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Malware is on the increase – and it’s not just your desktop PC that’s at risk of infection.

We all know how vital it is to keep our desktop computers up to date with the latest patches, updates, virus definitions and so on. But many forget that their webserver, and the software that runs on it, could also be prone to exploit and attack by unsavoury cyber-hackers.

Irish website owners need to be vigilant that their sites aren’t being compromised by unscrupulous hackers and malicious code.

We take care of most updates for you

At LetsHost the security of our servers, and your website, is a top priority. We’re constantly vigilant, and follow industry best practice when it comes to our server security set up.

All relevant patches and security updates are applied to all of our server software as soon as they become available, and we stay up-to-date with the latest security news, upcoming threats and solutions, giving you peace of mind.

There are, however, a few steps you, as a hosting customer, can take to help us make your website even more secure.

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E-mail marketing is still a winner when it comes to selling products and services. Consumers prefer e-mail communications to direct mail, social media, in store promotions and text messages, according to the latest figures.

A recent survey of shoppers across Illinois, Kansas, North Carolina and Ohio by CrossView revealed that almost 4 in 10 of them would elect to receive promotional information via e-mail.

E-mail turned out to be the most popular promotional communications channel amongst US consumers, followed by direct mail (23%), Text Messaging (18%), in store advertising (11%), social media (9%) with newspaper, TV and other traditional channels bringing up the rear with a total of just 3% between them.

Those are pretty telling statistics, and suggest strongly that investing in building a solid opt-in e-mail list and delivering compelling e-mail marketing on a regular basis is still a fantastic way for businesses to connect with consumers.

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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.

Image by Tom Raftery via Flickr

• Do you know how many people are visiting your website every day?
• Do you know where they’re arriving from, what pages they’re landing on?
• Do you know how long they spend with you once they arrive, and which page they leave from?

The simple answer is yes, you do!

All of that data is being recorded for you automatically in your server log files, and is easily accessible using the free tools in your LetHost CPanel account.

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Linux, the open source operating system that underpins LetsHost’s Complete Irish Hosting Plan, is the operating system of choice for the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

The telling statistic comes from a list of the “Top 500” most powerful computers in the world that was released at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany this week.

An impressive 405 of the 500 most powerful computers in the world run on Linux, which has a phenomenal 81% of the supercomputer O/S market around the world.

In terms of national supercomputing superpowers, America is still dominant: more than half of the supercomputers on the list are located in the US. The Cray XT “Jaguar” at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee retained its crown as the world’s fastest computer.

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Building and maintaining a website can be a pretty daunting prospect for small business owners.

Most of us don’t know HTML, and have neither the time or the inclination to learn it. So we go to a professional web designer to have our site built for us.

But we don’t really want to call on a web designer every time we want to update or add to the content on our website. We need a system that makes managing our web content less technical.

Enter WordPress… a popular, easy to use blogging and web content management platform that makes maintaining the information on your small business website as simple as editing a word-processor document.

Five reasons why WordPress is a good choice for your small business website:

• WordPress is completely free: that’s right, although it’s one of the world’s most popular and easy to use content management platforms, WordPress is open source, which means it’s free to download and install, and you and your web designer are free to tweak and modify it in any way you want.

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Image by JasonBechtel via Flickr

If you’re shopping around for a new web host you may have noticed that not all web hosting packages are created equal.

Most hosting features are easy to compare and contrast, but there’s one crucial factor that a lot of people overlook. Speed!

Why do you need a fast web host?

Although the overall performance of your website depends on a lot of different factors, your choice of hosting partner has a significant role to play.

Server specification, the number of accounts sharing server resources and the capacity of your hosts network infrastructure will all have an impact on how quick and responsive your web pages feel… and that’s important.

Faster web pages could improve search rankings:

Google has been talking a lot recently about making the web faster. Check out this Google video for some background on how and why the world’s leading search engine believes a faster web is a better web for everyone:

As part of their initiative to promote a faster web experience for their users, prominent Googlers like Matt Cutts have indicated that site speed could become a factor in search rankings in 2010.

Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.

Google’s Matt Cuts talks site speed with WebPro News in December 2009.

Faster web pages improve user experience and conversion

Once people find your site it’s a “no brainer” that more responsive web pages are much easier for them to navigate.

Web users are an impatient bunch. They won’t wait around for your content to load;  instead of twiddling their thumbs they’ll use their index finger to click through to a competitor’s site.

Improving the performance of your web pages (and the speed of your web host is a part of that) will help you to retain more of your site visitors for longer, and ultimately convert a higher proportion of them into subscribers, firm prospects and paying customers.

LetsHost takes hosting performance seriously

Here at Letshost we understand how important hosting performance is to your online business. That’s why we invest in the very latest web server technology and state-of-the-art hosting infrastructure.

We believe we strike the ideal balance between cost and performance for our hosting customers – check out our Irish web hosting options today to see how we can help your online business to thrive.

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Here at LetsHost we’re always keen to hear from our Web Hosting customers.

We work hard to offer one of the best web hosting deals in Ireland, with a great blend of features, space and bandwidth at what we consider to be great value. But more than that, we strive to make the experience of hosting your website with us an enjoyable and productive one.

We want to hear from you

Your feedback is very important to us. It helps us to fine tune our service to fit your needs.

We love to hear your success stories: how well your website is doing, and how your LetsHost hosting account is helping you to get great online results for your business. But equally we want to know where you think we could do things a bit better, so that we can keep improving.

One of the main reason’s we started this blog, and the LetsHost Twitter Account was to listen to what you have to say, and to make information and advice about your hosting account that much more accessible.

On the blog we’re aiming to deliver valuable content on web hosting, web design, and online marketing that will help you make the most of your LetsHost hosting account. We’re picking article topics that we feel are relevant to you, but the whole point of a blog is that its a two-way-street. You can tell us what you think through its built in comment system.

What hosting and / or website related topics do you want to read about? Drop us a line with your suggestions / questions in the comments below, and we’ll address them in future posts. Let us know what you’d like to see happening on the blog.

We’re looking forward to your input.

When you sign up for your LetsHost Irish web hosting account you either provide us with an existing domain name or register a new domain name.

That becomes the primary domain associated with your account, but did you know that your LetsHost Complete Hosting Plan gives you plenty of storage and bandwidth to host up to 25 additional websites, all from a single hosting account.

Add on Domains and Parked Domains

Once you’ve registered your new domain name(s) there are two ways to add additional domains to your LetsHost Complete hosting account. You’ll find these options in the Domains section of your hosting control panel (accessible via cpanel.yourprimarydomain.com).

1. Parked domains

When you park a domain you’re essentially “pointing” that domain to a domain that already exists on your account (either to your primary domain or an add-on domain… see below).

For example, let’s say your primary domain uses the Irish top level domain, .ie. So, greathosting.ie might be your main domain name, but you also decide to buy greathosting.com to help broaden your reach and traffic (and of course to prevent other companies from registering it).

In that case you want anyone who types in www.greathosting.com to be automatically routed to your primary domain at www.greathosting.ie.

By “parking” the secondary domain on top of your primary domain, any traffic arriving via www.greathosting.com is seamlessly redirected to www.greathosting.ie. Simple!

You can “park” an unlimited number of domain names with a single LetsHost Complete Hosting plan.

2. Add On Domains

Your Letshost hosting package also lets you add up to 25 Add-on domains. These essentially  behave as independent domains, complete with web-space, e-mail addresses, ftp accounts, etc. – all conveniently controlled through your central, web based LetsHost Complete Hosting Plan control panel.

Files associated with your add-on domains sit in a sub-folders under your primary domain’s public_html folder, and you can administer them just as you would the files for your primary domain. To the outside world your add-on domains look and behaves like a completely independent website.

Your LetsHost Complete Hosting plan gives you great flexibility when it comes to hosting multiple domains, and don’t forget, LetsHost is also a leading Irish domain registrar… so you get great hosting, great domain registration and great support all in one place.

You’ll find more details and step-by step instructions on setting up your add-on domain and adding a parked domain in the comprehensive LetsHost support knowledgebase.