ping! zine web hosting magazine 31
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Ping! Zine Web Hosting Magazine - Low Cost Marketing IdeasTRANSCRIPT
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004 | Ping! Zine magaZine
025 How to write for tHe blogospHere
028 cpanel parked & add-on & sub-domains, oH my!
030 blow out tHe dust
033 system & network monitoring
036 revenge of tHe intern
040 major incidents on tHe internet in 2008
044 ping! zine service directory
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Low Cost MarketingWithout knowing exactly what you are doing, you can waste a lot of time and money on expensive marketing campaigns that can leave your budget in a wasteful deficit. For first time marketing do-it-yourselfers, the following low cost marketing ideas are essential and have been proven to work.
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012 33 celebrity twitter accounts Hacked
012 uk2 group acquires virtual internet
013 record market sHare loss for internet explorer
014 steve jobs addresses His HealtH concerns
014 cHeck your credit card statements
017 internet domain seizures blocked by appeals court
017 sitemasHer.com web of pain
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Publisher Keith DuncanManaging Editor/Designer Derek Morris
Executive Editor Robert LangSenior Editor Dave Young
Editorial StaffFeatures Editor Joe Whyte
Technical Editor John BurmeisterCommentary Editor David Dunlap
Marketing Editor Trey GardnerCustomer Service Editor Douglas Hanna
Corresponding Editor Amy ArmitageHeadlines Editor Derek Vaughan
Ping! Zine Web Hosting Magazine © Jan.-Feb. 2009, Published and Copyrighted 2009 by Duncan Publishing Group, LLC, P.O. Box 516, Denham Springs, LA 70726. All rights reserved. Doughnuts, Yummm!Permission to reproduce part or all of this issue must be secured in writing from the publisher. For more information email: [email protected]. Pizza Party at my house, 4 P.M.Complementary subscriptions are at the discretion of the publisher and may be cancelled or modified at any time. Unsolicited submissions are welcome. We assume no liability for lost or damage of submissions. We assume no liability for the content of this issue and all points and ideas are strictly that of the writers involved and not that of the publisher, publishing company, printing company or editors. Doughnut managers of Canada, we salute you!This issue is brought to you by Extreme Walrus Juice. Ride the Walrus!
Contributing WritersFred Meissner
Tiara ReaFrank FiengoldJeff HuckabyPingdom.com
Contact InformationDuncan Publishing Group, LLC
Post office Box 516Denham Springs, LA 70726
Phone (225) 791-3963Website www.pingzine.com
General Info [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
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002 Hostcareers
003 gawkwire
005 cpanel
007 bocacom
009 bobcares
010 rackmounts etc
013 relio
015 sprynex
016 seeksadmin
021 global sign
023 seeksadmin
024 parallels summit 2009
027 jaguar pc
031 webHostmagazine.com
031 young copy
032 tHe cloud talk
035 parallels
043 lionfire solutions
047 turnkey internet
048 Host gator
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BITS & BYTES
Several Twitter accounts have been hacked including Barack Obama, CNN’s Rick Sanchez, Britney Spears, and others. Hackers used these accounts to send fake messages. Twitter locked down the affected accounts and has since given control back to the original users.
“I am high on crack right now” might not be coming into work today,” from Rick Sanchez’s name is an example of some of the tweets sent through hacked accounts.
The accounts were hacked through Twitter’s support tools. The hacker gained access and managed to reset accounts’ information. A post on the Twitter blog states, “These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the e-mail address associated with their Twitter account when they can’t remember or get stuck,”The company has since taken the support tools offline until they can be adequately secured.| David Dunlap (www.WebHostMagazine.com)
33 CElEBrITY TwITTEr ACCounTS HACkEd
The acquisition of VI.net is a strategic fit for growing UK2’s footprint in the UK market, but will offer the opportunity to build the VI.net service in both the UK and the US. The VI team have created a company with an unparalleled level of service in their market.
Peter Rees, outgoing Managing Director of VI.net remarked, “Our business has been built on delivering outstanding customer service through a highly motivated team of exceptional people. I am confident that the acquisition by UK2 will allow the customer to feel confident about VI’s future going forward and will offer the team the opportunity to build the business into a market dominating brand.”
Martin Baker, Managing Director of UK2.net and now VI.net also commented, “I am very pleased that we have been able to complete this important acquisition and can assure the VI.net customers that we intend to continue to deliver the products and service levels they associate with VI.net. I have been very impressed with the VI team and am looking forward to working with them to build the business in the UK and the US.”
UK2 Group will continue to operate VI.Net as a separate brand focused on the Public and Corporate Sector.
In the first quarter of 2009 a new cloud service called VPS.net (www.vps.net) will be launched across the UK2 group. VPS.net is expected to be an extremely important and valuable addition to the VI.net portfolio for both existing and new VI.net customers.| www.Gawkwire.com
wEB HoSTIng lEAdEr, uk2 group ACquIrES VIrTuAl InTErnET
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According to Net Applications, rivals Firefox and Safari continue to eat at Microsoft IE’s market share. Microsoft lost another 1.6% points in December giving Internet Explorer a total decline of 10.4% since December of 2007. Mozilla’s Firefox in contrast gained 4.5% in 2008 and Apple’s Safari ends the year with 7.93% of browser market share.
Researchers believe Internet Explorer is losing market shares based on the declining popularity of their older browser, IE6. Although IE7 also lost market share, it only lost six-tenths of a percentage point. IE8 will be unveiled as soon as Microsoft states that it is “just around the corner.” Microsoft is betting that IE8 will halt the decrease in market share.
Google’s Chrome browser was off to a shaky start early in the fourth quarter of 2008 but has increased its revenue share to 1.04%. This represents a 20% gain from November.
Net Applications cites other reasons for Microsoft IE’s decline. Statistics show that holiday months such as November and December have been traditionally bad years for Internet Explorer as more Internet users use their home computers. Home and off-work computers (such as cyber-cafes) boast a higher percentage of non-Microsoft browsers, while corporate computers favor Internet Explorer. “The December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage,” the company said on its Web site. “This in turn increases the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and other products that have relatively high residential usage. All December usage statistics should be read in that context.”| David Dunlap (www.WebHostMagazine.com)
rECord MArkET SHArE loSS for InTErnET ExplorEr
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Rumor has it that millions of credit card holders are finding a $0.25 charge on their credit card statements from a non-existent company – Adele Services in Melville, NY. Currently two theories exist as to why the mysterious charges are appearing on credit card statements.
One theory says the fraudster is testing illegal credit cards in small amounts before making larger purchases. Another theory suggests the fraudster is stealing a quarter from millions of credit card users in an attempt to get rich.
As to the validity of either theory, neither have been proved by anyone. Some credit card organizations speculate it’s easier to steal a quarter from millions of people than millions from one person.
Mitch Lipka, Globe Correspondent of Boston.com said in a recent article, “The latter theory has more credibility at the moment. The Better Business Bureau in Louisville reports that, at least so far, those who have been hit with the small charge have yet to get slammed with a bigger charge. The bureau speculates that the number of possible victims could be in the millions.”
No one knows how the fraudster got their hands on the credit card numbers. Lipka advises credit card holders to review their statements for the $0.25 charge and report it to the Federal Trade Commission (www.ftc.gof) and the Internet Crime Complain Center (www.ic3.gov) as soon as possible.
“Take a look at your credit card statements, and if the charge is there, don’t let it slide,” Lipa said. “It’s what the thieves want you to do. Instead, file a dispute with your credit card company, and lodge complaints.”
According to Lipka, Federal law enforcement agencies only react when consumer complaints reach high volumes. Responses to the article have been staggering with one commenter stating, “If I could help anyone for 25 cents a month (about all I could afford), I’d do it in a heartbeat.” Other responders say the crime is “intelligent” and “they should make a movie out of it.”
Consumers have two choices: sit back and do nothing while the thieves collect a quarter from millions and profit immensely or contact the authorities and send a message to all would-be fraudsters who think they too can profit from such a crime.| www.Gawkwire.com
CHECk Your CrEdIT CArd STATEMEnTS
BITS & BYTES
In an open letter to the public, Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, discussed his continued health problems, Macworld, and his duty as CEO.
Jobs cites a hormone imbalance for “robbing” him of proteins and thus causing him to lose weight. The drastic loss in weight has made many question if Jobs is still healthy enough to be the CEO of Apple. In his letter, Jobs stated that he “will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple’s CEO.”
The open letter also discusses how he mishandled his health problems as far as the Macworld keynote speech. “Unfortunately, my decision to have Phil deliver the Macworld keynote set off another flurry of rumors about my health, with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed,” said Jobs. Indeed, many news outlets have been discussing whether Jobs has cancer or if Apple will collapse if Jobs passes away. These rumors have fueled a reduction in the value of Apple’s stock since early last summer.| David Dunlap (www.WebHostMagazine.com)
STEVE JoBS prESEnTS An opEn lETTEr AddrESSIng HEAlTH ConCErnS
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The Kentucky Court of Appeals issued a ruling today prohibiting the seizure of 141 Internet domain names by the state.
In a 2-to-1 majority opinion, the court ruled for the Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association (iMEGA) in its suit against Judge Thomas D. Wingate (No. 2008-CA-002000-OA), by blocking the seizure orders issued by the Franklin (KY) circuit court judge for the domain names, all related to Internet gambling (Commonwealth of Kentucky, Franklin Circuit Court, Division II, 08-CI-1409).
Judge Michelle M. Keller, in her majority opinion, found that Internet domain names for online gambling Web sites were not illegal “gambling devices” by Kentucky law, as had been claimed by attorneys representing the Commonwealth, in their attempt to seize control of the names from their owners. Judge Keller stated that while the Kentucky legislature could have chosen to include Internet domain names in its gambling devices law, it had not, therefore the Commonwealth could not rightfully proceed with its forfeiture action.
“(I)t stretches credulity to conclude that a series of numbers, or Internet address, can be said to constitute a “machine or any mechanical or other device...designed and manufactured primarily for use in connection with gambling,” Judge Keller wrote. “We are thus convinced that the trial court clearly erred in concluding that the domain names can be construed to be gambling devices.”
Judge Jeff S. Taylor, also writing for the majority, added that the Commonwealth could not seek a civil forfeiture based on a criminal statute when there had been no criminal proceeding. Since there had been no criminal proceeding or
conviction against any of the Internet domain name owners, the Commonwealth could not take control of their property.
Judge Micheal Caperton, in his dissenting opinion, wrote that the Internet domain names were one part of a larger mechanism for gambling, which included computers and Internet service, and thus, in his opinion, met the definition of a “gambling device” under Kentucky law.
“This decision confirms why we went the way we did with suit,” said Jon L. Fleischaker, attorney for iMEGA and managing partner at Dinsmore & Shohl in Louisville, KY. “We knew when we brought this to the Court of Appeals, that we would get justice for iMEGA and the domain names in Kentucky.”
Fleischaker had argued in a December 12, 2008 hearing before the Court of Appeals that the Internet domain names were no more than “billboards” for the Web sites, and not mechanisms for gambling. Fleischaker had also argued that the Commonwealth’s attorneys could not try to fashion a civil law remedy with a criminal statue to justify the seizure of the domain names.
“We are very happy with the court’s ruling today,” said Joe Brennan Jr., chairman of iMEGA, an Internet trade association in Washington, DC. “The judges clearly agreed with our interpretation of the law, and thankfully, this reverses what would have been a terrible precedent for our country and the Internet.”
The Court in its decision declined to review additional arguments submitted by the Interactive Gaming Council (IGC) and attorneys representing Sportsbook.com, also seeking to have the domain name seizures blocked. | www.Gawkwire.com
InTErnET doMAIn SEIzurES BloCkEd BY AppEAlS CourT
BITS & BYTES
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For many new business owners and startup companies, determining how much to invest into marketing can be one of the hardest decisions to make. Initially you will most likely have incorporation and legal expenses, website design and hosting, staffing overhead and many more necessary costs before you even offer your services or products to the public. Many times small business owners tend to wear multiple hats in order to save money and to consider the added investment in marketing can be a scary thing. Without knowing exactly what you are doing, you can waste a lot of time and money on expensive marketing campaigns that can leave your budget in a wasteful deficit. For first time marketing do-it-yourselfers, the following low cost marketing ideas are essential and have been proven to work.
by fred meissner
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Pay-Per-CliCk Marketing:Ok, I know that pay-per-click services cost money, however a technique not widely being used is to find keywords that fit at least 1 of 2 criteria.
1) Find keywords through Google Adwords Keyword tool that are targeted keywords for your business nad have low CPC costs for low competition. See this tool here: http://adwords.google.com/select/keywordtoolexternal
2) Use keywords that are roughly related to your industry. For example, if you have an ecommerce site that sells pens then search for keywords in your adwords keyword tool that have to do with paper, office supplies, pencils, school supplies, back-to-school etc. Most likely you will find valuable keywords that have direct buying intent and do not have many competitors bidding on those keywords. The best thing about pay-per-click is that if you have a budget of $50 for per month, by utilizing this method you will be able to stretch that budget for the entire month. If done correctly, you can get sales through this process immediately for a very low fee and as your business grows you can expand this campaign.
Did you know?• Adwords offers Print advertising• Adwords offers banner advertising• Adwords offers Radio advertising• Adwords offers site targeting advertising• Adwords offers video advertising
ViDeO SynDiCatiOnDon’t be afraid of video marketing. Being the new kid on the marketing block, it may sound difficult, but it is actually very easy and many ways you can do this at a LOW COST. If you have imovie, final cut pro, adobe premier or any type of video editing software (find cheap video editing software at bestbuy.com), video camera and internet access then you are golden. For people without that equipment I suggest creating a powerpoint slide and exporting it as a .mov.Targeting a local audience for your business can be a huge resource with video syndication. Video sharing sites have high authority and weight within the major search engines so submitting your video to these sites along with selecting the right keywords for your title will get you rankings all across the net. Through our method at ArcherSEM.com we have a unique technique that allows us to get around 1700 rankings within 3 days utilizing this method and I have seen it work for thousands of new businesses.
Some tips to remember: 1. Sign up for all of the video sharing sites under your company name. 2. Use unique meta data in each submission.3. Keep your videos between 2-5 minutes. The shorter
the better.4. Keep your branding/watermark throughout the video.5. Make sure your main keywords for that video are vocalized as voice recognition is now an optimization technique for videos.6. Back link into your video submissions – social bookmarks tend to do well and can also drive traffic to these submissions.7. Keep a schedule; try to submit on a schedule.8. Provide contact information in video or at least in your description.9. CALL TO ACTION – CALL TO ACTION – CALL TO ACTION
Start a BlOgThis suggestion is one that will take time to pay off. However it can pay off BIG if you keep to it. Starting a company blog is a way to give your business a voice online. You have the opportunity to make your voice heard and people will listen. Creating a blog will give you additional search engine rankings on an ongoing basis, will grow your readership level through RSS subscriptions and can drive traffic to your site, creating a new marketing channel and sales opportunities. Below are some helpful tips on how to make this work for you and remember; all industries have leaders, creating a popular blog can give you the exposure you need to be contender.
Some helpful tips to consider:1. Give your blog a custom design2. Make your RSS subscription buttons easy to find (use feedburner.com to track your RSS subscriptions)3. Post on a regular schedule. Posting 2-3 times a week is a good start but if you only have time for 1 post a week then make sure it’s on the same day every week.4. Make each post as detailed and educational as possible. Creating resources for people is the BEST way to gain readership, a following, branding and ultimately – sales.5. Be active within digg, stumbleupon and reddit. These major social sites will be a helpful way to drive traffic to your new posts.6. Get to know other bloggers in your industry. Allow guest posts, try to get other bloggers from popular blogs to post on yours.
teleViSiOn aDVertiSingOk, with this one I know I have you saying to yourself TV advertising? Low cost No way! Well I am here to tell you … YES WAY! Many advancements in television advertising have taken place to make it more cost effective for smaller businesses. Spotrunner.com and spotzer.com are a couple low cost television advertising companies that allow you to choose a TV commercial template or create your own.
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To get started it’s about $500 to purchase your ad and once the ad is approved you can choose what TV channels and TV shows you want your ad to appear on and where. This technique is great for new businesses. Typical TV ad spots cost anywhere from $15 to $50 bucks per spot.
Some much needed tips to people unfamiliar with television advertising:1. Keep your USP (unique selling proposition) constant throughout your commercial.2. Have direct call to action throughout if possible.3. Do something catchy, annoying, funny or cool to create conversation. This is used to keep your engagement of that commercial working for you.4. Pull that visitor online. Have a contest and draw people to your site to sign up and win something. This will bring your offline marketing online to where they can purchase something.5. Keep your branding consistent.6. Help track your success by using whoscalling.com in order to track who calls the number you leave on your commercial.
GET INVOLVED IN FORUMS & BLOGSThe majority of people today do a lot research before purchasing either online or offline. Forums and blog comments are a great way to put a positive spin on your product/service and to drive targeted buyers to your site and to your products.
Some helpful tools to find these blogs and forums:1. Boardtracker.com2. Icerocket.com3. Blogpulse.com4. Blogsearch.google.com5. Technorati.com
SYNDICATE UNIQUE CONTENTThere are several places that will host content that you create for free, such as articledashboard.com, ezinearticles.com etc. Create an article that is about your service or products, put a spin on it while highlighting your company’s unique selling propositions and syndicate this through several article hosting sites.
The benefits of syndication are listed below:• Positive content online about your business.• Increased awareness of your business.• Increased back links to your site which will boost your natural rankings in the major search engines.• Increased content distribution – others will find this content and put it on their own sites which are a natural occurrence with content syndication.
CULTIVATE LOYALTY Sounds simple and easy right? Sounds like common sense to most. From my experience, starting a new business is not simple and one of the major areas of concern is always finances. Sometimes you don’t have the bandwidth to provide additional services at no charge or maybe you can’t afford to give that individualized attention that clients of a new startup business need. I’m here to tell you that it is not only needed but is a crucial point to starting a new business and making it successful. Everything we have talked about so far are great ways to help get clients but cultivating customer loyalty is the cornerstone of a new business’ growth.
How can you cultivate loyalty? It’s simple and this is how to do it:1. Give current customers discounts at certain points of your relationship….. Just because!2. Build a relationship with them… When you make calls ask them how they are doing, it’s a great conversation starter. We are not just business owners, we are all human beings and we all crave connection. Reach out a bit “in a professional manner” and start building a relationship.3. Send holiday cards and reminders that you appreciate them.4. And.. The most important is always OVER DELIVER and deliver ONTIME! Taking this stance will keep your clients happy and its ok from time to time to remind them that they won’t get this kind of service anywhere else.
IN CONCLUSIONThere are several other methods to marketing your business online however the items picked are from my experience a very highly effective way of operating your marketing campaigns. I would love to hear some feedback from our readers on how they marketed their business through low cost marketing ideas. Feel free to write our editor.
All of these items are tactics we have personally used for our business and to help jump start many other businesses. We have worked with several fortune 1000 companies and worked with thousands of clients helping them reach their online marketing goals over the past 8 years.
Writer's Bio: Fred Meissner is the Owner of ArcherSEM.com. Fred has worked with fortune 500 and Inc. 1000 companies helping them increase conversions, sales, traffic and ranking's since 1999. Contact us today for a free quote and a 10% discount using code ArchPing.
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HoW To WrITE For THE
BloGoSPHErE
by tiara rea
The internet has always had a unique, often times strange, language of its own. For example, those unfamiliar with 133t speak would have absolutely no idea what “n00b” means, just as those who don’t know a foreign language would be confused if it was spoken in front of them. While internet language might be hard to break into for many, writing for the internet isn’t nearly as difficult. Though there is a contextual difference, writing for the blogosphere doesn’t have to be a daunting task if you follow a few simple rules. [continued]
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Keep it ConversationalUnlike writing the About Us page on your business website, writing for your blog should remain lighthearted, conversational, and relatable. Use language that anyone, from a 6-year-old to a 60-year-old, could understand.
For example, if you’re writing about manufacturing, don’t use technical phrases that only a seasoned professional could comprehend. Relate to them, as they are your readership! Remember, in blogging you can use colloquial phrases, mention television commercials, and slather on the slang.
Make it InterestingAgain, writing for the blogosphere is different than writing for your business website. When you’re writing that About Us page, you can puff your company up with tons of facts, information, and statistics. But when you’re writing in a blog, your audience isn’t going to want statistics unless it directly affects their lives as well.
So if you sold 60% more hubcaps this year than last, tell a funny story about how you started the business, an event where something memorable happened, or even an anecdote about how hubcaps are like hotdogs. Your readers will appreciate the interesting stories that make your business what it is.
Show, Don’t TellBlogging is 80% about telling stories and relating to a readership, but there’s 20% left unaccounted for. This is where pictures, music, and links come into play. This is one of the big differences between article-writing for content and blogging to reach an audience – when you write articles or informational website content, you are just telling the facts. But when you blog, you are sharing with your audience, so use the internet’s many tools to help you along the way.
One of the most successful forms of blogging for companies, in my opinion, is sharing company party photos, staff introductions, or side project sneak peeks. So if you hold an office Holiday party or company picnic, take video and photos and post them on your blog. Your customers will love getting to know your organization by seeing you interact with your staff.
Also, just remember that blogging is about attention spans, so putting photos in a blog will definitely help those who, like me, are visual readers.
Don’t AdvertiseI know it’s hard, but this is another main difference between writing for the blogosphere and writing for articles – in articles, you can blatantly advertise your services, whereas in blogs, your audience will not be interested if they think you’re out for self-promotion. Blogging started out as internet diaries, so the more of that aspect you can bring into your language the better!
offer AdviceEven if customers can’t use your services right away, they will appreciate alternative advice about products and services they can use in the meantime. This doesn’t mean you should send them to competitors, but for example if you’re in the web hosting business, you might offer your customers a URL to WordPress, the free blogging service. If they enjoy that service, they may come to use yours when they are ready in the future.
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These are simple writing tips, so keep them in mind as you start your own business blog, and remember to update as frequently as you are able with helpful, relative, friendly content that your future and current customers will look forward to reading. p!
cPanel Parked & Add-On & Sub-Domains, Oh My!
cPanel’s concept of Add-on, Parked and
Sub-domains are very confusing for the first time cPanel user. This
article will explain each of them and when/why you would use them.
by frank feingold
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We’ll start out with the easiest concept, which is a domain. Before I can explain a domain there needs to be a brief discus-sion about “Top Level Domains” (TLD). No one really gives TLD’s that much thought. It’s really hard to define what a TLD is, so I’ll simply provide a sample list here:
.com .net .org .co.uk .jp
There are 100’s of different TLD’s (as well as country code TLD’s but you get the idea, right?) Domains then are pretty simple. It’s just any name that you pick (that follow domain naming rules) that are just to the left of the TLD. For the rest of our example here we’re just going to work the really simple “sample.com” domain.
So what are sub/add-on/parked domains?
We’ll start out with sub-domains first. You don’t realize it, but you use sub-domains every day. A sub-domain is simply the name just to the left of your domain name. The universally ac-cepted sub-domain for web sites (drum roll please) is “www”. So while everyone “thinks” of their domain as www.sample.com, “www” is really a sub-domain of sample.com. Other popular sub-domains are “mail’ and “ftp”. See, that was pretty simple, wasn’t it?
At this point you are probably asking yourself “why would I ever need a sub-domain other than www?”. There are a lot of good reasons. Some of them include “blog.domain.com”, “forum.doman.com”, “secure.domain.com” and “devel.domain.com”. Each of these sub-domains could have been created as www.domain.com/forum and www.domain.com/blog but there is one big technical difference. With www.domain.com/forum and www.domain.com/blog they both physically have to be on the same server because there is only one DNS record for www.domain.com. With sub-domains like blog.domain.com and forum.domain.com each sub-domain has it’s own DNS record and therefore can be on different servers. The fact that you can put the different sub-domains on different servers is not particularly useful for most cPanel web hosting clients but if you have a very large/active site you many want out put devel.domain.com on a totally different server than www.domain.com
Parked domains are pretty straight forward. When you park a domain in cPanel it simply lets one site respond to multiple names. So again, with our sample.com domain you could park sample.org and sample.net on sample.com and you would see the exact same web site for www.sample.com, www.sample.net and www.sample.org. The real confusion with parked domains is that cPanel uses a different meaning for “parked” vs. the rest of the domain world. When most people think of parked domains they think of a landing page that your domain registrar gives you to “park” your web site before you create a real one. If you simply think of cPanel’s parked domains as domain aliases I think it’s a lot less confusing.
Add-on domains in cPanel are also pretty straight forward. They literally let you “add-on” another domain to your hosting account so you can host multiple domains from a single cPanel account. So how does cPanel do this magic? Most of it has to do with the configuration of the web server and of course, you don’t have to worry about that. The only thing you really need to be concerned with is “where do I put my files?”. With cPanel your web pages will be put in your public_html directory. When you add-on domains (unless you change cPanel’s defaults) they will simply be directories under your public_html directory. Visually they look like this:
/public_html//public_html/domain2.com/pubic_html/domain3.com
So what is this 1+1 and 1+10 nonsense on most hosting sites?
OK, first off, let’s blame that on the marketing guys, ok? This is simply the best notation we could come up with to explain how many accounts you can host on a single hosting account. With our plan you can host one main domain (the one you sign up for) and then you can add one more sub-domain or add-on domain or parked domain. With another plan you can host one main domain and then up to ten more sub/add-on/parked domains. It does not matter how many of which kind as long as the totally does not exceed ten.
Hopefully this clears up the mystery a bit about sub/add-on and parked domains (and why you’d use them). If things are still not quite clear please feel free to contact Doreo sales (by phone, chat or email) and we’ll do our best to explain it.
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Writer's Bio: Frank Feingold is the President of Doreo Hosting. Frank’s responsibility at Doreo includes new product development and customer satisfaction. Frank has been involved in the web hosting industry since 2001. Prior to his web hosting career Frank had 20+ years of mainframe and mid-range experince working in corporate america.
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But don’t be upset. Blowing out the dust is a classic customer service trick and it is a classic because it’s effective. The effectiveness of the blowing out the dust fix stems from the basic that it appeals to basic human psychology and the ever-powerful ego. As competent, technically savvy, human beings, the idea of a problem originating from something as simple wires being loose is especially difficult to grasp. If a representative asks, “are the wires plugged in securely?” you will snap back “yes” with the utmost confidence. “That couldn’t be the problem. It has to be more complicated than that!” is what would go through my mind if a representative asked me to check if the wires were plugged in securely. And apparently, my reaction isn’t unique, or the blow out the dust “fix” wouldn’t exist. However, if the representative changes the situation ever so slightly and asks you to just “blow out the dust,” then everything is different. Suddenly, a legitimate technical
solution has been suggested. Dust is the enemy of everything involving circuitry (right?) and blowing out the dust can fix most any problem (maybe?). The level of legitimacy of the dust fix doesn’t really matter as much as what the fix represents on a broader level. What does matter is that it is a way to get customers to do something they think is so simple that they wouldn’t otherwise bother to check or, at the very least, would be insulted if asked to check. An example of this same logic in the web hosting industry is the classic “delete the X and try doing it again.” The idea is to get customers to go through the creation of X (i. e. an email account) again, and ideally, not make the same mistake they did the first time around. Chances are, the problem will magically “resolve itself” the second time around and the call will end without the customer feeling embarrassed.
by douglas Hanna
Have you ever called technical sup-port and been instructed to unplug the cable from the back of your modem, television, or other miscel-laneous, yet incredibly sensitive, electronic device, blow out the dust, and then plug it back in? If you have been instructed to do so and have actually done it, then you’ve fallen for one of the oldest technical sup-port tricks in the book.
BLOW OUT THE DUST
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YOUNGCOPY
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Creative customer service departments come up with their own little tricks to convince customers that the problem does not exist between the keyboard and the chair. Blowing out the dust, deleting the email account, setting all the values back to default, and the like are all common customer service escape routes. The technology itself is the perfect scapegoat (modems don’t fight back) and will work wonders in increasing customer satisfaction. No one wants to believe that they can be affected by human error or personal oversight and these simple customer service tricks can help avoid the awkward situation of implying, assuming, or even making a hint at the remote possibility of a customer making the slightest mistake. If the customer is always right, then we as customer service providers need to let them know just that.
Writer's Bio: Douglas Hanna is the Customer Service Editor at Ping! Zine. He blogs daily at serviceuntitled.com and is the Customer Service Manager at HostGator.com, LLC.
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It's ten o'clock Monday morning. The boss of the branch office is in a rage. He's been waiting for hours for an important email. Sound familiar? This is the leading scenario in Wolfgang Barth's new Nagios book. What follows is more than 700 pages of detailed information on how to plan, deploy and maintain an advanced Nagios monitoring environment.
Nagios 2nd Edition: System and Network Monitoring
by jeff Huckaby
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For the uninitiated, Nagios is an open source network and service monitoring platform that runs on most flavors of Linux and Unix. You can use it to continuously monitor email systems, databases, web operations and even the humidity at your data center. Through a modular architecture, Nagios is highly extensible and can support very large, complicated deployments. Nagios has the reputation of being difficult to configure and deploy as you can quickly get lost in the wilderness of configuration files. Fortunately with this book, you now have a excellent guide to put Nagios to work monitoring your IT infrastructure.
Complete and accurate documentation is often lacking for free open source software. As a result, deploying the software can become a time consuming endeavor. Barth's book eliminates this issue with Nagios. He covers deployment planning, installation, configuration and ongoing management. Sprinkled throughout are nuggets of advice about how to get the most out of Nagios.
The first three chapters focus on installation and configuration of Nagios. The goal is to get you going as quickly and easily as possible.
You will find a detailed accounting of configuration options for all aspects of Nagios monitoring. The second part of the book presents the various monitoring methods available to Nagios. The last portion of the book discusses developing your own plugins and advanced Nagios usage.
With a thorough read of the book, you will learn how to:
Install and configure Nagios and its plugins.
Monitor networks, host and network services.
Use plugins to proactive restart failed services.
Master the notification system to send alerts to responsible parties.
Use NagVis and other tools to visualize Nagios Data.
Monitor Windows, SAP and oracle systems.
Use of NRPE, a Nagios plugin to do remote checks, SNMP monitoring, and using SSH for remote manage-ment are discussed in detail. The Nagios notification system is reviewed with a focus on building a logical notification system so that you get alerted when you want for what you want. This is excellent as I've seen many users have problems grasping how Nagios manages notifications. There is also a chapter on NDOUtils, which you can use to pump Nagios results into a MySQl database. The latter is very powerful since you can then use your favorite programming framework to build frontend to your Nagios monitoring. There is also a section discussing the differences between Nagios versions 2 and 3.
Due to its concise, accurate presentation of Nagios, I found it faster to get the information from Barth's book than trying to find reliable documentation online, which is a rarity for most IT books. Recently, we've begun rebuilding our Nagios installation and Nagios 2nd Edition has proved indispensable during the process.
In short, if you are looking to deploy a monitoring solutions or already employ Nagios in your operations, this book is a must have. With it, you will save hours debugging that pesky Nagios configuration problem and learn to maximize Nagios' power to monitoring your IT operations.
Writer's Bio: Jeff Huckaby is founder and CEO of rackAID, an On-Demand IT Management firm based in Jacksonville, FL.
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A while ago we talked to an office intern on the joys of self empowerment; the ability to find splendor in the most base of human objects such as umbrellas and cardboard boxes. Well that office intern is all “growed up” now and has become a staff writer. Where did the time go?
After revisiting the newly made staff writer we ask the question, has he advanced from playing practical jokes now that he has advanced in his status? To make this purely scientific we ran him through the same torture, I mean testing as before. Stripped of his Bawls, Mountain Dew, Coffee, and any other caffeinated substance for a week, he was a mere shell of his former self. oh what we give up for science. But after a 24 hour caffeine binge and bordering on a catatonic state this is what he said:
My old nemesis Mr. Panky is no longer with the company. Some believe I did not like the man I affectionately, affectionately mind you, called Mr. Panky. Perhaps it was our ongoing cold war of pranks and practical jokes, or the way I added diuretics to his coffee right before his major meeting with the boss (Yes, it was me!! Hahahaha). But, Mr. Panky will always have a special place in my heart. For instance I would never do any of the following to anyone else:
Revenge of the InteRn: PRactIcal Jokes PaRt 2
by douglas Hanna
[continued]
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[continued on pg 46]
Pens that never work.The pen is an elegant tool from a more civilized age. But what happens if you cannot find one working pen on a desk filled with pens? Maybe you should ask one of your coworkers. Grab a bottle of super glue and place a very small drop on the tip of every pen your coworker owns. The next time they try to use any of their pens, they will fail.
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Remapping keys for fun and profit.This practical joke is a little involved but very much worth it. First you need to download a key remapper. Simply get on your favorite search engine, find one, download it, copy it to a USB keydrive, then prepare to unleash the fury. While your prey is away, get on their computer and install the key remapper. Depending on time constraints you can make the R key no longer work or, if you are feeling really devious, you can shift all the keys on the keyboard over one such that the A key now types “s”, the S key types “s”, etc.
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Key remapping revisitedYou just love word processors. Nothing better than using autocor-rect feature. Frank especially got a kick out of having every “I” he typed in turn into “I, Mr. Panky”. To have some fun with this prank, get on your coworker’s computer. If they use Microsoft Word you want to go to the Autocorrect Options (in Word 2007 that normally means customizing the ribbon by adding the options button then removing it after you are done, in earlier versions it means going to Tools > Autocorrect Options) in OpenOffice go to Tools > Auto-correct. What you are going to do is add an entry that takes some word or letter that is inputted and replace it with one you want: turn “my” into “monkey;” “me” into “moron;” whatever your heart desires.
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MAJORINCIDENTS ON THEINTERNETIN 2008
pingdom.com presents
We have gathered 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet in 2008. This was another eventful year, full of its share of accidents and incidents that disrupted the Internet and the WWW. We have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. You are sure to recognize several of them.
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MedITerranean subMarIne cable cuTsIn January, a pair of cut submarine telecom cables in the Mediterranean just north of Egypt caused severe Internet outages and disruptions in the Middle East, Pakistan and India. This incident reminded us all how dependent we are on the actual cabling that interconnects the various networks that make up the Internet. Further cable cuts in the same region followed, sparking various conspiracy theories.
The YouTube IP hIjackIngThis may very well be the most bizarre incident of the year. YouTube was completely unavail-able for roughly two hours because an ISP, Pakistan Telecom, had mistakenly claimed their IP address space (including the IP addresses used by YouTube’s DNS servers). This effectively took YouTube offline in a matter of minutes. This proved that a single ISP can, under some circumstances, inadvertently sabotage parts of the entire Internet.
exPlosIon and fIre aT The PlaneT daTa cenTerProbably the most massive data center outage of the year happened in June, when an explo-sion and electrical fire in one of The Planet’s data centers in Houston affected thousands of sites (around 9,000 servers), some for several days. The fire department’s initial refusal to let The Planet activate its backup power generators didn’t exactly help. In addition to this, ser-vices that depended on DNS servers located in that data center were also affected.
google aPPs and gMaIl TroubleGoogle has had numerous difficulties with its Gmail and Apps services this year, which set both the media and the blogosphere abuzz with speculation about their reliability. Just as with Amazon’s problems (see below) these issues have sparked additional debate around the cur-rent viability of so-called cloud services (and SaaS).
aMazon s3 ouTagesAWS (Amazon Web Services) has become somewhat of a poster boy for cloud computing, so every time S3 (or EC2) has a problem, “The Cloud” is called into question. Another reason these problems got a lot of attention is of course also that a lot of services use Amazon S3, so just like when a hosting company or data center has an outage, a lot of sites are affected. Some of the outages were quite lengthy. For example, S3 had an outage that lasted eight hours in July.
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PolITIcal ddos aTTack on georgIaThe growing tension between Russia and Georgia over Georgia’s membership in NATO spilled over online when the websites of several official Georgian websites, including that of the Georgian President, were subjected to a DDoS attack that made them unavailable over an entire weekend. The attackers were unknown but the motive was likely political: among the messages flooding the websites was “win+love+in+Rusia.”
sITeMeTer scrIPT crashIng PoPular blogsIn August, an update to SiteMeter’s script (websites can have it included on their pages to get visitor statistics) started crashing popular blogs like Gawker, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Valleywag and Problogger for Internet Explorer users. Presumably every single website using SiteMeter had this problem. This incident revealed how a third-party script can quite easily stop a whole site from working, which is a vulnerability that every site owner should keep in mind.
aPPle’s MobIleMe launch ProbleMsWhen Apple was migrating .Mac accounts to the new MobileMe, things did not go as smoothly as they would have wished. Steve Jobs has later admitted (in a leaked email) that it was a mistake to launch MobileMe, the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2.0 software and App Store all on the same day, and that MobileMe should have been given more time and testing.
cogenT PeerIng dIsPuTes WITh TelIa and sPrInTThe ISP Cogent is a veteran of network peering disputes, and this year saw them in disputes with both Telia and Sprint. In March, a dispute with Telia was widely publicized, and October saw the start of another dispute, this time with Sprint. These peering disputes make it problem-atic and sometimes impossible for customers of the different networks to reach sites located on the other network. The disconnect with Sprint only lasted a few days, but the dispute with Telia lasted for two weeks.
frIendsTer knocked ouT bY daTa cenTer IssuesFriendster was once the largest social network in the world, and while it may have lost its crown to Myspace and Facebook, it is still one of the largest in the world. In November, technical problems at the data center where Friendster hosts its servers caused the site to be unavailable for more than 23 hours in just three days, making it by far the largest incident for any social network in 2008. p!
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In keeping with the Holiday SpiritI am not an evil man. There are times when I feel like I need to give to my coworkers and with Frank, Mr. Panky, leaving I thought he should have a good, quality, wholesome, send off. I put away my super glue, my razor blades, the rolls of duct tape, and thought to myself, “Self, what would I want for a send off?” Why going away gifts are always good. So the day before Frank’s departure I armed myself with 10 rolls of gift wrapping and a small trunk worth of boxes of various sizes. I went through his entire office and gift wrapped everything in it. The staples, each pen, the box of paperclips, his computer, the desk, the light switch, everything was wonderfully wrapped in various My Little Pony and Barbie gift wrapping paper. You should have seen his face, I think he was going to cry. Tears of joy I am sure.
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Writer’s Bio: David Dunlap has been both a Web host industry analyst and commentator for the past eight years. Prior to his active writing career, David was a network and communications technician for four years. He currently is the Editor-in-Chief for WebHostMagazine.com
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