Servers have reputations too
12 Dec 2010
Many have compared the Internet to the wild west. While there may well be cowboys it is certainly true that your server is viewed by the company that it keeps. It seems that people spend a lot of time looking after their own online reputation and very little looking after the reputation of their infrastructure.
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.
Things to remember when setting up infrastructure:
- Your domain name has a reputation as well as your IP address. You should monitor both.
- A good free place to monitor IP addresses is Project Honey Pot.
- A good free place to monitor web domain issues (http only) are Google Webmaster Tools.
- If you are running a mailserver you should monitor realtime blocklists too.
- The ISP that hosts your equipment is responsible for the neighbours you keep.
- Server reputation can also include response time. Ensuring a low latency connection is essential.
Reputation monitoring is an important part of our SysAdmin service. We monitor your equipment so you don’t have to.
Facelift for Dogsbody Hosting
05 Nov 2010
It’s been over 7 years since we launched Dogsbody Hosting to the masses. Things have changed a lot in that time so we’re happy to have now completed a facelift for the site and are re-launching our new site today.
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.
What’s in a name?
04 Oct 2010
Cloud computing is often regarded as a horrible buzzword that is thrown around at every opportunity. This may be true but it may also be better and easier than some of the alternatives. In this article we look at the differences between the three main types of cloud computing and why there is so much confusion.
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.
Buzzword Bingo
03 Sep 2010
As happens when you are a company registered on social media sites we occasionally get sent invites to advertise on their networks. We’ve always been proud to receive most of our business via referrals and word of mouth but when LinkedIn offers you $100 of free advertising it seems silly to say no. The results turned out to be an interesting window into the words and phrases that are popular at the moment.
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.
Mobile websites
27 Aug 2010
Just as half the internet is still trying to get online it seems that the other half has decided that computers are old and mobile is the future. As always, it’s a compromise. Most companies do still need a “base” website but mobile is definitely growing and by having a dedicated mobile presence you can keep customers from forgetting about you when they aren’t tied to a computer.
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.
Security and The Cloud
19 Jul 2010
Don’t worry this isn’t going to be another post on how security is holding up cloud adoption or how the cloud is destroying security. There is already too much negativity regarding the reporting of security news (some would say all news). I do however want to discuss how security is changing due to the cloud and cloud technologies. In my opinion cloud computing is actually good for security.
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.
All a Twitter
29 Jun 2010
What is it they say about the best laid plans…
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
It doesn’t always have to be .com
18 May 2010
In some ways the internet is very crowded (100 million active websites) and in other ways very quiet (most web traffic is caused by few sites) but it’s important to remember that the internet is pretty much limitless and there is more than one way to claim your acre of land online.
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?
In The Beginning
27 Apr 2010
…and with this post I now declare this website open.
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
