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Customer Service
Selling web hosting services over the internet can be a bit impersonal. You may have signed up on our website. You might have never talked to anyone at our company. Sign up should be easy and that might be what you were looking for.
I do much of my banking online or through an ATM for the same reasons. However, there are times when I like to go in the branch and talk to someone when I have a more complex transaction. It’s nice when they listen to me and learn more about my needs. From a position of better understanding, they can make recommendations to improve our relationship.
We thought that, sometimes, you might like to talk to someone too. Of course we have phone support, this blog, and soon a forum where you can connect. But, we also decided that when anyone from our management team travels, we will try to get to know you and find out more about your goals for your online presence, your dreams, and how we could help you attain them.
I had a perfect opportunity last week. I traveled to Nashville for a seminar by David Bullock and Jerry West from SEO Rainmaker. (Excellent conference, by the way). Wednesday night I invited some customers to meet me while I was there.
I met Karen from Room in the Inn, and Jennifer from AccuImage, LLC . We had fun talking about their organizations.
Room In The Inn
Room In The Inn provides food and shelter for up to 225 people each night in over 150 area congregations from November 1st to March 31st. The congregation is in the middle of Tennessee, and their volunteers offer hospitality by giving their time, energy, and resources. Here are a few highlights of the service provided in the past year:
- 28,522 beds were provided to 1,033 different individuals (46% first-time guests)
- More than 150 congregations served 72,217 meals. 16,804 snacks and offered 12,658 showers
- 29,373 volunteers provided 11,030 hours and drove 155,242 miles in order to offer safe shelter for the homeless in Nashville.
We feel good that <a title=”IX Web Hosting” href=”http://www.IXWebHosting.com” target=”_blank”>IX Web Hosting plays a small part in the important work that Room in the Inn does.
AccuImage
AccuImage, LLC also does important work. They specialize in the design, development, deployment and support of systems designed to solve business problems. They streamline laborious paper-based processes and we all need that!
AccuImage works with financial services, manufacturing, retail, distribution, government, accounts payable/receivable, human resources, and a variety of specialized industries – both regionally and nationally. With health care being one of Nashville’s largest industries, AccuImage has a high concentration of health care clients as well.
WOW! Two very different organizations yet, both count on us to keep them up and running on the internet. The conference was excellent and meeting Jennifer and Karen was a pleasure.
I did manage to squeeze in a little extra fun. I’ve been to Nashville to run the County Music Marathon two times before. Both times I looked forward to the barbecue at Rippy’s. After running 26 miles, it sure tastes good! So it was a real treat to be able to walk just a block or two for a sandwich and some good music.
So, you never know when one of the IX team might come to town and give you a call. We’d love to meet you and learn more about your organization. If you want to make sure we don’t miss you, post a comment below and let us know where you are and what you do.
How does the old saying go? It isn’t cheating if you don’t get caught? Well, don’t tell anybody I gave you these two great CSS cheat sheets! Web designers rejoice, as these are two of the most handy things you can have, well… handy when it comes to cascading style sheets.
Know of anymore cheat sheets from around the Web that you get a lot of use out of? Let us know in the comments!
Related Tips and Tricks:
© Lunarpages Web Hosting – Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!
Depending on your online journey with us so far, you could be in awe of how well we’re doing for you and in high anticipation of what’s coming next. Or you could read this as “Gee, thanks. My server is too slow and you still didn’t fix it. You already blew me away… far away, as your customer.”
Just two years ago, the first was wishful thinking. Our servers indeed were slow (in all honesty, a few still are). Backups were made sporadically. Downtimes were frequent. Customer service, suffering from low server performance, ran at a very low morale. If you look around online, you will find many negative reviews about us spanning that two-year timeframe. Despite all this, many of you stayed on board and with us, supporting us through the tough times, allowing us to outgrow the growing pains.
To all of you, our wonderful customers, I want to say thank you. There are no words that could express my gratitude, but there are actions.
In three parts, I would like to introduce to you the sweeping changes we wish to make to improve our company for you. I would like to ensure that your continued journey with us will be worthwhile for you. The only way to ensure this can happen is with your help and feedback. So please, don’t be shy!
Before I get started, I’d like to briefly recap our major milestones of the last two years:
- All service issues previously stated are now resolved.
- We’ve successfully deployed IronPort anti-spam and anti-virus filtering to our entire customer base; a very expensive project, but well worth it. For you, this eliminated 99.9% of all spam and virus emails received to your domains and created a significant uptime improvement for your email service with us.
- Database related servers (all types of SQL) have been dramatically accelerated through improved ‘abuse’ management and massive hardware upgrades. Compared to two years ago, today you will experience expedient and stable database connections.
- Today, we operate our data center out of a self-financed and owned, state-of-the-art 20,000 sq. ft. facility in Columbus, OH connected with Tier 1 Premium Bandwidth only at 5gbit/s (from Sprint and Qwest). At some data centers, you will find ‘cheap bandwidth’ resulting in longer loading times when visitors come to your website. These delays are hardly noticeable when you test for them yourself, but as long as they exist, your sites will lose visitors. But not with IX. At this facility, we would not even allow a mediocre bandwidth provider’s fiber optics to pollute our crystal-clear path of light. This industry-grade true Tier 3/4 data space can house over 10,000 servers, all self-managed and employee-owned.
In fact, I would love to give you a tour! If you happen to be visiting Columbus on business or you can spare a few hours on your trip, I’d love to show you around our data center. We’ve a few hundred customers in Columbus as well – you’re welcome any time. Give one of our representatives a call and we’ll meet soon!
So how will we make your hosting experience with us worthwhile?
This year alone, my company has committed to its single largest investment into customer service and the level of server performance you experience.
Old and New
Before the year’s end, we are planning to upgrade our entire web hosting infrastructure. This should put an end to virtually all service-related issues. I can’t promise 100% uptime, but it’s what we’re shooting for. In detail, we will…
- Introduce Imperia, an ‘intelligent cloud’ hosting environment, for all of our customers. This effectively means that your websites, databases and email services will be hosted not on one server, but on hundreds or thousands, all at the same time. You could theoretically turn off half our data center, or take an axe to the server hosting your website – and it would be back online within seconds (in fact, it may not be down at all). Please don’t try any of the above by yourself.*
- Develop and launch a website management control panel featuring a state-of-the-art user interface that we are developing in-house right now. It is designed to make your life easier.
- Replace ALL existing hardware with brand new blade servers, centralized storage and a fiber-channel switching architecture. This is a multi-million dollar investment into our networking and server infrastructure that will make your sites load faster than any dedicated server ever could. If you were to rent an entire server and all it hosted was your website, it would load your site as slow as molasses compared to how fast your site will load on Imperia.
Our development team is starting a special Imperia VIP Membership that you can join if you are interested in providing feedback to help us test and optimize the new platform. As a VIP member, we’ll share top-secret development material with you, your suggestions will be considered first for upcoming releases and you’ll get early access to new releases (membership is, of course, free of cost.).
Stay tuned for Part 2 of 3, in which I will address a whole new approach to customer service.
Please don’t forget to let us know your opinion and feedback.
Thank you!
Fathi Said, CEO
IX Web Hosting
*Disclaimer: Don’t use axe to destroy computer of any kind.
Today, in celebration of our new affiliate plan tutorial category for the wiki, I wanted to do something for the Lunarpages affiliates out there. For those of you who have installed WordPress (and have a widget ready theme) it is super easy to get a Lunarpages banner up and running on the Lunarpages affiliate plan.
Step #1
Go visit our Lunarpages affiliate plan banner generator, and enter your affiliate user name into the text box (then hit the “enter” key on your keyboard):
Step #2
Click on the banner you wish to add to your WordPress powered blog’s sidebar. (we have dozens to choose from).
Step #3
Copy and paste the code from the text box into your clipboard or copy it into a simple text editing program like note pad to save it for later.
Step #4
Login to your WordPress administrator settings (usually found at yourdomainname.com/wp-admin/) and then click on Appearance and then Widgets. Now, drag and drop a Text widget onto one of your sidebars and paste the code you copied earlier into the text box for the blog sidebar widget. You can give the sidebar widget a name too, such as “Hosting Deal”.
Step #5
Hit the “Save” button and you are done! Now, you can go check out your blog, and make sure the banner is displaying the way you want. There couldn’t be an easier way to get your own Lunarpages affiliate plan up and running.
Did you know that one of our affiliate plan members makes over $50,000 every month? Now, that might be a hard goal to shoot for at first, but the fact that we offer you $65 per person you can bring to us isn’t that bad of a deal. Don’t be left out, earn money with your hosting recommendations today!
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© Lunarpages Web Hosting – Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!
Talk about a nice find. While browsing through my e-mail, I had found that a reader of the Lunartics blog suggested this resource to cover. Yahoo! offers a design and stencil kit to web designers out there for free, licensed under the Creative Commons. That would mean it is free to share and remix, however they do ask they you give them attribution – which is only right.
They offer the kit in the following formats: OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), PDF, PNG, and SVG. Some of the topics covered in the kit include:
- Ad Units
- Calendars
- Carousels
- Charts and Tables
- UI Controls
- Form Elements
- and many more!
You can visit Yahoo’s Developer Network site to pick them up for yourself. If you get some use out of them, come back, comment and show off your work.
Related Tips and Tricks:
© Lunarpages Web Hosting – Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!
Now, as a web host, we are always telling customers that one of the most important things they can do is backup their web site’s content. You can never have enough backups – because in the long run, you can never tell when the worst might happen. In the same sense, you should also be backing up the files on your own personal computer too. Now thanks to Lunarpages and the fine folks at Keepit – you can get unlimited desktop backups if you are a customer of Lunarpages.
For all new or existing customers, we are offering three months free of unlimited backup service at absolutely no cost at all. You will have three months to try Keepit out, and see why they are one of the best Online backup providers out there today.
Now, I know somebody is going to ask, “Well, how much is it after the three free months?” and I can answer that for you too. After the three free month trial is over, you can keep the service for a low $5 per month fee. That isn’t much to ask for when it comes to keeping your important files securely backed up off site, right?
Be sure to check out our newsletter feature on the Keepit offer, and if you have any questions on how you can gain access to this wonderful special, be sure to contact us.
Related Tips and Tricks:
© Lunarpages Web Hosting – Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!
Just in case you missed it, Issue 21 of the Lunarpages newsletter has been released. The big focus this month is on TremenDesk, possibly the best hosted help desk solution you have ever seen before and an exclusive backup deal for Lunarpages clients, courtesy of Keepit.com.
To steal a line from Ron Popeil, “That’s not all!”. You will also get the latest Lunarpages news, suggested TV watching from the Lunar-crew, information about the Gumblar security exploit, more WordPress links than you can shake a stick at – and much much more.
+ Check out all the articles featured in this month’s newsletter!
Click now, supplies are limited! I’ll probably not be allowed to watch info-mercials while I write anymore either…
Related Tips and Tricks:
© Lunarpages Web Hosting – Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!
It seems like no matter what business industry you’re looking at, there’s always an area where for shady activities. Web hosting and the domain industry are no exceptions. However, most people are totally unaware of one such practice known as domain tasting. Domain Tasting is essentially when a someone buys a domain name for the sole purpose of seeing whether or not it can generate ad income. The domain registrant puts ads on the domain, and if the ads don’t make any money, the registrant has five days to request a refund.
There have been many big companies involved with Domain Tasting, and since they can pull off the above example on a much larger scale, they have been able to reap insane amounts of profits. This had affected us and our clients because millions of domains were getting tied up by ‘tasters’ and would appear unavailable when someone actually went to register their domain name.
To help curb this problem, since April of this year, ICANN has made their $.20 domain transaction fee non-refundable. So if a company wants to sample 50,000 domain names, for instance, then they’ll have to shell out $10,000 in registration fees even if they get a refund for the domains within the five day grace period. This change hasn’t eliminated the problem altogether, but it’s certainly helped.
Obviously domain tasting wouldn’t have gotten as out of control as it did, had it not been for the huge profits that people were reaping in. At HostGator, we don’t have that many domain registrations, since we specialize in web hosting. However, it’s still evident that there are major profits to be earned with a decent domain portfolio. One such way to monetize domain names, that we’ve explored recently, is via domain parking.
When you first buy a domain, the domain will be using the default name servers of the registrar generally. The default page you see, usually with ads all over it, is a good example of a parked page. What most people don’t realize though, is that even if they aren’t going to develop the domain right away, they can still make money from the domain while it waits to be developed.
The company we’ve been using for domain parking is DomainSponsor. Basically we use their name servers on inactive domain names in our account, and all traffic gets pointed to a domain parking page where relevant ads are displayed, giving us a percentage of the revenue made from the ads.
So just how much money can you make with Domain Parking? We were pleasantly surprised with the results.
The above check was for the month of May. We’ve been using Domain Sponsor for the last 3 months, and are consistently getting over $25,000/monthly with the domains that we have. Now these results may be unique since we do have roughly 12,000 domain names in our DomainSponsor portfolio, but many domainers have much more domains than this and can stand to make much more money.
Overall, we’re very happy with DomainSponsor. As you can see from the above image you can easily group domains into portfolios and track advanced statistics to the exact day. Getting started with domain parking is super easy, simply sign up, and start adding your domains that are currently doing nothing to your portfolio at DomainSponsor.
Great tools do not make you a great writer, however it can make you a more productive one. Here are ten of my favorite blog clients – in no specific order. By using a desktop client to update your blog (rather than the web site interface) you can often gain features like being able to draft a post locally, or get your hands on even more tools to edit your articles. These selections have those abilities and many more included.
w.bloggar – The one I remember being around the longest is w.bloggar. This blogging tool will work with a number of different publishing platforms and doesn’t disappoint as far as features go.
Qumana – A really simple desktop editing tool, Qumana gives you all the publishing power you would need to write and save your post and to post to any of your blogs.
BlogDesk – BlogDesk makes it easy to write, speeds up lavish processes and assists the author with smart features.
Windows Live Writer – This is the tool I’ve been using for a while. Microsoft has gotten it right when it comes to the WLW. Now if they could just make the rest of their software lineup this easy to use and feature rich.
Post2Blog – a freeware handy blog editor that includes “live” spellchecking, instant image uploading, and an easy to use compose window to get all your writing done.
Thingamablog – A cross-platform, standalone blogging application that makes authoring and publishing your weblogs almost effortless.
WriteToMyBlog – The only “online” application on the list, WriteToMyBlog is a free word processor for your blog that will allow you to update your posts from anywhere.
Zoundry Raven – A next-generation WYSIWYG blog editor that makes posting to your blogs easier and faster. It includes simple tools to add links, tags, photos, music, videos and more.
ScribeFire – You can not forget about this handy Firefox add-on. ScribeFire mixes your browser with a powerful blog editor that can stand up to any separately installed program.
JBlog Editor – Although it is no longer under active development, it is still ne neat tool to use to manage your blog from the desktop.
There you have it, the best of the blog editing clients out there right now. Do you have another favorite that I forgot to mention? How about Mac and Linux fans – what clients do you use? Be sure to leave your suggestions, ideas and endless praise to the comments.
Related Tips and Tricks:
© Lunarpages Web Hosting – Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!
 How much do you know about the Robots.txt file? It can be a handy tool for any webmaster to know more about. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions I get about this special little file.
What is the robots.txt file used for?
In web site development, the robots.txt file is used as a special file that can talk back to the search engine spiders and crawlers to tell them what to do. Here is a little more about them from robotstxt.org:
Web Robots (also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders), are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Search engines such as Google use them to index the web content, spammers use them to scan for email addresses, and they have many other uses.
How do you create a robots.txt file?
All you have to do is create a basic text file (with the name robots.txt) in your public_html folder inside of your hosting account. You can create that from within your control panel or you can create it on your desktop, and upload it via an FTP client.
Can a robot ignore my robots.txt file?
Yes, but this does not happen that often. Most good main-stream robots will not do this. So is there a way to block just the bad robots? Kind of. You can only control robots that obey the robots.txt file. If that doesn’t work, you might also be able to block the IP address the robot is coming from (if they are coming from a single IP address).
What should I put in my robots.txt file?
This would depend on what you want to do.
If you would like to make sure all crawlers and spiders make their way in, insert this into your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
If you want to keep the spiders and bots away from your content in a particular folder, use this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /privatestuff
With "privatestuff" being the folder you wish to protect.
How can I check to see my robots.txt file has been created successfully?
It is easy to check if your have an account with Google Webmaster Tools. To analyze a site’s robots.txt file:
- Sign into Google Webmaster Tools with your Google Account.
- On the Dashboard, click the URL for the site you want.
- Click Tools, and then click Analyze robots.txt.
How can I figure out where this robot or crawler came from?
You can find a good list of just about all the different robots out there here:
That would be a good list to check first, when you have a robot crawling your site, and you are unaware where it came from.
How do you know you are being visited by a robot?
He will mumble something about klatu verata nikto. No wait, that was my buddy Gort. Often the sign that your being visited by a robot is that in your server logs you see many documents have been retrieved in a very short period of time.
Hope that helps in your robot taming ways. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask away.
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© Lunarpages Web Hosting – Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!
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