Hello,

Just a quick update to let customers on our Windows hosting plans know that we now provide support for ASP.NET AJAX.  Formerly known as ATLAS, this is a free framework for building rich, interactive, cross-browser web applications. This Microsoft technology integrates cross-browser client script libraries with the ASP.NET 2.0 framework.

This is mainly a development tool for advanced web designers and developers and will have no effect on our existing customer’s web sites. If you do want to use this technology, please make sure you have .NET 2.0 enabled on your account.

With all our Windows accounts we offer the option of running ASP.NET 1.1 or ASP.NET 2.0. By default your account will run ASP.NET 1.1 but you can update that instantly through your account control panel by going to Site Management > Site Settings > ASP.NET Version.

ASP.NET AJAX makes it possible to take advantage of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) techniques to create ASP.NET pages with rich user interfaces. ASP.NET AJAX allows for the creation of web applications in ASP.NET 2.0 which can update data on a web page without a complete reload of the page.

Check out these examples of what some people are doing with AJAX.

I still don’t know what Web 2.0 is. In a recent speech, Andrew Schroepfer from Tier 1 Research said it is the version after Web 1.0 and before Web 3.0. However, without having to assign some meaningless label to this phase of the web, I know this technology is introducing a whole new class of website development.

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

Posted in SoftCom, myhosting.com ~ No 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

We’ve become so accustomed to spam cluttering up our mailboxes, that it’s hard to remember that there was ever a time without it. In fact, the origins of spam go back so far that it is unlikely that any of us were fortunate enough to ever enjoy a spam-free mailbox.

We can draw a lot of similarities between postal mail and email. However unsolicited postal mail and unsolicited email have some significant differences. With unsolicited postal mail, the cost of delivery is entirely covered by the sender. This is not the case with spam email. Of course the spammers will pay for part of the delivery cost, but the majority of the delivery cost is paid by the recipients’ email service provider in bandwidth, CPU usage and storage space. These costs are often passed on to you, the end user via your subscription fees. So spam is not only annoying, but it is costly to all of us. By some estimates, spam accounts for up to 85% of all email.

Here at SoftCom, in order to try and reduce these costs, we use a number of different mechanisms to try and eliminate spam – even before it is delivered to our email servers.  Currently, we use two important checks before accepting the email from the sending server.

1. We check against a number of reputable RBL lists, or Realtime Blackhole Lists. An RBL is basically a list of email servers or service providers whose customers are responsible for the SPAM or whose servers have been hijacked for SPAM relay. Any connections to our email server from a server on the lists we use will be rejected, and the email will not be accepted for delivery.
2. The second line of defense is to check the recipient email address against our list of users. Any email sent to a nonexistent user is rejected. This type of email can even be a result of an email dictionary attack, a technique often used by spammers to try and discover new email addresses to target with spam.

Surprisingly, these two types of connections to our mail server account for up to 92% of all attempted connections to our email servers. If we were to accept all of these connections that our email server capacity would need to be increased by as much as ten times just to be able to handle the volume. For a customer on our Basic hosting plan ($9.95/month), this could mean a price increase of up to $10, doubling the monthly fee. (But don’t worry, we don’t have plans to do anything as drastic as that!)

The remaining 8% of email that is accepted is then scored against our Anti-Spam system which uses a series of rules and checks to determine the likelihood that any given email is spam. Anti-Spam rules will result in an email being given points towards an overall score. In general, email with a score of 5 or greater is considered to be spam. About 42% of all accepted email scores a 5 or greater, and 58% scores under 5. This means that up to 95.4% of all email either attempted or accepted to myhosting.com email servers is spam or suspected spam.

In addition to all this, we perform Anti-Virus scans on all incoming email, as well as some Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus scans on outgoing email to ensure that our servers are a source of clean email.

But that isn’t all… there are some further steps you can take. Due to the way the Anti-Spam system works, you can choose from multiple options on how to handle the spam that arrives makes it to your inbox. You can choose to tag email scoring 5 or higher with SPAM in the subject, thus allowing you to create an email rule to sort or delete unwanted spam. You can choose to take no action at all. Or you could even make a custom rule which checks the email header for the Spam score, and filters your mail based on your own thresholds. This allows you to increase or decrease the sensitivity of the Anti-Spam setting on your own. For our mail2web.com Exchange customers, this can even be adjusted from the control panel.

And for those users who want to bypass the RBL checks, it is now possible for myhosting.com customers to whitelist servers that don’t pass our RBL checks, on a per account basis.  And we’re planning to provide this feature for mail2web.com Exchange customers in the near future as well.

Although we do as much as possible to keep your inbox free of spam, nothing is perfect. Spammers are always trying new techniques to get past our filtering methods. And since the volume of email requires the use of an automated system, there are from time to time both false-positives and false-negatives. But we aren’t letting our guard down yet and we’ll continue to do whatever we can to keep your inbox Spam free.

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

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

More and more, we’re seeing a shift in the way that people communicate on the internet. Here at SoftCom we’ve decided to make the leap and move from sending periodic email newsletters to more frequent blog posts. This allows us to get more detailed about any subject, and it allows you, the reader, to decide when and how you want to read that content. With many blogs comes a feature known as RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. And although it is becoming fairly common, we wanted to take some time to explain to you how you can use this to keep up to date with our blog.

1. From your BrowserSome browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox include features which allow you to add RSS feeds in your Favorites or Bookmarks. When you are on a website that has an RSS Feed, you’ll see an icon like this in your browser’s Address field or one of your Toolbars.   This is usually an indication that you can add the Feed to your Favorites or Bookmarks. For IE7 users, clicking on this button will allow you to add the RSS Feed to your “Feeds” Favorite Folder which will then be accessible from your Favorites Center (Alt+C). For Firefox users, clicking on the icon will allow you to create a “Live Bookmark”, which you can place anywhere in your Bookmarks, including your Bookmarks Toolbar Folder.
2. Using a RSS Reader or News AggregatorThere are basically two different types of RSS Readers: the kind that you install on your computer, and the kind that you use from the web - and there are advantages to both. With a web-based RSS reader, you can read your subscriptions for any computer that is connected to the internet.  With a software-based RSS reader, you can download your RSS Feed updates and read them when you’re offline. We have subscription buttons for some of the most popular online RSS Readers on the right-side of this blog, which include Bloglines, Google Reader and NewsGator. Some popular RSS Readers include FeedDemon, FeedReader and RssReader. There are literally hundreds out there for you to choose from.
3. Customizable Portal PagesThese types of services, like My MSN, My Yahoo and My AOL, allow you to add custom content on your page including RSS feeds. For your convenience, we’ve added buttons for the most popular portal pages on the left side of the page. These websites differ from RSS Readers in that they usually display more than just RSS Feeds, and any RSS Feeds you do add will be displayed inline with your other content.

We hope that you take this opportunity to explore our blog and subscribe to our RSS Feed, using whatever method you prefer most. We’ll do our best to keep this blog updated with the latest news and information that is both relevant to the services we offer, and to your needs.

Sincerely,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

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

Hello,

I wanted to pick up from my post last week and write specifically about what we are doing to help businesses and organizations succeed online — the tactics we are employing so we can live up to our ’smiley’ promise.

The first area is the delivery of useful, inexpensive (sometimes free) applications that are also easy-to-use.

For myhosting.com hosting customers we launched a Site Builder application last month. Whether you’re on a Windows or Linux plan, you can now quickly activate this service through your myhosting.com control panel and generate a functional, attractive site in minutes.

The three page version is free, so if you’re not happy with the look of your site or want to try something new, give it a try and I think you’ll agree it’s a good tool for design and content management. And if you have the need you can upgrade the same site to be fully eCommerce enabled.

This is a great opportunity for anyone with a parked domain to easily get a site up and running without the need for a webmaster or designer.

One very unique feature in our Windows hosting plan is the mixed Windows / Linux environment. Without getting into too much detail, if you have a Windows hosting account you can enable a Linux account - for free - that behaves just like a directory within your Windows site. Nothing changes on your site, but it provides unlimited possibilities.

With this dual platform in place we can provide you with a broad range of free, open source apps. Right now if you go into the Application Manager section of your myhosting.com control panel (look inside the Site Management tab > Web Site Tools), you’ll see a long list of applications you can install with just a single click.

Whether you’re technical or not, I think you’ll appreciate the power of our MediaWiki, WordPress (blogging), Gallery 2 (photo album) and phpBB (forum) available free on our standard hosting plans. Joomla (content management) and one-click eCommerce applications are also available on the more advanced plans.

Finally, I think it’s important to mention that these applications are on tap for you to use. Turn them on only as you need them and pay for only what you use.

Next week I’ll talk about some mail2web.com applications our customers are turning on in droves.

Sincerely,

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

Posted in SoftCom, myhosting.com ~ No Comments