Archive for the ‘Hosting’ Category

More News of Note…

Filed under: Hosting,How To,Newly Launched,Newsletters — juliac on January 25, 2012

Holiday Traditions
The Holidays are filled with traditions both new and old. Two years ago, we broke our old holiday tradition of sending gift baskets to our largest customers and created a new tradition of honoring their continuing successes by making donations in their names to two very worthy charities: MAZON and Operation Food Search.

MAZON works nationally and, since 1985, has granted over $50 million to prevent and alleviate hunger among people of all faiths and back-grounds.

Operation Food Search is a St. Louis-based food bank that has been helping feed the poor and hungry since 1981. Each month, Operation Food Search distributes more than 2 million pounds of food and necessities to 265 food pantries, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters in 31 counties of Missouri and Illinois.

Operation Food Search feeds approximately 150,000 people every single month and nearly half of these recipients are children.

Customer Site News
Metaphor Yarns (www.metaphoryarns.com)
went live recently. Theirs is a great site for folks who love yarn. It is built on PDG Commerce with a WordPress component. The site has a cozy sense of place about it and given the list of classes and circles that meet there, I can see why.

The Music Zoo (www.themusiczoo.com)
asked us to integrate a third-party custom guitar “builder” widget from Taylor into their PDG Commerce cart such that when the user is done building their custom guitar, the guitar is on a PDG Commerce page ready to be added to the Commerce cart with image, details and pricing intact. Try it out here.

ImagiKnit (www.imagiKnit.com)
is another site devoted to yarn that recently went live with a new design. Built on PDG Commerce, it has a clean presentation where the yarn colors are presented as the main characters. I particularly like the “Yarn by Fiber” navigation on this site.

New Product Announcement
When enough is simply not enough and even more is still not enough, you need it all. And when you need it all, we are happy to oblige. HTN Cirrus Cloud Hosting accounts are now available with 30 GB of RAM and 1200 GB of disk space.

The Cirrus Cloud Hosting family of servers now ranges from 256 MB to a grand-daddy 30 GB of RAM–a whopping 128 times the CPU power of our smallest server. If you have a Cirrus Cloud Hosting account, you can easily change your hosting account to any other size by simply clicking the “Upgrade/Downgrade Package” button in the customer portal. Since we bill by the day and not by the
month, you pay only for what you use. For instance, if you double the size of your server on the day that you send your monthly newsletter, and restore the server to its original size the next day, you only pay for one day at the larger size.

The whole process is very convenient since your files stay in place, your IP address does not change, and your server is only down for a few minutes during the reconfiguration.

How fast would your website be if it was supercharged by dual quad-core CPUs (eight virtual cores) and a bodacious quantity of RAM? There’s only one way to find out: Upsize to (or order a new) Cirrus Cloud Hosting account now.

Celebrating 10 Years

Filed under: E-Commerce,Email,Hosting,Performance,Security,This & That,Web Development — Art Zemon on November 1, 2011

Ten years ago, on November 1, 2001, Hen’s Teeth Network was born. The past decade has seen tremendous technological change and let me work with truly amazing people and companies. Take a trip down memory lane with me.

When I started Hen’s Teeth Network, I never imagined the broad range of clients with whom I would work. Fascinating clients: from jewelry to medical marijuana, from children’s books to adult products, from swaddling blankets to grief counseling, from wedding invitations to anger management, from spiritual to religious to political and back again, from stylin’ shoes to hiking trails to bicycling, from podcasts to public libraries, from airplanes to trains to cars, from women’s fashion to medical uniforms, from art galleries to theatrical stages, from rubber stamps to air conditioners, from coffee to lobster to health supplements, from fishing tackle to board games, from financial forecasting to transportation planning, from dating help to parenting help, from home schooling to college course materials, from natural birth classes to Halloween costumes, from one-person start-ups to multi-national corporations to governments. It never ceases to amaze me how complex and interesting every business is, when you take the time to look at it carefully and understand how one business person is differentiating him or herself from his or her competition.

Among HTN’s clients, computers and the web are tools, simply a means to an end. Our mission, from the very beginning, has been: We help our clients improve their businesses by turning the internet and the web into useful tools.

2001

Launching a business less than two months after 9/11 might not be considered stellar timing but it was the right thing at that point in my life. I offered my time way below a living wage but it is better to earn something than nothing and, in those days, full fare work was darned hard to come by. Our web hosting was done on machines in my basement and reliability depended on my constant, personal availability. (more…)

Registering Your Domain in China or Asia

Filed under: E-Commerce,Hosting,Security — Art Zemon on March 15, 2011

One of our clients received a note which began like this. (I have replaced his actual domain name with “yourcompany”.)

We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in Anhui, China. On March, 12th, 2011, We received HUNDI Company’s application that they are registering the name “yourcompany” as their Internet Trademark and “yourcompany.cn”, “yourcompany.com.cn”, “yourcompany.asia”domain names etc. It is China and ASIA domain names…

Our client asked, “Is this a scam?”

Unlike a lot of the spam that shows up in our inboxes, this one is rooted in enough legitimate business that it deserves a longer answer than “delete the message.”

Yes, this is a scam.

And… many companies choose to protect their brand name by registering not only the .com domain name (yourcompany.com) but also .net, .org. .us, .info, .mobi, etc etc etc. International companies may choose to purchase country top level domains (cTLD) such as .uk (United Kingdom), .ca (Canada), .cn (China), etc etc etc. If you wanted to market in China then you might find it useful to own yourcompany.com.cn or yourcompany.asia. Similarly, if you had a competitor in China, you might want to procure that domain just to “stake your ground” and avoid any cases of mistaken identity.

Should you decide to register a .cn or a .asia domain name, I encourage you to do it via your normal decision making processes and register the domain name(s) with a reputable company operating in your own country, not with the folks who send messages like the one quoted above.

Upgrading Plesk 10.0

Filed under: Hosting,How To — Art Zemon on November 3, 2010

If you run a web server, you probably have a love-hate relationship with the control panel on the machine. Whatever came with the box is probably what you are stuck with, even when new versions are released.

Plesk Panel 10.0 breaks tradition by including semi-automatic upgrades. I say “semi-automatic” because you need to manually accept the upgrade but it all happens automagically with just a few clicks of your mouse. Here is an example, upgrading a server from Plesk 10.0.0 to 10.0.1.

First, the home page includes a big, green notice reading, “Upgrade to Parallels Plesk Panel 10.0.1 is available.” You can “See what’s new in this version” or “Open Parallels Products Installer” or “Postpone the upgrade.” (Click the pictures to see them larger.)

Plesk Panel 10 with upgrade notice at top of screen

Plesk Panel 10 displays a user-friendly upgrade notice at the top of the home page.

Clicking the “Open Parallels Products Installer” button launches the installer in a new window. This, too, is simple and easy to understand. It says, “Parallels Plesk Panel v. 10.0.0 – Latest version available: v. 10.0.1″ and there is a link to read the details.

Page 1 of the Parallels Products Installer

The Parallels Installer launches in a new window and confirms that the 10.0.1 upgrade is ready.

Clicking the “Install or Upgrade Product” link brings you to the third and final page. You get one more bit of confirmation about what you are about to do and a chance to preview the components that will be upgraded.

Parallels Products Installer confirmation screen

One last chance to preview and confirm your upgrade.

Clicking the “Continue” button is the last step. The process takes several minutes but works flawlessly. At the end, you get a chance to download the log file so that you can review the text output at your leisure.

Plesk Panel 10.0 Now Available

Filed under: Hosting,Newly Launched — Art Zemon on November 2, 2010

If you are interested in the latest and greatest in web server control panels, Plesk Panel 10.0 is now available. I have used lots of control panels over the years and I do sincerely believe that this is the sweetest user interface on the market today.

Parallels has done a tremendous job simplifying the UI for people who own a whole server and use it exclusively for their own web site(s). In this case, you can turn on Power User mode and gobs of stuff that you will not need simply vanishes, including the links for resellers, customers, subscriptions and service plans. You are left with straightforward access to managing web sites and email on your server. Much less cluttered than Plesk 9.5.

For resellers and webmasters, Plesk 10 does away with the old notions of reseller templates and domain templates. Instead, it adds the concepts of service plans and subscriptions, which exactly mirror what hosting companies sell. For instance, if you sell a 2 GB hosting plan which supports 1 domain and a 10 GB hosting plan which supports 20 domains then you would define two service plans, one each with those resource limits. A customer could then buy as many subscriptions to each service plan as he wants; simple and intuitive.

Plesk 10 also includes the integrated Customer & Business Manager module. It is a quick, optional install and gives you full access to what used to be sold separately as Parallels Plesk Billing (f/k/a ModernBill). It is included free-of-charge with all Plesk 10 licenses.

For more info, see the Plesk Panel page on our web site.

Cirrus Cloud Hosting and E-Commerce Hosting accounts are now available with Plesk 10.0 (and Plesk 9.5, if you prefer). These plans come in sizes from 256MB to 16GB and you can change size at any time without losing your IP address or needing to copy files or reinstall software.

September 2010 – Unseen Efforts

Filed under: Hosting,Newsletters — Candy Zemon on September 28, 2010

Keeping the Servers Running

Elves In The Night
What HTN Staff Do To Make Your Servers Worry-Free

Our HTN Cloud servers are built on solid components. They run well and they run fast. They are configured with up-to-date versions of infrastructure software, like the Apache web server, PHP, Perl, Python, MySQL, the Parallels Plesk control panel, and more.

You get that level of worry-free service you expect because someone else (in this case, HTN staff) takes on the work of monitoring, tuning, and updating. You are probably never aware of their efforts. Things just work.

There is rather a lot that goes into making things just work. We have added management infrastructure on top of those solid components so we can readily spot and fix issues that may develop.

(more…)

May 2010 – Growing On Demand

Filed under: Hosting,Newsletters — Candy Zemon on May 19, 2010

Success Can Be Challenging

Meeting a Demand Surge

A Success Story in Size-to-Fit

Eswaddle.com, often mentioned in past newsletters, had its products featured on the Dr. Phil tv program last week. It was rather astonishing to track the traffic spike directly after each airing of the show across the continental US time zones. As might be expected, their Cirrus server needed to grow. Because each step up in size doubles both the disk space and the cpu power, by the end of the day the site was working with 32 times the disk and 32 times the cpu it had started with. Size, however, is not everything. Tuning the Apache server to react appropriately was also an essential ingredient in keeping the site healthy and responsive through the traffic blitz. Once the traffic steadied at lower post-show levels, the site was able to resize again, this time to a smaller server. Apache server tuning appropriate to the newly selected size again finished the adjustment.

(more…)

Google Search Results Influenced by Site Speed

Filed under: Hosting,Performance — Art Zemon on April 12, 2010

You may want to pay more attention to how quickly pages load on your website. Google announced on Friday that it is using site speed in calculate search result ranking. Faster sites rank higher.

Performance tuning is a deep subject but a few obvious places to start are

PHP as an Apache module versus as a CGI script. Most shared hosting accounts run PHP as a CGI script. If speed is a driving factor for your site, look for a hosting account on which you can run PHP as an Apache module.
MySQL query cache. This is a huge performance gain for MySQL-based apps such as WordPress, Drupal, and many e-commerce engines. If MySQL response time is limiting the page load times for your site, get a hosting account where you can tune the MySQL query cache to meet your site’s specific requirements.
Local & fast MySQL. Many hosting companies make you use a MySQL database server that is relatively slow to reach and slow to respond. This makes any MySQL-based website run slowly. Consider moving to a hosting account which has the MySQL server on the same box as the rest of your application. (This point does not apply to huge sites which need multiple, physical servers.)
Sane site design. Pay attention to image sizes, over-use of server-side-includes, bloated code, etc.

Your hosting account makes a big difference in page loading speed. For many (most?) sites, RAM and bandwidth are the bottlenecks, not CPU. It can be hard to get a handle on those specs since many companies only market hosting accounts based on disk size and that does not have any correlation to performance. Talk to your hosting provider and see if a little more money can buy you a significant bump in performance.

Hen’s Teeth Network’s Cirrus Hosting accounts give you the ability to run PHP as an Apache module. All run MySQL locally, giving your site fast access to the database and giving you 100% control over the MySQL query cache configuration. See our earlier article, HTN Cloud Hosting 3x to 4x Faster, for a dramatic illustration of how much the hosting account impacts page load time.

April 2010 – Stratus Accounts

Filed under: Hosting,Newsletters — Candy Zemon on April 6, 2010

Stratus Joins HTN Cloud Hosting

Another Type of Cloud
Stratus Accounts in HTN Cloud Hosting

If you have been waiting for the smaller shared Cloud hosting plans to become available because your needs do not demand the Cirrus PCI-compliant servers, your wait is over. Stratus accounts are now available in two sizes.

Startus 2 accounts are ideal for non-commerce sites that need to support modest traffic – a brochure site, a blog, etc. At $10/month, these Stratus 2 accounts give you great value with the full HTN Cloud Hosting services for a single domain: nightly backups retained for 5 days, the Plesk control panel, access to the application vault of easily-installed programs, up to 100 email users, unlimited subdomains, and Google Postini email filtering.

Stratus 5 accounts are ideal for sites that need a dedicated IP address, but do not require PCI compliance. Perhaps you do e-commerce but your credit card processing is entirely through PayPal or Authorize.net or some such provider where the whole financial transaction is done at the payment processor’s site, not yours. At $19/month, these Stratus 5 accounts give you great value again – the full range of HTN Cloud Hosting services listed above apply for up to 3 domains.

More details for both types of Stratus accounts are on on our site.

(more…)

HTN Cloud Hosting 3x to 4x Faster

Filed under: Hosting — Art Zemon on April 1, 2010

I have known that our new HTN Cloud Hosting accounts were fast compared to our legacy VPS accounts but, until tonight, I had not found a concise way to show it. Enter Google Webmaster Tools. The crawl stats page includes a graph which neatly shows the average time to load a page from our site.

Page load times dropped dramatically when the site moved to an HTN Cloud Hosting account

This graph shows the average time required to download a page from the Hen’s Teeth Network web site. Can you tell when we moved it from an old VPS to a new Cirrus account?

Our site is reasonably complex for a “brochure site” since every page is PHP and touches a MySQL database. In early February, we moved the site with absolutely no changes to its new home. Page load times dropped to 25-33% of what they had been. Not only does the site feel faster, it’s measurable.

Archive for the ‘Hosting’ Category

2001

Elves In The Night What HTN Staff Do To Make Your Servers Worry-Free

Meeting a Demand Surge

Another Type of Cloud Stratus Accounts in HTN Cloud Hosting

Elves In The Night
What HTN Staff Do To Make Your Servers Worry-Free

Another Type of Cloud
Stratus Accounts in HTN Cloud Hosting