Posts from — November 2009

Web hosting is always changing and updating. If you own a site, or planning to build one, it’s important to know what’s new in the web hosting services arena. Here’s a collection of news and updates of web hosting, hosting services and web development:

Deutsche Telekom takes over Web Hosting Service Strato

Deutsche Telekom informed it will take over Strato, a German Web hosting company. The boards of both companies had approved the plan but that it still faces regulatory approvals.Financial details were not disclosed.

Telekom claims the transaction would make it a leader in the German Web hosting market with Strato’s products that include and enable email, Web sites, blogs, online shopping and data storage. Strato’s business is primarily aimed at consumers and small businesses.

Strato, based in Berlin operates about 4 million hosted domains.

UK Web Hosting Service Namesco Buys Poundhost

UK domain registrar and web hosting provider Namesco has acquired UK dedicated hosting provider Poundhost. This is the first major acquisition for Namesco since May 2008.

Namesco is currently the fourth largest domain name and hosting provider within the UK. The company will own 100% of the capital of the companies composing Poundhost, including Poundhost Internet, Server Arcade, VPS and Blueconnex.

Poundhost has over 10,000 dedicated and virtual servers and a large high-end customer base, 30% of which resides in the US.

Hosting Service Site5 Plants A Tree for Each New Hosting Account

Although world leaders fail to reach a binding climate agreement this year in Copenhagen, there is still hope and action at the grassroots level. Web hosting service Site5 has partnered with mokugift to plant a tree for every new hosting account.

“Tree-planting with new accounts is a natural extension of Site5′s existing environmental philosophy. Site5′s business was designed around a remote workforce which is the greenest possible option for a company”, explained Ben Welch-Bolen, CEO of Site5.

Cheap, quick and efficient – that’s Just Host web hosting for you.

With an amazing price of only $3.45 a month, it’s really hard to compete with this cheap shared hosting service.

Just Host Shared Hosting Package

So, what exactly do you get from JustHost? Here’s the deal they offer for $3.45:

• Unlimited Space - No need to worry about storage – you have all the room you need for your files.
• Unlimited GB’s of Transfer - Excellent for popular sites with lots of traffic.
• Unlimited Domain Hosting - This means you can build as many sites as you want.
• Unlimited E-Mail Accounts - A nice feature – give an email account to all your employees.
• Unlimited MySQL Databases - Great for CMS users, like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.
• FREE Site Builder - A wonderful feature for beginners.
• FREE Domain for Life - Saves you some money and trouble.
• Anytime Money Back Guarantee - JustHost are so sure you’ll be happy, they offer this guarantee without hesitation.

Just Host Features

Just Host promises 99.9% uptime for your site. Although this isn’t an unusual feature, Just Host are so concerned about uptime that they set up their own company to monitor people’s uptime for them called Just Uptime. All Just Host’s servers are monitored by Just Uptime.

Just Host guarantees reliability through load balancing technology and super fast backbone connections. With load balancing, your site is available from multiple servers, so if one server becomes unavailable, your site will still be online and accessible for your customers.

Just Host uses cPanel, which is an excellent control panel, which makes it simple to manage all aspects of your site. With this control panel, you can upload files, create databases, manage email accounts, create redirections, watch your site stats, manage FTP accounts and much more.

Just Host Customer Support

Customer support is one of the most important aspects of web hosting services. When you choose your hosting service, you need to pay special attention to what they offer in terms of support. Quick response and competent representatives are the most important features of a good customer support.

Just Host will answer your email in 20 minutes or less and they answer the phones after less than 3 minutes – that’s what we call a quick service.

Finally, Just Host employs English speaking experts that will be able to solve your problems quickly and efficiently.

Food lovers rejoice! Jamie Oliver, the amazingly cute and talented super chef, is going to launch a very interesting dating site, for those seeking love and loving food at the same time.

The site is in colabaration with match.com, a well known dating site. All you need to do is sign up to JamieOliver.com/dating and you’ll be able to contact any of the 6.5 million people on Match.com.

Oliver’s site also offers romantice recipes ideas and tips on making the first meal for your partner. Some of the recipes in this new dating site include Oysters with Chilli, Crostini and Lemon, Lime and Peppermint sorbet.

Match.com recently published a survey that pointed out that 45% of members wanted a good cook when looking for a new partner. So – brush up on those cooking skills!

“I’ve always found food to be a really powerful way of bringing people together and I thought it would be great if we could get people who loved food, to love each other”, said Oliver and added, “My site and match.com both have great communities on them and hopefully, by partnering up, we’ll be able to bring single food lovers together and make some love matches – or maybe even a marriage – happen.”

The successful Moo Crew Support Team has played a major role in helping FatCow secure a high ranking among the top ten web hosting providers on Consumer-Rankings.com. We talked to Gary Engel, Senior Vice President of Customer Support at FatCow, to find out how they do it.

Q: What’s unique about FatCow’s customer support?

A: “Our HefferCratic Oath sets us apart from other web hosting providers because when it comes to customer support, we put our money where our mouth is. If customers feel we haven’t kept up our side of the bargain – by answering calls in less than two minutes on average, providing answers to your questions at that time or a firm follow-up deadline – they receive a credit to their account equal to a free month of hosting.”

“All levels of our support team regularly meet with our engineers and network managers to talk through questions from customers. Our follow-up measures also make us unique – if we feel it’s appropriate, we’ll have a support representative at the management level personally check in with customers for feedback on how their questions were resolved. We also survey all customers who contact us to learn how we can improve our system.”

Q: How can new FatCow customers get off to a successful start?

GE: “We’ve designed our control panel so that it’s easy to use, but we realize that some customers need something extra to really get their sites up and running. That’s why we created our JumpStart service, which gives customers one-on-one time with our best agents to get a feel for the tools and services available.”

“Our QuickStart feature is a free service we offer that instructs customers on adding a domain, the options they have in setting up a mailbox, and introduces them to our website building tools. Customers can also refer to our Knowledgebase, a collection of articles offering technical assistance and helpful background information on products and services, and dozens of multimedia tutorials that provide visual step-by-step instruction. And of course, we are available 24/7 to answer any questions they have.”

Q: How do you ensure your customers receive quality service?

A:” We have a vigorous quality assurance process in place to both maintain our policies and identify how we can improve our training. We conduct separate audits of customer contacts – by phone, email and chat – then compare those audits for an accurate assessment, which ultimately drives our training schedule and new policies. We monitor call wait times, the time it takes to reach first time resolutions and the number of tickets that are escalated to tier-two specialists, which provides us with a broader scope of our support performance.”

“We’ve synthesized the information we obtain from this process on our internal Support Wiki. The wiki provides our agents with a searchable written resource that’s reliable and always up-to-date.”

“Customer surveys also play an important role here, because they give our customers the opportunity to “QA” our support staff right along with us.”

Q: How do you actually use the information from customers to improve your services?

A: “We use the information to improve the overall quality of our customer support. We use customer feedback from surveys and follow-up calls along with internal audits to examine agents’ performance on an individual basis. That’s how we identify strengths and areas that require additional instruction, which are then worked into our training process. Our goal is to provide reliable web hosting, and this process plays a major part in fulfilling that goal.”

Although everything is digital, and we present our business mainly through our web sites,  a lot of importance still lies on your business card. In a way, your business card represents you and functions as a reminder – it reminds the person you gave it to, that you talked to them and want to do business with them. Many business owners and freelancers use business cards, and they can help you in the marketing of your company. Don’t underestimate the power of the business card and what it can do for you. It portrays the personality and image of your business, and that’s very important.

Business cards come in many shapes and sizes, and there are a lot of unique designs out there. It really depends on your imagination, the skills of your designer and the amount of money you are willing to spend on it.

There are many design possibilities – shape, size, colors, paper type, the information you should print and much more. It’s not easy to decide how to make a good business card, but here are a few tips for you.

Business Card Tips

1. Don’t forget the basics: Before the design and the colors,  just make sure that your name, title, company, address, phone and fax numbers, e-mail, website URL and logo are on there.
2. Check and re-check: Proof-read your card as many times as you need before you send it to print. One mistake in one digit on your phone number, will make a stack of business cards useless.
3. Make sure your card can be scanned: Many people don’t keep the cards, but scan them into their computers. Makes sure the design is clear enough to scan.
4. Stick with the standards: Creating a unique and different business card might make an impression, non-standard cards can’t fit into binders. This way it’s harder for the receiver to keep the card, and they just might throw it away.
5. Consider including your picture: Your picture on the card may help people remember you better.
6. Don’t over-crowd: Your business card should include all the information about you, but it shouldn’t be too crowded with detail, and you should leave some white space for scribbles and notes.
7. Avoid flimsy cards: A thin, feeble card will signal that you put little thought and effort into creating it. Use high-quality cards with a glossy or matte finish for a sharp look. Choose a heavy paper, too.
8. Use both sides: This might make the card a tad more expensive, but it will also give you more room and the ability to use two languages if necessary.

Browsing through dozens of pictures in your favorite dating site, you see a girl or a guy that you like. Now is the time to contact them, and you know what they say – first impressions are the most important! When you write a first message to an interesting person on a dating site, you want it to be written well, and you want the recipient to be impressed by it and answer you.

How do you do that?

OKcupid, a popular dating site, has analyzed over 500,000 first contact messages and came back with interesting conclusions.

First of all, you wanna avoid netspeak, too much weird slang and typos. People tend to ignore messages that are grammatically incorrect.

Another thing to avoid is physical compliments. Yes, for many people it feels weird that you give them compliments without even seeing them. More than that, a “You are so HOT baby” message is almost sure to be ignored by the ladies, because it feels like harassment. The word “sexy” is especially problematic – so save it for when you really meet the person!

When writing a first message on a dating site, you also want to be original and interesting. Don’t go around and copy-paste the same boring, generic message to all potential partners. Read their profile, find points of mutual interest and write about that.

IttyBiz has written an interesting post about Marketing for Small Businesses. Read the post, answer some of the questions and try to find the way to make the right decision for your business.

Here are some interesting question you should ask yourself:

1. What do I love to do so much that it doesn’t feel like work?
2. What could I write in my signature line that would make that person desperate to click my link or call my
   number?
3. What personality traits do I have going for me in my quest to help my right people?
4. What could I do to be interesting to the media?

Read the full post at IttyBiz

If you are looking for a fast, efficient, extremely professional web hosting service – you might wanna go with InMotion.

InMotion puts an interesting emphasis on speed, and this is a very important consideration when choosing a hosting service.

While most hosting services utilize a single data center, which means your website and email could be very far from you – and sometimes slow because of that. InMotion allows you to choose your data center location, which makes your site faster and more efficient.

InMotion’s Business Class Offers 3 different plans – from a very basic one for small sites (2 databases, 2 domains, 25 sub domains) to a pro plan that offers unlimited domains, FTP accounts, e-mail addresses etc. The prices range from 6.95$ a month to 18.95$ a month – a very reasonable price for the great package you get. All business class web hosting plans come with a 90 Day Money Back Guarantee – so you can try it out before committing.

The 30 self installing scripts that are a part of all packages are very useful. There is also a choice of 2 website builders from InMotion – most hosting services offer only one. If you are into commercial sites, InMotion offers a variety of commercial features, including different kinds of shopping carts and payment methods.

Cpanel is InMotion’s choice of control panel – which is great. It’s easy to use and offers many professional features for advanced user. It’s also a common control panel for hosting services, which means a lot of people use it, so there’s lots of support and help around.

InMotion has won quite a few awards in the field of customer service. InMotion offers a lot of good tutorials, and a great customer support with live chat option.

Click here for more info about InMotion Hosting