Why are we using Softlayer Nameservers?

I was reviewing the live chat transcripts earlier today. An interesting one that was served by “Ronskit”, a live chat operator of Mellowhost caught my attention. One of our visitor was interested to know, why are we using Softlayer nameservers for the domain “mellowhost.com” (http://intodns.com/mellowhost.com) instead of ns1.mellowhost.com or so on. The visitor was more interested in proving that Mellowhost is hosted in a shared server and all of our clients are also using a server that is not really managed by Mellowhost. His excuses were flowing towards why we don’t sell VPS or Master Resellers, or so called “Alpha” Master Resellers instead we only sell Reseller and Shared Hosting. It is eventually hard to answer a management level of query by a sales representative and as expected he wasn’t able to please the visitor 🙂 I quickly thought to write this down for future references.

 

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2Checkout

As we do not have an offline Credit Card processing option, we were planning to add 2Checkout for long time. We had been seeing many requests from “Africa” and Middle East countries requesting to use 2Checkout. We have finally made 2Checkout available for all types of Payment to Mellowhost services. You can now select 2Checkout from the Payment Option for new orders or paying the recurring bills. 2Checkout can be used for paying with Direct Credit Card.

Happy Hosting!

How to protect your WordPress blog from web injection

I have been thinking to write this post for long time, although, couldn’t get time to write details about this major security issue. From my experience, I have seen a big percentage of users are using WordPress and a certain percentage always face some sort of Web Injections (Iframe for example) with any shared hosting provider. This post would go into deep to study why these web injections are occurring and how can you protect your wordpress blog from these sort of issues.

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First Impression on Windows 7

I have been using my Macbook for all of my work from last year. My desktop had the old windows xp. I was using Livezilla client which has only windows application (We got Providesupport today replacing Livezilla, as it got mac client, should post a new topic on it). This is why I had to use the desktop as a part of business along with my macbook. I was planning to upgrade this box for a long time. Didn’t really have enough time to do so. Yesterday, I went to a Microsoft showroom here, and got a license for Windows 7 Professional. They took 165$ in local currency for the Windows 7 Professional. I was actually hoping for Windows 7 Ultimate, but the pricing for ultimate (215$) was out of my budget. I had upgraded my RAM and Motherboard couple of days ago after a recent crash of my graphics card. I was well aware that my current hardware configuration should sustain Windows 7 Pro.

Installation went smooth. It was pretty faster than Windows XP if I can remember (Last time, I installed windows was in 2007). After using Macbook for last one year, I was continuously losing my interest on windows. Mac OS X Leopard is fast, virus free and most importantly, it doesn’t crash so frequently like my windows did before. I wasn’t really expecting much from Windows 7 over Windows XP. But I have to say, I am pretty much amazed with the performance and design tactics. I find it way faster than XP and in some cases, it would beat my Mac. I was hearing about the hardware acceleration improvement on Internet Explorer 9 and waiting to try it. It really squeezes your net! I tested both IE 9 and FF 4 Beta 6 on my windows 7, and I can definitely feel IE is performing better than FF. Older IE had tremendous problem with the tab opening, but IE 9 has overcome the issue, it looks like. It is opening tabs faster than FF 4. Although, sites are loading fast, but the compatibility seems to be a problem with IE 9. It can not load lots of javascripts and css, so I assume, it has more to improve.

I specially like the design of Task manager in Windows 7. I was using Windows 2008 R2 in one of my windows VPS, and it is pretty similar to that one. Linux is having lots of tools to find the bottlenecks of a system from scratch. I have never seen windows feeling interest for it. There are lots of geeks who would feel to tweak their OS and find the best from it. Although, windows have always been casual to give such tools to end users. This time, I can see windows is feeling the need. They have a Resource Monitor service built in to allow users to track root level usage.

Quick preview system for the tasks seem pretty nice. I can remember in old XP, when I was using the IE 6 and having around 20-25 windows opened, and the task bar was filled with “…”.

They seem to be having lots of improvement in the process management. I tried running couple of injections on svchost and other services, it seems, the current structure simply discards them. Even though, those were working with the latest update of windows xp. I read an article on Windows Server 2008 around a year ago, regarding the process architecture of it, and if I can remember correctly, Windows is more on following the linux architecture day by day. Users permission on process management is becoming more important. I would definitely work with it in later time and post a detailed report for Mellowhost blog readers 🙂

I have spent 6 hours till now with windows 7 professional edition, and I have say, I am impressed. You do need a good configuration to run it, but it is nevertheless a waste anymore. Keep up the good work Microsoft.

An Idea of Quality Analysis Department!

Mellowhost is nearly touching it’s 4th Anniversary in the hosting business. We have worked hard in last years to make the hosting environment more innovative and perfect for our clients. In most of the situations we have tried our level best to give the best performance you can ever expect from a shared hosting environment.

There are many reviews from our clients in different places. There were some situations, we have seen our customers misunderstanding and expressing their feelings. It is pretty hard to make an environment suitable for every sort of users, but our target is and was always to make it right for all. We have worked with all possible clients to overcome the understanding we had to make it positive in every possible aspects.

Contacting the host is probably the best choice to clear the ideas. It helps both parties to come to an understanding. I have seen some users in past who were having some issues with their CMS, but thinking it was a server issue. Even though, we do not provide 3rd party support, but to make the situation go right and concluding the misunderstanding, we have worked with the client to fix his/her CMS. The root factor to conclude this sort of situations is to contact.

We are planning to start a “Quality Analysis Department” which will be aimed to keep in touch with our clients. One can submit any sort of feedbacks (Example: unsatisfactory support, unsatisfactory server performance, unsatisfactory uptime etc. which makes you unsatisfied with the service) through the desk to our Quality Analyst. We will start digging on your query and try to find a way to solve your problem with the co-operation of other respective departments. Our Quality Analyst team will try to monitor ticket activity to find user’s satisfaction level. In case, we feel, one is unsatisfied with a specific reason, we will immediately contact him/her with the possible solutions we can provide to solve the case through QA Desk. A little co-operation from clients may solve these sorts of unwanted situations.

We are in the process of training our human resources to be a Quality Analyst. This process is still going and we expect to launch this department within November.

Happy Hosting!

New 14 daily restore point for R1Soft backup

We are pleased to announce, we are currently storing 14 daily restore point for all of our R1Soft backup. You can Restore any backup of your last 14 days from cpanel for free of charge. It was 7 days before. After couple of recent feedbacks, we have come to a decision to keep it with 14 daily restore points.

How “Niceness” impacts shared servers!

A very well known word in linux server is “nice” value. I have seen many people discussing about the effectiveness of Apache/Mysql tweaking, but eventually, if the throughput of your linux system isn’t good enough, apahce/mysql tweaking can fail. In this article, I am going to try explaining how “Nice” value of linux system can impact the performance of linux shared servers.

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New achievement in Digitalpoint

Let me make a quick post about being a 700 posts club member in Digitalpoint. I am using Digitalpoint since 2007, and made these 700 posts in last 3 years. My username in Digitalpoint is “mellow-h”.

Digitalpoint is one of the first place where Mellowhost had started marketing. Most of our old customers are from Digitalpoint. We are still getting lots of users from Digitalpoint regularly visiting our site or purchasing hosting. I got around 90 positive iTrader in digitalpoint. Digitalpoint has gone under couple of re-organizing in last year. One of the key reason we fall back from digitalpoint is their re-organization didn’t work out. Currently our primary target is webhostingtalk and seeing pretty decent traffic everyday. I am planning to jump over couple of more forums beside WHT and digitalpoint has come in my mind again. Lets see how it works this time. I have always missed Digitalpoint for last 1 year after their re-organization, hope this is going to be pleasing back again.

And good luck to me for having those valuable 700 posts in DP after 3 years 😮

Reducing CPU usage for WordPress users!

WordPress is one of the most demanding content management system of recent days. Most of the users these days use wordpress for their blogs or websites. Around 85% sites of our servers are using wordpress and most of the clients are utilizing multiple wordpress blogs for their business. WordPress has been found to be using pretty good sum of CPU and Memory. Today’s shared hosting environments are more limited based on the CPU and memory rather than the Space and Bandwidth. It is always a wiser choice to spend little amount of time to reduce the overall cpu usage. This makes the blog running faster and hosting companies feel good to host sites which are nicer to their CPUs 🙂 Here are some tips to reduce the CPU usage on a wordpress blog and improve the site performance.

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