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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.

Google+ for Business

Filed under: Community News,Newly Launched,This & That — Art Zemon on August 25, 2011

Google+ burst onto the internet scene in early July with the next must-have set of tools from Google. Though the initial release is targeted at individuals, businesses can already make good use of these tools to enhance customer support and communicate more effectively, both internally and with the world at large.

Though dubbed as another social network by many pundits, Google+ is not simply a replacement for Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn. Google+ is an overarching brand name covering a broad range of changes by Google. By using Google+, you will find it as easy to share something on the internet as it is to share your business card with a prospective customer at lunch.

Google+ gives you “circles” which you can use for organizing your customers, prospects, employees, etc. When you want to post something, be it some words or a picture or a link to a web page, you choose exactly with whom you will share it. If you “send” a message to your employees then your customers will never even know that the message exists. It you tell your current customers about a special sale, the general public will not receive the “special notice.” Of course, you can also post something for the public to read. There is no need to narrowly target your messages unless you want to do so.

Free video chat, for up to ten people at a time, is a wonderful new feature of Google+. Just click the green “Start a hangout” button, invite a few select people (or open up the hangout to the public), and your video conference will be open for business. Your customers can call you on the telephone now. Imagine how much more personal the conversation could be if you were also hanging out on Google+, waiting for an incoming video call.

Google+ is completely free, as are many of Google’s other tools. When you sign up, be sure to register as an individual and using your real name. It is, for instance, OK to create a Google+ account for “Art Zemon” but not for “Hen’s Teeth Network” or using a pseudonym.

Come find me on Google+.

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.