I must be mad! Or am I? I actually started paying for hosting

So this  is what I’ve been doing today – I started paying for hosting.

I know I know, what’s the big deal right? Well, I’m known for finding the best things online that actually work and are free. And if you think these things don’t exist, look at this blog right here. It’s based on wordpress which is the best blogging platform there is and it’s free. Millions of blogs are based on it. My poing being, free on the internet does not mean crap. It might take some diging around to find the best free thing out there, but free works and works well.

I’ve setup several websites and they where all hosted for free. I just figured out that the best free hosting out there isn’t that bad and for test sites it’s really enough.

So why have I started paying? Well, the best hosting right now is not free, and I got pissed finding out my free hosting of choice couldn’t put pdf’s on my sites. So I found a great review by John Jonas on his blog about all the hosting companies he’s been through and he recommended hostmonster. There’s a whole review on his blog, I really like John and he’s someone you can trust (plus he’s a great marketer that you should learn from) so I got myself a hostmonster account.

I then had to recreate my first 2 free hosted sites. Fortunately, all it took me was an hour. It’s incredible just how virtual an online business can be. At least the way I setup my business. I’ve set it up so that I can be in business from any computer anywhere. And this little fiasco of mine, having to recreate sites on new hosting (and doing so within an hour) just made me realize just how shockproof my business really is.

So let me share with you the tools I use to make sure I can be in business online even if someone steals my laptop tomorrow. I hope they don’t but if they do – no biggie.  I’ll still be in business online within hours.

This is how I set it all up:

1. Dropbox – Do yourself a favour and make sure all of your important files are backed up. I use dropbox because using it means that I don’t have to manually backup the files. If you need to backup your files manually, you usually do it only once in a while which means that your backups are never up to date. With dropbox (www.getdropbox.com) the second you save a file or update it, it automatically backs up on the dropbox server. And you can access those files from anywhere

2. Delicious – I bookmark everything using delicious. Again, I can access these bookmarks from anywhere. So I always have all of mysites, analytics, blogs, newsletter, affiliate programs etc. etc. available to me

3. Sxipper – Most of my bookmarked sites need to be loged into. With so many sites you need to manage your passwords and this is where sxipper comes in. It’s a firefox plugin that saves your username/passwords and inserts them into the login box when you land on a site that it has a username/password for. It saves a lot of timeand  it works like a charm

That’s it. That’s the basis of it all. When you combine all 3 tools, which are all free by the way, you can access all  of your important files and information from just about anywhere, on any computer
I highly recommend you put fail-safes on your online business, and I suggest you use the free tools I mentioned above.

And if you use a different technique with different tools, drop me a comment to this post and tell me. I’m sure a lot of my readers will love to have that information handy