I’m still not convinced at the effectiveness of this service. Almost a year ago, Reuters in collaboration with Yahoo announced the Youwitness News platform. If you see a newsworthy event, you are asked to send the picture to YouWitness, either by emailing it to pics@reuters.com or visiting the YouWitness site. Reuters editors review the pictures and select the most newsworthy images for publication on Reuters.com. Your compensation is that your picture is distributed within the reuters platform.

Even after a year, there doesn’t seem to be any change with their policy. If Reuters aim to target citizen journalism, it is important to provide users with proper incentives. From what I understand, you only get viewership for submitting a photo to them. But what about text? What about descriptions of the event? The platform does not support the full array of information which could be provided by the people who were actually where the news happened, and witnessed it firsthand. For this attempt to somewhat promote citizen journalism I give them fingers down. Solely because its popular, because it the current buzz, because “Media companies are racing to find ways of distributing user-generated content, as the popularity of web-produced amateur videos and photos shows no signs of waning” as stated by the FT technology blog. But not because they really care about getting a multitude of submissions nor a wide range of perspectives.

If they did care about the latter, Reuters and Yahoo would first of all offer sub-finance photographs and articles coming from amateurs. They would also create a less flashy/picture perfect site, but actually support a grassroots community of people who want to make a difference with the information that they have. Since it is easy to find so many other platforms which will help broadcast messages, why would anyone want to use the you witness news platform?

Just as reality TV allowed networking executives to launch a new series without paying its stars, this new project by Reuters and Yahoo, YouWitnessNews, will allow the companies to avoid paying their reporters. Apparently the idea is that just seeing your photo on the news page is payment enough. Imagine if Reuter’s shareholders were told, Look, we’re not making any money, but look how many people have seen our work. Something tells me they wouldn’t be nearly as happy as they are hearing that they’ve just recruited a platoon of unpaid workers to help make them money.

(source: The Free Josh Wolf Wiki)

From the website, here are the terms of use and waiver of all royalties for submitted materials:

By submitting material (including a picture, a video, other images, audio and/or text) to Reuters, you are agreeing to be bound by the Terms of Use for Submitted Materials which give Reuters a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to publish and use any material you submit and to a use of your personal data in accordance with Reuters Privacy / Data Protection Policy. You must own the copyright in the material you submit. Reuters is under no obligation to publish any material submitted. Material and any your personal data submitted to Reuters may be posted on and shared with any third party site that Reuters uses to receive your submission or to host and display such material. PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU SHOULD NOT SUBMIT ANY MATERIAL IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO REUTERS’ TERMS OF USE FOR SUBMITTED MATERIALS.

All I wanted was to find cheap, but feature rich web hosting that offered enough disk space and bandwidth to meet the needs of my growing web sites now and for some time into the future.

Many times I thought I had found a good web hosting service, then a Google search of the company would reveal multitudes of unhappy former customers. 

Most hosting review web sites were of no help as they seem to push web hosts that offered them the best sales commission, not necessarily the best hosting service for the consumer.

I tried to find unbiased web hosting plan reviews at several hosting forums. The problem there was that for every person who loved a web host someone else swore they were worst, most corrupt company ever.

I found several web hosting services whose plans sounded good, but each time I started the purchase process I discovered that I would have to transfer my domain name to their domain service, not just change the DNS settings at my current domain registrar.
It is my personal preference to keep my domain name and web hosting seperate (though the free domain name registration offered with many hosting plans is tempting).  Besides, my current domain registration service  offers a good price on domain registration, and as I use their newsletter management system it is required that my domain name stay registered with them.

I eventually chose three different web hosts for my three main web sites. My reasons for this were in part based on the different needs of my web sites (which I discuss below), the cost of the hosting plans, and the features they offered.   Also, I felt that the best way to guarantee uptime of at least one of my sites was to not host them all at the same web hosting service.

Below I’ve listed the three hosting services I am currently using and some of the pros and cons of each one I have discovered so far. 

Web Hosting Service 1 - This is the web hosting service I am currently using for this web site ($6.95 per month w/1 yr sign-up).
The hosting plan offers a huge amount of disk space and bandwidth (so much so that it may be too good to be true). However, I didn’t see any restrictions in the TOS or fine print… If I run into any problems I will let you know here. 
This hosting plan allowed me to keep my current domain registrar. I just had to change my name servers which is a simple process.  My other requirements were Cpanel (Y),  multiple MySQL (Y), cgi-bin, Perl, and PHP support (Y), multi-domain hosting (Y).
I contacted a support person about an incorrect FTP password which he answered incorrectly (and I figured out on my own later). However, I have since uploaded all of my files and have installed my scripts without any problems.
At this point I highly recommend this web hosting service.

Web Hosting Service 2   This hosting service was offering a plan that provided large amounts of disk space and bandwidth for minimal cost ($3.99 per month 2 yr sign-up) which sounded good to me.  They are well known and have been in business for a long time so I felt fairly secure signing-up for the two year contract to get the lower monthly price.
The hosting plan does not offer Perl support which is fine with me because my web sites only required PHP  and MySQL databases. If I want Perl in the future I have the option to upgrade the plan for an additional $1 per month.
There was one problem the first week after I purchased the hosting plan. My web site was offline sporadically - at least 10 hours that I know of (I signed-up with a service that monitors uptime)  I thought I had made a mistake signing up with them, but they fixed the problem and there hasn’t been an issue since ( I even purchased a second account several months ago - no problems yet).
NOTE - During sign-up their is a warning that scripts that put a heavy load on the server are not allowed.
If you need to run scripts of that type it may be a good idea to get it ok’d by their support personnel before you purchase a long-term hosting plan with them.

Web Hosting Service 3  I paid more ($7.95 per month) for this hosting plan because they offered failover hosting.
The benefit of failover hosting is that my web site files would exist on two servers (perhaps one in the US and one in the UK).  If the main server failed, the second server would take over. Therefore I was quite sure I  could expect almost 100%  uptime for my site.  Unfortunately my site has been completely offline more often and longer than some of my cheap hosting accounts with other hosting services. 
I contacted their support personnel and asked for an answer why the failover part of the hosting plan failed but I was just given a generic response.
I haven’t had any problems with them recently, however I don’t feel satisfied enough with their service to renew when it comes due. 
 I have included the link to their site, but cannot recommend the hosting plan at this time.

Techhosting is a new web hosting company, but the people behind it have been a part of the internet ever since Al Gore invented it*.

GB storage space