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Forums For Your Use
Forums are helpful websites where you can ask questions and interested people offer answers, often within a few hours (smaller forums may take longer). Sometimes they’re wrong and often they’re not thorough, but often they’re good starting points when you’re trying to solve a problem. Generally, you should have made reasonable attempts first, mainly by looking up official literature, Googling to see if your question was already answered, and trying your hand (within safety and good sense) at solving the problem yourself. Don’t yell at these people and don’t write subject lines like “Help!! It’s broken!! You’re stupid.”, because the people answering don’t have to answer and don’t owe you much, even if the forum is at the firm whose product you’re asking about. Draft your subject so they can see at a glance what the problem is and write your question to show what you tried and what exactly is failing to work. If something works sometimes and fails sometimes, try to figure out the circumstances under which it always fails, because that’s easier to solve.
I don’t have a forum now, but here are some from several other websites (the URLs as accessed ):
- Web Hosting Talk
- ForumWeb.Hosting (open the Forums menu at the top)
- Digital Point
- Hosting Discussion
- WebHostingChat
- TopHosts
- HostSearch Forums
- C|Net
- Several fora on different aspects are available at Stack Exchange, including:
- ** Server Fault
- ** Webmasters Stack Exchange (Pro Webmasters)
- ** Information Security Stack Exchange
- For Australia: Web Hosting Talk Australia
- For the United Kingdom: Web Host Chat (scroll mainly to Other Hosting Forums)
- I don’t think free hosting is feasible unless there’s someone else’s advertising on your website and you’re not being paid for that, but here’s a forum about it: Free Web Hosting Talk
News of the Hosting Industry
We don’t generally provide industry news, but here are websites that offer some, although some stories seem to be mainly from press releases and not from independent journalism, so you should read with care, although generally excluded are news sites provided by Web hosts, being competitors and likely biased:
- The WHIR (Web Host Industry Review) (as accessed )
- CSO (as accessed )
- ITBusiness (as accessed )
- The Hacker News (as accessed )
- The Hosting News (as accessed )
- Web Hosters (as accessed )
- WebhostingDiscussion (as accessed )
- The Webmaster (as accessed )
- Overlapping but less relevant: Data Center Knowledge (as accessed )
- A security firm has a newsletter that’s relatively lightweight, probably because its motivation is to sell products, and they tell about threats but not in depth, but it may be interesting: Naked Security by Sophos (as accessed )
- For more wide-ranging coverage of security, see:
- ** The legendary Bruce Schneier’s website (as accessed )
- ** Krebs on Security (as accessed )
Staff, Consultants, and Personal Advice
Small organizations can’t afford any specialized staff and large organizations will have many specialized staff. If your organization is in between, even a wonderful Web host may not be enough, since they want to keep all of your hosting business and also have you come to them for all other services they offer, when that may not be the best choice for you. An expert consultant who makes a living from you just for advice that’s in your interest can be trustworthy and helpful, and can cost less than even one full-time staffer. As your needs and your budget grow, you can add staff as it becomes worth the expense. You don’t have to, so you should do it only if it will contribute to your profits (or surplus for a nonprofit) or if it enhances your mission accomplishments.
I haven’t done much personal consulting and I doubt I have enough expertise for technically-proficient prospective clients. However, many professional consultants can be found on the Web and through other sources. If you still might want me to consult with you, please feel free to ask me. My postal and email addresses are on the contact page.