by BetterWebSpace on May 27, 2010
We haven’t launched our affiliate program yet (don’t worry it is coming!), but the sight of summer has already gone to our heads and we’d like to offer to all of our existing hosting clients a very special offer, and it’s really simple!
We know that our clients often refer us to friends, colleagues and other businesses so we’d like to reward them for doing that….
During the month of June:
- Refer two hosting clients and get one domain name* extended for free.
- Refer four hosting clients and get one domain name* and one hosting package** extended for free.
* Domain name extensions only apply to .com’s and .co.uk’s, for the minimum term (2 years for .co.uk’s, 1 year for .com’s) and only apply to domain names you have registered with BetterWebSpace.
** Hosting extensions are for your single next hosting invoice (annual for Easy customers, monthly for Easy Resellers), including backups if you have them.
Free extensions will be applied on 1st August 2010 to the next available invoice to be generated.
When referring clients, ask them to let us know that you referred them and provide you with their customer ID. Once you have two, or four customer ID’s contact us with those details to have the credit applied to your account, really simple!
Note: You can do this multiple times, so referring 8 clients would mean you could have two domains and two hosting packages extended!
photo credit: Seattle Miles
by BetterWebSpace on May 19, 2010
Since we became a limited company, newsletters from us have been a little thin on the ground, we’re still here – just really busy (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing!).
Whilst we’ve been really busy, we’ve got one or two open slots coming up for both design and automation work!
Spruce up your Website!
For those of you that aren’t aware our new designer has been with us for around 6 months now and has produced some great designs during that time, which several of our new and existing clients have been exceptionally happy with!
Jenn specialises in custom themes for WordPress, which means that once she has designed your site for you, you can then update pages through a simple interface that doesn’t differ too much from your normal word processing package (of course if you’d like us to do your site updates for you let us know). We’re also happy to create sites ranging from simple one-page solutions to large database driven websites.
Things to consider:
- Do you keep your site regularly updated (search engines tend to like that) – could this be made easier with a WordPress theme?
- Would you like us to convert your existing website to WordPress to make it easier to update?
- Would you like a fresh new design (either with WordPress or without)?
- Would you like a summer and a winter design?
- We’re also now taking orders for redesigns for Christmas (I know it’s a long way off, but the closer it gets the busier it gets!)
Prices start from just £100 for a single page website, and could be ready for you within a fortnight (depending on demand!)
Making Life Easier!
Since we launched our Office Automation brand we’ve been busy making our clients lives easier, in some cases saving them several hours every day! If you’d like us to look at some of the things you do online in a day and make them easier do get in touch!
by BetterWebSpace on October 14, 2009
This is a really common thing that happens to a LOT of users so I thought after it happened again today I’d be best explaining it here!
Nobody likes spam, it’s a fact – and we do our very best to ensure we filter out as much of it as possible so that you never have to download it (using things like SpamAssassin and blacklisting known spammers), unfortunately there will always be some that slips through the net and we have to allow it through to your mailbox (what is spam for one person may not be spam for another!).
Webmail, POP3 and IMAP Mailbox users
In the normal course of events when it gets through to your mailbox you will either delete it, or mark it as spam so your local offline reader can learn more about what you believe is spam. This is great and for you there’s nothing that needs to change.
Forwarders
Some of our users continue to use their new domain name to forward emails to their old email address (home/webmail etc) which we have no problem with (although if you setup your mailboxes properly at BetterWebSpace you’ll find you can send emails from your actual domain which looks a lot more professional!).
If a user is found to be sending spam (either by choice or by a malicious user targetting their account), we are fortunate that we are able to get spam reports from some of the bigger email providers that allow us to get on top of an issue before our server gets blacklisted. Being blacklisted will mean that other servers (who adopt the same security measures as ourselves) may refuse to receive our emails, this includes the likes of Yahoo and AOL.
Unfortunately if you have your mail forwarded to your offsite email, AND then report it as spam – the offsite email vendor (Yahoo, AOL, BTInternet) will often report our server as the sender of the spam, quite rightly so it was the last point of contact before it entered their system! However it only takes a few of these before they will block our server from sending to their servers (meaning you and lots of other users don’t get any mail!!
In Short
If you must use forwarders (and we’d advise you to check out our mail services before you make that decision), then please do not report any spam you receive forwarded from our servers – you’ll stop your own mail and that of others being received by your email vendor!
by BetterWebSpace on September 30, 2009
There’s been a reasonable amount of talk in the last week about whether small businesses really need a website, in our opinion the answer is definitely - but we were bound to say that! Here’s why….
What’s going on?
Small businesses have for while been able to advertise in the established online social communities (Facebook / MySpace etc) where “Business / Fan” pages allow them to publicise their commercial enterprise. Word of mouth is still one of the best forms of advertising, so businesses that have done this are generally doing really well out of it (if you’ve tried it and aren’t doing so well from it – contact us we can refer you to a business that may be able to help you!). The problem with using social networking to advertise is you rely simply on people’s connections to each other to get business not people’s locality.
Google on the other hand are increasing their local search efforts with a new feature in Google Maps, “Place Pages” provide everything you want to know about a place (whether that be a city or a business) on one page!
Let’s take a restaurant as an example, you should get the following:
- Web pages
- Directions
- Reviews
- Images
- Street View
- Business hours
With all this information at your fingertips (within Google) there is an obvious concern that people will never leave Google (some people we’ve now noticed refer to Google and the Internet interchangeably as one and the same thing!). Google has always said it will do everything to enhance the user’s experience, unfortunately for site owners this may mean that these users never leave Google!
Are there any positives?
Yes, I believe there are – this service will provide a website for thousands of small businesses around the world with next to no outlay, giving them an immediate online presence that the whole world can see (unlike the social networking sites discussed above).
Great, So does my small business still need a website?
That really is up to you! Without your own website you will always only be able to show the information that Google (or any other provider) has decided to show to users. If you want your own content, pictures, reviews etc organised in a way that you see fit – you really do still need your own website!
Also, what are you doing about email? I followed a van only yesterday for a local business with no website on it (all the other information was there about what they do – a website would allow them to show some pictures as well in my mind) and at the bottom was a btinternet.com email address. I have a bad habit of contacting any supplier I deal with to tell them how much more professional a domain name with “enquiries@companyname.com” would look, all for less than £25 per year!
We’ve also taken on a designer now and many of our customers have started to reap the rewards of the work that she does, in fact we’re building up quite a backlog for her – so if you have things you want done – get in touch soon!
photo credit: lepiaf.geo
by BetterWebSpace on September 7, 2009
There is an ongoing attack on older versions of WordPress at the moment, you should update your WordPress to the latest version with immediate effect (currently this is version is 2.8.4 if you aren’t already aware), WordPress have published a report on this attack.
If you don’t know which version you are using already – you should be able to find out in your dashboard, but don’t waste time checking please just upgrade.
By upgrading you know roughly how long an upgrade will take, fixing a hacked site can take weeks (and in some cases can even be irrecoverable!!).
If you are unable to upgade your WordPress yourself contact support for more information.
How do I know if I’ve been hacked?
There are two things you may notice:
Preventing an attack:
Simple, upgrade – don’t try to hack around it, don’t use plugins to protect yourself, update your base code and upgrade now.
Fixing up after an attack:
Unfortunately this hack attacks the database as well, so simply re-uploading your files won’t fix your problems, you’ll need to do something far more involved (again, it’s easier to upgrade!):
- Export all your content as XML
- Backup general files (images/themes etc)
- Remove all files
- Re-upload the latest version of WordPress
- Import the XML of your posts, pages and comments (and hopefully no hacked code!)
Again, we may be able to work on this for you if you need us to.
by BetterWebSpace on September 4, 2009
This is a common question we hear during the order process…
“Should I choose to transfer my domain to you, or just update my nameservers?”
The answer is really down to you and how much control you have over your domain!
Transferring Domains
Transferring a domain means moving it from your existing domain supplier to BetterWebSpace, you will then contact BetterWebSpace for all domain renewals (and hosting renewals if you order hosting as well). Your domain supplier may charge you a release fee for doing this (BetterWebSpace do not currently charge a release fee to release domains!).
If you select this option you have two options:
- Transfer your domain to under our control and then ask us to re-point it for you to it’s new location.
- Ask your current provider to re-point it (if you need the change to happen quickly) and then transfer it to our selves.
Update Nameservers Only
If you choose to update your nameservers only, you’ll simply be re-pointing your domain from it’s existing location to our servers. You will continue to contact your existing domain supplier for domain renewals and BetterWebSpace for hosting renewals. There is normally no charge for this.
by BetterWebSpace on August 13, 2009
In recent years this has been a very woolly term as defined in our Terms and Conditions:
2.3.4 you will not employ programs which consume excessive system resources, including but not limited to processor cycles and memory.
It came to our attention (after adding a number of new security applications recently) that we would only notify users when they were actually causing a problem that caused a service degradation to other users on the server. Now we have the new enhanced security we’re in a position where we will start emailing people if they exceed certain limits.
If you start receiving excessive resource usage emails on a regular basis you should work to reduce your usage to prevent further action being taken.
by BetterWebSpace on August 12, 2009
This is probably one of the most common complaints we receive and more often than not, website is up!
Please note that we must distinguish here by saying that down means uncontactable, displaying an error is a very different kind of “down”.
Let’s run through the possible reasons your website may appear to be down (and what we do in each of those scenarios).
- The server may genuinely be down.
Be assured if this is the case, we will already be working on the issue and may not be able to respond immediately to your mail (or the mails of other customers on the server), we post status updates if this occurs to Twitter, at the following address: http://www.twitter.com/BetterWebSpace (we suggest bookmarking this address or following us on Twitter).
- You may have been blocked by our security measures.
This is the most common reason for people not being able to access their website, it is caused by a large number of different factors which may include:
- Failed Passwords (simulating a Brute Force password attack)
- Too many logins one ofter another (simulating a Denial of Service attack)
- Many other factors
If you can’t see your site you should email Support with the following information:
- Your username:
- The server the account is on:
- Your public facing IP address (which can be got from here: http://www.whatsmyip.org/
- Their may be a problem with your computers routing or your ISP’s routing
If the previous two situations aren’t applicable we may ask you to perform some tests – such as visiting other websites, asking a friend if they can see your site etc. to help us check that the problem is not with our servers.
by BetterWebSpace on August 11, 2009
Sometimes when you’re saving files via a PHP script or your online file manager you’ll find that everytime you save it, it’s empty.
This is caused by one of two things:
- You don’t have the correct access permissions to modify the file.
- You are over your disk space allowance (quota) – check this in cPanel and use the disk usage viewer to locate areas where you may be able to remove files.
by BetterWebSpace on August 10, 2009
When we made the decision to install PHP5 we were made aware of a large number of scripts that weren’t being updated by vendors immediately that would not work with PHP5.
Rather than force all of our users to find new scripts, or face their website being broken we installed PHP5 alongside PHP4 to give users the choice, with a view to phasing out PHP4 over a period of time, this remains our plan.
You will notice that your cPanel and phpinfo() commands will both report PHP4 by default, below are the details to activate PHP5 in your account.
You should be testing PHP5 with your current sites by following the details below, if everything works correctly – continue to run PHP5. If you encounter problems then:
- Try to diagnose them
- Contact the script provider to see if they have a PHP5 compatible version.
Instructions for enabling PHP5
- Locate the file “.htaccess” in your public_html folder (note the . at the beginning of the name).
- If the .htaccess doesn’t exist then create it.
- Add the following lines to your .htaccess:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php