Drum roll please . . . introducing, new and improved:

i-Lite with double the amount of web space now 100Mb and 5 times the monthly traffic now 10Gb, 20 mailboxes and like all our plans it has Email Autoresponders UNLIMITED Email Aliases and Detailed Website Statistics. It is clear to see why our most affordable package is our most popular.

i-Biz has to be our best value product for small business. With a higher capability than i-Lite it features MySQL Database and Shared SSL Certificate. It now comes with 3 times the amount of web space and monthly traffic, up to 300Mb and 15Gb respectively.

Often overlooked, but brilliant if you have a busy website and don’t want to restrict your content and capabilities are our:

i-Corp with 500Mb of web space and 20Gb of monthly traffic
i-Prem with 1Gb web space and 40Gb of monthly traffic
i-Gig with 2Gb of web space and 60Gb of monthly traffic.

The advantage of upgrading your plan is avoiding running out of web space or exceeding your current traffic quota. If this happens, your site could incur additional charges or be temporarily disabled . . . never a good thing, especially if the reason your quota was exceeded was due to a lot of visitors! And with over 79% of Australians with broadband, more people are trying to access your website faster than ever before, meaning your site could potentially be reaching its traffic quota and you may not even know it.

• The new server is almost ready which means more Web Space and Faster Sites for everyone, plus the addition of an Application Firewall, details below
• This month we would also like to introduce our new VPS solution, details below
• And of course there is the Server Co-Location and the Corporate Spam Filtering as discussed in January’s newsletter.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting

A VPS is a powerful system that may be divided into independent sections; each section operating as a small dedicated server. Each VPS comes with your choice of operating system, has its own dedicated section of processing power, hard drive space, memory and can be used for whatever purposes you need it for. To find out more go to www.ingenuity.net.au/virtual-private-hosting.php or call us on 1300 66 46 43.

Application Firewall

The Application Firewall on our new servers will go towards making a more secure environment; mitigating such problems as Credit Card Fraud, spam creation and distribution, and tracking of common errors.

Wishing you all the best for the holidays and a safe and happy new year!

The Ingenuity Team

Don’t forget you can keep up with all the news at Ingenuity by following us on:

Facebook: facebook.com/IngenuityHosting
Twitter: twitter.com/IngenuityHost

As was introduced in December’s Newsletter we will be upgrading our servers to offer PHP 5.3 by default. PHP 5.3 is more robust, has increased security and provides improved functionality.

For you this means that if your site is developed in PHP4 and older versions of PHP5 they may encounter some functioning problems. We recommend you contact your web developer or us here at Ingenuity on 1300 66 46 43 and we can refer you to someone who can help.

Some more exciting developments here at Ingenuity have been the addition of some new products and services on offer to our clients:

Server Co-Location

If your company has a dedicated server to handle your IT related tasks such as hosting websites and managing email you may have encountered some common problems. Housing a server at your business premises can be slow, impact on the reliability due to a lack of constantly monitored environmental controls and redundancy in case of power failures, not to mention housing a server yourself can become quite costly due to internet connection bandwidth quotas. If you would like to improve the efficiency of your server and avoid such issues, Ingenuity provides different server co-location plans.

To take advantage of this service go to www.ingenuity.net.au/server-co-location.php or call us on 1300 66 46 43.

Corporate Spam Filtering

Spam is a problem that most of us will experience at some point by doing no other wrong other than simply having an email address. Ingenuity is now offering Corporate Spam Filtering to help your business tackle this all too common problem. As the name suggests, this isn’t the basic type of spam filtering that can easily be exploited by professional spammers – this is a corporate solution with proven results to considerably reduce the amount of junk emails received.

If you are interested in this product please follow this link for more information www.ingenuity.net.au/corporate-spam-filtering.php or call us on 1300 66 46 43.

Don’t forget you can also follow us via Facebook and Twitter.

We would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and to advise you of our trading hours over the holiday period and some upgrades we will be making in the new year.

Christmas Trading Hours

We will be closed over the Christmas period from 12pm Christmas Eve and will re-open 9am Monday the 4th of January. Some of our staff will still be on holidays in the week leading up to Christmas and the first week after we re-open, so please be patient if it takes a little long for us to respond to your enquiries.

For absolute emergencies, if you need to get in contact with us during the times we’re officially closed, you can contact us on 1300 664 643 and you will be transferred to our after-hours service and we will take your call or get back to you. Please note that we charge a fee of $220 per hour for this service.

System Upgrades

Here at Ingenuity we pride ourselves on being at the forefront of the industry, constantly striving to improve our service to our clients and the products that we offer to them. In line with this philosophy we are pleased to announce the roll-out of upgrades across our entire server system. We will be upgrading our servers to offer PHP 5.3 by default which is more robust, has increased security and provides improved functionality.

While we have always supported PHP5 and PHP4, for our clients whom have sites developed in PHP4 and perhaps old versions of PHP5, this means that your site may encounter some functioning problems. We believe that it is important to move ahead and make upgrades whenever possible and we would invite you to also take this opportunity to upgrade your own websites. To bring your website up-to-date we recommend you contact your web developer or us here at Ingenuity on 1300 66 46 43 and we can refer you to someone who can help.

Some more exciting developments here at Ingenuity have been the addition of some new products and services on offer to our clients which you can find out about in next month’s Newsletter.

Wishing you all the best for the holidays and a safe and happy new year!

The Ingenuity Team

P.S. If you would like to keep up with all the news at Ingenuity you can follow us on:

Facebook: facebook.com/IngenuityHosting
Twitter: twitter.com/IngenuityHost
Or have a look at our blog: www.ingenuity.net.au/blog

We’ve seen dozens of different online shopping carts come and go, we’ve watched the evolution of content management systems eg. Mambo to Joomla. Not to mention clients that have insisted on having content managed sites (and paid good money for them too) but have never updated a single page.

There have been over 1 Million Australian domain names registered and thankfully the number of domain name scams has dropped in 2007, although there were still a few places that were unfortunately tricked into spending a couple of hundred dollars purchasing new domain names when they actually thought they were simply renewing their existing names.

We’ve personally experienced the growth of blogging in Australia and attended the first ever Australian Blogging Conference.

Our client-base which started from virtually nothing has been growing at an exponential rate and this year has been busier than ever. To accommodate this growth, we’ve been progressively upgrading all of our servers and equipment and even though there were (as there will always be) a few small hiccups throughout the year, we’ve still managed to keep our Uptime at 99.99%.

So, what’s in store for the new year?

We’re planning on finalising the minor renovations to our office that we started about a month ago, hiring some additional staff and expanding our reseller offering.

2008 will be a very exciting year for Ingenuity and all our new and existing clients. We will continue to expand and improve our products and services whilst always providing the utmost highest level of customer service possible.

Happy New Year!

Our Windows web server experienced RAID issues which we spent a number of hours trying to fix. After little positive progress, instead of inconveniencing our clients any further we proceeded to purchase a new Windows server.

Normally server configuration, testing and installation in the data centre can take days and even longer when data from a previous system has to be migrated across to it. We have accomplished this task within 24 hours.

I’m sure there will still be a few minor issues that need addressing (things like customer scripts that were installed as a once-off solution for someone or other non-standard software that will need re-installing) but overall, everything is running again.

This outage did not affect any clients on either of our Unix servers nor would it have affected any email services.

To all Ingenuity clients – please accept our most sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience during the outage.

To give you a little background, my name is Peter Newsome and I run Ingenuity Hosting. We’re a web hosting firm situated in Brisbane, Queensland Australia and have been providing local, national and international businesses with web hosting services since 2003.

I currently contribute to three other blogs – two are corporate blogs associated with other businesses I’m involved with and one is a personal blog. I have profiles with various other Social Media websites and contribute to various forums, comment on other industry-related blogs and the list goes on… which made me wonder why I never setup a blog for Ingenuity.

So instead of wondering about it, I decided to create the blog which you’re now reading.

The purpose of the Ingenuity Hosting Blog is to:

1. Advise our existing clients of any Ingenuity updates
2. Provide advice, guidance and comments on the Australian web hosting industry and related services (such as domain names, websites, emails, online shopping carts, databases, etc. etc.)
3. Report on local web-related news items
4. And to give you a more personalised connection to Ingenuity allowing you to see that once you get past the geeky persona that most IT people have – we’re all still human

I hope you enjoy the blog and as with all of our services, we encourage you to be involved through feedback and comments.