Your LetsHost account offers great e-mail features as standard, with everything you need to set up and manage all of the e-mail addresses you’ll ever need.

E-mail from LetsHost is straightforward to set up, easy to use, and with a few simple maintenance steps management is a breeze.

Keeping your e-mail accounts healthy

• Keep an eye on space: check your e-mail accounts, regularly. If you have quotas set up for particular accounts, ensure that none of your mailboxes are full or approaching capacity. If they are download or delete mail to free up space.
• Clear up your “catch-all”: if you use a default address for undelivered mail on your domains (often dubbed a catch-all address) check it regularly for legitimate undelivered mail (miss-spelled e-mail addresses and the like) and delete any spam.

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When you’re choosing your web hosting there can be so many variables that it’s difficult to know where to start.

There’s storage to think about, monthly bandwidth, domain registration, e-mail, databases, online applications and scripts, website builders and much more.

Here at LetsHost we pride ourselves on having some of the best web hosting support in the business… but what about supporting people who aren’t yet LetsHost customers?

We decided it was time to take the pain out of choosing the perfect Irish web hosting plan.

Just click on the banner, answer a few simple questions about what you want from your Irish web hosting plan, fill in your contact details and one of our friendly team of web hosting experts will get in touch via your preferred contact method (phone or e-mail) for a chat.

They’ll talk you through everything, and once they have a clear idea of exactly what you need, they’ll advise you on the ideal hosting solution for your needs.

LetsHost offers a wide range of hosting and domain management solutions specifically tailored to deliver outstanding value and performance to Irish website owners. From shared hosting for home users and hobbyists to high-performance dedicated servers for large business clients and high-volume e-commerce systems, we have all your Irish hosting needs covered.

So click on the banner, and let us help you pick the ideal Irish hosting solution today!

We are pleased to announce the following software packages have been updated in our Fantastico software installer.

- Coppermine Photo Gallery: 1.4.26 -> 1.5.6
- Joomla 1.5: 1.5.17 -> 1.5.20
- Moodle: 1.9.8 -> 1.9.9
- Soholaunch Pro Edition: 4.9.3 r17 -> 4.9.3 r41
- TikiWiki: 4.1 -> 4.3
- WordPress: 2.9.2 -> 3.0
- Zen Cart: 1.3.9b -> 1.3.9d

These updated scripts are available immediately on all shared server accounts. You can install or update your current software installation from your control panel.

Fantastico, for those who have not used it, is a great tool that allows you to automatically install or update many of the most popular open source scripts.  For example, if you want a shopping cart on your website, you have the choice of many scripts, including osCommerce or Zen-Cart.  For blogs, we have Word Press, Drupal and many more.  Simply log in to your control panel, and select Fantastico.  You are then presented with the range of scripts available, and with a few click your software is fully installed and working.

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Your data is an incredibly valuable commodity. Whether you’re talking about your personal e-mail, photo library and documents stored on your laptop’s hard drive, a business critical database that stores your customer information or the files and associated databases sitting on your LetsHost web server, making sure that your data is safe and secure is crucial.

Modern digital storage media are, by and large, very reliable and robust, but occasionally things can go wrong, so it pays to take regular backups of your most important files.

How do I make a backup

That depends on what you want to back up, and where you want to back up to. Here’s a brief run down of some common backup scenarios.

1. Backing up your PC

Most modern operating systems, including recent flavours of Windows, Mac OSX and popular desktop Linux distributions, come with file backup options built in. There are also plenty of free and paid third party backup solutions… take your pick.

While the interfaces for individual backup products vary, the process is broadly similar:

• Select the files you want to back up and set a backup destination
• Run a manual backup / set an automated scheduled backup
• Keep the resulting backup files in a safe place
• Repeat frequently

If something bad happens, these programs normally let you restore a complete backup set, or choose the specific files that you’d like to recover.

2. Backing up your website(s)

Backing up a web server usually involves several steps:

• Select the files you want to back up
• Package the files into a single archive file (e.g .ZIP) on the remote server
• Download the resulting file to your local machine using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or your CPanel file manager.
• If you use databases (like MySQL) on your server, you’ll need to remember to back those up separately.

That’s a fair amount of work, and requires some technical know-how, so here at LetsHost we’ve implemented a system that makes things much easier. Every LetsHost Complete Plan hosting customer has the industry leading R1Soft Continuous Data Protection enabled on their hosting account. The system automatically takes four daily snapshots of everything in your account (files and databases) and lets you selectively restore any of your data through a simple web-based interface. Just click on the “R1Soft Backup Restore” option from the “Files” menu in your control panel.

(NB. LetsHost provides the R1Soft service as a reliable and convenient backup / restore solution for its customers, but we still recommend that you keep independent local backups of your most important data)

3. Remote online backup services

Regular local backups are much better than no backups at all, but storing important data in the same physical location as the original files is fraught with risk. That’s where secure, automated online backup services like LetsHost’s brand new PC Backup service come into play.

PC Backup is a secure “set it and forget it” backup solution. For a small monthly fee (starting at just €20 for up to 50GB of storage) we’ll automatically keep your most valuable data secure by seamlessly encrypting it and copying it to your own remote storage account. You can relax, safe in the knowledge that LetsHost is looking after your critical data for you.

Make sure your vital business information is safe… examine your backup solution, and contact us for information on how PC Backup can help keep your data secure.

LetsHost today announced their decision to join the R1Soft Hosting Partner Program (R1HPP), following the successful execution of Continuous Data Protection® (CDP) across their Linux and Windows Agents over the last year and a half. LetsHost offers R1Soft CDP as a free add-on service to all of its 13,000 hosting customers.

R1Soft CDP allows LetsHost to provide a fast, easy-to-use reliable solution with a Web interface that gives customers the sole power to restore and recover their own files without any intervention from the LetsHost technical support team. The next-generation CDP technology brings a number of highly advantageous features, including the ability to restore open files and granular tables in MySQL.

Since LetsHost started providing R1Soft CDP to customers a year and a half ago, it has tremendously benefitted customers who accidentally delete files and need to recover deleted emails, by enabling them to quickly perform restores from databases. With multiple backups per day, a massive improvement from the traditional overnight backup, LetsHost customers can feel confident that their Web site data is always available for quick restoration in the event that there is a system failure.

“Our Web site is a main source of revenue which means that uptime and a reliable hosting provider are critical factors to the success of our business. Between LetsHost’s highly available, dependable support staff and R1Soft’s high-performance backups we feel confident knowing our Web site and business are fully protected,” said Noel McPartlin, Fitness Ireland (http://www.fitnessireland.ie.)
“Current LetsHost customers have already seen the many advantages R1Soft CDP has to offer. R1HPP is designed to supply partners with all of the marketing resources and sales tools required to successfully promote R1Soft CDP as a premium backup service, attract more customers and ultimately generate additional revenue,” said David Wartell, vice president of R1Soft, a division of BBS Technologies.

For more information about LetsHost and their services, please visit http://www.letshost.ie

For more information about R1Soft Continuous Data Protection, please visit www.r1soft.com

A profile of LetsHost appeared in the Irish Times on Friday 16th January.

You can read the article by clicking here or read below:

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UNDER THE RADAR: Peter Cluskey interviews Daragh MacLoughlin, Letshost.ie

WHEN YOU’RE a newcomer entering an established market you need to make an immediate impact. That’s what Daragh MacLoughlin did with Letshost.ie in 2005 – charging just half the price of his competitors for an .ie domain name.

“We were firmly convinced that prices were too high,” recalls MacLoughlin (25). “The day we started the business, the average price for an .ie domain name was €85 plus VAT, so we entered the market at €42.99.

“Since then, prices have continued to fall and we’ve maintained that strategy of keeping our margin low with the aim of generating more business. The average price today is between €25 and €30 – and we’re at €19.99.”

It’s not hard to see why MacLoughlin, an IT graduate of NUI Galway, takes his business inspiration from Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary.

“There was a small number of companies controlling the shared hosting market when we entered it. We took the view that their prices were unnecessarily high and their products unnecessarily technical – and that’s where we saw our opportunity.

“I realise that when people see low prices they tend to believe that the quality will be lower as well, but that’s not necessarily the case at all. We set out to prove that we could be highly competitive and offer an excellent service as well.”

That strategy has worked. From a handful of customers in 2005, they now have a client base of 13,000 and manage 17,500 internet domains, roughly evenly divided between home-users and businesses.

Turnover has grown as a result, from just €250,000 in their first year to €700,000 in 2007 and €1.2 million in 2008.

Letshost.ie won the recognition of the industry and its peers last year when it was presented with the IE Domain Registry (IEDR) Achievement Award by Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan, for its work to promote the .ie brand.

And to combat the effects of the economic downturn, MacLoughlin and his business partner, Graeme Conkie, have decided to expand beyond the shared hosting market into dedicated server hosting – a move they believe will boost turnover to over €2 million for 2009.

Essentially, whereas shared hosting means there is one web server used by many different clients, with dedicated server hosting – the higher end of the market – each website has its own dedicated server.

“When we set up, we used servers located in the US to save costs,” he says. “Now we have that infrastructure in Ireland and in the next six months we’ll launch an additional new dedicated server-hosting service that we believe has the potential to generate a multiple of the income we make from shared hosting – though, of course, there are additional costs too.”

Letshost.ie is essentially an .ie domain reseller. It buys its domain names from the IE Domain Registry, a not-for-profit company which acts as a trustee for .ie domain names on behalf of the Irish internet community and manages the .ie country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) name space.

Since last year IEDR has been overseen by the communications regulator, ComReg.

“The job of the IE Domain Registry is to ensure that the quality of the .ie brand is not compromised,” MacLoughlin says. “It has done that very successfully and that makes .ie addresses attractive to buy and very trouble-free to use – which makes our job easier.

“I like to think of .ie domain names as the friendly face of Ireland on the internet. It’s like flying with Aer Lingus years ago, when you always got a friendly smile as you got on to the plane.

“There are less hijacking attempts and you hardly get spam from an .ie address. In fact, a review of different internet country codes last year by the online security company, McAfee, showed that .ie was the second- safest address in the world after Finland.”

There was a time, not too long ago, when those choosing Unix- or Linux-based web servers had to understand kernels, secure shell and command line in order to manage their websites, or pay someone to manage the sites for them. At the time, Microsoft offered an easier and more…well “Windows-like” experience with their IIS web server. Those familiar with Windows computing could generally learn IIS by tooling around the software for a bit and the familiar Windows operating system made learning fairly easy. Unix/Linux, by comparison, was the purview of techies, hackers and code-slingers who tapped away furiously on their keyboards and eschewed their mice as “tools of the ignorant.” For the small business owner on a budget, the expense of Windows and the knowledge requirements of Unix/Linux offered a dilemma.

In Steps the Control Panel, aka “Hosting Automation”

Luckily for the owners of about 80 million websites (and their web hosting companies) interacting with websites hosted in a Linux/Apache environment got a whole lot easier with the advent of the “control panel,” a software package meant to be installed along with the web server software and used by users to more easily manage their sites. cPanel, now the de facto standard in this arena,

So, what exactly is cPanel?

“ According to the company itself, cPanel is a fully featured web-based control panel that allows you to manage your domain through a web interface. The idea is to transfer as much of the control and responsibility of managing your web site to you. You have the ability to manage all aspects of e-mail, files, backup, FTP, CGI scripts, and web site statistics. ”

So, while old-school programmers and the technophiles of the world will likely continue tapping away at their keyboards, the rest of the website-owning world can take a very different approach to website management. For all intents and purposes, the cPanel management console looks like the online account one would have with an online merchant, their bank or a domain registrar, though with significantly more options:

E-Mail

Users can manage their e-mail accounts in a variety of ways, including setting up new mail accounts, setting up spam filters, managing mailing lists and creating forwarders and auto responders.

Files (Web Pages, et al)

Users can use the “Files” section of cPanel to create backups manually, create backup schedules that run automatically, monitor disk usage and create and manage FTP accounts.

Logs

Users of cPanel can view raw log files or utilise one of the several log analyser files that are bundled with the control panel software.

Security

Security options include password protection of directories and files, managing IP denials, protecting against hotlinks to images and managing SSL and SSH access.

In addition to those noted options noted above, cPanel also has a “Software/Services” option that allows users to interact with third party software, including bulletin boards, blogs, shopping carts, search marketing programs and WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) HTML editors. Finally, an “Advanced” section helps more advanced users with Apache handlers, error pages, cron jobs, and a variety of other useful tools for website management. In short, the difficulty of managing a website is a thing of the seemingly distant past, and website management has been brought successfully into the hands of site owners.

E-mail is probably the most essential communications tool used by companies and online businesses around the world. Apart from the convenience of e-mail communications, they are also virtually free and immediate. They offer correspondents the opportunity to respond right away or to prepare a more thoughtful response. E-mails can be informal when necessary, or they can take a more formal tone and importance when appropriate. More so than telephone or fax communications, e-mail has the ability to reach a truly global marketplace. Time differences are no longer an issue as e-mails can be handled and transmitted with much greater ease than voice messages and hard-copy fax documents.

When building an online business especially, e-mail is one of the most powerful marketing tools you’ll have at your disposal. An accurate and clean database should be kept of every contact that you receive via e-mail through a website. Simple forms and contact management systems are available that make collecting and managing e-mails very simple for webmasters and business owners. Building and effectively using a database of e-mail contacts can help grow sales as well as the long-term value of any company or website.

E-mail allows for businesses and marketers to speak to their clients and potential clients on a personal level, through the privacy of their own e-mail terminals. By correctly targeting an audience and avoiding tactics that can be construed as spam, businesses can build credibility and provide valuable information to their target market – all through e-mail. As your list of clients and marketing leads grows, your e-mail database will become that much more powerful and effective to you in building sales and long-term value for your company. In many instances, online companies are valued more for their marketing databases than for their actual revenue stream. Understanding the power of e-mail and leveraging it properly can have an enormous impact on the success of your business or website.

When should I switch to a dedicated server?

That’s a question that has several different answers and can be looked at from a few different perspectives. But in the interest of simplicity, let’s just take a quick look at some of the issues that you’ll be facing if you’re considering when or if you should commit to a dedicated server.

Performance: Is your site performing at a level that guarantees your visitors are seeing all of the necessary information in order for them to take the actions your site intends them to take? Are your site’s pages consistently loading quickly enough for forms to be submitted and orders to be processed? Is the overall user experience seamless and fast enough so as not to risk visitors leaving because of slow loading times?

If any of the above-stated performance questions are becoming an issue, then it is likely time to move to a dedicated server.

Visitors: There is no definitive number of daily visitors that makes it necessary to switch to a dedicated server. But traffic is usually a top concern when it comes to determining whether or not to switch to a dedicated server. The trick is to stay ahead of the curve.

You don’t want to switch to a dedicated server after you’ve begun to experience problems managing your traffic load. Rather, you must anticipate the traffic level at which you’re likely to encounter problems and make the switch to a dedicated server well in advance of that point.

Cost: The advantages to a dedicated server are many, including greater bandwidth, unique IP, site flexibility and hosting support (usually). But there is always a cost to obtain these advantages and you must determine if the additional costs are justified within your current site or business model.

The cost of a dedicated server is actually pretty reasonable in today’s marketplace. At Lets Host, we offer several options for our dedicated server clients. Contact us today for more information.

All Letshost hosting customers have access to fantastico deluxe through their CPanel. Fantastico is an application for installing 3^rd party scripts such as blogs, forums and content management systems. There are several reasons why we advise clients wishing to install a package that is listed in Fantastico to do it through Fantastico rather than by uploading the files directly.These are:

Speed – Fantastico will install your application with the minimum of effort by creating all databases and removing any installation directories.

Security – Fantastico will assign all the correct permissions to your new application such that no security holes are left open.

Updates – As soon as stable releases of updated applications are released, Fantastico will issue an email to notify you of this. It will also allow you to upgrade using the Fantastico interface and without getting stuck into editing complex files which may be outside your field of expertise. Keeping your applications up to date means better performance, ongoing support from the application provider and increased security.

More information on Fantastico and the applications it can install can be found by logging into your Cpanel and accessing it directly from this location.