I came upon this interesting blog written by Bill Sweetman, General Manager at Tucows.com, who suggests an unusual but nonetheless insightful New Year Resolution. Coming from the Hosting industry myself I definitely second his idea.
This Year: Don’t “lose” your domain name!
Mr. Sweetman explains how Tucows.com deals everyday with anxious customers who forget to renew their internet identity commonly known as a Domain name.
SherWeb definitely understands this situation as it sees plenty of customers complaining that they have “lost “or got their domain name stolen. So before it happens to you, here is what Mr. Sweetman has to say to avoid this disaster.
Take 30 seconds, RIGHT NOW, to find out when your domain name is going to expire. (Do a WHOIS query at whois.tucows.com, then check to see what expiration/renewal date is listed.) Make note of this date.
Now, take another 30 seconds to write a reminder to yourself to renew the domain name a few weeks before it expires. Go ahead, I’ll wait while you do this. Use Outlook or whatever calendaring system you use. Just make sure you set a reminder!
Finally, when you get your reminder to renew your domain name, RENEW your darn domain name! In most cases this takes less than two minutes, and you can do it online via the company your registered the domain name with.
As you can see, all this is extremely easy to do and requires little or no time. Most importantly, it prevents you from feeling angry and frustrated when trying to retrieve your “lost” domain.
That being said, I would like to thank M. Sweetman for his blog and would like to wish you all a Happy New Year!
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It has become mission critical for organizations to implement a business class email solution at work but most importantly to arm itself against the increasing amount of spam sent to employees within the company. According to Barracuda’s annual spam report: 95 percent of all e-mail sent in 2007 was spam.
Please read this interesting article if you want to know more about the study and consider yourself lucky to be protected (for free) by one of the best spam filtering solution on the market.
Thank you for reading me
I am very happy to be reporting from the Hostingcon 2007 http://hostingcon.com/2007/ in Chicago, where I spent the last 3 days assisting to conferences on current and future trends, opportunities and issues the web hosting industry is facing. I also took the time to visit the different exhibitor’s booth and discuss with a wide range of hosting specialists present on the trade show floor. So my comments on the whole event? Amazing city, friendly people, knowledgeable speakers and an overall very well organized and interesting Hostingcon.
On the menu, a wide variety of conferences separated into four tracks: marketing, growth opportunities, technology and leaders. The subjects ranged from the “Future of Hosted Messaging and Collaboration”, the “Modern SEO (search engine optimization) techniques”, the “Billion Dollar SaaS Opportunity”, to the “Competitive Advantage of Customers Service”.
Some of the most memorable and fascinating moments were the different guess speakers invited to address a room full of fellow colleagues and specialists of the industry. Attendees were all ears when Chris DeWolfe, former CEO of MySpace and now chairman of Demand Media, came to talk about the “Next Generation Web: What Lies Ahead for Hosting”. Liam Eagle, a journalist from the WHIR.com, covers the event in details in his blog entitled: “HostingCon 2007: Does Richard Rosenblatt Get
it?.” (Please read if you are interested)
Following this high profile event was a panel discussion with the cream of the crop of the industry. Serguei Beloussov (SWsoft CEO), Lou Honick (HostMySite CEO), David Koston (cPanel operations manager) and Sean Richards (technical director of Touch Support) who discussed the situation of with “Service Enablement”. For more information read HostingCon 2007: The Situation with “Service Enablement” written by Liam Eagle.
Finally, the 2007 Hostingcon ended on a strong note with impressive technology figures whose insightful and convincing speeches gave us an idea of what lies ahead in the near future. Jinesh Varia, Web Services Evangelist for Amazon talked about the new hosting service with Amazon. Chris Gladwin, President and CEO of Cleversafe presented a new method of storing data called Dispersed Storage that is more private, more secure and a lot more reliable than copy-based data storage. Lastly, Jeff Richards, Vice President, Digital Content Services at VeriSign introduced Verisign’s Broadband Content Delivery Services which will facilitate peer-to-peer (P2P) rich content delivery from media and other large companies.
So in a few lines, what did I get out of this Hostingcon 2007:
The growth and the profit margins of the web hosting industry are slowing while the competition is continuously increasing. There are opportunities to break the current barriers and get out of the mold we currently know and follow. The industry needs to find other ways to describe webhosting and attract new customers than by advertising unlimited bandwidth, 100 GB of storage, 500 free email accounts and by slashing 50% off the current retail price. The natural expansion or diversification of the industry seems to be pointing toward the SaaS model with Exchange Hosting and Hosted Sharepoint on the forefront, virtualization, grid computing (both on the storage and cpu side) and other exciting technologies. Finding ways to provide a unique and fully automated service to customers by offering tailored applications fully intergraded into one system will allow hosting companies to attract and retain their clientele. Finally I’ll leave you with one quote that I think summarizes what I got out of the conferences and the trade show: “Transformed or be transformed…”
Overall, it was a delightful and very inspiring Hosting Conference. As a guest, I would like to thank and congratulate everyone involved in that event. I’m definitely looking forward to next year!
