The customer portal can be accessed by clicking the “Account Login” tab at the top of every page on the www.letshost.ie website.  Simply enter your email address and password (or click the “Forgot Password” for a reminder).  This will take you to the new Customer Portal.

Once you are logged in, you can manage every aspect of your account from 1 place.  Here is a list of the key features:

• Review, Manage, and Pay for all services related to your account, eg Domains, Hosting, VPS, PCBackup, etc.  You can now extend the period of renewal for all domains (except  fixed term domains such as .co.uk).
• Upgrade your services.  For example you can upgrade (or downgrade) the amount of memory in a VPS, or change the Plan your on, etc
• Activate an SMS message (we love this one!) from the Account Details section, to send a reminder if you ever forget to pay a bill.
• You can cancel any service or domain from the control panel without contacting our support department.
• Network Monitor.  This section of the website details a historical view of all service related issues, as well as displaying the current service status of all our shared hosting servers.
• We have brought all the LetsHost Announcements in to the Customer Portal.  This section is where will will announce new products and services, or changes to accounts, etc.
• We have integrated our Knowledgebase in to the Customer Portal.  All the most popular questions and answers have been added to this list, and you can now search for solutions and answers from this section of the Portal
• Open, review and close all your support requests.  we have integrated our billing system with the Customer Portal, and you can open a new support request, or review all your previous requests.
  • We will be further improving this service going forward, by asking that all customers log their support requests through the Customer Portal.  We will shortly remove the email support address.  This way we can direct your ticket to the appropriate departments, and ask some very brief questions to help us resolve your question as quickly as possible.  We often get emails that do not contain enough information for us to help, so asking customers to manage their support through the Portal will make our “first time fix” much more achievable.
• You can place new orders or check the status of any other orders on your account, all from the Customer Portal.
• We have a new “Bulk Domain Management” systems.  Some customers have a few hundred domains registered with us.  This new feature allows you to manage all domains (or a subset) at once.  This is a great time saver for anyone with more than a handful of domains.

As if that is not enough, there are literally hundreds of improvements and little extras that will improve your overall web hosting experience with LetsHost.  We hope you like the changes!  We understand there is a lot of new features and functions, and not everyone will use every one, but we have tried to make it all as simple as possible with the sole aim of improving our services to you.

We would love your feedback and comments of the new system. If you have any questions or feedback, why not try out the new support system and let us know – we’ll be delighted to hear from you.

What are the advantages to having a sitemap?
Well, in addition to making it easier for your visitors to navigate their way around your site, sitemaps also make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl your site. This can improve your site’s search engine optimization by making sure that all the pages can be found. This will increase your search engine visibility, as well as your traffic.

And since most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, having a sitemap ensures that search engines and visitors alike can access all the content on your site.

Do you need a sitemap?
Well, it depends on your site. If your site only has one or two pages and hardly any content, then no. You don’t need a sitemap.

However, if your site has multiple pages and lots of content, it definitely won’t hurt to install a sitemap on your site. Here’s a good rule of thumb: Once you get to the point where you are no longer able to include all the links to your pages on your home page, then you need a sitemap.

After all, anything that will help your visitors as well as the search engines navigate your site is a good thing.

Great, Now I want to build a sitemap for my site
Ok you can use the following link to find the best sitemap creator for your site;

http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators

Here’s the streetview of Ellis Quay, where our LetsHost Dublin office is located.

But it’s not just Ireland’s cities that are covered — there’s surprisingly comprehensive coverage across the country, even in rural areas. Here’s a view from the road passing Long Strand in Castlefreke, West Cork…. well off the beaten track.

Now available in 25 countries spanning all seven continents, Google Street View has led some to voice privacy concerns , but for most people it adds largely welcome and useful detail to Google Maps, letting you explore at street level to get your bearings before travelling, or even if you just fancy a whistle-stop armchair tour of the Ring of Kerry.

We introduced Street View back in May 2007, enabling people to explore street-level imagery in five U.S. cities.

Three years later, we’re happy to announce that you can now explore Street View imagery on all seven continents, with the addition today of Brazil, Ireland and Antarctica. You can now see images from around the world spanning from the beaches of Brazil, to the moors of Ireland, to the icy terrain in Antarctica.

– Official Google Blog Post 30/09/2010

Yes, you read that right: Antarctica, with panoramic views of half moon island on the icy continent, complete with chinstrap penguins.

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.

E-Mail Marketing tools for small businesses

When you’re just starting out it seems easy enough to manage your promotional e-mail using your desktop e-mail client, but that soon gets unwieldy. It’s also difficult to manage industry best practice and comply with anti—spam requirements like double-opt-in and unsubscribe requests.

To market effectively using e-mail you’re going to need dedicated e-mail marketing tools.

Do it yourself e-mail marketing tools

If you’re a LetsHost Complete hosting customer, you already have access to a great free e-mail list manager in your Fantastico script library. Just log in to your control panel, scroll down to Fantastico and look for PHP List.

You can install PHP List on your server for free, and use it to manage all of your e-mail lists and campaigns. Installation and setup is reasonably straightforward, but is a bit more involved than the hosted tools listed below.

You’ll find a detailed article on setting up and configuring PHP List on the webreference.com site.

Hosted e-mail marketing services

These are a great option for small businesses, because all of the technical stuff is taken care of for you. You simply create your account, fill in your details, and start managing your e-mail marketing campaigns.

E-mail services typically offer a free or very low cost trial, so you can try before you buy, and then charge an ongoing annual or monthly fee depending on the volume of e-mail you send in any given month.

Here are a few popular e-mail services you can try to help connect you with your existing customers and give your sales a boost:

Benchmark E-mail: an affordable, feature rich and easy-to-use  system that lets you start small and grows seamlessly with your business. Benchmark offers a free 30 day trial.

AWeber: the e-mail marketing and sequential auto-responder service of choice among many A-List internet marketers, AWeber has everything you need to seamlessly manage multiple e-mail marketing campaigns for your small business. You can sign up for an AWeber account for just $1.

NewsWeaver: Irish e-mail marketing services company NewsWeaver offers another very popular solution focussed on the distribution of high-quality e-mail newsletters, but with all the features necessary for managing comprehensive e-mail marketing campaigns. Newsweaver offers a 30 day free trial.

There are many other services out there, and most of them offer a “try before you buy” free trial.

So give e-mail marketing a whirl, it could be just the thing to boost your small business’s online sales.

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!

Image by suzukik via Flickr

In a recent post we looked at how you can use web analytics tools already included in your LetsHost Complete Hosting Plan to analyse your website traffic and gain valuable insight into how your visitors use your site.

While these basic log file analysis tools are fine for giving you a general overview of activity on your site, they offer a very basic user interface and a pretty inflexible window on your logfile data.

Enterprise class analytics software for free

Enterprise class analytics software can (and does) cost many thousands of Euro, but thanks to Google many of the features you’d typically find in high end commercial analytics software are now available for free.

Welcome to Google Analytics.

Setting up Google Analytics on your website is easy. Once you have a Google account (if you don’t already have one you can sign up for a Google account here), just head over to the Google Analytics website.

While you’re on the Google Analytics homepage, check out some of the great, free Google resources to help you get more out of the product. When you’re ready, just click on the blue “Access Analytics” button, and sign in with your Google credentials.

• Follow the on-screen prompts to set up your analytics account.
• Once you’ve created your account you’ll see a page with Analytics: Tracking Instructions. For a standard setup you can leave the settings on the left at the default (single domain) value
• The code in the pane in the middle of your screen is your Google Analytics tracking code for your website.
• You’ll need to copy this code and add it (or ask your web designer to add it) immediately before the closing </head> on every page on your site that you want to track.

That’s it. Google Analytics will start tracking data for your website, and offers you a wide range of metrics, tools, goals and customisations to help you make informed decisions about your online marketing.

For a quick overview of the basics, check out the video below, and check out the great free Google Analytics learning resources in the Google Conversion University.

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.

What is a server log file

Every time a users browser requests a file from your webserver (an image, a HTML page, a pdf… any file) an entry is written to the server log recording that activity.

Some of the information that’s stored includes:

• the date and time of the request
• the browser and operating system of the user
• the IP address the request came from
• the URL the request came from, and the destination URL on your site

That sounds pretty basic, but from that basic information we you cann glean a lot of valuable information about what’s happening on your website.

How do I access my web server log files

Your log files are accessible from a sub folder of your hosting account via FTP.

But raw log files aren’t all that useful on their own. They’re just a long, long list of information. What you need is some clever software to parse all that info and deliver something you can use.

Luckily your LetsHost Hosting Control Panel (CPanel) includes a few tools that do exactly that. Scroll down to the “Logs” panel and you’ll find Analog, AWStats and Webalizer ready and waiting to deliver more log-file information than you can shake a stick.

Each of the tools collates and presents data in a different way, so give them a whirl to see which you prefer?

How can analysing log files help make my site better?

Your log file can reveal tonnes of useful information about how many visitors come to your website, how they find you online, and how they behave once they arrive.

Over time the data from your log files can help give you a clearer picture of what people want from your site, allowing you to tailor your site content and structure to deliver exactly what they want, improving the user experience, and ultimately improving your bottom line.

Well, there might not be an app for that… just yet – but here’s a handy YouTube video courtesy of those lovely people at Wiley Publishing who created the iconic “For Dummies” series of books.

All of your LetsHost email accounts support both IMAP or POP access, and your server for both incoming and outgoing mail is mail.yourdomain.com (where “yourdomain” is a primary or add-on domain associated with your LetsHost Irish hosting account).

Your username is the e-mail address you want to access (replace the @ with a + if you have problems logging in), and your password is the one you specified when you created the e-mail address in cpanel.

You’ll find lots of information on setting up new e-mail accounts and e-mail settings for IMAP, POP and SMTP access in the LetsHost Support FAQ/Knowledgebase.

Want more iPhone tips and tricks? You’ll find iPhone for dummies over on Amazon.

Image via Wikipedia

Social Media has been the darling of the digirati, online early adopters and web2.0 advocates for a while now, but 2009 was the year when explosive growth took social media into the mainstream.

Research by Nielson group for the year to May 2009 revealed the following statistics:

• An 82% increase in the total time spent on social networks and blogs in the year to May 2009.
• A 62% increase in the average time per web user spent on social networks and blogs in the year to May 2009
• Traffic on Twitter, the “poster-boy” of Social Media in 2009, grew by a staggering 1,448%

What does the rise of social media mean for you, your brand and your website?

If your peers, your customers and your prospects aren’t already using social media, chances are good that they soon will be. Getting involved in the same online social circles offers you the opportunity to engage in a meaningful dialogue with them.

There’s a global conversation going on, through blogs, social networks, forums, “micro-blogging” platforms and other social media platforms. Here are just a few ways you can harness the power of social media to benefit the online presence of your brand:

• Get and give help and advice: learn what peers and thought leaders in your industry are talking about, and gain insight that can help you in your business, and help others in return.
• Build a community around your brand: people like to feel a connection with the products and services they use, and to interact with the human beings behind the logo.
• Monitor, respond and influence: there’s a conversation going on out there, with or without you. Far better to engage and foster a positive perception of your brand from the outset than to sit on the sidelines.
• Foster ongoing, mutually beneficial relationships: it’s far easier and more profitable to retain existing customers than it is to chase new ones… social media tools can help you to build stronger relationships with a much wider network of people.
• Word of mouth: good news travels fast online… social media offers a wonderful opportunity for people to spread the love about your brand.

Exactly what opportunities social media can offer you depends very much on your business, where your customers congregate online and what you want to get out of it. The best way to find out is to dive in and start exploring… to get started why not try following @LetsHost on Twitter, or post a comment on this blog post?

We’re looking forward to hearing more from you and your business online!