We have a lot of customers using our UBB forum product, and one question that comes along with it is that the users sometimes don’t know how to resize their images to use for avatars or decent uploads. There are a variety of sites available that can do the job but some are slow, and others aren’t very trustworthy, so we’ve purchased a new site to allow this.

At Cranno.com you can resize a single or multiple images and also add watermarks to them if you’d like. It’s a free service, it’s fast and we won’t hijack your images.

We’re having a 1 week sale that will be ending on August 15th, 2010. You can save 90% off your first month on any of our shared hosting plans.

This will allow you to discover the difference with Mindraven Hosting for as little as $0.99 for the first month. Enjoy the fact that you won’t be stuck on a server with hundreds of other people.

Even though our affiliate program is only 1 month old I can say that it is off to a successful start. Our top earner, after 1 months time, is earning just a bit over $40 per month. All of these sign-ups are for our shared hosting plans so these are recurring commissions as well, so even if they were to never get another sign-up for us, they’ll continue to earn that commission on a monthly basis as long as those customers continue to host with us. So even if they hit a dry month or get busy for a month or two and can’t do much promoting, they’ll still have incoming coming in.

How have they done this so quickly? Just a little bit of marketing on their part. When they see we’ve made some sort of announcement or post about our services, they push it, tweet it, including their affiliate link. With any affiliate program it’s not a magic way to make money, but if you put in just a little bit of time promoting it, talking about it, etc. then it can definitely work for you.

So sign up today! and get your slice of the pie. Our hosting business is rapidly expanding and there is no reason you shouldn’t be benefiting from it.

Have questions or suggestions for our affiliate system? Just let us know in the comments below.

We’ve been offering Dedicated Servers on a case by case basis over the past couple of months. We’ve finally got everything in place where we can offer dedicated servers to all.

Our dedicated servers are located in a Chicago Data Center and they all come with multi-homed 10TB of monthly bandwidth. Various configurations are available and if you don’t see what you want/need, just let us know and we can work out a custom server for you. All servers are Fully Managed and come with several different cPanel options.

All Dedicated Servers come with a free UBB License, normally $139, free Members Area Renewal, normally $59 per year, and free installation, normally $125.

Plans start as low as $129.00 per month. Order Today!

After much debate, we’ve decided to join the do-follow movement and we’ve turned on do-follow for any comments to our blog posts. We’ve also added CommentLuv. We figured if you’re adding valid content to our site, then we should reward you in return with an actual backlink that will help your page-rank.

Now before you go getting out your auto-spam script and sicking it on our site, I do want to note that we will be a bit picky about what comments get through.

If you have something valid to add to a post, questions to ask then we’ll approve your post and your site isn’t some get rich quick site, then we’ll approve your post and keep the do-follow intact.

If you just post the “me too!” type posts where you’re not really adding anything of value, then we probably won’t approve it.

It seems that most of the “big” hosts have all gone to the latest catchphrase. Unlimited Hosting, Unlimited Bandwidth, Unlimited Disk Space. The Unlimited Plans sound great. You can send as much traffic that you want to your website, load as many files as you want and host a billion domains, all on one low cost plan.

The truth is however, nothing is Unlimited. Eventually, you’re going to hit a point to where your utilizing too much CPU time and your site will either be disabled or you’ll need to move up to a different plan. Read the fine print on those Unlimited Plans. You’ll find something in there of that nature. The problem is you don’t know at what point that might be.

Think about it. You’re on a shared server and everyone else on that server is on the same unlimited plan all paying some low price. Think about the cost the hosting provider has in order to offer that server and maintain it. So, how many customers do they have to stick on that server to make a profit? Hundreds. Obviously the hard drive is going to fill up at some point if everyone is using unlimited disk space. The bandwidth pipe will fill up as well, CPU usage will be maxed out. Your website speed will suffer in the process.

That’s why we don’t offer unlimited hosting plans. We clearly state the amounts allotted with each plan. This may cost us a few customers who would rather see that Unlimited keyword, but we don’t feel like misleading anyone. If you outgrow the bandwidth limitations on the shared hosting plans that we offer, then you’re more than likely going to need to move up to a VPS, Semi-Dedicated or Dedicated Server. So we want people to know that up front.

Since we don’t oversell, this allows us to specifically limit the amount of accounts on each server. We know the total amount of bandwidth/disk space that our customers are allowed, so we know when a server has really reached it’s max capacity. Yes, this cuts down on our profit margin, but we be believe in offering quality web hosting over quantity. With our plans, you know you’ll never be stuck on a server that is overloaded, overtaxed and cannot provide you with what your plan states that you should have.