MONTREAL, May 16, 2013 - Canada-based infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) leader iWeb announces the launch of a fully-managed Cloud hosting service based on OpenStack®.

The managed Cloud service is the first Openstack public cloud deployment in Canada and the first in the industry to provide guaranteed disk speed as a standard, a key element of overall system performance. The other key components of this breakthrough service are worry-free system management, rapid deployment, Cloud elasticity, scalability and soon, a robust application-programming interface (API).

“This service would not have been technologically possible even 12 months ago,” says Mike Gero, Director of Product Management. “When we looked at the market we couldn’t find a cloud that met all our customers needs. By engineering this cloud with the best vendors and technologies, we are delivering something I am sure customers will enjoy and competitors will envy. We truly believe this will meet our customer’s performance, availability and support requirements. Due to our use of SSD drives our standard disk performance is on average 2x that of other Cloud providers and the security of customer data is maintained with data replication and redundancy.”

Openstack infrastructure + iWeb’s network + Solid state disk drives (SSD)
= Guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS)

iWeb’s managed Cloud service is possible because it is provisioned on a QoS-enabled centralized block storage engineered exclusively with SSD drives. It is connected to iWeb’s rock solid network and utilizes “Grizzly”, the most up-to-date version of Openstack. Initial deployments of the service are fully-managed solutions, built with the latest generation of processors, memory and CentOS Linux. This is the first in a series of iWeb cloud products based on Openstack. Several additional services are planned for the 3rd and 4th quarter of 2013.

According to iWeb President and COO Christian Primeau, “This is the cloud that our customers have asked for and our staff has been very excited to develop, test and now deploy. It removes all the barriers for customers wishing to upgrade to a Cloud infrastructure. Reliability is built into iWeb’s DNA and this Cloud guarantees superior performance without sacrificing reliability. We are extremely proud of what we have built and pleased to bring it to the market.”

Information on the new Cloud offering can be found on http://www.iweb.com/cloud/.

About iWeb (http://iweb.com)

iWeb provides the on-demand server and cloud infrastructure that allows over 25,000 customers in more than 200 countries worldwide to deliver today’s Internet-based technologies and to create tomorrow’s online innovations. Since 1996, Montreal-based iWeb has been rated among the world’s top web infrastructure providers based on performance and reliability and among Canada’s fastest growing companies.

Contact: Andre Allen, iWeb +1-514-286-4932 Ext: 2284, community@iweb.com

[1] iWeb’s network continues to rank among the most reliable in the world and has achieved 100% uptime over the past 4 years, according to independent internet researcher Netcraft

MONTREAL, May 16, 2013 - Canada-based infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) leader iWeb announces the launch of a fully-managed Cloud hosting service based on OpenStack®.

The managed Cloud service is the first Openstack public cloud deployment in Canada and the first in the industry to provide guaranteed disk speed as a standard, a key element of overall system performance. The other key components of this breakthrough service are worry-free system management, rapid deployment, Cloud elasticity, scalability and soon, a robust application-programming interface (API).

“This service would not have been technologically possible even 12 months ago,” says Mike Gero, Director of Product Management. “When we looked at the market we couldn’t find a cloud that met all our customers needs. By engineering this cloud with the best vendors and technologies, we are delivering something I am sure customers will enjoy and competitors will envy. We truly believe this will meet our customer’s performance, availability and support requirements. Due to our use of SSD drives our standard disk performance is on average 2x that of other Cloud providers and the security of customer data is maintained with data replication and redundancy.”

Openstack infrastructure + iWeb’s network + Solid state disk drives (SSD)
= Guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS)

iWeb’s managed Cloud service is possible because it is provisioned on a QoS-enabled centralized block storage engineered exclusively with SSD drives. It is connected to iWeb’s rock solid network and utilizes “Grizzly”, the most up-to-date version of Openstack. Initial deployments of the service are fully-managed solutions, built with the latest generation of processors, memory and CentOS Linux. This is the first in a series of iWeb cloud products based on Openstack. Several additional services are planned for the 3rd and 4th quarter of 2013.

According to iWeb President and COO Christian Primeau, “This is the cloud that our customers have asked for and our staff has been very excited to develop, test and now deploy. It removes all the barriers for customers wishing to upgrade to a Cloud infrastructure. Reliability is built into iWeb’s DNA and this Cloud guarantees superior performance without sacrificing reliability. We are extremely proud of what we have built and pleased to bring it to the market.”

Information on the new Cloud offering can be found on http://www.iweb.com/cloud/.

About iWeb (http://iweb.com)

iWeb provides the on-demand server and cloud infrastructure that allows over 25,000 customers in more than 200 countries worldwide to deliver today’s Internet-based technologies and to create tomorrow’s online innovations. Since 1996, Montreal-based iWeb has been rated among the world’s top web infrastructure providers based on performance and reliability and among Canada’s fastest growing companies.

Contact: Andre Allen, iWeb +1-514-286-4932 Ext: 2284, community@iweb.com

[1] iWeb’s network continues to rank among the most reliable in the world and has achieved 100% uptime over the past 4 years, according to independent internet researcher Netcraft

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At iWeb our goal is happy hosting customers.

So whether you’re thinking about buying hosting, interested in influencing the future of web technology, or an iWeb customer with a voice to be heard, please help us to help you, by taking a few minutes to answer 15 simple questions.

It can only mean better iWeb services and solutions!

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The Google Chromebook is a lightweight laptop manufactured by Samsung that has many Google products and services built in. Google says the Chromebook is “an ultraportable, sleek laptop for everyday adventures. It weighs under 1.1kg and has over 6.5 hours of battery life, so you can bring it anywhere and use it everywhere.”

More about the Chromebook…

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Here is a first list of events we will be attending (starting today), whether as a sponsor, a speaker, to present our products and services or simply to be a part of the audience and say hi to our friends and learn more about what is going on in the exciting world of web hosting.

• OpenStack Summit
  Portland, Oregon
  April 15 – 18, 2013
• AQT Big Bang
  Montreal, Quebec
  May 15 – 16, 2013
• Parlons du Cloud
  Montreal, Quebec
  May 16, 2013
• Cloud Computing Expo
  New York
  June 10 – 13, 2013
• HostingCon
  Austin, Texas
  June 17 – 19, 2013
• Startup Fest
  Montreal, Quebec
  July 10 – 12, 2013
• Fonderfuel
  Montreal, Quebec
  July 11, 2013

If you are planning to attend any of these events please let us know, we would love to meet you.

This list is not exhaustive and we’ll keep you informed of our participation in the various events of 2013.

Canadian Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider becomes a corporate partner and one of top 50 sponsors of the OpenStack Foundation.

MONTREAL, April 15, 2013 – Canada-based infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) leader iWeb has joined the OpenStack® Foundation as a corporate sponsor with a commitment to developing open cloud standards and technologies.

The OpenStack Foundation supports a global community of more than 8,800 members representing 850 unique organizations across 114 countries and is responsible for continuing to promote the development, distribution and adoption of OpenStack cloud software.

“iWeb has long been committed to open technologies. As we get ready to deploy our new generation of private and public cloud, OpenStack was a great fit for us. We have been in development with OpenStack for many months now for a high performance cloud. The rich feature set and ability to customize all elements to meet the needs of our customers has been critical for iWeb. ” Says iWeb President and COO Christian Primeau.

OpenStack continues to grow quickly. Founded in 2010 with the support of 25 companies and a few dozen developers, today OpenStack powers some of the most widely-used SaaS applications and eCommerce sites along with some of the world’s largest public clouds.

As one of the top 50 sponsors of OpenStack, iWeb signals strong commitment to the technology and market positioning. Key benefits are the open community driven philosophy along with a rapid pace of innovation. iWeb brings a long history of innovation and reliability with hosted solutions.

“We are excited to welcome iWeb to the OpenStack community,” said Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation. “iWeb has had a long-held focus on reliability and commitment to the open cloud that will benefit the whole community, and we look forward to advancing the OpenStack mission with their support.”

Information on OpenStack can be found on http://www.openstack.org/.

About iWeb (http://iweb.com)

iWeb provides the on-demand server and cloud infrastructure that allows over 20,000 customers in more than 150 countries worldwide to deliver today’s Internet-based technologies and to create tomorrow’s online innovations. Since 1996, Montreal-based iWeb has been rated among the world’s top web infrastructure providers based on performance and reliability and among Canada’s fastest growing companies. iWeb’s network continues to rank among the most reliable in the world, according to independent internet researcher Netcraft.

Contact:
Bernard Dahl, Public Relations, +1-514-802-2801, iweb.news@presentis.ca

Canadian Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider becomes a corporate partner and one of top 50 sponsors of the OpenStack Foundation.

MONTREAL, April 15, 2013 – Canada-based infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) leader iWeb has joined the OpenStack® Foundation as a corporate sponsor with a commitment to developing open cloud standards and technologies.

The OpenStack Foundation supports a global community of more than 8,800 members representing 850 unique organizations across 114 countries and is responsible for continuing to promote the development, distribution and adoption of OpenStack cloud software.

“iWeb has long been committed to open technologies. As we get ready to deploy our new generation of private and public cloud, OpenStack was a great fit for us. We have been in development with OpenStack for many months now for a high performance cloud. The rich feature set and ability to customize all elements to meet the needs of our customers has been critical for iWeb. ” Says iWeb President and COO Christian Primeau.

OpenStack continues to grow quickly. Founded in 2010 with the support of 25 companies and a few dozen developers, today OpenStack powers some of the most widely-used SaaS applications and eCommerce sites along with some of the world’s largest public clouds.

As one of the top 50 sponsors of OpenStack, iWeb signals strong commitment to the technology and market positioning. Key benefits are the open community driven philosophy along with a rapid pace of innovation. iWeb brings a long history of innovation and reliability with hosted solutions.

“We are excited to welcome iWeb to the OpenStack community,” said Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation. “iWeb has had a long-held focus on reliability and commitment to the open cloud that will benefit the whole community, and we look forward to advancing the OpenStack mission with their support.”

Information on OpenStack can be found on http://www.openstack.org/.

About iWeb (http://iweb.com)

iWeb provides the on-demand server and cloud infrastructure that allows over 20,000 customers in more than 150 countries worldwide to deliver today’s Internet-based technologies and to create tomorrow’s online innovations. Since 1996, Montreal-based iWeb has been rated among the world’s top web infrastructure providers based on performance and reliability and among Canada’s fastest growing companies. iWeb’s network continues to rank among the most reliable in the world, according to independent internet researcher Netcraft.

Contact:
Bernard Dahl, Public Relations, +1-514-802-2801, iweb.news@presentis.ca

Our lightening fast response times saw us ranked a magnificent third in the world for overall performance during the month of March.

But it is the longevity of our 100% uptime record which speaks volumes for the hard work of our engineers and network architects, not only in recent months but over the course of our 16 years’ hosting.

Not only have we made good on our 100% uptime promise for the last 44 months, we have an incredible 99.999% uptime record over more than four years.

It’s all the result of an investment philosophy that means we use only the highest quality suppliers and technology partners, and always look to for scalability, capacity and efficiency.

Celebrate with us by taking advantage of one of our two special offers this April:

• One month free and unmetered bandwidth with any dedicated hosting plan
• 100% availability web cluster – only $999/mo

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider confirms Elya McCleave to lead customer service, completing the first phase of the company’s transformation following its 2011 privatization

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider confirms Elya McCleave to lead customer service, completing the first phase of the company’s transformation following its 2011 privatization

It all adds up to a wider range of more powerful servers, at lower prices, delivered faster than ever.

The new range of iWeb dedicated servers now includes ready-to-go configurations, as well as fully-customizable servers, in order to cover the broadest possible range of hosting scenarios. The wider choice of specifications are engineered to give optimal performance at a variety of budgets.

In response to customer feedback, most packages now offer unmetered traffic, so you can make the most of dedicated computing power and 100Mbps dedicated bandwidth without giving a second thought to additional charges for sending traffic to your server.

The launch follows a $4million investment in infrastructure and further automation at our state-of-the-art data centers in Montreal, Canada. This is the latest stage of 16 years’ investment in high-performance, scalable and energy-efficient technology and infrastructure undertaken with the aim of providing long term value to our customers.

By seizing upon new technologies while investing for the the long term, we strive to offer more reliable hosting at a lower price than our competitors. This is reflected in the new range of dedicated servers, which offers a wider choice and higher performance, at lower prices, delivered faster than ever.

The new range of engineered servers in numbers

• 37% lower price for Intel E5 servers, on average
• 8x more servers deployed within four hours
• 54% of all servers deployed within six hours

To see for yourself, take a look at the new range of dedicated servers and Smart dedicated servers.

Phishing emails will usually ask you to send personal information in reply to the email or will contain a link to an illegitimate website where you are asked to sign in or provide personal information.

In order to protect yourself from phishing scams, please remember to examine the email header and reply-to address, and the destination of any links in the email.

Here’s how to recognize a phishing email and how to respond if you think you might have received a phishing email.

Please remember that:

• iWeb will only ever send you an email from an @iweb.com email address
• The iWeb Control Center website address begins: https://account.iweb.com/…
  - Please note the https and the .com/
  - There is always a / (slash) after .com

If you receive a questionable email:

• Never provide your user ID or password in an email
• Do not respond to emails threatening to close your account
• Verify the destination of any links on the page before clicking them
• To log in safely, go to the iWeb home page and follow the links to the Control Center / login
• Contact iWeb customer service: contact@iweb.com

If you suspect you have received a phishing attempt mimicking an iWeb email, please contact customer service: contact@iweb.com or call us toll-free.

Photo by Gabrielo74

Increased traffic and online activity can hit all-time highs as both flu patients and illness avoiders alike steer clear of public places. A large boost in traffic can put enough stress on a website to slow down response time or worse, cause a crash. Frustrated shoppers and abandoned shopping carts harm a business and ultimately, shrink the bottom line. Be sure to take all the necessary steps to ensure your infrastructure is ready with adequate hardware configurations and backup solutions.

To go the extra mile in your preparedness, remember that healthy employees are your best assets by offering staff members the benefit of working from home when appropriate. The benefits are two-fold as infected employees can limit sick days and return to projects gradually while they also avoid infecting otherwise healthy colleagues; limiting the exponential spread of enemy number one, the flu. VPNs and other telecommuting resources are investments worth making if your staff stays healthy and managing them is relatively simple: http://kb.iweb.com/entries/22454866-securing-secure-shell-ssh?locale=1

With the right resources your business can not only get through flu season unscathed, it can benefit from being prepared. Contact iWeb to make sure adequate hardware and backup solutions are in place: http://iweb.com/contact

Check out Google’s Flu Trends: http://www.google.org/flutrends/intl/en_us/

Read on for a summary of these events and a look at international organizations’ attitudes to the threat of espionage from competitors, employees and governments.

Image from the Acamai State of the Internet report Q3 2012. The blue areas represent each country’s percentage of the overall total amount of attack traffic observed in Q3 2012 by Akamai.

In January, Akamai’s state of the internet report suggested that around 33% of attack traffic in Q3 2012 originated in China. This placed “the middle kingdom” well ahead of second-placed USA, which itself accounted for a sizable 14% of all the attack traffic Akamai measured.

Akamai’s figures relate to all kinds of attacks, and given that they are based on the volume of attack traffic, it is probably fair to assume that they are skewed by DDoS attacks, where high volumes of malicious traffic attempt to take down websites and pages. The motives for these attacks are diverse.

However recent attacks on US media outlets, including those on The Wall Street Journal which Mr. Murdoch cited in his tweet last weekend, have also included security breaches seemingly intended to obtain further information about forthcoming articles, information sources and authors. The Wall Street Journal has specifically cited China as the origin of these attacks, even suggesting that some of the hacking is linked to the Chinese government.

As ever, there is little evidence in the public domain that the Chinese government is behind these security breaches. This was pointed out by the Chinese government in light of the Wall Street Journal’s claims. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei denied any wrongdoing or association, reiterating the stance of the Chinese government against cyber attacks:

“It is irresponsible to make such an allegation without solid proof and evidence, the Chinese government prohibits cyberattacks and has done what it can to combat such activities in accordance with Chinese laws.” – Hong Lei

The Chinese government made similar denials following the New York Times’ revelation that it had been the subject of a four month campaign to steal passwords and hack the accounts of some of its journalists. In this instance Chinese hackers appear to have first accessed US university computers then rerouted the attacks in order to hide their true origin.

Aside from the question of government involvement, it is not new to see China in the news for digital espionage. Previous reports have purported to expose the extent of China-based hacking for commercial intelligence in order to improve the competitive position of Chinese companies and the country as a whole.

The wider context is that industrial espionage is a real and present issue in today’s digital economy, with apparent financial consequences.

In their global state of information security survey 2013, a global survey of more than 9,300 security and business executives, PWC asked organizations who had suffered a security incident how they were impacted. The second most popular answer given, accounting for 24% of incidents, was intellectual property theft.

Furthermore, the other most common impacts cited were not mutually exclusive of IP theft. The most popular impact, according to those surveyed, was financial loss (28% of incidents) and other common outcomes included compromise of brand or reputation (24%) and loss of customers (22%).

However, fewer than 13% of the same respondents cited “intellectual property theft due to nation-state espionage” as a factor driving their information security spending – that made it the lowest of all the published response options.

And when asked about the origin of the incidents, only 4.5% of respondents believed that governments were behind the attacks, compared to 16% stating criminals, 17% competitors, 28% former employees and 36% current employees. It seems that threats usually arise closer to home.

Breaking down the data by industry, however, reveals a higher concern for government and competitor espionage in certain industries, particularly those related to defense, media and technology, all areas which directly affect or concern government activities.

Those industries more likely to cite governments as the source of incidents include aerospace/defense (10%), agriculture (7%), entertainment and media (6%), technology (6%).

5% respondents from the hospitality and leisure industry cited groups associated with governments as the source of security incidents (versus average 2% across all industries).

Whatever the accuracy of organizations’ own ascertains as to the source of attacks, or their actual relative importance, it seems unlikely that any powerful government is not involved in industrial espionage at all, even if they feel it is a matter of national defense. Claims to the contrary therefore ring hollow. But the evidence suggests that organizations should consider the basics first in order to keep their own house in order, and to keep their applications protected against emerging threats so as to make sure they are not easy targets for hackers.

See our recent article: do I need a security assessment? for further reading or get in touch to talk about your hosting security concerns.

By extending live chat from iweb.com into the Customer Hub, it’s now more convenient than ever to get assistance from a member of our support team while you navigate around the site and pose questions in the live chat dialogue.

What’s more, it’s now quicker to reach the most suitable support department for your question: when you click to chat live with iWeb, you can immediately choose to speak to a technical support, billing or hosting sales specialist depending on your question, taking you straight to the right person.

Extending live chat to the Customer Hub also means that as an iWeb customer you can now sign in to the Control Center while chatting on iweb.com. That makes it easier for the support specialist to give you specific answers to questions about any aspect of your personal hosting service with iWeb, be it technical, billing or service related.

The new look live chat was developed in consultation with our customers, in response to their feedback on the areas they felt were most convenient and useful. We love to receive suggestions from of our customers, and would welcome any comments on the new live chat functionality!

Our electricity is 98% renewable generated. It’s one of the reasons we can bring you more reliable hosting at a better price than our competitors. And it’s part of the inspiration behind our sustainable investment approach and long term perspective.

It’s also one of the reason’s we’re lucky to be located in Montréal, in Québec, Canada. Montréal is a city with a history rich in innovation that’s home to many technology companies and the incredibly talented people that make them tick. All just 45 miles (72 km) from the USA border.

Read on for more details about green hosting with iWeb, which is 98% powered by hydroelectricity.

Photo by Bouchecl

iWeb is based in Québec, a province in the east of Canada that is blessed with an abundance of fresh water.

In fact, Québec is home to an incredible 500,000+ lakes and rivers that cover 12% of its surface and represent 3% of all the fresh water on earth.

When not stored as ice and snow, like that surrounding our data centers right now, Québec’s water flows via several enormous drainage basins to the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans.

This vast, powerful and continuous cycle is an incredibly potent source of renewable energy, which the governments of Canada and Québec have been developing and improving since the 1960s into the modern infrastructure we have today.

To get an idea of the scale of the operation, consider the largest hydroelectric project in Québec, the James Bay Project.

This series of hydroelectric developments has a capacity of over 16,000 megawatts and is bigger than the state of New York. Unsurprisingly it is also one of the biggest hydroelectric projects in the world.

Hydro Québec

In order to efficiently manage and produce hydroelectricity, all residents and businesses in Québec buy electricity from a single provider: Hydro-Québec.

As the name implies, Hydro-Québec is heavily reliant on hydroelectricity for the electricity they produce. In fact 98% of all the electricity in Québec (that’s the electricity that is powering your hosting with iWeb right now) is generated from this renewable source.

Green hosting

Although greenhouse gasses are still produced from the generation of hydroelectricity (the development, management and delivery involves activities that require some fossil fuels to be used), it is very clean energy source.

Hydroelectricity production in Québec is actually 100 times cleaner than coal energy, and around 40 times less pollutant than energy produced by natural gas.

Image from Hydro-Québec

This means that the electricity generation (and therefore electricity your servers run on) represents less than 1% of all greenhouse gas emmissions in Québec, compared to a figure of 32.5% of greenhouse gasses produced in the USA.

But Montréal is only 72 km (45 miles) from the USA border, and only 532 km (331 miles) away from New York where we link to the global fibre optic network (FLAG) that provides iWeb’s low-latency links to Europe and the rest of the world.

With our Points of Presence in the USA, that means that you can benefit from energy-efficient hosting that is 98% powered by renewable energy and still be close to the USA market and links to other world markets.

More than renewable energy

Some other elements of iWeb’s green hosting approach include our green data center cooling. We use the most energy-efficient cooling systems available: the Liebert DSE Precision Cooling System, which exceeds the ASHRAE minimum standard by 53% and is 70% more efficient than alternative technologies.

And will soon install free-cooling in order to take further advantage of the five months of sub-zero temperatures that we are currently enjoying. The long, cold winters always mean we can reduce the carbon footprint and cost of cooling servers (and pass that on to you as consistently lower prices).

As a platinum partner of Intel, iWeb also offers the latest Intel servers, notably our Intel E5 servers which Intel says are the most energy-efficient processors on the market thanks to their Intelligent Power Technology.

Related posts

• Natural server cooling (-27c) – Facebook photo album (January 23, 2013)
• ADVA FSP 3000 deployed (November 15, 2012)
• Here we grow again (October 24, 2012)
• Green hosting with iWeb, supported by Insertech (October 23, 2012)
• iWeb network amongst the most reliable (September 17, 2012)

Still, some people are curious to ask, “What impact will this change (pun intended) have?” Fewer coins in your wallet? The absence of ‘give a penny, take a penny’ coin relief bowls at cash registers? Increased headaches for hyper-detailed accountants?

Image by hotmayo

There might be several economic reasons to phase out the smallest of our currency’s denominations but melting down the copper and doing away with it won’t erase its impact. Think of all the expressions we’ll have to explain to future generations:

• A penny saved is a penny earned
• He doesn’t have two pennies to rub together
• Penny for your thoughts
• Let me put my two cents in
• It costs a pretty penny
• Lucky penny

I could go on….

Despite the ubiquitous keypads and transactional websites in today’s commerce landscape, we are not a cashless society. I don’t use coffee shop-branded cash cards and I can’t remember seeing anyone in line for their morning coffee using one either. And I certainly wouldn’t dare tip a cab driver with a credit card. I don’t keep a pile of money between my mattresses but I do reach into the cash section of my wallet for most purchases under $20. Cash is indeed, still in circulation.

What will this mean for retailers who process hundreds of cash transactions each day (diners, coffee shops, dollar stores)? Will the penny discrepancies even out if a retailer has a high number of daily transactions all with the same obscure amount? What if that retailer must round down almost all of its transactions by two cents? For consumers, it means almost nothing as hardly any of us produce more than a few cash transactions each day.

However, think about the reverse situation. 500 transactions rounded up by .02 cents = $10. If a business is open 365 days, this kind of skimming off the top brings them an additional $3,650 annually! If small businesses are opportunistic and take advantage with pre-calculated price fixing, it may become the new corruption trend we all pay for—one penny at a time. Or maybe not.

On the other hand, you can still pay with pennies as they continue to be legal tender and acceptable forms of payment. The Royal Canadian Mint has stopped making the penny and banks aren’t distributing them but they are still worth their value. So why not break out the jars and piggy banks and take a handful of copper down to your favourite charity? Leave a bag of pennies on the steps of a homeless shelter. Drop them in collections cans. Let’s allow this to make us all a little more generous, one penny at a time.

Find out about more about convenient payment processing at iWeb.

Consumer information is available on the Royal Canadian Mint’s website.

For customers unfamiliar with reverse DNS, Reverse DNS works by starting with an IP address, and checking records to see if it points towards a domain. Unlike the regular DNS system which will allow multiple domains to be served from a single domain, the rDNS system only allows one IP per domain. More details about reverse DNS are available on our knowledge base http://kb.iweb.com/entries/21869927-reverse-dns-or-ptr?locale=1.

You will be able to add, delete or view the reverse DNS for all IPs that you have on each of your servers. It is important to note that this feature is available for Smart Servers, Classic and Cloud customers.

For more details on how to configure Reverse DNS in your Control Center, we invite you to read the article for this purpose available in our Knowledge Base http://kb.iweb.com/entries/22038828-configuring-reverse-dns-in-control-center?locale=1.

This article originally appeared on iWeb Chief Executive Officer Eric Chouinard’s blog on business news website lesaffaires.com

In the early 20th century, economists confirmed a link between entrepreneurship and economic growth. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle; more entrepreneurs ensure the growth of the economy, and a growing economy fosters entrepreneurs! In tangible terms, this translates to increased individual and collective wealth.

That being said, Québec’s entrepreneurial index, as measured by the rate of business start-ups and intent to start a business, puts us at the bottom of the scale. Research done by the Fondation de l’entrepreneurship (FDE) suggests that there are 40% fewer entrepreneurs in Quebec than in the rest of Canada. That’s right, 40%!

If this trend continues…
By 2020, Quebec will have an entrepreneurial deficit: we’ll lack 38 000 business people ready to take over existing businesses. The number of business owners retiring will be greater than the number of entrepreneurs willing, or able, to acquire these companies. There are no exceptions; neither executive search agency nor the neighbourhood dry cleaner will have an easy time finding successors.

It’s not as if we have a shortage of people – the population is increasing -so why are we so few people willing to go into business?

Born for the “short end of the stick?”
According to the FDE, there is a gap between what the individual Quebecers thinks (“I”) and what he thinks his entourage believes (“We”) about success. The individual entrepreneur is afraid his success will be ill-perceived by his peers. As a result, entrepreneurial values – ambition, fulfillment, ascension (social, financial, political) – remain taboo and easy to disparage. “There’s nothing to good for his Lordship!” or” He must be doing something fishy”, that kind of thing.

Is success frowned upon in Quebec? Do we not make fun of people who want to stand by their ambition, who want to live their dream, or in some cases, to explore their genius? It sounds an awful lot like High School, does it not?

This cult of mediocrity troubles me. Not just in terms of our economic future, but also for the sake of my children. I do not want them to comply with the lowest common denominator, to fear success or fear failure, or fear that giving the best of themselves will turn them into a laughingstock.

What about you, Mr. Chouinard?
I too, sometimes, minimize my accomplishments, as I do not want to appear smug, or entitled. I’ve been told that’s called Imposter Syndrome, a “psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalise their accomplishments, despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they do not deserve the success they have achieved.” Perhaps I do, but I’m afraid it is not just I, but the entire province that suffers from this syndrome… If we have so much to be proud of, why aren’t we?

I believe enterprise is a path towards self-fulfillment. Beyond the audacity to start a business, there are other things one can “start”: start a family, start a degree, start planning a long trip, start giving time to a worthy cause – all gestures that contribute to our personal growth as well as the growth and reputation of our society.

Tools to help entrepreneurs
It is obviously necessary to encourage entrepreneurial initiatives, whether through subsidies, tax incentives or mentoring programs. If a friend dares to go into business, silence your doubts and encourage her! The RJCCQ has proposed a way to use funds accumulated in an RRSP to purchase a business, just like the HBP is used as a down payment for the purchase of a first home. Keep the ideas coming!

We won’ t recover overnight from our collective self-esteem problem. In the meantime, I encourage you to think big, to cultivate your dreams, to encourage entrepreneurship and support local businesses. If you want to learn more about entrepreneurship in Quebec, have a look at the websites of the École d’entrepreneurship de Beauce (www.eebeauce.com/) and the FDE www.entrepreneurship.qc.ca.

The ADVA FSP 3000 is the most efficient, reliable and scalable solution available and will help us scale our network while maintaining our promise of 100% uptime.

iWeb’s network availability and response are amongst the best in the industry according to independent audits by Netcraft. And we continue to invest in the most advanced technologies in order to maintain this enviable position.

By working with partners like ADVA and investing to improve capacity and performance today, we are in a superb position to meet the customer expectations of tomorrow and to provide more and more organizations with the most reliable hosting service available at a lower price than our competitors. Our data centers currently have capacity for 35,000 servers.

The ADVA FSP 3000 enables iWeb to rapidly respond to this data growth and scale to future 100G technology. It was specifically chosen because of its performance, small footprint and cost efficiencies.

Low power consumption reduces operating costs and allows us to offer better value for customers in the long term, while fulfilling our environmental obligations.

This combination, along with its scalability, ensures iWeb can respond to customer demand in the most effective way possible.

“Our network is our critical competitive advantage. It’s what differentiates us. It’s what sets us apart from the market. Our network availability and response times are some of the best in the industry. That`s why it’s vital that we only work with the most dynamic partners. ADVA Optical Networking reflects our own drive for customer satisfaction and the desire to push technology. You only need to look at the small footprint and low power consumption of the ADVA FSP 3000 to understand this.”

- Cyrille Mertes, iWeb CTO

“iWeb has built an impressive history focused on technology and, more importantly, using this technology to exceed customer expectations. The company has created a network that achieves 100 percent uptime and some of the fiercest response times in the industry. We`re working with iWeb to help drive its network forward, to help the team achieve even more. This is the beginning of a partnership that will see iWeb scale to 100G and beyond.”

- John Scherzinger, senior vice president of North American sales at ADVA Optical Networking

You can find out more about our high-speed, reliable network and take a video tour of our energy-efficient data centers on iWeb.com.

Its easy to forget about the work that goes on behind the scenes of the internet. The people and the hardware that host, power and facilitate the medium. We tend to think about the words, images, videos and data, and even the people who create them, and less about the infrastructure they rely on.

This is more true than ever in the age of the cloud. To the end user, cloud hosting is not about paravirtualized drivers and hypervisors but data accessibility and simple interfaces. For cloud-based services, the model is an opportunity for brands and services that make access to data and media simple, reliable and a little bit fluffy.

Clouds collide

The clouds making the headlines last week were more tangible. Indeed, they could be seen from space in satellite images published on weather and news websites charting the course of hurricane Sandy across the ocean to New York and New Jersey.

Sandy was bigger global news than many other hurricanes because it reached the north east of the United States. And the unprecedented demand for information this produced was met head-on, even fuelled by, an enormous variety of web reporting and footage.

Some sites produced impressive material like this time lapse video of the hurricane approaching New York and promoted them as ‘highlights’. Others took the opportunity to make political and environmental arguments, as in these satirical cartoons. Many more showed real scenes shot on the ground, often in the form of mobile phone footage uploaded to the cloud by people directly affected.

Many New Yorkers shared their surprise and disbelief on social media with 800,000 #Sandy instagram pictures uploaded and shared on the internet. Over 1,500 tweets per minute with hashtag #hurricanesandy were tweeted at one moment on Monday night as people shared thoughts and links.

While the impact of the hurricane was communicated internationally via media hosted in the cloud, and ultimately on server hardware in data centers around the world, those responsible for the communications infrastructure in New York and the surrounding area were stretched to the limit to protect information and maintain network availability.

Damage limitation

In difficult conditions, large scale power cuts were observed in New Jersey and New York. The hosting network suffered outages and technicians were stretched to the limit to implement continuity plans in extreme conditions.

Surge tides swelled through the city and filled whole floors of servers in New York data centers. Many of these suffered power outages caused by flooding, several suffering downtime as a result. The most widely reported downtime was that of news and gossip website the Huffington Post, who resorted to a hand drawn homepage and social media channels.

At least half a dozen major hosting providers suffered downtime, affecting access to hundreds of organisations’ data and web applications. Communications giant Verizon also saw data centers flooded, as did network and cloud solutions company Equinix, based in the Google owned building at 111 8th Avenue.

With datacenters flooded, many hosting providers suffered electrical faults that left them relying on large diesel generators and the skill and dedication of their staff.

In the chaos, Datagram had to wait 24 hours for a 2 megawatt generator to be delivered on an 18-wheeler that had been held up as it weaved its way through obstacles and fought its way through congestion. Peer 1 managed to maintain a constant supply of fuel to its own emergency generator, even if buckets were at point passed along chains of people to replace failing pumps within the facility.

Although Zayo Group admirably managed to keep all its customers websites and data available throughout the duration of the hurricane, temperatures in their data centers reached over 100 degrees when they were forced to temporarily switch off cooling systems.

On the network side of operations, up to 2,000 local networks were simultaneously out of action. International web traffic had be re-routed away from New York, a major international communications hub, and this was achieved with impressive efficiency and very little impact to the wider internet. Local internet services were badly affected, with New York and New Jersey worse hit.

This video from internet intelligence company Renesys shows how network connectivity was affected throughout the night of October 29 and 30.

Related articles

How much downtime is acceptable?
Here we grow again
Green hosting with iWeb

If you are not familiar with this awareness event, Movember takes place every year during the month formerly known as November. Men and women across the globe join forces to raise awareness and funds for men’s health issues. Men grow a Mo (moustache) for 30 days and therefore become walking, talking billboards for men’s health causes – specifically prostate cancer and mental health initiatives. Seeing as they cannot grow a Mo, women show their support by organizing events, collecting funds, leading a team and spreading the important message of men’s health.

Men who support Movember, called “Mo Bros”, should register at Movember.com. Mo Bros start Movember 1st clean shaven, then grow and groom their Mo for the rest of the month, raising money along the way. Women who support Mo Bros, called Mo Sistas, can also register on the website.

Want to contribute to this cause? Why not support the iWeb team! Visit http://ca.movember.com/team/533181 to donate and help our team achieve its goals. iWeb will match donations received.

We thank you for your contributions!

You can go trick or treating with peace of mind as our knowledgeable team of professionals will keep your infrastructure out of reach from bats and evil spirits alike.

Happy Halloween!

This project will be completed in two phases and is structured so that there will be no impact to our customers. The initial phase of this project consists of the replacement of all twelve air conditioning units by new, top of the line energy efficient units of higher capacity. These units will take advantage of our colder climate to minimize energy consumption. A second phase will follow with the installation of a fourth UPS, a third generator and the upgrade of the Hydro-Québec electrical entrance. The initial phase is already in progress and is expected to be completed by the end of 2012. The second phase will be executed by Spring 2013.

iWeb is committed to and executes regular capacity planning and facilities upgrades to ensure high availability in all our facilities. We thank all of our customers for their continued business.

Like any large IT infrastructure company, iWeb faces the major challenge of managing an enormous amount of server and hosting hardware. Maintaining four data centers with a total capacity of nearly 35,000 servers is not an easy task.

And when we consider how we manage our equipment, as with all our practices, iWeb is concerned about energy efficiency, recycling and the environment. That might be because we live in Quebec, where the seasons and surroundings mean the environment is never too far from people’s minds.

Quebec is one of the largest producers of sustainable energy in North America, notably due to its production of Hydro Electric power. Combined with the cold winter air that we use for keeping servers cool, this means we can boast data centers that are among the greenest, cleanest and most efficient in North America and the world.

And when a piece of equipment has finished its life in one of our data centers, iWeb makes sure that it is responsibly disposed of, into a computer recycling program provided to us by Insertech.

Insertech Angus became the first company to reach the Montreal Electronics Reuse and Refurbishing Standard 2012. This is the highest standard recognized by the Association for Electronics Recycling ERPA-Québec, the organization that manages the new program of extended responsibility for electronic equipment producers in Quebec.

The Recycler Qualification Office awarded this environmental certification after rigorous checks. Furthermore Insertech iscurrently the only computer reuse and refurbishment company in the Montreal area to have reached this level of certification.

We are currently looking for sales professionals and technical support representatives. If you speak French, English and Spanish, we really want to meet you!

Should you be a Linux rock star, we are also looking for experts to fill positions as system administrators and provisioning agents.

We hope to meet many of you at our booth!

Rest assured, each of iWeb’s data center is connected to the others via a redundant network ring and engineered to withstand any number of events, including even rare ones of this kind.

Let’s go back into the past for a quick look at how iWeb came to be:
Part 1: http://ericchouinard.com/2009/06/09/made-in-iweb-part-1/
Part 2: http://ericchouinard.com/2009/06/29/made-in-iweb-part-2/

MONTREAL, Oct. 2, 2012 /CNW Telbec/ – Simon Rivard, whose past e-commerce successes include Quebecor Media, TD Bank and Desjardins, was appointed Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of iWeb.

“The growth of any business depends on the effectiveness of its go-to-market strategy and its marketing ability,” says Christian Primeau, iWeb President and Chief Operating Officer, as the company nears the 20,000 managed servers milestone. “Simon’s 25-year experience will be invaluable in developing and implementing our sales and marketing strategy, as well as for the development of our range of products and services. Just as importantly, he “thinks big” and shares our values and our culture – which is very exciting!” adds Primeau.

“iWeb is essentially an entrepreneurial structure that has the means of its ambitions; there was no way I was going to refuse such a rare opportunity!” says Rivard, a graduate of Montreal’s HEC, who was recently a lecturer for the Université de Sherbrooke’s Masters and MBA program. (Communications and e-Commerce).

Earlier this year, iWeb was ranked among Canada’s Fastest Growing Companies for a fifth consecutive year, and the reliability of its IP network continues to rank it among the world’s best hosting companies, according to Netcraft, the U.K.-based Internet and hosting research organization.

About iWeb (iWeb.com)
iWeb provides the on-demand server and cloud infrastructure that allows over 20,000 customers worldwide to deliver today’s Internet-based technologies and to create tomorrow’s online innovations. Since 1996, Montreal-based iWeb has been rated among the world’s top web infrastructure providers based on performance and reliability and among Canada’s fastest growing companies.
http://iweb.com

Now iWeb is pleased to go a step further with the latest generation Xeon processors. We introduced the E3 processors to our Classic Dedicated lineup and are now providing the same processors for the Smart Server lineup.  In addition, we have simplified the configurations available for Smart Servers while keeping all the great features customers love.

Why choose the new Smart Server lineup?

E3 powered Smart Servers offer many advantages:

- Increased performance through new technologies;
- Xeon single processor offers for reliability at an affordable price;
- A minimum of 4 GB of RAM on all servers;
- The possibility to add up to 32 GB of RAM on E3 powered servers and even more with Dual Nehalem;
- DDR3 1600 MHz RAM, SATA3 6.0 Gb/s hard drives;
- The latest generation of processors with more cache, Turbo Boost 2.0, HyperThreading, and more;
- Double the traffic Allocation and Dedicated Firewall, Unlimited Local Bandwidth*
- Rapid Deployment;
- Private LAN’s*

* With SUPERSMART option.

Here’s a quick look at the new offers with single or dual processors:

New Offers:

Intel Dual-Core Core2 Duo 2.93GHz
4GB 1000 GB SW RAID-1 & 20TB Public Bandwith
$79 Buy Now

Intel Dual-Core i3-540 3.06GHz H/T
4GB 1000 GB SW RAID-1 & 20TB Public Bandwith
$109 Buy Now

Intel Quad-Core Core2 Quad 2.66GHz
8GB 1000 GB SW RAID-1 & 20TB Public Bandwith
$129 Buy Now

Intel Quad-Core E3-1230V2 3.3GHz
8GB 1000 GB SW RAID-1 & 20TB Public Bandwith
$149 Buy Now

Intel Nehalem Quad-Core Dual Xeon 2.13GHz E5506
16GB 1000 GB SW RAID-1 & 20TB Public Bandwith
$319 Buy Now

Available Operating Systems:
Windows Server
CentOS 6
Debian 6
Ubuntu Server LTS 12.04

Looking for an even more powerful and robust solution? We invite you to contact our sales team who will be able to offer you a solution tailored to your needs.

Once again, you asked, we listened.

The new lineup, updated operating systems and features are a direct result of customer feedback and request.  Please keep them coming!

We invite you to give us your opinion on this new product line on our Facebook page. You can also suggest new features or products that may simplify your life through our knowledge base http://kb.iweb.com/forums/20559673-feature-request?locale=1. Thus, we will be able to offer products that meet your expectations.

A beta version was launched a few weeks ago that made a limited number VMs available to Smart Server customers right in their Control Center.

As the beta continues, we will launch additional beta servers at a rate of 25 per week (first come, first served). To participate in the beta and to know the next release date, you must register on the notification list at the address: CloudServerBeta@iweb.com

You will then be able to activate your free beta test Cloud Server right in your Control Center by clicking on the “Add a server” button, then selecting the Cloud Server beta box and follow the instructions onscreen

The specs of the Cloud Server you will be testing are:

• Linux CentOS 64bit
• 1 CPU compute unit
• 512 Megs of Ram
• 10GB of storage space
• Full root access via ssh

Note that this is an early beta release and functionnalities are limited at this time. This is not the final product. More functionalities will be added in subsequent releases.

As beta testers, you will be able to participate actively in the development of this new product. In exchange for free access to a Cloud Server during the beta test, you will need share your comments and suggestions and of course report any problems you notice.

We are counting on you, your comments are important!

I recently had the occasion do a lot of tests on my Smart Servers. I installed several webmail software, I tested  email relaying via the private network. I also experimented with reverse proxy and load balancing with lighttpd, nginx and varnish-cache. I enjoyed experimenting with mod_security and memcached. I also looked at graphs and monitoring solutions through various software sush as mrtg, cacti, monit, munin and nagios. Among all these interesting topics, deciding what I was going to blog on became a daunting task! I really enjoyed playing with mod_proxy and the private network connected to the Smart Server, so let’s go with that.

My scenario is quite simple: I have a customer who occasionally uses too many resources to be alone on his server. You know, those famous political columnist, they appears at the 6:00 pm news and boom! at 6:02 he receives a huge amount of traffic, the server slows down, people see that the site is behaving oddly, and become aggressive reload button clickers, believing it will help.

The setup I configured includes three servers. Ideally, it would take more than that, especially if the goal is to become redundant and failproof. Whether it’s a hardware failure, a network failure, an electrical failure or simply an update that goes wrong, the result is the same: A website DOWN= an unhappy customer!

On my back-end I had two web servers that could easily be hosted anywhere on the web. Here we use the Smart Server because the objective is to test and to use their private network. This adds a security layer so web 1 and web 2 don’t need to be directly accessible on the internet. In our case, the server is acting as load-balancing made of ProxyPass. This setup works quite well when the customer doesn’t do too many changes to his site, read: uploads images, changes the template, updates!

I isolated the /wp-admin/ directory so that it always falls on the same server, the proxy in my case and I configured a little cron with rsync to synchronize files every 10 minutes. At the moment, this scenario satisfies me, even though it is far from being ideal or perfect. There would be a way to automate a synchronization of files on all servers, but I have not really tried solutions such as FAM or DRBD.

Basically, I installed the standard wordpress on the server that makes the ProxyPass. Then I configured the site and installed the extensions and templates. I configured a SQL DB on this server, in our case it is also the proxy but it would be ideal to isolate it on its server or to an external database service like Xeround. In my WordPress, apache, mysql and memcached configurations, I always specify the internal private network IPs since all my servers at iWeb are Smart Servers. This eliminates traffic on the public network. It makes the setup much safer.

All servers have experienced a basic hardening that I have already given the outlines. They have iptables on both network interfaces and they not relay traffic between the two networks interfaces. They have the memcached service configured on the private network. It seems we never have enough of this cache.

On the web 1 and the web 2, I configured Apache to listen on the private network only, no ftp, bd or sql. I almost blocked all the traffic on the public network and I only authorized protocols used on the private network.

On the server facing Internet, I configured mysql to listen on the private network only, Apache and vsftpd, them, to listen to the public network. I set up the ssh keys so one can easily synchronize my DocumentRoot rsync. I then allowed time to receive the files. Minutes later, after the passage of cron, I end up with a beautiful WordPress installation! To add a web 3, 4, etc. becomes a child’s play.

On my servers, web 1 and web 2 I have a similar configuration using port 488 since it is already authorized in SeLinux.

NameVirtualHost 10.X.Y.Z1:488
<virtualhost 10.X.Y.Z1:488>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@horizonlinux.org
    DocumentRoot /usr/local/sites/www.horizonlinux.org
    ServerName 10.X.Y.Z1
    ErrorLog logs/www.horizonlinux.org-error_log
    CustomLog logs/www.horizonlinux.org-access_log combinedio
</virtualhost>

This is the configuration I used on the proxy server:

<virtualhost www.horizonlinux.org:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@horizonlinux.org
    ServerName www.horizonlinux.org
    ServerAlias horizonlinux.org
    DocumentRoot /usr/local/sites/www.horizonlinux.org
    ErrorLog logs/www.horizonlinux.org-error_log
    CustomLog logs/www.horizonlinux.org-access_log combinedio
 
    ProxyRequests Off
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    <proxy *>
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </proxy>
 
    ProxyPass /balancer-manager !
    ProxyPass /wp-admin !
    ProxyPass / balancer://mycluster/ stickysession=BALANCEID nofailover=On
    ProxyPassReverse / http://10.X.Y.Z1:488/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://10.X.Y.Z2:488/
    <proxy balancer://mycluster>
        BalancerMember http://10.X.Y.Z1:488 route=hrz1
        BalancerMember http://10.X.Y.Z1:488 route=hrz2
        ProxySet lbmethod=byrequests
    </proxy>
 
    <location /balancer-manager>
        SetHandler balancer-manager
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </location>
</virtualhost>

If you have any comments or questions for Charles, you can post them in the comments section below.

You too can share your tests and configurations with the community! Contact us!

About Charles Lacroix: Self-educated and always looking for new challenges, Charles Lacroix is a Linux consultant at djj-consultants.com. He is drawn by computer secirity and by everything related to the Web. This article has originally been published on his blog horizonlinux.org and is published here with his authorization. Thank you Charles for sharing with the Community!

Depending on your project however, there are several reasons why you should consider a dedicated Smart Server instead of a VPS.

The differences between dedicated servers and VPS

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. The term refers to a software-enabled virtual machine running on the same physical computer as other customers’ virtual machines. A VPS behaves like a separate physical computer, dedicated to the individual customer’s needs, provides the privacy of a separate physical computer, and can be configured to run server software.

A VPS is not a dedicated server, though. The main difference lies in the fact that with dedicated you have full access to the server resources. Hybrid servers like iWeb’s Smart Servers (http://iweb.com/smart-server-hosting/overview) are dedicated servers that offer both the power of a fully dedicated server and the flexibility of cloud computing. It uses Smart Layer, a Xen-based layer of virtualization that provides a lot of powerful administration options, and you get the full use of the dedicated server hardware.

6 reasons to go the Smart route

Here are the 6 reasons why you should consider a dedicated Smart Server instead of a VPS:

1. Higher security

Although virtualization platforms are hardened at the hypervisor level, not all solutions are equal in terms of security. Virtualization platforms are still environments that you share with many others, sometimes thousands of clients. The only way to be sure that your data is fully isolated from others is with a dedicated server.

2. Steadier performance

One of the issues you may encounter with VPS servers is inconsistency in performance. If you benchmark a VPS solution at different times of the day under the same conditions of traffic, you might get different results. Some service providers may allow you to burst your allocated CPU utilization, but you’re not guaranteed that this extra CPU power will be available when you really need it. With a dedicated server you are guaranteed access to 100% of the CPU resources.

3. More personalization options

VPS providers generally offer fixed configurations, prepackaged, with no option to upgrade. Smart Servers offer you more flexibility. While you start with a package that meets your needs, you can increase your RAM along the way and upgrade your server (CPU and Disk Space) without reinstalling your whole system thanks to Smart Server’s easy migration option.

4. Genuine hardware parts

A VPS configuration never displays the actual hardware components it is built upon. With dedicated Smart Servers you get assurance that each server is built with genuine hardware parts: Intel CPUs, Western Digital Disks and major brand RAM (whether Kingston, Crucial or Corsair, depending on availability) and Super Micro motherboards.

5. Ease of use

Smart Servers come with our exclusive, custom-built Control Center. This is a unique server management GUI that offers you more control over your server hardware and network configurations. You also have access to a virtual console that allows you to manage your server as if you were right in our datacenter and perform remote reboot, if need be. Smart Servers can easily be configured to use cPanel WHM control panel and R1Soft backup software for additional flexibility and data security.

6. Price vs. Value

Cost is always an important factor when choosing a hosting solution, however, value is even more important. If you look closer, there is not significant difference in price between a dedicated Smart Server and most of VPS offerings available on the market. There is a significant difference, though, in the value delivered, considering the flexibility and features you get with a Smart Server.

Before choosing a VPS to host your next project, make sure to check out iWeb’s Smart Servers.

Most importantly, it means that we currently have no SBL listings for our IP space! We were recognized by the Spamhaus Team as a proactive no-spam-tolerance network.

This is quite rare as Spamhaus listing process is very strict and thorough. That is something we are very proud of.

Although spam is something that happens on a regular basis, our abuse and support teams work hard at keeping spammers off of our network (good job guys!).

You too can help. If your receive spam originating from our network, simply report it to abuse@iweb.com by sending a copy of the mail headers (make sure to include rogue server’s ip address in the subject line).

You might not receive an instant confirmation and spam might not stop right away (wouldn’t it be great if it was that simple?) but you can be sure that we will do all necessary verifications on the suspected server.

iWeb currently only offers Debian lenny as an install option on Smart Servers. Many of you requested that we supported the latest Debian distro named squeeze.

We are working on implementing this distribution (as well as updating the other available OSes) to be available out of the box with Smart Servers. Luckily Debian can be upgraded successfully manually from lenny to squeeze by installing grub-legacy after the upgrade and before rebooting your Smart Server.

Here’s the step-by-step procedure:

1. First of all upgrade your system to last lenny

 apt-get update
 apt-get upgrade

2. Record a transcript of the upgrade session

 script -t 2>~/upgrade-squeeze.time -a ~/upgrade-squeeze.script

3. Edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file to replace lenny to squeeze.

 sed -i -e 's#lenny#squeeze#g' /etc/apt/sources.list

4. Upgrade the package index.

 apt-get update

5. Install new apt and dpkg

 apt-get install apt
 apt-get install dpkg

6. Minimal system upgrade

 apt-get upgrade

7. Install new kernel

 apt-get install linux-image-2.6-flavor

(to retrieve correct flavor type:

 uname -r

)

8. Install new udev

 apt-get install udev

9. Once you have upgraded both the kernel and udev, the system should be rebooted.

10. When system go up, fully upgrade the system

 apt-get dist-upgrade

11. Install grub-legacy

 apt-get install grub-legacy

12. Remove obsolete packages

 apt-get autoremove

13. Read Debian release note (4.9) to check the list of obsolete packages.

14. Now reboot and enjoy your new squeeze system.

Caveat emptor: As blogger Jeremy Cole mentioned in a recent post « if your system is not a “stock” lenny install, i.e. with 3rd party deb sources and a bunch of custom stuff, your mileage may vary.  I did this to a fresh, new server before anything else. Basically, the standard instructions break grub-pc (GRUB2) on this Xen-based system.  Follow along until the end, then remove grub-pc and re-install grub-legacy. Your system will then be ready to go!».

SOPA is the acronym of “Stop Online Piracy Act” and PIPA stands for “Protect Intellectual Property Act”.

The goals of these two bills are to stop copyright infringement on the Web in the United States, originating especially from foreign countries, according to American legislators.

However, according to its opponnents, the bills will violate freedom of expression while damaging the Internet as we know it.

Despite the fact iWeb did not engage in a specific activity today, we do follow the case closely. We suggest you to gather information about SOPA and PIPA in order to understand how Internet users are involved in the United States as well as in other countries, especially in Canada.

More detailed information is available on the GovTrack.us website, which follows the American Congress activities:

SOPA: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-3261
PIPA: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-968

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to defend Internet users, summarizes why these bills are unacceptable in an open, free and safe Internet world:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech.

Here is a video produced by Fight for the Future that describes how we are involved in these bills:

Many renowned Websites joined this fight by warning their users about the situation:

Wikipedia
Google
Wired
The Oatmeal
Reddit

In Canada:

Identica
Tucows
Michael Geist (Copyright specialist and law professor at University of Ottawa)

In the Media:

http://www.branchez-vous.com/techno/actualite/2012/01/sopa_une_journee_de_greve_inte.html
http://blogues.radio-canada.ca/surleweb/2012/01/17/protestations-anti-sopapipa-le-canada-participera-t-il/
http://www.radio-canada.ca/emissions/la_sphere/2011-2012/chronique.asp?idChronique=195737
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/01/17/f-sopa-canada.html

(Sources: Wikipedia, GovTrack.us, Electronic Frontier Foundation, CBC)

We would be glad to know what your questions or concerns are on the subject. Feel free to comment:

But there is Zero Tolerance when it comes to illegal activities and especially anything related to children exploitation. Spread the word!

A few months ago, the Canadian Police Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, an organization associated with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), presented iWeb with a certificate of appreciation for our continued support and our assistance in order to reduce child exploitation on the Internet.

We humbly accepted this certificate and we will tirelessly continue contributing to eradicate this plague, even if the task seems endless, unfortunately.

iWeb is vigilant in all matters relating to Internet security, fraud attempts, spam and all overall illegal activities such as distribution of child pornography. Our abuse team is on the alert, but if you notice anything unusual that passes on our network, please let us know by email at abuse@iweb.com (for reference please read iWeb’s Acceptable Use Policy).

Here are some sites you can visit if you want to know more about the policies in place in Canada and the resources that are available:

Canadian Police Centre for Missing and Exploited Children
http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cpcmec-ccpede/index-eng.htm

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection
http://www.protegeonsnosenfants.ca/app/en/home

CyberTip.ca – Report Form
https://www.cyberaide.ca/app/en/report

Now that 2011 is down the drain and a full 30 years have passed since the IBM VM Machine, we thought you’d appreciate us to update and republish it.

Check out the updated ending, enjoy and comment!

1981 – The IBM VM Machine, first list server

The first LISTSERV was hosted on an IBM Virtual Machine mainframe over BITNET. LISTSERV enabled group email collaboration, and spurred the first list spams, flame wars and online trolling

Netcraft’s measurements will allow you to evaluate reliability of data transfer. The reliability performance is monitored every 15 minutes, from several reference points.

According to Netcraft, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent from a customer’s point of view than outages on hosting companies’ own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why they choose to rank their table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage.

Netcraft is a British Internet services company that provides internet security services and research data and analysis on many aspects of the Internet since 1995. It is a respected authority on the market share of web servers, operating systems, hosting providers, ISPs, encrypted transactions, electronic commerce, scripting languages and content technologies on the internet.

The complete analysis is available on Netcraft’s website. More details on Netcraft’s methodology can be found here: http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/Hosters and http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/FAQ.

At any time, whether at work or at home, whenever you use a password protected connection, you must be very cautious about protecting personal information.

This is especially important if you offer server management services to many clients.

You will be surprised to read the list of the 50 most encountered passwords in intrusion attempts. These passwords were collected by the kind people at Dragon Research Group, based on the analysis of logs gathered after successful “brute force” attacks (http://dragonresearchgroup.org/insight/sshpwauth-cloud.html).

If any of your passwords can be found in this list, you should know that you are at risk. A hacker could easily access your data in just a few seconds.

In fact, when you choose a password you should at least meet the following criteria:

1 – Long and strong passwords:
Combine uppercase and lowercase letters with numbers and symbols and choose at least 8 characters to create a more secure password. Several passwords generators, both software or online, can help you in this task.

2 – Unique account, unique password:
Use a different password for each and every account you manage, avoiding to re-use the same information from one to another. This is especially recommended if you set up systems for several clients.

3 – A shelter for your passwords:
Anyone can forget a password. If you do not trust your memory or if you really have too many passwords to remember, you can still write them down to a file. Remember to keep the list in a safe place and preferably away from your personal computer (and for pity’s sake, avoid Post-Its!). Ideally, use a software password manager that supports encryption like the open source utility KeePass.

These are just a few basic tips, but here are some additional resources that will help you protect your or your clients’ personal data:

Dragon Research Group
http://dragonresearchgroup.org/

Stop. Think. Connect.
http://www.stopthinkconnect.org/

Secure Password Generator
http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

KeePass Password Safe
http://keepass.info/

Get Cyber Safe
http://www.getcybersafe.gc.ca/index-eng.aspx

Securing Wordpress against hackers
http://blog.iweb.com/en/2011/02/securing-wordpress-against-hackers/2954.html

Please share your own advice and resources in the comments section of this article.

The Prime Minister of Thailand recently announced that the large quantities of water that flooded the country could take up to six weeks before retiring.

Many companies have found their facilities largely damaged and several suppliers of electronic components are unable to produce the parts needed by major brands of computer systems.

Several analysts even predict shortages of some common parts, including hard drives. For instance, affected company Nidec, a manufacturer of hard drive motors, provides 70 to 80 percent of the parts available on the market. Nidec is a supplier to the main hard disk manufacturers, including Hitachi, Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital.

Western Digital, the largest manufacturer of hard disks in terms of volume, employs 37,000 workers in Thailand and about 60% of its production is done in this country.

The company has temporarily suspended its operations in Thailand but the other company facilities in Malaysia, Singapore and the United States are fully operational.

Distributor inventories of are not yet affected but if the situation extends beyond the forecast, a shortage could actually occur in the coming months.

As for iWeb, we fill up our inventory so that the situation does not impact our customers and we can continue to meet the demand. We are monitoring the situation closely.

(Source: storagenewsletter.com, C/Net, npr. Photos: NASA, Bangkok Post.)

This new tab summarizes the key information and simplifies the activation of the different services on your server Smart, such as SuperSmart, in addition to offering shortcuts to navigate in one click to other sections within the Control Center.

In the specifications summary of your server, you will find information about the IP address, network, CPU, RAM, hard drives, the backup service, the operating system and control panel.

You will also find the list of Smart Services and a short description of each of these services. Finally, shortcuts to get online help or technical support are available in the bottom section.

Here is a screen capture of the Smart Server’s Control Center new home page:

Feel free to comment on this new feature. You can also send us your suggestions. Who knows? They may find themselves in a future version of Control Center!

One year ago, iWeb introduced its biggest innovation to date. The launch of the Smart Server, the first product based on iWeb’s SmartLayer technology, marked the first step in transforming the company into an innovative provider of automated Web hosting services.

Since its release, the product has evolved and the iWeb team has delivered a multitude of features to its customers in order to give them more control over the management of their servers. The promise to deliver a product that eliminates many of the problems normally associated with the management and use of a dedicated server was successfully fulfilled.

“We stayed in touch with our customers and developped features that meet their expectations ,” said Martin Leclair, iWeb’s President of Products and Technology . “Customers who buy a Smart Server today will also benefit from any new feature that will be added in the future.” he adds.

Over the year, several features were added with both increased security and server management ease in mind, all available through the Control Center, the Smart Server’s user-friendly management interface. The SuperSmart option provides a software firewall to easily protect critical Smart Server ports and services. Automated Reinstall of the operating system is now available to the customer right from the Control Center. Customers are now able to easily save and restore their data and their Smart Server configurations (including MySQL database configurations) in a few clicks with the available R1Soft backup tools. Smart Groups brings together multiple Smart Servers in an environment completely isolated from other clients allowing each server in the group to communicate easily while remaining invisible to other servers connected to the same LAN, as if they were installed in a physical private rack. All these features are now available in the “Smart Services” tab, in the Control Center, for easy management of the Smart Server.

Many other features will be rolled out in 2012. Once again thanks to the teams that work hard on developping such a great product and making it evolve week after week.

Many thanks to all our clients who chose the Smart Server as the basis for their Web hosting infrastructure. To celebrate the Smart Server’s first anniversary a contest will soon be held. Full details will be announced in coming weeks on the iWeb.com site.

For several months, I’ve been using a Smart Server from iWeb and I can say that I am pleasantly surprised. The price is right, they are reliable and the interface to manage your server or servers, the Control Center, is quite nice. Notably, it provides access to a virtual console allowing you to turn off the server if it stops responding.

Recently, iWeb launched a series of additional features for the Smart Servers, known as, the SuperSmart Option. Check out what it offers…

• An increase to the data transfer allocation that goes from 10 000 GB to 20 000 GB
• A software firewall, external to your Smart Server
• A 1 Gbps LAN, interesting if you have several Smart Servers.

For the extra bandwidth, if one day I reach the 10 000 GB of traffic, I would be happy to pay $ 20 more per month to activate this “SuperSmart” option. But right now, I am trying to use up my 10 000 GB but I can’t (even though I backup my friend’s server every night and I sync my data to the cloud).

As for the firewall, it is particularly good for people who buy a dedicated server with cPanel and do not know the tricks to properly secure a server. By default, the firewall is fairly permissive but there is one thing that I find amazing: the firewall is external to the server so if you are locked you of the server because of an error in your ruleset, it is just 2 or 3 clicks and “voilà!”, you have access to your server again.

I made several tests on the private backnet and it’s really a nice product. At first glance, it looks well insulated, there is probably 1 VLAN per customer with a /27 subnet , which is quite enough for my needs. I tried to scanning the backnet with Nmap, I sniffed to see if I could find anything but I discovered that iWeb had already foreseen this.

What I like the most about the Smart Servers are the possibilities that the backnet has to offer. I am about to develop a great project with an old friend and this backnet will be very helpful. There is a strong possibility that I will use the SuperSmart option for the extra bandwidth as well as the unmonitored 1 gig backnet. I will certainly enable the firewall because it’s there, but I will also complete it by using the iptables to have a more precise filtering. Here are the settings which I consider particularly important for a good firewall, that I would like to have seen in the interface:

• Filter according to the source address.
• Filter according to the destination address.
• Filter on the private network.
• Filter within the FORWARD table, or even play in the NAT table.

But at least the port scans will be blocked before they get to me :P

My conclusion: SuperSmart is well worth its price, especially if:

• Your are not familiar with iptables, and server security in general
• You need more than 10 000 GB of bandwidth
• You expect to transfer lots of data through the backnet.

What’s more, knowing iWeb, they will keep adding many more pleasant surprises to the Smart Server!

About Charles Lacroix: Self-taught and always looking for new chalenges, Charles Lacroix is a Linux consultant and computer technician at the Cégep Sainte-Foy. He is passionate about computer security and everything related to the Web. This article was originally published on this blog, horizonlinux.org and it’s reproduced here with his kind authorization. Thank you, Charles, for your contribution to the iWeb community.

This new company will aim to consolidate all shared hosting and domain name reservation activities, which will no longer be offered by iWeb. This service supports over 15,000 clients, 23,000 websites and 32,000 domain names in over 100 countries around the world.

Funio’s new website, is now accessible at www.funio.com.

iWeb’s president and chief officer, Eric Chouinard, firmly believes that shared hosting must benefit from all the attention of a team of professionals exclusively dedicated to development of the product.

Funio will seize this opportunity to innovate and add value to the products as well as the tools that enable their delivery. In past years, iWeb has invested a lot of time and resources into its “Smart Layer” technology and dedicated servers.

iWeb will pursue deploying all its efforts in this direction in years to come, thus standing out through this innovation. However, the moment has come to provide our shared hosting customers a dedicated company who will take care of delivering the best out of the service.

The creation of Funio also explicits the two company’s mission: iWeb for dedicated servers and Funio for shared hosting.

iWeb has named Sylvain Leclair, until recently iWeb’s CDO and vice-president of sales and marketing, to the position of president of Funio.

For Sylvain Leclair, Funio has a lot of work to do in order to finalise the transition, but the priority will be to add value to the shared hosting services by offering better support and tools that will allow the customer a better control over his hosting.

Moreover, in the next year, Funio will add many new features to raise the value of the services received by the shared hosting customers.

Finally, Funio will rethink its infrastructure, including the domain name management system who will undergo a long due facelift. Our team has been impatiently waiting for this project for some time now, and we are all very motivated by this new beginning. It is a challenge to the high aspirations of our team.

iWeb.com and Funio.com will work closely until Funio can take over independently and autonomously, which is scheduled for early 2012.

The official press release is available at this address: http://blog.iweb.com/en/2011/10/iweb-announces-the-creation-of-new-shared-hosting-service-funio/8601.html

Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or “GPL”), Drupal is developed and maintained by a community of over 630,000 users and developers around the world.

The Drupal Montreal community invites you to the fourth edition of the DrupalCamp that will be held on September 16-18, 2011 at McGill University’s McIntyre building.

The objective of DrupalCamp is to gather all those interested in Drupal so they can get acquainted, share experiences and their ideas in person in an informal setting.

This year, organizers hope to receive more than 200 participants and the event will offer, in addition to an open-space meeting format, a number of workshops and conferences (see program for details). A few days before the camp, a multilingual code sprint in Drupal will be held at the Notman House, September 14-16, 2011.

iWeb’s team is very pleased to partner with the event as a sponsor and several of our developers will be on hand to share their knowledge with other participants. Watch for break out sessions!

It’s not too late to register ($20 for participants already registered online and $25 for those who register on the same day).

Be seeing you!

P.S. FYI, Drupal 7 is available as a One-Click Install from the customer-hub (Panelbox shared hosting) or if you use cPanel and the Fantastico extension on your dedicated server.

Netcraft’s measurements will allow you to evaluate reliability of data transfer. The reliability performance is monitored every 15 minutes, from several reference points.

According to Netcraft, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent from a customer’s point of view than outages on hosting companies’ own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why they choose to rank their table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage.

Netcraft is a British Internet services company that provides internet security services and research data and analysis on many aspects of the Internet since 1995. It is a respected authority on the market share of web servers, operating systems, hosting providers, ISPs, encrypted transactions, electronic commerce, scripting languages and content technologies on the internet.

The complete analysis is available on Netcraft’s website.

With Smart Group comes many benefits: the installation requires no manual intervention and provides you the freedom to manage your private LAN in the Control Center. The Smart Servers share information on a local link, which increases the security of your servers. The Smart Group is installed on the Smart Layer, which makes the installation immediate, eliminates any need for downtime on your server and doesn’t require that we physically move your servers in the datacenter.

Smart Servers within a Smart Group can share as much data as you need, since the local bandwidth is unlimited with the SuperSmart package. For example, you will be able to create a group for a Web server and a database server, without connecting the database server to the public network. You could also install a Load-Balancing server that is accessible via the public network and that can manage the load distribution within your private virtual LAN.

To give you a preview, here is the video tutorial of the Smart Group:

As you can see, you need only drag and drop the Smart Servers in your account to your Smart Group directly from the Control Center.

This service is included in the SuperSmart package offered at 20$ per month.

Font choice, along with page layout, font size and type arrangement, is one the most important ingredients in the overall typography of a page. With tens of thousands fonts out there, how do you know which one to use? Some fonts are best suited for a professional business like Apple, while others are better for a children website. Serifs, kerning or weight can determine the portrait of the page.

Mainly, to choose the proper font, you have to go with your gut feeling when you see the font for the first time. Categories are already established to help you find the correct font (handwriting, fun, techno, business, etc.). By choosing the right font, you can provide a better message to your audience, since the font is as powerful as an image. Tim Brown, the Type Manager for Typekit, said: “I don’t start with a layout and then choose type; I start with type and then grow out from that.” Since a typographer understands his responsibility towards the reader, the best typographers and type designers are obsessed by details, so that the readers aren’t.

Here is a list of a few font websites recommended by our designers:

• http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ – Free
• http://new.myfonts.com/ – Reseller
• www.google.com/webfonts – Free
• www.typekit.com

Don’t be shy to ask colleagues, friends or family about your font choice. Even a glimpse at the typography should evoke some sort of feeling. Finally, typography matters because words matter.

What are your favorite fonts? Do you know good foundries?

Organized by Montreal Tech Watch, this event gathered developpers and product managers from several companies to test the usability of their respective products.

The companies present were mTrip who develops intelligent travel guides for the iPhone and Android; matchFWD whose objective is to connect talent with growing companies; ArtSumo connects artists from emerging countries with art aficionados around the world and Twtpoll who develops tools to create polls to use on Social Media sites. The main goal for iWeb was to gather comments from people who have never used our products, specifically, the Smart Server and its control panel, the Control Center.

First, we were pleased that our product caused a real “Wow” effect! The participants were impressed by the quality of the design of the Control Center, and the disconcerting ease with which they were able to navigate and manage the Smart Server! Although not purposely optimized for smart phones, we also received feedback that our Control Center performed particularly well on mobile platforms. Of course there were some critiques and minor cosmetic bugs were pointed out during the session but nothing dramatic. So, we are confident we are on the right track!

We are actively listening to comments from the community, whether from existing clients or specialists interested in web hosting and software development. Being an Agile organized development team allows us to relatively easily prioritize and introduce new features as well as improve and optimize our existing features. You can be sure you will be hearing about the Smart Server for quite a while ;-)

Feel free to add your comments or questions, we’ll be glad to hear from you!

The “Smart Services” tab can be found in the Control Center and enhances your ability to exercise complete control over your server. Click this tab to find all the optional services available on Smart servers including the features included with the SuperSmart package.

To give you a preview, here is a screenshot of the interface:

Discover the SuperSmart package offered on Smart Servers, the Smart Firewall option and the R1Soft Backup Solution.

Many other options are coming soon and will be available in this tab, including Smart Groups, a private virtual LAN service for all your Smart Servers. Smart servers within a Smart Group will be able to communicate while remaining invisible to other clients’ servers connected to the same local network.

Follow the iWeb Blog to remain up-to-date about upcoming Smart Servers features!

The main goal of idea2delivery.ca is to connect entrepreneurs as well as to provide educational and informational resources. Tools for entrepreneurs such as white papers and a section dedicated to showcase startups and small businesses are also available.

The real strength of the project is a documentary, presented as a reality show, which follows an entrepreneur all along the way in his startup process. We briefly interviewed Wendy during the festival about the project:

For more info and watch the show’s pilot episode, read the article on Montreal Tech Watch: Idea2delivery starts a web-based reality show on entrepreneurs

World IPv6 Day has been initiated by the Internet Society, to promote a progressive transition to the IPv6 protocol, since addresses in the current IPv4 protocol, are in short supply.

It was very important for us to participate and to convey the message that we are getting ready. Today iWeb’s main domain (iweb.com and www.iweb.com) is available in dual stack mode. It means that if you connect to our website from an IPv4 address (ex. 209.172.32.36) or an IPv6 address (ex. 1ce:c01d:bee2:15:a5:900d:a5:11fe) you will see our home page.

Another range of urls have been IPv6′ed, all of our mirrors are now available with the new IP format. Check out the page: http://mirror.iweb.com.

To have a little fun, the IT team brought you this little game. Try to match each IPv6 address to its corresponding domain. There are clues directly in the IP , so don’t be lazy, do not use dig. ;-)

So, what are the next steps?

We have already upgraded our main routers operating system. Three of our upstream providers, namely Tata, Level3 and Tinet are already IPv6 compliant. Peer1 and Cogent are next in line. We are progressively setting up all our services and websites domains to be compatible.

There is no official date yet but it’s clear iWeb will offer you full IPv6 services. Our teams are working hard on this project. Expect more news within the next couple of weeks.

Additional info:

iWeb to participate in World IPv6 Day
http://blog.iweb.com/en/2011/05/iweb-to-participate-in-world-ipv6-day/7602.html

Internet Society
http://www.isoc.org/

World IPv6 Day
http://www.worldipv6day.org/
http://www.worldipv6day.org/participant-websites/

So at iWeb, we are looking to do our part to support the startup and developer communities. We see a great oportunity to do so by sponsoring the International Startup Festival in our hometown, Montreal. We are putting our money where our mouth is by offering to pay for tickets to the International Startup Festival where you will have access to industry giants, thought leaders and your peers in the various stages of the startup lifecycle.

We will award tickets to the startups whose story we like the most. Plus, the winners will:

• have access to our specialists to give you advice about the infrastructure you’ll need for your project
• spend one-on-one time with our Chief DNA officer, Sylvain Leclair
• get the chance to share your story with iWeb community and beyond

We’re choosing the winners July 5th so don’t wait!

Entering for a chance to win is easy. Simply fill out the form below to tell us your story. We will choose the story we like the most.

Not sure where to start? Here are a few questions to help you tell us your story:

What is your idea? What stage are you at? Why would you like to attend international Startup festival?
Are you a startup, but not starving? We would love to hear you story too!

You will now be able to operate a user-friendly Firewall on your SmartServer in a few clicks with the easy-to-use web based interface. This new feature allows you to enhance your server’s security and to ensure increased uptime on your server. This adaptable Firewall is dedicated to your server and, consequently, is not shared between various servers or clients.

The Firewall is installed on the Smart Layer and not on the Operating System, which allows better flexibility. The Firewall installation is immediate and requires no downtime on your server. In addition, the Firewall has no impact on the server performances since it uses no resources on the OS (Operating System), unlike a Software Firewall. Furthermore, if you reinstall your servers OS, your Firewall configurations will remain unchanged.

The Firewall offered in the SuperSmart package is analogous to dedicated Firewalls for Classic Servers, with the addition of the web based interface that allows the user to configure, enable and disable the Firewall rule sets without going through SSH command. You can now enable or disable your Firewall in a few clicks and the configuration updates require no manual intervention.

Three types of configurations of your rule sets will be available (two are predetermined). The first configuration is the default, and is set when your server is activated. This allows inexperienced users to efficiently manage their server’s security without advanced knowledge in system administration. The second configuration is adapted for use with cPanel. It allows you to effortlessly configure the Firewall for the specific services offered with cPanel. The last configuration is “Custom”, and is aimed at experienced users who can manage all the Firewall rule sets. These rule sets allow every type of user to configure the Firewall, from the inexperienced to the advanced administrator.

To give you a preview, here are a few screenshots of the interface:

This service is included in the SuperSmart package offered at 20$ per month.

Additional options will soon be available on the SmartServers, including Smart Groups, a private virtual LAN service for all your SmartServers. Each server will be able to easily communicate without being noticeable by the other clients’ servers connected to the same local network. You will receive further information in the upcoming weeks.

Welcome to the first edition of the iWeb Browser Race! In the past few months, we’ve noticed that the race for the best Web browser can be brutal. With our chronometers in hand we’ve been analyzing statistics with help of our computer program called Boulier Quad. We’ve decided to start to regularly share results as well as the quarrels, quips and quick comebacks between users during what we’ve dubbed “The Incredible Browser Race.

Please note that these statistics are drawn from a very particular cast of users: YOU! Our customers, visiting iWeb.com. These statistics could not be applied to other websites.

Here are the results for April:

• For the 8th consecutive month, the winner is Firefox, with a significant break out of the gates for Firefox 4 (10% increase in one month only), picking up speed, preserving its lead, and further distancing itself from Internet Explorer and Safari.
• In second place, the “Pit-Stop” prize, for the fastest tire change, is awarded to Chrome (10.0), since all 9.0 version users have now been updated. It’s small burst of speed has taken some of the wind out of Internet Explorer and Safari’s sails. (they came in with a combined total of 2%)
• In third place, the consolation prize is awarded to Internet Explorer, which is losing speed compared to Firefox and Chrome. The new version (9.0) did not make any difference. Although it is Microsoft’s brand new car, only 1.3% of Internet Explorer users updated their browser for the latest version. Microsoft will therefore need to tune its new Rolls-Royce.

Special Prizes:

• Black Flag: Internet Explorer has lost 2% of its users, while the global volume increases. A pit-stop to fuel up (Service Pack) might be necessary.
• White Flag award: three quarters of our clients can now use the Virtual Console for SmartServers, we are eagerly awaiting the 4/5 mark.
• Bleeding Edge: One (or two maximum according to the statistics) user surfed our website with Chrome 12.0 last month. If you are this user, congratulations! You represent the future!

What is your favorite browser? What features do you seek the most in a browser? We invite you to share your comments, while waiting for the next edition of the iWeb Browser Race.

Prepared by the Internet Society, World IPv6 Day’s goal is to promote a progressive transition to the IPv6 protocol, since addresses in the current IPv4 protocol, are in short supply.

Users of the new protocol will automatically connect to iWeb.com using IPv6, during the 24-hour experiment. However, users with IPv4 will continue to connect via the current protocol, since the website is published in IPv6 and IPv4.

This test is limited to iWeb.com websites and will neither affect the Customer Hub nor the Blog nor the Control Center.

IPv6 has been in alpha/beta mode since August 2009. IPv6 is configured on our core network and we already have three IPv6 transit providers, which are Tata, Level3 and Tinet. We plan to annex Peer1 and Cogent to this list shortly. The Internetwork Operating System on all our routers was upgraded March 15th, in order to become fully IPv6 capable allowing us to offer it on all our servers in the future.

For further information about IPv6, you can consult the following website : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6.

In the meantime, you can test your IPv6 connection by clicking on the link: http://test-ipv6.com/.

iWeb is proud to be taking part in this event, as it represents our proactive approach to preparing for the transition to this new protocol, whose usage will eventually be extended worldwide.

For several weeks, our IT team has been working on the Panelbox Platform, the infrastructure that provides iWeb’s shared hosting services.

Since the last series of maintenance performed on these systems, we have implemented several significant improvements. These improvements have been made in consideration of the feedback you have provided us.

First, we implemented Ksplice. This is an extension of the Linux kernel that allows a system administrator to apply patches to the kernel without having to reboot the system.

One of the significant advantage of this system is that it greatly reduces the number of planned maintenance actions that we perform on these servers. Another is that it allows us to apply the security updates much more quickly in case of a security flaw.

Ksplice works for x86 and x86-64 and is developed by Ksplice Inc. under the GNU General Public License.

Second major enhancement: CloudLinux. It’s actually an OS that replaces our traditional CentOS. CloudLinux’s major advantage is the ability to efficiently distribute the resources of the server among customers. We can now automatically limit the use of resources per customer on a server.

This limit allows hosted sites to temporary exceed resources while ensuring that the resource overflow will not affect the entire server.

Thus, a user will no longer be able to consume all the server resources, either voluntarily or involuntarily due to an intrusion, a bug or other occurence. Therefore, even if a site has a problem, all other sites hosted on this server will remain available.

The affected site may then experience a slowdown, even display an error message, but would not necessarily be suspended for exceeding resources. It is important to note that we still have the ability increase limits in real time where required; for example, to ensure availability during special events.

These improvements, are combined several other lesser modifications, such as a thorough optimization of our MySQL servers, the use of Linux Malware Detection to prevent hacking attempts in our servers through customer’s sites.

In addition, we have optimized our backup scripts so that we can restore “disfigurement” of sites of moderate magnitude in a few minutes (up to 15 to 30 minutes for an entire server if the deletion targets only the index).

Finally, we have performed a migration of Panelbox S02 to S013 and S015 to S032, which are VMWare based. In the coming days, we will conduct preventive checks of the file system (FSCK) on these servers to take full advantage of the recent VMWare update from version 3.5 to 4.1. In short, this verification will allow for improved resource management (better CPU and Virtualized memory utilization) and improved high availability (faster and more reliable migrations of virtual machines, etc.)

Our teams have put in a lot of hard work to implement these changes. We are confident that it is well worth it and we are sure you will enjoy these improvements.

What it takes :

• WordPress updated version (February 2011 = 3.0.5)
• PHP version 4.3 or higher
• MySQL version 4.0 or higher
• Apache mod_rewrite (Linux Hosting recommended)
• Wildcard CNAME record for subdomains
• Activation Procedures for Multisite with sub-domain option
• Plugin : WordPress MU Domain Mapping
• Access to DNS management interface

Step 1 : Enable Multisite function with sub-domain

You can use this procedure to activate the Multisite function under WordPress 3.0.5 (with sub-domain option).

Step 2 : Create site and choose domain names

In my example, the main blog will be www.babillard-scolaire.org and I have already created a second site which is testmapping.

• my first site (which will be managed under the same WordPress babillard-scolaire.org will be :
  testmapping.babillard-scolaire.org and the domain name that I will “map” will be www.babillardscolaire.com

Step 3 : Install the WordPress MU Domain mapping plugin

You may download the plugin on the WordPress.org site

1. Create the mu-plugins directory under the wp-content directory
2. Copy the sunrise.php file (from the WordPress Mu Domain mapping plugin) in the wp-content wp-content directory
3. Copy the domain_mapping.php file (from the WordPress Mu Domain mapping plugin) in the mu-plugins directory
4. Edit the wp-config.php file (I suggest to use NotePad++) and add the following line:define( ‘SUNRISE’,’on’);
   just above the “/* line. That’s all, do not touch the following! Good blogging! */”

Step 4 : Mapping configuration in Super Admin (through the instrument panel)

Note : you must know the IP address of your website (mine in this example is 174.122.132.8). You can also use a CNAME according to the plugin information.

Click on Domain mapping under Super Admin and enter the IP address in the Server IP Address field and check :

• User domain mapping page
• Redirect administration pages to site’s original domain (remote login disabled if this redirect is disabled)

Step 5 : Map the domain name on the site

So I want to map the www.babillardscolaire.com domain on the website I have created testmapping.babillard-scolaire.org.

Go to the testmapping.babillard-scolaire.org site administration by clicking Super Admin and the Administration link which is under testmapping Super Adminan the Administration link which is under testmapping.

This opens the instrument panel to manage the testmapping site.

On the panel, click Domain Mapping under Tools

and add the domain you wish to map.

In my example, I want to map the www.babillardscolaire.com domain. So this is the information I have entered in the http:// field; then you check Primary domain for this blog and you click the Add button.

Step 6 : Configure the domain on CPanel

To make the www.babillardscolaire.com domain work, I also have to configure it through CPanel, by using Parked Domains in the Domains section.

Enter the domain name (here www.babillardscolaire.com) and click the Add Domain button.


Note : First, we need the DNS zone of your domain (my example: www.babillardscolaire.com) points to the IP address where your website is hosted.

I can now manage the www.babillard-scolaire.org and www.babillardscolaire.com (testmapping.babillard-scolaire.org) sites in the same instrument panel. You can add as many sites as you want.

Please send us your articles on Web Design, Web Hosting or Web Marketing to community@iweb.com.

All of us at iWeb are particularly proud to offer support to the Make Web Not War Vancouver event and to the open source community through our sponsorship.

It is definitely the place to go if you like to learn about the latest tips, tricks and software from industry experts. The conference focuses on open source applications and explores the newest web paradigms and technologies, notably mixed web environments, interoperable applications, PHP on Windows and the Windows web platform. MWNW is about bridging the gap between different platforms, communities, and developers of all trades and backgrounds.

Last year’s event in Montreal was a huge success — this year’s conference in Vancouver will be even better. Here are three good reasons to attend:

1) Meet with and chat with like-minded developers and share stories.
2) Learn from industry leaders and check out the panellists.
3) Fun. Video games. After party.

MWNW is jointly sponsored by Microsoft and open source communities across Canada. iWeb is the Platinum sponsor for the event and proudly hosts the following websites

http://webnotwar.ca
http://port25.ca
http://webcentralstation.ca

as well as servers used for the Code Your Art Out code competition.

Fast facts:
What: Make Web Not War
When: May 7
Where: Masik Studios
145 West 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, British Columbia V5Y 1C2

So, are you convinced?

Many of you have asked if a video would be available. Now it’s done. Enjoy!

This video and several others are also available on our Youtube channel.

The theme of his presentation, “The role of the manager in the Scrum Team” will address among other topics, change management, personal growth, management of human beings beyond metrics, weaknesses and pitfalls of Scrum that the Agile manager must avoid.

The presentation will be given in French. Here’s the summary: “To become more agile, more and more companies are trying to adopt the Scrum methodology. The Scrum Master, the team, the product owner roles are a formal and documented process. By building a team of independent and autonomous individuals, the Scrum ‘pack’ by definition excludes the manager. In the literature, he is considered a ‘chicken’, his role being often interpreted as passive and often caricatured (“buy pizza and get out of the way”). How much space in Scrum exists for a team manager? What is the role of the coordinator, the team leader, the director, and even sometimes the VP / CTO / COO in the context of the Agile project process? ”

To discuss these concepts, Bruno invites you all to attend his presentation on Friday, March 11 at 9:40. The more the merrier!

A delegation of our developers will also attend Confoo and participate in the various presentations. They will mix with the community and they will be glad to answer your questions about their work as a developer and about iWeb in general.

So if you see us, do come and meet us.

Bruno Morel participated in an interview following his presentation (in french):

The presentation itself will be rebroadcast on our blog in the coming days.

No doubt, it’s a compelling publishing platform, with its open-source development model, its powerful plugin and theming system, and its strong community of users and developers.

One of the direct consequences of the platform’s popularity is the constant attacks and hacking attempts it encounters.

First there are blog comments spammers, but also bots and hackers who try to take control of your website. For example, many of our customers have already had the nasty surprise of having their home page replaced by a black page signed by a hacker. Very often this vulnerability is due to the fact that the WordPress installation on the client is not updated and still uses an outdated version.

We’ve introduced several measures that would prevent a similar issue, from technical measures to measures preventing social engineering. We are constantly hardening our own servers and regularly applying security fixes but, you must also insure your own security is up-to-date, whether you manage your own dedicated server or you run a simple Wordpress blog on your shared hosting account.

It’s easy to overlook WordPress security and every WordPress blogger should spend some time on the issue. WordPress regularly releases an update to their blogging platform. Of course, the minimum you should do is upgrade to the most recent version, especially if it’s a vulnerability fix release. For instance, if you installed WordPress from the Fantastico OneClick install option and have never updated to the latest release, you should do it now.

To find out which version you run and if an update is available simply look for the release number in the Dashboard.

Unfortunately, having the latest version does not guarantee a hacker will not try to break in.

Here are other tools which might help you improve your blog security:

• First of all make sure to change the default admin usersername to something other than ‘admin’. The linked article gives you 3 ways to do it easily.
• The WordPress codex has an extensive resource on how to harden your Wordpress install
• The WordPress Security Scan plugin scans your site for security issues, checks passwords, file permissions, database security. It also hides the WordPress version and secures the admin area.
• The login lockdown plugin allows you to control login usage. It prevents for instance scripts or bots doing dictionary attacks
• The WordPress login logger plugin allows you to have logs on who tried to log into the admin area.
• WP DB Backup is a plugin which makes a copy of your WordPress database. Useful in the case a hacker went through your WordPress and publishes or deletes existing articles.

There are also other efficient tactics such as preventing access to wp-admin apart from selected IP addresses, through the .htaccess file. Users or bots with an unknown address will be greeted with a 403 response. If you run WordPress on your own dedicated server, you might also want to run a VPN application like OpenVPN, to secure the access to your Dashboard.

A final piece of advice before we conclude:

Do not trust every plugin you find on the Internet. Make sure that a wide community of users is using and that its author provides some support or at least fixes bugs that are reported. If the plugin is free, do not forget to show your support by making a donation if the author asks for it, or even contribute to it if you are a developer.

This list is not exhaustive. Please share your own tips and advice in the comments below.

Have you ever heard a colleague answer the phone like this: “Good afterno… Yes… What? Completely?… When did it go down?… Really, that long?… We’ll look into it right away… Yes, I understand… Of course… Okay, speak to you soon… Bye.”

The call may have been followed by some cheesy ’80s rock ballad coming from the speaker phone, interrupted by “Thank you for holding. You are now caller number 126 in the queue.” That’s your boss calling the hosting company’s 24 hour “technical support” line.

An important website has gone down, and sooner or later, heads will turn to the Web development corner of the office, where you are sitting quietly, minding your own business, regretting that you ever mentioned “Linux” on your CV. You need to take action. Your company needs you. Your client needs you. Here’s what to do.

1. Check That It Has Actually Gone Down

Don’t take your client’s word for it. Visit the website yourself, and press Shift + Refresh to make sure you’re not seeing a cached version (hold down Shift while reloading or refreshing the page). If the website displays fine, then the problem is probably related to your client’s computer or broadband connection.

If it fails, then visit a robust website, such as google.com or bbc.co.uk. If they fail too, then there is at least an issue with your own broadband connection (or your broadband company’s DNS servers). Chances are that you and your client are located in the same building and the whole building has lost connectivity, or perhaps you have the same broadband company and its engineers have taken the day off. You will need to check the website on your mobile phone or phone a friend. To be doubly sure, ask your friend to check Where’s It Up? or Down for Everyone or Just Me?, which will confirm whether your website is down just for you or for everyone.

If the website is definitely down, then frown confusedly and keep reading. A soft yet audible sigh would also be appropriate. You might want to locate the documents or emails that your Internet hosting service sent you when you first signed up with it. It should have useful details such as your IP address, control panel location, log-in details and admin and root passwords; these will come in handy.

2. Figure Out What Has Gone Down

A website can appear to have gone down mainly for one of the following reasons:

• A programming error on the website,
• A DNS problem, or an expired domain,
• A networking problem,
• Something on the server has crashed,
• The whole server has crashed.

To see whether it’s a programming error, visit the website and check the status bar at the bottom of your browser. If it says “Done” or “Loaded,” rather than “Waiting…” or “Connecting…,” then the server and its software are performing correctly, but there is a programming error or misconfiguration. Check the Apache error log for clues.

Otherwise, you’ll need to run some commands to determine the cause. On a Mac with OS X or above, go to Applications ? Utilities and run Terminal. On a PC with Windows, go to Start ? All Programs ? Accessories and choose “Command Prompt.” If you use Linux, you probably already know about the terminal; but just in case, on Ubuntu, it’s under Applications ? Accessories.

The first command is ping, which sends a quick message to a server to check that it’s okay. Type the following, replacing the Web address with something meaningful to you, and press “Enter.” For all of the commands in this article, just type the stuff in the grey monospaced font. The preceding characters are the command prompt and are just there to let you know who and where you are.

C:\> ping www.stockashop.co.uk

If the server is alive and reachable, then the result will be something like this:

Reply from 92.52.106.33:
bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=53

Ping command from a Windows computer.

On Windows, it will repeat four times, as above. On Linux and Mac, each line will start with 64 bytes from and it will repeat indefinitely, and you’ll need to press Control + C to stop it.

The four-part number in the example above is your server’s IP address. Every computer on the Internet has one. At this stage, you can double-check that it is the correct one. You’ll need to have a very good memory, or refer to the documentation that your hosting company sent you when you first signed up with it. (This article does not deal with the newish eight-part IPv6 addresses.)

For instance, my broadband company is sneaky and tries to intercept all bad requests so that it can advertise to me when I misspell a domain name in the Web browser. In this case, the ping looks successful but the IP address is wrong:

64 bytes from advancedsearch.virginmedia.com
(81.200.64.50): icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=26.4 ms

Note that ping might also show the server name in front of the IP address (advancedsearch.virginmedia.com in this case). Don’t worry too much if it doesn’t match the website you are pinging — a server can have many names. The IP address is more important.

Assuming you’ve typed the domain name correctly, a bad IP address indicates that the domain name could have expired or that somebody has made a mistake with its DNS settings. If you receive something like unknown host, then it’s definitely a domain name issue:

ping: unknown host www.nosuchwebsite.fr

In this case, use a website such as Who.is to verify the domain registration details, or run the whois command from Linux or Mac. It will at least tell you when it expired, who owns it and where it is registered. The Linux and Mac commands host and nslookup are also useful for finding information about a domain. The nslookup command in particular has many different options for querying different aspects of a domain name:

paul@MyUbuntu:~$ whois stockashop.co.uk
paul@MyUbuntu:~$ host stockashop.co.uk
paul@MyUbuntu:~$ nslookup stockashop.co.uk
paul@MyUbuntu:~$ nslookup -type=soa stockashop.co.uk

If nothing happens when you ping, or you get something like request timed out, then you can deepen your frown and move on to step three.

What a non-responding server looks like in a Linux terminal.

Alternatively, if your server replied with the correct IP address, then you can exhale in relief and move on to step five.

Note that there are plenty of websites such as Network-Tools.com that allow you to ping websites. However, using the command line will impress your colleagues more, and it is good practice for the methods in the rest of this article.

3. How Bad Is It?

If your ping command has timed out, then chances are your whole server has crashed, or the network has broken down between you and the server.

If you enjoy grabbing at straws, then there is a small chance that the server is still alive and has blocked the ping request for security reasons — namely, to prevent hackers from finding out it exists. So, you can still proceed to the next step after running the commands below, but don’t hold your breath.

To find out if it is a networking issue, use traceroute on Mac or Linux and tracert on a PC, or use the trace option on a website such as Network-Tools.com. On Mac and Linux type:

paul@MyUbuntu:~$ traceroute www.stockashop.co.uk

On Windows:

C:\> tracert www.stockashop.co.uk

Traceroute traces a route across the Internet from your computer to your server, pinging each bit of networking equipment that it finds along the way. It should take 8 to 20 steps (technically known as “hops”) and then time out or show a few asterisks (*). The number of steps depends on how far away the server is and where the network has broken down.

The first couple of steps happens in your office or building (indicated by IP addresses starting with 192.68 or 10). The next few belong to your broadband provider or a big telecommunications company (you should be able to tell by the long name in front of the IP address). The last few belong to your hosting company. If your server is alive and well, then the very last step would be your server responding happily and healthily.

Traceroute on a Mac, through the broadband company and host to an unresponsive server.

Barring a major networking problem, like a city-wide power outage, traceroute will reach your hosting company. Now, you just need to determine whether only your server is ill or a whole rack or room has gone down.

You can’t tell this just from traceroute, but chances are the servers physically next to yours have similar IP addresses. So, you could vary the last number of your server’s IP address and check for any response. If your server’s IP address is 123.123.123.123, you could try:

C:\> ping 123.123.123.121
C:\> ping 123.123.123.122
C:\> ping 123.123.123.124
C:\> ping 123.123.123.125

If you discover that the server is in the middle of a range of 10 to 20 IP addresses that are all broken, then it could well indicate a wider networking issue deep within the air-conditioned, fireproof bunker that your server calls home. It is unlikely that the hosting company would leave so many IP addresses unused or that the addresses would have all crashed at the same time for different reasons. It is likely, though not definitive, that a whole rack or room has been disconnected or lost power… or burned down.

Alternatively, if nearby IP addresses do reply, then only your server is down. You can proceed to the next step anyway and hope that the cause is that your server is very secure and is blocking ping requests. Perhaps upgrade that deep frown to a pronounced grimace.

Otherwise, you’ll have to keep listening to Foreigner until your hosting company answers the phone. It is the only one that can fix the network and/or restart the server. But at least you now have someone else to blame. And if you are number 126 in the queue, it’s probably because 125 other companies think their websites have suddenly gone down, too.

4. Check Your Web Server Software

If the server is alive but just not serving up websites, then you can make one more check before logging onto the server. Just as your office computer has a lot of software for performing various tasks (Photoshop, Firefox, Mac Mail, Microsoft Excel, etc.), so does your server. Arguably its most important bit of software is the Web server, which is usually Apache on Linux servers and IIS on Windows servers. (From here on in, I will refer to it as “Web server software,” because “Web server” is sometimes used to refer — confusingly — to the entire server.)

When you visit a website, your Web browser communicates with the Web server software behind the scenes, sharing caching information, sending and receiving cookies, encrypting and decrypting, unzipping and generally managing your browsing experience.

You can bypass all of this and talk directly to the Web server software by using the telnet command, available on Windows, Linux and Mac. It will tell you conclusively whether your Web server software is alive. The command ends with the port, which is almost always 80:

ping@MyUbuntu:~$ telnet www.stockashop.co.uk 80

If all were well, then your Web server software would respond with a couple of lines indicating that it is connected and then wait for you to tell it what to do. Type something like this, followed by two blank lines:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.stockashop.co.uk

The first / tells it to get your home page; you could also say GET /products/index.html or something similar. The Host line tells it which website to return, because your server might hold many different websites. If your website were working, then your Web server software would reply with some headers (expiry, cookies, cache, content type, etc.) and then the HTML, like this:

Checking the web server software with telnet.

But because there is a problem, telnet will either not connect (indicating that your Web server software has crashed) or not respond (indicating that it is misconfigured). Either way, you’ll need to keep reading.

5. Logging Into Your Server

The remote investigations are now over, and it’s time to get up close and personal with your errant server.

First, check your server’s documentation to see whether the server has a control panel, such as Plesk or cPanel. If you’re lucky, it will still be working and will tell you what is wrong and offer to restart it for you (in Plesk, click Server ? Service Management).

If your server has a control panel such as Plesk, try logging in to make sure the Web server is running.

If not, then the following commands apply to dedicated Linux servers. You could try them in shared hosting environments, but they probably won’t work. Windows servers are a different kettle of fish and won’t be addressed in this article.

To log in and run commands on the server, you will need the administrative user name and password and the root password, as provided by your host. For shared hosting environments, an FTP user name and password might work.

On Linux and Mac, the command to run is ssh, which stands for “secure shell” and which allows you to securely connect to and run commands on your server. You will need to add your administrative user name to the command after -l, which stands for “login”:

paul@MyUbuntu:~$ ssh -l admin www.stockashop.co.uk

Windows doesn’t come with ssh, but you can easily download a Windows SSH client such as Putty. Download putty.exe, save it somewhere and run it. Type your website as the host name and click “Open.” It will ask you who to log in as and then ask for your password.

Using Putty to SSH from a Windows computer.

Once you have successfully logged in, you should see something like admin@server$, followed by a flashing or solid cursor. This is the Linux command line, very similar to the Terminal or command prompt used above, except now you are actually on the server; you are a virtual you, floating around in the hard drive of your troubled server.

If ssh didn’t even connect, then it might be blocked by a firewall or turned off on the server. If it said Permission denied, then you’ve probably mistyped the user name or password. If it immediately said Connection to www.stockashop.co.uk closed, then you are trying to log in with a user name that is not allowed to run commands; make sure you’re logging in as the administrative user and not an FTP user.

6. Has It Run Out Of Space?

Your server has likely not run out of hard disk space, but I’m putting this first because it’s a fairly easy problem to deal with. The command is df, but you can add -h to show the results in megabytes and gigabytes. Type this on the command line:

admin@server$ df -h

The results will list each file system (i.e. hard drive or partition) and show the percentage of each that has been used.

Checking hard disk usage on a Linux server.

If any of them show 100% usage, then the command probably took eons to type, and you will need to free up some space fast.

Quick Fix

You should still be able to FTP to the server and remove massive files that way. A good place to start is the log files and any back-up directories you have.

You could also try running the find command to search for and remove huge files. This command finds files bigger than 10 MB and lets you scroll through the results one page at a time. You might need to run it as root to avoid a lot of permission denied messages (see below for how to do this). It might also take a long time to run.

root@server# find / -size +10000000c | more

You could also restrict the search to the full partition or to just your websites, if you know where they are:

root@server# find /var/www/vhosts/ -size +10000000c | more

If you want to know just how big those files are, you can add a formatting sequence to the command:

root@server# find /var/www/vhosts -size +10000000c -printf "%15s %p\n"

When you’ve found an unnecessarily big file, you can remove it with rm:

root@server# rm /var/www/vhosts/badwebsite.com/backups/really-big-and-old-backup-file.tgz

Permanent Fix

Clearing out back-ups, old websites and log files will free up a lot of space. You should also identify any scripts and programs that are creating large back-up files. You could ask your host for another hard drive.

7. Has It Run Out Of Memory?

Your server might just be running really, really slowly. The free command will let you know how much memory it is using. Add -m to show the results in megabytes.

admin@server$ free -m

The results will show how much of your memory is in use.

Checking memory usage on a Linux server.

The results above say that the server has 3550 MB, or 3.5 GB, of total memory. Linux likes to use as much as possible, so the 67 MB free is not a problem. Focus on the buffers/cache line instead. If most of this is used, then your server may have run out of workable memory, especially if the swap space (a bit of the hard drive that the server uses for extra memory) is full, too.

If your server has run out of memory, then the top command will identify which bit of software is being greedy.

admin@server$ top

Every few seconds, this gives a snapshot of which bits of software are running, which user started them and how much of your memory and CPU each is using. Unfortunately, this will run very slowly if memory is low. You can press “Q” or Control + C to exit the command.

The Linux top command shows what is running.

Each of the bits of software above is known as a “process.” Big pieces of software such as Apache and MySQL will often have a parent process with a lot of child processes and so could appear more than once in the list. In this benign example, a child process of the Apache Web server is currently the greediest software, using 7.6% of the CPU and 1.6% of the memory. The view will refresh every three seconds. Check the Mem column to see whether anything is consistently eating up a large portion of the memory.

Quick Fix

The quickest solution is to kill the memory hog. You will need to be root to do this (unless the process is owned by you — see below). First of all, though, search on Google to find out what exactly you are about to kill. If you kill a core program (such as the SSH server), you’ll be back to telephone support. If you kill your biggest client’s data amalgamation program, which has been running for four days and is just about to finish, then the client could get annoyed, despite your effort to sweeten it with “But your website is okay now!”

If the culprit is HTTPD or Apache or MySQLd, then skip to the next section, because those can be restarted more gracefully. In fact, most things can be restarted more gracefully, but this is a quick ignore-the-consequences type of fix.

Find the process ID in the PID column of the command above, and type kill -9, followed by the number. For example:

root@server# kill -9 23421

The -9 tells it to stop completely and absolutely. You can now run top again to see whether it has made a difference. If some other similar process has jumped to the memory-eating position instead, then you’ve probably only stopped a child process, and you will need to find the parent process that spawned all the greedy children in the first place, because stopping the parent will stop all the children, too. Use the process ID again in this command:

root@server# ps -o ppid,user,command 23421

This asks Linux to show you the parent process ID, user and command for the process number 23421. The results will look like this:

PPID  USER     COMMAND
31701 apache   /usr/sbin/httpd

The PPID is the parent process ID. Now try killing this one:

root@server# kill -9 31701

Run top again. Hopefully, the memory usage has now returned to normal. If the parent process ID was 0, then some other process entirely is consuming memory, so run top again.

Permanent Fix

You will probably have to restart the offending software at some point because you may have just disabled your server’s SPAM filter or something else important. If the problem was with Apache or MySQL, you might have an errant bit of memory-eating programming somewhere, or Apache, MySQL or PHP might have non-optimal memory limits. There’s a slim chance that you have been hacked and that your server is slow because it’s sending out millions of emails. Sometimes, though, a server has reached capacity and simply needs more RAM to deal with the afternoon rush.

To find out what went wrong in the first place, check the web logs and/or the log files in /var/log/. When your hosting company has finally answered the phone, you can ask it to also take a look. Figuring out what happened is important because it could well happen again, especially if it’s a security issue. If the hosting company is not responsive or convincing enough, seek other help.

8. Has Something Crashed?

Most Linux servers use Apache for the Web server software and MySQL for the database. It is easy to see whether these are still running (and to restart them if they’re not) or are using up way too much memory. To see all processes running on your server right now, run this command:

admin@server$ ps aux | more

Scroll through the list and look for signs of apache (or its older name httpd) and mysqld (the “d” stands for daemon and is related to the way the programs are run). You are looking for something like this:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ   RSS TTY     STAT START   TIME COMMAND
apache   29495  0.5  1.4 90972 53772 ?       S    14:00   0:02 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   29683  0.3  1.4 88644 52420 ?       S    14:03   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   29737  0.3  1.4 88640 52520 ?       S    14:04   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd

Or you can use the grep command to filter results:

admin@server$ ps aux | grep http
admin@server$ ps aux | grep mysql

If either Apache or MySQL is not running, then this is the source of the problem.

This listing shows that Apache is indeed running.

Quick Fix

If Apache or MySQL is not running, then you’ll need to run the commands below as root (see below). Linux usually has a set of scripts for stopping and starting its major bits of software. You first need to find these scripts. Use the ls command to check the couple of places where these scripts usually are:

root@server# ls /etc/init.d/

If the results include a lot of impressive-looking words like crond, httpd, mailman, mysqld and xinetd, then you’ve found the place. If not, try somewhere else:

root@server# ls /etc/rc.d/init.d/

Or use find to look for them:

root@server# find /etc -name mysqld

Once it is located, you can run a command to restart the software. Note that the scripts might have slightly different names, like apache, apache2 or mysql.

root@server# /etc/init.d/httpd restart
root@server# /etc/init.d/mysqld restart

Hopefully, it will say something like Stopping… Starting… Started. Your websites will start behaving normally again!

Permanent Fix

As above, check the log files, especially the Apache error logs. Sometimes these are all in one place, but usually each website on the server has its own error log. You could look through the ones that were busiest around the time of the crash. Or else you could have a misconfiguration or a programming bug or security breach, so it could well happen again until you identify and address the cause.

Becoming a Super-User

Most of the fixes above require special permissions. For example, you (i.e. the user you have logged in as) will be able to kill or restart processes only if you started them. This can happen on shared servers but is unlikely on dedicated servers, where you will see a lot of permission denied messages. So, to run those commands, you will need to become the server’s super-user, usually known as “root.” I’ve left this for last because it’s dangerous. You can do a lot of irreversible damage as root. Please don’t remove or restart anything unless you’re sure about it, and don’t leave your computer unattended.

There are two ways to run a command as root. You can prefix each command with sudo, or you can become root once and for all by typing su. Different servers place different restrictions on these commands, but one of them should work. The sudo command is more restrictive when it turns you into a lesser non-root super-user who is able to run some commands but not others. Both commands will ask for an extra password. For example:

admin@server$ sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart

When you run su successfully, the prompt will change from a $ to a #, like this:

admin@server$ su
Password:
admin@server#

It might say admin@server or root@server. Either way, the # means that you are powerful and dangerous — and that you assume full liability for your actions.

Conclusion

This article has provided a few tips for recognizing and solving some of the most common causes of a website going down. The commands require some technical knowledge — or at least courage — but are hopefully not too daunting. However, they cover only a small subset of all the things that can go wrong with a website. You will have to rely on your hosting company if it is a networking issue, hardware malfunction or more complicated software problem.

Personally, I don’t mind the ’80s music that plays while I’m on hold with my hosting company. It’s better than complete silence or a marketing message. But it would be even better if the support rep picked up the phone within a few seconds and was ready to help. That is ultimately the difference between paying $40 per month for a dedicated server versus $400.

When the dust has settled, this might be a conversation worth having with your boss — the one still sitting glumly by the phone, eyeing your frown, and waiting for Bono to stop warbling.

Wordpress

Wordpress began as a simple blogging platform and has evolved over time to become a full-fledged content management system as well as a strong website development platform, through the multitude of available extensions, widgets and themes developed by an ever-growing community of developers. Wordpress is also used to manage communities through BuddyPress, a special version which offers Facebook-like features, forums with Simple:Press or shopping carts with the WP e-Commerce extension.

Wordpress reached a high level of maturity and its latest version, 3.0, which has just been released is undoubtedly the most complete. After a year and a half of work by over 200 volunteer contributors, many bugs have been fixed and many features demanded by users has been built-in (see complete list on the official website).

A guided tour of version 3

The administration interface has been streamlined and the contextual help system has been expanded to every screen.

Developers will appreciate the new APIs that will allow them to create and manage more easily the various elements of a theme, including the types of pages and menus. A new default theme named Twenty Ten, uses and highlights all the new features available to developers.

However, the most anticipated feature is the integration of multi-user functions (MU) which allows managing multiple sites from a single installation of Wordpress.

For more more details, watch the video guided tour:

Upgrade or new installation?

If you’re already a Wordpress user you were probably impatiently waiting for an update to the long-awaited version 3. There are two ways to perform an update. Either by doing a complete clean-install or by using the integrated updater right from the admin dashboard.

The first method is more complicated but it gives you complete control on the process and it is highly recommended if the configuration of your site is complex, especially if you use many extensions and a custom theme.

Updating from the dashboard is simpler but sometimes there are situations where an error can occur:

"Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 3516487 bytes) in ...."

According to many reports, the problem is due to the fact that the size of the file update is now larger than before mainly because of the new MU features and new Twenty Ten theme. WordPress now requires extra memory to complete the download and operation sometimes exhausts the amount of memory assigned to the default PHP scripts on the Web server, hence the error.

Several of our shared hosting customers of have reported the problem while others have managed to update without problem.

In the meantime if you encounter the error, there is still hope. Simply make a small change to your custom php.ini by adding this line:

memory_limit = 64M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (64MB)

If the parameter already exists and uses a different value (typically 32MB), replace the old line by the new one.

If you do not have a custom php.ini file, no problem. Simply create a text file, name it … as you can guess, “php.ini” and save it in a private place of your server (I put mine in /etc/ at the root of my account) .

Then create a file named .htaccess (or edit it if it already exists) to the root of your website (eg in /www/ or /public_html/) and add the following line:

suPHP_ConfigPath /full/path/to/the/directory/ (indicate the exact pathname of the directory that contains your custom php.ini file).

We are studying the possibility of increasing the default memory for shared hosting customers.
UPDATE (Sept. 13, 2010): The default memory limit has been increased to 256MB on all our shared servers. Remember however, that if you use a custom php.ini file, the value shown is the one that will be used by your applications.

If you need help do not hesitate to contact us at customer service. We will gladly help you.

In any case, whatever the method of updating that you choose, check the compatibility of your extensions with version 3 and above all, make a backup of your database before proceeding. This will save you many headaches if something goes wrong.

When making database management system decisions many companies focus on initial benefits but fail to pay attention to longer term advantages. The ability to scale, redundancy, reporting and synchronization are features that you can take advantage of out-of-the-box with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2.

Next week, Microsoft is going to host a webcast whose purpose is to highlight the benefits of Microsoft SQL Server Express and Windows Server dedicated hosting.

This webcast will focus on tools and procedures for getting you up and running with SQL Server quickly, how SQL Server compares to MySQL and how to get a fully functional copy of SQL Server for free.

You can join the live webcast on June 23rd from 1-2pm EST. Access to the Webcast is free but you must register here: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032453541&Culture=en-CA

The webcast is opened to anyone but will be held in English only.

iWeb was really proud to partner with one of the coolest events of the week: Make Web Not War (MWNW).

MWNW 2010 was held on May 27 and is one of the first conferences on the topic of interoperability and cross-platform development in Canada. The conference, which focused on the latest techniques and technologies available to the web community, was sponsored jointly by Microsoft and open source communities across Canada, including PHPQuebec.

iWeb, along with Microsoft, was there to present bounties to three promising projects developed in PHP and we are pleased to introduce them to you:

Evan Prodromou for Status.net:

StatusNet is an open source microblogging platform that helps you to connect and share in real time while using your own domain name. Evan is the founder of StatusNet and the creator of the StatusNet software. He is the CEO and lead developer at StatusNet, Inc., a company that provides integration and support services for this platform to brands and organizations.

Marc Laporte for Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware:

Tiki Wiki is a Content Management System (CMS) and Groupware application that can be used to create all sorts of websites, portals, intranets and extranets. Marc is an administrator and developer of the TikiWiki project since 2003. He is the founder of AvanTech.net, a company that specializes in the integration of TikiWiki CMS/Groupware based solutions.

Marc-Andre Lanciault for ImpressCMS:

ImpressCMS is a community-developed content management system that can be used to easily create and maintain dynamic, flexible websites. Marc-Andre is the lead developer of ImpressCMS and founder of INBOX International, a company that offers integration services of Open Source Web technologies to enterprises.

iWeb is proud to support local Open Source projects and truly believes in the strengths of interoperability for all types of applications.

The three projects were submitted to the Windows Web App Gallery so that they are widely available to IIS users. Look out for the apps to be featured on the Web Platform Installer soon. If you would like to submit an app please contact Arun at phponwin[at]microsoft.com or follow @phponwindows on Twitter. For more information about Microsoft and its involvement with Open Source technologies, swing by the Port25.ca Blog. Thanks again to all the developers at StatusNet, ImpressCMS and TikiWiki that worked on the bounties!

Front (left to right): Marc Laporte from TikiWiki and Evan Prodromou from Status.net. Back (left to right): Stéphane Jose from iWeb, Gladstone Grant from Microsoft and Marc-André Lanciault from ImpressCMS

Hard drives are useful to store and quickly access to data but they may fail at any time or even alter and delete data.

When the volume of data is very important, it must be accessed by multiple servers. We must therefore turn to more flexible and powerful storage solutions

This is where iWeb can help with its 3 storage solutions:

- Single Storage Server
- Redundant Storage Server
- Dedicated SAN Storage

Which of these solutions is best suited to your needs? Here is a brief description for each one:

Single Storage Server

This solution provides a server with multiple hard drives. Its primary function is to be the file storage central point. It can be accessed by multiple web servers so that your information is always current regardless of the server on which your site’s visitor is connected. This is the most economical solution of the three. Note that your architecture depends only on the proper functioning of a single storage server and our second solution offers a higher level of security.

Redundant Storage Server

Unlike with the first solution, it offers two storage servers instead of one. In case of hardware failure of one of the storage servers, the second automatically takes over. It is a seamless process and it won’t affect neither your web servers nor your customers and visitors. In case of failure, the configuration of your Web servers won’t need to be changed, thanks to the use of a virtual IP address

Dedicated SAN Storage

This solution is especially interesting for database servers. It provides access from several Web servers to data stored on multiple databases servers. This configuration allows high performance and great ease of use especially because of the fact that the SAN is recognized as a local volume by each of these servers.

Contact us if you have any questions or if one of the solutions proposed above interests you.

It’s not often you find a technology partner as passionate about their customers and community as the folks at iWeb.

A few months ago iWeb graciously donated a few servers for a pilot project to help local Montreal OSS communities with their development & testing efforts on IIS7, while we also donated $1000 to the project once it was ported over to Windows and IIS.

The idea was well received when it was announced at CareerDemoCamp Montreal in December and 2 bounties were accepted shortly thereafter. A couple months later both of our initial projects have successfully ported over to Windows and IIS (ImpressCMS and TikiWiki) and just recently we had another bounty accepted by our friends at Status.net!

In my conversations with iWeb’s best: Bertrand and Olivier about ideas for bounties and incentives, we came up with an idea for a coding competition, one that will give every developer in Canada using PHP, Python, Ruby – not just .NET – a chance to participate. iWeb even offered to help provide some free hosting for some of the contestants! Wow!

Flash forward a few months, and together we have launched the FTW Coding Competition, intended to bring out the best and the brightest developers in Canada to compete for up to $15,000 worth of DELL prizes. As a developer, you can submit your own app you already have created, or develop a new app or port an app, be it Open Source, or not, written in PHP or .NET, or anything else that would run on Windows Server / IIS or Windows Azure.

So, if you are a developer, have some code kicking around – why not see if you can win? Enter your application into one of the 3 categories: PHP Application on Windows/IIS or Azure, Windows Azure Cloud Application (Any language: .Net, PHP, Ruby, Python…) or Open Data Application (Any language, using any of the Canadian Open Data catalogues). Give it a shot!

Oh, and thanks to the awesome guys at iWeb, we may even be able to help out with some hosting for your app. Just email us: phponwin[at]microsoft.com or hit me up on twitter: @Nik_G or @PHPonWindows

Nik Garkusha is an Open Source Strategy Lead, Open Data enthusiast, PHP, Open Source, HPC and everything in between at Microsoft Canada

What is a DemoCamp? It’s an opportunity for Web developers and startups to meet and learn more about the job market, local brilliant projects, and network at the same time! It’s a series of 6-8 presentations which showcase the developer community. The demo can be a software, a web application or a current project. No powerpoints, just demos! The idea is to show technology in action and inspire attendees.

The Demo will be at the Mont-Royal center 2nd December 2009 at 6.30pm. The evening will start after the career workshop at 6.30, up to 8pm, when the demos will start. The event is free and open to all!

The presentations by iWeb employees will be Patrick Lafontaine and Benjamin Vanheuverzwijn. The subjects will be:

- Getting efficient MySQL backups, for free. Patick Lafontaine, certified MySQL DBA (CMDBA) and MySQL Developer (CMDEV)

- Presentation of free software for developing on a microcontroller PIC 16 bit. Benjamin Vanheuverzwijn, electrical engineer student

We hope to see you  at the DemoCamp next wednesday.

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So far, there weren’t any advanced articles mentioning advanced setups or tips on how to scale efficiently a website. The reason is very simple: from experience, it’s better to just launch a website, and then optimize only when bottlenecks and performance problems occur. Most development teams follow this principle; otherwise, they will be optimizing prematurely their setup, and also due to the fact that every website has different needs and thus different problems to solve.

You can see below for instance the graph when delicious’s homepage is loaded

It took about 1.85 sec to render the website, knowing that other websites such flickr.com target 250ms total loading times. The graphic above shows that the server response took 1.3 sec, which is almost 2/3rd of the total time. This means the bottleneck is either in the DNS server, or maybe because the delicious servers were handling too much traffic, and were queuing user requests.

Here’s a graph for another website (TechEntreprise):

Response time is similar to delicious, in 1.83sec, however, the responses are very different in nature: it’s loaded in less than 100ms, but static files such as pictures, css, or javascript take the remaining. Assets delivery should then be optimized on this website, using compression, trying to use less static files, or using special hosting solutions to make the response faster.

During the lifetime of a website, a development team must then track those metrics; and optimize iteratively, each time on a different bottleneck. The problems can occur:

1. DNS Servers
2. Front-End Servers Capacity
3. Application Servers speed and capacity
4. Back-end and database servers speed
5. Static files servers

1. DNS Servers

When a new user wants to visit a website that wasn’t visited recently, there must be first a DNS query. The DNS queries can be noticeable if the visitor is another continent or if you have slow DNS servers. Learnhub, a website made by a company from Toronto, saw for instance that DNS response time took up to 500ms, and switched to Dynect for ultra-fast DNS Hosting. The graphic below shows the improvements when they made the switch:

The response time is now 3 times less for learnhub, a noticeable improvement for its massive user base in India.

2. Front-End Servers Capacity

Front-End servers are the first servers to deal with your request, putting it into a queue, and then dispatching it to the appropriate server, such as an application server, the application cache (or memcache). Front-End servers can be specialized software (such as haproxy or nginx, which have built-in load-balancing features) or it can also be dedicated load-balancing hardware such as the ones here. In more modest websites, Apache or the web server would be the front-end and the application server at the same time.

In most hosting architectures, the bottleneck is rarely the front-end servers. If it is, that’s because you didn’t choose the best routing algorithm, for instance chosing round-robin queuing instead of more intelligent load-based queuing. In most cases also, it’s because there are not enough application servers, and the front-end servers are just waiting for requests to be computed. Here is for instance how response times change when you add more connections to app servers (with the same load-balancer in front)

It’s a significant boost, so tweaking the website’s latency can just be configuration change.

3. Application Servers speed and capacity

The application server computes the request, for instance delivering a personalized page according to a user’s preferences.

This depends on technologies used by the website (php, python, java, ruby + any used frameworks)

If the bottlneck is the application server, there are two paths: either optimize the web app code, or scale it by using more and better hardware.

Optimizing the code is beyond the scope of this article; it involves testing, using patterns and best practices, benchmarking sections of your code, and then try to refactor the code for better response time. Go to the resources relevant to your technology stack, benchmark it, and get help from an experienced engineer or development team.

If you’ve hit the wall in code optimization, you can think about getting beefier servers, try to find the best mix of RAM and CPUs, and then use this “base server” to scale horizontally, in clusters. An easy solution for LAMP websites can be seen here.

Many modern websites (put the “web2.0″ keyword here) also have advanced features such as user emails and notifications, computations of social graphs, search, messenging, text messages, video transcoding, etc. If you have such functionality, a very quick way to decrease response time is “outsource” those features to dedicated servers. You can use messenging servers such as ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ (an Apache project) or even kestrel (which Twitter uses) to offload long-running tasks to specialized servers. Doing asynchronous requests would allow in theory instantaneous response times, so that’s something you would want to look at as soon as you have more than a couple of dedicated servers.

Caching is also an efficient way to process requests, to prevent requests hitting app servers. As for web application code, this depends on technologies used for your website.

4. Back-end and database servers speed

Fortunately, optimizing database servers is easier than the above points.

There are known and “battle-tested” solutions for instance on scaling MySQL, from replication to master-slaves setups, and balancing the loads. Like application servers, you can search for the best hardware for the server, using power servers, and with very low access time hard drives. You can see for instance in the following graph how MySQL behaves for different hardware on different loads, and then plan accordingly:

Many web companies also use heavily memcached in front of the SQL Servers, in order to retrieve frequently-accessed objects from memory.

5. Assets Servers

Assets servers delivers static files, such as pictures, videos, javascript files, and other static elements such as flash animations.

You can tweak your web application to serve less files (for instance get all javascript files into just one file), compress files (and then gzip when serving the request).

Optimizing static file servers is probably the easiest when scaling and lowering response times.

Nobody does it better than Google currently. They deliver the best search results, getting thus repeated visits, and they also focus on delivering the most relevant ads, thanks to a unique and intelligent PPC algorithm.

Google’s Adwords efficiency beats then other Internet marketing tools, such as newsletters, direct mailings, or “classical” advertising such as banners.

Surprisingly, Twitter Search might be the next holy grail for Internet marketers, and for Twitter and its investors too. Beyond customer service, or beyond brand tracking in the social media space, Twitter Search can be used as a powerful sales tool.

For instance, the TweetDeck screenshot has a panel dedicated to Twitter users writing about “dedicated server” (panel 2). This goes from troubles about setting up a dedicated server, to those looking for recommendations, or those micro-blogging about their software stack. If one sells then dedicated servers, it’s straightforward to initiate a contact with a reply, and acquire a customer.

This is powerful, as it goes in the same spirit of Google Adwords: Twitter Search surfaces the intention of Twitter users, with people looking for answers NOW, and receptive to feedback. It shows the most recent results in the panel, similar to Google’s most relevant results listed first in a web search page. It’s even more powerful, since you can put a name to each result, and have access to the user’s bio and network.

This is just an example, and it’s easy to see how you can integrate it too in your customer acquisition tools. You could track

wordpress near:Toronto

if you are a wordpress developer based in that city, and want to offer your services. You can even track keywords related to similar products (Drupal, Joomla, Tikwiki) in case you are also able to manage those leads. Twitter Search has more features, worth the look

As any new tool usage, a company or a service provider has to be very careful with Twitter Search, since it’s akin to say… hitting strangers in a bar. There is a fine line between authentic conversation and advice (which is what Twitter is meant to be), and spamming random users about your products. Twitter (or a third-party tool TweetDeck) also lacks tools to manage threads and conversations, which would allow a sales team or a customer service team to “assign” a Twitter user to a representative. Alerts, notifications, user tagging, flagging a few users, those are power features that Twitter would need to implement and make it a competitor (or a compliment) to Google Adwords, and ultimately transforming Twitter into an Internet giant.

Related Articles:

• Opportunities on the Web
• Revolutions, Crisis and Innovation: Why the Internet is still the most exciting technology in 2008
• Top 9 Reasons Why Web Hosting is Awesome

As such, there are lots of blogs and websites specialized on the topic of how make money online, most of them focusing on the “how to get rich quick” schemes, and most of them not worth a second look, since many are just plain scams.

Here’s one interesting link though, a list of top web companies which earn the most. Google tops the list, at $21.8 billion revenues each year, followed by Amazon, Yahoo and Ebay.

If you are publishing a website, do have a look at the list, it does give ideas. There are a large number of companies in Internet advertising, and a few sizeable ones in retail (Amazon, Ebay, Zappos), however there are companies which are virtually monopolies.

Paypal for instance could use more competitors. Bloggers, web2.0 startups, big media companies would need a micro-payment system, one which is at the same very easy to use for consumers, and powerful for companies.

The iTunes Music Store is also a model which could use more competitors. It’s a virtual monopoly on music and media delivery on the web, and what a better time now than start a new web service to deliver music and video to consumers.

We could also have more online stores. Zappos (shoes) and Amazon (books) are good models; one could think about stores specialized in clothing, or in electronics, or in sports etc.

Have a great weekend!

The management team of these companies blame lower advertising rates, and an audience shift to the Internet. More and more people get their news online daily, on a variety of sources, on different blogs, or on more established websites. Other forms of communication, like Twitter, are also known for breaking news, and the source for real-time coverage of news, as seen in the Hudson crash incident, or the Mumbai terrorist killings.

Web TV has also seen quick growth during the past few years. It began by podcasts, but there are now web-only producers, to be found on Youtube (such as Jon Lajoie), or producing their own daily or weekly shows. Diggnation, commandN, university lectures by Stanford or Berkeley, to new independant companies such bombe.tv

If there’s no denying that print, TV, or radio has their unique qualities, everyone in the iPod generation knows that the future is the Internet. If a country was to build in its future, it will have to bet on new technologies, on the Internet, the digital industry, and web entrepreneurs.

In Canada though, the picture is not so clear. There are talks currently about the Internet tax, where Quebecor, Rogers, Shaw and other ISPs would pay something to “support” Canadian-produced media. Quebecor says for instance that it’s against the principles of the Internet to tax ISPs.

We’ll certainly follow on this issue, but there’s already one thing that should be discussed: there is a risk here that growth and work done in the Internet by entrepreneurs and companies would be used to fund “old media”. Local bloggers have highlighted the issue (here’s another take by Michel Dumais) stating that the newly announced Canadian Media Fund (announced Monday) will fund mainly TV productions, or any other canadian content on the web, radio or print, as long as there’s a television version as well.

Regulators needs to address those issues and make sure there are no restrictions or unfair treatment. Here at iWeb, we support independent web publishers, and believe those are why the Internet flourished so much.