MD Newsletter: December 2008
Happy Holidays
We have jam packed this newsletter with a number of quick how-to's and short articles which we hope will make your web hosting experience a whole lot easier. First things first! MD would like to wish everyone a happy and safe holiday season and to celebrate we are offering huge discounts on our new High availability packages for new and existing clients because we want you to have the best hosting experience in Australia.
So whats new at MD?
- We have been proactively working on our support department where ticket response times are averaging 30 minutes 24 hours a day. Our goal is to respond to tickets in less than 10 minutes with a resolution first time because we know your time is valuable.
- If you have contacted our support number 1300 734 660 you may have noticed something different. There is no longer an Auto Attendant. You will now be connected to a Support Consultant who is trained in billing, domain and support related queries.
- We have migrated most of the server fleet to our Melbourne data center, and are moving away from our previous single server model to the stable and reliable High Availability Infrastructure.
What does this mean for you?
Several servers can fail simultaneously for any reason. Our monitoring infrastructure will kick in and logically move your site to available resources in the hosting cloud.
But - what happens if a meteor were to hit our datacenter? We are actively working on replication of our current infrastructure to another datacenter to ensure our high availability standard and goal of very high uptime.
- We have very recently added another router and and internet
provider to complete our phased network rollout. This has increased both the capacity and reliability of our sevice. In practical terms, this means that one or more data links or routers can fail and the network will continue serving out dat
If you have any questions about the technology then please feel free to call us during business hours.
Happy Hosting!
Mark Galea
MD Support
How-to article – Your MyAccount
Over the next few issues we will be creating a number of how-to articles about hosting and your hosting features with MD.
So many times I daily I hear from clients who have never heard about their myaccount. Myaccount is one of the most important features of your hosting; through it you gain access to all of the following features
* Login to your control panel
* Get technical support and assistance
* Submit a support ticket
* Order new products and services
* Check the status of your server
* Check your Affiliate status
* See our latest server status notifications
* Check what emails we have sent to you recently
* Check out past invoices, and see what invoices are coming up
* Manage your domains
* Update your C/C details and make one off payments
* Update your personal information, including contact email
* Change your password
How do I log into my Myaccount?
We enable you access to your myaccount through various easy to find links on our website, your myaccount details are located in your welcome email when you first sign up with MD Web Hosting.
Updating Domain Settings
http://www.mdwebhosting.com.au/support/wiki/index.php/Domain_Overview
Domains, like your other services, can be managed from your MyAccount. To get started, login to your MyAccount and click 'My Domains'. This will take you to your Domain Summary page. Each domain you have ordered is listed, along with the renewal amount, next due date and original registration date. Domains are colour coded - yellow domains are pending and red domains expired. While domains are currently active.
Once inside 'My Domains', you can manage a Domain by clicking the 'View Details' button next to the corresponding Domain. http://www.mdwebhosting.com.au/support/wiki/index.php/My_Account_DNS
From this area you can:
* Disable Auto-Renew (not recommended!).
* Update your Nameserver settings. If you host with MD then these are provided inside your Welcome Email.
* Turn Registrar Lock Off (not recommended!).
Note: Registrar Lock is a feature available on gTLDs only (.com, .net, .biz, and so forth). Australian domains do not have this feature, so trying to enable the feature on AU domains will fail.
How do I Contact Support?
Support tickets are the easiest way to communicate with MD if you have any accounts or support enquiry. Tickets are answered 24/7 so you should not have to wait long to get an answer.
To lodge a ticket, login to your MyAccount. Click the 'Submit Ticket' link
Choose the relevant area to submit your ticket to. E.g., for support issues (hosting, email, ftp, sitebuilder, etc) choose the Support department. For accounts, billings, invoices, new domains, and other enquiries, choose the 'Billings Enquiries' department.
You will be asked to describe your issue or query. Please put as much information as possible - as an example, if your email was not functioning as expected, you would provide:
* Your domain
* The email address you are trying to use
* The password you are using to access the email
* Any errors being generated by your email client program
* Steps we can take to reproduce your error
The more information you provide, the easier and faster staff can fix issues for you.
You can also click 'My Support Tickets' to view replies to your ticket, or to view your ticket history. By default, ticket replies are sent to the main account holder's email account.
There are many more features available to you through the portal, feel free to take some time to read more information and guides on myaccount through our knowledgebase.
http://www.mdwebhosting.com.au/support/wiki/index.php/My_Account
Support and Services
Tech Tip 1: Make use of your features
So many clients go through their entire hosting life with out even exploring the vast world that is “The Hosting Control Panel” The hosting control panel is the control center of your hosting where a lot of clients use it solely just to create their email accounts and maybe a forwarder on the odd occasion.
In todays article I’m going to highlight 2 handy features, which are often overlooked, their names are awstats and spam assassin.
AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. Some of the features include;
* Number of visits, and number of unique visitors,
* Visits duration and last visits,
* Authenticated users, and last authenticated visits,
* Days of week and rush hours (pages, hits, KB for each hour and day of week),
* Domains/countries of hosts visitors (pages, hits, KB, 269 domains/countries detected, GeoIp detection),
* Hosts list, last visits and unresolved IP addresses list,
* Most viewed, entry and exit pages,
* Files type,
* Web compression statistics (for mod_gzip or mod_deflate),
* OS used (pages, hits, KB for each OS, 35 OS detected),
* Browsers used (pages, hits, KB for each browser, each version (Web, Wap, Media browsers: 97 browsers, more than 450 if using browsers_phone.pm library file),
* Visits of robots (319 robots detected),
* Worms attacks (5 worm's families),
* Search engines, keyphrases and keywords used to find your site (The 115 most famous search engines are detected like yahoo, google, altavista, etc..
* HTTP errors (Page Not Found with last referrer, ...),
* Other personalized reports based on url, url parameters, referer field for miscellanous/marketing purpose,
* Number of times your site is "added to favourites bookmarks".
The above features are essential in ascertaining the popularity of your website and the locality of your visitors. This enables you with the power to make strategic and educated decisions based on actual facts.
Tech Tip #2 – Spam Elimination
Don’t you hate the annoyance of Spam, a lot of clients go by with out even knowing the power of spam filtering once enabled in their account. Spam assassin is an open-source Bayesian filtering software available for most clients and easy enabled through your hosting control panel. Windows users don’t fret! Spam filtering is automatically enabled through smartermail.
Here are some qick steps to eliminating spam for all you linux clients
Steps to configure SpamAssassin
These steps will filter the spam at the server level.
* Login to your web host (access the cpanel with user name and password)
* Email Management Tools
* Click on SpamAssassin
* Enable SpamAssassin
* Configure SpamAssassin
* Set "required_score" to 5 (this is the default setting)
* For "rewrite_header subject" type "Spam Assassin Spam Header" in the box.
(this is for the text added to the Subject: line of mails that are considered spam)
* In "whitelist_from" type any addresses that may get labeled as spam
* Click "save" to save your settings.
Steps to configure Outlook Express
These steps will automatically delete the email that has been filtered by SpamAssassin
* At the top of Outlook Express go to tools - message rules - mail - new mail rule
* For Rule 1. check the box "where the subject line contains specific words"
* For Rule 2. check the box "delete it"
* For Rule 3. click on the link called "specific words" in this sentence
* A window will pop up called "Type Specific Words"
* Type "Spam Assassin Spam Header"
* Click Add-Ok
* Name the New Rule ie "New Mail Rule #1"
* Click Ok.
Now all your email will be filtered by SpamAssassin. Any email identified as spam will be labeled "Spam Assassin Spam Header" in the subject line and automatically deleted by Outlook Express.
This will reduce most of the spam you receive to a small trickle. If you still get too much email spam then just increase the "required_score" in SpamAssassin.
Tech Tip #3 – Secure your Hosting
We do all that we can to secure our servers to ensure your information is safe and that there is no interruption to your web services. You should always use a good password practice. Use long passwords that have letters, numbers, some capitals and characters. You can't protect your password totally but you can make it take a long time for them to gain access to your computer. Changing your password regularly will eliminate any insecurities to your account. “pctools” has a great password generator http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/ which I often use when updating my own passwords.
Search Engine Optimisation 101
I have to say I’m relatively new to the world of Search Engine Optimisation where I have to say it is quite an art mastering and continually manipulating your site to see the effect it has with ranking in search engines. Over the next few articles I will share some of the wisdom I have learnt during my time at MD Web Hosting in effort to ensure your site shares some success in the organic listings.
Lesson 1: Title and Meta Tags
Your title tag should be brief stating the main functions of your business which are essentially your prominent keywords. This will also contain a reference to your company name as in the example below. Remember each page of your website is different and they should be titled appropriately. Duplication of titles and meta tags rates negatively not positively.
<title>Web Hosting, Domain Name Registration & Reseller Accounts :: MD Web Hosting</title>
With the meta tags you should aim to have about 10 keywords where there is no need to repeat keywords as they are seen individually
Example: “Web, Web Hosting, Email Hosting” is incorrect procedure use “Web, Email, Hosting” as there is no need for repeat keywords.
<meta name="keywords" content="MD, Web, Hosting, Email, Domain, Name, Registrations, Dedicated, Servers, Ecommerce, Australia">
Your description should be brief but portrays the main functions of your business as in the example I have implemented below on our website.
<meta name="Description" content="Trust your business is in safe hands with MD, delivering domains names, web hosting solutions, daily backups, 24/7 support. Call us on 1300 734 660">
I can’t stress the importance of creating similar yet individual title and meta tags for each page of your website. As duplicating the title and meta tags from your index to every page on your site is a negative.
Happy Hosting,
Mark Galea
MD Support
Open-Source Vault!
You have to love open-source software, open-source basically means "FREE" over the next few months we will be showcasing some of the best quality open software in the world.
On today's agenda: Ecommerce here are some of the best carts currently available.
I have only started playing with Magento where it is a professional ecommerce solution rich in features not normally seen in other comparative products. It is quite similar to commercial ecommerce solutions and is hard to believe that it is a open source project. Highly recommended to users with intermediate internet knowledge.
I have not personally used presta shop in a commercial environment and just have come across it recently. Its a professional grade solution and is easily downloaded and installed. The back end is fully featured with a clean templates design and looks to be highly recommended for the beginner and intermediate user.
Opencart is another example of a shopping cart that is simplistic and easy to use. OpenCart also has a quite aesthetically pleasing storefront where the backend simplicity makes this software recommended to users wanting a simple to use piece of ecommerce software.
On a final note you have to always ask yourself is this software right for me? Basically the number one pitfall are limited modules with some ecommerce software. After you spend weeks developing and tweaking your site you don’t want to find out your payment gateway isn’t supported. So with anything in life it is best to jot down your requirements and plan before you commit to any piece of software.
