On Tuesday, Nerds On Site announced our new geographically redundant DNS system, and made it a standard option for all our shared hosting clients. This is the third in a series of three articles on geographically redundant DNS, designed to answer the What, Where and Why of our new service.

You may be wondering where you can get geographically redundant DNS for your online business. All clients that are hosted with Nerds On Site are automatically protected by this service. Is your website currently protected by geographically redundant DNS? Our team will give you an absolutely free analysis of your website’s DNS service. All you have to do is email our Hosting Team, and include your website address. Our team will quickly get back to you with the results of our analysis. Click here to check your website for free!

On Tuesday, Nerds On Site announced our new geographically redundant DNS system, and made it a standard option for all our shared hosting clients. This is the second in a series of three articles on geographically redundant DNS, designed to answer the What, Where and Why of our new service.

Why is geographically redundant DNS crucial for your business? Two days ago, Media Temple (one of North America’s largest hosting provider with nearly 1 million domains under management) suffered a 2 hour and 5 minute period of downtime because of an attack on their DNS system. While MediaTemple has redundant DNS servers, their servers are not geographically redundant, making them much more susceptible to attack.

There are many types of disasters that can hit a server, such as hardware failures, power outages, network outages, hacking attempts, denial of service attacks and many others. Many of these issues will affect all servers in a single physical location, such as multiple servers in the same data center. By placing redundant servers in geographically separate places (one in Canada, one in the United States) Nerds On Site is able to prevent the widest possible array of issues, including issues that take down our competitors on a regular basis.

By hosting with Nerds On Site, and having your DNS protected by our geographically redundant system, you know that you are getting the best possible reliability for your business. Contact our team today, by phone: 1-877-MY-NERDS, or by email: http://nerdsisp.com/contact-us.html.

Yesterday, Nerds On Site launched our new geographically redundant DNS system, and made it a standard option for all our shared hosting clients. This is the first in a series of three articles on geographically redundant DNS, designed to answer the What, Where and Why of our new service.

You may be wondering just what exactly geographically redundant DNS is? First, let’s explain what DNS is. DNS stands for the ‘Domain Name System’, which is a naming system for computers, websites and any resource connected to the Internet. DNS is the system that enables your browser to find your website, and enables your clients to find your website. DNS is usually invisible; it works in the background to make the Internet work and come alive on your computer. What’s important to understand is the DNS supports your website, your FTP access, your email and any other hosted service that you have. If your DNS service fails for any reason, your website and email will immediately stop working for you and all your clients.

The majority of all hosting providers provide a single DNS system to all their hosted clients. Like many reputable hosting providers, Nerds On Site provides a redundant DNS system that creates a new level of redundancy for our clients. This means that if one DNS server fails, our redundant DNS server instantly and seamlessly takes over, ensuring that clients can still find your website and can still send emails to you.

Nerds On Site goes well beyond redundancy however, by providing geographical redundancy. This service means that our redundant DNS servers are located in another data center from our primary DNS servers. In fact, Nerds On Site has located our redundant servers in another country completely from our primary servers, thus guaranteeing that no issue can take down both servers simultaneously. This means that our clients are protected even in the event of a full data center failure, which is a service that is especially rare in the industry.

DNS is the service that ensures the world can find your business online, and if you host with Nerds On Site you’ll know that your DNS service will simply work, allowing you to immediately forget just what DNS is in the first place. Contact our team, and learn how we can increase your website’s reliability and availablility.

The Nerds On Site Hosting Team is proud to announce that we have launched our new geographically redundant DNS system, and are providing this new service absolutely free of charge to all of our hosting clients, both new and old. Our team is working hard to add this new service to every one of our existing clients, and is nearly done upgrading all hosting accounts. All new hosting accounts with Nerds On Site will automatically be protected by our new DNS service, which provides unprecedented levels of reliability and stability for all our hosting clients.

While geographically redundant DNS is not a first in the hosting industry, it is very rare, especially in the shared hosting world. Over the next few days, we will be posting a 3 part series of articles on geographically redundant DNS, answering the What, the Where and the Why. You will be able to read this series on our blog at http://nerdsonsite.com/blog/online-services/hosting, or you can subscribe to our feed at http://www.twitter.com/nerdshosting to be immediately updated as we post new articles.

Spring is here and the TO DO list is getting longer. Organize the garage, clean out the attic, weed the garden, clean up the computer… the computer?! Absolutely!

Besides the “dust bunnies” that are likely hibernating inside, there could also be viruses, malware and several unneeded files that are slowing your machine down.

Nerds On Site has got some solutions that will make computer systems run like new!
Have us visit to help with the spring cleaning – we will:

1. Scan the computer for Spyware and other forms of Malware. Spyware infects computer systems, hinders performance and threatens security.

2. Defrag the hard drive. Information can often be stored in multiple spots on the physical disk. Defragging works to move these fragmented files closer together on the hard drive reducing the amount of time the computer spends accessing each individual piece of data.

3. Clean up clutter. Cookie “crumbs” and the browsers cache often result in a slower running computer. Many browsers retain copies of websites visited for quick access during log on and cookies remember personal information. This can all place a burden on systems and clearing that information can encourage speedier performance. Clean up the system tray or taskbar on the bottom right corner of your screen. Those little icons are programs that automatically start up when you turn on your computer. Remove or turn off unnecessary ones with a right click of the mouse. Organize files, pictures and MP3s Documents, Photos and Music folders to keep them organized and eliminate the clutter on your desktop.

4. Remove all unused programs. If programs are not being used and there are no intentions of using them, just uninstall them. The more programs you run in the background while you work, the more RAM is needed to keep them running smoothly. Many programs run in the background even when not in use. Removal helps important programs run faster.

Right now, Nerds On Site is offering a Spring cleaning special, for $137.50, to help get your computer in squeaky clean condition.

Nerds On Site relieves the burden of tech problems giving people more time to do what they love!

While Nerds On Site cannot help organize garages, they can provide a variety of tech solutions. Nerds can offer system clean ups, network updates, software upgrades, etc. No matter the issue, local Nerds are the gateway to a network of Nerds worldwide with solutions to IT predicaments.

John Harbarenko

May 21, 2010

Do you need to manage inventory, keep track of when it came in and shipped for any given day. Do you need to look back and see what you shipped a client 4 months ago? We have a solution for you. This SaaS solution was written for clients in the farming industry who needed to track their produce. You can manage unlimited number of produce from the picking, selling, garbage and shipping stages. We can even customize this to fit your needs.

Take a look and give it a try. If we could make this work for you, email us

http://inventory.nerdsonsite.com

I included this item in a previous Security Corner article, but I wanted to make it the focus of this one. Several astute eNerds have sent me links to articles on this topic recently and I want to express my appreciation for their involvement.

The issue is simple and apparently has been a HUGE security hole for a long time, but went mostly unnoticed (at least by the security community, but perhaps not by the “bad guys“) until a few weeks ago. Most “high end” printers (and copiers, which typically also serve as scanners and printers), have hard drives in them to store images. This is a good feature and makes sense – it is a way to be able to go back and retrieve images for future use. This is also a way to “spool” print jobs as they come in until the copier/printer is able to print them.

These hard drives are typically accessible through the web-based management console, but many users seldom or never access these drives. Many do not even know that there is a hard drive in their printer or copier.

There is probably a LOT of sensitive information contained on that hard drive. If the unit is in a medical office, patient medical records have been printed and scanned. If the unit is in the offices of an insurance or financial services provider, or in a bank, or in the offices of a mortgage broker – well just think of the personal information that is scanned, faxed, and printed!!

This represents a significant risk, even while the unit is just sitting on the network, because most companies do not have this hard drive on their “access control” radar screen. The REALLY BIG problem, though, is that many businesses lease these units and replace them with newer ones when they go “off lease”. Where do those units go after the leasing company reclaims them? They are resold as used equipment – often at bargain prices, in bulk lots, and to buyers in other countries.

In a reasonable world, one would think the leasing companies would have the good sense to remove or replace these drives or wipe them securely before sending them on to a new home. NOT SO. It turns out that these units are often re-sold as-is, complete with all that juicy personal information on the drive for anyone to recover (steal).

So warn all your clients – when that unit goes out the door, everything that has been scanned, faxed, or printed (potentially during the entire life of the unit) may be going out with it. This is true for units that are going off-lease, being recycled, being donated, or just headed for the landfill

Lease agreements may prohibit the removal of the drive, and we ALL know that simply deleting the files does not remove them. Clients should insist on WRITTEN guarantees from the lessor that these drives will be securely erased before resale, recycling, or disposal.

Hard drives are not a new feature of these units, and one would have to assume that this problem has just gone unnoticed until recently. One would also have to HOPE that the recent publicity will spur some action (if only to avoid liability) on the part of the manufacturers and lessors of these units.

I was going to include some of the links that have been sent, but just “Google” “copier hard drive security risk” and you will get more than you will want to read / watch.

Dennis H in West Virginia, US

May 10, 2010

Software as a Service or (SaaS), is software that is NOT installed locally on a user’s device, but provided as a service over the internet. There is nothing to download and install, all you need is a web browser. An example of this is web mail, almost everyone has a Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo or other free online email account.

To access these, you log into the service on the respective companies site, you don’t need to install anything on your computer.

Benefits of SaaS include:

Lower Costs – no new software or hardware to purchase, all you need is a computer that runs a browsers

Painless Upgrades – nothing on your end is installed, so when a new version is rolled out, it’s handled on the servers end, not yours

Less Compatibility Issues – with a common desktop application, one user may have one set of files installed while another user has a completely different version. This may cause (and in my experience, always does) problems when installing your application. With a browser, everyone has one installed already, so they just log into the site.

Require Less In House Staff – if you only need a web browser, you don’t need staff resources to manage your computers, managing upgrades, patches or other IT related tasks.

We’ve already talked about our RAF Enterprising solution we offer, and over the next few posts we will show case various SaaS solutions we have to offer, such as inventory management and projectmanage-it.

Remember, you can always reach us at development@nerdsonsite.com

Joomla is a content management system (CMS) that gives the user full control of updating and modifying the content of their website in a easy to use interface .

Here are a few benefits to you:

Easily Change The Look – there are thousands of templates to choose from, so if you feel like changing the look of your site, it’s very easy

Hundreds of Plug Ins – want a photo gallery or E-commerce, there are plug ins already available for that, no need to have someone develop that for you

Don’t Need To Be an HTML Expert – you don’t need to know how to bold or underline text, add hyperlinks. The interface is easy to use that anyone can learn how to tweak the wording of any page.

In 3 easy steps we can have a company on its way to owning and managing its own professionally developed website.

1. Pick your own site name (www.yourcompany.com)
2. Choose a Joomla Template
3. Provide us your company logo and page(s) content


And if you don’t have time to manage your site, we offer a hosting NerdCare that includes such disaster recovery, hack detection, 24/7 monitoring of your website and best of all contact changes.

If we can help out, please email us at development@nerdsonsite.com

US Treasury Department

This latest high-profile attack is a perfect reminder of the vulnerability all websites face, and the importance of taking steps to protect your online business against hacking attempts. Nerds On Site offers NerdCare Assurance packages to our hosting clients that protect against just this sort of attack. Two parts of our Assurance package work hand in hand to protect you from hackers.

The first is our hack detection system – every our our system takes a cryptographic signature from each and every of the thousands of files in your website, and then compares those signatures against our database records of your clean website. If any change is noticed, our team is notified immediately, not just that someone has modified code in your website, but the exact spot the code was modified. If our team determines that your website was indeed hacked, they can immediately switch to our disaster recovery tool, also covered for free with your NerdCare Assurance plan. Our team will then know exactly which file to restore, immediately restoring your website to perfect, healthy operation.

There is no such thing as a hack proof website, as this latest incident with a government website proves. However, hosting your website with Nerds On Site, and protecting it with one of our NerdCare Assurance plans will give you protection unparalleled in the industry today. Contact us today to learn more!