About a week-and-a-half ago, we launched a new feature in both of our Control Panels.  Some customers may have already noticed and started taking advantage of this feature. This new feature allows you to view all of your past and current Customer Support cases. This includes all email correspondence, chat correspondence, and even telephone correspondence with our Customer Support department.

What is the advantage to you as a customer?

• You’ll always have access to all the Customer Support history linked with your account.  If you’ve forgotten what the solution to a given problem, go back at any time and have a look.
• If you’re away from your email but still want to check the status of a Support case, now you can.
• If for some reason you didn’t receive our reply email, you can view everything and even reply from your Control Panel.

We hope that you’ll find this feature useful, and if you haven’t already… try it out now!

• mail2web.com Control Panel
• myhosting.com Control Panel

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 1 Comment

We have made some changes to our Affiliate Program. Effective immediately the pay outs have been increased to 4 times the monthly fee for the plan. This is a great time to join the program or if you are already an affiliate to make even more money.

Here are the basics of the program:

• The program is free to join.
• We provide you with an online tools to manage your account and access the resources you need.
• Payouts are based on the schedule below. As a rough guideline they are approximately equal to four months fees for the service.
• After a referred customer signs up they must stay with that service for a minimum of 90 days and their account must be in good standing.
• Payments options are by check, PayPal or Account credit (for existing customers).
• The minimum payout will be $100.00 US.
• Payments are made once a month for qualified sales.

For all the details you can check out our website: http://softcom.biz/Affiliates/

Sign up for our Affiliate Program and start making money now!

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

**Exchange payout is per domain with at least one active professional seat

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ No Comments

I was at HostingCon in Chicago last week and I heard someone comment about whether “email was still the killer app.”

Besides being a slightly useless thing to say, it occurred to me that email never was a killer app. A text message is a message.  Rather it’s the tools used to manage messaging in combination with the protocol that makes for the better experience.

Truth is a lot of people I speak to don’t understand the difference between POP3 email, IMAP4 email and MAPI services. As a result, they don’t understand why Microsoft Exchange is so expensive (Microsoft Exchange email is based on MAPI) and so useful.

Let’s start with POP3. That’s the basic email that comes with most hosting plans or is provided by your ISP or cable company. The most important thing to understand about POP3 is that your messages are stored on the email server until you access them through a common POP3 client like Outlook, Outlook Express or Eudora. 

When you connect to your POP3 email account through one of these clients, all your unread email messages are downloaded to your local machine for you to read. They are removed from the server.

The one exception is checking your POP3 accounts through the mail2web.com email retrieval application (mail2web.com). This webmail application allows you to preview your messages, on almost any remote mail server , before they’ve been downloaded. 

We get a lot of complaints from mail2web.com users who think we’ve deleted their emails. What actually happened was someone opened Outlook on their desktop and downloaded all their messages off a POP3 server.  Now those messages reside in someone’s office / home PC and can’t be easily accessed.

IMAP4 is different in that email is stored on the server. There is an added bonus of being able to create folders to manage your messages. When you connect to an IMAP4 account, the messages are not downloaded to your local computer but instead are previewed for you, recording what has been read and what hasn’t and allowing you to move messages to folders you created. 

This is important as IMAP4 accounts give you the ability to access your email from multiple locations and computers and maintain a synchronized copy.

 All the email accounts provided with hosting plans on myhosting.com are both POP3 and IMAP4 compatible. Apple’s iPhone uses the IMAP4 protocol for email syncronization which you can use with our Exchange hosting plans or our myhosting.com email acccounts.

But the killer app is Microsoft Exchange based on the MAPI protocol.  Okay,  I hate the term ‘killer app’ . . . but it’s the best messaging platform on the market.  MAPI is an ‘aware’ protocol and by that I mean it is constantly listening for changes on the server and then communicates those changes to you, however you are connected (browser, desktop, mobile device). If you are running Outlook with a full Exchange account (our Professional account) you don’t have to constantly click send and receive to see if you have new messages. Changes are pushed as they are recorded on the server.

Like IMAP4, all messages are stored on the server but Exchange also stores your calendar, contact, journal, tasks and much more. All this data is ‘aware’ of changes and communicates those changes immediately. You can also share real-time data with others in your organization and collaborate in a way you could never do with POP3 or IMAP.

Of course all this enhanced functionality requires extensive hardware to support. While diskspace costs have gone down considerable in the past 5 years, even the best SCSI drives have a maximum rate at which they can read or write data.

Exchange hits this maximum quickly with very few active users. And that’s just one of the reasons why Microsoft Exchange is so much more expensive than POP3. Microsoft’s monthly license fees - charged directly to Exchange hosters - also adds to our costs.

But it’s still much less than what your business pays for phone service and in my opinion, just as important and effective for running an efficient business.

John Carthy
V.P. of Sales and the Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 1 Comment

Now that I have your attention, I am excited to tell you about some changes we have made to our Affiliate Program. We have made it even easier for you to make money.

We launched the program a few months ago and it has been a great success with over 250 Affiliates already in the program. Now we have made the program even better with higher payouts, more payment options and a lower payout thresholds.

We have also made these changes retroactive to start of our Affiliate Program. So if you are already a member you will be able to take advantage of this right away.

We have tried to make this program as straightforward as possible. The idea is simple; you refer customers to our services and in exchange we send you money.

Here are the basics of the program:

• The program is free to join.
• We provide you with an online tools to manage your account and access the resources you need.
• Payouts are based on the schedule below. As a rough guideline they are approximately equal to three months fees for the service.
• After a referred customer signs up they must stay with that service for a minimum of 90 days and their account must be in good standing.
• Payments options are by check, PayPal or Account credit (for existing customers).
• The minimum payout will be $50.00 US.
• Payments are made once a month for qualified sales.

For all the details you can check out our website: http://softcom.biz/Affiliates/

Sign up for our Affiliate Program and start making money now!

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

**Exchange payout is per domain with at least one active professional seat

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 2 Comments

One of the key ingredients of a Shared Hosting account is the domain name. Without a domain name, it’s either difficult or even impossible for your visitors to reach your website. Which is why it’s so important to make sure your domain name is renewed every year at its expiration date.

There are a few different states a domain name passes through after it has expired. Of course, these rules don’t apply to all domain names, including most country-level domains, are operated by different registries with unique rules. However these guidelines generally apply for the big 5; .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO and .BIZ. Once your domain name expires, it enters a “Grace Period” where you have approximately 40 days to renew your domain name at the same renewal rate. On the 45th day after expiration, the domain name enters what is called the “Redemption Period”. During the redemption period it is still possible to renew your domain name, but the redemption fee is quite costly and does not even include the renewal fee. The redemption period lasts approximately 30 days, after which it’s no longer possible to renew. The domain will be deleted within 5 days from the end of the redemption period.

So you can see how it’s possible to go from a fully functioning domain name to a completely expired and deleted domain name in 80 days — less than 3 months. And the moment your domain name is deleted, there’s always the possibility that someone will snatch it up for their own use. Even if your domain name is only 1 day into expiration and you renew it, it can still take a day or two before its working again. This is why it’s so important to make sure your domain name is renewed before it expires, not to mention that you can avoid all the confusion and potentially complicated procedures to get your web site back on track.

There are a couple ways you can make sure you don’t miss the expiration date. Some people simply choose to renew their domain name for as long as possible in one shot, which is 10 years at a time. This way you don’t have to worry about it for quite a while. But that’s not all that helpful if you’re not sure how long you’ll need your domain name for, or if you simply can’t afford the 10 year renewal fee. This is where our auto-renewal feature comes in handy. For all domain names registered through myhosting.com and mail2web.com we will by default process an automatic renewal for your domain name 10 days prior to the expiration date. So all you have to do is make sure your account remains active and has up-to-date billing information, and we’ll take care of the rest. Of course, we also recommend keeping your contact information and email address up to date, since we do send renewal reminder emails regardless of whether you use the auto-renew feature or not. In addition, make a habit of logging into your control panel at myhosting.com or mail2web.com periodically to look for alerts and updates.

For those of you who have hosting services with myhosting.com or mail2web.com but don’t have your domain name registered with us, it’s not too late! If you want to make use of our renewal system or auto-renew feature, you can transfer your domain name by contacting our Customer Support Department for more information.

And a word of warning to all domain owners - there are some unscrupulous companies who try to take advantage of the domain name renewal and transfer process by sending unsolicited snail mail to domain name owners, trying to get them to renew their domain name at inflated prices. Beware of these unsolited mail campaigns. If you receive this kind of mail and the sender doesn’t look familiar to you, check with your domain name registrar first so you don’t fall into the trap!

Regards,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ No Comments

After nine years of development, Microsoft recently announced that it will be discontinuing FrontPage. I’ll explain what discontinuing means in a second but I want to make it absolutely clear that myhosting.com will continue to support sites developed and maintained with this application as long as possible.

All Microsoft is doing is stopping any new development of FrontPage and has apparently used the code base to develop two new products: SharePoint Designer and Expressions Web.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is quite unique in that you can use this tool to design Office SharePoint version 3 sites as well as develop some pretty sophisticated work flows. While you could use FrontPage to connect to a SharePoint version 2 site, you can not connect to a SharePoint version 3 site using FrontPage. For this you must use the inline design capabilities or use SharePoint Designer.

Expression Web boasts some pretty decent features including the ability to develop sites for today’s standards including XHTML, CSS and XML (important for producing consistent results in various browsers as well being more compliant for indexing by some search engines). There’s also support for ASP.NET 2.0 and it is compatible with Visual Studio (good for a designer working in conjunction with developers).

For most website owners, who aren’t developers and don’t manage any SharePoint sites, there’s no need to upgrade. As it is, FrontPage is one of the only web design tools that requires server side extensions to power a bunch features like the web search component. While these extensions are supported on current Windows web servers (2003), they will not work with the next server release from Microsoft – the elusive Longhorn.

And while there is no official release date for Longhorn, when it is eventually released, myhosting.com plans to maintain our current servers for customers who require this functionality, and continue to support FrontPage customers as long as there is support from Microsoft for the core operating system.

That should be good for several more years but eventually you might want to consider a new tool for designing and maintaining your site. Expressions Web is one choice but there are some great, mature tools in the market that can be used on any platform. Try out Dreamweaver or GoLive by Adobe. But we recommend avoiding Flash if being found in the popular search engines is a major consideration for you.

Good or bad, current web design standards are being driven by search engine optimization (SEO) considerations and Flash just isn’t SEO friendly.

John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 6 Comments

Welcome to part 3 of my series on Anti-Spam and Whitelisting. My last post referred to a method which makes it easier for email senders and recipients to request and complete the whitelisting process. I just wanted to take a moment to elaborate on that procedure now that its available for our customers.

Normally when an email is bounced back to the sender, the error message can often be a little cryptic and difficult to understand for those of us who are a little less technical. This is also the case when your email is bounced due to an RBL blacklist. We’ve attempted to alleviate this by sending a more user-friendly error message which explains the reason why the email wasn’t delivered. This error message will also contain a URL, which when followed will lead to a web page where the sender can request that they be whitelisted.

After following the link, the individual will then be asked to provide their email address and the email address they were attempting to contact. Once the request is submitted, an email is sent to the web hosting account owner or the hosted exchange account owner. The email will also contain a link which will lead directly to the Whitelist administration page, where they can quickly approve the request.

Once approved, the sender will be able to send email to the original recipient - bypassing the RBL blacklist completely. Although this procedure isn’t fully automated, the steps take only seconds to complete and are completely painless. Neither party needs to spend any time figuring out which IP Address needs to be whitelisted, and only minor input is required.

We hope that all of our customers will enjoy this new feature.

Regards,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 1 Comment

January 2007 marks the tenth anniversary of SoftCom.

The world has changed a great deal since we started. The Dot-com bubble saw the founding (and in many cases, dramatic failure) of numerous new Internet-based companies. The political and economic situation has been marked by increased globalization and the aftermath of the events of September 11th 2001.

Looking back to 1997 according to wikipedia.org:

• Bill Clinton was starting his second term as US President.
• The Green Bay Packers won Super Bowl XXXI defeating the New England Patriots, 35-21.
• Tony Blair becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom ending 18 years of conservative rule.
• The first book in the award winning Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling is published.
• On January 12, the computer HAL 9000 comes online (in 2001: A Space Odyssey)
• Microsoft buys a $150 million shares of financially troubled Apple Computer.
• The domain Google.com was registered

SoftCom has also seen some changes over the years.

• In May 1997 mail2web.com was launched.
• In June of the same year we offered Microsoft Windows web hosting services.
• In 2001 we added support for 16 international languages to mail2web.com.
• 2002 saw myhosting.com become the world’s largest Microsoft exclusive hosting company.
• Later that same year mail2web.com got involved in car racing sponsorship with the Porsche Team at the Le Mans 24 and as the title sponsor of the Mosport – mail2web.com Grand Prix.
• In 2003 we took two large steps forward by upgrading to Microsoft Server 2003 and moving to a telco-grade Data Center.
• The following Year we introduced a unique web hosting package; a blended Windows and Linux offering.
• 2005 was the year of communication and collaboration, seeing the launch of both Exchange email and SharePoint hosted services under mail2web.com.
• Early in 2006 we took web based email to the next level when we launched mail2web.com LIVE. A free email service based on Microsoft Exchange.

Today SoftCom provides valuable, efficient and cost-effective Internet based services to more than 16 million customers with support of 26 languages in 220 countries worldwide.

I can’t wait to see where we will take things in the next ten years!

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 100 Comments

Blogging is certainly a publishing revolution. Anyone with a PC and an opinion can now make their views and photos available to the world. And get feedback . . .

And yes, some blogs and opinions are downright boring. I’m sure I’ll get feedback to that effect. But some are great, niche sites that offer the highly focused information you can’t get anywhere else.

Further to my last post, I love gadgets. Check out gadgetmaniac.mail2web.com (based on WordPress) and you’ll find a massive collection of product reviews and articles about some products and developments I didn’t know existed, I will probably never buy but I find incredibly interesting just the same.

Some blogs can actually generate money through advertising. Don’t quit your day job, I’m not talking about ‘get rich, working from home’ schemes but rather the ability to generate enough money to cover your hosting costs and maybe a little left over for the odd gadget purchase.

Free sites have all sorts of limitations - file sizes, forgettable domain names, bad reporting and ultimately little control when it comes to integrating things like Google Adsense - the easiest way to run ads and make money.

But for less than $5.00 a month you can get a WordPress account with myhosting.com. WordPress is the leading application for blogging, can be set up in minutes (we have an auto-install script), and you can use the domain name of your choice (could be an extra fee if it’s a new domain name, but you can transfer an existing domain name for free).

Part of the setup includes an automatic installation of the Adsense plugin, so once you get an Adsense account it’s easy to place ads around your content. Write a few articles a week - check your traffic through Google Analytics (also included as an auto install provided you have an account) - and provided what you write is interesting and somewhat targeted, your opinion will be heard and you might even make some money.

That’s revolutionary.

John Carthy
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.
V.P. of Sales and Marketing

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ No Comments

In my last post I discussed a number of the steps we take to try and keep spam out of your mailbox. I just wanted to take this opportunity to further expand upon the use of RBL lists. The idea behind RBL lists is to compile a list of mail servers which fall into one of the following categories:

1. Open for relay - meaning they are easily hijacked by spammers.
2. Disreputable ISPs that allow spammers to use their email servers.
3. ISPs that do not actively respond to spam complaints against their servers by disciplining or shutting down users who spam.

By listing these email servers in RBL lists and actively using these RBL lists to block unwanted mail, we’re all doing our part to encourage bad ISPs to clean up, and to encourage consumers to use secure and reputable email hosting services and ISPs.

Although we feel we’re fighting the good fight, sometimes innocent users end up getting caught in the crossfire. Some users may not agree with the use of RBL lists, or may be unwilling to change hosting providers. So this is our motivation for providing the new Whitelist feature which allows you to decide whether you want to allow mail from select servers that appear in the “Blacklist”. This allows you to enter the IP Address of the sender’s server into your domain-level Whitelist, which will circumvent the RBL for that domain. We even make it easy for the sender and the recipient by providing them with a method to easily request and approve the Whitelist entry.

We feel that these steps give you the best of both worlds, protecting you from the bulk of annoying and unwanted email, while still allowing the email you want to receive to come through. I hope this helps shed some light on the subject.

Happy Holidays,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 4 Comments