Free Jelly Co-Working Event For Bracknell Home Workers and Self Employed To Launch Next Week at Enterprise and Innovation Hub

A revolutionary co-working ‘Jelly’ event for freelancers, home workers and small business owners in Bracknell and surrounding areas will take place at the Bracknell Enterprise and Innovation Hub next week after massive success in the United States.

Set to take place on the second Thursday of every month, Bracknell Jelly is a free event where the region’s self-employed, small business owners and home workers can work, chat and collaborate with each other without having to pay for meeting rooms or office space. It gives local people the chance to get out of the (home) office and work alongside other like minded people for one day every month for free.

The Bracknell Jelly has been organized by local consultancy firm, Dogsbody Technology. Founder Dan Benton said, “For some people it’s having a different chair to sit on, for others it is having someone saying bless you when they sneeze. I was a home worker for many years and know how lonely it can get and how useful having other people around as a sounding board can be. I was inspired after hearing about the success of Jellies in America and decided to organise one in Bracknell as a way of giving something back.”

Registration for the Bracknell Jelly is free and sessions are scheduled every month throughout the year. The meeting room space has been donated by the Bracknell Enterprise and Innovation Hub, giving home workers the opportunity to work in a professional environment for the day without sacrificing internet access or productivity.

Each Jelly is a mixture of work, chat, helping others with business issues, passing on tips and perhaps even collaborating on a new project. There are thought to be around 30 active co-working Jelly events around the UK. Bracknell home workers feeling isolated or lacking inspiration can register for free to attend any Jelly event at the Bracknell Enterprise and Innovation Hub. Spaces are available for the next event, which takes place on Thursday February 14^th. To register, visit http://www.bracknelljelly.com

About Bracknell Jelly: Bracknell Jelly is a free monthly informal co-working event where freelancers, home workers and small/micro business owners can and work, chat and collaborate with each other.

About Dogsbody Technology: Dogsbody Technology Ltd is a Linux consultancy company providing bespoke solutions that help clients get the best out of technology. Previous work has involved security control, virtualisation platforms, cloud computing and high availability networking. Its services are not limited to Internet facing technology or networking and it has previously consulted on electronics and automation.

-ENDS-

Press Release: Bracknell Jelly is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

Free Jelly Co-Working Event For Camberley Home Workers and Self Employed To Launch This Month at Basepoint Camberley

A revolutionary co-working ‘Jelly’ event for freelancers, home workers and small business owners in Camberley and surrounding areas will take place at Basepoint Camberley later this month after massive success in the United States.

Set to take place on the fourth Thursday of every month, Camberley Jelly is a free event where the region’s self-employed, small business owners and home workers can work, chat and collaborate with each other without having to pay for meeting rooms or office space. It gives local people the chance to get out of the (home) office and work alongside other like minded people for one day every month for free.

The Camberley Jelly has been organized by local consultancy firm, Dogsbody Technology. Founder Dan Benton said, “For some people it’s having a different chair to sit on, for others it is having someone saying bless you when they sneeze. I was a home worker for many years and know how lonely it can get and how useful having other people around as a sounding board can be. I was inspired after hearing about the success of Jellies in America and decided to organise one in Camberley as a way of giving something back.”

Registration for the Camberley Jelly is free and sessions are scheduled every month throughout the year. The meeting room space has been donated by Basepoint Camberley, giving home workers the opportunity to work in a professional environment for the day without sacrificing internet access or productivity.

Each Jelly is a mixture of work, chat, helping others with business issues, passing on tips and perhaps even collaborating on a new project. There are thought to be around 30 active co-working Jelly events around the UK. Camberley home workers feeling isolated or lacking inspiration can register for free to attend any Jelly event at Basepoint Camberley. Spaces are available for the next event, which takes place on Thursday January 24^th. To register, visit http://www.camberleyjelly.com

About Camberley Jelly: Camberley Jelly is a free monthly informal co-working event where freelancers, home workers and small/micro business owners can and work, chat and collaborate with each other.

About Dogsbody Technology: Dogsbody Technology Ltd is a Linux consultancy company providing bespoke solutions that help clients get the best out of technology. Previous work has involved security control, virtualisation platforms, cloud computing and high availability networking. Its services are not limited to Internet facing technology or networking and it has previously consulted on electronics and automation.

-ENDS-

Press Release: Camberley Jelly is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

Camberley Christmas

Is it really December already!

Just a quick post to say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you over the holidays.

We’ll be taking some time off over Christmas, however we’ll continue to be monitoring our customer’s servers 24/7 as usual

Our office will be closed on the following days and response to emails maybe slower:
Mon 24th Dec 2012 – Office Closed
Tues 25th Dec 2012 – Public Holiday
Wed 26th Dec 2012 – Public Holiday
Thur 27th Dec 2012 – Office Closed
Fri 28th Dec 2012 – Office Closed
Mon 31st Dec 2012 – Office Closed
Tue 1st Jan 2013 – Public Holiday

We considered sending Christmas cards or presents this year for our customers but we’re really not sure you want another bit of paper cluttering up your desk or some chocolates to add to your snack shelf.

This year we have made a donation to two charities instead; they are:

Crisis – A national charity for single homeless people. It’s not nice being homeless at any time of year but winter has got to be the worst time.  Now imagine being homeless, in winter and alone.  Crisis does amazing work to both help people in this situation and help stop people from getting into this situation and we are very happy to help them.

Creative Commons – A non-profit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.  We are sure you have all heard of Creative Commons.  Many people use it on a daily basis but few really think about the work that goes on behind the scenes to make CC work. Knowledge is a powerful thing and any tool that allows people to share knowledge while retaining protection in this mad legal world that we live gets our vote.

We hope you all have a great winter and see you in the new year.

Christmas Shutdown & Giving is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

Project Honey Pot allows us to track the reputation of all of our customers servers.  They would do this without donations from us but it’s the least we can do to support such a great service.

To quote their website…

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

If you run servers yourself, we encourage you to signup to the project, monitor your IP addresses and donate an MX record or a link from your site.

Sponsoring Project Honey Pot is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

We were invited to join a discussion on the BBC Surrey breakfast show to talk about broadband speeds in Surrey…

Storing data online (do you really want me to say “in the cloud”?) means that we need to be connected to the Internet to access it and amazingly there is still a large part of the population that doesn’t have that sort of access.

What’s your opinion?  Do you think this is a big concern?

Radio Interview: Rural Broadband Speeds is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

If you are a 16-19 year old with good grades in and around the Camberley area that would like to work for a small Linux specialist company then please do get in touch.

Full details are on our jobs page.

We Are Hiring is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

Our new address is:
Dogsbody Technology Ltd.
377 – 399 London Road,
Camberley,
Surrey
GU15 3HL

We’ve moved into Basepoint Camberley which offers serviced offices and unlike many office providers is owned by the profit making arm of a leading UK grant charity. It’s nice to know that the rent we now pay is ultimately going to a good cause.

You may also have heard us talk about more people in the office. We have moved in with fellow tech company Orcare Ltd. a web development agency that builds sites using the Umbraco CMS. It’s a great partnership and one that has already pushed opportunities in both directions.

So if you are in the area and fancy a chat then do feel free to give us a call and pop in. Let us know in advance and we’ll even make sure the (beer) fridge is stocked with your favourite drink.

We Are Growing is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

We are often asked to make sure we source servers or products from companies that are ISO27001 (or ISO9001) certified.  While it’s good to have a stamp to prove that a company has attained a level of standard I feel there is often confusion over what this certification means.

Luckily, Alec Muffett, a friend of mine wrote a lovely piece on his blog about Google receiving ISO27001 certification for their Google Apps products…

ISO27001 is good to see stamped upon a vendor’s product and business processes – however it is emphatically not a “seal of security approval” – not at all.

The promise of 27001 certification is that a vendor has considered and documented various security risks and threats which would impact their offering – and has established a process to continue this in an ongoing fashion – and then has had the documentation of that understanding cross-checked and validated by an external agency.

In sporting metaphor: a vendor (in this case, Google) gets to design their own high-jump bar, document how tall it is and what it is made of, how they intend to jump over it; and then they jump over it and the certification agency simply attests that they have successfully performed a high-jump over a bar of their own design. The design documents and jump technique do not need to be made public.

So what would be really interesting would be if Google publishes their security requirements, their standards, their policies and risk assessments, so everyone else can see what kind of high-jump they have just performed – how high, how hard, and landing upon what kind of mat?

It would be that which would inform me of how far I would trust Google Apps with sensitive data, most especially with regard to the provisions they must make for “lawful access” to data by government actors.

Dogsbody Technology helps you cut through all the layers of sourcing new infrastructure. Talk to us to find out how.

ISO27001 Certification is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

Dogsbody Technology is a home run businesses.  We don’t have offices to tie us down and can work anywhere we wish.  While this is great for getting work done it does get a little lonely sometimes.

For the last year we have attended Berkshire Jelly, a co-working meetup in Crowthorne where people that work at home can meet up and work in a communal environment.

Unfortunately the current organisers (Hazel McLellan and Lyn French of findgoodcustomerservice.com) who originally sourced the location and set this event up have had to move onto other things so we are very proud for Dogsbody Technology to take over this brilliant event.

We are re-naming it Crowthorne Jelly but it’s the same event you all love and of course it’s FREE!

What is Jelly?

Jelly is a casual monthly co-working event, where home-workers, freelancers,small business owners and office based people who every now and then want a change can get together with their laptops once a month to meet new people, work, chat, share ideas and ….be inspired together in a social environment.

Jelly is a mixture of work, chat, helping others with business issues, passing on tips and maybe even collaborating on a new project.

Jelly is NOT networking – the aim is not to meet new clients, pitch your business or try to sell to anyone -there are plenty of excellent networking events in the south east to do that.

Jelly was started in the USA and is now increasingly popular in the UK with over 30 active co-working Jelly events already and more starting every month.

So if you’ve ever felt isolated in your home office/ work office and want to meet some other like-minded people in a different work environment, then Jelly is for you – it’s free so give it a try and come along!

What does it cost to attend?

It is FREE to attend, all you need do is bring money to buy yourself tea/coffee (there is an honesty box).  You can bring your own packed lunch- at the moment we’re investigating the option of ordering freshly made sandwiches on the day – more to follow, so watch this space.

Do I have to stay all day?

No, people turn up at any point from the starting time onwards, introduce themselves to the organiser, plug in their laptop and access the wifi.  There’s no obligation to be there from the start to the finish, so you can fit jelly in around other commitments like the school run. Obviously the more people that stay for longer the more vibrant and interactive the day will be.

Do I qualify?

As long as you have a laptop to keep you busy and you’re a business person then you qualify. The more variety of people the better!  Even if you’re still researching a business you’re more than welcome to come along for inspiration.

What do people do at Jelly?

Anything you can do quietly and independently, so anything on a laptop. Other Jellyers will appreciate you taking phone calls outside the room if your mobile rings.

Its the ideal time and place to catch up on all those little jobs you keep meaning to do but never get round to. You could do stuff like:

• Accounts
• Catch up on some reading/ writing
• Emails
• Online housekeeping
• Blogging
• Updating social media profiles
• Commenting on blogs
• Tweeting

There is Jelly in the Cloud is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

A standard part of our SysAdmin service is to setup reputation alerts for your domain names and IP addresses.  Last week one of the servers we manage for a client was added to a realtime blacklist (RBL).  Blacklists are used to identify places online that are unsafe.  This could be spammers, malware or porn. We were convinced that our customer had none of these issues so we contacted the blacklist to find that they had actually blacklisted an entire subnet which included our server.  They had noticed a large amount of spam coming from a number of machines around ours and had quite correctly wanted to blacklist them.  Our server was “collateral damage”.

Thankfully the blacklist in question removed our server very quickly but it does show that just like real life, all the hard work that goes into keeping your house safe and secure can be tarnished quite easily by having bad neighbours.

Servers have reputations too is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

Dogsbody Hosting started out being a hobby that paid for itself and slowly turned into a business.  We are really proud of our roots and how we have had to do very little marketing over the years.  100% of our sales have come via referrals and 98% of the customers we had after year one are still with us to this day.

Our old site was looking rather dated though.  Back in 2003 the biggest browsers were Internet Explorer (IE6, IE5.5 & IE4), Netscape Navigator & Opera.  The modern markup that we have today was a twinkle in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee, and Javascript was used for web apps such as games on websites instead of one of the key tools in website development that it is now.

Our original site was written using the Mambo CMS.  As this CMS forked and grew into the Joomla! project we migrated our site a number of times.  When looking to redevelop our site we looked hard at sticking with Joomla! by utilising the new code and templates available today but as the site was so old (in Internet terms) there was too much of the old Mambo and old Joomla files around that would break things.

It became obvious we had to start from first principals again which meant that we were free to look at the other CMS systems around.  After much testing we settled on WordPress, an excellent CMS that has grown from strength to strength in recent years.  In fact over 70% of the new hosting customer this year are using our space to run a WordPress site.

During the years we amassed quite a collection of FAQ entries and pages for help and support.  While these were full of useful information we didn’t think that they were being used by our customers who can pick up the phone and speak to a person any time they want.  Why would they spend time crawling through a Knowledge Base when they could get an answer that was personal to them and their setup just by calling us.  We have therefore archived our FAQ pages.  They may come back in the future, but only if you need them.

The new website has given us a great opportunity to tidy up and publicise some of the great products we now have.  We have created a number of hosting packages for standard setups as well as launching a Secondary DNS service for companies that run their own servers but need independent redundancy.

We hope you enjoy our site and here’s looking forward to seeing it grow more in the future.

Facelift for Dogsbody Hosting is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

SaaS – Software as a Service

Chances are you have been using SaaS for ages and not even known about it. Webmail anyone? SaaS allows you to use a program or software as a free (Gmail) or paid for (Salesforce.com) subscription service. Customers rely on the vendor to maintain and update the product for them saving the time and energy required to setup and run these services themselves in house. Google is really running with this concept from calendaring, word processing and even mapping being possible from any web browser. Having software run externally also allows for very easy roaming as any user can access their data from anywhere in the world.

PaaS – Platform as a Service

The PaaS layer offers savings for both the customer and the developer but at the cost of functionality and control. Examples of PaaS are Google’s App Engine and the Force.com platform.  The PaaS supplier provides a standard programming environment, usually with API’s that allow for easily utilising certain off the shelf tools such as redundant storage and databases.  Developers can quickly create tools and products that can be sold with all the advantages of SaaS services without having to get their hands dirty building fully secure and redundant systems from scratch.

IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service

Purists say that IaaS is the only one that deserves to be called Cloud Computing. For years companies have purchased or rented servers in data centres to run their applications. While it was great to have your own box it was up to you to make it robust and redundant enough to cope with everything the Internet throws at you. IaaS providers such as Rackspace and ElasticHosts virtualise their data centres and sell virtual servers with the same power as the physical server you had but with the added benefit of redundancy and a large cost saving. Because virtual machines can be turned on and off at will and with most providers billing by the hour or minute it is very easy to cope with peaks in demand. Instead of using one server to process some data over 20 hours you can use 20 servers and have your answer in one hour.

There are always exceptions

Of course no labelling would be complete without some blurring of the lines. Amazon have successfully managed to confuse things with their very popular AWS products. While their S3 service is a PaaS product, their EC2 service is sold and commonly referred to as a IaaS product.  However there are a number of proprietary tools and calls that you must use which many argue makes it a PaaS product too.

Whatever your views (and there are many), Dogsbody Technology can help you understand what is right for you and your business.  If you have any questions regarding this post or suggestions for articles on more subjects then please do comment below or drop us a line.

What’s in a name? is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

When creating adverts online it’s always a good idea to run more than one advert at once, you can then run them for a bit and keep modifying the one that’s doing the worse.  After a while you end up with some adverts that are pretty well tuned for the people you want to attract.  We didn’t bother modifying any ads this time as it was a short ad run but we did create a number of different ads with slightly different wording.

(Quick side note: When running ads it’s always a good idea to link them to your websites analytics.  Not just to separate out the traffic to your site but to link that traffic to actual contacts/sales etc.  Surely it’s better to get 100 clicks to your site where 10 become customers than get 10000 clicks and 1 customer.  Especially when you are paying by the click!)

To keep things easy we set a maximum spend of $10 per day and ran all of the ads below for 10 days…

Advert	Clicks	Impressions	CTR
Cloud Computing Let us show you how to get the most from powerful Amazon AWS services.	51	162168	0.031%
Electronics & Automation Integrate your website with the real world. The ideas are endless.	1	10451	0.010%
VMware We can help you adopt a Virtualisation solution that is right for you.	1	10552	0.009%
Amazon AWS Let us show you how to get the most from powerful Cloud Computing services.	3	40700	0.007%
SysAdmin Let us worry about the system administration of your server.	0	12724	0.000%
Virtualisation We can help you adopt a VMware solution that is right for you.	0	10403	0.000%

As you can see, the Cloud Computing and Amazon AWS ads are identical with the words swapped.  The same is true for the VMware and Virtualisation adverts.

What does all this mean?

The Impression Count is the number of times that LinkedIn users have been show each advert.  LinkedIn decide when to show your advert and while you can pay more money to “bid” to a higher position it is linked to the text in the page that LinkedIn is showing to the user.  It is therefore safe to say that LinkedIn treat the title of your ad as more important that the text (Ads with the same overall text had very different impression counts).

CTR stands for Click Through Rate, how many and what percentage of the people that saw the ad actually clicked on it.  As you can see the numbers are low but at $2 per click the money goes down fast.

Results

Based on all the above we can make the following statements about the popularity of certain buzzwords:

• A lot more people are talking about Cloud Computing than Virtualisation. This was quite surprising to us.  While Cloud Computing is the buzzword du jour Virtualisation is the pin that runs it and for the swing to be so unbalanced is slightly unnerving.

• “Cloud Computing” is bigger than “Amazon AWS”. this makes sense, it’s a subset.  AWS is just one vendor of cloud computing services.

• “VMware” is more popular than “Virtualisation”. no, wait, what!?  A very interesting find.  I don’t think anyone would argue that VMware is one of the biggest players in the Virtualisation market but for it to be bigger is interesting.

• Advertising on LinkedIn is expensive! $100 for 56 clicks to our website.  Lets just say we are glad it was a free trial and we don’t need to heavily advertise

I realise the sample numbers on this were low.  We would love to hear if you have any other statistics to back this up or blow us out the water.  Feel free to comment below.

Buzzword Bingo is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

What is a mobile device?

You may think this is a strange question but statistics vary hugely depending on the demographic of visitors to your site.  From a truly worldwide perspective Nokia still has a very large market share.  Continents such as Africa absorb most of their web browsing in a mobile form where Nokia has a monopoly and few people have desktop computers.

It’s a very good idea to look at your website statistics to find out the type of visitors that your site is getting.  Technology sites such as this one are mainly visited with newer smartphones which can deal with more complex webpages and which makes things a lot easier.

Finally, lets not forget the new range of mobile devices, the tablets!  Is an iPad a mobile device?  Either way, if you are designing for mobile, you should design for tablets too.

Ways to go mobile

There are many ways to go mobile.  If you have the budget you can design a customised site although most sites are built via a CMS such as WordPress or Joomla.  For WordPress we have found that the WPtouch plugin provides a very nice mobile version of your site if most of your visitors are using newer smartphones and the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin provides a mobile version of your site that works with the most variety of phones.  There are similar plugins for Joomla and other CMS tools which we can help you with if you have any questions.

Dogsbody Hosting also provides a mobile webpage service that allows you to create a mobile website easily without any coding experience needed.  Create a quick site to publish your companies opening hours or offer discount vouchers to people reading your posters in the street.  The possibilities are endless.

If you have made a mobile site using the tools we have told you about here then please let us know in the comments.

Mobile websites is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

What’s in a word

I probably use the word “cloud” too much, I realise it’s an industry buzzword for something that has been around for ages but it works.  Call it Outsourcing, Virtulisation, SaaS or Utility computing, they are all variations of Internet computing by machines that you do not directly own and have just licensed for the time that you need.

The ring of steel

For years security experts have been saying that companies should stop using the idea of a ring of steel around their internal network. The concept that you are either connected to the internal (trusted) network or the external (untrusted) network is very outdated and just doesn’t work with today’s computing use but companies still insist on using it.

While people tried to adopt this topology to greater granularity with “Chinese firewalls” (lets separate accounts from development) people will continue to have to move data around between areas of the business to do their work and it quickly becomes an IT vs Business battle.

With more companies needing to get company data outside the building either to access it from a smartphone or share the data with another company the whole procedure falls down altogether.

Smaller rings

One solution is to adapt the model to it’s ultimate conclusion.  A ring of steel for each machine/job/task.  Until now this has been an impossible task, from a practice standpoint but now that companies are moving to cloud and virtual environments resources can be configured in any way needed.  No longer are you required to physically move cables in the patch room to change a networks topology.  Instead of one server with one operating system running web and email and any number of other tasks you can have that same server with many operating systems all locked down to do their one job well.  Most servers in the cloud and virtual environment come with their own firewall and authentication mechanism that can be easily managed on mass.  How many hardware server rooms can say that?

Outside is inside

Given this new model there is no need to have a “corporate firewall” on the edge of your network at all.  Why not let the internet in?  This is in fact what we do at Dogsbody Technology. Every machine on the network is public and even internal switching is treated as public.  If we want to move a private file from one machine to another it needs to be done in a secure/encrypted way.  While that sounds like a lot of work it really isn’t.  You save on a lot of infrastructure from not having to worry about a locked down network and while it does take a while to setup safe transfer methods, once you are set up there is no difference between transferring a private file to the computer next to you or a computer the other side of the world.

Not the end of the story

Of course, like all security, this is not the end of the story and will not fix all your issues.  Monitoring and company policy are still required to stop, find and block exceptions but we’ll discuss that in a separate blog post.

If you have any questions or comments reading this post them please do leave a comment below or contact Dogsbody Technology for more information.

Security and The Cloud is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

It seems that around 20 of our Twitter followers have disappeared! While it seems like you are following us, you may not see our tweets and you do not show up in our list of followers.  If this is you then please just go to our twitter page unfollow and follow us again.

Ironically these are the same followers who all got crunchies for being the first to sign up.  Perhaps Twitter doesn’t like you “buying” followers?  We have tried to raise numerous support tickets with Twitter but they aren’t listening it seems, hence this post.

Thank you again to all our followers, we love you all

All a Twitter is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

When first creating a website it’s easy to instantly think that you need a .com web address or that you are just in the UK so can go with a cheaper .uk address.  There is nothing wrong with that but with .com being the busiest of all the top level domains (TLDs) and .uk now being the 2nd largest country code top-level domain (ccTLD) it’s quite hard to get the name you want.

Two is better than one

It’s always a good idea to own more than one domain.  You may only need one domain to run your site but you have to ask yourself how you or your company would feel if you owned the .com address and then someone else went and bought the .co.uk?  Remember that they can use the domain for whatever they like which may be something you don’t want associated with your name and brand.

Having multiple domains can act as a backup too, if you can receive email on more than one address then should something happen it can allow you to carry on running, at least while things are sorted out.  And before you ask what can happen to domain names that you own… they can be stolen/hijacked, taken offline by authorities or even forget to be renewed… although we would never do that!

Another advantage to owning several domains, they can be utilised for different areas of your business.  .tv domains are a great example of this allowing it to point to video content.  Instead of hiding tutorials or a video blog deep on your website or on YouTube why not point your customers straight there.

Speciality domains

Speciality domains are domain extensions with a specific meaning that is well known to Internet users.  These domain extensions provide a clue to visitors that tells them the type of content to expect or what form that content will take.

.me – Not many think about Montenegro when they see a .me domain.  The use is obvious, .me means it’s about me.  Visitors to the site will expect content about the person who owns the domain.  Recommended for blogs, a CV or resume, photo sharing, anything personal.

.tv – “If you have a play button on your website you should have a .tv”.  Visitors to a .tv site know what to expect, video content.  Recommended for tutorials, family video sharing, screencasts, live streams & YouTube channels.

.mobi – Specifically designed to host mobile content.  Most CMS driven sites such as WordPress and Joomla can seamlessly offer a mobile formatted page and it’s a good way to advertise this to mobile visitors.

.co – A great alternative to the .com TLD.  Also has additional meanings such as co-op.

Other domains

You don’t always need a speciality domain, there are the standard ones too.

.com – The original and still has its place.  Recognized globally as the biggest.

.net – You can’t get more tech than a .net domain. Perfect for Internet companies or groups that work in the online world.  Many companies also have a .net version of their domain which is used by the IT group to name and manage machines used by the company, this separates the IT “tinkering” from the marketing “sales”.

.org – Always intended to be used for personal sites .org has now lost that moniker and is deemed by some as just for non-profits.  Some companies like to have a commercial presence on .com and their organisational details on .org.

.info – Of the seven new TLDs introduced in 2000 .info has become the most successful.  “Info” is a recognized term in over 30 languages which makes this TLD a truly global domain.

.biz – A popular alternative for companies whose business name is already taken as a .com.

.eu – For a UK company branching out from our small island it can get expensive to start registering and promoting domains in every country.  The .eu allows for a pan European look.

.uk – Not to be belittled.  You may be a sports club or local group, even if you do leave the UK you still want to promote yourself as a UK team or company.  What could be better than having it in your name.

Whatever you choose you can see that there are plenty of options.  Perhaps Dogsbody Technology or Dogsbody Hosting can help you with your decision.

Let us know what you think too.  There are many many more TLD and ccTLDs, which ones do you like?

It doesn’t always have to be .com is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.

It’s going to be an interesting ride as the future of Dogsbody Technology comes into focus and you will be able to read all about it here.

This site can turn into whatever you would like to see. Perhaps a commentary on the latest tech/security news, details of how we are setting up and growing the business or a way of notifying you about issues and outages with services you may be using.  Comment below and we will see what we can do

If you are a Twitter user then please do follow us @dogsbodytech or do subscribe to this sites’s RSS feed.

Your CEO, CTO, OMG and LOL, Dan

In The Beginning is a post from: Dogsbody Technology Ltd.