This Monday, 7th May 2012, is a bank holiday in Ireland.

Our sales and accounts departments will be closed for this holiday, however, our technical support staff will be on hand all day and night, as usual, to assist with any issues, support, etc

Our telephone lines will be closed on Monday, but please log any requests through our customer portal by clicking the Account Login tab a the top of the LetsHost.ie website and a member of our team will be on hand to help.

The IE Domain Registry will be closed on Monday, so any new .ie registrations will be queued for processing on Tuesday.

LetsHost

We wish all our customers, in Ireland and Worldwide a very happy Paddy’s day.

Our support staff are on hand as usual to provide technical assistance by e-mail, as usual.  Telephone support will be closed on Monday 19th March, and will re-open at 9am on Tuesday 20th March.

Our Sales and Accounts departments will be closed until 9am on 20th March.

This new SMS communication method supplements the regular account e-mails notices and reminders. This allows payment and renewal reminders to reach customers fast. Customers have advised that sometimes e-mails can be missed, due to contact information changed or inboxes overloaded. So we have introduced the SMS messaging service as an additional communication vehicle to get important account information to clients – completely free of  charge.

To activate the SMS reminder service, please log in to the Client Area by visiting http://www.letshostbilling.com. After accessing the My Details page, you  can activate the service and register your Irish-based mobile phone number. When a payment becomes overdue, an SMS message will be sent to the number, showing the amount and date due.

This communications channel is reserved for account reminders, and only one SMS message is generated for each billing cycle.  We will never send promotional messages with this billing service, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

We have invested heavily in our customer portal, and continue to add new features and services on a weekly basis.  We have some great new features under test at the moment to compliment the other recent service additions, including fully integrated DNS Management, and fully integrated support system.  The LetsHost customer portal is a very easy to use, comprehensive place to manage all aspects of your account.

1. Consider the Extension – “TLD” is the term that many in the industry use to refer to “Top Level Domains.” This is merely a reference to the extension of the domain name, such as “.ie”, “.com” or “.net,” among others. Generally speaking, the“.com” extension is the most popular and the domain that is most readily remembered by those browsing the Web. However, there are many instances in which a country-specific top level domain is more appropriate. In the UK, for instance, the “.co.uk” extension is extremely popular and a very appropriate choice. In Ireland, the .ie extension is the most popular and should generally be used by companies or websites based in that country. If the country is not a consideration in registering a domain, the “.com” extension is typically the best choice, though websites built for organizations, and especially non-profit organisations, may be best served by a “.org” top level domain.

2. Branding is Important – All other things being equal, the shorter the domain, the better. Your domain should also be easy to remember, so that someone seeing the domain in print, or hearing it spoken, can easily remember it. Branding is an important consideration as well, so if you feel as though your website is going to rely heavily on branding efforts, generic domain names are not as valuable as very specific domains. Be creative, and your branding efforts will be easier.

3. Keywords Can be Crucial – If branding is not a terribly important element of your website development or business plan, or if your branding efforts include a keyword or keyword phrase that is specific to your website or business, adding a keyword in the domain can be highly effective. This can also aid in search engine optimization, as the domain plays at least some role in determining rankings.

4. Dashes Are Best Avoided – If you can avoid dashes in your domain, do so. While a single dash is acceptable, domains with multiple dashes are seen as being “spammy” and can turn off would-be visitors. Dashes also make a domain harder to remember, and their presence may lead would-be visitors to type in an incorrect name when trying to recall your site’s domain

Once you have decided on your domain name, it can be easily ordered from the LetsHost.ie website, at http://www.letshost.ie

LetsHost target market is in comprehensive website and e-mail hosting for small to medium businesses, as well as to personal users. We provide affordable, premium Irish hosting plans featuring superior reliability and outstanding technical support.

The shared Windows “Complete” hosting package has been developed for company, ecommerce, organisational or private use. The shared hosting plans include unlimited e-mail accounts, multiple daily backups using our Continuous Data Protection system, and fast and simple software installs of the most popular web applications. LetsHost now has a full suite of both Linux and Windows services to answer the needs of customers, from novice users to experienced designers to resellers.  As with our Linux shared solutions, the Windows hosting service is build on our Cloud platform.  This offers extremely high levels of reliability and performance for all users.

“As a Windows hosting provider, we’re here to ensure that our customers can roll out successful web projects quickly, and economically,” explained Graeme Conkie, Director. “In addition to our shared hosting packages, we also offer Windows hosting on a cloud-based Virtual Private Server (VPS) infrastructure that delivers security, scalability, knowledgeable support and peak performance. At LetsHost, our online solutions supply speed and reliability whether customers are registering a domain, creating a website, reselling sites, or setting up a VPS system.”

Within its Windows hosting packages, LetsHost includes the automated and easy-to-use Plesk control panel with its integrated web design tools. The renowned Plesk panel is recognized worldwide as providing highly intuitive solutions and a long list of features for Windows hosting. LetsHost makes it easy for new clients to migrate from other control panel providers so they can experience the benefits of its comprehensive plans.

By choosing LetsHost, customers gain secure, cost-effective, cloud based solutions with hardware redundancy for the utmost dependability. All of the company’s hosting packages include useful programming tools at no extra cost, such as Visitor Stats, E-Commerce, WordPress, Joomla, Customer Relationship Manager and more. The LetsHost server infrastructure and support teams are based in Ireland, and 24×7 technical assistance is available.

As with our shared Linux hosting solution, we have created a single “Complete” hosting plan that will fit almost all requirements.  Full details of this service, pricing, etc can be found on the www.letshost.ie website, or by following this link : LetsHost for Windows Hosting Details

What does this mean?
Basically, a CDN allows you to put copies of the static files from your website on to super fast, geographically dispersed “edge” servers which results in much faster response speeds of your website.

Now, here is the clever bit – The LH-CDN service can detect where abouts in the world you are, and serve the static files from the closest location geographically.  The CDN also does nothing else but serve your files.  It does not have to worry about decoding PHP scripts, or worry about sending and receiving emails, or run database queries, etc.  It simply serves the static files for your website from the nearest location to the person who needs them.

The diagram above depicts how users in different locations in the world can access local “Edge servers” to obtain the fixed parts of your website.  For example, in Australia, users connect to our cache server in Sydney or Brisbane to obtain the images and video for your website.  As the Australian server is much closer to the user, the webpage loads significantly faster.

Even if you are not targeting your website at overseas visitors, using the LH-CDN will still significantly improve performance.  This is because the edge servers serve just the static images, video, etc.

The LetsHost CDN uses over 30 geographically dispersed “edge servers” located worldwide that cache the static content for your website.

Our “Edge Servers” are located in over 30 locations worldwide, including:
Sydney & Brisbane, Australia
Japan
Singapore
Florida, Texas, California and New York in the USA
London, Amsterdam, Madrid, Moscow, Brazil
..and of course Ireland.

I am sure many of you are wondering how this could possibly work for your website.  If you have a web site that displays images, or uses JavaScript, or has lots of text, etc, such as a blog, an e-commerce website or a

We have already moved all of the images and JavaScript from the LetsHost web site on to the CDN (all images are now served from cdn.letshost.ie).  And within minutes of doing this, we have seen a 50% improvement in response speeds (0.6 seconds from over 1 second previously for our home page).  Not only is this great for your users, but search engines, such as Google are now saying that they rack websites based on performance as well as all the other factors (eg content quality, etc).

It is a well known fact that users will not stay on a slow website.  Improving your websites performance is one of the most important tasks to carry out once the initial content is put together.

If you want to improve your website visitors experience, as well as improve your search engine rankings, CDN is definitely a worthwhile option.

We have still to finalise pricing, but we do have some free trials to give away for a short time.   Please contact our Sales team (email sales@letshost.ie) if you would like a free trial.

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