While many of this year’s ads were released before the event, the night still included many memorable spots. This year, 30-second spots sold for $3.5 million. That price point sounds expensive, but this is just about the only opportunity of year when viewers actually anticipate commercials.

Hostgator is extremely reliable, cost effective, and they offer great support. In this Hostgator review, I’m going to share with you why Hostgator is so popular among internet marketers.

Hostgator offers all the standard hosting plans that everyone else does, including shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS and dedicated hosting services. I been hosting sites with Hostgator for over 3 years and recently moved this site and others to them.

In all that time, I can only think of one or two times where I’ve experienced any downtime at all. Hostgator boats a 99.9% uptime guarantee and I definitely believe it. It is very rare with hosting companies to experience their advertised uptime, but Hostgator manages to do that. This is the number one factor that I look at when choosing a good web host.

Hostgator offers several hosting plans, so which one should you choose? If you just want to run a handful of websites that get a moderate amount of traffic then I would recommend the Hostgator Baby plan. This is Hostgator’s most popular plan because it strikes a good balance between affordability and performance.

The Baby Plan is just $7.96 a month and you can save even more than that by pre-paying yearly or applying one of the many Hostgator coupon codes out there. Plus, if you find yourself ever out-growing your shared hosting plan, you can easily transition to a Hostgator VPS or dedicated server by submitting a simple ticket request to support.

For managing your web hosting accounts, Hostgator uses cPanel. cPanel is very easy to use, and it allows you to easily add any new domains to your server, setup email address, and setup 3rd party software via Fantastico.

I mainly install WordPress for my sites, and Fantastico makes it a very simple process to do. But if you want to use an alternative CMS like Joomla or Drupal you can do that too. You can install more than 50 different popular web scripts using Fantastico.

As a web developer, I install a variety of different scripts on my Hostgator account and they always work out of the box. Hostgator installs the latest version of PHP which ensures that everything runs smoothly.

While I don’t really recommend installing it on a shared server, I’ve also been able to successfully install Prosper202 on my Hostgator account. You do need to contact support though to have them whitelist your Prosper202 domain and turn off mod_security for you though.

Speaking of support, Hostgator support is the best I’ve found. They offer 24/7 web hosting support and they are very fast and responsive. You always get to speak to a live person on the phone, or you can just use their live chat on the website to get answers as well.

I’ve used the live chat to contact Hostgator numerous times for various issues, and I’ve always come away impressed after talking to their support people. They are knowledgeable and patient, and they have always been able to answer any of the questions I have had.

Never downplay the importance of responsive support when it comes to web hosting. I’ve had experiences with other web hosts where I’ve had to wait a day or two to receive any response. There is no worst feeling in the world when your site is down, and you can’t get a response from support to tell you what’s going on.

While Hostgator is certainly not the cheapest webhost in existence, they are still competitive in price if you use the right coupon codes. Luckily, I’ve managed to get a few Hostgator coupon codes for you to use:

• mattytemple25 – Save 25% Off Any Order.
• mattytemple10 – Save $9.94 Off Any Order.
• mattytemple25r – Save $24.94 Off Any Reseller Packages.

Hostgator is probably the most recommended web host, and for good reason. It’s fast, reliable, and offers exceptional support. That’s really all you need from your hosting company. So if you are in the market for a web host, be sure to check them out.

• The EU will come down hard on Google over it’s anti trust investigation 
• Facebook will go public (IPO) 
• Nokia will start selling Android based phones 
• Yahoo will shut down or sell more services  (details, and more details)
• Steve Ballmer will step down or be fired as Microsoft’s CEO 
• WebOS will be back 
• RIM will be acquired 
• There will be no 4G/LTE iPhone this year 
• All major laptop manufactures will offer solid state drives 
• Net neutrality will become an important main stream issue 

No game like GTA III really exists anywhere on the Android ecosystem. The economy of creating something on a scale this ginormous and then charging less than £3 for it just isn’t there. So despite its age, Rockstar’s multi-million selling title is actually a little more original than you’d expect, considering it was first released in the month Britain invaded Afghanistan.
If there’s an aspect of GTA III that hasn’t made it over to Android then I either haven’t noticed it or it isn’t that important. At first, the idea of a complete port of the original struck me as unrealistic, especially given how ropey touch controls can be in Android adventure titles. Through the use of auto-targetting when you’re caught in a firefight and simple left and right buttons when you’re driving however, any fatal problems are solved. I’m not saying things are perfect but they couldn’t be any better unless you plug in a USB controller with which this title is also compatible.

Read my full review on The Review Corner.

The Next Big Thing Has 4G Enabled Speed

The Next Big Thing Has the Best Apps

The Next Big Thing – Movies & Music

I only wish other companies had the guts to make ads this good. Talk about hitting them where it hurts (i.e. with the truth).

Feedly is a fresh looking RSS feeder that provides a cool alternative to Google Reader. If you’re like me, you like to keep track of a lot of blogs and news sites, Feedly is a great app to have. Personally, a good reader is something that loads and refreshes quickly, has a nice UI and is easy to use. Feedly does a great job of ticking these boxes. You initially log in with your Google details and the app quickly loads your feeds into a smart list. It also gives you an optional list of further interesting feeds, great if you want to discover new blogs and news sources. Quite at random I stumbled upon a very funky photography feed called The Impossible Cool.

The stories/blogs load quickly and are presented nicely and easy to read. On the whole I found this quite intuitive and enjoyable. RSS Readers are frameworks for what you really get out of apps like this- the blogs and stories. To do its job well then a RSS Reader needs to be smart and intuitive- you don’t want the hassle of configuring too much if you don’t want to. Feedly does this really well and you can easily just dive in and be reading your subscribed blogs with little delay. I did do a bit of a speed test between Google Reader and Feedly and did find the Google app a little quicker, but I would perhaps argue that Feedly looks a bit cooler. Feedly also comes with a nice little 4×1 widget that sits nicely on your home screen. I have quite a lot of news sources on my home screen so wouldn’t normally use a widget, but for some people this might be a nice touch.

One thing I quite like in a reader app, is the ability to switch from white background and black letters to black background with white letters. It just makes for a more pleasant experience when reading at night- not having something bright shining in your face when your eyes are tired! Feedly can do this and you can invert the normal layout for something less bright. It’s little things like this that demonstrates the thought that has gone into the development of the app, and gets a big thumbs up from me.

Read my full review on The Review Corner.

During this downtime I have been working on a new look for this site which I plan to have ready for launch in the new year now.

I have now secured new hosting for this and my other sites which will be coming back online over the next few weeks.

My sites are now hosts courtesy of Host Gator and they have offered users of my sites 25% off there first order (hosting only) when using coupon code ‘mattytemple25′ at checkout.