Check this site out to protect your email address.

Note: This technique is not by any means a foolproof solution. But this technique will still certainly go a long way towards minimizing your exposure to less capable automated email harvesters.

Point 1: Magento Rules the Ecommerce World

Magento is now more popular (at least more visited/searched) than other major open source ecommerce web applications (Checkout Google, Compete). Currently, I believe Magento is leaps and bounds above any other ecommerce system out. If you don’t agree, I urge you to show me a more fully featured, open source ecommerce system.

Point 2: My Personal Backup is still Jungledisk

I’ve been developing with Amazon’s AWS services for about a year. They’ve really been leading the development of “cloud computing” applications. Their API’s are pretty straight forward and although I have a few complaints, it’s a pretty nice system.

The Amazon S3 Network (which allows you to store data on Amazon’s cloud) has been my latest love. Amazon’s “pay as you go” pricing model makes it competitive even when you compare it to a DIY project.

After checking this out, I wanted to start running my personal backups onto Amazon’s S3 network. I thought I’d have to develop something but then I found JungleDisk. JungleDisk is a Windows and Mac backup system that stores all of your data on Amazon’s S3 network. That means, if someone steals my laptop, all of my data would still be safe. JungleDisk currently costs $20 (one time fee) and Amazon’s S3 network costs me about $6 per month for around 40GB worth of a data.

I’m real happy with JungleDisk and I’m proud to recommend them. Its automated, fast, reliable, and cost-effective. But, they have a few things that they should be worried about… They were recently bought out by Rackspace (Amazon’s cloud computing competitor). Although you can choose to use either Amazon or Rackspace, I’m usually scared to commit to a vendor unless I know their future intentions. I hope things aren’t going to change (JungleDisk claims nothing will change), but you never know. Also, JungleDisk has a very strong competitor in Mozy (Bought by EMC which also claims nothing to will change due to their buyout). Although I have used the mozy system, I stuck with JunlgeDisk b/c of it’s performance and the Amazon’s S3 network. But now, Mozy only costs $5.00 per month! For $5.00, its definitely worth trying. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Mozy and Jungledisk.

My recommendation: personally, I don’t care which backup system you use. You can continue to use 3.5″ floppy disks… but please… please… PLEASE BACKUP. I once had a client pay $10,000 for data recovery. Seriously.