Recommended Services and Products

US Netizen customers appreciate good quality at a reasonable price. They also prefer to avoid extras that mostly get in the way or add cost where no benefit is gained. Keeping with this tradition, US Netizen is making recommendations for a variety of Internet-related service and products.

Most of the services and products we recommend are free. Where there isn't a free service or product that performs adequately, we recommend one with low cost. We always recommend a good quality, hassle-free method of getting what you need or want.

Each of these services and products deserve their own page:

Search Engines

Antispyware Software

Antivirus Software

Simple Recommendations

Web Hosting:  1&1 has a wide range of hosting packages. The beginner account for $2.99/month has a generous 5 GB of space. Free domain, website templates, 2 GB POP3/IMAP mail and webmail too.

Web Portals:  UPDATE! Start.com is closing May 22. Apparently, it wasn't popular. A new free portal has just been made public by MSN:  Start.com. Customize your content including the usual news, weather, blogs, RSS, etc, but this has no advertisements. No banner ads, no flash ads, no text ads. Requires Javascript to be enabled in your browser (90% of people have it enabled). Good job MSN!

We don't provide a customizable portal because it would cost you money through higher fees.

E-mail Attachments: Our e-mail allows attachments up to 10 MB including the e-mail text. If you need to send an attachment that's bigger, we recommend BigAttachment.com. Send attachments up to 100 MB to anyone. The upload times out at 20 minutes, so attachments larger than 10MB will time out using our dialup service.

General News:  Forget CNN on dialup. Google News is ad-free (for now) and loads quickly.

Technology News:  If you like a good rant of mostly irrelevant tech trivia, try Slashdot. For the rest of us, mainline technology news with a British attitude is "spot on" on weekdays at The Register. Breaking tech news is fresh at NeoWin.

Internet Directories:  Directories are mostly irrelevant and many are simply spam. DMOZ is still hand edited and may currently be the best. It is a bit slow at adding sites, so it's far from perfect. Yahoo directory used to be at the top of the heap, but now websites must pay $299 per year to be listed. Most refuse to pay, so you are left with those sites that pay for advertising. Google Directory is nothing but a scrape of DMOZ, so skip it.

Browsers:  Internet Explorer is a good browser that renders more pages correctly than the others. It has a serious flaw:  it is insecure. It is hard to imagine why anyone would develop a program that allows the installation of software without your knowledge. Visit some sites and you end up with software installed on your computer. It is usually called spyware and getting it without asking is called drive-by downloading. Get rid of it with antispyware. Currently, we are recommending Firefox for use as a primary browser. You can customize it with some very useful extensions. Scot Finnie has a great discussion of Firefox extensions. Tip:  Turn off scripting support for security protection. If you really need to use a site with scripting and you trust it, use Internet Explorer for that site only.

Disposable E-Mail:  How often are you asked for a valid e-mail address before you can get the information you need? You know that they will just send you spam, so you don't want to use your main address. If you need a valid e-mail address for an unlock code or other "one time only" purpose, use Mailinator. Just enter anyname mailinator.com in the form, then go to Mailinator and check your e-mail. No need to set it up in advance. Any alphanumeric name will work and the mail you received will be deleted after a few hours.

Firewalls:  Even dialup users are vulnerable to attack, so a software firewall is needed. Attacks are normally thought of as probes of your computer from the Internet. All software firewalls address incoming attacks. For most users, the Firewall built in to Windows XP with Service Pack 2 is adequate for incoming attacks. If your computer has a worm, it's primary goal it to replicate and it does so by sending probes from your computer to the Internet. Many Firewalls do not protect you from outgoing attacks. We recommend Comodo Firewall Pro. Among the numerous firewall products available, Comodo is the best free product. It is very effective and procides few false warnings. It is more effective than ZoneAlarm free and doesnt tax your computer.

Digital Photo Software

Picasa from Google simply works well and it's free.  

Graphics Software

Animation:  Flash or GIF animators have their place, but how about that cartoon look?  Toon Boom Studio creates professional-looking animations at a reasonable price. A great feature is automatic lip-synching with your audio track.

Other Products and Services

These websites offer various products and services, but we have not thoroughly reviewed them. After we complete a thorough review, these may make it to the recommended list.

Satellite Internet - Cosmosatellite. A leading satellite Internet service provider in the North America region.
Geeks on Steroids Worldwide Directory
Tsection Web Directory -- Add your URL today!
NicheBOT.com - Find what people search for.
NicheBOT offers free keyword research services, innovative web site software, search engine ranking tools, and more.

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