annual. Domain names cost $10-$20 per year depending on where they are registered. If your website and your email both suddenly stop working, it's likely your domain name has expired. Never fear, most registrars will hold your domain name for an extended period of time, giving you a grace period to renew it before they offer it up for sale. Once it goes up for sale, it will most likely be purchased by someone else immediately, so you really don't want to let your registration lag. If someone else buys your domain name because you didn't keep it renewed, they become the new legal owners of it.

You can purchase your domain name for multiple years at a time. In addition to the cost savings (the cost of domain names will begin increasing this July and will continue to gradually increase for the forseeable future), there is another significant advantage to longer term registrations: The longer you have your domain name registered, the higher your rankings in search engines appear.

Curious about your domain name? You can view what information is publicly available about your domain name, including its expiration date, using the Internic WhoIs tool: http://www.internic.net/whois.html  Contact your webmaster if you have any questions about it.

If I have registered or renewed your domain name for you, I will continue to manage this for you until you ask me to stop, so you don't need to worry about it. As I wrote in an earlier post, there are many companies that will contact you to register your domain name for you. It's a lucrative business for them with minimal investment, preying on the ill-informed. Please contact me if anyone wants to renew your domain name for you, as not all of them are legitimate.

The AppleCare support staff (phone support) have been very knowledgeable and helpful, except for not knowing about the authorized service center in northern Colorado (see previous post). Eli helped me yesterday with 2 useful tools I thought I'd share today for anyone else having problems with their Mac.

The first tool is the standard Apple Hardware Test (AHT). He had me get to it by inserting the Applications disk that came with the iMac, then restarting the computer. As soon as it turns to a black screen press and hold the "d" key. It will eventually bring up the Apple Hardware Test. If it fails, it will return an error code the Apple service people can decode, in my case a "hard drive sensor mis-reporting". You can learn more about this on the Apple site: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509

The second tool is actually not an Apple-authored piece of software although it is found on their website, and it's quite useful. It's a Dashboard Widget called iStat Pro. This handy little app displays such useful things as the temperature of your computer, your fan speeds (mine were increasing constantly), CPU and Memory resources and more. http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/istatpro.html

Remember my favorite friends at the Apple Store at Flatiron Crossing? The ones who told me a bunch of incorrect things about the iMac and its software when selling it to me, who sold me a computer with a bad hard drive, who gave me attitude when I returned it for repair, who told me I should change the way I do things rather than make the computer work for me, and who theoretically fixed my broken computer? They broke it in the process of "repairing" it. Not only were they a day late in getting it fixed, according to an AppleCare Support diagnosis they either didn't replace my hardware sensor as they should when they replaced the hard drive, or they didn't hook it back up securely. There's a small chance that they simply replaced the bad hard drive with a hard drive that has a bad sensor, but that's "unlikely".

One good piece of news I can confirm for people living in northern Colorado - unbeknownst to the majority of AppleCare support folks, as helpful as they are, there is indeed an Authorized Apple Service Center (reseller too) in Fort Collins, Colorado. They're The Mac Shack, at 157 N College, on the west side between Mountain and Laporte Aves. I'll report back on their service when I get my iMac back from them. No more trucking all the way to Boulder or Broomfield! http://www.themacshack.net/

One other good piece of news I can in all honesty credit Apple with: the box the iMac comes in is nice and sturdy, and has withstood all this traveling around northern Colorado. Maybe that's what the $2000 was for, the hardware is crap but at least you can cart it around in a sturdy box to get it repaired frequently!

Are you hearing a clicking sound from your computer or an external hard drive? Clicking sounds are not good. My iMac hard drive clicked for the first month I had it. It reminded me of a miniature Irish step-dancing troupe inside the computer, dancing up a storm. Now that I have a new hard drive in it, I haven't heard the step-dancers at all. That's good, right? If only the fans were working properly...

More to the point, when talking to Apple support they acknowledged that when you hear clicking sounds, that typically means the hard drive is failing. She described it as sounding like a gerbil running around inside the computer.

To top it all off, my external Seagate hard drive has been clicking as well. It hasn't clicked a lot and it is also brand new, so I didn't worry much about it. Turns out that one shouldn't be clicking either. When I tried to re-install my iMac from my Time Machine hard drive, thankfully it did recover completely. It counts down how many minutes are left to restore from the backup, and whenever the hard drive started clicking, the minutes would increase. Clicking stops, minutes decrease. Clicking starts, minutes increase. Direct correlation between the two. I'm grateful that I could actually recover my system, but now I get to go back to Dell and complain about the hard drive they sold me, and hopefully get that replaced before I need a complete recovery and my backup fails.

I cannot believe their incompetence. Exactly one month and three days ago I first visited this store as a then-strictly-pc-user. I already blogged about my experience there, the good, the bad, and the ugly. But it doesn't end there. I picked up my iMac from repair this morning (a day later than they promised), brought it home and started it up. It had a new hard drive, no data. They were going to charge me for putting all my data back on there even though they're the ones that sold me a bad hard drive in the first place, but I was too quiet of a mouse to argue so I decided to try it myself. Time Machine recovery worked flawlessly, except for the new clicking sound now emitting from my external backup drive. Thankfully it didn't die in the middle of the process, so I have my computer restored.

The fan is noticeably louder, but I figured if that's the worst of my problems, I'll deal with it. Guess what, it's not the worst of my problems. My iMac now goes into sleep mode as it should, but won't come out of it. Moving the mouse, tapping keys on the keyboard, tapping the power button, none of it brings it back. I have to hold the power button in until it eventually powers off.

I called the store and was told, "Gosh, that doesn't sound right." I can either A) call AppleCare Support, or B) make another appointment with the idiots who sold me a bad computer and then broke it while repairing it, she recommends B. Not on your life, I'm never stepping foot back in that store again!

One question I'm asked frequently is about renewing domain names. This is a service I provide my clients, but it doesn't keep malicious companies from trying to get their business. A popular one sent by snail mail (postal mail) is from Domain Registry of America. I hesitate to call it a scam because I've never tried to use them and they may very well be a legitimate business, but their letters are very deceptive and I warn everyone to stay away from them. There have been numerous complaints to ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but unfortunately the DRoA is still in business.

Domain Registry of America sends out letters to people stating their domain name is due to expire, sometimes as far in advance as 5-6 months of the actual expiration date. They state you need to renew your domain name right away, with a "reply requested by" date far in advance of when you actually need to renew. They're renewal prices are outrageously high, 2-3 times the standard renewal rates from more legitimate registrars. For example, the latest request they sent me arrived yesterday, quoting $30/year to renew my .com name, when checking out GoDaddy.com's .com registration rates today are $10.69/year. Domain Registry of America can quote considerably higher rates, I've heard some people writing a check for $300 or more. Don't be fooled.

The letters from Domain Registry of America often imply urgency is required, to keep your website alive you have to send them money now. That's not typically true. Read carefully, and then check with your webmaster to verify when your domain name needs to be renewed, and which registrar they recommend using. I'm willing to bet your webmaster will not recommend Domain Registry of America.

It looks like the same people who run DRoA also run Domain Registry of Canada, of Europe and of Australia. To read more about the DRoA, you can check out this blog post: http://blog.forret.com/2004/12/domain-registry-of-america-scam/

Thunderbird is the best email application available. It's an open source (free) project by Mozilla, the same folks that brought us Netscape so many eons ago, and more recently Firefox, Filezilla and Bugzilla to name a few. First let me point out that Thunderbird is not as susceptible to viruses as Microsoft products like Outlook and Outlook Express. Microsoft products tend to be targeted more by hackers, and the open source community has a lot more people protecting Thunderbird because they want to, not because it's their job at Microsoft.

What really makes Thunderbird so amazing is their intelligent junk filters. I use Thunderbird in conjunction with my ISP's spam service as well, a double-whammy that makes my email manageable. I manage several dozen websites and nearly every one of them has the webmaster@site.com address go to me, resulting in a tremendous amount of spam. Slow days may only bring about 50 spam messages. Busy days can bring hundreds of spam to my inbox. The most I ever had was a span of 3 days with about 13,000 messages each day. So you can see why I care about spam filters!

Using my ISP to mark them as spam as well as it can, I set up Thunderbird to automatically filter those messages straight out of my inbox and in to a junk folder. Any decent email application will do that for you. But my ISP misses a lot, and Thunderbird can be trained to recognize spam. Each message you mark as spam (a one-click process), Thunderbird learns from and improves its own filtering system. Marking it as spam automatically moves the message to your junk folder and helps Thunderbird filter out similar messages the next time it downloads more email. Thunderbird is smart and learns quickly, and at this point I only receive a few messages a day in my inbox that are truly spam, a much better solution than the dozens or even hundreds I saw in Outlook.

Today marks the one month anniversary of buying my iMac, and I had to return it to the store today because the hard drive needs to be replaced. I am so impressed - badly! It didn't take them long to figure out what was wrong, but that doesn't make me any happier. They didn't have the standard iMac hard drive in stock, so I had to leave it there - with all of my private data on there, I'm not happy about that.

As I was leaving, no less than 3 employees stopped me on the way out to make sure I was pleased. Well let's see:

• My 1-month old, over $2,000 iMac is dead already because this store sold me a bad computer in the first place
• I had to drive an hour to the store, another hour home, and I'll drive two more hours to pick it up in a few days. That's ok, I surely had nothing better to do with my time, like run my business and work for my clients.
• I will have lost a total of 3 productivity days where I can't get my job done because they couldn't fix it on site.

Do you really think I'm happy? 

When talking to my "genius," he tells me that I should have called Apple Care because they could have told me where a closer Authorized Apple Repair Center is. I DID call Apple Care, and they told me to come to this store! 

While there, I inquire about Time Machine. You can't set the backup interval on it, it's either on and performs backups every hour, or it's off, but I can exclude certain files. I have a 10 GB mail file using Thunderbird. Thunderbird is far superior to their Mail program - I'll blog about that another day. In the meantime, I can't allow Time Machine to backup my 10 GB file every hour - my computer will be filled up in a week, but I want some type of backup for my email.

Hence, a new inquiry about a second external hard drive with backup software that will allow me to manually determine files and time intervals for backups. Well sure, they have them, but my "genius" strongly recommends I don't bother with them and stick with Time Machine, and switch to Apple's Mail program instead of Thunderbird. Well, there goes a couple hundred dollar sale for him, I'll take my business elsewhere.

So my final experience from this morning? Chatting with another woman who was bringing her iMac in to get it fixed. She had a handy little cart for moving it, and she suggested I buy one, only $20 at Costco. Why, you ask? Because, in her words, "It makes it so much easier when you have to keep bringing your iMac back here." Oh joy, I get to look forward to more returns?