Why do you need a web hosting service? Your business web hosting service provider will launch your website on the internet, making it possible for individuals around the world to gain access to your site and your product or service.  There are two main types of web hosting service.  Free hosting services are provided without cost to you and any service that costs your money is a paid web hosting service. With a free web hosting service you can get your company’s website out there without incurring any fees and this is very attractive to many small businesses looking to get noticed on the internet. Free domain web hosting is a great alternative if your advertising budget is small. The downside of free web hosting is that the website of the company will contain advertisements and banners and you will have limited disk space and limited data transfer.

With a paid web hosting service you gain a significant amount of freedom to make your website just the way you want it and your customers benefit from a more reliable website.  This is not an option for everyone but for companies and individuals with available resources, paid web hosting is a great idea. For the extra money you can expect to receive extra bandwidth, more storage space, more design options, better customer service and have fewer issues if your website generates high traffic.

I. Plurk (www.plurk.com) — This is both social networking and microblogging (put them together, you get “social journal”) because the responses to a post are visible under the post itself. And the journal part comes in the form of a time line. Quite confusing for the newbie, but you’ll get why it’s developed quite a following.

2. FriendFeed (Friendfeed.com) — it’s basically a conversation very similar to Twitter. You can contribute to a shared topic. share links and other items and its also an aggregator of bookmarks and feeds.

3. Yammer (www.yammer.com) This microblogging service is for companies. An organization can create an account and register its employees and this serves as a private network. It’s usually used to ask questions and exchange work- related information.

4. DailyBooth (dailybooth.com) — All you’ve got to express yourself are pictures and a caption. This is a good service for those who love to snap shots of every little thing and can be imaginative in writing descriptions.

5. Tumblr (www.tumblr.com) — This is a very simple service that lets users almost anywhere. The interface is especially noteworthy because of its infinite customization possibilities. It’s also been named “Obama’s Top 5 Tech Tools.”

The company reported a 54-percent drop in third-quarter net income to $337 million, or 17 cents a share, as sales slid 15 percent to $12.9 billion. Analysts on average predicted profit of 27 cents and sales of $13.1 billion.

Chief executive officer Michael Dell is focused on lifting profit, even as that means yielding market share to rivals. Dell fell behind Hewlett-Packard Co. and Acer Inc. after holding the no. 2 spot since 2006. Dell attributed the drop to a PC market fueled by consumers, who account for just 20 percent of revenue. The company is counting on a revival in business spending in coming months to resuscitate sales.

“Dell remains a transition story,” said ShawWu, an analyst at Kaufman Bros. in San Francisco, who rates the shares ‘hold.”

“The conclusion here is that it looks like they are losing share more than expected, even though there was some expectation of that already.”

Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, declined $1.58, or 10 percent, to $14.29 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading, the biggest drop since Dec. 1. The stock has gained 40 percent this year.

Gross margin, the percentage of sales remaining after production costs, was17.3 percent, missing the 18.6 percent Wu anticipated. Dell had $102 million in expenses for “organizational effectiveness actions,” including the October decision to close a desktop PC factory in North Carolina, chief financial officer Brian Gladden said.

Prices for memory and liquid-crystal displays also weighed on profit margins, he said.

The company will continue to put profit before market share and last quarter walked away from some consumer retail deals because “the margins weren’t acceptable for us,” Gladden said.

Shipments at both Hewlett-Packard and Acer rose last quarter, according to Framingham, Massachusetts-based IDC. Dell’s PC shipments fell 8.4 percent, compared with a 17.1-percent drop in the second quarter, the research firm said.

Dell said it expects fourth-quarter revenue to improve over the third quarter. spurred in part by a pickup in consumer demand in the holiday shopping season. Orders from business customers have been rising steadily over the past few months and are expected to continue this quarter, the company said.

Since returning as CEO in January 2007, Dell has made 10 acquisitions, cut more than 10,000 jobs and outsourced 43 percent of production under a plan to save $4 billion annually. He also entered the smart phone market in China and Brazil and intends to offer the devices in the US next year.