Wrightsites.com Hosting Blog

As a hosting customer, you probably don’t realize the importance of the control panel to the functionality of your website.  Over the past ten years, I’ve been surprised that some customers don’t even know the control panel exists.  I guess for the most part, it isn’t important because once everything is set up; you usually won’t have to go into the control panel very often.

Control Panels were first developed for wide scale use by a company called Alabanza around 1998.  It was on that first control panel that I started my business in 1999.  I wasn’t a techno geek, so keying in commands on a server frightened the heck out of me.  This made the control panel perfect for me.  It allowed for automated account signups, email creation, file management, and more. 

Over time, various control panel solutions came on the market, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.  In 2001, Wrightsites.com moved to the H-Sphere system because it offered so many excellent features: ability to manage servers running multiple operating systems (Linux, BSD, Windows, and more), ability for customers to host multiple domain names in one account, ability for customers to have multiple accounts under one login, integrated trouble ticket system, integrated billing system, and more.  H-Sphere was truly a turn-key system for us and our resellers, which was very important to me because as a former reseller I understood the need for those features and knew that most other systems left resellers to fend for themselves.

Over the past few years, the hosting control panel market has seen massive consolidation.  This has resulted in all major commercial control panels except one being purchased by a company called Parallels (formerly SWsoft).  This company had already owned the Plesk system, which had an ugly and hard to use interface.  Plesk ran on Linux and Windows, but independently of each other (whereas our Linux and Windows are controlled jointly).  Now, they own every commercial panel but cPanel, which like Plesk runs Windows and Linux separately.  Running the systems separately would require more equipment and would virtually double expenses for things like security. 

Why should you care about this?  I guess I’m not saying you should.  That is, after all, why you pay us to host your sites, right?  So we worry about the hosting stuff and you don’t.  That’s very true, but I think you should at least know that so much of what a hosting company can offer is based on what their control panel includes or is capable of.  When Parallels first bought H-Sphere, they treated it like an ugly step-child.  That has started to improve recently with the inclusion of Site Builder, which will replace Site Studio and the availability of the Virtuozzo VPS system.  Much works remains for Parallels to bring H-Sphere back to the cutting edge, but some signs indicate that they will.  I truly hope so because it is a great product that is still unmatched in the basic feature set it includes.

Finally, before closing off for the night, I’d like to welcome a new customer to our service.  Apples Markets and Village Market this week launched a new website that I built for them.  You can view the sites at www.applesmarkets.com and www.wellingtonvillagemarket.com.  It has been a pleasure working on this site.  I guess this is a good time to point out that although it isn’t prominent on our site, we do offer website design services.  If you’d like to discuss this, please let me know.

Next week I’m going to write about Cascading Style Sheets and their importance in website design today.  I hope you’ll join me again for that blog entry.  For now, I’d like to wish our U.S. customers a happy Independence Day (Happy Birthday America!) and our international customers a great weekend!

People either love or hate spam.  Wait, I’m supposed to be talking about junk email, not the canned meat!  Unsolicited bulk email, usually called spam, is a pain and only the people sending it appreciate it.  Right? 

Not entirely true!  Spammers don’t mind spam because they are getting paid big money to make sure you and I see that message.  And the “advertisers” who are paying the spammers to send the messages out wouldn’t be paying that much money unless it was working.  That’s right – somewhere on this planet, people actually buy stuff they see in their spam!  Apparently, they buy enough to make the cost of a spam run worthwhile.  So the first tip to reducing spam is to ignore it!  If you know someone buying from spam, explain to them that they are making spam worthwhile and paying for its survival.

Beyond cutting off the effectiveness of spam, there isn’t much we can do to stop it.  And as a web hosting provider, we have to provide our clients with email service, so now what?  Now, we have to find a way to deal with it.  That’s exactly what I decided to do almost three years ago.  At the time, I was getting close to a thousand emails a day.  Since my email goes to my desktop computer and my smartphone, one or the other was downloading new mail constantly and it seemed like I never got anything done.  I tracked my time one week to see how much time I spent dealing with all of the spam I was getting – 532 minutes in seven days.  That is nearly nine hours of my time spent on junk mail.  Put that into dollars – how much do earn per hour?  I bill myself out at $75 per hour for some services and that would be roughly $675 per week spend on spam.  Seeing that number was a real wake up call.  I needed a better solution.

During this time, we were using one of the many available systems for blocking/filtering spam.  We were using a system called SpamAssassin.  We even used an addon for SA called Rules du Jour.  This addon was an automated system that would update the rules SpamAssassin used to block spam.  Even with this, for SA to really be effective, you need to spend hours on tweaking the rules.  I know of some large hosting companies that have full-time employees dedicated to nothing but updating these rules.  By doing this, they can typically achieve an 80% block rate.  Not bad, that would cut my spam down to around 200 per day, but I didn’t have the time to spare to do this, nor the $30,000+ per year to pay someone else.  Plus, the more you lock down SpamAssassin, the higher the risk that you will mess up legitimate emails.  You know that email joke about Viagra that Uncle Bob sent you?  No?  Maybe your email goes through SpamAssassin and it blocked it because it mentioned Viagra.  This was another major challenge that I faced.  I did not want to do anything that was going to cause this situation.  But all hope was not lost…

There are many products available as “network appliances” an example of which would be a router or network switch like you might have in your home.  The anti-spam appliances are larger though – more like the size of a five-disc CD changer.  The Barracuda is probably the best known of anti-spam appliances.  Many companies use these in-house to block junk mail from their internal networks.  Some of the others are: IronMail, Spam Marshall, SpamGate, and MailFoundry.  I looked at these and some other options, but selected MailFoundry.  MailFoundry was far from the cheapest.  It impressed me with its claimed kill rate of 98% of incoming spam.  Even more impressive though, was their claim that they could do this without blocking legitimate email.  Always before, the more you clamped down on spam, the more legitimate email would get caught in the net too.  MailFoundry claimed to have a false-positive rate of one in one million emails.  So I tested it out for a couple of months on a handful of accounts.  As promised, it blocked roughly 98% of spam, 100% of viruses, and it did so without a single false positive!

That’s how our Mr. GoodMail system came to be.  Mr. GoodMail is really a MailFoundry that I’ve branded in such a way to promote for myself and our resellers.  Ok, Ok Mark, but how does that help me, the website owner?  Well, if you host with Wrightsites.com, you get the Mr. GoodMail system free.  It isn’t automatic though, you’ll have let us know you’d like it added.  But the system definitely works.  We process upwards of one million messages per month.  Between 93% and 95% of these messages are blocked by Mr. GoodMail – sent to our users only in a quarantine digest that allows for retrieval of any mail that is accidentally blocked.  Generally, 3%-5% of mail is legitimate.  So that means we are blocking roughly 98% of the spam that you would get otherwise.  If you happen to be reading this and host your website somewhere besides Wrightsites.com, feel free to contact us about buying our Mr. GoodMail service as a standalone service. 

And for those of you who are hosted with us at Wrightsites.com, if you do get mail that is spam, it probably slipped through Mr. GoodMail.  Please forward spam on to spam@mrgoodmail.biz so that we can forward that on to MailFoundry and they can adjust the system to block that message in the future.

So, to help reduce the amount of junk email cluttering your box, make sure you do not buy anything from spam, sign up for hosting from Wrightsites.com or anti-spam service through Mr. GoodMail, and make sure to send any spam that makes it through our filters to spam@mrgoodmail.biz.

Thanks for joining me this week.  I hope you’ll be back again next Thursday when I discuss hosting control panels.

One question I’ve been hearing a lot lately from both customers and potential customers is, “How can I make sure I’m getting my money’s worth from my website?”

Considering the way the economy is, I’m not surprised to hear this question.  As a small business owner, I understand the need to carefully consider how every dollar is spent.   Putting money into a website doesn’t make sense unless the site is working for you.  But how do you measure that?  And how do you improve it?  Let’s look at these issues.

First, we need to understand that not every organization uses their website the same way.  Wrightsites.com, for instance, is a web service company – our website is our storefront.  Other companies, such as AM Appraisals (www.amappraisals.com) have both a physical presence and a website that they use for business transactions.  This is sometimes called “click and mortar”.  Still others, like Glass and Garden (www.glassngarden.com) may or may not have a physical storefront, but they are using their websites primarily for showing off their goods and services and letting people know about events they will be participating in.  This is usually called a “brochure website”.  Each of these three entities uses their website in a different way.  This also means that we need to promote our websites in different ways.  Here at Wrightsites.com, our entire marketing budget can go towards pushing people to our website, because our website is our entire business.  AM Appraisals and Glass and Garden gain their customer base from more than just their websites, so they need to spend their marketing dollars more selectively (think Yellow Pages, billboards, newspaper ads, local magazines, brochures, booths at home and garden shows, etc.).  My point is that since there are different purposes for having a website, there are also different ways to judge if a site is working or not.  In other words, one size does not fit all.

So how do you measure if your website is working for you?  There are several ways to do this.  You could (and should) be asking as many of your customers as possible how they found you.  Your website would be an obvious possible answer, but the answers to this question will really show you where you are getting the most bang for your marketing buck.  Another possibility is to look at your website statistics.  These show you a lot of basic information about your visitors: where they found your website, what page they entered the site on, what page they left the site on, and what pages in between they visited.  All of our hosting packages include Webalizer statistics.  This basic script analyzes server logs to see what time of day your visitors are browsing your site, how many visits per day, pages visited, entry and exit page on the site, host information about your visitors, referral sites, strings searched that led to your site, and information about the web browsers used to browse the site.  We also offer AWstats, an upgraded package, for $2.00 per month.  AWstats covers everything that Webalizer does, plus: visitors by day of week, countries where your visitors are from, search engine spiders browsing your site, duration of visit, operating system of visitor, keyphrases searched, keywords searched, and approximate times your site has been added to favorites.  There are also other systems available that require you to place a small piece of HTML code in each of your pages.  Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) is one example of this.  The biggest advantage to this system is that it can be plugged into Google AdWords for better results with that system.  This will also let you see the paths taken by many of your visitors, which can help you understand if you have a problem  with navigation of your site.  The bottom line is, if you aren’t getting visitors to your site, then it can’t be paying for itself.  Make sure your site draws in users from the moment they see it, then keep them active with well-written, relevent text, and keep them moving through the site with a clean, easy to understand navigation system.  Once you have all of that, advertise your website everywhere you can.  This will all help your ranking in the search engines and go a long way toward making sure that your site is paying for itself.

How can you improve your website so that it will start paying for itself?  Keep it simple.  You want to make sure your site design is simple enough to follow, but complicated enough to draw the visitors in at first.  Then, get to know some SEO techniques.  Search Engine Optimization is a service offered by many companies that will help modify your site so that it will rank as close to the top of the search engine listings as possible.  I'm not going to go into this topic now, because we will have an entire posting on it later.  Basically, you need to drive more traffic to your site.  That means putting your web address on all formal advertising and communications for your company.  Having pens printed?  Include the web address.  Getting shirts, hats, or even stuffed zebras?  Slap that URL on there!  This will help drive people to your site.  Just make sure you have something on the site for them to see or do – otherwise this is all wasted.   

Yes, I’m biased on this subject, but I really do believe that all small businesses and organizations should have a website – if for no other reason than to communicate with customers or members.  More and more people every day turn to the Internet first when looking for information.  Even information such as the hours of a local store are often sought out online first. 

That about does it for this edition of the Wrightsites.com Hosting Blog.  Join me next week when I discuss ways to lessen the pain of spam.

Welcome to the all new Wrightsites.com blog!  On this blog, we will post company news, industry news, new technologies being offered, website design techniques, marketing ideas, and anything else that may be considered useful to our customers.   There will be an article published here at least once per week – usually on Thursday nights.  I will write most of the articles here, but will occasionally have a guest author.

We’ll start out with blogs themselves.  Many people believe blogs to be nothing more than an online diary where people often tell more about themselves than they should.  It is true that many people do use blogs in this way, but they can be much more.  Just as I plan to do here, you can share information with your customers.  This information can be anything from helpful pointers to new product releases.  Good blog articles can assist your present customers, attract new customers, and even bring back your old customers!  The possibilities are almost endless.

Blogging is informal writing.  So while I don’t suggest using poor grammar and spelling habits, it isn’t the end of the world.  There is a lesser expectation of perfection in the blogging world – including in professional blogs.  I wouldn’t use a lot of web slang like “LOL” and “ROFL” but an occasional use is fine.  You don’t need to write something every day, but try to keep a schedule.  I am going to try and have articles published on Thursday nights.  Once per week is sufficient – remember that your readers have other important things to do besides just waiting for you to publish something new.  Most importantly though, keep it interesting.  At the end of each posting, try to give some hint as to what will be happening the next time you publish.

Maybe you aren’t sure where to get started.  Don’t let that stop you!  Blogging is easy to start, but be aware that you have many options.  Do you want to build your blog as part of your website or use a separate provider, such as Blogger.com or Live Blog.  The advantage to a separate provider is that you don’t have to worry about keeping your blogging software up-to-date, but they have some disadvantages as well.  Keeping your blog as part of your website gives you the freedom to customize the blog to look exactly like your site – something you can’t do with blogging providers.  You also have the advantage of being able to add features that you find valuable, not just the feature-set that the commercial bloggers offer.  Finally, you can get better statistics about who is viewing your blog, what articles are popular, and maybe find out if the blog is bringing new customers.  If you choose an outside blogging site, I suggest you thoroughly read their setup and help files.  If you’re interested in adding some blogging software to your website, read on.

There are many blogging scripts available for free download on the web.  Most will be written in PHP and will require a MySQL database.  Here at Wrightsites.com, all plans Bronze and above include the necessary resources to create most blogs.  In fact, you can install two of the best known scripts from within your H-Sphere Control Panel: b2Evolution and WordPress.  Both are good and I believe both are easy to use.  My personal preference is for b2Evolution, which is what is powering this blog.  I’m not entirely certain why I prefer it though – it could be because it was the one I used first.  I do think that b2Evo is more powerful – giving you more control over various system preferences.  It also allows you to have multiple users that can post blogs to the same or different areas of the blog site.  In either case, from your control panel, go to the EasyApps Collection and turn it on.  A list of programs will appear that can be installed.  Blogs is the first category on the left and you can click on each name to get a description of the software.  Once you click on the software name, you will see an Install link that will take care of the installation for you.  If you choose one of these packages, I caution you to keep in mind that feature and security updates are published for these programs on a regular basis.  Installation of these updates is a manual process until Parallels (maker of H-Sphere) fixes the EasyApps package.  If you need assistance with this, just send us an email and we’ll help out.

If you have thoughts or suggestions on this blog, I’d love to hear them.  You can leave comments, which won’t be published immediately as I need to screen out the spammers.  But even if you disagree with me on something, I’ll still post your comments because I believe opposing views are necessary to provide a good base for decision making.  I think these fingers have spewed enough into this article for now, so I’ll close out this first article by saying thank you to anyone who actually made it this far without falling asleep!  I normally will tell you the subject of my next article, but I have so many choices right now that I haven’t narrowed it down yet.  Be sure to check back next Thursday to see!