Slamdot Aims To Take The Pain Out Of Webhosting For You

Slamdot aims to take the pain out of web hosting for you. All your account functions are available from a central dashboard which is really easy to get used to. What impressed me was that the information which is most important to each relevant section of the account is displayed in the right sidebar, making navigating quicker than usual.

Some of the special features that Slamdot has are -

completely integrated billing, support, hosting, and domain management
ability to manage multiple hosting plans (great for web design clients)
built-in FastCGI control so you can restart Rails applications
The hosting provider’s state of the art servers are located in the SoftLayer datacenter near Dallas, TX. The RAID servers come with at least 2GB of RAM and all data is backed up nightly. See here for a full set of hosting features and signing up for their web hosting service.

Right, now let’s have a look inside. You dashboard is where you can do all of your billing and account-related management, clicking through to the main plan management you see a tabbed interface which is very…well 2.0 if you will. Each tab has their own respective sub categories to further manage your hosting plan.

The hosting control panel shows you the amount of bandwidth and disk space you have used and how much you have left, handy information to always know for customers. You can jump to the most important areas straight away from the welcome page, which can save you a lot of time if you have many domains to manage or work as a hosting manager.



My one main gripe that I’ve always had with my current host is the absolutely retarded way of collecting stats. Instead of showing me unique visitors, they show me the number of server requests each of my visitors has made. Which in effect makes for totally useless stats. Slamdot though does things differently.

The first thing you see when you click on “Website” are your web stats and you are greeted by an Alexa chart for your domain, along with a month by month comparison, followed by a daily visit log of unique and total visitors. It also shows the amount of data transferred. You can see more detailed stats by clicking on the “Webalizer Stats” button. More help is only a search away.

Each hosting plan offers you a bunch of features, at $11 a month the Personal plan gives you the option to host up to 3 websites, MySQL databases, domain pointers, subdomains, email accounts, FTP accounts and more. Which if I look at it comes out around a $1 cheaper than where I currently host. But I have to say the ease of use makes the price I pay seem much much higher. Though personally I wouldn’t host 2 websites on one plan itself, let alone 3.

Uploading files via Slamdot’s file manager is very easy, you simply click on the directory you want to upload to and browse for your file to upload and do it, that’s it.

Advanced Features

Going into the advanced features, you see a bunch of options, again the ease of use in navigation was just very pleasing. From manging your databases, backups, Perl Modules, FastCGI and Cron Jobs. Setting up an SSL will need you to get a dedicated IP, which costs an extra $1 month.
More at:http://www.slamdot.com/
Via-http://www.everybodygoto.com/

User Generated Captiond Video

dotSUB provides users to create captions for online videos. After uploading a video to dotSUB's website, it’s first transcribed in the original language. Sentence by sentence, a user can then translate the resulting text into his or her own language. Subtitles are automatically imbedded in the video and can be viewed on dotSUB in everything from Korean to Ukrainian. The system also allows for collaborative captioning on a single video. If a work is still in progress, the amount of speech that's been subtitled is displayed (e.g. Italian 12%), and other users can pitch in to finish the work. Like Wikipedia, anyone can edit or add to the captions.

Project ReadOn which is like this but it doesn't embed captions, showing them in a separate frame instead. While ReadOn's captions are rendered in large type and therefore easy on the eyes, they're prone to falling out of sync with videos, since both are loaded separately.

As web video's popularity continues to grow, making it accessible to both the hearing impaired and speakers or students of other languages is a worthy cause that could grow into a substantial niche market. One to look into if you're involved with online media, accessibility or education.

More at: www.dotsub.com — www.projectreadon.com
Via-Springwise

Dollors Diggers

About: Hip-hop community website and e-newsletter
Who started it: Felicia Palmer and Steven Samuel of SOHH.com
Location: Jersey City, New Jersey
When: Started in 1993
Startup costs: Less than $500

A lot has changed for Felicia Palmer and Steven Samuel since they started SOHH.com in 1993. Back then, the site was known as Support Online Hip-Hop and was simply a place where the two could post newsletters and run an online bulletin board about hip-hop music and the community. Using Samuel's home computer, they built the site themselves from scratch. "We picked up a book on HTML and pretty much figured out how to launch the site in a week," Samuel, 35, says.

Now SOHH.com is a vibrant urban media company boasting 2006 sales of more than $1.5 million. Palmer says the company owes its growth to word-of-mouth popularity and a resurgent interest in online companies from advertisers after the dotcom bust. "We never really spent any money [on marketing]," says Palmer, 37. It was unique and interesting content, such as hip-hop awards when the hip-hop scene was still emerging, that drove visitors to SOHH.com--and kept them coming back.
More at:http://www.sohh.com/
Via-Entrepreneur