We have wired and wireless options to connect all the devices in your house to one shared internet connection, whether that is ADSL, Neotel or 3G.

With the option to track where everyone is connecting to, how much data each device is consuming, and potentially block websites that you think your children should not be accessing.

Contact us now for more information on our home networks.

There could be various reasons.

The point here is that once you’ve made a backup of your critical data, how sure are you that you can actually restore the data?

It is pretty pointless to have your data on a tape or external drive, but there’s no way to restore it. So without ever testing a restore, your backup solution is only 50% done.

Your question now is probably, how do I test a restore without negatively impacting my business operations. You can’t exactly just go restore the last backup on your live application server, can you?

There are a number of solutions here. What I’ve found works best for me is to setup a virtual server that matches my live server in configuration, but not in specification. Server hardware is pricey and you don’t always need the same spec server to test a restore. You will need one if your primary server does fail though.

But to test the restore, a virtual server with enough resources will do. Once you have this up and running, try to restore your databases, websites, emails, system state, and whatever else you are backing up on a regular basis. If the restores fails, try with a new backup, until you get it right. Or you could make the call that some things just aren’t worth the effort to try and restore, and implement manual procedures for these.

A system state is a very finicky thing to try and restore, especially if your new hardware does not match the original. So if you have less than 30 users, you could go the route of manually recreating your system state, and just restoring data as and when required.

The bottom line:  An untested backup is only half the solution.

And a trend we’ve encountered is that a lot of providers will register the client’s domain in their own name.

This means that when you want to move your domain to another host, they could hold your domain for ransom, because legally it belongs to them.

Well, not quite. Your company name belongs to you, and if your domain name matches then you can lay claim to it, with some effort on your, and potentially your lawyer’s, part.

But I’ve seen quite a number of times that people had domains registered that don’t quite match their company names, and in these cases, you don’t have a case.

You either need to prove that you originally requested the domain registration, and even this may not help. Or, you use a new domain name, which may have other stationery cost implications, and potential search engine issues.

So, make sure that when you choose your provider, they do actually register your domain in your name, with them only listed as technical and/or admin contact on the registration.

Now they’re by no means a large business, with about 35 users on the system at its busiest, but when the shop is busy you can ill afford having your critical systems hold up business.

I came away from having the quick look (took an hour), having found a multitude of problems on the server, all which could have been solved if the people actually working on it understood the basics of what they were working with.

Unfortunately, what I’ve found in a large portion of the IT services industry, is that the price of staff, and not the skill level, is the determining factor when hiring, and the good ones will always move into the ‘large enterprise’ domain, because this is where the interesting problems, and the better salaries are.

Service providers hire the cheapest “skills” they can find, and their clients suffer because of this.  Not only do the basic issues slip through the cracks and slow down the business.  But they also get billed more hours to get the same job done.  A win-win situation for the service provider, a lose-lose for every one of their clients.

Problem is, if this is your approach, and not just in the IT industry, you will not be able to sustain your business for a very long time.  Clients get frustrated and move onto the next service provider, and you go down.

Better solution in the long run is to make sure that your staff has the necessary skills, and to pay the ones with the skills enough so that they stick around.

Another thing I took away from this, is that you should periodically make sure that all is as it should be at all your clients.  Stop by, have some coffee and chat.  Any problems will quickly surface over a friendly chat, and you can then quickly deal with these.

Go have a look

You may ask, why use WordPress (essentially a blogging engine), to do an e-commerce site.  The answer is simple, it was the most cost-effective solution for what our client is trying to achieve.

The business manufactures products, and they sell these through various channels.  The web is another channel to sell these products through, but will definitely not be the only channel, and will probably not be the main channel.  In the same breath, time to market was an important factor, and seeing that our client is familiar with this platform, it made the most sense.

What do you think?

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With the way we do business, and the way tech-savvy consumers want to interact with your business changing, have you kept up with the times?  If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you have.

If your business has a website, email address, blog, forum, or any other electronic communication channel, is there someone that constantly monitors all these channels as closely as what your phones are being monitored?

Even if you’re a one-man business, with today’s mobile technology, you do not have an excuse not to monitor all channels all the time.

As a tech-savvy consumer myself, when I send a request to your email, or via your website, I expect a quick response.  If I don’t get it, I’m likely to take my business elsewhere.

To give you a quick example.  I’m quite an avid cyclist, and recently broke one of my bike’s wheels.  My first reaction was to find a wheel builder in my area, and the quickest way to do this, Google.  I found one, who actually guarantees a rebuild for a lifetime, and he had a website.  So I clicked the “Contact” link, and sent him an email.  I’m still waiting for the response.  Needless to say, I took my business elsewhere.

So, moral of the story, if you enable your clients to contact you with means other than a telephone, or in person.  Make sure that it is not a one-way hole, into which all communications disappear.

If you can afford it, have the person answering your phones also monitor each of the channels that you advertise.  And have that person respond to the any incoming communication.  Even if only to say that your client’s request has been routed to the person that will be able to help them, and to give an estimate as to when the client can expect that person to get back to them.

In the earlier examply, if I received a reply saying that they are too busy to service my request at that point, I would still have considered them for future business.  But with the lack of response, there is no way that I will ever consider that provider for future business.

How many of your potential clients have you lost this way?

My second port of call was to setup a POP3 mailbox on a server under my control and test full connectivity.  All worked well and the incoming and outgoing messages were delivered within a minute.

Realising that the POP3 connection was fine, and that routing between the connector and Exchange was working, I started checking Exchange queues.  All seemed fine here, with no messages waiting for routing, and only a few messages hitting the bad mail queue.

Time to dig a little deeper.

Noticing that the POP3 connector passes messages using the file system to the Exchange SMTP router, I did a search for any files with the .eml extensions.  Lo and behold, I found a folder with over 900 of these, under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Windows Small Business Server.

I took a few of the files and moved them to the Pickup folder for the Exchange SMTP router, and confirmed whether people were now getting mails they were looking for.  Some of them were.  On the right track.

I started moving more files, with all messages getting delivered.  So, the problem was that files weren’t moved from the POP3 connector to the SMTP router.

But why?

The answer popped up literaly when I tried to move the oldest file in the queue. “Trend Anti-virus has found <virus>, no action needed”

Whenever the application that delivered files from the POP3 connector to the SMTP router picked up this one message that contained said virus, Trend killed the process, and happily told the console user that all is in order.  It wasn’t, there was a long queue of emails to be moved.

It looks like the app sorts them by GUID, so some of the messages were getting through, but most weren’t.  I’ve now excluded this folder from the anti-virus, and have to trust that the scan on the client side will get rid of any contaminations.

Because of the amount of photos, I decided to use the LightSource controls to enable picture viewing.  It worked out nicely, and you can scroll between related photos, using the mouse (hover over the top right and left of photos for the link to appear) or the arrow keys, to get back to the thumbnail view, you can just press “X” or “Esc” on the keyboard.

There are some outstanding sections on the site currently, but these will be there soon.