We provide web hosting and email services for roughly half of our web site clients at the moment. Now and again I’ll get questions from other web developers asking me what hosting provider we use and I always recommend the same one.

The best hosting solution for clients, and the one I always recommend you use, is whatever host the client currently has.

If a business is happy with their current web hosting and/or email provider there is no reason to switch unless there’s a valid technical limitation with the current setup. Isn’t that throwing money away though? Absolutely.

Email administration, for a web development business the size of our own, is the biggest time sink with the smallest return. Trust me when I say that the money you’ll earn through hosting will never equal the time and effort you’ll invest in providing tech support for email administration alone.

What if you need to take over web hosting and email in order to get a new client? The sites we’ve built and maintain are small enough that we can use one of the popular shared hosting providers like DreamHost or Media Temple. Most people either love or hate both of those companies and they both have had and will continue to have their ups and downs. In the end, they’re both pretty even. For a reasonable price, they offer great hosting options for small web developers.

A client recently bought a brand new digital camera and wanted to have a quick and easy way to resize the photos and make them more suitable for email.

Luckily, Microsoft has released a series of small programs for XP that they have strangely named PowerToys. One of these PowerToys is built exclusively for resizing images. After you download and install the program you’ll be able to instantly resize any image on your computer by right clicking the file and selecting “Resize Pictures” from the menu.

You’ll be presented with a selection of image sizes (or you can define your own) and when you are ready the PowerToy will make a resized copy of your original image in the same directory. You can resize multiple images by selecting multiple files and going through the same process.

For a web developer, if your client doesn’t have access to an image editing program or any interest in learning how to use one, the Image Resizer PowerToy is a great way for XP users to avoid a little heartache in preparing web-ready images.

If you recently installed Internet Explorer 7 you may have started seeing the following error message when opening up Microsoft Access files:

“Microsoft Access cannot open this file. This file is located outside of your intranet or on an untrusted site.”

You can make this go away by opening up IE 7 and going to “Internet Options” under the “Tools” menu. Go to the “Security” tab and select “Local Intranet” then hit the “Sites” button. Uncheck the box marked “Automatically detect intranet network.” Apply the new settings and your Access database should open without problems.

For some mysterious reason, Ubuntu doesn’t come with Samba pre-installed and ready to roll right out of the box. This is a bit strange to me since Ubuntu has a reputation as being the most user-friendly Linux distribution around.

Anyway, I’ve saved anyone looking to get Samba up and running on a Ubuntu distro the hassle of scouring the threads at ubuntuforums.org and found the following two excellent tutorials:

HOWTO: Setup Samba peer-to-peer with Windows

How to share files using Samba (the more secure way)

Enjoy.

I have a client who is in white hot love with IncrediMail and has used it for years. He recently bought a new computer and when he went to install the latest IncrediMail he realized that the old JunkFilter feature had been replaced with a subscription service called JunkFilter Plus. The “Plus” is code language for “Only $35.99 a Year.”

The solution is to install an older version of IncrediMail (version 2031 or earlier). This turns out to be much harder than one would think. It’s not only very hard to find a version of IncrediMail that’s 2031 or earlier but uninstalling your JunkFilter Plus copy isn’t easy.

Luckily, someone has written step-by-step instuctions available for Windows XP Home users. He even has the 2031 version of IncrediMail available for download on his site.

I ran through the steps for my client and he was up and running his beloved IncrediMail with free junk filtering in no time.