The AJT Blog

Budget Hosting: You get what you pay for!

2007-05-18T21:40:00.000-04:00

This article talks about some of the problems thousands of website owners face when using a "Budget Web Host". Servers cost a considerable amount of money to run, the only way the budget host becomes profitable is by over-loading servers. At AJT our policy is to not over-load servers, infact our busiest web server has just 215 domains hosted. Compare that to the server discussed in this article which has over 1200 domains - no wonder they have problems!

Read Article Here: http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2007/05/03/dreamhost-sucks-at-hosting/

Remember, you get what you pay for!!! If it is too good to be true.....it usually is!

New Tutorials on the AJT Client Support Portal

2007-04-19T23:49:00.000-04:00

Our clients have been enjoying the tutorials located on the AJT Client Support Portal (www.ajtsupport.com) and we have had many requests for additional tutorials over the past year. We just completed the roll out of 40 new interactive help tutorials. We would like to think that the new tutorials go above and beyond "supporting our services" as they also educate our Clients on exciting things they can do without the need of an experienced web designer or programmer for everything they desire. Doing simple changes and management "in-house" saves our Clients hundreds of dollars (or more) per year.

Please be sure to check out the portal and click on "Help Documents". The new support tutorials will assist even the most novice user on how to do simple (and advanced) duties such as;

1. Navigating around the AJT web hosting control panel.
2. Creating and setting up new e-mail accounts at your domain.
3. Making simple changes in Dreamweaver MX
4. Transferring files (FTP) using a 3rd party FTP program.
5. Setting up and managing your shopping cart (osCommerce).
6. Setting up a vacation e-mail auto-responder.
7. Viewing your live website statistics.

....and much much more! Now over 75 tutorials available!

No time to make updates to your site?? NO WORRIES! Our team is always available to assist! Simply open a ticket on the portal for assistance.

Different Types of E-mail Service

2007-04-14T01:57:00.000-04:00

With technology constantly changing, there are always new services being made available. This is true with e-mail service as well. To help explain, we have broken down the main types of e-mail service in easy to understand terms to help you make the right decision as to what type of e-mail service your business should have. Please be aware that AJT can offer you any of the services below and/or make recommendations. Please contact our sales or support team for more information or specific questions.

POP3 E-Mail Service

This is pretty much the standard of business e-mail when you have your own domain name. This works best when you have just a few e-mail users and do not require any advanced services. With AJT this does include a free webmail interface for each user. There is no "per user" charge for POP accounts with AJT. The downfall is the fact that POP email normally runs on a single web server (rather than a cluster for redundancy as the more advanced services do) and there is no third party spam filtering service built in, however it can be added without issue.

Managed POP3/IMAP E-mail Service with Enterprise Level Spam Filtering

This is similar to the service listed above only it has the third party (or enterprise level) spam filtering built in that will capture 99% of spam. Besides spam filtering, the other big difference is this is ran off a clustered server environment - not a single web server so downtime is basically eliminated. You also get anywhere from 250mb to 2gb of storage space and a much better webmail interface, similar to Outlook. There is a per-email account fee for this service, usually under $5 per account depending on the size mailboxes you desire.

Managed and Hosted Exchange E-mail Service with Enterprise Level Spam Filtering

This (in our opinion) is the absolute best e-mail solution. It can get pricey as the price runs anywhere from $12 to $15 per month, per user, but it well worth it. Just like the above option, you get the enterprise level spam filtering and clustered server environment for a 99.99% uptime guarantee, however with exchange e-mail, a whole array of features come to life such as; unlimited storage, folder and document sharing, outlook calendar sharing, outlook exchange licensing, outlook web access (very cool - basically view your outlook exactly as it is on your computer from any computer with a Internet connection) and our personal favorite, online synchronization. If you have a Windows Mobile, PDA, Blackberry or other "Smart Phone" the exchange server will sync (over the cell signal) with your Outlook inbox, calendar and contacts. This is the ultimate for those of us that travel or are out of the office during business hours. You can also get a non-hosted Exchange server where you do not have to pay big fees per email user, but then you have to manage the server at your location (not for novices) as the connection redundancy will not be as good.

We hope this little bit of information sheds light! There are options for everyone and while one works great for one company, it might not work at all for another. If you have any questions about types of email, we welcome your questions.

Happy e-mailing!

Secure Password Techniques: Don't Fall Victim

2007-03-30T20:22:00.000-04:00

These days, just about everything we do on the Internet requires password usage in one form or another and password hijacking/hacking is on the rise. The "bad guys" run automated querying scripts that can crack simple passwords in just minutes. Whether the hacker is trying to crack your personal banking password or is trying to gain access to your email account, it can create an absolute nightmare. With a few simple techniques, you can almost 100% be certain that your personal information is safe and secure.

Since we deal with website and email hosting - let's talk a little about e-mail passwords.

One thing that many of our Clients forget is just how sensitive e-mail passwords are. Case in point, lets say a hacker is able to get your email password but he/she is not able to crack your banking password (because you made that one more secure). What they do is simply put in a request for a "lost password" and within minutes, they are logging into your bank, credit cards and stock portfolios. People forget how important your email password is! Allowing your email password to get hijacked is like handing a hacker a free pass to your finances and affairs. That is why we are sending this very important announcement to all of our Clients. Many of you are using very simple passwords and are at risk of being hacked. Hopefully this will help prevent disasters before they happen.

Over the past 60 days, we have seen a dramatic increase in e-mail account hijacking. In the cases we dealt with, the email password wasn’t cracked in an attempt to get into personal accounting information, but quite simply, it was hacked so that the hacker could use the account he/she hacked into to send spam to people all over the world. Two of the most recent instances, our clients passwords were of the simplest form. One of the passwords was "password" and the other password was "legal". These are dictionary terms and are very simple to crack. The spammer were able to send about 8,000 spam emails in 10 minutes time, at which point our technician saw something wrong and terminated the spamming session (and contacted the client with a new temporary password).

The problem here is, 8,000 messages were already sent. Instances like this put an entire web server and/or your domain name in risk of being blacklisted as a spamming server. Lucky for us, we have a standing agreement with all major providers (such as AOL, MSN and Yahoo) where they notify us of any spam generated from our network and give us the opportunity to rectify the issue without having to take action by means of blacklisting a server or domain name.

We cant even count the number of times that a client will re-set a perfectly good (random) password to something simple. So now is the time to think about security and change your password to something "safe and sound". So how can you make your password safe you ask? Very simple!

Following any one (or preferably more) of the tips below will ensure you have a secure password:

1. Make it lengthy - Each character that you add to your password increases the protection that it provides many times over. Your passwords should be 8 or more characters in length; 14 characters or longer is ideal.

2. Combine letters, numbers, and symbols - The greater variety of characters that you have in your password, the harder it is to guess. Keep in mind you can substitute a dollar sign for the letter "S" like this. Or try substituting the @ sign for the letter "A" or even a zero for the letter "O". Also mix in a capital letter - that one capital letter (randomly chosen) will make your password 3x more secure than a password without a capital letter.

3. Be creative! Try not to use a simple word, but something a little more complex. Then combine symbols as replacement for a few letters. You can make your password a "choice phrase" while making it a super-secure password. Good example the word "waterfall" as a password can be used like this: w@t3rF@l1. Miss-spelling words is also a really good technique.

You should avoid any of the following:

1. Avoid sequences or repeated characters. "12345678," "222222," "abcdefg," or adjacent letters on your keyboard do not help make secure passwords.

2. Avoid your login name. Any part of your name, birthday, social security number, or similar information for your loved ones constitutes a bad password choice. This is one of the first things criminals will try.

3. Avoid dictionary words in any language. Criminals use sophisticated tools that can rapidly guess passwords that are based on words in multiple dictionaries, including words spelled backwards, common misspellings, and substitutions.

4. Use more than one password everywhere. If any one of the computers or online systems using this password is compromised, all of your other information protected by that password should be considered compromised as well. It is critical to use different passwords for different systems.

We hope that this information has been helpful to you. Feel free to share with with your family, friends and colleagues as this is good practice - not only for e-mail passwords, but for anything that has personal information involved. If you have any questions, or if your email is hosted with AJT and you would like to change your e-mail password to something more secure, but forgot how to change your password - simply open a support ticket on our customer support portal - http://www.ajtsupport.com/email-support.html and our technicians will be happy to assist you. Remember, we are available 24 hours per day, 7 days a week.

Excellent Customer Support Takes Two!

2007-03-08T09:12:00.000-05:00

There are plenty of suggestions out there for providing great customer support, but there’s not much that we’ve seen on how to get great customer support. Part of being a great customer is the inevitable interaction with a customer support person when something goes wrong or when you have a question.

Being on the receiving end for thousands of support and customer service requests we’ve learned a thing or two about how you should go about putting a customer support request together. How you communicate has a lot to do with how your request is handled. Here are some tips:

Remember there’s a human on the other end.
It doesn’t matter where your customer support rep is, even if you are leaving him or her a voicemail or writing an email, your words will be heard or read and they are still human. Treat them with dignity and respect. Their sole purpose is to help you so be kind and thank them in advance for their assistance. The nicer you are the nicer they’ll be in response — this is simple human nature. You also have to remember how stressful and sometimes just difficult the customer/technical support line of work is. What might end up being a quick reply to your request (one liner email response) might have taken the tech an hour or two of tedious work to resolve your issue.

Don't assume that your problem is really a problem.
Let's say you call our customer support team about an issue - let's pretend your email isnt working (and you are upset). You immediately think the server is down and before the tech answers the phone you are already fired up. But with many issues, a safe estimate would be about 1/3 of our support tickets, are not even a server problem but a problem with your computer and/or internet connection. Now at this point, once we verify that "our side" of things are completely operational. We then begin troubleshooting "your side" (i.e. your computer and modem). I would say, out of these instances, 90% of them can be resolved immediately. Note that we are not a computer support company, that is what Geek Squad does, they come to your home or office and fix your computer. However in an attempt to provide exceptional customer support, our techs will try the steps to help you get functional once again. Be sure you realize that this tech just went way past his call of duty and saved you a $100 service call.

Don't get upset if the phone is not answered at the moment you call.
Leave a voicemail or simply visit http://www.ajtsupport.com/ and submit a ticket. Sometimes Clients get bent out of shape because they tried calling 3 times within 10 minutes and get the voicemail each time. Remember, the tech(s) on duty also have a responsibility of watching over the network and performing maintenance on all servers. They might also be working a really complicated issue. Regardless of the reason, realize that a voicemail electronically opens a ticket in our system and you will get a speedy reply. We did some "secret shopper" testing and compared our response time to that of some of our competitors on several occasions. In the few times we did reach the voicemail, the AJT tech had already replied while we were still on sitting patiently on-hold (in an seemingly endless queue) waiting to speak with a tech from the competition. Our PBX phone system has these queue capabilities, however it is so much nicer to not have to hold a burning phone to your ear for an hour.

Pick and choose your emergencies
If you have a legitimate emergency, the absolute fastest way to reach our team is to fill out a quick ticket here: http://ajtsupport.com/email-support.html and be sure to mark "High" or "Emergency" as doing so will set off audible alarms in our operations center as well as send SMS text messages to all managers and customer support representatives. You will get a reply within minutes. Legitimate emergencies include (but are not limited to); email down, website down, urgent change required - basically use your judgement, its not OUR place to tell you what an emergency is.

Don’t assume your request will be ignored.
I’m always surprised by the number of people who start or end their email with “No one will probably see this, but…” Don’t assume that. It devalues the request, starts the exchange off on a negative, and puts the support agent on the defensive.

Don’t start with a threat.
“Do this immediately or else…” or “If you don’t do this I’ll report you to the Better Business Bureau” or “If you don’t do that I’m going to report this to my bank and other authorities” or “If you don’t respond within 4 hours you’ll be hearing from my lawyer…” It’s not uncommon to hear this on the first email from people. I don’t know if folks assume you are out to get them or they’ve been burned before, but starting with a threat never helps your cause. Given the choice to help two people, the customer service person is naturally going to help who appears easiest to help first. Plus, people will do more for others who are kind to them than they will for someone sounding bitter and dismissive right from the start.

Provide useful, descriptive, relevant information.
This can be a tough one since people don’t always know what’s relevant, but think it through before you send your support request. If you are having trouble logging in, don’t just say “I can’t login. Any ideas?” Instead say “Whenever I try to login, the login screen just reloads without an error message. I know my username and password is correct. Any ideas? Thanks.” That extra bit of information will help considerably and will reduce the number of back-and-forth emails between you and the support person.

Don’t write overly detailed, wordy support requests.
The longer your email the more of a burden it puts on the customer support person. They have to read the entire thing (I’ve seen simple support requests balloon into two printed pages), sift through to find what’s meaningful, and spend more time figuring out exactly what’s wrong. Since they’re trying to help you, you want to reduce their burden. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to help you. So, be clear, concise, and brief. More words often confuses instead of clarifies the issue. Save the wordiness for the thank you email once the problem has been solved.

We hope this is helpful. Just as customer support folks need to learn to provide great customer support, customers need to learn how to be great customers.

Creating and Using Safe and Secure Passwords

2007-03-08T08:57:00.000-05:00

Most of us like to create our own passwords. Here are a few guidelines for this task when creating passwords for just about anything, most importantly, for your email account and other confidential logins.

The best password is one that's unassociated with you, the user, because a clever intruder who knows about you could possibly crack such a password. On the other hand, a password that has no association with the user may be eminently forgettable. Users solve this problem in a number of insecure ways, ranging from writing their passwords on post-its that they affix to their monitors to leaving notes in an unlocked desk drawer!

A good password contains upper and lower case alphabet characters and numbers, but no special characters (, . ; : * % & !). If you have difficulty remembering such an involved password, another suggestion is to merge unrelated adjectives and nouns, such as funnyclock or smartbottle. It's even more effective to use that scheme if you place a number between the words. A good strategy is to create the password out of the first letters of a phrase familiar to you and to intersperse numbers. Good examples would be a word such as firebomb as your password, only spell it this way: f1rE80mB

Passwords are case-sensitive. The longer the password, the harder it is to guess or crack, so six to eight characters should be your minimum length.

Following these simple guidelines will avoid you a lot of stress. We recently had a clients email account hijacked because their password was a simple 6 letter word with no uppercase, symbols or numbers. A spammer was able to blast off about 8,000 spam emails using this clients email address before our System Administrator found the issue which was picked up on when the server loads (processes running) were extremely high.

Feel free to follow these guidelines for your other personal items as well - it is a good habit to get into.

Flash Design: Looking Back, Looking Forward

2006-10-20T20:29:00.000-04:00

Flash: Looking Back, Looking Forward

In August of this year, Flash celebrates its tenth anniversary. It has come a very long way from its beginnings as a natural sketching program. This article takes a look at some of the major milestones, considers the current challenges to the product, and discusses Adobe's future plans for Flash. The product that became known as Flash began its life as an idea in the minds of John Gay and Robert Tatsumi. It was called SmartSketch, and it allowed users to sketch illustrations on a tablet PC with a stylus, in a very natural-feeling way. When the two creators showed the product around, they found a lot of interest in being able to do animation and to take these illustrations online -- remember, this was the mid-90s, and the first dot-com boom was in full swing.

The next iteration of the product came out in 1996. It was called FutureSplash Animator, and supported animation. It also came with a small browser plug-in that allowed users to view animations embedded in web pages. The plug-in handled vector graphics. This turned out to be important later in its history for a couple of reasons, as you'll see.

At this point, the product worked so well at what it did that media companies such as Disney and MSN used it on their home pages in late 1996. By this time Macromedia, a maker of tools for web designers and web content creators, realized what a valuable addition this product would be to its line-up. In December 1996, Macromedia acquired Gay and Tatsumi's company (Future Wave Software) and renamed the product Flash.

The very first pivotal point in Flash's history came the following year, in 1997. The browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft were going hot and heavy, and Macromedia was faced with a chicken-and-egg quandary. In order to get lots of developers to use their product, there had to be lots of people using the browser plug-in so they could see the content. But there were hundreds of browser plug-ins at the time, and users would not be interested in downloading a separate plug-in unless there was a lot of content to see with it. What could Macromedia do?

The company hit on a solution. Netscape was leading the browser war at this time, so Macromedia paid Netscape "a considerable amount of money" to distribute the Flash plug-in, according to Kevin Lynch, chief software architect and senior vice president of Adobe's platform business unit (Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005). Part of the deal involved keeping the browser plug-in below a certain size, which was easy with vector graphics. Microsoft, not to be outdone by its rival, agreed to distribute the plug-in without charging Macromedia anything.

Flash's Major Milestones

Thanks to this deal, Flash has become one of the most ubiquitous plug-ins on the Internet, and Flash content can be seen almost everywhere. Wired recently quoted an NPD Online worldwide survey from April 2006 stating that almost 98 percent of web users have the Flash Player installed on their PCs. The Netscape deal wasn't the only milestone that led to Flash's domination of the field, however.

The next major milestone, according to Mike Downey, Flash senior product manager, came in 2000 with Flash version 4. That involved the addition of the scripting engine. In version 5, the company rewrote the scripting language and called it ActionScript. It was aligned with the ECMAScript standard, like JavaScript. This meant that any programmer who was familiar with JavaScript could work with ActionScript. Instead of simply creating animations, developers could now "create games, interactive presentations and full-blown apps," Downy explained. "That's when the entire Flash ecosystem radically changed."

Version 6 of Flash, which came out around 2001 or 2002, brought another big change: video support. This originally started as a pet project by one of SmartSketch's creators. As always, the trick was to keep the browser plug-in (Flash Player) small. Even today, Flash Player is still small, so it plays quickly for everyone who uses it. This is one of the major reasons that it has become the de facto video player on the Internet. The ability to watch video transparently is another reason. There's no clicking through screens to tell what media player or version of it you have.

Today, many high profile sites are designed around Flash, including leading edge sites such as YouTube. Whether companies that build sites on the forefront of technology continue to use Flash will help determine its future. In Adobe's view, however, the future doesn't rest entirely with video -- or at least, not with video as we think of it today.

New Directions

The Internet is not television, Downy pointed out, so there is a need to get away from the "television metaphor" of passively watching. "Burger King's Subservient Chicken was the trendsetter," Downy says of the well-known web site that allowed visitors to type in commands to a man dressed in a chicken costume, who would then do what the command told him to do. (The Subservient Chicken site is still going strong). The addition of interactivity to Flash adds a whole new layer to the user experience.

Indeed, Adobe's latest version of Flash uses a whole new codec to make it easier to create interactive video content. It also significantly increases the quality of the video. There are a number of ways that developers have taken advantage of this ability. For example, at Red Bull's web site, sports (and particularly races) play a major role. With many videos, users can control the camera angle at which they view a race. Flash also allows users to view synchronized data next to the main video -- for example, to show the air speed and other supplemental information next to the video of an airplane race.

A major plan for the future is to make Flash interact better with other products, especially Adobe's. Naturally, this was very difficult up until last year, since Adobe and Macromedia were rivals in the marketplace. The next version of the Flash authoring tool, however (codenamed "BLAZE") will feature support for Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects, with integration of the rest of Adobe's products to "happen incrementally over time," according to Downy. For example, in the next version developers will be able to bring a mock-up of something they were working on in Photoshop into Flash.

Another important direction for Flash is the mobile market. Here again, the use of vector graphics in Flash Player delivers a competitive advantage, because the content automatically adjusts to the size of the screen. Additionally, since Flash was created in the early days of the Internet, a lot of the solutions that the company came up with for the problems of making it run well over slow connections give the software a competitive advantage for running on mobile devices. For example, content automatically streams to the Flash Player and starts playing before all of it is received, reducing the amount of time a user has to wait before he or she views it.

In fact, Adobe has been working on getting support for the Flash engine on mobile devices for years. "We've just worked out a deal with Qualcomm that will allow content developers to deliver the Flash Player over the air to any BREW-enabled device," Downy notes.

Challenges with Flash

One of Adobe's challenges for the future is to turn Flash into more of a general-purpose application development platform, and to encourage developers to see it that way. "Today the shift is from animations to applications," explained Lynch. To this end, Adobe introduced Flex, a Flash development environment, and beefed up the Flash Player so that it runs scripts faster.

Adobe is also working on Apollo, a project that will let applications written for Flash run without a web browser. "Everyone is rushing in the same direction, which is to reduce the barriers between a web page, an application and multimedia content," observed Peter O'Kelly, an analyst at the Burton Group.The Apollo project addresses the fact that developers now have many more options when it comes to developing web applications, including other scripting languages and tools, and AJAX. Indeed, Adobe recently joined Open Ajax, which is a project for AJAX development.

Even Flash's competitive advantage of being able to run on many different browsers and operating systems is being challenged, from an unlikely quarter: Microsoft. The software giant is working on Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere. This development software is supposed to render Windows applications on different operating systems and browsers. Lynch doesn't sound very worried about it, though. "It's good that Microsoft is recognizing the need for Microsoft applications to run everywhere, but it's very hard to achieve -- and we have achieved that with Flash," he noted.

Another challenge Adobe faces is the perception that it does not support the Linux operating system. Most recently, the company has been criticized for not creating a Linux 8 Flash Player. According to Downy, however, the Linux version of Flash Player is in very active development. "That's one of the major misconceptions out there, that we have only one intern working on the Linux player...We decided to skip version 8 on Linux and go straight to version 9 just because of timing," he explained.

Adobe has created a web site that celebrates the tenth anniversary of Flash. The software looks and works very differently from the way it did originally. There is little telling what it will look like 10 years from now, aside from the fact that it will have continued to evolve to meet the changing needs and challenges of a new generation of designers and developers.

Spam Filtering Services

2006-10-06T20:25:00.000-04:00

Spam is something we all fight every day as e-mail users. Filtering thru hundreds of junk e-mails to decipher those few "good" e-mails out of the mix. Now this is just for your e-mail account. Think of it from a network standpoint. Think about a web server with 100 domains and on average 15 active email accounts per domain. This creates huge loads on web servers and requires a constant careful watch to ensure no web server gets overloaded. Spam is the single most intensive waster of valuable server resources. So what do we do to help combat spam?

There are a few things we do here at AJT. The first thing is we have RBL's running on all servers. RBL stands for "Real-time Black List" and blocks known spammers IP addresses. Today alone, one of our RBL's on one of our servers captured 38,476 spam emails. The second thing we do is run a program called SpamAssasin which scores, tags and deletes known spam. The third thing is called grey-listing and is still in beta test, but this will work like an RBL only a little better.

This helps - but what about us that dont want to see any spam?

We refer many clients to a company located here in Florida called AppRiver, LLC (www.appriver.com). For around $500 per year, AppRiver will "sanitize" ALL email that comes in. Each client we have that is using AppRiver just loves the "spam free" lifestyle. At first $500 per year might sound expensive, but add up lost time that you and your employees are wasting looking thru spam all day. Studies show that Spam costs a small company (10-15 employees) on average $2300 per year in lost time/revenue.

Why do we push AppRiver so much? Because we use them ourselves! They provide top notch support around the clock and literally capture 99.9% of all spam before you ever see it. If you have any questions we are always happy to answer them - just contact our support team and we will be happy to assist. If you are interested in trying out a spam filtering company, AppRiver does offer a full 30 day FREE trial - no questions asked, no credit card required. If you like it - you keep it and pay. If you dont like it (unlikely) you simply cancel. We also encourage you to shop around for other "spam filtering services" to gather pricing. AJT only can recommend AppRiver because it is what we use (and know).

We hope this information helps. Perhaps someday all spammers will go away - but until then, we will just have services in place to block them.

New Internet Explorer - Version 7

2006-09-18T21:26:00.000-04:00

The new Internet Explorer version 7 hit the market a few months ago and is still in "Beta testing" mode. The AJT team, including all of our managers, designers, programmers and technical support team members have been experimenting with the new version of Internet Explorer.

There are many great features to the new version, and everyone here at AJT who is using IE v.7 is really enjoying it. One of our personal favorite new options is how new windows are opened. The new IE uses a "tab" system that basically opens new windows within a single IE window. No more 20 IE windows for the hefty surfers - all of your windows are nice and organized in one Explorer window.

Another neat feature is the zooming tool - zoom in on any part of a website, increase the size, decrease - whatever best fits your screen size (and eyes).

As of today, we have only found one little bug with IE v.7 which is pretty amazing considering it is still in its "Beta" release stage. The issue we found probably would never be picked up by your average surfer - yet we did report it to the Microsoft development team. We will post more comments as we test and continue to use our new favorite browser.

If you are interested in trying the brand new version of Internet Explorer, simply visit the Microsoft Download center online at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie to download absolutely free.

Another great browser platform that is growing rapidly among Internet users is Firefox. We have been enjoying this browser for about a year now and Firefox (now owned by Google) is just one of many free items that Google now offers. Check out Firefox and download for free - http://www.mozilla.com/firefox.

Happy Surfing!

The Hosting Industry's Secrets

2006-09-20T21:25:00.000-04:00

The web hosting industry has a several dirty little secrets that we think you should be aware of. We feel you deserve to be able to make an educated choice among hosting companies. Most often, the average shopper will compare the features of one hosting company against another. And the winner is often the company with the biggest numbers at the lowest price. The loser in this situation is most often the customer.

Mistake: Buying by the numbers
The most common mistake people make when selecting a hosting company is that they don't go any further than to compare the features offered by the prospective hosting services. Bigger is most definitely not always better and neither is cheaper. We're going to show you the right way to compare hosts, the secret gambles hosts make, the mistakes people make when buying hosting services, and some of the marketing tricks hosts use to attract clients.

The Right Way To Shop For A Hosting Company - The first step is to determine your needs not what features are being offered. This way you can avoid overbuying and falling into the marketing hype that we hosting companies put in your path. Next try to determine what your future needs will be just in case you’re short and long-term dreams for your web site come true. This way you will be able to determine if your perspective hosting company will be able satisfy your future needs.

Industry Secret: Overselling The Server
Here's some of the secrets that you probably wouldn't know unless you owned a hosting company. Most clients don't use anywhere close to the amount of disk space and bandwidth allocated to their account. Most of the clients on our servers use less than 100 Megabytes of disk space (sometimes more depending on the amount of active email users). To capitalize on this fact, hosting companies offer packages with 1000, 2000 or 3000 megabytes of disk space in spite of the fact that if they ever sold the amount of space they're offering they'd need so many servers that they'd never make a profit. This seldom happens and is a good gamble.

Additionally the $10 dollar hosting company has to compensate for the expense of running a secure web hosting network. They do this by either cutting corners on their NOC or servers and/or pack 700-800 (or more) domains on a single web server! Wow - talk about server overload. Can you say.....downtime? AJT runs, an average, just 200 domains per server. Our track record shows that we hold true to our 99.98% uptime guarantee. In keeping the client base low "per server" it keeps the loads on the server to a minimum. What causes server lock-up, overload or downtime is when servers get overloaded. We monitor each web server like a hawk - if a load reaches a specified threshold, alarms immediately go off in our office and everyone on staff gets an SMS message to their cell phone in which the server load is immediately investigated by our team and action is taken if required.

When it comes to web hosting, the old saying, "You get what you pay for!" is absolutely true! We can provide you with hundreds of testimonials from happy AJT clients that moved to us, either from local competitors that "try" to run a small rack out of their office using a DSL line or from the "budget" $10 dollar hosting companies. Just take a look at our online portfolio - Click Here - we host almost every website you see listed on this page. Monitor these websites - you will see nothing but uptime and fast loading pages.

Industry Secret: The Bandwidth Lie
Please indulge me as I tell you another metaphorical story. Think of the data lines coming out of a server as a highway of data and the amount of traffic lanes being the bandwidth capacity to carry your data to the Internet. With that in mind, ask yourself if you want to share the highway with a convoy of trucks during rush our. Or worse, what if the highway for all the traffic coming and going from Los Angeles had only two lanes? Bandwidth is the amount of data on the network coming in and going out of a server. Many hosting companies tell you that you can have unlimited bandwidth knowing full well that they have a very limited amount of bandwidth to offer. Frankly, nothing is unlimited.

We have an extremely fast and broad connection to the internet backbone using three large communications providers. Our hosting packages offer generous, yet realistic amount of bandwidth for our clients. For clients who need more than their allotted share of bandwidth we provide it on an as needed basis.

Unlike many hosts who have one contact with the Internet backbone, we have three redundant connections using three different communications providers. Many hosts rely on only one connection (such as a Sprint DSL line or a FDN T1 connection). If that one should fail, you’re down until it’s repaired. It should be pointed out that hosting companies rely on phone companies to provide the backbone connection. How long did it take the last time you wanted your phone company to repair anything? With redundancy to fall back on, we’re up and running all the time even if one or two of connections should go down. Knowing the above information, where do you want your web site?

Industry Secret: Service and Technical Support
There's another gamble played by many hosting companies that if odds weren't in their favor they would be out of business. That gamble is that when people are reviewing their services they never bother to check into and test the support department. All too often it is after they sign up when they send in their first support email or first call to tech support that they realize what they’ve bought into.

How to test the service before you buy - It's really not possible for any company to answer the phone with a live person every time you call, but you should never get a busy signal or no answer. Leave a message and wait. You should expect an answer within a reasonable amount of time. Depending on the time of the call you should get a reply within hours if not minutes. The same applies to email requests for support. How long does it take to get a reply? Even if the answer is that the tech has to do a little research to find the answer. Just so you're not left hanging.

Try playing “Test the tech.” You might ask a question that leaves an open end for them to expound on. Something a little out of the realm of a tech support persons job. The question, "Can you tell me about your least expensive hosting package?" would be fine for a sales person but not a tech, which is exactly why you should ask. If the reply comes with a short reply or a link to a page on their site this might be a red flag. It is indicative of busy techs, not concerned about actually helping, only getting out quick replies. They should take the initiative to take advantage of this request as a marketing opportunity. You've giving them a golden opportunity to try to close a sale. You're a fish nibbling the hook; do they try to reel you in? Do the techs care? If they don't take the initiative now, what will it be like when you call for support? We offer our clients a private phone number, interactive Flash tutorials and 24 hour support via our support portal - www.ajtsupport.com

Additionally, each and every web hosting account, no matter how big or small, is assigned an Account Manager. This is something that NO other web hosting company does for their hosting clients (unless, of course, they are spending hundreds per month). We believe you should have a contact to talk to about anything related to your account. Your Account Manager will oversee your account on a day by day basis, answer any questions you have and assist with upgrades or suggestions. We host Clients on our servers from large multinational Corporate Law Firms to City/County Government Agencies to Real Estate Agents and hundreds of other industries across the board.

Want to switch but don't know how? NO PROBLEM! In most cases our team will handle the migration of your website at no additional cost to you. Just provide us with the necessary information and let our technicians handle the "dirty work". In all cases, downtime is not necessary. A complete "mirror" of your website is made on the AJT network, at which time the DNS is changed ensuring zero downtime for your website and e-mail services. Rest assured, our team has the art of migrating Clients down to a perfect science.

Industry Secret: The NOC
Servers are fancy computers that are left on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They don't often get rebooted (unlike my home computer). They are only part of the infrastructure that serves up data to those who wish to view your web site. Hopefully, they're kept safe in and industrial strength and secure Network Operations Center (NOC).

The environment for the server on which your web site resides plays a key roll in the reliability and security of your data. Many hosts see nothing wrong with renting office space, or worse, their basement, to house their servers. They are getting by on a shoestring and your data is as vulnerable as the next lightning bolt, power outage, burglar, angry competitor, or curious child. You never really know who's manning the server. Housing a server in a "standard office" is something we couldn't even fathom. Being in a multi-million dollar NOC might be more expensive for us - but in the long run, it works in our favor as well as our Clients. Top notch NOC = No Downtime/Fast Connections means our Clients stay happy. When our Clients are happy - they stay with us as well as refer us new business. Pinching pennies is something we save for paperclips and envelopes. We pay top dollar when it comes to our hosting infrastructure and this business model has proven to be successful.

We have two strategic locations that house the AJT servers. Several servers are at our Baltimore Maryland NOC and the others are at our Dallas Texas NOC. Both Network Operation Centers house other clients such as Motorola, Appriver, Delta Airlines, The Miller Company, Nikon, Bluetooth and many other big names. We believe in investing in the BEST for our servers and location. We have three autonomous locations linked together by an encrypted digital connection. One for the office and technical support staff and the other two houses the servers and staff of network experts who man the NOC's. More information about our network: www.ajtdesign.com/services/hostingnetwork.html. The infrastructure of the multi-million dollar NOC includes the building security, uninterruptible power back up and generators, network, communications lines, routers, air conditioning, spare servers and other supporting equipment. The NOC is alive with activity 24 hours a day operating and maintaining the integrity of your web site as well as thousands of other clients. The NOC is not open to the public. Admittance requires an ID or an escort. Other hosting companies would be challenged to boast of such a facility.

Industry Secret: Telling the Truth
AJT makes every effort to be honest and forthright with our clients. We want you to make educated decisions based on your needs, not our marketing. We’re here to help you find the best solution for your needs. We find that honesty and integrity is our best marketing tool.

If you have any questions about AJT's Web Hosting services, please visit us online at www.ajtdesign.com/services/hosting.html. Please be sure to watch our "Hosting Introduction" video. Additionally, if you would like to schedule a live demo with an Account Manager, we invite you to contact our team, toll-free at 1-877-258-3746.

"Specialized Industry" Web Design?

2006-09-29T22:42:00.000-04:00

A busy few months it has been here at AJT. We have been launching on average 6 to 8 new projects per month, many being extremely large projects with interactive backend management systems. Sometimes we get calls or e-mails from prospective customers and they ask "Do you specialize in my industry?". Our answer is almost always -- NO. This is because our business model has been built to be a diverse web development and marketing firm to service a wide range of industries. What we do specialize in is the actual production of a successful web presence. Does a company that only does websites for, lets say Lawyers for example, produce a better website than a firm like us? The answer is again -- NO. Infact if you look carefully at some of the web development companies that only do Lawyer websites or Real Estate websites or Car Dealer websites, you will quickly find that all of their "designs" look almost identical, very cookie-cutter. Some potential customers think that its best to work with a firm that only does websites in their "field", and though we do not talk them out of their personal feelings, we do bring to their attention that it is not necessary to know the in's and out's of a particular industry to create a successful website. We do have extensive discussions to learn what we NEED TO KNOW about a certain industry when it comes to web development, but it is not required for a web design firm to know every real estate law (for example) to produce a high quality, effective website for a Real Estate Agent.

One of our Clients, Condo Hotel Center is a prime example. They initially hired a firm that specialized in real estate web design. The website was up for about 2 years and was next to useless. Condo Hotel Center approached AJT for a total re-vamp in 2004. The site has now been up for 2 years and receives over 200,000 new visitors per month and ranks #1 on all of the major search engines for almost every keyword related to their industry. Infact their website is so busy, we had to sell them their very own web server just to handle the traffic. They now look back and laugh at how they made their first decision - thinking a "real estate web design company" would be the best fit - instead they ended up with a cookie cutter template seen on hundreds (or thousands) of other websites, no search engine rankings and no customer support. That all changed the day they hired AJT.

We enjoy our diversified portfolio. Next to existing customer referrals, our online portfolio (www.ajtdesign.com/portfolio.html) is our main selling tool. Highly effective, custom web presences that exceeds our Clients expectations are what the AJT team strives to produce on each and every project. We enjoy the "pat on the back" when the job is over. A nice note thanking our team of designers and programmers is always a great moral booster and keeps our team on the up - always wanting better.

Welcome!

2006-09-06T21:43:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the AJT Blog! This Blog is going to be a place where the AJT team members will post articles and comments about various aspects of the ever changing Internet world. As we get our Blog setup completely, it will be full of great information, articles by the AJT team, resources and links. We are excited to enter the world of Blogging...

Be Careful With Autoresponders

2006-09-09T21:31:00.000-04:00

From the AJT Abuse Department

Spammers use a very effective technique. That is known as "domain name hijacking". They also hijack email addresses and even server names. They do this through the use of spambot and spider software that works 24/7/365 doing the work of collecting information for them. Once obtain they couple the hijacked domain name with a bogus user and now in most instance with legit user names such as "info@", "admin@", "postmaster@", etc. They write this address in the "From" line of the email headers and then of course, write the specific email address in the "To" line they want to send their spam to. They send the mail, millions of them. All the emails that bounce due to filters created by the recipient (email address in the "To" line) will bounce back to the email address in the "From" line which in this case is the innocent bystander's email address that was hijacked.

If this email address is not correct or non-existent in the specific account they it will end up in the "DEFAULT" inbox of your client's account. If you have this account configured to "REJECT MAIL AND SEND AUTORESPONDER" then this auto-responder will most likely reach the other network's spam traps and/or will get caught up in a loop thus generating spam complaints which ultimately end up in server IP blockage. It is very important that you read the following articles. Educating e-mail users will ensure a smooth running operation with minimal interruptions and inconveniences.

Why are auto responders bad? http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/329.html

There is a link that has an article on this topic that may offer some insight and a little help. Please read carefully: http://news.spamcop.net/pipermail/spamcop-help/2002-July/007903.html

If you have any questions or comments about this information, please contact the AJT Support Team online at www.ajtdesign.com/customer-support.html.

The "Spam Button" on AOL

2006-09-09T21:41:00.000-04:00

From the AJT Abuse Department

On a daily basis we receive numerous spam complaints against many of our clients. In researching the issue we found that AJT's clients are NOT the ones (purposely) sending the spam. The bad news however is that they are "indirectly" sending the spam. Interested? Read on...

Upon investigating this issue we generally find that the root cause of the problem resides in that, one or more email accounts in AJT's clients mail manager were configured to forward mail to AOL and/other networks email address (es). As normal mail is forwarded to AOL and/or other networks, spam of course, is also being forwarded. These clients then receive the spam from their own account in our network at --let's say -- their AOL account and then they proceed to click the "Report as Spam" button in his/her AOL email client software to thus report the spam. In essence these clients are self-reporting.

As a result of the complaints generated from our client's domain AOL could temporarily block AJT's server IP and/or a particular domain. To stop this blockage from taking place and to thus stop further abuse. What can you do?

Three possibilities.

1. Stop reporting the spam with AOL and thus stop self-reporting - simply delete the email. This is the ideal alternative since its hard to know what comes from your domain and forwarded to AOL and what comes directly to your AOL account - see #3 for another option if you insist on reporting.

2. Find a different alternative to your email forwarding (i.e. gmail, yahoo or hotmail accounts). This is also a really good alternative.

3. If you insist on forwarding mail to your AOL account (not a problem) and you insist on reporting spam (problem) you will want to analyze the full headers of each and every spam email received prior to reporting the spam (highly unlikely that you would want to do this) to make sure that the email is not one that was forwarded from your account with us to your AOL email account. Any references to your domain name or our server name will tell you that it came from your domain.

We would be very appreciative if you would share this information with all email users on your account that might forward email to their personal AOL accounts. You will save yourself (and the AJT abuse team) a lot of hassle.

E-mail Spoofing - A Huge Nuisance!

2006-09-16T03:26:00.000-04:00

Several times a week, we get support tickets asking about "E-mail Spoofing" because they are receiving bounce notices for emails they surely did not send. So we decided to post some details about e-mail spoofing on our blog to help explain.

WHAT IS EMAIL SPOOFING? E-mail spoofing is the forgery of an e-mail header so that the message appears to have originated from someone or somewhere other than the actual source. Distributors of spam often use spoofing in an attempt to get recipients to open, and possibly even respond to, their solicitations. Spoofing can be used legitimately. Classic examples of senders who might prefer to disguise the source of the e-mail include a sender reporting mistreatment by a spouse to a welfare agency or a "whistle-blower" who fears retaliation. However, spoofing anyone other than yourself is illegal in some jurisdictions.

E-mail spoofing is possible because Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the main protocol used in sending e-mail, does not include an authentication mechanism. Although an SMTP service extension (specified in IETF RFC 2554) allows an SMTP client to negotiate a security level with a mail server, this precaution is not often taken. If the precaution is not taken, anyone with the requisite knowledge can connect to the server and use it to send messages. To send spoofed e-mail, senders insert commands in headers that will alter message information. It is possible to send a message that appears to be from anyone, anywhere, saying whatever the sender wants it to say. Thus, someone could send spoofed e-mail that appears to be from you with a message that you didn't write.

Although most spoofed e-mail falls into the "nuisance" category and requires little action other than deletion, the more malicious varieties can cause serious problems and security risks. For example, spoofed e-mail may purport to be from someone in a position of authority, asking for sensitive data, such as passwords, credit card numbers, or other personal information -- any of which can be used for a variety of criminal purposes. The Bank of America, eBay, and Wells Fargo are among the companies recently spoofed in mass spam mailings. One type of e-mail spoofing, self-sending spam, involves messages that appear to be both to and from the recipient.

Be Careful with E-Mail Attachments

2006-09-22T23:15:00.000-04:00

Just a few days ago we had a customer wrote in to our support department. The customer had received an email from "admin@" their domain name and had an attachment. Unfortunately the customer hasn't been keeping up with the latest trends in spammers that attempt to forge their emails (also called spoofing - see previous blog entry here: http://ajtdesign.com/blog/2006/09/e-mail-spoofing-huge-nuisance.html). What this email contained was an attachment, which the Client opened and his computer was immediately infected by a worm which began using his computer as a "spam relay" meaning his computer was turned into a virtual spam machine. Unfortunately we are unable to assist with removing virus's from a customer's computer - not just because "that isn't our job", but because we are not "computer technicians" and honestly do not know how to fix issues like this. A call to the Geek Squad was in order. (It's a common misconception that we are computer techs - when that is far from the truth. Supporting web sites, web servers and e-mail hosting is very different than fixing a computer.)

So to make a long story short, never open an attachment from something that appears from your own domain name unless you know who sent it. If it looks fishy - it probably is. Also, just know that AJT will never send an attachment with any of our announcements to our Client base so should you ever get anything that doesn't have our company logo, physical address, phone numbers, etc. then dont open it. Granted most computers would have immediately deleted this email upon download from the server, this particular customer was using an out-dated version of McAffee. Our entire company uses Norton Internet Security and we keep our virus definitions up to date - so really, if something like that were to come in to us, our Norton would get it before we could even have made the mistake of opening it. By following these two simple rules you can rest assured that you will keep your computer virus free!

If you are interested in a third line of defense that will intercept Viruses before they even make it to your computer, we recommend a spam filtering service that works as a middle man not only blocking 98% of all spam, but also blocking 100% (guaranteed) of viruses. Check out our Web Hosting section for more information: http://www.ajthomas.net/services/hosting.html.