First thing I did last year was to check in on the site to verify that my credit card information are correct. Which they were, not a huge surprise considering that I have not used or changed the data in one year’s time. Next thing I try is to make a manual payment on the Wiredtree Grove website, with the same result.

I get the dreaded authorization failed error on the page. That’s bad, considering that delays in payment of the invoice could mean that the server Ghacks is running on could be taken offline by the company until a payment clears.

So what can I do? I call the Mastercard hotline in my country where I have to wait a good ten minutes or so before I have to go through a ridiculous authorization process (card number, name, birthday, address, three digits of the linked bank account number). I then get the following explanation (every year, actually more often as I sometimes buy expensive stuff on the Internet, have to call them all the time).

Mastercard has an automatic fraud detection system in place that blocks payments that break a pattern or look suspicious. My payment to the web hosting company Wiredtree is apparently looking like a fraudulent payment. The only possible explanation that I have for this is that it is a four-digit payment to a foreign country. The service agent offers to disable the fraud protection for the next 24 hours or 3 days so that I can make the payment.

I’m curious and want to know if there is a way to whitelist select companies, but that is apparently not possible. The system is also not capable of learning from past year’s payments. I mean, I pay the hoster once a year at the same time. Should not an automatic system be able to come to the conclusion that the payment is legit if it happened in past years as well?

I ask the agent about options. The only option for me to make sure that the automatic payment gets through is to call them a day earlier to remove the automatic fraud checking for three days from the account. That’s ridiculous, don’t you think? To make things worse, you have to pay for that call.

Have you ever had problems with your credit card and online payments? Let me know in the comments. Oh, and hosting for Ghacks is paid in full for a whole year, so no worries in this regard. Until next year, that is.

It is relatively easy to check for whois information, which may give you information about the domain’s registrar, and more importantly, the name of the registrant, administrative and technical contacts. It is a good sign if those match.

But what about finding out where a website is hosted? You could look up the IP of the website and look at the company who owns that IP range, but that is rather complicated and not as speedy as the following option.

The website Who Is Hosting This offers an online service that will give you information about the company that is hosting a website. Why would you want those information? If you are like me, you’d like to verify the seller’s claims. But you could also use it if you are a webmaster and stumble upon a super fast loading site, or if you want to contact the hosting company, for instance if the website in question is infringing on copyright.

All you need to do to find out where a website is hosted, is to enter the website’s url into the form on the service’s frontpage. A click on Search displays the results after a short scan on the next page.

The screen displays a thumbnail image of the website and the hosting company prominently. The latter with a link to its web page, if available.

Listed on the page are furthermore the website’s IP address, name servers and links to futher details. This includes Whois lookup, DMCA Takedown and the BuiltWith website.

The whois links directly to the registrar’s whois page, DMCA Takedown to a service that sets you back $99 for filing a DMCA notice, monitoring the site for removal, filing a DMCA with major search engines and preservation of the evidence trail.

Built With finally displays technical information about a website. This includes server information, advertising, analytics and tracking or frameworks used.

Who Is Hosting This is a nice to have service. It works really well for most domain lookups. I have tested it with US-based and German domains. The links to the company websites are not working all the time, especially if a parent company is listed and not the hosting company. Users can add webhost urls in this case to fix that issue, provided that they know the host. If they do not they still need to research the company on a search engine like Bing and Google for that information.

There are several web hosting directories, but as one example, http://www.webhostdir.com/ works like this. At the very top of the home page are two tabs, one for “Web Hosting” and the other for “Dedicated Server.” If you don’t yet know whether your businesses website will require a dedicated server, chances are good that it will not. Most business websites are small enough that shared web hosting offers adequate services for their website needs.

Underneath those two tabs is another row of tabs: Home, Web Host Search, Request a Quote, Web Hosting News, Guides, Hosting Forums, and Web Host Awards. The hosting forums are where you’ll find a lot of firsthand knowledge about what works and what doesn’t in web hosting. This is where the clients get together to discuss their web hosting experiences and to ask questions. You can sign up to participate in the hosting forums, but before you start posting, you should go through the FAQ section to see what answers are already available, and to learn the dos and don’ts of participating.

After looking through a hosting directory, and maybe participating in forums, you may have a good idea which hosting company you want to use. The directory will give you contact information for web hosts, and this is valuable information in your search. You should be able to go to your short list of web hosts with your requirements for disk space, bandwidth, and amount of traffic you need it to handle, and from their responses you’ll be able to gauge a bit about the web hosting culture at different hosting vendors as well as their eagerness to answer your questions and help you find the right hosting package.

In addition to presenting your needs in a web host, you should also ask hosting providers about basic things like how long they’ve been in business, and what methods of customer support they employ. Between these factors, your needs, your budget, and what you’ve learned from hosting forums, you should be able to make a wise choice in hosting providers. A web hosting directory can be your key to sifting through the many companies out there to find the one that suits your needs best.

The upload limits are 250 Megabytes for video files and 50 Megabytes for mp3 and images. The user guide is still speaking of a 2 Gigabyte limit per user which contradicts the information on the homepage of the service most likely because the user guide has not been updated with the new information.

The options offered by Oosah surely look nice. Besides the storage capacities the service offered Flickr, Youtube, Facebook and Picasa integration, an iPhone client, playlists, galleries, slideshows, public and private sharing and a easy to use web interface.

A new announcement on the homepage and on the blog seem to suggest that the developers did not expect the popularity of the service: Uploads have been disabled temporarily and Flickr integration disabled.

That problem is homemade on the other hand. The Internet has seen multiple services that made a huge announcement and could not live up to their promises because of the massive media coverage and exponential user increase.

The insight from the situation should be to make sure that the important data is backed up properly before rushing to new services.

Users have many different options to find files that are hosted on Rapidshare. Some of these methods include the use of specific Google search parameters that will only search Rapidhshare for the files and file types that the user specified in the search.

Other options include so called Rapidshare Search Engines which maintain their own database of files that are hosted at the file hoster. They usually keep the databases up to date and link directly to Rapidshare for easy file access.

There is another type of site that is offering Rapidshare searches, not nearly as effective as the sites that maintain their own database. So called Google custom search engines do nothing else than to combine the advanced search parameters of Google with a custom search engine that is bringing in revenue for the creator of the search engine. They can normally be identified by looking at the search button. If that button states Google Search you know that it is a custom Google search and not a website with its own database.

If you want to find Rapidshare files you can use the following Rapidshare search engines that all use their own database.

Rapidshare Files

• Rapidshare Search Engine [link]
• One Click Files[link]
• Mega Download [link]
• File Crop [link]
• Rapid TVPHP [link]
• Files Tube [link]
• Rapidzilla [link]
• RS Rapidshares [link]
• RS Find [link]
• Rapidshare Data [link]

It is easy to find hundreds of Rapidshare files search engines on the Internet but most of them provide no benefit over a normal Google search. Those ten websites in the list are unique.

I quickly contacted Sarah Perez who is in charge of the website and she told me the following. Her websites are all hosted at Dreamhost who closed down the account because of disputing credit card charges which Sarah had nothing to do with.

Now the funny thing is that you can only get the Dreamhost account access back if you send them a money order or check by postal mail for the amount of the chargebacks. The mail goes to a postbox address that Dreamhost seems to check twice a week.

Imagine that. You are a business owner and need your website and they check the frigging postbox twice week adding to the waiting time.

Support is unreachable it seems. She put in four support tickets and one complaint and tried to phone them but is only receiving voicemail. She cannot reach them no matter what she tries.

I hope everything sorts out soon. Things like that can throw a business back several months.

I wonder why all those companies shoot first. It would be so much better if they at least tried to contact the owner of the account before going on a rampage.

The captcha is made up of characters and animal images and the user is asked to fill in the four letters that have the image of a cat attached to them. The problem with that captcha however is that the animal images look really alike and it is damn hard to tell if you see a cat, a dog, a donkey or some other four-legged animal with a tail.

If you concentrate you can identify the cats and fill in the form. The problem is that a wrong answer will load yet another capture with and you have to start over again. I’m all for protection and anti-spam measures but this one is going to far in my opinion. There are better ways to implement captchas. What’s your take on that new captcha ?

The message that appears reads: “All download slots (number) assigned to your country (name) are in use. Several ways to bypass the country limit exist and I would like to explain two of them and hint to others that can also be used if the need arises. The first one has been around for a while. You do need to download the User Agent Switcher add-on for Firefox or edit the registry in Windows if you are using the Internet Explorer.
Firefox:

Click on Tools, User Agent Switcher and select Options.. Options from the menu. Click on User Agents in the new tab and then on ADD. It is only important to fill out the first two fields. Name the first any way you want, Megaupload for instance. Copy and Paste the following line in the second field.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Alexa Tool bar)

Internet Explorer:

I strongly advise to use Firefox instead but if you really want to do this in Internet Explorer you have to edit the registry. For IE7 and IE6 navigate to the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\InternetSettings\User Agent\Post Platform.

Right-Click Post Platform and select New String Value and name it Alexa Toolbar.

Firefox users need to switch to the User Agent that they have created before they click on a download link. Do this by clicking on Tools, User Agent Switcher and choosing the name (megaupload) that you entered during the creation.

The second method would be to enter the megaupload website indirectly by using a service that does not reveal where you are coming from. Two services that come to my mind are Google translate and anonym.to

I never experienced problems with the server and the price will blow most of you away I think, it is only 59 Euro a month with everything included. 59 Euros are about 70$ a month, still a bargain I’d say. Some of the services they offer are free phone support, 24/7 reset service, full root access (of course), 50 GB backup space, six IPs and much more. The link above is a link to their english page.

They offer three different kinds of rootservers besides the one that ghacks is hosted on. The cheapest for 29 Euros a month, the most expensive one for 79 Euros. I don’t think you can find a company that is able to compete with that, well not many at least.

You are free to choose one of the following linux operating systems when you setup the account:

32-Bit:

• Debian 3.1 min/LAMP
• Ubuntu 6.06 min SuSE 10.0 min/LAMP
• SuSE 10.1 min/LAMP

64-Bit:

• Debian 3.1 min/LAMP
• Ubuntu 6.06 min, CentOS 4.3 min SuSE 10.0 min/LAMP
• SuSE 10.1 min/LAMP

I can really recommend them..

Ryan divided the results into three different categories and named one or more winners for each category. Categories are for posting, viewership and editing. I don´t want to keep you waiting, winners for posting are Vimeo and Videoegg, for viewership Youtube and for editing Jumpcut.

Thanks for your patience, we will make some tests today to test the functions, if everything works out fine ghacks will be back to normal tomorrow. Expect some great changes soon.

Thanks for your understanding and support in this matter ;)

And while the links have been removed because they are no longer valid, the news have been kept as it is part of the site’s history.

Partnersites:

AMCP Blog give their impression on the Flock browser, a new browser which uses the same rendering engine as Mozilla Firefox. The Flock web browser is still available. Its developers have however moved the browser from using Mozilla’s Gecko engine to Google Chrome’s WebKit rendering engine instead. Then in April 2011 the browser was discontinued completely and developers suggested to switch to either Chrome or Firefox in the process.

Joe from Mybestgadgets reviews some interesting gadgets this week, among them is the Solar Flare Messenger Bag that trickle charges your electronic devices with solar energy. The Solar Flare Messenger Bag is still available on the Internet. It is available for around $160 Dollars on select sites. It can be used to charge electronic devices such as cell phones during commutes.

Other sites:

• Economist has a story about the battle of the portals, Why Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! are fighting over AOL. It turns out that AOL is still up and running, and that none of the mentioned companies has purchased the Internet company after all.
• Pc Mag published their list of the top 101 websites.
• Engadget unpacks the Ipod with Video, short review with lots of pictures. The iPod Video was a big thing back in 2005. Apple has released other devices in the meantime that have replaced the video iPod more or less. This includes the Apple iPhone, the iPad and newer versions of the iPod that is capable of playing music and video.