Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Finding the right web host

We all know that...well, all of us still in business know that anyway......in order to keep a business going these days you've got to have a presence on the web.

You don't have to be running your whole business on the web, this is true. You don't have to be selling over the web, or to be servicing your customers that way, but you do at least need to have a presence, a reference site.

And of course you can actually service your customers, sell to them, over the web as well. What you want to do is really up to you: and is of course contrained by the real world. A business which sold bridges over the web wouldn't be all that successful while one that sold MP3 files certainly could be. But even so, a bridge building company will need a web presence just to let people know where they can go to get bridges.

Once we've decided what we're going to do online then we need to decide who is going to host it. If all you need is a static site with a bit of email for your bridge building company then one host or type of host may be all you need. If you're going to be selling MP3s then a whole host of different matters come into play. Bandwidth, reliability, how quickly can you expand servers and memory, all these sorts of things. Which is where vps hosting might be worth looking at.

It's a sorta half way stage between a shared server and a dedicated one. You get the interface, the access to the nuts and bolts of the machine, of a dedicated server but still running on a shared server. the detail of one system and the cheapness and flexibility of the other.

Worth checking out.

The Danielle Staub sextape

So, things aren't working out all that well for Danielle Staub at present.

She's been booted off the reality show, Real Housewives of New Jersey....partly because it's now surfaced that there's a Danielle Straub sextape out there.

And this sextape comes only a couple of days after the revelation of a drug and prostitution soaked past.

All of which is really rather sad I think. for if we're going to have a reality TV show then we probably should have one that includes, you know, reality. And yes, there really are a number of women of a certain age who in their youth did other things. So why should this reality not be shown on a reality TV show?

I guess there's always the possibility that this is too much reality....

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Private tutoring has never been so cheap

One of the things that economist are puzzled about is that no one is really quite sure what people are going to use the internet for. Sure, we know it's a great big new technology, just like electricity, mass production or the train was. But just as when those were first invented, what people actually use it for is unknown.

Why this matters is because we're not really sure which industries are going to be over turned by it. One bet, one that really hasn't quite been grasped as yet, is that it will be education that is transformed. If you can learn everything you need to over the net, with one to one instruction when needed, videos of lectures at other times, or with online textbooks, what's the point of having to go to a school each day?

And there are services springing up which show how this can be done. For example, need tutoring on Algebra 2? Can't quite grasp 5th grade math? Need some help in adding fractions? Maybe it's the formula for volume which is your problem?

Now, OK, that's just maths....but this one company will give you all the tutoring any one child or pupil desires, 24/7, in any and every subject they cover, for just $99 a month. Add that sort of tutoring to a decent set of textbooks and why would anyone be spending $12,000 a year per child on the public schools? You can get a better education for one tenth of the cost!

It really is possible that the major industry that will be overturned by the internet isn't newspapers, or movies, but education.