Euro Fast Host

We host a blog for Bettabuy.com,  site that compares prices on thousands of products. The blog has sections on Competitions, New Products, Price Reductions, Sales, Top Sellers, Voucher Codes, and Web Exclusives.

The blog part of the web site is powered by Wordpress, and we have installed the Helicontech ISAPI re-write module. This means that the blog can use search engine friendly URLs (as has long been the case on Linux sites, but is much less common on IIS). An example URL is http://www.bettabuy.com/blog/2007/09/dorothy-perkins-sale/.

We have also installed the same on this blog, so it will be interesting to compare search engine rankings before and after the URL rewrite.

The nice thing about helicontech is that the htaccess file takes the same format as those on Linux, so pretty much no editing is required. This is a great bonus because writing htaccess files is not simple if you are new to them.

We will be writing some documentation on how to do this but in the meantime if any customers want some help setting it up please email support@eurofasthost.com and let us know!

Duncan

We use Windows Messenger a fair bit at work - even in the same office it’s ideal for, for example, sending links to a colleague to take a look at. And of course when people are working remotely, it’s an ideal way to stay in touch. But, it still suffers from the usual Microsoft problem of being over complicated!

I accidentally deleted a contact from it, and when I tried to re-add them, the link at the top just wouldn’t work (this is in a Vista machine). So I started messing around and before I knew it, a browser window popped up asking me to enter some details so that my contacts could stay up to date with my contact details… fair enough I thought, should only take a few minutes.

So I entered some of the required information then it all became just to much of a pain in the neck to complete - it was no longer a 2-minute job, but was looking like it could take quarter of an hour. So, being busy ;-), I gave up.

Next thing I know, there’s an email in my inbox from Windows Live Spaces welcoming me to “Windows Live(TM) Spaces!”. They have very kindly allocated my own URL where I can publish all sorts of things… is it a nice snappy domain? Something easy to remember and spell? Something you can tell someone in the pub and they might remember it? Well… its…

http://cid-00037ffe84eff1a2.spaces.live.com/

Got that? Easy peasy. No-one could ever forget that URL.

And, helpfully, the email went on to explain that this site could be viewed on a mobile with the URL:

“You can also access your space from a mobile device using this web address:
 http://cid-00037ffe84eff1a2.mobile.spaces.live.com/ ”

Now that should be a snap to enter on a mobile

Duncan

Since installing our SpamBlock server we have access to detailed statistics about the number of spam emails being delivered to some of our customers, and the figures are truly amazing.

Of 2.2m messages delivered to the system, 1.8m were spam. That’s 82% spam… 82%!

Of these, 201000 are ones delivered to random names at a domain (ie csdwewr@whatever.com) which is one of the reasons we don’t recommend “catch-all” mailboxes where anything@whatever.com is delivered to a default mailbox. It just makes the spammers job easier.

Just over 1m messages were blocked by RBL (realtime block lists) available freely on the internet. When used carefully, these lists are fantastic resources in the fight against spam.

So it seems the solutions are out there to reduce spam to practically zero, but they need constant hardwork to keep them effective - as usual its a constant technological battle between the spammers and the wider internet community.

SMS messaging is big business, and we have recently had the opportunity to work with a customer to setup an SMS competition to win 50cc Scooters. Working with another of our customers as the SMS provider, entrants can text the answer to a question to an SMS short code to try to win the scooter. The 3000th entrant wins the 50cc scooter, tax, registration and delivery!

The cost of the text can be set by the operator, and in this case was chosen to be £1.50 and then there is a revenue share agreement on income generated. The twist with the competition though is that when a contestant enters, they are texted back with their postion (if they give the correct answer). So, it’s made clear on the web site that the 3000th entrant wins, and once each contestant has answered correctly, they are texted back and told where their answer was… so if they are correct entrant number 2654 they will receive a text telling them so, and they can re-enter if they like!

It is a new area for us, so will be an interesting exercise, and it may be something that we offer as a service on a wider basis - there are all sort of possibilities. What about domain name registration by SMS for when you have that great idea for a web site in the pub? Service status messages by SMS? E-mail alerts for sales from your site? Affiliate sales notifications? The possibilites are endless.

With all the recent publicity over “dodgy” competitions, we have been careful to make the contest as fair as possible, and make the terms and conditions clear. And unlike many premium rate SMS competitions, entrants will not be sent multiple text messages at £1.50 a time. The idea is that it is fun, you have a realistic chance of winning (much better than the National Lottery), and it increases sales for the site owner.

If any of you have a great idea (or even a boring one!) for how you could use SMS within your businesses, let me know (duncan@eurofasthost.com) and we’ll see if we can help.

And, for anyone who wants a go at winning a 50cc Scooter, the competition can be found at ScooterSpot.co.uk (and no, the guys from our office can’t enter!)

Recently Vista updated itself, and after this certain web sites would “bounce” when viewed in Firefox. The bookmarks also disappeared - not the ones under the “Bookmarks” menu, but the ones between the navigation bar and the browser content. Bit frustrating, and led to using IE for a while before finding the time to investigate. Anyway, it’s easily solved by right-clicking on the grey area between web page content and navigation bar, and adding a new bookmark.

Thanks to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Window_shakes for the solution

For some reason my laptop (Advent 7093) recently stopped working. After some investigation it appeared that it would only boot up if just one of the SODIMMs was installed. With two, it wouldn’t boot at all. Bit odd, but there you go.

The laptop came with two 512MB SODIMMs so with only one, it was trying to run Vista Business with just 512MB ram, and it was painful to say the least… so bad it was practically unusable, It improved slightly after running the system optimiser to get a new “Windows Experience Index”. But still, it wasn’t really useable without a lot of patience.

So, I got a new 1GB SODIMM and installed that, and it’s back to being a pleasure to use. But it seems 1GB is the minimum to get decent performance from Vista.

Given my recent phone bill (following the trip to Tenerife) I thought it would be worth calling T-Mobile to see if I could get a phone upgrade (despite it being less than 12 months since the last one). The answer was yes, and I could have pretty much any phone.

So, despite having the MDA Vario Pro (and being very happy with it, especially the Push E-mail, which is fantastic), I ordered a Nokia N95.

My main requirement for a phone is for email - I am really not bothered by playing MP3s, videos etc. I also liked the idea of the built in sat-nav. And, I also liked the idea of the 5MP camera - I know I wont really use it, but its nice to think I might. And of course the high speed 3g (HSDPA) is great when using the phone for internet access on the laptop as I do quite regularly.

So how is it? Well, physically its great - a nice size, and the sliding front reveals a decent keypad (which makes a change from the touch-screen of the MDA).  The keys are easy to use, and as usual with Nokias, fairly intuitive. It does however feel a little flimsy, and the front is liable to slide open when being placed into a pocket.

The camera is great, and takes really good pictures. I don’t really use this facility much, but it’s nice to have and I may well use it more frequently now I always have a decent camera with me. Haven’t used the video camera facility since there isn’t enough storage space in the phone memory. I need to get a memory card for it (since Nokia doesn’t supply one in the box), then I’ll have a play.

The built in GPS is nice - looks a bit like Google Earth, but you need to pay (about £40 iirc) to get full voice navigation instructions. This can all be done from the handset with a credit card. I used the navigation in earnest for the first time a couple of days ago to find a location in Leeds. So I programmed it in South Cave and it quickly planned a route. In the car, the front was slid open to activate the GPS, and this took a few minutes before it found the satellites (although it was low down in the car, since I don’t have a cradle yet). It all worked really well until the M1 into Leeds when the phone decided to reboot for no apparent reason). There was nowhere to pull over, so by the time the phone had re-booted, opened the navigation software, re-found the satellites etc, I was well into Leeds and improvising on the route until the phone was back up to speed. That said, once it was running the navigation was easy to follow and worked a treat. And, the speakers on the Nokia N95 are first class - how they get such good quality sound out of such small speakers is a wonder.

The only real problem I have with it, is the very slow email access. I have setup an IMAP account, and when logging on to retrieve headers, it is *very* slow. It can take a couple of minutes just to download and display the headers. I have no idea why this is, but I hope a firmware update improves it. I also tried getting the phone to stay connected permanently so there is no need to logon for headers. This works, but it makes the otherwise excellent battery life very short.

Given that email is one of the main uses for my phone, it’s a bit disappointing, but at least it does work and you can send and receive emails. But, I was spoiled by the superb push email on the MDA Pro.

So, do I revert to the MDA Pro or stick with the Nokia N95? I’m not sure yet, but I’ll give the Nokia a few more days to see. It’s certainly much better as a phone, much more compact, and has better battery life. Nokia says its what computers have become, but it will be some time yet before the mobile comes close to PC functionality.

I was recently lucky enough to have a few days in Tenerife enjoying some pre-summer sunshine. As always, I took the laptop and mobile so I can stay in touch whilst away.

The setup was the latptop connecting via bluetooth to the phone, then using 3g to access the internet. As usual, this was no problem and all worked quite well. Can even VPN and connect to Exchange server, so it’s just like being in the office really.

But the big problem is cost. I already knew it was going to be £8 per MB - an extortionate amount, but needs must and if you’re careful, it shouldnt cost too much for a few days. So, I made sure not to download any large attachments, and keep web browsing to the essentials.

When I got back to the UK and my next phone bill arrived, I was a little shocked to see it was £1051! Now, I was sure I hadn’t downloaded as much as that.

But, I didn’t take Vista into account. I stupidly went to bed one night and left the laptop with the screen up (ie not in standby mode) and bluetooth enabled on the phone. And Vista decided it was the time to download an update of about 131MB… all over bluetooth / 3g and at £8 per MB

So, the phone bill was more than the entire trip to Tenerife. The moral of the story is…. Switch off the laptop and bluetooth!

I have installed Windows Vista Business and Office 2007 on my laptop - it wasn’t a particular goal, but the laptop had started having a few issues, so I thought I’d give it a go.

The laptop is an Advent 7093 with Intel T2300 @ 1.66GHz with 1GB RAM so not a bad spec and within Microsoft’s recommendations for Vista.

So I popped in the Vista CD and followed the instructions - and opted for a reinstall rather than an upgrade (an upgrade seemed to be asking for trouble). It all went well until the install just seemed to hang with the progress bar not moving for around 20 minutes - not a good sign and it looked like it might fail.

But, patience won out and the install progressed nicely. Once it was done the system rebooted and proceeded to benchmark the laptop. A rating of 1 (poor) to 5 (best) is allocated according to performance based on various criteria (eg hard disk performance, graphics card etc). The laptop did well (3s and 4s) but the graphics card only got a 1 - so the whole laptop was restricted in terms of Vista features because of the poor performance of the graphics card.

To be honest, I was pretty disappointed - the graphics were slow, blurred and low res - making Vista look like something from ten years ago.

The reason, of course, was that the graphics card (Nvidia GeForce) driver had not been installed. So, a trip to Nvidia’s web site to download the driver and off we go - or so I thought. For some reason it wouldn’t install - either the Vista version of the driver or the XP version (running in compatibility mode). It either crashed or said it couldn’t detect the graphics card.

This was a bit of a pain, and I thought I would have to revert to XP. But with a bit of fiddling and then manually installing the driver (rather than detecting the card) and choosing the Nvidia dirver manually, we managed to get it installed - and the difference was dramatic!

Vista transformed into a *much* better experience (benchmark of 3 for the graphics card by the way) and I was happy again.

Things (predictably) take a bit of getting used to, particuarly setting up wireless networks and VPNs but with a bit of perseverance it’s not too much of a learning curve.

So, Office 2007 was installed, which has some really nice features. But by far the best for me is the “filter” option in Access and Excel, which makes it much quicker to use. I do a fair amount of data manipulation and these options make it much better - you can often run a standard filter on data without having to write a query.

So, overall I’m really pleased - it’s fast (although I’m sure you do need a decent spec), and reliable - so far haven’t had any operating system crashes. The only issue has been with Dreamweaver which needed a system roll back an reinstall. But apart from that, no problems.

And, it looks fantastic!

We run Microsoft Exchange Server internally for mails (via our public SmarterMail servers) and one of the options is DirectPush to mobile devices.

Basically, it means you can sync you Windows Mobile devices via 3G or GPRS so mail is “pushed” from Exchange as it arrives and is delivered direct to your PDA wherever you are. When I’m out and about, it’s fantastic - email delivered direct to the phone (a T-Mobile MDA Vario Pro by the way) and it’s really very useable.

So, is it something we should sell? Well, yes I think so. We will be installing a public exchange server and trialing it with some existing customers. If you would like to be part of the trial, please email duncan@eurofasthost.com and we’ll add you to the list.

There isn’t a definite timescale yet (we have a lot on with the new web site and revised packages) but it will be within the next few months.

Web hosting has come a long way in the last twelve months, and our site is somewhat out of date. So, we will be launching a brand new site in the next few days which will have a much more up-to-date look, and of course it will be fully web standards based and accessible

But it’s not just a fresh new look… we will also be launching a full re-vamped range of hosting packages that reflect recent developments in web technology.

These will include:

1. One-click support for blogging software including Wordpress and Joomla (this blog is written with the excellent Wordpress). No excuse now for not adding a blog to your web site!

2. We already offer full support for .NET2 hosting, but it will be simpler than ever to install on your web space.

3. New statistics package - we have upgraded to the very latest version of SmarterStats, and we’ve gone for the Enterprise edition so you can get detailed web site statistics emailed to you as often as you’d like.

4. New mail package - SmarterMail 4 has been installed, which is a massive imporvement over previous versions. It supports calendering and integration with Outlook too.

5. One-click (well, nearly) installation of Oscommerce so you can quickly an easily build an e-commerce store.

There are lots of other new developments coming soon as well, including Helm4 support, which brings a whole new level of functionality to your web hosting control panel.

Spam is a real pain in the neck for both us and our customers. First, a little story about last week.

We noticed abnormal traffic coming into one our our mail servers and needed to investigate further. What was happening was this: Someone was spamming and using one of our domain names as a return address. This is quite common, but in this case it was a little more problematic than usual. The spammer puts a “from” address on their spam of xyz@whatever.com where xyz is usually a semi-random fictitious name. They then send their spam to hundreds of thousands or more email addresses. In many cases these addresses are for non-existent, closed, or full mailboxes and so the receiving server sends a non-delivery report to the “from” address - which in this case was for a domain on our network. But, because the first part of the from address was xyz or whatver, the mailbox didn’t exist on our server, so of course our mail server dutifully tries to send another non-delivery report. The result is a mess!

For a while, there was so much traffic (in excess of 100,000 inbound messages) that our server started to reject inbound mails, which obviously included legitimate email. So, what could be done?

Well, from the firewall point of view, it would be easy to reject all connections from a single or a few external hosts, but these bounces were from servers all over the world, so this wasn’t feasible.

We also have some content filtering ability, but it wasn’t flexible enough to filter SMTP content and drop it before it hit the network.

We can enable a “catch-all” mailbox so our servers just accepts all inbound mail and dumps it into a temporary mailbox.

We can “ride-it out” because usually the spammer will use the domain for a while then move on to some other innocent target. Usually the ISP of the spammer sending the mail will suspend the account of the culprit following complaints from other ISPs - but in this case, the sender was using computers of unknowing end-users who were running mail relays unsuspectingly (ie the mail was originating from all around the world rather than a single ISPs mail servers).

We can divert the MX records to a seperate machine which temporarily accepts mail for the domain to relieve the load on the main mail servers.

In the end, we implemented a combination of the above and the effect was mitigated. It did mean that some customers had temporary issues sending mail and there were delays for some ligitimate inbound mail. Fortunately, the internet email systems works such that if a mail server has an issues delivering email first time around (i.e. the recipients mail server is down or otherwise unavailable), it will usually queue the mail for further delivery attempts in the future. If it can’t deliver the mail after a configurable number of attempts, it will at least bounce the mail to the sender with a non-delivery report explaining the problem. Therefore, no mail should ultimately be lost.

So, what are the lessons here? The main ones are:

1. Don’t use catch-all email addresses - they just end up as honey-pots for spam. Setup individual POP3 accounts, and if needs be aliases for these accounts as well. This can all be done through our control panel.
2. Make sure anti-virus software is up to date to keep your computer secure and stop it being used as a spam relay. A typical symptom of this is a significant slow-down in your internet connection speed. If you are worried you are an open relay there are several free tools on the internet you can use to check - if you are unsure, give us a call and we’ll check for you.
3. Use a router instead of a modem for your internet connection. By using a router, you are by default much more secure than by using a modem. With a router, your externally visible IP address is assigned to the router rather than you PC so it acts as a barrier. We will shortly be launching a store where you can purchase routers as well as other hardware.
4. Use spam protection - we offer a very advanced and reliable spam filtering system which really will make your inbox a happy place again! We will have some offers on this shortly.
5. From our point of view we have put in some additional procedures to deal with the problem when it happens again, as it surely will!

We host some pretty impressive sites, but as part of our contract with customers, we don’t disclose the URLs of sites we host without permission from the account owner. This is a shame, because some of the sites are fantastic examples of their genre, whether it’s full-on e-commerce sites generating huge revenues, to showcase Flash sites, music sites, database driven applications, affiliate sites, and of course some fantastics standards compliant web design.

So, with this in mind we are going to place a “Hosting Showcase” section on our new web site where we list some of the best web sites our customers own. We will be contacting applicable sites shortly to ask permission to add the listing then we’ll publish some of the best as soon as we can.

Eurofasthost.com was formed in April 1997, so 2007 is our tenth anniversary year! In internet terms this makes us pretty long-lived as web hosts and to celebrate we will have a number of events throughout the year. We are already planning a party around April time which will see us get together with our customers for a bit of a knees up.

Our customers are the key to this success, as well as our hard-working team, so it’s about time we said thank-you.

We are not sure what we will be doing yet, but watch this space!

We are in the process of reviewing all of our web hosting prices, and as part of this obviously take a look around at competitors. Comparing prices is not easy! There are providers at the “pile em high, sell it cheap” end of the market, and there are others with premium pricing. So, where are we in the market?

Well, we are basically in the middle. We provide real support, with real people providing real answers. And, most of our customers tend to be SMEs or web developers and reseller. So, we provide full telephone support during the day, as well as a 24-hour emergency support number. We also own and manage all of our own servers so we can go the extra mile to provide exactly what a customer needs.

We therefore offer what most SMEs want - a good reliable service, with real people (ie not a call centre) to talk to when things either go wrong, or a little help is needed. For our web design customers, we also offer the reassurance that we have developers in-house so when a programming query comes up, we are in a good position to help.

All of our packages provide the features most commonly used in modern web applications - many of the sites we host are in fact advanced web applications.

All of this means that our pricing should reflect the level of service provided and at the same time remain accessible. We will be launching a range of new packages reflecting this goal next week.

Well, it’s been a long time since we updated the Eurofasthost.com web site, and we have been somewhat sidetracked with offering a broadband service. So, we have the re-design in progress with a host of new packages and applications ready to go.

Our new shared hosting packages are, we believe, some of the best on the market, and will offer an excellent combination of price, support, and features. These will include many new application packs such as Wordpress, DotNetNuke, Oscommerce, Mambo, and phpBB. All of these are installable from the control panel with a few clicks.

The site should be live by Friday 19th January if all goes to plan.