Tougher economic times compel businesses to look for ways to cut costs while still maintaining the essential infrastructure and services they need to operate and grow their business. An excellent way to do this is outsourcing IT requirements to a third party hosting provider.

Hosting providers provide a safe home for information technology needs with their redundant connectivity, hardened infrastructure and bulletproof security. All this is supported by a team of dedicated IT professionals whose sole objective is to keep IT infrastructure safe and running smoothly 24×7x365.

A business of any size can derive a number of benefits from outsourcing IT infrastructure to a hosting provider. First and foremost, there are significant cost savings. Hosting in-house, for example, requires significant man-hours and qualified personnel, which does not come cheaply. Using the services of a hosting provider, on the other hand, reduces that significant piece of overhead to a single monthly fee.

On top of the cost savings, outsourcing IT infrastructure to a hosting company frees up internal resources. Instead of having IT staffers configuring servers or trying to handle tricky email issues, it makes much more business sense to have them working on high priority tasks related to the organization’s core operations – ranging from anything such as desktop support to application development. Working with a hosting company gives IT staffers the time and energy to do their jobs better. And in smaller organizations where IT expertise is scare, outsourced hosting puts mission-critical needs in the hands of knowledgeable professionals – exactly where they belong.

Outsourcing to a Web hosting provider also gives businesses peace of mind. Rather than having to worry about security threats, downtime or technical glitches, businesses can be certain that their infrastructure is in the hands of someone that understands exactly how to handle the intricacies of information technology in an online environment. This peace of mind is sometimes overlooked, but can be an integral component of a well-run enterprise.

Hosting companies also provide a very desirable degree of specialization that delivers performance levels local IT or design agencies can’t match. Hosting providers reside in world-class data center facilities and are devoted to a single purpose: the housing, security and protection of valuable content. Everything they do, from the software development to the construction of facilities is designed to provide an environment that is up and running around the clock. Local IT shops are built on a different area of specialization. They design, install and customize. Hosting and managing infrastructure is not their core competency and expecting them to be able to do this at a high level of precision is an unrealistic expectation. The logic is pretty straightforward: you would not ask a bicycle repairman to fix your car.

Finally, outsourcing to a hosting provider is akin to having an advisory service which does not charge exorbitant consulting fees. Businesses can consult their hosting provider on any matter relating to technology and get a knowledgeable answer. What are the pros and cons of hosting on Linux? Should I be outsourcing my email to a hosting provider? Should I be upgrading my dedicated server’s memory and hard drive? Is a virtual private server a better option for my growing business? These questions and many others fall under the expertise of a hosting provider and businesses can expect an informative answer. And conveniently, it is very likely that the hosting company offers the product or service that can address the needs expressed by the customer.

Hosting providers rent space on a server or an entire physical server to support IT infrastructure ranging from email and web sites to advanced applications and databases. The server renting business, however, also translates well into related expertise such as data backup and storage.

Backup and storage services do not just provide a home for valuable data and content, but they also guarantee protection against its loss or corruption. With the help of replication software and redundant physical infrastructure, hosting companies are able to keep duplicate copies of data that is retrievable in real-time even when a disaster strikes.

In a world where growing amounts of both personal and business data are being stored in an online environment, the demand for this type of service will only grow in the future. This creates a strong opportunity for the hosting business, which is ideally suited to serving this need.

Outsourcing IT infrastructure to a third party hosting provider is not only cost-effective, but ensures reliable and best in class performance. Web hosting companies are able to handle a wide range of IT requirements and businesses should consider working with them to improve their business processes or leverage the online world to create bottom-line value.

A couple of months ago a power surge burnt (not literally) one of the memory sticks in my PC. I found it after quite a hassle. My computer would start normally but there was no video output. First I thought it had something to do with video card but eventually after removing one memory stick at a time I found the bad one. I was down to 3GB.

That was not the end of it. A couple of weeks ago my Windows Vista started crashing frequently with the blue death screen. Unfortunately the blue screen disappears so quickly, you would need a photoghraphic memory to capture the information from it. First I thought it was some bad software and refreshed my system with OS reload. But this continued. Googling found that it had something to do with some outdated driver or memory. So I went to memtest86.com and downloaded the small iso zip file and booted my pc through it. And viola I do have bad memory – pun intended :). Thanks to this laptop I’m still connected to the world.

Now I have to find which stick is bad so I’m going through one stick at a time. It is painfully slow process but that’s life. I will post the results later how it goes. With two sticks gone bad it is time to buy more RAM, and may be ddr800 this time as the prices have insanely gone down since I bought ddr667 last year.

It was all the buzz. GMail experienced a hiccup and was down for a couple hours last week. I missed the whole thing. However; when I started checking my newsreader and twitter, email, etc. everywhere I turned people had been crying, “GMail is down! We’re DOOMED!“

I was quite surprised at the public outrage. I use GMail for my personal email. I’ve been using it for years without issue. I think in all those years I’ve experienced (personally) about 10 minutes of downtime. I had no idea it was down last week during the actual outage as I was working and didn’t try to check my email during those few hours. Even if I did, I would have felt at most slightly annoyed and would have came back to it later.

What’s surprising is how many stated they felt disconnected, unproductive, and were moving to another free email service, such as Yahoo. In this day and age of technology, there are countless ways to communicate, and while email is very convenient especially with those abroad, it certainly isn’t the only form of communication. Systems go down. Services fail. It’s just a fact of life in this world of computers, routers, networks, and email. One should always have a backup plan.

To Google’s credit, they explained, “We feel your pain, and we’re sorry” Which is all they can really do.

Today we find in our voicemail queue that someone overnight left a rather unique message. We were rickrolled.

Wikipedia definition of “Rickrolling”

Rickrolling is an Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up“. The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a Web link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true source of the link without clicking (and thus satisfying their curiosity). When a person clicks on the link given and is led to the web page he/she is said to have been “Rickrolled”.

I love when our customers have a sense of humor. Here’s the message.

So… anyone gonna confess?

The green buzz is being exploited all over the web and abroad lately. What does it mean to be green exactly?

ok thats not what I meant, but kermit would be proud nonetheless. It means having little or no impact on your environment in short. Consider the materials needed for all the computing and server parts to the ridiculous sums of energy needed to run server farms 24/7. To be quite honest datacenters and server farms are one of the worst things to hit the environment in the modern decade.

Take a look at your homes electric bill and consider how cool it needs to be so your tv doesnt burn out if left on all day and night for years straight. The tv itself is chewing up energy and the a/c is working overtime to cool that system, fans and other systems are working nonstop to remove the heat. Now imagine your one pc in your home office has to remain online all day and night. Now imagine you have one thousand offices in your home, besides declaring bankrupcty since you cant afford the power, how is that remotely close to being friendly to mother nature.

We can and do look at ways to reduce our impact but our electric bill alone tells us when it comes to being green, datacenters have a long way to go. Some ways we try to reduce our impact are recycling hot water from coolers to use as heating for offices, using raised flooring and channels to remove heat and apply cooling better, reducing old ineffecient servers by using more virtualization and newer more efficient processors. The main drive for this happens to be profit margins though, not just being green.

Don’t let corporate spin masters make you think giant datacenters are helping mother nature. The fact is its good for business and thats why its being done. Consider that one cabinet of 25 servers in the sub $200 market, drawing 30amps of power 24/7 is now replacable by one monster vps node. Granted our monster vps nodes pack a lot of power under the hood and easily consume the power of 3 of those servers alone. 25 to 3 is a pretty significant power and cost savings.

So buy more vps hosting , mother nature will thank you for it. Ok probably not but we will, and it really does make a difference compared to the old standard of dedicated servers. Quite frankly the need for dedicated servers under $200 mo is dimenishing quickly thanks to virtualization technologies like Virtuozzo, openvz, xen, Vscontrol.

Why? Well, despite the fact that I work at the greatest web hosting company in the world, it’s because I am now an iPhone user.

I’ve held off for years jumping on the cell phone gadget bandwagon. The closest I’ve ever been to having anything that was “latest and greatest” in the cell phone world is picking up a new Motorola Razr two years after the first Razr came out (or getting my iPod as a gift several years after MP3 players became all the rave). Even then, I didn’t have a text message plan. I saw no need to text people when I could just call them.

That all changed last month when our oldest went and moved two states away after graduation. My husband made the case that it would be easier to communicate with her if we had some sort of texting plan. OK Fine. We started out with a little $5.00 – 200-texts-a-month plan. EXCEPT: I soon discovered they would use that up in the first week! I quickly changed it to an unlimited plan. Once the family got word we had the much coveted Unlimited Texting ability, miraculously one of my kids sent and received 150 texts the FIRST DAY we had the plan. I didn’t even know that was possible.

It took me a bit longer to catch on to the texting bug. I found it difficult to tap out texts to my kids or husband on my little Razr. Then I got my hands on my friend’s iPhone. He bought one last year when they first came out and I’ve always been intrigued by it. I found out texting on it is a breeze. The more I messed around with my friend’s iPhone, the more I wanted one.

On July 11, 2008, the day of the iPhone G3 launch, I became an iPhone user. And I’m loving every minute of it. I’ve become almost as bad as my children finding reasons to text family members and friends, and if I could talk my boss into getting some sort of text plan, I’d probably find reasons to text him too! (*cough hint hint *cough)

My favorite features so far:

• The built-in GPS. This is going to prove exceptionally useful for my forever navigationally challenged husband.
• The iPod. I no longer have to carry around my iPod and my phone. I now have both in one little gadget.
• It’s super easy to text with the qwerty keyboard.
• The ease of downloading and installing apps from the App store.. For example, Twitter; I love my twitter and now I can get updates super easy on my phone. I even downloaded an application that allows me to control iTunes on my computer from my phone.
• Internet and eMail access on the go from anywhere I have a signal, which so far has been everywhere.

Do you have an iPhone? If not, why? If so, what are your favorite features?

Offering businesses virtual private servers as a comparable option to dedicated hosting looks to drive down cost and reduce power consumption of hosting datacenters

HOUSTON, TX. July 16, 2008 – WowVPS! web hosting, providers of virtual private server (VPS) hosting services and a subsidiary of Landis Holdings Inc., today announced a new promotion of 25% off all “Xen” hosting plans starting from only $10.45 per month. Besides reducing ongoing operating costs for companies during tough economic times, shifting usage from dedicated servers to virtual private servers can reduce overall required power consumption.

“Socially responsible web hosting involves making choices that meet a company’s hosting needs while minimizing the impact on the environment,” says Greg Landis, president of WowVPS!. “While the focus has been mainly on new technologies to reduce power consumption, sometimes the simplest answer is selecting the right hosting plan. Our VPS hosting plans offers businesses an attractive option of improved flexibility of dedicated hosting at prices much lower than full dedicated packages.”

WowVPS! utilizes the latest version of VSControl virtualization software from Devpond, another subsidiary of Landis Holdings. VSControl software was developed in-house and eliminates the software cost which often leads to increased VPS hosting prices. WowVPS! offers plans with higher specs than any other VPS provider while maintaining 100% uptime.

WowVPS! starts with the “Xen Awakening” entry level plan, regularly priced at $13.95 per month but on special for only $10.45 per month, and includes:

• 12 GB disk space
• 200 GB bandwidth
• 192 MB or RAM
• Unlimited domains
• Free 3 VPS IP addresses

All WowVPS! “Xen” hosting plans include:

• Full VPS root access
• RAID 10 disk storage
• Guaranteed RAM
• Premium bandwidth
• Multi-core, multi-processor CPUs
• VSControl software
• No oversold resources
• Choice of Linux OS
• No contract obligation; cancel any time
• Online server and service restarts

The new WowVPS! web site includes a community forum, a blog, user-friendly control panel and the NixCore client management software.

To learn more about the 25% off special, visit www.wowvps.com/xenvpshosting.php.

About WowVPS!

WowVPS!, based in Houston Texas, provides high-quality Internet hosting solutions to small and medium-sized businesses, government agencies, prominent individuals and non-profit organizations worldwide. WowVPS’s core portfolio comprises information technology and business hosting services, as well as programming services.

Remember my post about Phishing Awareness? Recently Gmail announced they are teaming up with eBay and Paypal to help protect Gmail users from phishing scams.

Now any email that claims to come from “paypal.com” or “ebay.com” (and their international versions) is authenticated by Gmail and—here comes the important part—rejected if it fails to verify as actually coming from PayPal or eBay. That’s right: you won’t even see the phishing message in your spam folder. Gmail just won’t accept it at all.

As a Gmail user, as well as a PayPal and eBay user, this is good news.

You may or may not have heard of the term, “Phishing” (pronounced like “fishing”). Phishing is the act of sending an email pretending to be from an online store or service such as eBay, PayPal, Amazon, major banks, etc.

The format of the email will look very similar to a standard email you would get from such a service. It might even contain the company’s logo. Here’s an example phishing email I received a while back:

PayPal is committed to maintaining a safe environment for its community of customers. To protect the security of your account, PayPal employs some of the most advanced security systems in the world and our anti-fraud teams regularly screen the PayPal system for unusual activity.

We are contacting you to remind you that on 28 September 2006 our Account Review Team identified some unusual activity in your account. In accordance with PayPal’s User Agreement and to ensure that your account has not been compromised, access to your account was limited. Your account access will remain limited until this issue has been resolved.

To secure your account and quickly restore full access, we may require some additional information from you for the following reason:

We have been notified that a card associated with your account has been reported as lost or stolen, or that there were additional problems with your card.

This process is mandatory, and if not completed within the nearest time your account or credit card may be subject for temporary suspension.

To securely confirm your PayPal information please click on the link bellow:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run

We encourage you to log in and perform the steps necessary to restore your account access as soon as possible. Allowing your account access to remain limited for an extended period of time may result in further limitations on the use of your account and possible account closure.

For more information about how to protect your account please visit PayPal Security Center. We apologize for any incovenience this may cause, and we apriciate your assistance in helping us to maintain the integrity of the entire PayPal system.

Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Team

It looks pretty real doesn’t it? Someone who’s not ever experienced receiving an email like this or isn’t very familiar with how PayPal works may fall for it. The email seems harmless and the link even appears to go PayPal.

First and foremost: PayPal, eBay, Amazon, and most likely your bank will not send you such an email if your account was truly compromised. So this is your first clue that the above and similar emails are a phishing attempt.

The link looks real doesn’t it? Take a closer look. Does the link actually go to PayPal?

No, it doesn’t. The link actually goes to http://www.blahblah2.paypal345.blarg.org.com.net/ which is something I just made up. In a real phishing attempt the link may contain the word PayPal (or ebay or your bank, etc) in the URL as this one does, but it’s not really PayPal. Don’t be fooled!

What you’ll be taken to is a site that will look like PayPal, may even look exactly like the PayPal home page, and there will be a form for you to enter your information. Usually it will ask for your account ID, password, credit card number and possibly your social security number. Once you hit submit after filling out the form, that information is collecting by identify thefts who will then use your information to make fraudulent purchases. They will very likely also purchase a web hosting account that will be used for their scam. (They also hack into unsuspecting innocent people’s websites and upload scripts and mailers to send out these notifications and collect data from people who fall for their phishing emails.)

Another clue is these emails usually contain poor grammar and misspelled words. In my example above, take a look at the last paragraph. Most major companies know how to spell, “incovenience” (inconvenience) and “apriciate” (appreciate) and if they don’t they are usually smart enough to run emails they send to their customers through a spell-checker.

When it doubt, never never never click a link you receive in email that states you need to update your PayPal account. Always go to paypal.com, ebay.com or your bank, etc. by typing the address in your browser if you need to update account information. You can always call them as well and see if your account actually does have any issues.

If you receive an email supposedly from PayPal, your bank, etc, telling you there was suspicious activity, or that you need to update your account, if there was an unverified transaction, or anything at all that directs you to click a link to correct the situation, do NOT click the link and input any information. Always always go to the the sites manually. Report the emails you receive to the abuse address for the website/service you are trying to visit. For PayPal it’s spoof@paypal.com. For eBay it’s spoof@ebay.com

A question we often get asked is, “What is the difference between your VPS plans and your SDX (Semi-Dedicated) plans?”

Semi-Dedicated
Our SDX plan is basically one shared hosting account on a powerful server. What’s different compared to our standard shared hosting plan is that there far fewer accounts on our SDX servers. So you have more resources available to you. For example, if you have a fairly busy forum not suitable for regular shared hosting, you would want to purchase our Semi-Dedicated hosting plan.

SDX is not intended to be used to resell hosting since it is still a basic shared account. It’s intended for those who still want a shared hosting environment that packs a bit more punch. Our SDX plans are also good for a video share website.

VPS
A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is sort of like having a dedicated server in terms of customization abilities but without the extra cost (because it’s still a shared hosting environment). Our VPS plan offers full root or administrator access and you have full control over the settings and software on the server. Think of a VPS plan as having a partition on a large server.

You would have a choice of which OS (operating system) you wish to have installed. The choices are:

• CentOS (most popular)
• Debian
• Fedora Core
• Suse
• Windows<

You can also choose which version of MySQL, PHP, mail, etc. you want installed. (You cannot do this with Semi-Dedicated.) In addition, you get the choice on which control panel you’d like to use to administer your VPS. The choices are:

• cPanel
• Direct Admin
• Interworx
• Plesk

SDX plans come with cPanel only.

A VPS account can be used to resell hosting if you desire. In a nutshell, VPS plans allow you to completely customize the Virtual Private Server to suit your hosting needs.

This is also discussed in the JaguarPC Forums in this thread: VPS vs Semi dedicated

Both are powerful hosting solutions and JaguarPC provides both options at very reasonable prices. Check out these current specials:

• SDX Specials
• JaguarPC Free Control Panel’s Super Ram Bonus’s (VPS)