Exploding Inbox (CNET)

For many business people, their email inbox is a drag on their productivity. Massive amounts of email – and much of it useless – causes many to loathe checking their email, or it causes many others to stay glued to their inbox just to stay on top of it. The CEO of a large European-based tech firm hates email so much that he is attempting to actually ban it for his 74,000 world-wide employees. Blogs (including Forbes last week) are full of ideas on how to manage your inbox, and most of these ideas serve no real purpose other expounding the problem (in this author’s humble opinion.)

I personally get far in excess of a thousand emails sent to me every day, and yet many of my colleagues are surprised to find that my inbox generally doesn’t require scrolling on a MacBook Air. I thought I’d add my voice to the chorus preaching about clean inboxes, and share some of my tips to keep your inbox clean.

Spam Protection
The very first step is to have really, really good spam protection, what we would call enterprise-grade spam protection. It used to be that really good spam protection was quite costly, but that cost has been coming down quickly over the past years, to the point that today you can actually get it for very little or nothing at all with a good hosting package. According to SpamCop.net, on average 14.6 spam messages were sent every second during the last year. According to Symantec, about 73% of all email is spam, and by cutting out that volume, you’ve already saved yourself the vast amount of email coming to your inbox.

Now, you probably already have a spam filter, provided by your current email provider. How good is it? Are you still getting a few dozen spam emails each day? Then it’s time to cut those out. Nerds On Site provides spam filtering by SpamExperts with all of our shared hosting account. SpamExperts is a fantastic enterprise-grade spam filter, which claims 99.98% of spam is stopped by their system with only a 0.0001% false positive rate. By adding such a spam filter to your system, you can cut down on almost all the garbage you get on a daily basis.

OHIO
No, not the state – it’s an acronym, standing for Only Handle It Once. This is a method that I stumbled upon a year ago or so, and it’s a magnificent way to deal with most of the remaining legitimate email that is coming into your inbox. Every day, a large portion of your inbox is filled up with emails that come frequently, repeating themselves nearly every day. It’s time to find a way to stop all of them! Here are a few examples and fixes, and you can apply these to your own particular circumstances.

First up is newsletters. We all seem bombarded with newsletters, whether they are daily, weekly or monthly. Most, if not all of them are newsletters we no longer want, no longer remember signing up for or are borderline spam themselves. Unsubscribe! All legitimate newsletters have a unsubscribe link at the bottom, and if they got past your excellent spam filter, they are almost certainly not a phishing link. In nearly 100% of the cases, once you unsubscribe from a newsletter, the company sending them will immediately honour your request and will stop sending them to you.

Next up is automated reports. Many of us seem to get a constant stream of automated reports from such services as MLS listing services, daily deal services, equipment monitoring alerts, etc. In many cases, you can change this flood of alerts to only alert you when something critical is happening, or to send you a daily summary of these reports instead of each individual report one at a time. For example, I’ve read that Groupon has a setting where you can request to only get one summary email per day instead of an individual email for every deal. One other example is reports that you simply don’t need to action, or that shouldn’t have been sent to you in the first place because you should have taken action. A perfect example of this is a ticketing system or a project management system in which a team is working on the same project or ticket. Every notice how every time an alert goes out to the person who ‘had the ball’ you get copied on it? See my Outlook Rules tip below for ideas on solving that.

My last example ties in closely with the automated reports example, but is slightly different. I’ve dealt with many professionals that have great monitoring services watching everything from the health of a computer to the health of a piece of equipment. Many times when the system alerts them to a problem that isn’t critical, they leave it to deal with it later. The problem is that we are all so busy we put off this ‘non-critical’ tasks, and suddenly we find ourselves with many, many repeats of the same alert. Now multiply this across all the systems you are monitoring, and you can quickly see how hundreds of items in your inbox are just copies of the same ‘non-criticial’ alert. Here’s the fix – start getting into the mindset that every single alert is critical. You need to find a way to NEVER get that alert again. This might mean hiring someone to permanently fix it, or fixing it yourself. Either way – by fixing the ROOT cause of the alert, you’ll ensure that you no longer get that email in your inbox.

Outlook Rules
Now this tip might take an IT’s help to accomplish (did I mention we can help?), but it’s extremely powerful. Microsoft’s Outlook application is very popular for business email use (and is this author’s personal recommendation for an email program over anything else) and it contains a very powerful email rule system. I won’t go into any depth on specific rules, but consider the remaining email in your inbox. Is any of it legitimate email that actually requires you to take no action at all? Consider writing a rule to automatically delete it before you even see it. You can also write rules to automatically move certain emails into a subfolder, or flag certain emails as important. For example, you may want to flag all emails from your company’s CEO as important so that your eye is immediately drawn to it when you look at your inbox. However, I find the most powerful use of this tool is to automatically delete duplicate copies of email. Many of us find ourselves on multiple company mailling lists, and frequently the same email is sent to all of these mailling lists. You can write an intelligent Outlook rule to automatically delete all but one of these duplicate emails.

No one rule will solve YOUR email woes, but our team can certainly help you find the perfect combination for your business. Nerds On Site works hard every day to increase your Productivity, Profitability and Pleasure through technology. Get in touch today and learn how we can make inbox frustration a thing of the past!

When choosing a new hosting company for your corporate website, knowing your needs is crucial. So say all the blogs that attempt to help you find the perfect web host. But, what if you don’t know your hosting needs precisely? What happens if you don’t KNOW what your hosting needs will be next month, next quarter, next year? What happens if your business explodes? Will you have time to understand your new needs, and find a new hosting provider to meet those needs? What happens if you just don’t understand hosting, and just want to get back to running your own business?

Nerds On Site has a solution: Unlimited Hosting. Unlimited hosting is much simpler than it seems – in fact, it simply means that you no longer have to worry about overage charges, upgrading plans, or switching providers because you outgrew your current provide. Unlimited Hosting means you’re with a company that is ready for your growth spurt, that understands that getting listed on Digg shouldn’t mean your site goes down for the rest of the month, that wants to help you grow your website traffic but doesn’t want to charge you more when you are successfull.

Contact our team to learn how we can take web hosting off of your ‘worry list’. http://www.nerdsisp.com/contact-us.html

Over the past 7 days, we’ve tried to explain some of the features of our NerdCare Assurance packages. We’ve talked about our monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, hack detection, preventative maintenance and content updates, and these are just the major points in our Assurance packages.

Our packages are designed to increase your Productivity, Pleasureability and Profitability, and in addition to our pre-packaged Bronze and Silver solutions we offer customized packages for your unique needs. All of our packages include guaranteed response times and flat rates to allow your business easily budget. Since downtime and recovery due to hacking can cost thousands of dollars per incident, our Assurance packages give you peace of mind with flat rate costs.

If the information we’ve shared over the past few days hasn’t already clearly showed the lengths we are willing to go for our clients, consider this. All clients covered by our Silver package will be contacted by a member of our team at least once a month to ensure that we are doing all we can for your website and your business. Imagine your current hosting provider initiating contact once a month to make sure that all your needs are being met!

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

In our continuing series on Hosting NerdCare Assurance, we want to mention an incredible feature of our Silver package. Monthly content updates allow your business to simply shift the responsibility and burden of updating your website to our team, freeing up you and your staff to work on other aspects of the business.

A regularly updated website receives a higher ranking with the search engines, and naturally attracts more traffic. Clients will only visit websites that present them with fresh information on a regular basis. While the responsibility for creating that content remains yours, our NerdCare package will mean that you no longer have to perform the work required to upload it to your website.

Our team can take your new information, such as new products, photos, contact details, team members, blog entries and much more, and upload it to your website on your behalf. Having a team perform this service for you results in you having more time to devote to the other aspects of your business. Now, when you create a new newspaper advertisement, you just have to provide it to our team, and it will be copied on your website as well.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

In our continuing series on Nerds On Site’s Hosting NerdCare Assurance, I would like to talk about our preventative maintenance provisions in our Silver NerdCare package. As a Pembrokeshire proverb says, “Eat an apple on going to bed, And you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.”

CMS-based websites, such as Joomla, Drupal and WordPress have become very popular. Due to their popularity, however, they have become a prime target for hackers. Generally speaking, if a hacker can determine a vulnerability in one of these technologies, they can write a worm that automatically search for and hacks all other websites built on the same CMS.

The developers behind all the popular Content Management Systems work hard at releasing updates to their product to combat this hacking activity. However, this becomes an extreme inconvenience to many clients, both because you just want to focus on running your business, and also because some of these patches can take advanced technical knowledge to deploy. Our Silver NerdCare package covers all these updates, and our team will patch your website as they are released. This procedure allows us to close all known vulnerabilities in your website before hackers can take advantage of them.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

While all the pieces and tools in our Hosting NerdCare package work together and are equally vital to your piece of mind, our hack detection system does stand out in the industry for its uniqueness. At the time of this blog, we are not aware of another company offering a product even close to ours, and the benefit to you over your competition is really quite amazing.

Clients protected by our Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have their website scanned every hour of every day. In a nutshell, our system will take cryptographic signatures of every single file in your website, and compare them on an hourly basis. If a hacker manages to change even one bit in one of your files, our team will be immediately notified of the change, and we can swing into action. The vast majority of business owners only find out that their site was compromised once Google or Badaware.org block their site, and once that happens, it can literally take weeks to reverse the damage and have the site back up and running.

Nerds On Site’s Assurance packages allows for our team to know the moment a breach is made, and equally as important, we are notified as to which exact file was compromised. This level of detail allows us to repair the damage before anyone knows about it, ensuring that your site isn’t blacklisted.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

Yesterday, in our continuing series on NerdCare Assurance, we wrote about the depth and breadth of our backup procedures for our NerdCare clients. Today we want to talk for moment about why we want those backups.

Every day, over 3500 business websites are hacked. With the sheer number of servers world-wide hosting websites, inevitably one is crashing at any given moment. While Nerds On Site takes every precaution to protect against every conceivable threat and risk for our hosting clients, it is still best to plan for the worst.

As part of our Assurance packages, Nerds On Site will restore any damage to your site by utilizing our backup system. Since data restores on our system are generally measured in seconds, it’s usually the quickest way to recover from a disaster, no matter how large or small.

Consider the following scenario – one of your employees is logged into your website, making some minor changes. Suddenly, and quite by accident, this employee deletes a file, or perhaps a folder. Now your website is possibly inactive, or missing crucial information your clients need. With another provider you would then have to go through the old procedure of calling them up, waiting on hold, and hoping that they have a backup of the data. Inevitably, if you find that they do have a backup, it will cost you money to restore the data, and perhaps take upwards of 24 hours while they look through their tapes for the information. At Nerds On Site, a quick phone call to your dedicated Nerd, or a quick email to our dedicated team, and the damage is restored free of charge.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

Today, in our continuing series on our NerdCare Assurance packages, I would like to talk about backing up a website. Most businesses would be amazed to learn that their hosting provider does not backup their website, as there seems to be a prevailing belief that all hosting providers backup everything. Your hosting provider may even explicitly claim that they backup your website, but have you inquired as to what exactly they are backing up?

As part of all our Hosting NerdCare Assurance packages, Nerds On Site will backup everything related to your website, including all databases, email and web files. However, we go much further than this, and actually take a bare-metal backup of the server that you are hosted on. When a server goes down, due to hardware failure, hacking or any other reason, it can take days to rebuild and re-configure them. This is downtime that is extremely costly to your business. Our bare-metal backups allow us to simply replace and restore the server, while skipping all the other time-consuming steps others have to perform.

This level of support translates really resulting a protection of your image and brand, as well assuring the quickest possible response times and smallest amount of downtime. At the end of the day, Hosting NerdCare Assurance will have a direct effect on your bottom line, by ensuring that your website is up all the time!

There is an alarming trend in the hosting industry, one that has been building for quite some time but is now starting to accelerate and permeate all areas of the trade. Almost every industry rag you pick up today will cheer on the ‘commoditization’ of hosting, talking about how the cost of hosting is dropping steadily, almost to the point of being free. Unfortunately, no one is asking at what expense this trend is happening, and as competitors lower their prices, other hosting companies feel obligated to find areas where they too can shave some costs.

I remember a conference I attended in Washington, DC. two years ago, and I happened to have a chat with two representatives from a major US hosting provider. These ambassadors for their company were all too eager to brag to me about the many thousands of clients they were able to stuff on one machine, keeping their costs as low as possible. This virtual approach to cheek-by-jowl living hurts both the clients and the hosting companies in the long run, as thousands of clients are forced to share the meager resources of the cheapest servers the hosting provider could slide into a rack.

Another way companies try to save money is with cheap ‘white-label’ servers, which are not built with quality name-brand parts, carry no warranty, and break down far more frequently than their more expensive, name-brand counterparts. Google is famous for using such machines, but their setup is significantly different, as every machine is redundant to every other machine, and thus the failure of one server does not affect anyone.

Business clients looking for a place to host their website need to remember that price should be far down the list of things they look for. Compare hosting to the hiring of an employee. When searching for that new employee, you will first weed through a stack of submitted resumes, looking for a short list of suitable, qualified, professional looking candidates. This is much like the process of reading hosting providers’ websites for information on their services. Next, you will interview this short list, probing the candidate to see if he or she will be the best possible fit for your business. As you select an employee based first on her qualifications, so should you select a hosting provider based on their qualifications.

If a hosting provider is one of the cheapest providers in the industry, remember to ask what corners had to be cut to achieve that price level. It is somewhat disingenuous for a hosting provider to tell you that volume is what led to their price reductions, as volume generally means the company was able to stuff more clients per server than anyone else out there. In a future article I will tell you a few qualifications that you should look out for when choosing a new hosting provider for your business.