The first is limited to the first 5 signups, when entering the code LIMITED08 during the order process it gives 50% off the plan costs for the life of the account.

The second is running to the end of January 09 and gives 10% off the plan costs for the life of the account when entering the code XMAS08 during the order process.

All plans:

• Are on servers which are not oversold.
• Can be hosted in the US or UK, you choose at sign up.
  They are our servers not just reseller accounts on some other companies servers.
• Include Email Virus and spam scanning.
• Hosted on servers with redundant storage.
• Provide a web based control panel (cPanel) and include Fantastico (easy install of a range of free scripts).
• Utilise R1Soft Continuous Data Protection, that is an off server backup of the account data is made every hour.
• Provide stats packages for monitoring site traffic.
• Have Zend Framework preinstalled for those requiring it.
• Have FFmpeg installed for those requiring it.
• Allow cron jobs.
• Provide PHP 5 and MySQL 5, including PDO MySQL.

Full plan details and ordering can be found at http://www.tolranet.co.uk/webhosting.html

We also have an affiliate scheme where by a percentage of each sale is paid the the referring affiliate.

Any questions can be directed to our help desk.

Affiliates are provided with the HTML for various premade ads which can then be placed on the affiliates website. When clicked the affiliate is credited for the click and if the visitor purchase from web hosting or a script from TOLRA the affiliate is credited with the commission fee.

For every web hosting signup or script purchase the affiliate account will be credited with 20% of the customers first invoice.

More information can be found in our forums at http://forums.tolranet.com/showthread.php?t=240

Then when you are ready to get started as an affiliate visit https://www.tolranet.com/affiliates/

10% off for the life of the plan with the code: WHTOCT0810

or

50% off your initial invoice with the code: WHTOCT0850

ORDER NOW!.

Example:
BUSINESS-1 plan
300MB RAID Disk Space
15GB Bandwidth per month
Normally = £8.50 per month

Special Applied:
£7.65 per month for the life of the plan with WHTOCT0810
£4.25 for the 1st month then £8.50 per month after that with WHTOCT0850

All our packages include:

• All our web servers utilise hardware RAID arrays and Continuous Data Protection technology from R1Soft in order to protect your data. We retain 8 weekly recovery points, 14 daily recovery points and 48 hourly recovery points.
• Choice of hosting your site in the UK or in the US.
• cPanel and Fantastico.
• ZEND Framework is preinstalled on all servers.
• Linux servers running either RedHat or CentOS.
• Free transfer from existing hosts.

TOLRA have been providing personal, small business & corporate shared web hosting since 2003.

All prices are excluding VAT at 17.5%.

Both directories get a mix of submissions from individual site owners as well as from companies set up to promote web sites, the logical thinking would be that those submissions coming from professional promotion companies would be near perfect.

The unfortunate reality appears to be that some of these promotion companies are being paid to do a job yet they fail to even use common sense in the execution of this work, an example would be the submission of a used cars site to artweblinks.com, obviously not appropriate. To put it in plain English the site owner pays the promotion company to promote their site, the promotion company submits the site to an inappropriate directory and the directory discards the listing, the net result is the site owner has gained nothing but a bill.

The other failure we see is in the title and description text, there’s obviously those that keyword stuff and for free submissions they go directly to the bin, but many fail to use the description to it’s full. Experience tells us that using a description of the absolute minimum length results in the listing having a lower chance of being indexed by search engines than one submitted using a well formed descriptive sentence using all or most of the permissible space. This being the case then my feeling is the promotion companies should be writing unique descriptions for their clients that not only fulfil the requirements of the directory but also entice visitors to the site being listed.

Part of the problem is undoubtedly submission companies offering to submit a site to thousands of directories for a few dollars the other is companies deciding to offer SEO as an extra without putting the effort in required to fully understand the marketing of a site. As far as I’m concerned a site has to be marketed as a whole, that is usability, appeal to the target audience along with both on site and off site optimisations, there are marketing people on myJournal that can explain site marketing far better than I can.

So what’s the point of this other than a rant, well it’s to remind people who want their sites promoted not to waste their money on shoddy services by blindly going with companies that promise the earth, not all SEO companies are equal or performing the same work. Ask questions, for example when submitting to directories will they simply use the text you give them or will they actually take the time to craft a professional description for your site to maximise its exposure, are they just link building or optimising your content and probably most importantly do the people doing the work have a complete grasp of the language your site is being promoted in. Don’t be affraid to ask for examples of their work.

I looked at various collaboration software but these generally had significantly more functionality than was needed, in the end I stumbled upon FolderShare from Microsoft.

It is extremely simple to setup and use, simply create a folder on your hard disk to share, map a FolderShare library to it and invite others to share the library. Once configured copying a file to the shared folder causes that file to be copied to all other participants of the shared folder.

Microsoft don’t often impress me but in this case they seem to have produced a lightweight solution that does exactly what it says it should and does it well

FolderShare doesn’t have any of the bells and whistles associated with collaboration suites, for example it won’t notify you of updates or provide a history of who edited which files, so while it may not be suitable for all applications it is worth a look if you need a simple way of sharing files between people.

For TOLRA this signals an end to support for PHP4 within our software products, we will now be concentrating on PHP5 and looking towards the new PHP6.

Our web hosting offerings will now no longer be supporting PHP4, with new server deployments being PHP5 only and PHP4 being removed from existing servers. As we have been notifying clients of this change for many months and helping them migrate where necessary the removal of PHP4 should go unnoticed.

For those still using PHP4 then there’s a migration guide at http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.php