Tigertech.net is a relatively small web-hosting company based in Berkeley, CA. Their prices are competitive for web hosting ... domain registration, complete DNS zone control, MySQL, and optionally WordPress is included.

Their customer service is astounding. And their documentation -- I've never read such helpful, friendly documentation anywhere. Just go look at it! Look at this section on how to use custom scripts on their site: https://support.tigertech.net/...

They're the sort of company that not only writes a lot of documentation on navigating the obstacle courses of other domain hosts when migrating to their service, but also they don't make it hard to migrate FROM their service, either.

I've recommended it to friends and clients and never heard a single complaint.

Try 'em out and see what you think!

I used to hate expiring passwords on the financial data systems where I used to work. Then one day the Comptroller was locked out of his own account because he had tried his old password too many times. But it turned out the Comptroller was on vacation and hadn't even tried to log in.

It turned out that an inside person had put a physical keylogger (USB pass-through device between computer and keyboard, ordered straight from China) on the Comptroller's computer one night and collected it a week later, and then subtly tampered with her own salary. She had also stolen the e-mail passwords of any employee who would have been alerted about the change, and instantly deleted the e-mail notifications as soon as she modified the system. She was sophisticated enough to alter other logs and alerts as well.

We might have locked down our internal systems better to begin with, but I have to say that she might have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those darn password changes.

I work for a small liberal arts college, and in many ways this is the IT model we have, in many ways because we can't have control: students come with whatever computer they like, and the faculty (who have a lot of power here) can't be hindered from writing their own programs, collaborating with other faculty in other colleges with other software, etc.

So we secure the infrastructure, we lock down the administrative systems and keep it behind a massive firewall, and we do our best to make sure all Windows users have antivirus and antispyware (while not blocking Linux and Mac users). Students, faculty, and staff can download and install concurrent-license copies of Photoshop, etc., and we have very low academic prices for Microsoft Office and now for Leopard and iWork.

If someone calls us because they can't get something academically-related done, we do our best to give them permissions to do so as soon as possible, and try to fix it so similar people in the future won't have that problem at all (unless it does lead to a real security issue). If they ask us, "How do you do this?" we have standards and recommendations for them, which makes it easier to support, but we won't stop people from doing it another way. For example, we're on Exchange, but we support Thunderbird and Mac Mail as well as Outlook/OWA/Entourage. And we still have some Eudora and Netscape Mail and Pine nd who-knows-who-else users, and so we have IMAP setup instructions on our web site and good luck to them.

Google bases a lot of their company on higher education, so it's not really s surprise to see this -- but it's an example that other companies may want to emulate, even if not all their employees are engineers. Many of our students barely know computers beyond word processing, web surfing/social networking, and IM, yet network security and monitoring for sudden traffic surges, combined with good free (for them) antivirus, means it's very unlikely they'll get themselves into trouble -- and if they do, tech support sweeps in and cleans it up ASAP. That's a model where the vast majority can figure it out for themselves, and it would help businesses to trust their own employees enough to do so.