Ever wondered how the volume of snail mail compared to the volume of email?

Infographic from Pingdom.

[Thanks to Nerds Hosting team leader  Jonathan Arnoldussen for this post]

Lethbridge Nerds On Site team leader Chris Polis talks to two University of Lethbridge students.

Today, I was at the University of Lethbridge‘s annual Career Fair. Helping out at the booth today were Chris Polis, from Lethbridge, and Brad Racette, from the Calgary area. We were meeting with many prospective eNerds from the massive population of the University, of which I’m an alumnus.

Do you have a serious interested in the possibility of becoming a Nerd? Visit www.iwantobeanerd.com for more information!

This is part two of what was to be a two-part series, but there was just too much to say about backups that it will take several installments to cover all the important points. Some Nerds will have a full understanding of every point I cover and some non-Nerds will find it overly complex. In the end, I hope it will help everyone understand that backup, especially server backup, IS complex. Every Nerd should understand backups and every Small and Medium Enterprise should understand that they need an expert to manage their backup plan.

The value of data is almost always underestimated and protecting it adequately requires careful planning and an investment of time and money. There are free backup programs and some server backup software costs over $1000, $2000, or more for a single server license. No one wants to pay that much money for something they could get for free, so we have to understand why not all backup software is the same.

In the first installment, I talked about the risks to data and how data replication protects against hardware failure, but not against data corruption or data deletion. I also talked about “snapshots” or restore points as being useful for restoring the state of a drive to a previous point in time, but these are not, in themselves, a substitute for a backup.

There are two main types of backups, and they serve different purposes. Typically, you want to use both.

The first type of backup is an “image” backup. It is a bit-for-bit copy of an entire disk or partition. It is for disaster recovery – it can be used to recover the entire system to the same or another hard drive. This is referred to as a “bare metal” restore because it requires no prior installation of any operating system or other files in order to complete recovery. In theory, the best way to make a backup image is by booting the computer from a CD, a USB drive, or some other partition other than the one you want to image. That way, none of the files on the partition will be “open”. Open files are files that are in use and locked by the operating system. This may prevent them from being copied. Many backup programs can image a Windows partition that is in use, though, using a Windows service called the Volume Shadow Copy service. This allows creation of an image from within the operating system running on the partition.
Some backup software can even restore the image to a virtual machine or a computer which has different hardware. This is an advanced feature found in more expensive backup programs. The restore process must install generic hardware drivers, scan the system for hardware devices, and then locate and install the appropriate drivers.

1. Time – creating an image of the entire drive and restoring from an image can take a long time.
2. Efficiency – image backups copy every bit and byte on the drive, even those parts that rarely or never change. It is extremely inefficient to keep making new copies files that do not change
3. Rollback – restoring from an image restores ALL files to a point in time. This may “undo” operating system updates that you do not want to “roll back”.
There is much more to talk about with regard to backing up. Here are some more points to consider:
- Data backups – why they are different from image backups and why you NEED BOTH
- Backup file types – single file vs. individual files and proprietary standard file formats
- Full backups vs. differential backups vs. incremental backups
- File-level backups vs. block-level backups
- Server backups (why server backup is so hard and why server backup software is so expensive)
- Why you would (or would not) use compression and encryption
- Strategies for data retention (how may versions do you need to keep)
- Backup media (from USB drives to robotic tape libraries)
- Special advanced features (such as the ability to mount images as drives)

Earlier this week I wrote an article referring to a recent Pingdom survey of DNS records. It was discovered that over 2/3 of all websites suffer from some DNS issues. Perhaps you might be wondering just what types of problems your website might have if your DNS records aren’t correct.

One common problem that our team has been noticing is the inability of some mail system (including ours) to successfully deliver email to a domain with invalid DNS settings, specifically a domain with invalid MX records. Allow me to explain a few of those terms. First, every domain name that has email services must have a MX record setup in their DNS Zone. The DNS Zone tells other computers where your email, website and other hosted services are. MX records (Mail eXchange records) tell other mail servers where to deliver your email.

If your MX records aren’t setup correctly, you will find that you will no longer receive some or all of your email. If you are having a problem receiving email, even if this is a new issue, you should first check to ensure that your DNS zone is clean. Improperly setup MX records can work for a while, and even work with some mail providers, but over time more and more mail providers will cease delivering to your mail server.

Nerds On Site offers free DNS analysis services, and if you are hosted with us, we’ll help you fix it free of charge! Contact our team today to ensure that your DNS Zone is setup correctly!

Did you know that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser market share has sunk to its all-time-low in April, at under 60 percent, as reported by NetApplications statistics?

NetApplications browser market share statistics for April 2010.

Fun Fact #1: Who remembers Netscape? Yes, way back when dial-up was all the rave. Anyways it has been over 10 years since IE won over them.

Fun fact #2: IE has just released Internet Explorer 9 Beta

Revenue increases with uptime

You can have the best website in the world, but if it isn’t up, what good is it? While you might struggle to put an exact dollar figure on the cost of downtime for your business, you know it’s there. Every moment that your website is down is time that client’s can’t learn about your company, can’t contact you for information or sales and damage to your reputation increases.

GoDaddy is a very popular hosting platform, accounting for approximately 22% of the hosting market according to intac.com. Established in 1997, GoDaddy is now well known for their racy commercials and GoDaddy girls. GoDaddy offers domain registration services as well as shared hosting offerings.

The first difference between Nerds On Site and GoDaddy from an uptime perspective is GoDaddy’s reluctance to publish their availability statistics, making it difficult for a prospective client to properly evaluate their offerings, and raising the question of trust. If a company hides their uptime statistics, can you trust them? How would you know if your website was up or not? As a business owner, you have better things to do than monitor your website, and with Nerds On Site you can simply follow our Twitter feed or watch our trust site for all the information you need.

We are left to explore GoDaddy’s possible uptime through third-party tools, which are not as accurate as the company’s internal numbers must be. However, besthostratings.com reports that GoDaddy has maintained a 99.971% uptime ranking since 2005. This translates to 3 nines of uptime, which is short of the 4 nines of uptime that Nerds On Site has been providing to our clients all year.

When choosing a web host, you can trust Nerds On Site over GoDaddy to keep your website up. Our uptime stats are a full level higher than GoDaddy, and we publish our uptime statistics. Contact us today to learn how we can improve your online revenues!

Smarter Scanner – Threats don’t always enter your network in ways you expect. ESET NOD32 Antivirus for Mac intelligently scans compressed files to find hidden threats other products miss. Proactive protection begins at the earliest point in system startup to ensure your computer is always secure. Cross platform protection detects Mac, Windows and Linux malware.

You may think that the Mac does not need an anti-virus, since they don’t get viruses very often, but the fact is that any computer needs antivirus software because they are connected to the internet. The Mac is gaining market share, and although it is a small target, it is a target. It’s important to have antivirus software. If you don’t have software telling you that your computer is infected, there’s no way you will know.

If you’d like this setup on your Mac, do not hesitate to call us at 1-877-696-3737! 

[thanks to Nerd Jim Humphrey for inspiring this post]

Some of you may be using Bell mail or Sympatico mail and are getting undeliverable mail messsages saying that Hotmail has detected unusual activity on your accounts, and that your account has been temporarily disabled. Another symptom is that you can receive mail but can’t send. This is an issue with some email clients and the Bell mail servers (outsourced to Hotmail).

Resetting the mail account password will temporarily fix it but the problem will persist. Don’t waste your time trying to fix the problem. Call Bell tech support first. It will save you quite a bit of wasted time. You can reach them at numbers here: http://support.bell.ca/en-ON/Customer_service/Contact_us/

According to a report released by Pingdom on September 9th, over 66% of all websites have potential DNS issues, and these issues can lead to your website and email being inaccessible by some or all of the Internet.

Test results from their report:

• 31% passed with flying colors, all tests ok.
• 29% passed, but with at least one warning, i.e. not necessarily an error, but some setting (or lack thereof) that could potentially cause a problem.
• 34% passed with at least one error detected, i.e. with some setting that doesn’t work or is incorrect.
• 6% had really critical errors, i.e. were completely broken in one way or another.

As you can see, a full 40% of the tests had errors of some kind in them.

Nerds On Site offers free DNS analysis reports for your website, so contact us today to get your free report! If you host with Nerds On Site, we’ll also help fix the problem for free!

When you’re a hosting client with Nerds On Site, you can sleep easy at night. Each client has the peace of mind of knowing that if a problem occurs with their website, their primary Nerd is quickly made aware of it, and so is the Hosting Team.

Whether an issue is minor or major, the client receives an email or phone call from their primary Nerd alerting them to the situation and what has or was done to resolve it.

If you have questions or concerns, you can email the hosting team directly at hosting@nerdsonsite.com, but we strongly prefer that clients first contact their primary Nerd. No need to waste time waiting on hold or go through a long and frustrating typical tech support phone call.

Customer support is very important to us, which is why we provide multiple ways to get a hold of our team. You’re busy, and we know that, so we make it our priority to address any concerns you may have as quickly as possible.

If an issue does arise, your Nerd will contact our entire Hosting Team, who will quickly look into it and provide a solution. This means that our entire team is made aware of any problems, not just one individual, making the process far more efficient.

We can arrange for a live Skype discussion to address any concerns or questions, and to ensure that there is not any confusion. You won’t find that kind of personable approach with any other company.

We keep your Nerd involved because when he/she removes himself/herself from being involved, they lose the confidence and respect of the client, and that’s not a situation we want to be a part of.

This is a strict guideline of ours because your Nerd knows your technology and business, so it only makes sense to keep them involved. This allows your Nerd to shape the direction of the conversation, allowing for much better customer service and satisfaction.

Your satisfaction with our services will allow us to succeed and provide better service and support to our clients. Help us support you by making use of our team approach through our team email address and by first contacting your primary Nerd.