As a web devloper working remotely is pretty much assumed. I have several projects going, and managing them can get a little crazy. Working on my own, and typically by the hour, I can not skip out on tracking my minutes. Forget hours, I track minutes. Way too often I am stuck doing a little five minute job, one that you could not honestly charge an hour for, and in the past I used to just say don’t worry about it. Not! I won’t make any money that way. So I track all my minutes now, and if you are a contractor working with many clients I would say drop what your doing right now, and set up a method to track your minutes.

Do More Than Track Time

Besides just tracking your time, if you are not doing this already, is to track your projects progress. Take advantage of all the project management sites out there. A project management software or service can not only track your time, but create an excellent, professional, method of keeping in communication with your client. It also lets them easily see how the project is going, and potentially add new tasks. I always like to find the extra job in their.

Easy Projects has an nice platform for their collaboration software,  and additionally offer a free 15 day trial period if you want to just try it out. It’s ideal for tracking. Another site, Celoxis, offers a great project management tool. They also offer a free trial period of 30 days. Could be the way to go if you have a quick project. Whatever you decide to do, if you are not tracking already, start tracking now more accurately now. Your now working for free are you?

Tools contractor, manage, project, track

Hey, I actually found a hosting review site that does not list Host Monster as number two. In fact they don’t even have Host Monster on their list at all. They are called Web Hosting Union, and they do business web hosting reviews. Not all hosting companies are designed for the same thing, and a site that is made for your business could benefit by being on a hosting site designed for business, not the casual user.

The number one business hosting company was Lunar Pages, see Lunarpages Hosting Review. The reviews are based on speed, uptime, ease of use, and customer service. Lunarpages offers a pretty huge amount of disk space, 1,500 gb, and even more for bandwidth, 15,000 gb per month. There is no set up fee, and only costs $7.95 a month.

Looking at their basic package they had three different shopping cart platforms pre-installed, and also included a free SSL certificate. Those are some pretty good reasons to consider business specific hosting sites.

Web Hosting Union updates their reviews weekly, and their reviews are not for profit done by web hosting experts.

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So I have been looking at a bunch of websites that rate hosting services. UpperHost is yet another one, see their best web hosting ratings to see how they have rated everyone. While I was looking at all these hosting review sites, I found one very common similarity, Host Monster.

UpperHost has rated Bluehost as number one as far as they are concerned, see bluehost hosting review, but their number two ranked host was Host Monster. What’s the big deal? Well, when I look at many other host rating sites, they all seem to have their own different favorites for the number one spot, but Host Monster always seems to get the number two spot. Comparing BlueHost to Host Monster, personally Host Monster seems to be the better pick. Both are comparable for services, but the one thing I like more about Host Monster is that they pre-install a ton of the common services that you might want, like Joomla, polling software, or Wordpress.

Another selling point for Host Monster is really just their customer base. They are currently hosting nearly a half a million sites. Getting a high rating like they typically do combined with such a large customer base really confirms their quality of service, and their pricing. I might just have to check them out when I set up my next domain.

Here is the review of Host Monster that UpperHost gave.

Hardware, Websites and Blogs bluehost, host monster, hosting, review