From the desk of Underground Nerdz…

Many companies offer free web hosting but what many people don’t realize is that free web hosting comes with many restrictions. With free web hosting, you have banners typically covering the top portion of your website or pop-ups on your site for advertisements or even stating that you are using free web hosting. Most people that utilize free hosting don’t care about these eye sores but what they don’t factor in is that for a user to browse their professional site and see the banners, it’s not only distracting but is unprofessional. Using code on the back-end can result in your site being taken down by the host as all of them require their banners and pop-ups to be used.
Other factors that contribute to the lack of control for those using free web hosting include the lack of overall control for your site. While a few sites out there offer their shopping cart services for free, many of the hosting companies that allow you to utilize their free hosting, won’t allow the code that is needed to run this due to a lack of support on the server. If they do, be prepared for a lot of ads.

Now, there is nothing wrong with ads that are tastefully done, ads that are relevant to your site or ads for your partners – especially if you are being paid for them. With free hosting, however, that’s how the hosting is paid for – through the use of the hosting company’s and partners’ ads. Other restrictions include lack of email accounts, minimal disk space and bandwidth.

With Underground Nerdz, our hosting provides a banner/advertisement free environment. We also provide you with unlimited email accounts, bandwidth and disk space.

Many of you have probably heard about SOPA in the news recently and are curious as to what it is. SOPA stands for “Stop Online Piracy Act” and is currently making it’s way through Congress with which they appear to be attempting to push through without anyone noticing.
What does this mean?
To generalize the Act, SOPA will more or less enable the MPAA and RIAA to create blacklists of websites that they feel are distributing ‘illegal’ content or have some part in the process. Based on terminology of the legislation, this means that the sites can be reported as being non-compliant with SOPA and a process begins to more or less shut the site down. Initially, the site will be removed from search engines, advertisers will be forced to remove any of their advertisements from the site and the ISPs can then block any traffic to the site. Companies like Paypal will also be forced to no longer accept any transactions with the site.
How does this affect how the internet works today?

To begin with, many images and media are used across the internet as it is and with this legislation passing, if an image was used without permission or un-properly cited, an entire site can be immediately be shut down.  With the way things work today, if a site is found to be using an image that was used without permission or does not have the source properly cited, the site owners will be contacted with instructions by the owner of the image. This could mean that they simply want the image removed but in many cases the image owner requests proper citation of the image with a link back to their site and original work.
Why you should be opposed to this?

The internet is an amazing highway of information that is available to everyone – for free (minus of course the cost of your  Internet Service Provider). With legislation passing like this without much, if any, restriction, it enables the government, with the support of various big wig organizations, to simply shut down a site with reference to this act. Any site could be shut down at any time for a small infraction that they may not even have been aware of.

How can you learn more and what can you do?

Many websites are standing up to this including heavy hitters like Google, Wikipedia, Mozilla and even Reddit have posted information on their home page to show that they oppose this legislation. These sites are offering links to additional information about this subject matter and some of them also provide links to online petitions with Reddit actually linking to a web form you can fill out to have someone call you and connect you with your representative.
Thank you all for your support!

Welcome to the Underground Nerdz (UGNZ) blog!

For our first blog post, we’d like to take the time to explain how important it is for you as a small business owner, to have your own site and we’ll also explain a little bit about some terminology that you will hear.

As a small business, it’s detrimental for you to NOT have your name out there for people to be able to find you with the least amount of cost possible. With our website packages starting out at $400, we strive to bring you the best possible bang for your buck and having your business’ presence on the web is equally important.

Why is so important, as a small business, to have a website? For starters, a majority of consumers will first scope out the web for any information about a prospective good or service. People don’t want to have to reach out to someone to see what it is that they have to offer because they don’t want to wait. By having a website for your company, you can let your words and images/video speak for you. A great example of this is the website we built for Kendamasite.com. Prior to this post, you probably didn’t know that this business existed, what a kendama is or how you use it.

When building the website for our client, we took into account that we didn’t know what a kendama was and utilize our personal experiences when building a website. Our client provided us images as well as video to help sell her product. Not only do you know that her business is out there for you to engage as a consumer, but now you know what a kendama is and how it is used (now go buy one!).

Now, I’ll reiterate again that a small business needs the most bang for their buck. When looking at having a website created, questions need to be asked if you aren’t already being provided the information. To even have a website created, you need to settle on a domain name and you have to have web hosting. The domain name is the address which will be entered to visit your website (IE undergroundnerdz.com) and the hosting is how your site is stored online.

It’s important to know how much bandwidth and diskspace is offered with your hosting. Bandwidth is the amount of data traveling to and from your site. If you initially upload 30 files of let’s say all pictures, the upload transfer process will be counted against the monthly allowance of bandwidth. This means that if your monthly allowance for bandwidth is 100MBs and the image sizes total 10MBs, then you can only upload or have another 90MBs of data transferred. Disk space is the amount of space available to you on your host’s servers for storage including the webpage files, images and video. So not only do all of the photos you just uploaded affect your monthly bandwidth allowance, but it will also take up space on your host’s server meaning that if your host allows you 900MBs of disk space and  those images, again, are 10MBs total in size, you’ll have only 890MBs left of disk space – this doesn’t reset every month. Remember, bandwidth is the allowed data transferred to and from your site while disk space is the amount of space allotted to store data for your site.

Underground Nerdz allows for unlimited bandwidth and diskspace as long as the files are related to your website.

Check out our website at UndergroundNerdz.com and contact us if you have any questions – We’re here for you!