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To expand on my previous post about DR, Mike in his post indicated that if his main business went down he could have it back up and running with another provider within an hour. To achieve this you would probably have to do the following With DR it's critical to get the important, i.e. money making parts of your business back up asap. To do this you need to have the ability to change the DNS records for your site and have either: An up to date backup of your site you can access, that isn't held on your hosting site. In this case you can restore the backup onto another hosting provider Another instance of your site hosted else where, at the bare minimum you have the following: Hosted with another provider. In another city. ideally this should be in another state maybe on the other side of the country. You can then update your DNS record for the site to the new location and very quickly the site will be back up and running again In either of these cases it's absolutely critical that you don't use your hosting company as your domain registrar it's easy/convenient to have them in the same place, remember the domain registrar controls the DNS records for your site. However if the company is subjected to a DOS or ransomware attack, you are royally screwed. Your site is down and you can't change the DNS to send traffic else where.

When you are looking for a web design company you should always get it done by a professional web designer. But how can you tell which web design companies are the real deal and not time wasters? 1 – Their Own Website! The first thing you should do when choosing a web design company is to look at their website. Pay the most attention to their portfolio. This will be the best indicator of what to expect from the company. Ask yourself, would you be happy with your new website if it was of similar quality to the websites in their portfolio? 2 – What level of support do they offer? As your website grows over the years it will need minor tweaks and changes. Will the web design company perform small changes as part of their customer support? Your website may also have bugs that lurked unnoticed during the testing phase. Be sure to choose a company who will fix these issues months after the site has launched. 3 – What technology do they use? Do they use shiny new tools like HTML5 and CSS3 or dusty old tools like HTML3.2 and Flash? The websites they create should be W3C valid and should be tested on all major browsers. 4 – Will you be able to host the site yourself? A good web company will give you the option to find your own hosting instead of hosting it themselves. Having the option will give you good flexibility in the future. 5 – What extra services do they offer? Optional extra services offered are a bonus. Search engine optimisation, copywriting and mobile friendly websites are often offered by web design & development companies. These may not be needed when your website is first created but are useful services for its future. Whoever you choose to design your website you need to make sure they are professional. Their past performance will be the best indicator of their future performance. You must also consider their level of support as you will almost certain run into problems with your website.    

I still prefer Screaming Frog. To me it's a tool a lot like Scrapebox. When Scrapebox was popular, a lot of people were turned off by its interface. It was very basic and simple. That's how Screaming Frog appears too. Definitely designed by engineers. Tried Sitebulb. It's not bad. I did like the site structure visualization option, but like you said, once you get to bigger sites that feature quickly becomes pretty useless. Then Screaming Frog introduced the same feature, so I had no reason to even consider switching.  I guess if you do a lot of site audits, Sitebulb might be of interest. They can export some decent looking reports, but unless they have changed it recently, you do not have much control over what gets into those reports. Some of the things that Sitebulb reports as an issues, I don't agree with, so that would get confusing to hand to a client.

I know a lot of IM'ers use Mailchimp. They just recently changed their pricing and fee structures. Take note, this was written by someone who runs a competitor's product. Nevertheless, it does a good job outlining the changes.  Also worth noting, these changes only impact free accounts and new paying subscribers. If you currently have a paid account with Mailchimp, this does not impact you, but I would not be surprised if this eventually rolls out to everyone. If you are on a free account and on the verge of hitting the point where you will have to pay, you are going to be put into the new pricing structure. A few notes: In this new plan, you will now be paying for everyone, including people who have unsubscribed from your lists. They took away the ability to send unlimited emails on paid accounts. Mailchimp, like the old days of limited data and text plans on smartphones, is introducing overage charges. If your subscriber number hits the next tier level, instead of just upgrading you to the next plan, you will be upgraded AND charged an overage fee. Users will need to stay on top of their list counts as they approach the next pricing tier. Lastly, they are gating a lot of their features in the different plan tiers. Previously, almost every feature was open to users at every tier, including free users.  I had moved from Aweber to Constant Contact to Mailchimp. Might be time to look for a new service. I have always hated their clunky ass interface anyhow.

Will give them both a try