Why? Sure you’ve already got Mastercard and Visa, won’t they do?

Well, they probably will do and, yes, it’s true that outside the British Isles and North America, acceptance of their cards isn’t nearly as widespread as it is for MC/Visa. However, when you get your credit card stolen (and you will do sooner or later), it’s the only one that you can depend on getting replaced whilst you’re on holiday. With Mastercard and Visa you’re depending on a lot of connections working and, particularly if you’re going to one of the countries in the former Eastern Bloc, then that infrastructure just isn’t in place.

OK, so it’s handy when it’s stolen abroad, but what about in the UK? Well, acceptance is pretty much universal these days and you’ll pick up a nice cashback bonus at the end of each year. It might not always look as worthwhile as some of the points rebate schemes but how often have you actually used the points that you’ve accumulated. Besides, with points you’re stuck with whatever the card issuer has in their catalogue, whereas with cash you can get whatever you want.

Definitely worthwhile as a third card and I think you’ll be surprised at how often you use it.

Well, I’ve tried that and I’ve yet to find one that can come up with a suggestion that is outside the standard off the cuff ideas that anyone could reel off. Until now that is.

Holiday.co.uk aren’t quite there yet but are definitely heading in the right direction I think. For a start they have loads of information on places that really are all over the world which isn’t always so easy to come by if you’re aiming for somewhere that’s truly out of the ordinary. A less obvious difference is that you can actually book the flights online to really exotic places which you can’t do on most normal travel sites.

Now, to be fair, you can’t always get hotels in the more exotic places. However, that’s something that’s commonplace across the majority of travel sites. For instance, although I could have booked a flight to Quito in Ecuador, they didn’t have a hotel listed there although you could call them for a hotel as, unlike most online places, they have real people on the phones which is something that you usually need for really out of the way places.

From all that you’d think that they only had exotic destinations but, of course, that’s far from the case. They’ve the usual beach, ski and city break options but even there they tend to offer that little bit more than you find on most travel sites. Not only that, but you can be considerably more flexible with your search options than on any other travel site that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a LOT). Normally, you’d need to say at least where and when you’d like to go but you can leave out the where and the when can be up to seven days different from the date you give which lets their system come up with some ideas that you might not have thought of.

An excellent site with the information that you need to plan even the most exotic trip but which retains the ability to offer you holidays at the ordinary end of the scale too and with the flexibility that people are looking for these days. Of course, in many ways this should be no surprise as they’re ABTA’s very first online travel agency, dating way back to 1994.
 
 

With this in mind their range will suit any woman of any age…even Granny! taking a further look I love the range of cami’s in the brochure; not cheap and tacky looking, just romantic, sexy and so stylish at the same time. Just as I said, even Gran could treat herself to something from this range.

Stockings have made a huge comeback in ladies fashions in recent years and there is a nice selection of style and design - women today prefer the hold-up style stockings which can be worn under skirts, even trousers, and will give any set of legs a sexy allure. My favourite is the seamed style - very 1940’s Hollywood.

For those who are into Ann Summers designs you will find this range at Knickerbox; we all know what to expect from an Ann Summers selection so I don’t need to say too much more…

If you are making a gift selection then take a look at the Top Ten; this gives you an idea of what are the most popular items. Guys, this should help you if you are choosing something for your lady. If you want to make a saving check out the clearance sale section as there is always a list of items on discount and each item is something special.

The other great thing about this unique company is that they have a philosophy which came from being environmentally conscious long before the trend became world-wide.

Their clothing line began back in the 1970’s on a kitchen table - that simply. Ever since then their clothes have been chosen as the only garments that countless adventurers choose to take.

These clothes have in-built protection features which will protect the wearer from a variety of elements:

* wind

* rain

* snow

* heat

* certain illnesses and skin conditions

The clothes are waterproof and sun proof and treated to repel and withstand bacteria and contamination from parasites.

As well as a fantastic range of travel clothing Rohan also present to you a line of wonderful travel accessories which are entirely practical, functional and look great as well.

Rohan clothing is also the top choice of high profile adventure documentary makers; film makers, explorers and expedition trekkers.

Do you have a special occasion coming up and need to find a great gift? why not spare your feet the walking distance and simply have a look at what is available on ‘Thanks Darling’?

This is a site with a difference: there is an astounding variety of gift ideas available - absolutely everything to suit any age and anyone. Men and teenage boys are especially difficult to buy for but on this site you will have not trouble finding something at all.

They have hampers, gifts for sports enthusiasts, experience packages and even some ideas for those who like to get an adrenalin rush out of life.

They offer online purchasing from a very safe and secure site as well. You would have to walk a long way to find so many different gift ideas in one place so definitely have a look: someone will certainly say “Thanks Darling” if you do.

Come on own up - which woman does NOT appreciate a beautiful bunch of flowers being given to her; the great thing is that Eden4Flowers do not just do ‘bunches’ of flowers - you can choose from a stunning range of floral arrangements that is sure to please anyone.

One great way of making that gift even more special is to add an extra special touch such as chocolates. Flowers say everthing you need to say that is why they make such an ideal gift for someone special. Why not add a touch of fun as well…choose some balloons to go with the flowers and chocolates as well or even a bottle of wine or champagne.

Their delivery is super fast so if you wish to impress someone this evening your selection can be delivered right in time and the flowers themselves are all fresh, bright and put together by skilled florists.

Now that summer is almost here it is great to be thinking about getting our kids out of all those stuffy coats, stockings and boots and into lovely light summer clothing. Childrens fashions have come along in leaps and bounds over the past years and it is a joy to go shopping for things for the kids to wear, especially if you are going away on holiday.

Great Little Trading Company has a wonderful range of clothes for the kids; all top quality and right up to date with regards to fashion. For both boys and girls you can get items that they can wear out to somewhere special or simply play around in.

You will also be able to buy accessories and items for their bedrooms if you are thinking of renovating as well as great things for the playground, yard or for playing indoors.  Their catalogue is free so register online and order right away and you can purchase online. If you have any special occasions coming up take advantage of their gift finding service too.

I’m terribly stingy when it comes to hiring a car. Whenever I can, I spend the time to go through all the car hire companies operating in the airport that I’m flying to because their deals change at different times.

Yet, every single time that I’ve done that recently I’ve ended up with Holiday Autos.

They’re not really a “proper” car rental firm in that you won’t find a sign in the airport saying “Holiday Autos desk” and that’s what keeps their prices low. Whereas Hertz, Avis, Europcar and the rest are paying for people to staff their offices (and each one has thousands of offices) and to buy enough cars to be able to offer you things like a guarantee of having a car, all that Holiday Autos do is negotiate a bulk hire rate and pass the savings on to you. I say “all” but, of course, that’s hard enough I’m sure.

One of the interesting things I found is that although Europcar are normally the outfit that supplies their cars around Europe, it costs more to hire the same car directly from Europcar and the terms of the rental aren’t as good either. For example, I wanted to do a one way drop off once: the Holiday Autos price was 30€/day for the car whilst the Europcar rate was 50€/day AND there was a 100€ dropoff charge from Europcar vs none from Holiday Autos.

Anyway, save yourself both time and money and just book with Holiday Autos. Just be sure to book well in advance as they do sell out of the very best offers quite early.

Men really do like to buy nice lingerie for their partner but can often find the experience a bit intimidating to go into a shop and browse the racks. The best solution is to look at La Perla. The items are just beautiful and designed to suit all shapes and sizes; so long as you know ‘her’  fitting and favourite colours you cannot go wrong making a purchase for her from their range of lingerie.

Here’s a tip: ask a female friend of hers, if you are not too sure about things such as sizing/style, and get some assistance from a female point of view. I can assure you - when she opens her gift she will love whatever it is you have personally chosen for her.

It seems appropriate that we start of these reviews with the review of the site that hosts this blog.

So why did we choose Hostgator? Well, we’ve been shopping around and have tried out quite a number of other hosts that seemed to be capable of meeting our needs but none of them really matched up to their promises.

Our first criteria was that we needed a host that would let us host a reasonable number of domains within a single account. Many hosts limit you to one which sounds fine when you’re starting out but when you need to add a second domain that means more charges for hosting which soon mounts up. HostGator don’t put a limit on the number of domains you can host so each additional domain just costs you the domain registration fee ($10/year or so).

Secondly, we needed around 1GB of storage. That sounds like a lot but when you’ve a lot of photographs on your sites as we do it doesn’t take long to use up a lot of space. Many hosts limit you to under 100MB whereas HostGator has a 600GB “limit”. They’ve got the bandwidth to go with that too which many hosting services don’t (photographs really eat up bandwidth).

Our next key criteria was reliablity. When you monitor how your host is performing, you often find that they fall well short of the 99.9% uptime that many of them talk about. This isn’t something to be complacent about and though HostGator has been well above that figure for us we’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Money back guarantee. Initially we figured that this wasn’t important but it turned out that it was with some hosts that we tried. HostGator have one of the longer money back periods at 45 days which is more than enough to see if they work for you.

We needed PHP and MySQL. That’s offered by a lot of services these days but HostGator add RoR which we may be using in the future. However, watch limitations on the number of MySQL databases as some places limit you to as little as one; there’s no limit on HostGator. Likewise there’s no limit on the number of POP accounts with HostGator.

24/7 support that’s actually there 24/7 is ironically not so important with a good service like HostGator but it’s nice to know that it’s there if you need it.

Cpanel wasn’t one of our initial short-listing criteria but turned out to be more important than we thought it was as some services that do their own thing in terms of front-ends to your account are quite difficult to settle in to. A small thing is that you can choose your own account name with HostGator which means that you don’t need to type in long e-mail addresses when logging in as you do with many services. It’s also rather handy if you’re using more than one hosting service as you can get away with the same configuration files for the MySQL access if you’re mirroring sites.

They’ve loads of features that we don’t need right now but may do at some point such as quite extensive support for e-commerce.

The server speed seems really good too. We were able to import our database in less time than it took one hosting service to delete the files related to it. That’s something that both you and your users will appreciate and it’s also quite important for SEO reasons as well: fast sites tend to get indexed better.

The only thing I don’t like is that their $7.95 ticket price actually only applies if you pay for three years in advance which most people probably don’t. Therefore the real price is $9.95. Yes, that’s about $3/month higher than a lot of services but then you’re getting much more than a $3 value for it. However, they run discounts all the time and you should be able to get a 20% discount on the headline price using the links here bringing the price down to $7.96.