But now we offer hosting options with a semi-dedicated server, virtual private server, and a dedicated server.

“Regular” hosting has dozens if not hundreds of website being served on ONE computer. This is generally not a problem – and is MUCH cheaper for the client. However, if the website has some heavy traffic, or some serious database stuff going on, an upgrade may be in order.

In practical terms the additional options mean that your site will be sharing the hardware with either far fewer sites (in the case of the semi-dedicated and virtual private server options) or with NO ONE else (in the case of the dedicated server).

As usual, my pricing is VERY competitive. Click the links for more info:

Hosting with a Dedicated Server

Hosting with a semi-dedicated server

Hosting with a Virtual Private Server [VPS]

I have a post for my Mercer CSC125 class with several links to the Macworld material, including photos, video, and some editor’s reactions. You can view that post HERE, over at csc125.blogspot.com.

I threw the lesson plan out the window, and we had a very interesting discussion about the student’s reactions to the iPad – was it a usable thing now, could it be usable on the job – in business, etc.

What surprised me was that the overall reaction was “yeah, it’s cool, but I don’t see how it’s useful for me”. Several questioned droppiong $500 on something they weren’t sure they’d use (which was actually  nice to hear! I’m sure their parents would be proud.)

Most of the kids have smartphones and laptops. Abvout half of them know about multi-touch capabilities, but relatively few have multi-touch capable devices. A surprising number said the omission of a videocamera was a deal-breaker for them – most who said this use video chat on Skype to stay in touch with home (several states away, even across the ocean in Britain).

My take?

A very cool technology which will again change how we interact with the computers in our lives – after the concept of “no keyboard” is adopted across the industry. I can see using one, especially given the iWork apps (which are Office compatible), projector interface, and the fact that I do all my email on the web anyway.

This is going to be interesting!

Techrepublic posted a few snippets from the presentation by Steve Jobs:

…and here are some reactions from the PC World and MacWorld editors:

It is NOT the best thing out there, but works pretty doggone well. It DOES “suck up some CPU cycles” – i.e. when it’s running your machine will slow down a bit.

It is DEFINITELY better than running nothing – so if your subscription to Norton or Symantec or whatever is running out, and you don’t have the cash, check it out.

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=523334930-a275dfeedae0baeeab728d8c7a14c0c1-bf&brand=TECHREPUBLIC&s=5
for an article about it, with links to the download.

More details at
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/products/?p=839

Download the product at
http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/default.aspx

I am using using it on one of my machines, and it seems to work well. When it’s scanning the machine does slow down, but this is on a slower Pentium 4 machine.

——-

Pop a thumb drive into your PC.

On your PC:
My Documents–>My Music–>iTunes
One of those folders inside iTunes has all of your audio files. Copy them onto the flash drive.

Eject the flash drive, and pop it into your Mac.

On your Mac:
Open up iTunes. Open up the preferences, and make sure “Copy files into the library” is checked. I also suggest checking “Keep the library organized”.
Slide the itunes window over to the side.
Open up a window to your flash/thumb drive.
Highlight all of those folders that contain your audio (Command-A is a keyboardshortcut). Click-n-drag them into the iTunes window.
Wait a while.
It may ask you about authorizing this machine blah blah blah. Allow it – you might have to add an AppleID and password.

OTHER RESOURCES
http://reviews.cnet.com/ipod/9602-12576_7-0.html?messageID=2510455&kw=ipod
http://lifehacker.com/242468/geek-to-live–how-to-move-an-itunes-library-from-a-pc-to-mac-and-back
http://www.jakebouma.com/2008/04/05/how-to-move-your-itunes-library-from-a-pc-to-a-mac-without-losing-metadata-ratings-playcounts/

In the interest of helping him out I sent the following email – which has been edited to suit my purposes here.

Another of the things I do is web hosting (at http://www.midgahosting.com ) and design and online presences and such for some of my clients – and I noticed you’re using a cs email account. Just wanted to mention that you’d really get some brand boost if you had your own domain, and use that as your email “base of operations”.

I’ve got a couple of real estate people who are doing that – they’ve bought their domain and hosting (under $4/month) and they’ve never done anything with the hosting part.

In your case I’d suggest getting the domain, and then setting up a wordpress blog (which is EASY using midgahosting) – use a couple of “pages” for company info, but use your posts for the releases you send out. This would amplify the search engine affect for each release.

[What they look like depends on the template chosen for the blog, but often pages show up as tabs at the top of the blog, and posts are the main part. Over at http://www.maconmacguy.com, for instance, pages are the tabs at the tops, but posts are the entries on the right under "news".]

Just thought I’d throw this idea into your bucket! I feel strongly that receiving emails from whatever@mycompany.com is stronger than getting it from whatever@cs.com.

–

The process:  head over to http://www.midgahosting.com.
Click on the “sign up” link, at the top.
Fill out the form. Decisions to make:

1. what username you want – for logging into your control panel area
2. Which data center (I suggest California, but there isn’t much speed difference between California and London from Georgia)
3. Which plan – for your purposes I suggest the cheapest! Easily upgradeable later if needed.
4. Pre-installed script – Select wordpress here. No charge – this just saves you a step later.
5. Your desired domain…. then the usual contact and payment info

==============================================
Tom Rule
The MaconMacGuy
Computer help, training, Websites, Processes

http://www.MaconMacGuy.com

Web Hosting under $4 a month

http://www.MidGaHosting.com

==============================================

As with most things, this required him to do some setup before it would actually work. In this case, I shot a video of how to do it because that’s how my client best learns new information (typing up a long email with instructions isn’t of much help).

I suggested he setup an Excel spreadsheet and have his assistant type in all of his contacts (which are seriously scattered between several machines and webmail services like hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.). She would then save the file as a CSV, which SmarterMail can import.

The key bit o’ info was that you can add a category to each contact in SmarterMail. After adding a category (“mail list”) to the desired contacts, it’s easy to select all of the contacts in a specific category when typing up a new email.

This took a bit of research, but is a prime example of one of the services I offer my clients. I take an existing situation and try to connect the dots – showing them how to take advantage of the technology they have, or offering some alternative methods (In this case, I listed MailChimp as an option). There is often a “cheaper than inexpensive” service online that you can use to accomplish something.

Check with me an ask about what I can do for you!

One of my clients is blind, and runs a computer-based recording studio (that is verrrry nice, let me tell you….). There’s a constant dance we have to do to keep his machines running, because not only do you have the inherent complexities of dealing with Windows (XP pro in his case), PLUS the weirdnesses of audio on Windows, you have JAWS, a screenreader fropm Freedom Scientific to boot.

It can get hairy keeping things running.

My client has depended on Outlook Express for years for his email – primarily because Jaws didn’t play well with the full Outlook, and webmail isn’t an option (for the same reason). Summer 2009 Microsoft stopped supporting Outlook Express on Hotmail because they moved to “Windows Live”, which uses a fundamentally different technology for email fetching.

Now, I understand the technical and business reason for Microsoft’s decision – after all, this is a FREE product they’re offering. I also understand my client SHOULD have moved off of using MSN for his primary email a long time ago, and moved it onto his own domain – but generally you don’t fix what’s broken, especially when you have a memorize what is onscreen because you can’t see it!

But this means my client can do NO business online, because email is how he conducts a good part of his studio work.

A tough situation – one he didn’t ask for. In the next installment I’ll describe what we decided on after much discussion – and let you know how it all came out.

As I type this I’m waiting to find out myself!

Fortunately it was on may way, so I was able to swing in quickly just to see what was going on. I confirmed the errors, which were the “generic” type of thing you get when the application has a situation it doesn’t know how to handle.

I tried to do a quick online virus scan, to no avail – the machine was running way too slow. Granted, its a slow machine, underpwoered, needs RAM (which the company has not installed yet), and is running Windows 2000 – but even by IT’S standards it was running slow.

After a few minutes I thought the check teh hard drive. That 18gig drive had – wait for it – 20 kilobytes of free space.

{insert dragnet theme here!}

The computer had no working space on teh hard drive – avg had nowhere to stash the virus definitions update file, and Firefox couldn’t update it’s cache.

I deleted several non-used apps, and cleared out the Windows Temp folder…. a simple fix for a major problem. It isn’t a long-term solution, but will keep them running for a while longer.

This is a small business, with a couple of people in the office taking care of “just about everything”.

So, if you want to keep your office from working well, do these things:

1) Put the absolute minimum of RAM in your computers. (One machine has 260K for the OS – Windows2000). This will make your office personnel spend most of their time WAITING for their machines to do anything.

2) Never train them in anything. That way they won’t know anything about tools that will help them do their work – like Outlook, or web browsers, or….

3) Don’t share ANYTHING, even though they are on a network already. This way one person will have to wait until the other machine is open to get anything done.

4) Never backup anything. That way you’ll REALLY be hosed when (not if) a machine breaks down!

5) Don’t setup any standard communication lines – like a REAL email address based on the business’s domain. That way no one will know how to contact anyone – they’ll all be using yahoo, or hotmail, or…….

6) Don’t crosstrain – don’t let anyone know what anyone else is doing, especially in terms of websites, usernames, and passwords!

7) Don’t setup guest accounts on your machines – that way anyone who walks by can mess around with the machine.

So how is YOUR office doing? Need some help? Contact the MaconMacGuy for some mostly intelligent help!

Many are afraid to muck around with the standard installation – the idea of messing around with the hard drive, or wiping out their current OS is enough to scare them away.

I’ve begin recommending WUBI to them (Windows-based Ubuntu Installer). Aside from being actually fun to say (try it three times, as fast as you can, while sitting at a traffic light with your car windows down….) it is a non-destructive way to install Linux onto your WIndows machine to see if you like it.

You download and install Wubi, which then takes over the rest of the installation. You do have to give it an amount of the hard drive for it t “take over” – I used 10gig which has been enough for my needs. You’ll also give it an administration username and password – WRITE IT DOWN!

On reboot you’ll see a “Pick which OS you want” menu. Select Ubuntu and the machine will boot in Ubuntu. It’s a full fledged installation, and works MUCH faster on my glacial Athlon 2200+ machine. My rough guess is tasks are about 25-35% faster on this machine under Ubunut compared to Win XP Home.

I can provide training on this, and installation help.

More information:
Wikipedia article on Wubi
The Wubi Installer

The Wubi Guide

Fortunately their domain was good for another year, so all that happened was their site was temporarily replaced with an “account suspended” page – easily fixed by paying the bill.

So why did this happen?

The easy answer is that someone wasn’t paying attention to their emails! After all, the system starts sending out reminder messages a month in advance!

Looking deeper, however, reveals a flaw in the system setup – and this is why I look at the whole system when setting up a new website. There should be a line of communication that is put in place to ensure someone who can react to problems vis-a-vis the site is kept apprised of problems.

This particular client is a homeowner’s association – and as such has a management staff PLUS a volunteer board of directors. Communication lines have not been clear in the past, which made it difficult to decide who needed to know what when originally setting up the system.

As a result, the original setup was for account info be sent to the main office email account….and here is where the flaw was exposed last week. The office does not have a clear communication setup – the website email account is used, but also a additional “off-site” account, which was getting heavy traffic (and thus most of the attention.

The fix? The primary hosting account now is listed as an alias – which automatically forwards everything to the webdesigner, the board’s president, the office, PLUS the communications committee.

A lesson learned with a very small price to pay. You don’t often get those in adulthood!

Plans start at less than $4 a month (US). This includes a whole slew of features – plenty of email accounts, alias email accounts, file storage, bandwidth, stats, and auto-install of many different open source packages (like Wordpress, Movable Type for blogs, classified ads, guestbooks, phot albums, etc). These are all accessible via an easy to use control panel – you just login and click to select what you want to do!

>More details can be had at MidGaHosting.com

So when would you need something more powerful?

A lot of the cheaper hosting systems woudl have you believe they can handle anything. Short answer: NOPE!

That’s why I offer a second option for my clients. It is more expensive – around $120 a year – but is hosted on a more powerful server, in a datacenter with a closer tie to the internet’s backbone. (In laymans’ terms, those servers are a few layers closer to the absolute fastest segments of the whole internet – well, except for Internet2, which isn’t publicly available.)

I generally suggest my clients host on teh more powerful options when they will have a LOT of traffic, are going to do heavy ecommerce, need industrial strength Spam filtering, would like to share calendars/address books/etc via Outlook AND Webmail company-wide, or will want to upgrade to a VPS or hosted server in the future.

I have an article HERE that looks at the differences between the hosting plans I offer. Take a look – and feel free to contact me for more info, or an opinion on what you should do!

A small business – it might be a plumbing company, printshop, whatever….. – has their website plastered on their truck / flyer / billboard / facebook ad / etc. They’ll have the company name, a phone number, maybe a phrase describing what they do – in short, it’ll look pretty good, and is probably pretty effective.

…and then I get to the contact email address.

If you are going to go to the trouble of having a website and your own domain (www.joesplumbing.com) – you really ought to use an email address from that domain as your primary contact.

Why?

Using whatever@joesplumbing.com will reinforce your website, your brand name, and make it easier for potential customers to remember you. There is also the advantage of consistency – clients only have to remember ONE domain (joesplumbing.com) – not 2 or three (Wait – was the email contact at yahoo.com? hotmail? live.com? uhhhhhhhh……)

Granted, this is ONLY an advantage if your domain makes sense for your business – but it is definitely worth doing well!

What about spam?

Most hosting plans will offer some type of spam filtering. The plans over at MidGaHosting.com all do. It is a fairly capable spam filtering system that catches the majority of the spam received, and it is easily configurable in the hosting control panel. You just make a selection for each email address on how aggressive you want the filter to be.

If you need something heavier-duty, try the hosting plans offered by the MaconMacGuy. You can add on an industrial strength spam filter for $12/year per email address that will catch virtually every piece of spam the world throws at you. It is remarkable effective – and can save you some significant time in handling email.

Another Option

Setup what is known as an “alias” email account – again, easily done in your hosting control panel. An alias account isn’t a “real” email account, but the hosting will automatically forward any emails sent to info@joesplumbing.com, for example, to Joe’s real account at Gmail or Yahoo (which then spam filters the incoming mail). The DISADVANTAGE of this approach is that your customer will email info@joesplumbing.com, but will receive a reply from joesplumbing@gmail.com – and this can be confusing. It could also possibly trigger their spam filter.

Contact the MaconMacGuy for more information and ideas for using technology in YOUR business!

• Someone asked me the other day what I did.

• Yesterday I spent a few hours setting up a new online presence for my music activities.

• This morning I glanced at the MaconMacGuy logo.

Three unrelated incidents – yet they combine into a thought about what exactly it is I do as the MaconMacGuy.

Essentially what I do is enhance a client’s online presence through a variety of means. My skillset is fairly broad, and I’m not afraid to call in help where it’s needed – but my real strength is in identifying what technologies make sense for a business to use, and then helping the business implement those things into the workflow.

Case in point – YoungAmericaMusic.com. For several years that site has been a traditional static site (which I designed and have maintained). In the last year I saw a need for YAMS to have something more dynamic – but that would still reflect the “folksy” vibe of the store. Emmett, the owner, also needed to a way to do some updates, and it needed to be baby-simple. He doesn’t have time to integrate a whole new techno-thing to his workflow – he’s got music lessons to teach!

We discussed what he needed – a way to post event announcements to 2 different groups. I setup 2 different blogs on Blogger.com, and took about 20 minutes one day and worked with him. He became comfortable with it quickly, and started adding material to both of them. Meanwhile, I added the two blogs to my Feedburner account – and setup a headline animator. It took just a few minutes to add the code to the front page – and mission accomplished, with VERY little expense to the store.

Now he has a way to add announcements to the groups – they are automatically added to the site, people can get new material automatically sent to their email, and I can track how many people are reading his missives.

As a bonus, this new feature should also increase his search engine visibility because of the search-engine-friendly dynamic content.

This type of thing is what my byline is referring to: Putting the Pieces Together. I leveraged my experience with Wordpress, blogging, SEO (search engine optimization), teaching & training, HTML/PHP, plus a few other odds and ends to make this happen – and he is not only happy with the results, he is already seeing some tangible benefits to the store.

So how can I help you?

I just tried to give a final exam in a computer class I teach at Mercer. The final is given online using an online service we use in the class – and have all semester relatively successfully.

The class yesterday took it with a few problems, but nothing major. Today, though, was a different story.

3 of the 20-some student could access the final exam – and a 30 minute conversation with tech support resulted in the response “We don’t know what is causing your problem.” This is tech-speak for “That shouldn’t be happening, and we’d need to do some serious forensics work to figure it out – and that’s not going to happen”.

This started me thinking about what a small business needs to do when thigns blow up. In my case (a college class), I discussed with the class the options – and made a change the syllabus (not count a final exam and adjust the percentages in other areas to make up the difference) – so it wasn’t a busizes-critical thing.

But if it HAD been, what would I have done? Anyone who depends on technology has got to think about that – the biz calls it “disaster-preparedness”, but I’d call it “common sense”. You KNOW your machines are going to die, and they will do it at the WORST possible moment.

Every machine on the planet has the middle name of “Murphy”, and they follow Murphy’s law to the letter.

So make plans for your machines going down. How will YOU improvise when it happens?

The article references a blog by Danny Sullivan, who is arguably THE guru when it comes to online search engine optimization techniques. In the original blog posting Danny tells a few stories about his recent move to California – during which he had occasion to try to find a local locksmith and a pizza place. In one case the site had been hijacked and was trying to download viruses onto any visitor’s computer – that will really buoy a business’s reputation! In another case there were in fact TWO website and domains for the business – but neither one was really complete.

The other interesting fact is that Danny tried to help these people out by offering some free advice – but was rebuffed on both accounts…. perhaps “ignored” is a better word.

On the face of it those two business owners were not very interested in making their websites useful. It sounds to me like they had one merely because they “ought to”, but really didn’t understand why.

I’m not one of those people who are convinced a website is the path to overnight riches – it certainly hasn’t happened in my case! – but I AM convinced that a well-designed website serves a valuable place in a business owner’s toolkit.

It can serve as a brochure – in it’s simplest form. But there are several different aspects of that “simple” brochure that you need to include, or it is useless.

It definitely can serve as a point of contact – but too many sites just put a “mailto” link up – which is really annoying if you are on a public computer and DON’T have your personal email program on it. or if you are like me and use webmail 100% of the time).

But, again – there are issues you have to make sure you cover!

It can also serve as a customer tool – a place to swap files with clients without all that tedious mucking about in FTP-space (to mangle a line from a certain Douglas Adams book).

What has been interesting in watching my client’s sites is the traffic they get from a simple site that provides the information people need – and in a way that makes the search engines happy. None of them will every get a gazillion visits a day, true – but a few hundred a week can still generate some serious sales leads.

So take a gander at your site – and contact me to see if I can make it work better.

One of my clients has a website I was hired to completely redo as a CMS system. I accepted the job at a serious discount (mainly because I live there) and proceeded to create the site using WordPressMU.

Things were going fine until I tried to transfer the domain. At this point the site is completely down – WordPressMU is confused becuase it thinks there’s a URL problem – so the only thing you can get is the signup page. I ahve cleaned out the database of ALL references to the old “temp” URL, which made no difference (yet).

Meanwhile, I’m trying to get the domain transferred over to the new hosting (keeping teh domain adn the hosting with the same vendor makes life a lot simpler – AND in this case it’s cheaper over at MidGaHosting.com compared to GoDaddy).

This is when it gets…ahhh..interesting. no one has any documentation on the original account setup – and Private Domain Locking was enabled originally, but no one has the account number or password.

Still researching, though! Updates when there’s something worth reporting!

For example, let’s say you want to setup an online ecommerce store, but your pricing structure does not work with teh shopping cart out of the box. At this point you have 2 choices – customize the store, or find a different way to finagle the pricing into a format the cart can work with.

Customizing the store means you’ll be adding to the upfront development expense, and you very well may be locking yourself out of any upgrades or even security patches. If the customization isn’t handled well, you very well may have a customized cart that can’t be updated, AND where the prices have to be updated one by one.

This is not a good place to be if you have several thousand products in your catalog.

The solution I’m working on involves pulling the new pricing info (received from the master vendor) into an Excel spreadsheet, which then massages the data into something acceptable. We can then export a CSV file, which the cart can read en masse.

It’s quick, simple, and easily changed. It also makes the cart updateable – a win-win situation.

Projects currently underway:

• Lakewildwood.org redesign
• MowProducts.com – tech help
• ..and of course, this site! Way overdue for a redesign