McKremie Web Hosting is now offering a free domain name with the purchase of any of our 12-month or 24-month web hosting plans. This is not a limited time offer; this will be part of our standard options going forward. The free domain name applies to the following extensions:

.com

.net

.org

.info

Most of our new customers are starting a website for the first time. This will help them by saving about $10.00 per year in domain registration fees. This is all backed by our 24/7 US-based customer support. If you are not failure with out web hosting features here is a small list:

- 24/7 US-Based Customer Support (Phone & Email)

- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee

- 90-Day Money-Back Guarantee

- #1 Control Panel – cPanel

- PHP, CGI, Ruby, Perl, MySQL

- Unlimited E-Mail Accounts

- Wordpress

- Drupal

- Ruby (RoR)

More feature can be found here: http://www.mckremie.com/hosting.php

I know everyone in their mother has a list of good FireFox add-ons but I would like to share the top 7 FireFox Add-ons that we use here at McKremie.com.  We deal with DNS issues, mutliple websites, and other issues and these add-ons really save us tons of time.  We all have our favorites and these are in no puticulare order.  This list complments the social media tools that will make life easier, if you haven’t checked them out have a look.

1) ShowIP

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/590

Show the IP address(es) of the current page in the status bar. It also allows querying custom information services by IP (right mouse button) and hostname (left mouse button), like whois, netcraft. Additionally you can copy the IP address to the clipboard.  This is very helpful for anyone that works with DNS issues or SEO.  It is by far the most effient way to get the websites IP address without having to run a look-up.

2) SEO ToolBar by SEO Book

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results.  Inlcudes information about Google PageRank, website age pulled from Archive.org, Yahoo! linkdomain information, number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us, Technorati information, ALexa Information, directory listings and whois information. 

3) Domain Details

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2166

This one overlaps with a few of the others but has some great functions.  Displays Server Type, Headers, IP Address, Location Flag, and links to Whois Reports.

4) Screengrab

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146

It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame, basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard.  This add-on will save you so much time if you don’t have it you are really missing out.  With this add-on you can grab screenshots or pictures within secounds.

5) Social Media for Firefox

URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7888

6) Update Scanner

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3362

Monitors web pages for updates. Useful for websites that don’t provide Atom or RSS feeds. This tool is great for following compeditors and catching when a website changes their homepage.
You can select how often each site will be scanned and minor changes can be ignored, like date, time and whatnot.

7) User Agent Switcher

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.  View the current page as in a different browser (IE, Opera, NetScape). This comes in handy when you want to check for Cross Browser Compatibility issues.

In the modern digital age there is no more valuable method of self-expression than the Blog. The Internet has become the source of informational revolution, a place where ideas and dreams collide, forming a unique opportunity to expose the truth of who we as humans are to each other. A completely new and unique idea, The Kizzog, introduces children to this powerful medium. The Kizzog offers the opportunity to communicate and interact in the digital age of now and beyond. Below are 50 reasons YOUR child should have, and will benefit from a Kizzog Kids Blog. read more»

We just started our 20% Off Spring Break Special.  This promotion will run for a few weeks only and can save you big bucks!Just use the coupon code below and save 20% Off your initial order of our web hosting services.

Coupon Code: SPRING

Tip: The coupon code is good off of the initial order only so save money buy paying up-front for your web hosting needs.  The coupon code will work for our prepaid 12-month and 24-month hosting plans.

*20% Off only applies to web hosting services and does not apply to domain names or other services we offer.

We (McKremie) just conducted an audit of our support tickets to give our potential customers an idea of how our response times are.  We went through the support tickets for January and February to see how fast or slow our team has been responding to tickets.  It took a little time but we went through the data and were quite pleased.

First off we knew that the response times have been good as myself and the management team often monitor tickets that comes through our Helpdesk.  But, I didn’t have an exact response time just a few estimations.  Anyway, I’m happy to report that our average response time for web hosting issues is 7.5 minutes.  What does this mean to our customers and potential customers?  If you need to contact our support team you can expect a response on average in a little over 7 minutes.  (currently) Our fastest response time was 2 minutes and our slowest response time was 17 minutes.

Not too bad for a 24/7 operation!

We have been on Twitter for a little while now and wanted to let our blog readers know how to find us.

@McKremie – Official Twitter Account for McKremie Web Hosting.

Twitter is an amazing social network that has been gaining huge popularity over the past few years.  I personally check and tweet a few times per day.  If you have a twitter account please send us a tweet @McKremie so I can add you to our followers list.  It’s also a great place for anyone that might have questions about McKremie to reach out to myself and the team.

We will be having a few Twitter contest from time to time so ensure you are following us to get all the details.

The past few months I had the opportunity to give a few interviews online. I have listed links to the interview below so readers can check them out.

Interviewed by Joedel Sanvictores:
Joedel Sanvictores is an internet marketing expert based in the Philippines. He is very involved with search engine optimization as well just about all aspects of the word wide web.
December 9, 2008 – Interview of McKremie President

Interviewed by Mike Lugar:
Mike Lugar is a young internet entrepreneur who owns a computer services business in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
October 30, 2008 – Interview with McKremie, LLC Co-founder

I enjoy the online interviews and it’s always nice talking with new people and answering questions about McKremie, LLC. Over the past few months we have had some good publicity about some of the new services we launched. Within the next week we are getting ready to launch another new product and are very excited about it.

On November 23, 2008 at 10:00 PM PST we updated our ticket support system with new and improved software. We strive to find better ways to help our customers and our old support ticket software was OK but not great. It lacked some functions that we really need like;

1) ability to move tickets between departments
2) ability to assign tickets to a specific staff member
3) ability to suggest knowledgebase articles

There are other reasons but the above mentioned were are main criteria. We were able to close most of the open support tickets with our old system prior to the software switch. Those that had tickets opened 24 hours later on the 24th of November had new tickets created as we turned off the old system at that time. We are happy to report that the transition was smooth and the new support software is working great.

The main support URL has changed to this one here. I recommend to all our clients to bookmark this page for future reference. You can also access the support department via any page of our website in the top navigation.

There are plenty of people out there who have tons of experience in building web sites from scratch. They understand how to quickly install scripts and make sure everything looks good to the website’s visitors. But, what if you aren’t one of these people? What if you are someone who knows that they want to build a website or blog but you aren’t sure that you have the time (or the patience) to learn how to properly install the scripts you need? If you are one of these people, there are two things you need to know:

1) you are not alone and

2) it was for you that Fantastico was developed!

Fantastico was developed by the team at Netenberg–the same team who introduced Take 4, AccountLab Plus and Controller to Internet users. Fantastico, now known as Fantastico De Luxe, is an auto installer that was created to allow web users to install a large variety (40+) of web scripts with just a few clicks. Fantastico offers users easy installation of all of the following:

Blogs (Wordpress)
Content Management Systems
Classifieds
Customer Support Systems
Discussion Boards
E-Commerce Platforms
Billing Software
Image Galleries
Mailing Lists
Polls
Project Managers
Site Builders
Surveys
Wikis

All web users need is to find a web hosting provider that already has Fantastico (McKremie) installed and they can have a fully functional website up and running in minutes. Fantastico has truly become a godsend for those who do not have the time or motivation to learn how to do the complicated coding that they’d be facing if they were to try and install each of these scripts without the help of an auto-installer.

All of this makes Fantastico sound almost too good to be true. The truth is that there are a few (not many) drawbacks to Fantastico as well. The biggest drawback is that Fantastico does not give users a choice when it comes to deciding which features of a particular script they would like to install. It simply installs the most recent version of the script it has in its library. This can lead to problems later on when a script is updated or upgraded and it takes the Fantastico team a while to upload the latest version of the script to their service. Another large drawback comes from the ease in which installation can occur. Users who aren’t careful could end up accidentally uninstalling a script just as quickly as it was originally installed. This could be disastrous for users who do not regularly back up their web sites.

The most popular use of Fantastico for our hosting clients is to install Wordpress. For those who are interested in installing Wordpress on a McKremie hosting account all they need to do is:

1) Login to their cPanel account

2) Find the icon that says “Fantastico De Luxe” and click it

3) Click on Wordpress icon or link and press install now button

4) In this next screen it will ask what directory you want the blog software installed in. If your website is a blog and or you want your blog to be the main entry page then you don’t have to enter anything into the directory field. Fantastico will automatically install the software on the top level of your domain.

i.e. www.yourdomain.com

However, if you want the blog to be an extension of your website then you need to specific that directory. (also know as a folder)

i.e. www.yourdomain.com/blog/

Once the installation process is over you will see confirmation that you successfully installed Wordpress. You will be given a chance to have your username and password emailed to an email address that you specify.