What is Pingware?
Pingware is our subscription blogging service. It is good for
professionals who want to maintain their own blogs, as well as for
blogs for retail businesses, publishers, and non-profits.
Pingware is built on Blogware, a best-in-class blogging package from
Tucows.
Pricing: We sell Pingware
subscriptions on an annual basis. Our blogs are priced based on
storage and bandwidth. Here are the prices for our blogs:
Mini: $24.00 per year. 100 MB of storage/100 MB of bandwidth.
Starter: $49.00 per year. 1 GB of storage/2 GB of bandwidth
Basic: $89.00 per year. 2 GB of storage/5 GB of bandwidth
Plus: $149.00 per year. 2 GB of storage/10 GB of bandwidth
Please take a look at this table comparing the basic Blogware features with other free and paid services.
We chose Blogware as our underlying platform for Pingware because it has many advantages for our target audiences:
1. Custom Components.
Rather than waiting for an off-shore development team to come up with
new features, we can build our customers new components and features
that meet their needs Recently we built is a slide show that sits in
the sidebar on the blog. We have used this for photos in our blog
for Sudan: The Land and the People.
But it can also be used for rotating text in the form of testimonials,
books reviews, new product offerings, and menu specials.
2. Complex Notifications:
Blog readers need multiple methods for getting new information from a
blog. Pingware allows readers to define their own methods.
They can get posts via email or via RSS. They can subscribe only
to certain categories. This type of flexibility is very important
for building and maintaing a loyal audience for your blog.
3. Search. Pingware
incorporates a full-text search of the blog’s content. This is an
extremely important feature that is not built into Typepad or Moveable
Type.
4. Photos. This is hands
down the best feature of Pingware’s software. You can zip a file of
photos, upload them, and in seconds you have a perfectly organized
photo album, complete with scaled-down thumbnails that link to larger
photos of a size you can specify. On top of that, each album has a
built-in link to a slideshow feature.
5. Podcasting. Pingware fully supports podcasting and videoblogging.
6. Privacy. What
separates Pingware from the rest of the blogging platform pack is how
easily it allows you to assign permissions and security to part or all
of the elements in your weblog. For example, you can secure categories
so only a select group of blog users can access them. This is useful
for using one blog for both internal and external purposes.
7. Custom Design. We’ve
created blogs using both Pingware and Movable Type, and we find
Pingware to be more malleable. Creating a custom component, changing
CSS, or switching back and forth from a two-column layout to a
three-column layout is much easier with Pingware.
8. Storage and bandwidth.
Most blogging platforms boast unlimited (even free) blogs - but not
unlimited storage or bandwidth. Most professional bloggers will quickly
exceed the limits of the free packages. To buy extra storage on free
blogging services such as LiveJournal would cost you upwards of $100.00 a year just for 1 GB of storage (not including bandwidth).
With our new mini package, you can get started for as little as $24.00
per year. Our intro package is a bargain for 100MB
storage/bandwith, the next upgrade package is a steal: 1G storage and
1G bandwidth for $49.00 per year.
