Our clients are busy trying to run their business. Why should you have to worry about silly ‘little’ things like the status of your domain name? The Bay Citizen (a non-profit San Francisco area newspaper) is in disarray these days, what with merger talks and the recent death of their founder. Their domain name was with GoDaddy, and they naturally had more important things to focus on than what their domain name was doing. Sadly, all was not well, and they failed to renew their domain, whereupon it expired and their website went down.

Nerds On Site works day by day to remove these type of stresses from a client’s life. Don’t you have enough to worry about? With Nerds On Site, all domain name are AUTOMATICALLY renewed and constantly managed. We don’t ask a client if they want to keep their domain, we don’t wait for approval or authorization or for you to take a few moments out of their day to understand what the Nerds want this time – we just protect your domain. Also AUTOMATIC, INCLUDED and FREE is domain locking (to prevent unauthorized individuals from stealing the domain) and WHOIS Privacy for supported domains (to help prevent theft and spammers).

If you don’t currently have your domains with Nerds On Site, consider the differences we offer.  Sure, our domains are a few pennies a month more expensive than a GoDaddy domain, but isn’t it worth it to prevent this level of embarrassment?  http://jimromenesko.com/2012/02/03/proof-that-the-bay-citizen-is-in-disarray/

Our team continues to work hard on ways to make our hosting packages more understandable and easy to purchase.  One change we have just made is to rename our hosting packages.  Previously, we had a ‘Basic’ hosting package, upon which you then could add ‘Bronze NerdCare’ or ‘Silver NerdCare’.

Our new matrix has the ‘Basic’ hosting package, just like previously, and now the new ‘Business’ hosting package, which is the same as the previously named Basic hosting + Bronze NerdCare.  For existing clients, the new names will take effect for your March billing period.

This change comes quickly on the heels of another improvement we made last week, which was to include WHOIS Protection free of charge for all support domains.  Many exciting changes are happening, so get in touch with our team and see how we can help YOUR business!

It’s been a few months since we posted our email settings, and we’ve moved blog locations a few times, so it may be difficult to find the original posts.  Here again are our shared email settings.  These are the only settings that we currently support.

POP SETTINGS
Incoming Mail Server: mail.nerdsisp.com
SSL: yes
Port: 995

IMAP SETTINGS
Incoming Mail Server: mail.nerdsisp.com
SSL: yes
Port: 993

SMTP SETTINGS
Outgoing Mail Server: mail.nerdsisp.com
SSL: yes
Port: 465
Outgoing authentication must be turned on.

Webmail is available exclusively at https://mail.nerdsisp.com.

When selling our clients hosting services, Nerds On Site strives to keep the process as streamlined and intuitive as possible.  In the web hosting and domain registration world there are a lot of options, and this can get confusing.  One such option is ID Protect, also known as WHOIS Protection.  This valuable service hides your public WHOIS information, such as your name, address and phone number from spammers and Internet thieves.  By hiding this information, you make it much harder for thieves to try to steal your domain name.

Once an add-on service, ID Protect is now included free of charge with every new supported domain registration!  For every new com, net, org, biz, info, name, tv, cc, me, Nerds On Site will automatically turn on ID Protect to keep your domain even safer than before.

Without ID Protect, spammers can obtain your email and contact information and then use it for spamming purposes and redistribution to marketing firms. Your email address can stay on file with various spammers and marketing firms for years. Check out the difference between an unprotected and protected domain registration.

If your website goes down, it’s more than frustrating – it can damage your reputation and cost you money.  Even the ‘big boys’ struggle with downtime, as this fascinating infographic shows.  This infographic was brought to you by KISSmetrics.  Click here to see this graphic in full size.

About two years ago, Nerds On Site implemented a strong password policy for all our email users.  Because of todays technology it’s become trivial to “crack” weak passwords, it’s too easy for malicious software and people to take control of email accounts – this means someone could send emails from your account without your knowledge. By strengthening your password, you’re reducing the risk.

It’s easy to reset your password – go to https://mail.nerdsisp.com and enter your email address and current password.  Once you’re logged in, the system will prompt you for a new, stronger password – the system will let you know if it’s a good password or not. Try to chose something that will be easy to remember, or maybe write it down in a safe place (Hint: don’t leave it taped to the side of your screen.)

If you use Outlook, or Mac Mail, or another email client on your computer, you will need to update it to use the new password you’ve just chosen.

To help you with this, here’s a step-by-step video to guide you.

For fun, do you wonder just how weak your current password is? Check out security guru, Steve Gibson’s password tester: https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm.

Remember, strong passwords don’t guarantee that your email won’t get hacked, but it is a big step towards better protection.

Here’s an amusing article about just how weak (and common) some password are: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/service-oriented/security-101-users-still-using-extremely-weak-passwords/8003.

Our NerdCare Assurance plans are very popular with our clients, and we’ve prepared this little video to show you how you can easily add NerdCare assurance to your website if you don’t already have it.

Nerds On Site believes in openness and transparency, and this is especially important in our hosting availability statistics. We have long hired an outside company to monitor our services and to provide direct statistics to our clients and the public, to ensure that these statistics are honest, fair and open. Pingdom is a very trusted source of monitoring, and they watch all our systems closely, providing publicly available statistics at trust.nerdsisp.com.

The month of December (2011) was a particularly good month for our hosting services, in large part because of our new relation with SpamExperts that started in November. During the month of November, our team integrated the SpamExperts filtering service into our mail systems, giving us a huge leap forward in spam filtering and mail reliability. This new reliability is reflected in our numbers for December, and we fully believe to see even better numbers in January.

Availability Statistics for December, 2011

IMAP: 99.99%
POP: 99.97%
SMTP (inbound): 100%
SMTP (outbound): 99.95%
Shared Web Hosting: 99.98%

All our hosting clients are protected from spam by our relationship with SpamExperts, and their system is quite good indeed. However, even the best system occasionally allows spam through, and this article will help you to report any email that you think is spam directly to SpamExperts. This will allow SpamExperts to analyse the email, determine the reasons that it escaped their notice and adjust their filter to better protect you.

In the Spampanel web interface we have a “Report Spam” function. You can upload a spam message to train the spamfilter. It is in a ‘drag ‘n’ drop’ style feature meaning you can save the SPAM email to your system, then drag and drop the email into the “Report Spam” area. Currently only the .eml format is supported.

For .msg format you can use the free “Outlook Email client add-on” to report spam which was not correctly blocked by the SpamExperts systems. More information about these can be found here.

If you’re using Thunderbird you can also use the free “Mozilla Thunderbird client addon“. More information about this addon can be found here.

If your email client is not supported, it is possible to report spam by forwarding the spam email(s) as attachment to a special address spamreport@spamrl.com. All messages attached in .eml format will be processed by this system.

We have planned some mail server maintenance for New Year’s Eve. On December 31, 2011, we will be taking down our mail system for a few hours starting at 8PM EST (Toronto/New York). We do not have an estimate on the duration of the downtime, but do fully expect it to be completed within 4 -6 hours. As always, updates will be shared on our Twitter feed (@nerdshosting). All mail will be spooled by SpamExperts and then immediately delivered after the server is backup.