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Small-Business Web Services

WEB SITE HOSTING Phpwebhosting.com Plenty of companies offer inexpensive Web hosting plans. Unfortunately, you usually get what you pay fornot much. Phpwebhosting.com is an exception. For only $9.95 per month (or $110 per year), you get Web hosting with all the trimmings. Among them: 125MB of disk space (more for free, provided you need it and can justify your request), unmetered traffic, and unlimited e-mail addresses. This comes with the caveats that porn, bootleg software (also called "warez"), and file archives are not allowed, and that while traffic may be unmetered, that doesn't mean it's unlimiteduse too much bandwidth and you may be asked to throttle your traffic or leave. You also get PHP4 scripting for serious site programming, your own MySQL database, Perl, Python, secure shell access, and FTP access, among other features, all on fast Linux servers. Whether or not you're tech-savvy enough to make use of these geeky power tools is another question. If Python makes you think of snakes rather than scripting, you're probably better off paying more for Web hosting at a company like Verio that offers lots of support. By way of comparison, Verio's Silver plan (see below) costs five times as much. For those with the technical chops to administer their own site, Phpwebhosting.com has one of the best deals going. Up to $9.95 per month / phpwebhosting.com / (877) 582-9093 / www.phpwebhosting.com (Tested April 2002)

STOREFRONT HOSTING Verio Verio claims to be the world's biggest company that can host your Web site. Fittingly, it's also one of the best, especially for business clients and power users. The company's Bronze package ($50 setup; $24.95 per month) offers 10 e-mail accounts, CGI scripting, access to raw log files, and a monthly allotment of 100MB of disk space and 5GB of bandwidthmore than enough for a business that's new to the Net. The Silver ($50 setup; $49.95 per month) and Gold ($50 setup; $99.95 per month) plans offer more space and bandwidth, plus more bells and whistles like MySQL database support and PHP/FI scripting. Verio also offers e-commerce options, so you can easily upgrade your site to sell products. In the past, Verio has had some customer service issues as it integrated the mom-and-pop ISPs it gobbled up on its way to the big time. But in a recent test, we put in a call to tech support voice jail. Amazingly, the wait time was a mere 1 minute and 10 seconds, and the tech was helpful, knowledgeable, and courteous. While your mileage may vary, such performance speaks well of Verio's priorities. Reliability is also one of Verio's strong points. The company guarantees 99.9 percent uptime for Unix plans (but interestingly, not for Windows 2000). Better still, hosting clients will find that Verio's Web-based control panel vastly simplifies site administration. In all, Verio delivers solid service at a fair price. $24.95 to $99.95 per month / Verio / (800) 438-8374 / www.verio.com (Tested April 2002)

HUMAN RESOURCES Enthusian The hiring crisis is over for employers; it's just beginning for job seekers. But even with a surplus of applicants, finding talented, dedicated employees remains a challenge. The Enthusian TalentAxis Web system gives recruiters an integrated package of the hiring, development, and retention tools needed to best fill their workforce requirements. Not only does TalentAxis provide a huge pool of talent from which to cull the finest candidates, but it also replaces cumbersome paper processes with a streamlined browser-based workflow. Billing for Enthusian's services is electronic-itself a cost savings-and includes financial reporting and tracking information. It even lets hiring managers schedule interviews online, putting an end to timewasting phone tag. The cost-charged to the client's human resource vendors-comes out to about 2 to 4 percent of transactional revenue. Most reassuring, Enthusian isn't another dot-com hanging on by its fingernails. It's a subsidiary of Spherion, a company that has been providing human resources services for more than half a century. Cost varies / Enthusian / (888) 622-9583 / www.enthusian.com (Tested March 2002)

RECRUITING FlipDog.com You know you're doing well as a startup when the leader in your industry acquires your company. That's just what happened to FlipDog.com in May 2001 when TMP Worldwide (owner of job site leader Monster.com) bought the site from creator WhizBang Labs. WhizBang developed FlipDog.com to showcase its machine learning technologysavvy software that basically scours the Web looking for new job postings. That's a significant selling point not only for FlipDog.com's new owners but also for job seekers. Especially with unemployment on the rise, job listings that aren't up to date are worthless. FlipDog.com also has plenty to offer prospective employers. Its Web Candidate Search ($2,995) employs the same machine learning technology to find potential job candidates from among those who have posted their résumés online. $95 for a single posting / FlipDog.com / (877) 887-3547 / www.flipdog.com (Tested February 2002)

PAYROLL PayCycle Get a handle on your company's payroll data from anywhere, anytime. You can use any PC with an Internet connection to access PayCycle's reportsall sorted by date or employee and exportable to Microsoft Excel with a single click. Plus, PayCycle lets you control when your tax payments go out, giving you the option to earn interest on your money in the interim. Other payroll services may withhold taxes, but they don't pay them until later. The company says that as of March 1, the service is available to businesses in all 50 states. For $39.99 per month for five employees and 99 cents for each additional staffer, the price is right, making PayCycle ideal even for small operations. There's also a $19.99-per-month household option, for those who want to hire domestic help while remaining in full compliance with IRS requirementssomething to think about if you're considering a career in politics. $39.99 per month for five employees; 99 cents per additional employee / PayCycle / (866) 729-2925 / www.paycycle.com (Tested April 2002)