Spencer Wolfe

What Are You Going To Do With That Website?

Well, there certainly have been a lot of changes since we built our first website. We started by using a company called Webcom.com out of Santa Cruz California. We were very pleased with their service until NTT’s Verio bought out their business and let the business go dormant in 1999. We switched to a company called Pair Networks out of Pennsylvania. We were pretty happy with their service but found them expensive, their control panel a bit hard to understand if you weren’t a Unix guy, and nickeling and diming you for various services (a dollar for a domain, $12 to set up, etc.).
About this time, the masses of hosting companies had come online. We were impressed with Hostmysite.com. They had 24 hour telephone support (you had to pay $24.95 a month with Pair just to get 8AM-5PM EST). They even helped us get Japanese webmail working. We were very impressed, until we decided to take our servers in internally. It took weeks to get a refund for the remaining months for the 2 years that they made us pay for to get the best monthly price. It seemed their president had to approve refunding money for services they would not provide. Their quick answering operators started blowing us off when it came time to return our account balance.

Bringing our servers into our own network (at our headquarters office) was brilliant. No more shared services with hundreds of other users. Mail popped into the inbox from engineers onsite and even from customers. We noticed major changes in performance.

For our non-profit organization (NPO) we continued to host our sites. We were disappointed with Hostmysite so we went back to Pair Networks. We concluded that Pair was better as inspite of their lack of telephone support, their team knew better how to service the customers. Hostmysite seem more intent on answering the phone, even if they didn’t know what to say after the initial ‘hello’.

In the process of running the NPO website into the upgrade stage, we discovered some great things. Commonly known as Web 2.0, websites had gone from the HTML, Dreamweaver (ouch!) editor type of work to content management systems (CMS). We no longer had to fiddle around with HTML tables, graphics going out of wack, and pain every time you wanted to upgrade the site. We discovered CMS was a software that runs on the web-server can help you focus more on content and less on coding webpages. Our first experience was with Expression Engine (EE). We had our site template built by a great designer in Australia, then we began to focus on filling in the details (events calendar, blog, audios, etc.).

Before we got the site live we had to decide on whether to keep using Pair or try another service. We took the leap and decided to use Bluehost with our designer. What a great decision! Rather than using a proprietary hosting service, we found that they used Cpanel and open source control panel for setting up databases, creating email accounts, and probably most convenient is the Fantatisco feature. Fantatisco is a feature in Control panel that allows you to install

Content management Systems
Web Logging (Blog) Software
Mailing List Software
Helpdesk Ticketing software
Online Guestbooks
Online Photo Albums

Many other open source applications are available. The keywords these days are MYSQL and PHP. They are musts for running the Web 2.0 software on your web server.

In a nutshell, we are really happy with Bluehost. Their interface is really more useful than any other hosts. They don’t really try to nickel and dime you as the other companies tend to do. Their control does seem a little bit stitched together, but it works very well. My only concern was to hear that they have 800 users on each server. But frankly, you don’t feel there is anyone else on that box.

It is amazing how you can just install WordPress or whatever application via the control panel. It is just a few clicks before you have your own blog, website, or online photo gallery.

If you are looking for a webhost, look for someone who has Cpanel, Fantasico and a lot of good standard web applications that will make your website more complimentary to your content.

We have heard that www.dreamhost.com and www.liquidweb.com are good but have no experience with them. Any recommendations on good web hosting companies? Please leave a comment if you like as a lot of people are looking reading up on hosting companies.

There are so many choices out there, so feedback on good hosts would be helpful.

With Cisco really becoming a popular phone system these days, we wonder how the Nortel and Avaya’s of the day will do. Looks like there is some good news. I would love to see Nortel buyout Avaya. That would give Nortel a better ACD product (where Cisco is very far behind), and more of a direct sales force in North America and many markets. I am not sure how much that would help them against Cisco. Avaya Japan is a bit of a revolving door with a lot of turn over in the staff while Nortel Japan is a solid organization but just suffering from difficult news coming out of headquarters.

We’ll have to think about this one a bit more, as it seems Avaya is trying to put itself on the block a bit looking at other suiters as well.

At AINEO, we know a lot about security because companies are relying on our engineers to keep things secure. We have given advice on how to keep individual computers save and secure. However we wanted to take a few moments to talk about the overall network.

Occasionally, I send out an email to a list of friends and a few acquaintances of various funny commercials and jokes that I receive on the personal side. About a year ago, I received and email from an ‘IT consultant’ saying, ‘I don’t share your sense of humor. Your attachments could have a threat, so I have deleted everyone one of them.’ Being a person of reason the first thing I thought how could someone know if they share someone else’s sense of humor if the humor was completely in the form of video attachments to emails? In actuality, every incoming and outgoing email at AINEO is scanned by four separate engines for all threats. The chance of getting some type of nasty attack through AINEO servers is zero.

That was a reminder that some people are a bit behind in their security. Even people who say they are supposed to experts in the field. Clearly the above mentioned consultant should have been running full security tools on his mail server. Clearly in our opinion, GFI Software has the best tools available. Every exchange server should be running GFI Mail Security and GFI Mail Essentials to protect their system. Many enterprises run Symantec on Exchange Mail servers which we highly recommend against as we have seen many problems generated by this software on a mail server.

If you are running solid tools on your mail server, spam, viruses, and phishing emails should be a thing of the past. Attacks via email are declining because people know their game. You have to keep on top of it, however email based breaches have become more difficult for the hacker. Therefore, these computer thieves have changed their tactics.

The new horrible attacks are actually coming through websites. The important thing to secure in the organization is actually port 80. Port 80 is the incoming port that brings internet access to your users. Through port 80 of your router, your organization views websites of customers, partners, and vendors. But through this same port you can get compromised sites loaded with keylogging software (self-installing software that logs all your key strokes) trying to pick up important passwords or any other financial information. These sites are not just clearly compromised shady sites on the net.

Samsung USA was famous for having their hacked by someone. When a visitor would view their site, the compromised site would try to install software onto the web vistor’s PC. Samsung was notified, but very slow to remove the threat from their corporate site.

So how do you secure port 80 of your network, PCs and people from the threats? The first step is have good virus protection on your workstations (PCs). AINEO does actually recommend Symantec on the desktop side. We have found McAfee and Trend Micro behind the times.