Today is National’ Heroes Day in the Philippines. It commemorates the celebration of the national heroes. This day falls every last Monday of August. The president of the land usually declares this day as a non-working – meaning it’s a vacation day!

Unfortunately, I was not able to take advantage on this so-called vacation day. I was asked to report in our office. To make it fair to everybody, we were all called to report including our bosses.

We are actually fast tracking the re-launching of our new system. Sorry, I can’t divulge it yet for now but it has to something to do with short messaging system and email services.

Being the most senior software consultant of the company, our president gave me the tasked to look for a solution on how are we going to upgrade the servers of our systems.

Currently, our servers are located on two separate providers. Our main server is colocated here in the Philippines and the other server is in Europe since most of our clients are there. We have a 1/2 half rack colocation space which we are renting out in Manila while our server in Netherlands is being managed by other people.

During our informal discussion, I recommended that we need to look for another web hosting provider so we can have additional backup for our projects.

By the way, our system is currently processing 600,000 emails per month. We are projecting that this will past the 1 million mark in two months time. Ever since we started our company (yes, I’m one pioneers), we already decided that all our servers must be managed by an enterprise level service providers. Having a managed hosting setup like this, we can concentrate in developing our projects instead of worrying about the network infrastructure.

It’s already midnight here and yet I’m still busy looking and searching for another provider, most probably based in Canada or USA because we have plans to expand our business in North America. I’m not the hero type person but my boss told me that I need to submit my report tomorrow at 3PM during our meeting or else we can’t get a bonus for our project,

Whew! Time flies so fast! I had a great time in Hong Kong with my family and my in-laws.  There were 14 of us in all. My kids really enjoyed the vacation so much that they don’t want to go home anymore. My 4-year old son even wants to stay in Ocean Park and live there forever!

The vacation was a blast. Every minute I spent with my wife and kids was unforgettable. I will forever cherish the bonding time and activities we shared together. My wife told me that I was even more “childlike” than my kids specially when we were in Hong Kong Disneyland.  I was even singing the song “It’s a small world” when we were inside the pink  castle on Fantasy Land.

My sister-in-law also noticed that I can’t control myself in grabbing those virtual goodies while we were watching Donald Duck and friends on Mickey’s Phillar Magic 3-D show.

Oh well, I admit that I was! I enjoyed everything inside the Disneyland including the parade of Disney’s character and was even more gamely in getting wet.

Too bad our 4 days of vacation had to end but the memories of course will stay in my hear forever.

Sorry for this too personal post of mine. I’m still in euphoric mood. I totally shut-off myself from the “online world”  during our vacation. I did not check my emails nor log on to the internet. I even switched off my mobile phone.

So no technical blog post for me today or maybe  just an update because I received two great emails this morning which I want to share with you.

First is the FREE DOMAIN Name Registration of 1and1 Internet is extended until the end of this month of June 2010. You may want to check my previous post about it or you can go directly to 1and1 internet website and grab your new domain.

The second email was about the new FREE ebook from the ever famous  mogul  blogger JohnChow.  The Book isn’t going to cost you anything because  he’s giving it away for free. You may download The Ultimate Blog Profit Model here.  I actually read it in just one sitting  this afternoon and it’s awesome. It details the business model that John used to enable his blog to make over $500,000 last year. I think you will really enjoying read it as well.

That’s all for today. I still have a lot of pictures to upload on my Facebook

that's me , wearing a red anime shirt with my new hairdo!

If you noticed the title of my post ” Hosting your OWN Blog”, I capitalized the word “OWN”.

Let me clarify this, the word “OWN” doesn’t mean buying your own hardware and setup your own web hosting in your house.  What I mean is, if you seriously want to be a blogger (read: make money online) forget about using free hosting service such as blogspot or wordpress. I’m not against bloggers using free blog hosting, I’m also using blogspot in one of my internet marketing.

While free hosting services are great, it doesn’t give you a professional image if you can’t even spend a few pennies. Some pay-per-post providers will not even allow blogs on subdomains. So it pays to have your domain hosted on a paid and reliable web hosting provider.

To be honest, there are a lot of cheap but reliable hosting nowadays there really is no excuse anymore of not hosting your own blog.  I have written a lot of  reviews on various web host provider already. Check them out.

As I’ve recommended before, if you don’t like my personal reviews, you can always check some independent  reviews of the best services out there. Or if you prefer, just “ask Mr. G”-  search google- on what company is providing the best service, but I warn you that not every replies of Mr. G are the most reliable.  Ask for a second opinion, search forums, ask your fellow blogger. If you’re a non-techie, person,  ask your younger siblings or friends who are more adept to new technologies.

There are hundreds of web hosting providers waiting for you out there. Seek them and they will be found