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I Am Shaman Review

When it comes to pur­chas­ing herbs online, you should really trust the ven­dor you are pur­chas­ing from. I have used IAmShaman.com for my exotic herbal needs for over 4 years now and have noth­ing neg­a­tive to say about them. The prod­ucts are very high qual­ity, just as promised. My orders have always been processed quickly (within a day if placed dur­ing busi­ness hours) and I receive my order within 3 days of plac­ing it.

I Am Shaman offers plants and herbs that can­not be pur­chased from health food stores, actu­ally nowhere locally in my town. I com­pletely rec­om­mend I Am Shaman if you are look­ing for qual­ity prod­uct from peo­ple you can trust. With this ven­dor, you can pur­chase prod­ucts like kava, kratom, blue lily, amanita, fly agaric, san pedro, morn­ing glory and any other entheogen you can imagine.

Per­son­ally, I have pur­chased their Kratom (which they are very well known for), Kava Kava, Aman­i­tas and Blue Lily. I was very pleased with the qual­ity of all the prod­ucts a numer­ous amount of times.

Tags: blue lily, botanicals, entheogens, herbs, iamshaman, kava, kratom

Valuable coupons from JustHost

It’s hard to find an afford­able, reli­able host that has a great sup­port team these days. Believe it or not, I finally found one after search­ing for years.

JustHost offers un-metered plans for $3.45 a month, if you pre-pay for more than a year, you get a decent break in pric­ing. When you have the chance to take advan­tage of extra sav­ings on a plan like that, it can’t get any better.

50OFF — Does what it says, get 50% off your entire order.

FREEDOMAIN — Get a free domain for life.

SPECIAL20OFF — Get 20% off.

Click here to go to JustHost and start sav­ing!

As far as I know, these coupon codes do work, if any are bro­ken, please com­ment this post and let me know.

Tags: hosting, justhost, savings

Firefox Ultimate Optimizer

I’m not sure why there’s no solid down­load spot for this that you can trust, but now there is, right here.

Since Fire­fox 3, the won­der­ful, tabbed browser has been eat­ing a ton of resources. On one of my machines, once Fire­fox is opened, the mem­ory usage doesn’t seem too crazy. When a new tab is opened, it really starts eat­ing the mem­ory. I’ve seen it use nearly 500 MB of mem­ory while brows­ing with a few tabs open.

With Fire­fox Ulti­mate Opti­mizer, mem­ory usage is imme­di­ately con­trolled. Whether it’s using 20 MB or 1 GB, this tool brings the usage under 5 MB at all times.

Down­load Now (1.44 MB)

Hosting Review: LunarPages

I began my pro­fes­sional web host­ing expe­ri­ence with LunarPages some years ago, over­all, I was pretty happy with the ser­vices that they pro­vided for me. Before I pur­chased host­ing with LP, I read quite a few reviews on the com­pany. They were all mixed reviews, some say­ing that LunarPages is excel­lent, some say­ing it is terrible.

I learned that those who were say­ing it is ter­ri­ble were doing things they were not sup­posed to with their account. Over the few years I used the ser­vice, there was hardly any down­time, if there was, they would let you know ahead of time. The only time my site was down was for planned maintenance.

The thing that really caught my eye with LunarPages is the sales they are always hav­ing. When I signed up,  I believe that I got host­ing for under $4/month for a year. The thing that frus­trated me with LunarPages though, is the fact that after your “year of pro­mo­tion”, they hike the prices on you, some­thing that is not stated before you pur­chase your host­ing. I assumed that I would always pay this price, but I was wrong.

After I was hap­pily hosted for a year, they ordered me to pay:
$7.95 per month for host­ing and $20 to renew my domain.

Now I see why they offered host­ing for so cheap. Over­all, I can say that I sug­gest using LunarPages host­ing if you do not plan to be there for longer than a year.

Sup­port:

Uptime/Reliability:

Over­all:

Tags: downtime, lunarpages, planned maintenance, uptime reliability

Hosting Review: HostAle

This isn’t a full review, but if you are a per­son who relies on a web host­ing company’s sup­port, this should help with your deci­sion. A while back, while on a search for a good reseller account, I came across HostAle. By their website’s appear­ance, they seemed legit and well man­aged. I read some reviews, checked out their server’s uptime and all that fun stuff. Seemed good to go.

I found a coupon which was basi­cally a free trial. I would pay $1 for unlim­ited reseller host­ing. Once I cre­ated my billing account, I got into the sup­port area and started ask­ing questions.

The first thing that I noticed was that the sup­port rep. typed very care­lessly and unpro­fes­sional. I asked them what the specs are on their servers. They replied with “We havbe 2 of them. wat else do u want to kno?”  Come on man!

Why would you talk to a poten­tial new cus­tomer like that? They would not answer any of my ques­tions about the server, which made me think that they are just using a mas­ter reseller them­selves and over­selling it. What is sad, is that just from that con­ver­sa­tion, I no longer was inter­ested in pay­ing a dol­lar to try out their ser­vices. Instead, I received 3 emails a day from these peo­ple remind­ing me to pay my invoice. I requested that the billing account be terminated.

Though for weeks, my inbox was still flooded by the garbage. I finally went back to the sup­port page and requested that the billing account be ter­mi­nated, because I am not inter­ested in pur­chas­ing the ser­vice any­more and I’m tired of the emails. I got a reply of “I’m not sure if ur still sleepign, but you don’t have an account with us, you never had. drink some coffe dum dum.” If you’re going to insult me, shouldn’t you at least be sure that you are right? The last remark made me laugh. After I explained what account I wanted ter­mi­nated again, I didn’t hear another word from them.

Over­all, the sup­port is ter­ri­ble. I was never able to actu­ally try the ser­vice and give those idiots one of my hard earned dol­lars, but I think this says enough. Any­one who is going to argue with me about how I don’t have an account with them, but I’m logged into their site talk­ing to them on their sup­port script. I under­stand that they may have thought I was talk­ing about an actual host­ing account, but I spec­i­fied billing account and men­tioned tones of times that I was sick of receiv­ing invoices for a ser­vice that I don’t want. I told them that the rea­son I didn’t want the ser­vice was because the sup­port was ter­ri­ble. If there’s an issue with my account, why would I want to talk to some­one who can­not take the time to cor­rect their typos and is rude to me?

If they were truly a good host­ing com­pany, when I asked to ter­mi­nate my billing account, they should have been try­ing to give me a rea­son to keep the account and give me an excel­lent deal for host­ing. An excel­lent exam­ple of a qual­ity host is JustHost.com. When I was check­ing out their ser­vices, I went through the steps of reg­is­tra­tion to see what the final costs would be for a 5 year plan. Once I fig­ured it out, I closed the web­site so I could com­pare prices with other sites. When I clicked that X, I was imme­di­ately greeted by a sup­port win­dow that was ready to con­nect me to a real per­son and answer my ques­tion. I know that those win­dows can be annoy­ing, but the rea­son they put it there is to show that they care. If you were con­fused or had ques­tions, they give you an oppor­tu­nity to ask them. After I set up the billing account and closed it, I quickly received an email which was obvi­ously not a real per­son, but sounded like a real per­son. This email told me how they wanted me as a cus­tomer, and to get me, they would give me 50% off if I bought it within the day. That is what you call cus­tomer care.

If some­one has or does use this ser­vice, you are wel­come to post a service-related review in the com­ments below.

Sup­port:

Uptime / Reli­a­bil­ity:
Unknown

Over­all:

Tags: billing account, garbage, hostale, Hosting Reviews, invoice, reseller account, Reviews, support, terrible, uptime

Hosting Review: HostCule.com

I’m pretty sure that my 7-year-old could run a more suc­cess­ful host­ing com­pany than this. I came across HostCule while look­ing for free hosts, hon­estly, it did seem like a too good to be true host­ing “company”.

At first, things were fine, I posted on their forums a few times and got a small reseller plan. I wasn’t expect­ing much of it, so I didn’t do much with it. Some time passed, and after mon­i­tor­ing the server for a while, I decided to move a few sites over there. What a mis­take, at the same time the owner was “sell­ing” the com­pany to Radon Sys­tems, a so-called com­pany ran by a 16-year-old kid some­where in the UK. That’s when things started going down hill, fast.

He claimed that the server was located in Hive­loc­ity, but with the issues and down­time, I’m guess­ing that it was just a reseller account that was com­pletely over­selling. The mon­i­tor­ing ser­vice Mon­tas­tic reported that through two weeks, the server was down for 13 days. Wow, impressive.

Every time shit hit the fan, he would say “Oh, it was a DOS attack.” After about 5 DOS attacks, he announced that he pur­chased a hard­ware fire­wall which would stop the attacks. Amaz­ingly, after this, the attacks per­sisted finally to end it all, he claimed that some­one was host­ing a rootkit that killed the server.

I was pissed. I know that it’s pos­si­ble for all of this to hap­pen, because I have a host­ing com­pany, but I’m not stu­pid enough to give every­one free host­ing so they can destroy all of my work and the work of pay­ing cus­tomers. It just seemed like a bunch of BS. It’s a good les­son on why you should never trust a free host­ing com­pany like I did. I gave them my trust, and in return got screwed. I recov­ered most of my stuff, thanks to back­ups, but it’s the time that killed me.

You can­not give some­one free reseller host­ing in exchange for forum posts. This is like going to a hack­ing for, giv­ing out your server infor­ma­tion and say­ing “Have fun with my server guys!”

It’s pos­si­ble, but risky to hand out free, shared host­ing but you really have to keep and eye on every sin­gle file that is uploaded as well as keep a very strict pol­icy and enforce it.

Over­all, I wouldn’t sug­gest using the ser­vice if it returns. Although their sup­port was good, it’s not a rea­son to host with them. Before the server went down, they started offer­ing paid host­ing ser­vices, I feel sorry for any­one who got suck­ered into that.

Sup­port:

Uptime / Reli­a­bil­ity:

Over­all:

Tags: dos attacks, downtime, free hosts, free reseller, mistake, reseller plan