EmptorMaven

Online hosting is a crowded market.  For over four years I have used 1and1.com and have found their services to be competent, reliable, and very competitively priced.  There are probably other players out there that are just as good, but with so many questionable businesses in the mix it’s hard to be sure.

I cringe every time I hear of somebody paying $35/year for domain name registration when they can get full-service registration with privacy on an ongoing basis at 1and1.com for $7/year.  Nobody should buy web services before comparing with 1and1.com.

Online backup of your personal data is as essential as ever. A year ago I recommended Mozy for online backup, but recently its competitor Carbonite released a new version that I believe has given it an edge. I have kept 46GB of my photos, videos, and documents backed up for several months now with Carbonite.

Drawbacks to Carbonite include:

1. It won’t backup USB drives.
2. Backups aren’t encrypted (for those paranoiacs out there).
3. After trial period you must subscribe by the year, not month-to-month like Mozy.

Drawbacks to Mozy include:

1. GUI not integrated; not as easy or convenient to use.
2. Many complaints heard about restore problems.

Note: For small amounts of data you may find JungleDisk more economical.

If you don’t use a lot of cell phone minutes then you probably shouldn’t enter into a service contract.  Too many people commit to spending $30 or more per month (plus inscrutable taxes) just so they can make an occasional, “I’m running late,” or, “I’m over here” call.

The best alternative is a prepaid cell service like T-Mobile To Go.  There you buy a SIM card that you can plug into any (unlocked) GSM phone and you buy minutes in advance that are credited to that card.  For $100 T-Mobile will give you 1000 minutes that will last up to a year.  If at the end of the year you haven’t used them all you can spend as little as $10 to buy more minutes and your entire balance will carry over for another year.

Not only can you buy this service without the hassles of a credit check, but you also enjoy freedom from any future bills or charges.  If you don’t want or need the service you can just throw away your card, or sell it with its balance to somebody else.  Be aware that the cheapest 2-year cell contract will probably cost a total of $700 (hard to tell with all the taxes and surcharges they keep adding — not to mention the billing errors that always seem to be in the phone company’s favor).  In contrast you can keep T-Mobile To Go for 2 years for just $110 plus sales tax.  And in my three years with this service I haven’t had any unpleasant surprises.

The best way I found to buy T-Mobile To Go is at Costco, where last week I got an activated SIM card and a current-generation slim Samsung t219 phone for just $20 after rebate!

Anyone who uses a computer should subscribe to online backup.  Right now, Mozy is both the best and cheapest online backup service out there.

If you create any content on your computer that you would like to keep, you have to back it up.  A single hard drive can fail at any time.  A single computer can get corrupted, stolen, or destroyed.  If you are diligent, you can create periodic backups that allow you restore lost files to some point in the past.  But if you are a regular computer user you create so much content  — MP3′s, digital photos, Email, etc. — and change it so frequently, that even recent backups will miss things.  I had a primary hard drive fail last year, and even though I made a practice of Ghosting it to a backup drive at least once a month, I still lost several weeks of Email and some new work that hadn’t been checked in.

If you are clever, you can rent offsite storage and write scripts to regularly and automatically update critical files.  But dealing with open files, versioning, and graceful restores are all non-trivial tasks.  Mozy has taken care of all of that, and $55/year is eminently reasonable for unlimited personal backup.