A smaller web hosting company can be an alternative to the “big box” hosting companies available nationwide. Although the larger hosting companies boast of unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, etc. Do you need massive amount of disk space or do you need customer support and help optimizing your site? Having that massive space isn’t going to help when your company doesn’t show up in the search engines week after week. What will help? Having a person on the other end of e-mail or a phone call, to guide you through what your next steps are and what to watch out for. When you e-mail a support question do you get a form letter back that has no specifics to your problem? For your business or personal web venture – that’s not going to work.
Here’s where a smaller web company can help you. A smaller web company generally has the same amount of bandwidth available for your traffic. The limiting factor for them is usually disk space. With enough disk space available overall a larger company can over-sell the resource – much like an airline oversells seats on the next flight. You’re not the only person on that web server – in a larger company they over-sell those too – that next person is going to be taking up disk space and traffic as well. What happens when they take too much? You and your website suffer. Will the larger company notice or will they wait until you say something? Maybe you should pay more money and get their monitoring package? Where’s your money savings now? A smaller hosting company has it’s advantages here – they’re more invested in an individual customer. Whether that customer is a business or a personal website, they’re looking out for it. Not overselling means when you purchase your package, you’re purchasing an agreement for a certain amount of resources. If you only need 10 gigabytes of space you only pay for that amount – and no other customer will be putting it in danger.
Personal web support comes from a smaller web hosting company as well. Larger web hosting companies rely on web-support systems that take your incoming e-mail and look for keywords – when it finds enough keywords it will reply with a link to a support document or with a canned response. We’ve all gotten these before – do they really work for us? If we’re having a simple problem, sure – but that’s not likely to happen very often. Generally, problems come up and they’re a simple problem with a twist. My website works – except for my comments page, or maybe your blog area is posting, but not responding when you try and view it. These are the most common types of web support issues – ones that are best helped with human interaction.
Smaller web hosts don’t have the keywords you were told to look for “unlimited everything”. They do have what you need though – unlimited customer service.
For those of you that have Ubuntu systems, the apt-get system will be invaluable to get updates for security and general packages. There are a few things to keep up with on the apt-get packages.
The apt-get program on your system is downloading updated information from mirrors around the world, and those updates need to be verified at some point – enter the security keys… These security keys, without going into the entire cryptographic detail, have a public and a private portion. The public portion is distributed to the public in order to verify that the updates you’re getting are indeed from an official Ubuntu source (or Debian, Slackware, etc). These keys have expiration dates and if you just hit one – no worries, here’s the fix:
gpg –keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net –recv-keys 40976EAF437D05B5
gpg –export –armor 437D05B5 | sudo apt-key add -
That’s the quick fix – we’d love to explain the details behind the whole apt-get system – just let us know at our homepage: Northwest Sysadmin
A question came in from a customer the other day to ask if the e-mail servers we provide (blatant plug if you didn’t setup e-mail hosting yet: Northwest SysAdmin) can be setup with an iPhone to provide a constant e-mail source – and the answer is yes… We actually have a specific type of e-mail server called an IMAP server. An IMAP server is one that allows computers to update the status of e-mails and have that carried across to other clients. If you read an e-mail on your iPhone and check e-mail from home later – that e-mail is marked as read there as well. Deleted e-mails or SPAM can be processed on one computer and when your phone checks the account – the processed e-mail is carried over!
We have an e-mail setup similar in office: SPAM processing, different phones accessing an account, etc. The processing happens back on the servers, all the other connections reap the benefits. My phone just checks my account, it doesn’t need to do SPAM processing, flag important e-mails, process meeting schedules – it just gets the mail.
IMAP servers are setup on your computers much the same way a regular e-mail account is. One of the tricks is to designate one computer to be the primary client – this one will handle the chores of the account; flagging messages, automatic forwarding, trashing those SPAM. With our hosting that part is easy – our servers can take care of SPAM processing with several choices of processors (we recommend the Spam Assassin hookup).
Here’s a picture of where to start your mail configuration:
Click on the email accounts icon, that will take you into your e-mail addresses and their setup.
On the next screen, choose the account you’d like to configure (if you have multiple) and click on the “Configure Mail Client” icon shown here:
Here’s the easy part – we have auto-configure setup for Outlook, Outlook Express and Mac E-Mail clients – any other client just cut and paste the server information on the page.
We’ll post an update on how to hook into Spam Assassin and have it get rid of the SPAM.
If anyone has any questions on the setup – e-mail us – we can pick up our mail anywhere!
One feature we can use in the upcoming Snow Leopard: the Services menu. Of the few features announced from Apple has been the overhaul of the services menu…
As it stands now, the menu is pretty useless – here’s a shot of my menu:
The greyed-out options are useless in this application, Snow Leopard will supposedly take care of those by hiding them when not available. We’re hoping another option is to customize the menu according to our needs – seriously, how many times are we going to need to open something in our recipe collection program? How about adding new items? As reported Snow Leopard should have the full complement of features for Applescript or Automator additions, reorganizing, etc. We’re looking forward to the changes!
For those of you on Firefox (recommended), they have an important update with some stability fixes and security updates – here’s the official list: Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2009-24
Most of the updates are rated as “critical”. We’re recommending to our clients that they update right away. Just a reminder for those that don’t have the update packages from us…
Technorati Tags:
Security, Software Updates, Firefox
