Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Posts tagged Windows Webhosting
Smartertools answers the cry for help in the war on spam with SmarterMail 4.0
Jan 9th
A few months ago we were invited by the smartertools team to become a beta tester for Smartermail 4.0. The biggest change in Smartermail 4.0 for us is the improved spam fighting techniques. With the earlier versions of Smartermail, RBL checks and bayesian filtering was released, unfortunately spammers were already aware of bayesian filtering and had already found ways to corrupt the effectiveness of bayesian filtering. RBLs are just hit or miss and not really effective for the most part (they tend to throw the baby out with the bath water). One of our comments at that time was “hey look at spamassassin” but unfortunately the bits had been set in stone and it couldn’t be implemented. Appearantly we weren’t the only ones commenting on this because today we have spamassassin integration but it’s integrated far better than I could have expected.
Enter the ninja.. Spamassassin
Spamassassin is a widely used anti-spam tool mainly used in linux. it uses a set of rules that are constantly being updated, revised and added to but also supports using 3rd party resources like razor, DCC, and pyzor which are distributed spam databases if you will.
Smartertools really researched spamassassin and realized that a windows platform would simply not run it as effectively as on unix. So they not only integrated spamassassin but set it up such that you can run a farm of linux based spamassassin servers to filter mail through. Very cool! That there is smart planning!
Daddy don’t want your mail unless you really want to get it to him.
Next is the addition of greylisting. Greylisting is an extremely simple idea. It basically rejects a message on the first attempt and then accepts it on the second attempt. Legitimate mail servers will send a message and if it doesn’t send the first time will re-attempt to send the message again a few minutes later and will continue to re-attempt the message for a set period of time until it finally times out at which point it’s bounced. The thought being is that spammers are hit-and-run mailers. They have so many email addresses to attempt to deliver to that they simply attempt a send, if it doesn’t go through immediately they move on to the next address and abandon the previous one. Now Grady (from Smartertools) said greylisting would probably be the biggest help in the fight on spam and I didn’t believe him. Boy was I wrong. Greylisting by itself has almost completely eliminated spam on our beta test domains. I’d say less than 10% of the spam quantity is making it past greylisting and that’s a high ballpark estimate.
What’s the trade-off for all this?
Well there’s no such thing as a free-lunch. Greylisting does delay your messages for a couple minutes and I personally have found it to not be a problem. However if it does cause a problem for you, Smartermail allows you to opt out of greylisting on your domain if you wish.
Any messages that make it through greylisting are then fed to spamassassin’s rules, dcc, razor, pyzor and ofcourse the RBLs and only then a message is delivered. Now you’re probably wondering won’t all of those post greylisting tests delay my email from being immediate? Well we’re seeing between 1 and 10 seconds per message for processing through spamassassin and based on the accuracy it’s a very acceptable trade-off and this is running on a standard linux VPS account.
Why is all this necessary?
Spam has reached epidemic proportions and has simply grown out of control. 2/3rds of all email I used to receive on my personal domains was spam. Think about that 2/3rds of every email I’d have to wade through was spam. This means only 30% of the time I spent working in outlook was spent doing anything productive. For us as a hosting company spam represents a major part of our support requests each day and as a result costs us a great deal in time, resources and manpower. Not to mention the lost revenue, time and manpower it costs our clients each day. Not to mention the cost in server hardware necessary to deal with the increased message processing (thanks to spam!). Spam is simply out of control and needs to be stopped. By implementing systems like SmarterMail 4 we may not be able to stop spam but we can definitely lessen the impact it has on us and our customers.
My website’s been hacked and I need to remove a folder named COM1
Dec 18th
No not my website, but probably yours if you had anonymous FTP open. So here’s the scenario, you have a website that somehow someone in some far away country has loaded all these french pirated movies, arabian rap songs and warez. They were crafty and placed all these files in a folder named com1, or a folder named with all spaces or perhaps a folder named .. And now you want to delete these files but how?
Deleting folders named COM1
This is first because it’s usually the hardest. what you’ll do is type:
- rmdir \\.\c:\your_root_folder\com1 /s /q
That’s it! /s says remove all directories and folders under this folder /q says do this in quiet mode (don’t bother me with warnings)
Now if you get a warning that you don’t have permission to delete com1 then open windows explorer, select the top folder, right click on it and go to properties -> security -> advanced -> owner and change the owner on the folder and all subfolders to administrator. then try the command again
Deleting folders named “ ” or “..” or “.”
This is straight forward. The command is dir /x look for the short name for these folders, it will be something like “CBCC3~1″ then from dos type
- rmdir CBCC3~1 /s /q
That’s it they’re deleted. Now how did they get in? My money is on anonymous FTP or bad frontpage permissions but that’s for you to find and close.
FrontPage retires – Microsoft Expression Web is born and so begins the evolution of FrontPage hosting
Dec 8th
The birth of a hosting company
In 1999 when Applied Innovations was first launched, it didn’t really take off like a rocket ship as one would hope. You see, I started on the Internet around 1991-1992 via FTP, Telnet, Usenet and ahh my long forgotten friend Gopher. I remember firing up one of the very earliest versions of UIUC’s mosaic and seeing text and images like a newspaper. I thought “wow that’s kind of interesting”. It wasn’t until I watch the USS Enterprise animate across the screen that I realized the web was UBER-COOL! With this revelation I quickly loaded a copy of NCSA HTTPD on a Solaris server and then various iterations of Linux. Learned HTML, then CGI programming and then PERL programming and it continued. It was with PERL programming that I found my new love. I knew that developing interactive webcontent was going to be huge and for this Electrical Engineer it would be but a hobby, afterall I sold my soul to the world of Digital Communications, Digital Signal Processors and BEEPERS!
A month after the launch of Applied Innovations I spent two weeks studying for this fancy new exam Microsoft was touting. All these guys that they were “cool” suddenly because of this unbearably hard exam they had studied months for. Well within that two weeks I became an Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. I earned MCSE, MCP and MCP+I all within a 2 week time period. I remember sitting in the testing center after taking my first exam that day waiting for my second and people staring at me like I was nuts taking two exams in the same day. I wonder what they would say if they knew I passed all of them in just 5 days. Considering I had been working on computers since 82, built my first PC around 86, it’s not that hard to imagine this happening.
Anyway, until this point Applied Innovations was a full blown apache based hosting company, IIS? Eh, windows was great for the home PC but not the web server. I needed PERL, not ASP. Once I really delved into IIS did I learn what was to come and sudden Applied Innovations started offering windows hosting. Afterall, I can have both? ASP and PERL? If I host on IIS? How can you lose!?!
The quick growth of a hosting company
Now having done website development from the first earliest days of the web, I had already worked on numerous projects for clients and made a nice little portfolio of projects (in fact, my last PERL/MySQL project still lives today with the same design and code that I initially created). I used this portfolio of clients and launched a windows hosting company. I had a good 30 or so clients and they were managing to pay for the server so I was happy. Now having been an avid Internet user and dare I say developer, I had ofcourse used FrontPage before Microsoft purchased it and after. I saw the writing was on the wall and joined up to become a Microsoft FrontPage Host. Was accepted as a FrontPage host, listed on the Microsoft FrontPage resources and then the fun really started. I picked up a handful of clients and these clients soon spread the word that they had a FrontPage host that knew what was going on and was familiar with their little application/tool of choice. Suddenly we were bombarded with people wanting to sign up. Now mind you until now Applied Innovations only hosted people I had personally worked for or knew. Next thing I new we had people doing whois lookups and posting our phone number (my home phone number no less) on newsgroups, people leaving me voicemail messages like “Hi, um I heard you’re a webhost for FrontPage, if so call me. I need someone that knows what the hell is going on”. I tell you it was exciting times. Sending emails to our company email addresses, my personal email address, faxing in notes asking about hosting. It was a zoo! I tell you we’re about to turn 8 years old and to look back on those times, that was by far the most fun.
When people ask me how we got started? I honestly say “offering FrontPage Webhosting” and to this day we support FrontPage and will continue to support it as long as we’re around (and we’re not going anywhere).
FrontPage, you see led to the birth of Applied Innovations. It was frontpage that let us grow and it was catering to frontpage and frontpage based apps that brought even more growth. A few months ago it was announced that frontpage would not be released with Office 2007, that two new applications would come along, Sharepoint Designer for those looking to develop on Sharepoint services and Microsoft Expressions later to be officially released as Microsoft Expression Web. This week Expression Web was released and alas the final chapter of FrontPage starts.
Expression Web, not just FrontPage 2.0
So you would think this would be a sad event for us to see FrontPage retiring. Well, in a way it is but we actually EXCITED to see Expression Web come forward. Let’s face it Macromedia, er I mean Adobe Dreamweaver is a great development tool and probably the tool of choice by most professional web designers, frontpage has been relegated to the tool of newbies for the most parts (though still a easy to use and powerful application). So it was inevitable that Microsoft would develop a new web design/development tool.
Expression Web, is not just a new web design tool, it’s an evolution of web design tools. It will without question be the catalyst that starts the other web design tools to evolve as well. Expression web brings CSS design to a new level of ease (I don’t know about you but I’m old school and more a developer than a designer and never really cracked the CSS egg, I understand it but think you need a degree in graphic design to really master it). Expression makes it possible for even me to write nice CSS designs.
Expression Web also becomes extensible, it brings some of the features of Visual Web Developer to designers allowing them to utilize ASP.net and start developing dynamic content that they normally would leave to developers. Do you see it? Yes, Expression Web allows developers to do design work and designers do developer work? What’s that you say? Up is now down? White is now Black? Stop means Go? No, not quite, I just checked and hell hasn’t frozen over yet (yeah we’re all still safe for a little longer). It just means that these boxes we’ve built ourselves into are going to now have doors so we can get out of them and try new things. It’s an exciting time for designers and developers alike.
I honestly can’t do Expression Web justice trying to explain it but what I can do is provide resources and links to those that can
- First, the Microsoft Expression Family of Products website: Expression Web is just the first tool to be released
- Then, the Expression Web Blog. I absolutely love it when development companies take up blogging. I guess the team at iD could be considered the first true bloggers with their finger’s constantly getting updated (if you don’t know what a finger is you’re not Old Skool!)
- One of my favorites is the Expression Add-ins page. I believe we’ll see an even larger number of add-ins for Expression.
- Starter Kits are all the rage these days and Expression has ‘em. Expression Starter Kits.
Finally, My personal favorite resource, is our own Expression Web Resource page. That’s right Applied Innovations isn’t sitting back waiting to see what will happen with Expression Web, we’re jumping on it and offering Expression Web ready hosting immediately! All our plans are compatible with all features of Microsoft Expression Web. As a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner and ASP.NET webhost, we’re Expression Web Ready! Best of all we’re offering those clients interested in Expression Web special hosting offers.
That’s right, we’re Expression Web hosting ready and we’re ready to support it today. We look forward to contributing to the Expression Web community and watching it grow much like we’ve watched the FrontPage community grow and ofcourse the Internet grow.
Become a Webhosting affiliate – make millions!!
Nov 6th
Okay, maybe not millions but it’s definitely profitable to be a webhosting affiliate. I really haven’t blogged about our webhosting affiliate program but I suppose it’s about time I do. The Applied Innovations affiliate program pays $25 per referral. This means you put a special tracking URL on your website with nothing more than “We recommend: AppliedI.net for hosting” as the text and every time someone clicks that link and signs up for hosting you get paid $25! A nice thing is that cookie lives for 30 days so if they follow that link, bookmark it and then come back later to sign up, you’ll still get paid!
Better than that, it’s a 2-tiered system. This means anyone you refer that sends signups gets you a 10% commission on all of their signups! You just can’t beat the potential there.
How Much Can I Make As a Hosting Affiliate?
Here’s the late night infomercial spiel. Let’s say you refer 3 people who refer 3 people each. What would you make? $75 for the first 3 people and then another $22.50 from the 9 referrer referree’s for a total of $97.50! Not too shabby, almost $100 for nothing more than a text link on your website? How can you beat that?
But the other guys pay more?
Yeah but they other guys SUCK too! We’ve been scrutinized that the referral rates should be 2-6X more than $25 and there are those companies out there that do pay that much, but like the old saying, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is!
And guess what? Those companies SUCK! (yeah it’s my blog so I can say suck!). Okay maybe they don’t all suck but they do make it a little harder to earn and they provide absolutely no second tier and we believe that’s where the real potential earnings will come in.
Many of these companies:
- don’t pay
- scrutinize every signup and void most!
- offer a poor level of service that results in unhappy customers and someone upset at you for referring them
- don’t provide accurate tracking or any sort of traffic logging!
- or just outright suck!
Do a search on hosting affiliates and you’ll find almost everyone of the large paying affiliate systems just don’t convert or don’t pay!
Appliedi.net is definitely not one of these companies! Sure we do have a terms and conditions agreement but that’s to protect us as much as it is to protect you. The last thing anyone needs is a bad apple ruining it for everyone else.
Does Your Affiliate System Actually Pay?
OH YEAH!
We launched this just a couple months ago as a sort of closed test system before rolling it out to all of our clients. We wanted to see how it would perform for us and if it would be easily administered and managed. We have 3 affiliates all getting checks for $350 or more! We have a bunch more getting checks for atleast $100 and almost every one of these affiliates is seeing a 2nd tier income already from their affiliates referrals.
Good quality webhosting as affordable prices converts easily!
What’s Next?
A special affiliate’s only hosting bundle is in the works. We are working on a hosting offering that will be an affiliate hosting special that’s only going to be available if purchased through an affiliate, this would mean a unique discount offering from you to your site visitors that at the same time would land you $25! CHA-CHING! (and possibly more CHA-CHA-CHING! but more on that at a later date)
What do I do?
If you haven’t already done so, you need to head over to our webhosting affiliate site and signup. Then post your linking codes and banners on your site and watch your email. We have a few special promotions in the works for our affiliates!
How do I promote my affiliate link?
So first thing you should do is select one of the ready made banners, buttons, text ads, or links from our site and post it on your site. I’m personally fond of a simple “this site proudly hosted by: AppliedI.net” with a link back through your affiliate account. But banners and buttons in the proper place do very well. Many believe the bigger the banner the better the conversions but truth is location is king and where you place your banners will really dictate how many eyes land on it.
Another great way to spread the word is write a blog article (you are blogging, right?) about Applied Innovations and our hosting service. Even make it a blog about your site/store and mention in there that your hosting provider is Applied Innovations.
We have seen great results from affiliates posting links to us in their forum signatures (everything from car forums, to myspace posts, to gamer forums have converted!). Good forum results have been from forum posts in web design and developer related forums & websites.
But the best results are from testimonial postings, either on forums, blogs or even directly on your website. People want referrals for webhosting. There’s too many cold marketing machine hosts, too many ”I have a server in my basement” hosts, too many slicksters that people want to know who a good host is and if they’re on your site chances are they’re happy and want to know who your host is! What better than to recommend a Microsoft Certified Gold Hosting Partner with plans from just $7.96/month!
Show me the money!
Okay, so maybe you won’t make a million dollars as a hosting affiliate. You’ll definitely make a nice chunk of change for doing nothing more than what you probably do for free today! Referring your friends to Applied Innovations for the same great support and help you get yourself.
Remember if you’re happy and you know it, refer your friends (and don’t forget to sign up for our windows webhosting affiliate program)
Applied Innovations is all grown up & Microsoft Certified Gold!
Nov 3rd
Applied Innovations (www.appliedi.net) (applied-eye is how we say it, most of our hosting clients call it app-lid-E) was merely an idea in November of 1998, in February of 1999 we took on our first webhosting clients and officially launched the company as a Microsoft Windows webhosting company running NT4 and IIS4.0 and offering both ASP & PERL on windows! When Windows 2000 launched we were among the first hosts to launch Windows 2000 hosting and joined the Windows 2000 Hosting early adopter program.
The move from NT4 to 2000 was probably the easiest migration we had ever made and to become a Windows 2000 only host was not difficult at all. Why? Because we only had 1 webserver and 110 websites!
Since our modest start Applied Innovations has continued to grow and today is recognized in the webhosting community as a premier windows webhost specilizing in E-Commerce and ASP.net webhosting.
It is with great pride I announce that we have finally completed the process of becoming a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with multiple competancies and specilizations.
Achieving status as Microsoft Gold Certified Partner represents our commitment to one of the core values Applied Innovations was founded on: to provide the best level of service, support and technical expertise to our clients possible. Microsoft Gold Certified Partner represents the highest level of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies, and provides us the closest working relationship with Microsoft allowing us to provide an even higher level of service and support to our hosting customers.
Applied Innovations currently maintains Gold Certified Partner competencies in: Networking Infrastructure Solutions and Advanced Infrastructure Solutions with a specialization in Hosting Solutions.
Applied Innovations Corp (www.appliedi.net), A Boca Raton, FL based webhosting provider was founded in 1999 to provide cost effective webhosting solutions to Small and Medium sized businesses allowing them to grow and successfully compete in the Online Marketplace. Today we host thousands of websites and have clients worldwide. Our specialization is ASP.net hosting, E-Commerce hosting and sharepoint hosting on the Microsoft Windows family of Operating Systems.
