I have been exploring the business models behind blogging these last few months and have come across a few interesting thoughts that are made possible by affordable Web Hosts.

In particular I would like to cover Net Actuate formerly known as VR Hosted, but has recently changed its name to Actuate.

I was reviewing their pricing levels and saw that they offer web hosting of a 5 GB with one dedicated IP address and 10 add-on Domains for $10 per month.  In the blogging world that is $1 per month per blog for 10 blogs, that can readily earn several hundred dollars a month once established and running which takes just a few months to achieve. 

Plus, this base level account offers unlimited MySQL databases and unlimited subdomains.  All this means that users can grow their websites until they have a viable business and if they need extra storage now, in six months or a year from now, their earnings will easily cover an upgrade.

Now it doesn’t really stop there as they also offer a second level with 10GB of space, 20 add on domains for $15 per month, that’s something close to $9 per year per domain (of course this does not include the registration of the domain) but that is still a great deal.

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Digital cable has a great deal of promise but in many ways it has failed to deliver.  A decade ago as people were starting to transition from analog cell phones to digital cell phones in the states, many people rightly recognized that the digital phones were not as powerful or as good as their reliable analog phones.

The two phones ran on different systems and the chopped down nature of digital made the early sound quality sound rougher and in general the service was not as good.  The technology was really good for the carriers because they could now quadruple the number of calls that an antenna could carry from say 1,000 to 4,000.

Digital cable is supposed to deliver more channels to cable subscribers, just like digital cellular antennas could handle more calls.  The problem is that the digital packets often times get chopped up and don’t always make it back together again.

This week I have been watching the digital cable channel lottery as I watch one channel after the next fall victim to pixelation.  Its usually either Fox News or CNN and sometimes a few others, but this week it seems to be rotating through about two dozen channels through out the day.

If I am going to pay for 500 channels of nothing on I expect them to be clear and crisp and well watchable!

This isn’t the case and at times it is almost worthless to have a 24 hour news channel that you can not hear or see more than half of the time.  I currently have Comcast, but used to have a different problem with Dish, called rain storms that wiped out all of the channels for a couple hours every few days out of the month.

Until the cable companies can figure out that I do not need 100 more channels of nothing on, but I do want the first 500 or at least the first 100 to be viewable with some reliability, I am going to be very tempted to jump ship and take the first alternate option that comes along, just like we all learned to jump ship with our wireless carriers a decade ago, until we developed a cellular churn culture.

The cable companies are likely to learn very soon that digital TV can lead to a subscriber churn culture as well.

Technorati tags: Broken Technology Series, Digital Cable, Comcast, Dish, Pixelation, Why does my digital Cable look fuzzy

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Every time we go to the store to buy something we are paying for the product and the infrastructure and payroll that supports the store. Sometimes we need this infrastructure and the support of the staff, but sometimes when we are buying a replacement widget or an entire value pack of widgets we just need that support. Yet many of us still pay for it.

Our sponsor Ebates offers a unique solution to help us save more money during those times when we don’t need the help.

When people sign up through Ebates, they purchase products from stores like circuit city and others through the links and tools that Ebates provides. Ebates then receives that infrastructure/payroll like commission for the sale from the retailer and they pass part of it right back to you! So you could buy something at Circuit City and get a 25% rebate from Ebates.

Now maybe you need the service and support from Circuit City when you buy and install that all too complicated plasma TV, but when you are buying a DVD or headphones or an iPod, why pay a commission to the cashier when you could keep that commission in your wallet?

Technorati tags: Ebates

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