A true life example: had a client who had been taken by these guys. She forgot to renew her domain but after expiration she went ahead and renewed and they allowed it. The Whois information showed she still owned the domain, in her own name, for another two years. I told her to transfer the domain to a more ethical service. DROA would not allow it, saying the domain was locked and ownership had actually moved to another person when the domain expired. She was crushed. I reminded her that she had paid DROA for the renewal and the domain was under her name, address and email. She called DROA and they said they’d “put in a request” but it might take weeks to take care of, and she still might not get the domain she still owned back, despite the fact that she still owned it. I told her to inform them that she would sue and magically the transfer immediately went through. Crazy how that works, isn’t it?

Here are the reasons I put this company on this page: 1. She lied to us about having paid before. That would be enough. 2. Their site doesn’t rank well in search engines, so chances are no one would find us on their site to begin with. 3. The “listing” they give you is the same information people can find for free in Google, and are more likely to find in Google. 4. The price is obscene to begin with. 5. She said we couldn’t see our listing because it had expired last month. Any company worth anything gets a renewal BEFORE expiration, so red lights were going off everywhere.

Avoid them, and 99% of the other “directory” phone solicitations you’ll get.

How do you sign up for Google Analytics?  Well, visit Google.com and sign in or sign up.  Once you’re signed up and logged in, go to your Account (good links are usually found on the top right of the screen).  There is a section for My Services and to try something new.  If you’re not already signed up for analytics, either find it on that page or, if it isn’t there, click the More link down at the bottom.

Find the Analytics link and click it.  It might take you through a setup screen, it may not.  Once you’re on the main Analytics page you can click to add a website profile.  Enter your info, follow the direction to insert the code on your site, and you’re done.  After a couple of days you can return to Analytics to see your statistics.

You can find out how many hits and visits you get, from where in the world, using what browser and operating system, what pages are visited the most and a lot more.  It makes for a good basic look and for some people may be all you need.  And it’s free.  So why not use it?

Problems:

1. The letters and calls don’t come from your dealer.
2. Your dealer probably doesn’t even have the option to extend anyway.
3. You’re about to get taken for some potentially serious cash for nothing.

So needless to say, toss these in the trash.  If you really think you need to extend your car warranty, talk directly to your dealer to see if that is even possible.  And never, ever give personal information over the phone to a number of unknown origin.

HeySpread allows you to upload a video and choose from a list of sites you want to send the video to.  I paid $50 for 1,000 credits and each upload costs one credit per video site.  On my $50 I could upload happily for quite some time.

So I tried it out and successfully uploaded several videos to YouTube, Daily Motion, Metacafe, and Yahoo (there are more sites available, those are just the ones I chose).  The upload and distribution was successful and I was very pleased overall with that part.

I enabled statistics for several of them, which costs 15 credits each time.  The problem is HeySpread’s stats only include hits made after you enable the service so it doesn’t keep track of stats from videos you’d uploaded previously.

So I’ve got a pretty good team going.  I use HeySpread to cheaply send my videos to the sites I choose, then I input those urls into Vidmetrix and track them there.  That way I get stats from the life of the videos, nicely added up for me.

I recommend HeySpread’s video upload service and Vidmetrix’s tracking service but not HeySpread’s tracking service or Vidmetrix’s upload service.

As a quick for instance, my thoughts today are dedicated toward those who fancy themselves “journalists” or “public information gatherers.”  Sometimes people like this are extremely helpful and break stories the mainstream media won’t or can’t break.  They research a car dealer for example and find that the company purposely tinkers with engines to ensure frequent service appointments.  I am totally fine with that.  It’s the “activists” who don’t know what they’re doing that bother me.

I’ll give one fast example.  A Twitter user who purports to be a consumer activist sees a young looking man in a bar drinking a beer.  That user immediately posts a Twitter blurb “warning” locals that the bar serves to underage kids.

An uproar results.  The bar’s patronage drops and given the rough economy, closes within months.

The problem?  The young-looking guy is legitimately 26 years old and the claim is completely false.  A writer with ethics would have tried to verfiy the person’s age before slandering the establishment.  Instead this “activist” forced a law-abiding company to suffer great harm while the bar across town that really does cater to underage kids keeps enjoying business as usual.

My point to all this is, ask questions.  You might see something that puts a beep in your radar, but make sure it’s actually legit before shouting from the rooftops.  You’ll have more credibility and serve the public good without harming people who don’t deserve it.

1) If uploading through their site, the upload always stopped at 99% and would never complete.  This was in just about every browser on  Mac and Windows machines on high speed.

2) By using an outside service I finally got a video uploaded and they rejected it because I put my url at the end.  You’re apparently not allowed to even do that for fear a viewer might not click one of Revver’s ads.  This alone makes the whole thing useless to me because sometimes I have to put an address for people to get more information.

So, if you are willing to use an outside service to upload (like HeySpread), don’t want anyone to visit you or pay any attention to you once they’ve viewed your video and instead want them to avoid you and go right to your competition, Revver might be for you.  For most other people and certainly any business, probably not.

1.  I hated their control panel.  The panel was very slow to load a lot of the time and while its simplicity may appeal to some people, I wanted a lot more.

2.  When I canceled my account, they refused to give me a partial refund.  For this reason alone I wouldn’t recommend them, because most companies will refund the part of your fee that you didn’t end up using.  Lunarpages just keeps it, even if you only used the service for two months – they keep the other ten month’s worth.

Otherwise it was an okay service and some might have a good time with them.  I wouldn’t use them again for the control panel issue but if you are absolutely sure you’ll be with them for the entire term you sign up for, you might not have problems.

Though not as bad in the uptime department as Mosso, Siteground’s servers did have a very frequent habit of simply going to sleep.  The site would go down for hours, the secure server certificate wouldn’t work or email would go down for no reason.  Plus they were charging more than they needed to for add-on services.

After I moved my client away, Siteground still had the secure server certificate account.  When it came time to renew, the client paid for another year of the cert.  Siteground responded by applying the money to someone we’d never heard of and told us that since we didn’t have hosting, we couldn’t get support for any other add-ons, even if they were paid for.

Well that’s moronic so I raised a little hell and Siteground refunded the money, which I used to go directly through Geotrust.

I’m not sure they have any idea what they’re doing.  Certainly not recommended.

I went ahead and moved the company site to their Mosso account and the nightmare began.  I’ve been on free web hosts from 1999 that ran better.  There was frequent downtime, with the site going down on average once a week, sometimes for several hours or longer.  The Mosso status blog’s favorite words were:  “php degraded.”  Numerous phone calls only gave us the same excuse – that other websites were hogging resources and Mosso just had to wait for them to come along and then they’d try to handle them.

Every phone call also gave us another line:  that Mosso was implementing procedures to handle all sorts of traffic so php degradation didn’t happen again.  I later came across a person who’d been on Mosso and been told the same thing – two years earlier.  Through this of course we learned that we weren’t on anything close to even a semi-private server.

After another half day of lost sales I was given permission to move and I did so with gusto.

I’ve tried out a lot of hosts and No Monthly Fees at their early worst was better than Mosso.  I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone.