AUSTRALIAN WEB HOSTING REVOLUTION.

A simple matter of using plain English, demystifying web hosting and answering the questions that people have about web hosting while continuing to provide the service we were already providing that was so far above the industry standard.
We started the year with a complete overhaul of the website, which continues to be a work in progress as we attempt to revolutionise Australian web hosting, with continuous updates and information added to our knowledge base.

Of course this isn’t enough, and we continue to try and find new ways to communicate our message to the world; Ingenuity Hosting is the mate who fixes your email, finds you a web developer, puts you in touch with someone to fix your PC and if you have a business; Ingenuity Hosting is Your Online Tech Department.

Help us get our message out there and follow this link  to our Facebook page and hit that like button and you will go in the draw to win 2 tickets valued at $270 to FBall – Riverfire Cocktail Ball to be held on the banks of the Brisbane River at Riverlife Function Centre, Kangaroo Point on Saturday 3 September. For all the details go to www.fball.com.au.

In the last post we talked about our re-branding and the new-look logo and website. In the next few posts we’ll tell you all about some of our upgrades to existing services like our webmail interface as well as our new tools to help you manage existing services like emails, databases and domain names.

It’s now the new financial year and we have a bunch of new web hosting products and services to share with everyone.

Let’s start with our new Hosting Exchange email services:

If you’ve worked in any corporate environment your emails were most likely setup on a Microsoft Exchange Server. It’s the most common setup for large organisations, and provides some fantastic features such as shared calendars, public folders, contact lists, tasks and full, real-time synchronisation with portable devices. But for something like this, you normally require a dedicated server to run the Exchange software and an IT Department to maintain and administer the service for you.

For slightly smaller organisation that didn’t have the budget for a server, software licensing and a team of geeks to look after it all, an email system like this just wasn’t a possibility… until NOW with Ingenuity’s new Hosted Exchange Email Service!

With our Hosted Exchange offering, you gain all the benefits of a corporate email service such as the shared calendars, contacts lists, tasks, public folders and all the other stuff mentioned above but most importantly full synchronisation with of all emails – including sent items, on your portable devices like your iPhone, iPad, Blackberry or Android smartphones.

What’s even better is that all your emails are stored in ‘the cloud’ so you can access them from anywhere and know they are safe and backed-up if anything ever happens to your computer.

More specific information about our Hosted Exchange Services here.

On the topic of Cloud services and back-up’s – don’t forget we do that too. Click here for more info about our:  Cloud Servers and Cloud Hosting Solutions, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Servers and Server Colocation as well as Offsite Back-ups.

The other brand new service that we’ve just launched is our iMicro plan – a micro-site hosting solution!

One of the most common online marketing strategies used by the big brands are micro-sites. Have you ever been to a large corporate site that sells a wide range of products or services and when you’ve clicked on one of them, it’s taken you to a smaller site specifically designed to promote that service, product range, make or model?

These smaller sites appeal to both users and search engines because they condense all the relevant info into a few pages so you don’t have to wade through a huge, confusing corporate website with thousands of different products just to find the info you need.

We’ve also found that more people are blogging than ever before (some even taking advantage of our $50 WordPress Install offer mentioned on our homepage) and a lot of our clients are now setting-up small corporate blogs to associate with their main company website.

So to accommodate the uptake of these small niche marketing sites and low-traffic corporate blogs, we’ve launched our iMicro hosting plan.

With this package you’ll get 20Mb of webspace and 5Gb monthly website traffic all for just $9.95 per month.

This package is available to anyone with a main website setup on iBiz plan (or above). So if you’ve been thinking of adding a blog or want to promote a product to attract the attention of the search engines but didn’t want to pay for a full hosting account – then this is the plan might just be what you’re looking for.

If you’d like more details on our iMicro hosting or are interested in setting-up a Hosted Exchange email service – give us a call on 1300 664 643 or email sales@ingenuity.net.au

For all our latest updates, don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

It all started nearly a year ago when we decided it was time for a new website. Our old site was looking a bit dated (and it was starting to get embarrassing given that we’re a web-based company) and just really wasn’t up-to-scratch anymore. Just like the builder whose house is in desperate need of repair or the plumber with leaky taps, we had neglected our own home while trying to fix everyone else’s.

So our ninja’s aimed their shurikens at our evil nemesis – Procrastination – and BAM, the re-branding process began.

The first step was a new logo

Even though I quite liked our old logo there were a few minor issues with it and it was time for a change. A logo should be unique, recognisable and clearly represent your company. At the same time it needs to be simple and versatile so it can be used on stationery, shirts, cars and anything else we feel like branding.

Our old logo was a stylised lightbulb which was supposed to suggest ‘bright ideas’ – something often associated with the word ‘ingenuity’. Only problem was, people often didn’t even realise the image was a lightbulb. Further to that, the layout and gradients made it difficult to put on anything other than our website and business cards.

As a direct result of this personal experience, mixed with a bit of common sense, we knew the attributes of a good logo and the things we wanted to avoid when our new logo was designed… but we had no real clue of what our logo should look like. This made the design process quite tricky until a friend suggested we try 99designs.com.

At 99designs, you launch a design contest for your specific design project. You nominate a monetary prize along with a brief of what you want (or don’t want) and the competition begins. Within 7 days you have hundreds of design entries to choose from. There are few things that make this site awesome.

• You are presented with creative ideas from hundreds of different people. Everyone has their own style and skillset which means you get a wide variety to choose from.
• You can provide feedback while the competition is running which can really help turn a good design into a great one.
• It’s quick – the contest only takes 7 days from start-to-finish. So if you’re in a rush or have a specific deadline, you know you’ll have the finished product within a week.
• It’s cost effective and the price is fixed right at the start, so there’s no squabbling, miscommunication, disagreements or any hidden fees or charges. Further-more, if you decide none of the designs are what you wanted, you’re not obligated to choose a winner and you get your money back.

So we launched a contest and within a week we had a whole selection of very cool and very unique designs. There were so many great entries, we genuinely couldn’t decide, so posted some of the better designs on our Facebook page and asked our fans for their feedback. As a side-note, if you missed-out on this because you weren’t a fan, you can always become one now

When the feedback was reviewed and all votes counted, the winning entry was chosen and is what you see in the top left corner of our site. Internally we’ve affectionately dubbed the symbol as “The Man Button”. Some have said it looks a bit like a computer chip, many said hi-tech, others said Aztec and one even said it could be construed as a phallic symbol. We see it as a symbol of our companies invigorated image and bright shiny future.

Then came the website

From years wasted spent surfing the net, plus our background in SEO, we knew the traits of a highly effective website. We also knew the message we wanted to communicate – that we’re a fun, yet professional team of geeks that genuinely care. But we weren’t 100% certain how we were going to bring all this together through code, text and imagery.

To gain some much-needed inspiration, we spent a few days looking at visually appealing and informative websites. We began working on a structure that suited our industry and something users were familiar with from othe providers without taking them too far from what they have come to expect from Ingenuity Hosting.

The result of two weeks solid work is now our new website. We did all the design, development, content creation and artwork in-house fueled by frequent coffee breaks and those ever faithful Krispy Kremes, using strong teamwork to keep the day to day of the business running without a hitch.

Given our core business is hosting services from Email to Cloud and everything in-between, the decision to challenge ourselves with the new website was a brave one.  It sure was fun, and as hosting providers, the development of our own site has given us a true insight into the world of a web developer and graphic designer and a real appreciation of what is important to them.

As we all know websites are organic, constantly evolving beasts. With the help of some of our strategic partners we are on a mission to make the website even better; with more information, clearer navigation and better graphics. So stay tuned and tell us what you think!

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.