Parallels Plesk Panel 11 is the ideal tool for small business IT professionals. It makes Web site creation faster and easier, lets you offload e-mail management to nontechnical people, and enables end users to safely access server resources without supervision.

Simplifies Web site launching. For example, it comes with:

* Easy-to-use wizards that let you rapidly add new Web sites.
* A power-user interface that’s perfect for managing your own server and sites without unnecessary complication of a traditional shared hosting control panel.

Web hosters (including shared hosters and design studios) can benefit from Parallels Plesk Panel 11 via:

* Improved web server performance and websites on mobile devices with NGINX
* Server management via smartphone provides increased control
* Improved security protects customers data and websites

Website owners (including small businesses and IT Professionals) can benefit from Plesk Panel 11 in the following ways:

* Improved security protects personal data and websites
* Mobile website publishing and optimization
* Envision, create and curate your website, Facebook presence, and mobile presence with tools that integrate directly into Parallels Panel.

For our current customers on previous versions please contact us so we can assist you in moving to the new version.

We are proud to announce the availability of our Parallels Plesk CloudFlare Plugin to integrate your site with a simple install from your Plesk 10 control panel. This plugin is available on all new VPS accounts and dedicated servers. If you whish to integrate CloudFlare now on an existing VPS please open a support ticket and we can assist you.

Please read below for more details about CloudFlare Services.

An Overview of CloudFlare

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

CloudFlare’s system gets faster and smarter as our community of users grows larger. We have designed the system to scale with our goal in mind: helping power and protect the entire Internet.

CloudFlare can be used by anyone with a website and their own domain, regardless of your choice in platform. From start to finish, setup takes most website owners less than 5 minutes. Adding your website requires only a simple change to your domain’s DNS settings. There is no hardware or software to install or maintain and you do not need to change any of your site’s existing code. If you are ever unhappy you can turn CloudFlare off as easily as you turned it on. Our core service is free and CloudFlare Pro offering for enhanced services for websites who need extra features like real time reporting or SSL.

Contact Hardhathosting Support about integrating CloudFlare today and be part of the community that is creating a better web.

Click here to read CloudFlare Common FAQs.

HardHatHosting.com is proud to announce a partnership with one of the quickest growing security and performance services CloudFlare.

We are currently writing the first Parallels Plesk CloudFlare Plugin to integrate your site with a simple install from your Plesk 10 control panel. In early September all Hardhathosting Plesk 10 VPS accounts and Dedicated Servers will have an easy way to turn on the power of CloudFlare. If you whish to integrate CloudFlare now please open a support ticket and we can assist you.

Please read below for more details about their service.

An Overview of CloudFlare

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

CloudFlare’s system gets faster and smarter as our community of users grows larger. We have designed the system to scale with our goal in mind: helping power and protect the entire Internet.

CloudFlare can be used by anyone with a website and their own domain, regardless of your choice in platform. From start to finish, setup takes most website owners less than 5 minutes. Adding your website requires only a simple change to your domain’s DNS settings. There is no hardware or software to install or maintain and you do not need to change any of your site’s existing code. If you are ever unhappy you can turn CloudFlare off as easily as you turned it on. Our core service is free and CloudFlare Pro offering for enhanced services for websites who need extra features like real time reporting or SSL.

Contact Hardhathosting Support about integrating CloudFlare today and be part of the community that is creating a better web.

Click here to read CloudFlare Common FAQs.

Parallels Plesk Panel 10 is the ideal tool for small business IT professionals. It makes Web site creation faster and easier, lets you offload e-mail management to nontechnical people, and enables end users to safely access server resources without supervision.

Simplifies Web site launching. For example, it comes with:

* Easy-to-use wizards that let you rapidly add new Web sites.
* A power-user interface that’s perfect for managing your own server and sites without unnecessary complication of a traditional shared hosting control panel.

Makes it easy to add functionality. Parallels Plesk Panel lets you:

* Gain single-click access to more than 200 open-source and commercial applications.
* Assign employees access to specific applications.
* Use Google Tools to simplify Webmaster tasks.

Easily share with others. For example, you can:

* Allow limited access to employees based on assigned privileges.
* Let employees manage their own e-mail accounts.
* Simplify the user experience with a new, highly intuitive user interface.
* Offer your customers a dedicated environment with a full-featured yet simple interface focused on their sites and server.

Pinnacle Cart is a PHP Shopping Cart application which has been greatly growing in popularity recently.  The most distiguishing feature that we discovered about Pinnacle Cart is it’s simplicity of operation.  We’ve been subjected to tons of different shopping carts.  Anything from the Open Source realm to the very expensive and even on a rare occasion the home grown.  It always seems that most shopping carts require you to have some kind of complicated understanding of the IT world in order to maintain it, or at the very least keep a developer on a retainer close by.

With Pinnacle Cart the hard core developers and IT people that often preach about how they never use anything but the commandline, might not find Pinnacle Cart to be has hard core as they might like.  But for anyone that wants a great shopping cart that is easy to customize and design for, that is easy to maintain and operate and that allows you the time to work on the important aspects of your business, this is it.  Stop pounding your head against the wall trying to figure out where the HTML ends and the template code begins, it might be a better plan to start with something that just plain works.

To quote their website they say:

Our management team has over 30 years of combined sales and marketing experience. We are not techies, by nature. Our background in advertising, marketing and web design has given us a unique perspective on the design of this platform. We created shopping cart software that is easy to use and extremely effective at selling your products.

And that is exactly what the makers of Pinnacle Cart have done.  Easy to use and extremely effective at selling your products, is just what every website owner is looking for.

Screenshot

What is really impressive is that they include many features that are add-ons for other shopping carts.  Impressive upselling capabilities such as recommended products, customers also bought and buy x get y free features are all right at your finger tips ready to use.  Customer relationship management is all built right into the system.  Being able to send newsletters, product updates, allow customers to save carts are all important features.  Pinnacle Cart has even included an impressive one page checkout allowing website owners to minimize cart abandonment for visitors that hate lengthy checkout screens.

If you haven’t taken a look at Pinnacle Cart yet, it’s definitely worth the time.  They offer a demo to experience Pinnacle Cart on their website.  Take a poke around and decide if it’s the shopping cart for you.  And if you decide to combine a powerful shopping cart with a powerful hosting account such as HardHat offers, you will be impressed with the results.

This is a great tag to use to help fix any issues you may have with duplicate content.  Lots of web developers have struggled with this for a very long time.  I’ve even seen a few people get penalized for duplicate content just on the basis that the same content could be reached via “http” as it could via “https”.  And the results of being penalized is severe, especially if you had built up a lot of natural ranking on the SERP’s.

Every “application” whether it is eCommerce related or a content management system such as WordPress, usually has multiple URL’s to visit the same exact content.  For example if you are using Magento you can visit a product page via:
domain.com/product.html
OR domain.com/category1/product.html

And if you are using X-Cart you could access a product page via:
domain.com/product.php?productid=16135
OR domain.com/product.php?productid=16135&featured

These multiple URL’s within a system are usually designed to keep track of where the customer came from when visiting the product.  This makes it easier for the system to build the breadcrumbs for the visitor to track back.  Naturally if the Search Engines are going to penalize you for this, then you need to do something to correct the issue.

And this is where the Canonical Tag can come in.  In the top of your page hidden away you can put this little tag that tells the Search Engines the actual URL that each particular page should be referenced via.  So even though the Search Engine accesses the page via one URL, if the Canonical Tag shows a different URL they are supposed to consider the different URL as a suggestion for the actual page. Keep in mind that I said “as a suggestion”, this is not the end all be all, they will take it as a very strong suggestion, but they always reserve the right to interpret it their own way.

One final message before sending you off to links for the modules.  The use of the Canonical Tags should be a last resort, or put in place just to make sure.  You or your Web Developer should do everything in their power to make sure that duplicate content doesn’t exist.  You should make sure that your non-www redirects to your www or vice versa.  You should use your robots.txt file to block out additional portions of a URL such as in the X-Cart example above “&featured”.  You can also add in your own 301 redirects for particular pages if reached redirect to the proper URL.  Don’t rely heavily on the Canonical Tag, do everything you can to make it right and then also use the canonical tag in case you missed anything.

Here are some links to plugins for the more popular applications out there:

For those WordPress users there is a great plugin that will take care of this for you developed by yoast.com.  I think he had a good jump start on this plugin.  Here’s the link: WordPress Canonical Tag Plugin

X-Cart users have a great option available to them through a very robust third party add-on.  The add-on used to cost about the same price as your X-Cart license which was kind of ridiculous, but the price has come down dramatically.  And when you factor in all the additional features you get with the add-on, I think it’s well worth it:  X-Cart Canonical Tag Add-on

Magento is a pretty new eCommerce solution.  But it’s got a very large following, and a lot of available support.  For those of you daring enough to run this very large resource heavy cart there is also an extension available to you.  Built in collaboration with the owner of yoast.com the same person that put together the WordPress plugin above: Magento Canonical Tag Extension

You can grab a Drupal module as well.  The owner of yoast.com was a busy little bee evidentally.  He worked with Marek Sotak on this one and got a module created to even help those Drupal lovers out there, the brave ones that they are :) Drupal Canonical Tag Module

A university did a study not to long ago where they calculated the average conversion rate of this kind of email is approximately 0.0008% or some ridiculously low number like that, I may have forgotten a zero in there as if there wasn’t enough of them.  In the name of research they supposedly sent some of their own emails through a bot network.  This is a lot of computers like your own at home that are infected with trojans or spyware that can actually be remotely controlled and used to send spam with, which on a side note is the reason why many ISP’s are blocking port 25 these days.

So even with this conversion rate being ridiculously low, Spammers don’t decide that it’s not worth it, instead they figure they just need to send out many more emails.  Online statistics estimate that about 94% of all email sent, is spam.  The only way we can ever really stop this trend is to do everything we can to block it, ignore it, or stop clicking on the darn things.

So how much is it really costing your company?

Well most people will admit that it is a very big nuisance, but what does it actually cost us?  I know that without proper filters in place I would waste a ton of time on it.  Let’s say every morning you spend about 15 minutes clearing out your spam that you received over the previous evening.  Then lets say you spend another 15 minutes scrolling through your spam folder looking for false positives from the freebie spam filter you’re using that doesn’t work very well.  Then let’s say that at least twice during the day spam comes into your email box and you check the mail to find out it’s nothing and then it takes you 15 minutes to really focus back on whatever you were just working on.

So here we are with a pretty conservative estimate of 1 hour every day wasted on spam messages.  If we estimate 22 working days a month, that’s 22 hours a month.  If you have 5 employees that’s 110 hours a month in your company being wasted on spam.  Just at minimum wage alone we’ve just successfully flushed about $770 each month.

What the best option to recoup this money?

Most of the freebie filters block just as much legitimate mail as the mail you don’t want, which can waste just as much time.  Most companies view expenses as expenses, they cost money, so we want to cut costs to be more profitable correct?

This might work in most scenarios, but as you can tell a cost effective spam solution can have a great return on investment.  The best services out there are actually a separate service from your email and/or web hosting.  Normally it is a service that is a separate server that you will change your MX record to point to so that all mail goes to it first, then it delivers all clean mail back to your actual email server.  This saves you time from even having to download the bad mail in the first place.  There are many services out there that can perform this function.

HardHatHosting offers one of those services with their Enterprise Spam Filtering.  At only 99 cents per email account per month and a false positive rating of one in one million and filtering rules written by real humans updated every 5 minutes, it’s easy to see how a company can recoup the wasted money of lost time and salaries of dealing with spam.

We have a web page set up with more information about our Enterprise Spam Filtering, or as all our customers are well aware pick up the phone and give us a call, we’d be more than happy to answer all your questions and even give you a 30 day free trial.

The Reason for the Change

Our previous Hosting Accounts were utilizing a platform called Sphera.  Over the course of the last few years we had noticed that the platform as a whole was falling behind some of the competitions features and capabilities.  While at the time we implemented the system it provided a superior system compared to the competition in terms of a chroot environment and security, in the recent years we’ve noticed a customer dislike for the usability of the control panel when it came to management.

To top it off Sphera was even bought out by a large competitor, Parallels.  Parallels actually was currently offering an even better system than our Sphera platform in their Virtuozzo system.  This new platform offered the same separation of resources and security by implementing a similar chroot environment, in addition they offered a higher level of QOS (Quality of Service) in maintaining each environment.  When paired with the Plesk Control Panel, the system is very user friendly and easy to administer.

After a thorough investigation into all our options, we found the Virtuozzo Containers to be the best option for our future Hosting Accounts.

Other Changes and Improvements to Expect

In our new Hosting Platform, we have a much more sophisticated billing system.  In the past, notifications of renewals and invoices were not automatically sent out to customers.  We also implemented a lot of new hardware, which allows us to offer more resources such as diskspace and bandwidth in our plans.

The new system also offers the ability for us to provide additional services to our customers as a value add. Many improvements have been made in terms of integration of additional services, billing, ease of installation, etc.

How Does an Existing Customer get Setup on the New System?

Unfortunately there is not any magic wand that can migrate your entire account over to the new system.  A little bit of work has to be put into ensuring a smooth relocation to our improved system.  That’s where we will help.

First, naturally a customer would need to purchase the new hosting plan.  This gets a new account setup, and also sets the customer up in the new billing system.  No need to worry about loosing any existing payments on the old system. If a customer has paid for a year up front on the old system just let us know and we will apply a prorated credit in the new system.

Next, you’ll need to set up the account.  After purchasing the new account, several emails will be sent out.  One as a order confirmation, another as an invoice, and the last will be the login details of the account.  Once logging into the account, various tasks will need to be completed.  The domains that need to be hosted on the account will need to be configured.  The email accounts for each domain will need to be created.

Finally, if a customer is unfamiliar with moving website files, or re-installing a system such as a dynamic content application, asking our tech support personel for help is always an option.  Whether it’s “can you move the files for me?” or “I can’t figure out how to set up an email account”, that’s what our support department is here to do.

Conclusion

Hard Hat Hosting has always strived to be a company that offers quality hosting.  We don’t offer six million terabytes of diskspace for fifty cents.  We don’t have a tech support department based out of India.  But Hard Hat Hosting offers quality hosting that works.  As always we keep within strict limits on every account type as to how many accounts will share the same server.  This ensures that your service works when you need it.  And if a customer is having trouble getting it to work, they’ll find our customer service is there to assist.

How do you go about getting the most from our customer service?  As many of our customers know, we strive daily to ensure that our customer service is the best that it can be.  We have real people answering real phone calls from 9am – 6pm Central Time.  We also have a 24/7 support helpdesk that we often respond to so quickly that our customers don’t answer back until the next day because they just didn’t think anyone would be answering a ticket at 2 o’clock in the morning.

But what can you do as a customer to ensure the most out of your hosting?

The first thing that you can do is be prepared to offer as much information as possible.  We are more than happy to wait it out with you if you need time to find certain information, but the more you have readily available the faster we can help you with your problem.

On a rare occasion we’ve had customers even create support tickets without supplying any information except the problem.  Ticket: “Our Website is Down, HELP”.  At this point our response is very limited, the customer hasn’t provided their name, their domain name, or any other information that we could use to even find the account.

Naturally, there is this kind of basic information that we need to even begin looking for the root of the problem.  It occurs often enough that my only assumption is that panic has overcome the customer, and so they just immediately send off an email hoping for help.  Best thing you can do is to stay calm, and logically provide all information possible.  If you provide too much information we can just take what we need, and fix the problem.  If you don’t provide enough information, we can’t even proceed until we hear back from you.

Additional information about the problem itself is also helpful

An estimated 80-90% of the problems have occurred because of something that was done immediately before the problem occurred.  For example, sometimes customers choose to install their own SSL certificate.  After installing the SSL certificate they check their website and it’s not working.  Their email works, FTP works, just the HTTP or “web” process is not running.  We’ll immediately get a ticket or a phone call describing the problem.  Naturally, with nothing more to go on than “My Website is Down”, it may take a few extra minutes to find out that there is a problem with the SSL certificate.  In this example, just letting customer service know what happened immediately before the website went down, helps expedite the process of finding out what the problem maybe.  And in this instance we could help properly install the SSL.

Because of the amount of maintenance time and monitoring we put into our servers, a down website due to a major problem on the server or service as a whole is pretty rare.  The majority of the time an issue is contained to just the one hosting account that is having problems, possibly even contained to just the service that is not working properly.  The more information that can be provided in regards to what has happened recently, the faster and more efficiently we will be able to take care of that problem.

So what if I don’t have a problem?  I just need help with my Hosting Account?

We’d be more than happy to assist with this as well.  Many customers will encounter a problem at some point whether it is configuration, scripting, or some sort of issue that doesn’t directly deal with service outage.  Maybe you want to redirect all of your non-www traffic to your www domain name.  Feel free to give us a phone call and we’d be glad to discuss it.

In these instances, it’s best to first describe the actual problem you are trying to solve, not the problem you are encountering with implementing the solution you’ve come up with.  For example, John Smith calls us up because his website is down.  We start taking a look at the problem, and don’t really see a problem, everything is responding properly.  We visit the site, to find that there there is a scripting problem occuring that just returns a blank screen, which to some may look like the site is down or at least not functioning.  Now we take a look at the code being used and we find that there are some redirects in PHP that aren’t coded properly, and ending up in a break.  While trying to help with what would be the proper syntax, John Smith describes to us how he’s trying to redirect all his “mydomain.com” traffic to “www.mydomain.com”.  At this point we explain there is an easier method, we delete all his extra code, add three lines to the .htaccess or the httpd.conf file, presto chango, all finished.

There is always going to be about 101 ways to skin the cat.  Our primary goals are always going to be to make sure to help do it the most efficient method.  Once we understand the actual real problem that needs to be resolved, often we can come up with a better solution.