Spamming Yourself (and Us!)

Posted by BetterWebSpace

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!

The end of Websites for Small Business?

Posted by BetterWebSpace

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….

My business plan :)

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!

Creative Commons License photo credit: lepiaf.geo

Newsletter: Happy Birthday (to us!)

Posted by BetterWebSpace

BetterWebSpace enters it’s 7th year this week – something we’re really proud of!

Happy Birthday BetterWebSpace

It seems a long while ago since we setup our first website, at that time we only bought other hosting accounts cheaply added our services and sold them on at a profit – mainly so we could get our own web hosting for free!

Within a few months we had to purchase a reseller account to allow us to grow, this reseller account was smaller than the reseller accounts we provide today! It still gives us a warm fuzzy feeling when we see our own customers make that step from a normal hosting account upto a reseller account like we did, we’ve seen some people make entire businesses from it purely by accident through this process!

5 years ago we had outgrown the (several) reseller units we had and had to start buying our own servers, this was a great time but with some large risks, fortunately it all paid off and now we provide hosting for hundreds of customers with thousands of domains!

We’re very proud of what BetterWebSpace has become in the last 7 years, and would like to thank all of our customers for helping us to get where we are. Some of our current customer have customer numbers in single digits and have been with us right from the beginning!


All Change (actually it’s only a little change!)

You may have noticed quite a few changes happening in recent months, upgrades, price changes, backups… These were all part of our plan to make the business grow more and more and it’s working – so expect more changes to come…

The biggest of these changes is that in the not too distant future is that BetterWebSpace will become a trading name of InnovaTech Media Ltd. On a day to day basis nothing is changing other than in name, Keiron will remain Managing Director of the new company and you’ll still have all the same services you are used to.

From a payments perspective if you pay via Paypal nothing will change for you, but as the limited company requires it’s own WorldPay account we’ll be working with our customers who use the FuturePay (recurring billing) service to get you moved over to our new account.

Once we have a firm date for this change we’ll be communicating it to all customers.


A Change for You?

Whilst we’ve been changing we’ve noticed a lot of our customers are looking to change as well, whether it be the look and feel of their site or to add new features or space:

  • Many of you took advantage of upgrading before the recent price changes and locking in on the old pricing structure, other users may need realise they need to grow so please contact us if your requirements change.
  • If you haven’t taken advantage of our backup service already we’d recommend you do, it provides peace of mind when you don’t have time to download your own backups.
  • Also, we’ve recently recruited a designer to work with us on a regular basis, so if your site needs a bit of a change or a new style for Christmas – why not get in touch with us and we’ll see what we can offer you?

BetterWebSpace
Where hosting just got better…