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.

Sometimes customers will stop using a particular email address, or their mailbox can fill up, or simply not review it as much as they used to.  For these reasons, sometimes our invoices and reminders go un-noticed, and their service will stop running as a result of non payment.

Now, with our new SMS service, we have opened up a whole new communications channel.  To register for this service, simply log in to the Customer Portal from www.letshost.ie, and go to “My Details”.  At the bottom of the page, you can check the box, activating the SMS service, and enter your elected mobile phone number (Irish numbers only).  Best of all – its Free!

When a bill becomes due for payment, we will send a single SMS message to your phone detailing the amouunt and due date.  We will only ever send a single SMS message for each service on each billing cycle, and never for any marketing or sales messages.  You can unsubscribe at any time by simply unching the register box.

Details below:

- Earn 25% upfront on any Web Hosting or Virtual Private Server (VPS) sale you send to LetsHost

- Referral cookie active on client machine for 90 days

- €25 minimum balance before withdrawal

- Pay outs available after 31 days of service purchase

- Activate via email to sales@letshost.ie or through your client area (Once logged in click ‘Affiliates’)

- Usage Sample:

http://www.letsho.st/shared/aff?aff=XXX (This links to our shared hosting plans)
http://www.letsho.st/vps/aff?aff=XXX (This links to our VPS plans)
http://www.letsho.st/aff?aff=XXX (This links directly to our homepage)

Key: XXX = your affiliate code

Terms and Conditions:

- Referral commissions are only valid on sales made from 31/08/2011 onwards

- Commissions not paid on Domain Registration, Site Builder, SSL certificates, Dedicated IP addresses, Anti Spam Service, Administrative Fees

- Commission is calculated on fee paid to LetsHost. If a coupon code of 30% is used on a purchase, you will receive 25% of 70% of the product value or in other words, 25% of the sale after any discounts are applied

We welcome any queries you have to sales@letshost.ie on our new affiliate program.

SSL stands for “Secure Sockets Layer.” Secure Sockets Layer is a protocol designed to enable applications to transmit information between each other securely. SSL is the most widely deployed security protocol used today. In today’s Internet focused world, we typically see SSL in use when a web browser needs to securely connect to a web server over the insecure Internet. For example, in the case of a browser, users are alerted to the presence of SSL when the browser displays a padlock. This is the key to the success of SSL, as the users know the site is valid and secure and it is an incredibly simple experience for end users.

How does SSL work?

SSL works by the sharing of encrypted keys, or passwords. The keys are created in pairs, one a public key and one a private key. When the keys are traded in a particular manner between two parties, this protocol assures the parties in communication they are transmitting with one another and not a hacker or phisher. It also assures the data being transmitted is not intercepted by someone else.

What happens when my web browser connects to a secure website? (SSL)

1. The browser requests that the web server identifies itself.

2. The server sends the browser a copy of its SSL cert.

3. The browser checks whether it trusts the SSL cert, and if it does it sends a message to the server.

4. The server sends back a digitally signed acknowledgement to start an SSL encryption session.

5. Encrypted data is now shared between the server and the browser.

SSL’s importance in E-commerce

When a customer visits a store they can see who they are dealing with. They can see the person and the product and make a decision on payment. When a customer visits your website they have no way of knowing who they are dealing with or who owns the ecommerce website from which they are about to buy. They are exposed to all the risks associated with sending data over the internet.

Using an SSL cert on your website enables a web browser (your customer) to communicate securely with your website and assures the customer of these three key issues:

1. That the website really is who it claims to be.

2. That credit card numbers, etc are encrypted and cannot be intercepted.

3. That the data sent and received cannot be tampered with or forged.

LetsHost.ie offer SSL certs from €89.99 + VAT per year. For more information on these GeoTrust SSL certs, please visit http://letshost.ie/hosting/packages/sslcert

Before we go into how you can use Facebook to promote your business, have a look at the following statistics:
- Facebook has more that 500 millions active users
- The average user has 130 friends
- The average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
- There are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices
- People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

What the above stats tell you is that there are a huge amount of people connected to Facebook, they spend alot of time on Facebook (both using a traditional computer and while on the move using their mobile devices) and they are connected to many businesses and events and share these with their friends.

So how can you get connected to all these potential customers? First step is to create your business page – this is free to do and you can start off with as little or as much content as you wish, adding in extra content whenever you want. You can then suggest this page to friends and other businesses and if they choose to ‘like’ your page, it will appear on their profile becoming automatically visible to all of their friends. They can then suggest your page to their friends and it continues like that.

The important part comes next – be active with your page. This can be with simple updates to your page, adding Facebook-exclusive promotional codes, creating events (such as a sale/promotion, open days, etc) or actively engaging with other Facebook users. Facebook users, and internet users in general, are fed such a huge amount of information constantly, it is important to be on their screen – ‘out of sight, of of mind!’

What if you have a website already – do you still need a Facebook page also? The answer is ‘yes!’ While your website can be a wealth of  information on your business, products and services you offer etc, this is often largely static content. Facebook, on the other hand, will have a certain amount of information on your business but its point is about being active – active and up to date content and information, getting in contact with customers, generating a buzz around your business. Also, there are more and more options to integrate your Facebook into your website so visitors can easily go from one to the other.

The above is only a introduction on what you can do on Facebook and, more importantly, what Facebook can do for your business. The above alone can generate interest in your business, awareness of the products/services you offer and ultimately bodies through the door and real sales at the end of the day. And that is before you consider spending a penny on paid advertising!

For more statistics on Facebook, please visit http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

To create your own page for free on Facebook, please visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?ref_type=sitefooter

Specifically the IP (Internet Protocol) is responsible for the route this traffic takes from source to destination. An IP address is a unique Identifing number of any device on the internet and consists of 32 bits. This means that in theory there should be in excess of 4 billion address but for various reasons (NAT!!) nearly half a billion of these are unusable on the internet.

In 1991 the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) realised that the current IPv4 was reaching the end of its lifetime. It became clear that there were not enough IP addresses to go around and with the growing popularity of mobile devices the rate exhaustion of these addresses began to grow exponentially.

To counteract this a new version of IP called IPv6 has been in developent for over a decade. The most noticable difference between the two version is the size of the address. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses which gives us 2^128 unique addresses, 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

IPv4 IP addresses take the for 12.34.56.78 whereas IPv6 addresses are expressed in hexidecimal notation and take the form 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf

IPv6 is designed to address the shortcomings of IPv4 in terms of addressing and routing, security, network address translation, administrative workload, and support for mobile devices.

LetsHost are actively working with our partners to test all our systems with IPv6 and will continue to update our customers as progress is being made.

With the price of external media drives dropping with each passing month there is no excuse for any business not to have backups in some shape or form on either external harddrives, CD/DVD or tape drives.

A backup strategy is vital for any business that relies heavily on their data to be able to function in an ever increasing digital work place. You will need to identify the data that you can not do without and how often this data is changed. It is a good idea to run a daily backup of spreadsheets, emails etc and to make multiple copies. i.e a backup of your backup.
It is not wise to store all your backups in the one location as hardware failure could wipe them all out. You should strongly consider keeping a copy in a remote location.

LetsHost.ie offer an online backup solution – more information can be found by going to http://www.pcbackup.ie

Please note:

1 – This offer is limited to NEW registrations only and limited to single year purchases only.

2 – This offer does not apply to transfers or renewals

3 – As this is a special offer, renewals will be more expensive in year 2, to a maximum of 19.99 + VAT (LetsHost are still the cheapest for domain registration / renewal). LetsHost will match any domain renewal price lower than this in year 2 when buying a domain transfer and hosting.

1 – Web developer

This is a 6 month contract position with an option to renew after 6 months.

Role:

- Development of back office applications
- Design and implementation of web based, customer facing applications

Skills profile required:

- At least 2 years experience in a similar role
- Have a strong knowledge of PHP / MySQL / Ajax / Javascript / HTML & CSS
- Be experience in coding applications which are primarily API based
- Experience in graphics creation / manipulation an advantage

A CV with cover letter and references should be forwarded to jobs@letshost.ie

2 – Support representative

This is a full time position base in our Dublin office and involves evening/night time shifts.

Role:

- Dealing with front line customer technical queries via email & phone

- Answering support tickets and ensuring customer satisfaction

Skills required:

- Excellent phone manner / writing skills
- Knowledge of desktop email systems – Outlook, Outlook Express, etc
- Knowledge of Linux, DNS, Email systems
- Understanding of network technologies – TCP/IP, DNS, etc
- Excellent troubleshooting and diagnostic skills
- Must be flexible and dependable
- Have a qualification in I.T, Computer science or another IT related course

A CV with cover letter and references should be forwarded to jobs@letshost.ie

** At this time we are not seeking any assistance from 3rd parties in filling these roles – thank you **

Because Frontpage has reached the end of its life (8 years ago) it has been increasingly difficult to maintain and support on our servers. Older software will gradually deteriorate when not maintained by Microsoft support and eventually becomes a security risk. As data security and integrity is of the upmost importance at Letshost a decision was made to remove the FrontPage extensions from our shared servers.

In 2006, Microsoft released their new HTML Editor/Web Design product called Microsoft Expression Web with version 4 being released in June 2010. This product is much more feature rich and adheres Web standards much more strictly. Expression Web supports PHP, HTML/XHTML, XML/XSLT, CSS, JavaScript, ASP.NET or ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, Flash, Windows Media, and Photoshop, as well as integration with Microsoft Visual Studio and Expression Studio.

Some free alternatives to Frontpage/Expression can be found on the links below

http://www.evrsoft.com/

http://www.pagebreeze.com/

http://www.kompozer.net/

There are also many free, web-based Content Management Systems and Blogging systems available online. Popular choices include Joomla (http://www.joomla.org/), Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/) and WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org/).