Archive for April, 2010

I’m sure you’ve noticed there are a lot of web hosting companies out there, some making outrageous claims, and some appearing to be very cheap. What should you be looking for in a webhosting company? Why is White Dog Green Frog different?

One of the key areas, I guess, is that I (Brian) come from a background of being a (Unix) system administrator for many years. Having worked for Fortune 100 companies, and training staff doing system admin at those companies, I understand how they think and I’ve been able to bring some of that thinking to the practice and value that we bring as a company.
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How much time, effort and money have you invested in getting your site set up just the way you wanted? Getting the design, having it developed, adding all your content, all the little tweaks and updates…

If you run an eCommerce website, how much customer history do you have stored in your site’s databases? Sales history, invoices, customer details…

Now, imagine if you lost all that tomorrow.

Imagine if a hacker got your password, and destroyed all your hard work. Imaging if with the slip of a finger you accidentally delete a core file, rendering your site useless.

How long would it take you to recreate it all? How much of that data is completely irreplaceable? How much business would you lose in the meantime?

Backups can save you. When was the last time you backed up your site?

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About 90% of our support calls are related to email. Usually the call starts with “My email doesn’t work”! The following is a fun article which will solve a lot of these issues for you, hopefully saving some time.

Before you do anything, perhaps obviously, the very first step to troubleshooting is to ensure that your internet connection is working. Without an internet connection, you will not be able to receive email or view your website (or any website for that matter).

Check to see if you are able to go to www.google.com. Next step is to enter in your domain name here. If your internet connection is not working, contact your internet service provider (ISP) such as BigPond, iiNet, Internode etc.

AUTHENTICATION FAILURE
I know computers can be annoying and cryptic at times, but surprisingly, the error message that Outlook (or the other various email programs – Thunderbird, Mail, Entourage etc) provides, actually usually tells you exactly what the problem is.

Example: You hit send/receive but a popup appears that says “Enter Network Password:” you enter it in your password and it appears again and again and again and so out of frustration you finally hit “cancel” only to receive this error:

Your email rejected your login. Verify your user name and password in your account properties. Under Tools, click Email accounts…

Here’s a question for the class. What do you think that error message means?… CORRECT! You’ve either entered in your password incorrectly or you’re not using the entire email address as the username.

REMEDY: Enter in the correct password. If you don’t recall your password, you can always reset it in your hosting account Control Panel (cPanel). “Authentication failure” is just a fancy pants way of saying “login incorrect”.

FIREWALL BLOCK
Quickest way to determine if you have a firewall block is to go to your website. If there is a firewall block, it will read something like this:
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Need a website? Just for a bit of fun, show us your footy club membership card and we’ll give you $50 off your web development package!

If you are a Collingwood supporter, flash us your Dane Swan membership card and we’ll give you $100 off your web development package!

St Kilda and Carlton supporters will be charged an extra $50. GO PIES!!!

This is an oldie, but goodie. If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s a must see. If you have, you can spare 1 minute and 50 seconds out of your day for a good repeat laugh!

My mother joked about me sounding like him when I sing karoake. Nice mom, nice…

These days, email has become the way a lot of business is done, yet many small companies are forfeiting the advantage that having their own domain and email address (info@yourbusiness.com rather than yourcompany@bigpond.com or worse, yourcompany@hotmail.com) brings to the table.  I always know when I’m dealing with a company with an email address of yourcompany@bigpond.com that it’s a probably 1-man band or that they simply haven’t been able to harness technology effectively yet.  Perhaps they will in the future, but in the meantime I have doubts about doing business with them that have nothing to do with their expertise in their field, which may be first class!

Here are some of the advantages that having email under your own domain brings:

1.  Better Spam control

Despite having many email addresses, I get well under 10 spams a week from our many email addresses combined.  If you are suffering from Spam overload, talk to us; our experienced team has a variety of solutions and our default email system has most of them included!

We have solved spam problems for many companies through a variety of solutions, some of which are surprisingly simple.  As just one quick example, there are times when a change of email solves spam problems completely, other times simply not publishing your main email address on your website where the baddies can “harvest” it and add it to their lists is enough.

2.  Convey a professional appearance

Having your own domain conveys a sense of professionalism and seriousness about your business right off the bat.  Wouldn’t you prefer to do business with a company that is committed to itself?  Remember first impressions can be very important in business, and an email address mentioning hotmail, yahoo or bigpond conveys a definite impression of being a one person company. (Note that this doesn’t apply as much to gmail which is often used by professionals even in large companies)

While none of us want to project a false impression that our companies are much larger than they are, projecting the impression that you are smaller than you are is just as false and doesn’t serve you or your customers well.

3.  Be independent from your ISP
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