There are essentially 2 types of email programs you will encounter with hosted mail: Webmail and Email clients. Some of us prefer to use webmail (Horde) when accessing our email accounts. Webmail is useful when traveling or when you don’t have access to your own computer, but Horde can cause delayed mail and is not designed to store large amounts of email. For this reason, I always suggest to our customers that they download and configure one of many free email clients. Windows computers now come preloaded with Windows Mail, which has a clean and familiar feel to it (the layout and navigation are very similar to Outlook). If you prefer to use another email client, here are a few links +Continue Reading
Domain Name System (DNS) is an internet service that basically translates all domain names into IP addresses. The internet is actually based on IP addresses, but since we humans prefer easier-to-remember terms, DNS was created. Anytime you type a domain name into the address bar (ie google.com), DNS will change the name to the specific IP address that is assigned to that domain.
|| FOR EXAMPLE: www.bbc.co.uk can also be accessed through its IP address of 212.58.253.68 ||
If you’re a website owner, there are a few DNS records of which you may want to have a rudimentary knowledge. The 3 most likely records that you may encounter are the A, MX, and CNAME Records. +Continue Reading
“When is Verizon going to get the contract for the iPhone?” I have never owned a smart phone so I was a bit apprehensive when my good friend and independent Verizon consultant, Lance Burkhardt (Twitter Username: @SirLance99 or @SirSynct), offered to lend me a BlackBerry Storm 2 phone to let me play around with. He knew I had been looking and was in the market for a new phone and service because my contract with T-Mobile was up and I had complained several times through Twitter that I was unhappy with their network coverage. +Continue Reading
Okay, so you have your domain and even some decent content on your WordPress blog. Now you just need to get it noticed. Some people live by the rule that if you have good content, you’ll eventually get noticed. While this is true to some degree, there are also some plugins that may help boost your traffic. Here are my top 5 favs:
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It is tough trying to decide on a hosting service to go with when there are so many “review” sites out there. Like a product or service you always see people venting about bad experiences with a company, on the internet, rather than positive ones and so you don’t know who to trust. You can’t please everybody all the time, but some companies definitely try more than others. Being a freelance developer myself I have worked with many different companies in the past (Godaddy, Dotster, Bluehost, HostGator, IcdSoft) including the one I currently work for now.
(Full Disclosure – I work for Ecommerce, Inc which is the parent company for IX Webhosting and have a website with them http://www.mashingthenet.com and working on developing another http://www.thestandardrec.com).
Most companies offer the same features and requirements you are looking for. Unfortunately, the hosting industry gives out statistics like uptime % for marketing purposes. It is nice to have expectations, but not unrealistic ones. 98% of all statistics are made up. There are many factors to consider with uptime like resource hogs on shared hosting who should be moved to Virtual Private Servers or Dedicated Servers, hardware failures for equipment that is still under warranty that takes time to recreate from backups, Terms of Service Violaters, or customers who are victims of ddos attacks, etc. For me, other than uptime, the biggest deciding factor is customer service and tech support. You also have to consider while cheap is good it is relative. I am reminded of the old saying, “You get what you pay for.” In my eyes the bigger the company the cheaper the price and more brand recognition with regards to competitive strategy, but it doesn’t always equate to great customer service when things go wrong. It depends on where operations budgets are being focused on: R&D, Marketing, Operations, Customer Service. The two best ways you can decide is word of mouth and have a test account on with a short billing cycle so you can do “trial” runs. The great thing I like about IX currently over other companies is the direction they are headed with operations and customer support. They want to get away from the customer settling for average expectations. They have a 99.999% uptime guarantee, 24/7 US based phone support, 24/7 ticket and live chat support and all the other of the requirements you are asking for including affiliate sales for you to receive commission on (http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.affiliates).
Here are some blog posts on where the company is headed: Custom Control Panel:
http://blog.ixwebhosting.com/2009/09/introducing-imperia/
http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/awards/ecommerce_vizuri.html
Customer Service:
http://blog.ixwebhosting.com/2009/06/how-will-we-blow-you-away-exactly-part-1-of-3/ http://blog.ixwebhosting.com/2009/07/how-will-we-blow-you-away-exactly-parts-2-and-3/
Here is the status blog to make customers aware of persistent issues on their servers that take more than an hour to fix or other operational moves that they email customers ahead of time if they are affected: http://status.ixwebhosting.com/
If you have any other questions about IX Webhosting or any of the other hosting companies I have worked with I would be happy to answer them for you.
