Archive for the 'News' Category

posted by MariyaV @ 14:55 PM
July 11, 2013

It looks like those who have been giving the benefit of the doubt to big Internet corporations like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and others, have no reason to doubt it anymore: recent leak from Edward Snowden, a system administrator who worked for National Security Agency (N.S.A.) to The Guardian and The Washington Post, seems to be capable of convincing those who could not be convinced before – Internet companies have been providing access to their users personal data for U.S. government. Read the rest of this entry »

skype down yesterdayYesterday was another day the unavailability of Skype brought great disservice. Although this fail was not global, it did affect many users including those who run business over Internet or use the Web as a powerful secondary channel with Skype serving for business communication. Support calls and chat sessions, on-line meetings – all types of conversations, run over Skype dropped dead having if not paralyzed then significantly disrupted the activity of hosting providers, e-shops, on-line consulting agencies and many more businesses. It’s not know for sure why this outage took place, but that is not something we are going to discuss today.

Today we will tell you how to take serious preventive measures to avoid such issues in future. In fact it is not recommended to use Skype or similar services as a primary channel for business communication, no matter if this communication is within the organization or between the company personnel and their customers, but if you do, you should definitely back them up.

Backing up Communication Channel Within the Organization

To sound the most helpful and to cover as many aspects as possible we decided to split our tips into ones for issues with communication within the company and into those that affect communication between staff and customers. Let us start from company internal issues since those are kind of easier to be resolved, at least in terms of organization of the backup channel, since the ways to do that may be quite difficult.

Instant Messengers

Facebook chat and Google Talk have pushed traditional instant messengers out, but the protocols are still working and worth being used. Yes sir, dig out your good old AIM or ICQ accounts’ credentials, fire up your clients and bring the conversation there. An interesting thing about those is that you can easily move all your business contacts to a separate list that is going to make the communication easier. Moreover, some of the latest ICQ clients support audio and video conversations, too.

Local Chat Platform

If you limit communication within your company to instant messaging on the one hand and want to make it secure on the other hand, there’s nothing better than setup a Jabber (XMPP protocol based) server and get some Jabber-complient client to keep all your internal business discussions within it. A well-organized server will let you communicate with your partners and gather them in conference rooms world wide, regardless of their location. And if some serious security is required, you may limit your Jabber server accessibility so that your partners could connect to it over VPN.

Local VoIP Platform

If live audio conversations are vital, you can either setup a server that would support voice over IP technology or signup for some VoIP service. Both variants imply the possibility to make calls over Internet using special software installed on local machines that are connected with the VoIP server. Organizing such a channel for communication within the organization is going to be rather cheap since you and your partners will only use extensions, which does not expect any cell or land phone calls being made. Other solutions will require more expenses which nevertheless stay worthwhile.

Backing up Communication Channel Between Personnel and Customers

Instant Messengers

Those can be used as a backup solution for communications between staff and your customers, too. There are, however, aspects that should be kept in mind while moving your support chat to AIM or any other service. First things first, using public messengers for communication with your customers does not look quite professional – so while switching to those channels, even temporarily you need to create a special user login, which name would somehow be connected with your company and your business. Another thing to check is your customers’ tastes – some may use MSN, some prefer AOL, some chat via ICQ. Finally, you will need to be able to update your clients on that rather quickly – using your corporate blog, forum, Twitter account or Facebook or even main website page will be fine to provide those backup account names.

On-site chat system

This is something that should actually be a primary channel and of course you will be hardly able to install it as a backup channel once your experience a crash, but if you have a chat system but prefer using Skype instead, it is high time to refer your clients there. It may also be worthwhile to reconsider the system in use so that it wouldn’t make you to switch to Skype at least for instant messaging – currently many chat systems have convenient interface and support numerous features – chat-to-email delivery, operator or service rating and many more.

VoIP Platform

Unlike Jabber that is mostly used only locally, VoIP platform can be used as a communication channel for both staff and customers. This channel however, will require more expenses than an “internal” one since you will need to have a land line phone number bound to your VoIP server. Thus, accepting call withing roaming and from cell-phones may affect your balance. On the other hand, if it is a backup solution and the issue is not to last long – you can sacrifice your funds for maximum uptime of your service.

As far as you can see, there are many other ways to build a reliable on-line communication channel for your business. Some of them may not be free but the money you will spend on those will provide your with great reliability and good quality of connectivity. You can use one of very cheap VPS plans we offer to set up a communication platform for your business. In this article we do not deface Skype, of course – we just issue a friendly reminder for everyone, who use public communication services for business activity since those may fail and damage your business easily.

posted by Archie @ 19:29 PM
April 14, 2011

SiteValley.com VPS PromoYesterday we at SiteValley.com started a promo – from now on you can get a virtual private server from us with a doubled amount of RAM paying the same price. This is a limited time offer, although the final date of the promo is not yet defined we started receiving many sign-up requests. Since the promo is also valid for our current customers, incoming upgrade requests arrive as well.

Why?

One may wonder why we increased exactly RAM. We might lower the prices, increase disk space or bandwidth quotas or include some special service to the plan cost. However we did not, since the main idea of that promo is to fulfill the need of our current and prospect clients – the need of performance.

We released a plenty of articles regarding VPS hosting peculiarities lately and despite that almost all factors become the key ones when you search for a virtual private server, there’s one parameter you look at firstly – amount of RAM. RAM really is important for the VPS user, since if the client needs more disk space or less traffic limits, he or she gets a physical server, but if they are here for a VPS, they check the RAM quota in the first place. Right now, when software requirements increase and the amount of day-to-day tasks grows – it’s rather hard to manage all that having a server with amount or RAM that used to be popular among home PC users over ten years ago. Right now the minimal RAM quota at SiteValley.com is 512MB and we believe many of our customers are going to like it.

What Does it Mean for Me?

If you are still in doubts, let us show you some examples of how useful those changes are and how exactly they are going to do you good.

First thing first – the control panel – that’s something many people have problems with. Experiencing lack of RAM they either have to get an inconvenient panel of DirectAdmin type to have more free RAM left or get a full-functioning entirely automated solution, like cPanel that makes them forget about some manual works on the server… and that makes the server forget about being fast and responsive. Well, right now even our minor plans – oVPS1/xVPS1 – will let you have your VPS with cPanel setup on it.

Tasks processing and scheduling. If you wait for non-business time to backup your content or to execute some mass mail delivery so as not to experience slowdowns or glitches – your VPS lacks RAM. There’s not much to do about it since you can kill or suspend primary processes. Thus you have to figure out schedules and do some work within inconvenient narrow time frames wishing your VPS had more RAM. Now it has, so you may not be that strict about memory allocation and load distribution.

Overall performance. Whenever your VPS uses up all RAM, it never goes down at once. Our OpenVZ customers are happy with burstable RAM they can use to cover minor load spikes, while XEN users rely on swap that uses hard disk to temporarily store background processes, saving RAM and reallocating it for new processes. It’s fine and such overuse is bearable, but it causes slowdowns and if you work with databases or dynamic content – you may start receiving timeouts, so your site turns unreachable with your server being online. Well, for now your server will have some more RAM to use up till it starts using swap or eating some spare memory of the carrier.

We hope that our article helped you understand why we took care of RAM being increased specifically and what changes it is going to bring in. If you want to get a VPS from SiteValley.com but feel somehow unsure about the plan and virtualization type – feel free to contact our live chat support or submit a ticket to our sales department. And of course, you can browse our blog for more >VPS-specific articles.

posted by Archie @ 21:28 PM
March 14, 2011

SVHostingBlog.comWe are back with you with our brand new blog, which is now designed in a more responsive and reader-oriented manner. We hope you like the way it looks, but it’s not just the outlook that changed. Below you will find some information on our SVHostingBlog 2.0. Consider it both a case study of the past months and a brief tour around our new blog since for now you will find more reasons to browse it.

Getting Recognized

One of the major ideas we kept while working on redesign was brand awareness. Meeting readers who didn’t know that we offer web hosting services and communicating with clients, who never guessed SiteValley runs its own blog, we decided to make our blog look more close to our business – now we’ve got design that makes us recognizable and the navigation block to make the search around our main web-site easier.

This is, however, not just it. We decided to thank our readers and created a 20% discount for those our visitors, who like blogging and looking for a reliable hosting solution. If you are eager to run your own blog and don’t know what to start with – visit our Blog Hosting page and signup with coupon “svblog” to enjoy the instant 20% off your hosting bill.

Becoming Social

Improved Twitter activity, new Facebook fans – why not share our success with you? Share your news and success stories, too. Share, discuss and involve even more people spreading your word across the web.

We are also open for discussions on our blog content and organization – just share your opinion in the survey box, delivered by a great widget by KissInsights and we will consider your suggestions. We do value our readers’ opinions so please spend a couple of seconds after reading this article to leave it. Of course, we are going to change the survey questions from time to time to get the clearer picture of what you think of us so please stay in touch.

More Dialogue

The latest research we ran and those hours of moderation spent monthly on traditional Word-Press comments made us switch to an awesome commenting tool called Disqus that is going to be used at our blog for now. Now you don’t need to register or leave your full name and email – just login with your Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo or OpenID and share your thoughts.

Apart from commenting simplicity you will also feel how easy it became to communicate with other commentators and attract people from other resources to take part in discussion. For instance, having logged in with your Twitter account you can easily make your comment a Twitter mention.

Topics and Categories

Those are going to be expanded, too. Our former articles on blogging prompted an idea to create a special category of Blogging Tips where we are going to deliver more details on how to make you blog look and run better. Apart from those, more articles on software and web-technologies are expected. Again, you will be able to share your ideas on what and in which niche should be published.

Additionally, we decided to make some room for guest posts. We are going to accept those monthly within the framework of a “Special Guest” rubric. Since SVHostingBlog is still a corporate blog, we are not going to publish many of them – mostly useful and interesting posts by great webmasters, Internet marketers and so on.

Before You Close the Tab

Thank you for being with us, no matter if you just joined us or have already been a dedicated reader for months. We hope you like what we are doing there and that our articles are useful for you and your business. If you have any questions or want to share something right ahead – feel free to leave your comment below – we will get back with you as soon as possible.


The Pirate BayThere’s been much rumor during past four days regarding The Pirate Bay getting ready to launch The Music Bay – their new peer-to-peer music sharing project. So far there’s only a domain name – themusicbay.org – registered and currently being redirected to thepiratebay.org, but their intensions are really serious. It’s hard to keep from quoting the opinion, The Pirate Bay insider shared with the torrentfreak.com blog: “The music industry can’t even imagine what we’re planning to roll out in the coming months. For years they’ve complained bitterly about piracy, but if they ever had a reason to be scared it is now. It will be a special surprise for IFPI’s 78th birthday, and we’re thinking of organizing a huge festival in Rome where IFPI was founded.” Read the rest of this entry »