Category Archives: General

Friday 25th June 2010
JaguarPC
P.O. Box 1108
Fulshear, TX 77441
http://www.jaguarpc.com
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Hello,
Howdy loyal clients! It’s been a long time since I’ve sent a newsletter out. A trend I’m breaking right now with this first in a long series of ongoing updates. First let me say thank you to everyone who has helped us make our 11th year in business an exciting one. Summer is here and its time to turn up the heat. Ok enough silliness, lets get on with the updates.

Many of you may have noticed already there’s been some major pushed in our software, training, and personnel aimed at providing an improved customer experience in service and support. We are pleased to announce Jim Sowell, long time JaguarPC manager and former CSM has been promoted to Director of Support. His role is to manage the support services, quality, and senior level management over other support manager roles. In short if you ever have a problem don’t be afraid to contact him: jim@jaguarpc.com and in our forums JPC-Jim .

We have also made a great deal of advances to our client dashboard and while you won’t notice them all, there are several hundred, here are some of the more notable:

• - Clients can reply to ticket updates and notification via emails


• - New ticket escalation processes


• - Clients can create multiple users (up to 5) with access controls.


• - New ticket rating and feedback system


• - New ticket search features


• - Integrated rewards points and ordering


• - Many order form improvements including order tracking


• - Clients can download invoices in PDF format


• - Pay invoices using other sources than card on file


• - Rewards points and affiliate stats improvements


• - New private messaging system


• - Important emails saved in Alerts


• - Ability to add notes to accounts, logins, directions, etc


• - Monitoring improvements include uptime reports and logs


• - Ability for dedicated and VPS clients to add monitoring with instructions, Free to all


• - New Site of the month service open


• - Manage private name servers


• - Third tier brand-able end user support system integrated. End user support not available yet.


• - Automating all orders, API improvements


• - Many others including some bug fixes

Ok there’s a lot more to go over but I don’t want this to turn into a book. Half of the readers have probably already stopped reading, yea I’m looking at you . J/K

Two important notes before I go. We have updated our TOS in a major way, the AUP and SLA have been combined into the TOS. http://www.jaguarpc.com/about/policy-tos.php

Over the years ICANN and Verisign have increased the costs of domain names several times. We have absorbed these costs for the last 10years and not passed the costs on to our clients. Unfortunately the latest increase announced all over the web will need to be passed on. This price increase affects TLD’s such as .com, .net, .org, .us, .info, .biz and .name . The prices for these domain names will change from $9.95/year to $12.95/year effective immediately.

Please join us in our community forums!
http://www.jaguarpc.com/forums/

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Did you know?
JaguarPC pays out thousands of dollars worth of referral credits each month and tens of thousands of extra rewards points. Start referring friends, family, co-workers, and your own site visitors by starting your own referral campaign right inside the client dashboard.
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Login to the client dashboard for account updates, pay invoices, contact support, manage your account, or to contact us :

https://secure.jaguarpc.com/clients/
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Regards,
Greg L. – CEO
JaguarPC
http://www.jaguarpc.com

Several years ago I started having problems sending email to my customers.  The only time I send email is to update a customer on the status of their order, or to ask a question about their order.

I don’t send spam, but on the few occasions that I sent email to customers about their order, some of the customers did not receive the email.

I’m talking about a time period a few years ago, but I know that some of the problems I experienced are relevant today.

ComCast rejected the email as Spam.  At least ComCast  sent a failed notice,  and thanks to ComCast I realized there was a problem.

AOL just let the email go into a black hole without a response to the sender to let you know there was a problem.

Gmail, and MSN sent the mail to a spam folder. If the recipient was not checking the spam folder they did not get the email.

Yahoo was unpredictable.  Sometimes the mail would go to a spam folder, and sometimes it just disapeared.

I was reminded about these problems due to this post by rachidny who is a Jag Customer.  rachidny was having problems getting his email through to the intended recipient in the same way I was having problems a few years ago. In my experience adding a SPF record will take care of problems with many ISPs like ComCast, and AOL.

With MSN/HotMail you need to submit your SPF record to MSN at  https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=senderid&ct=eformts

The SPF record will satisfy most ISPs, however in my experience it will not satisfy Yahoo.  Yahoo wants a domain key.  Thats really strange because at least  75% of the spam I recieive has a domain key.

If you need to get email through to all the recipients you have to play the game.

If you have CP you can set up SPF and Domain Keys under email authentication.

If you are using Plesk Support can set this up for you.

On February 5th, 2010 Facebook announced a new site design. Since then the feedback has been overwhelmingly negative. The biggest complaint is the loss of the ability to filter updates and posts from your favorite Facebook applications.

Facebook states:

We’re making it easier for you to find and interact with applications and discover new ones, with the new Applications and Games dashboards, accessible via the “Applications” and “Games” links on the home page. The dashboards will surface the applications you’ve interacted with most recently as well as your most recent application activity and your friends’ activity.

Then later in the post they clarify:

We’re also working on a more granular set of controls for specific applications, so that you can turn off activity for certain applications while leaving it on for others. We’ll have more information to share on this soon.

It’s not clear if the latter means they are working on more controls for filtering or for privacy.

I, for one, used the application filters daily and missed them as soon as they were gone. However, I did find a work around. It’s not the best solution but it works for now.

UPDATE: As of March 20th, the instructions below DO still work but you have to scroll down past several new posts in your feed before your filter starts displaying your application posts correctly.

If you obtain the application ID for the application you want to set a filter for (actually it will be a bookmark in your browser) you can still see posts only related to the application you’re interested in.

For example, to view only FarmVille posts, you can do so by clicking on this link: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?filter=app_102452128776

You can then bookmark this in your browser.

The format for the bookmark is: “http://www.facebook.com/home.php?filter=app_APPICATION-ID-NUMBER”

To obtain the application ID number, I found it by searching for the application in Facebook. Once it appears in the search results, click on the application and it should have a long URL containing the application ID in the address bar of your browser.

For FarmVille the URL was: http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=farmville&init=quick#!/apps/application.php?id=102452128776&ref=search&sid=572162762.2672672765..1 and the application ID is listed after “application.php?id=” and before the “&”. So the ID is: 102452128776

Hopefully Facebook comes up with a fix for this soon, but for now, enjoy this work around. You’re also welcome to visit us on Facebook!

It’s critical that businesses complement their servers with an investment in a high-quality backup and storage solution.

By Greg Landis

Businesses of all sizes are increasing their use of the Internet on a daily basis. They are using the Internet to communicate, publish content and store and process data with the help of web-based applications. With all of this content and data being created and stored on servers, there is a corresponding need to ensure its safety. Hard drives can fail, servers can be hacked, human error can cause data to be deleted, and the data centers that house these servers could catch fire or become victim to natural disasters or even terrorist attacks. All of these are plausible scenarios that can threaten the integrity of the data stored on a server.

Because of these realities, it is absolutely critical that businesses complement their servers with an investment in a high-quality backup and storage solution. This will guarantee that mission-critical data and content is backed up regularly and protected against technical failure, human error or disaster. All types of organizations need this type of insurance. A single hard drive failure can result in the permanent loss of important content, contact information, sales records and financial data. Such a disaster would be a death sentence for any organization conducting business on the Internet. There are other good reasons to have a backup plan. With the right protection in place, customers can be free to experiment and push their servers to do more without having to worry about the negative ramifications. It also brings peace of mind that contributes positively to an organization’s operations.

Buy data protection from a hosting company

It makes a great deal of sense to buy storage and backup solutions from a hosting company. They already host the customer’s server and data protection is a logical extension to web hosting that can be integrated and run off the same network. Customers also benefit from a single bill for all their IT hosting services and by working with their hosting company, have a single point of contact, a high degree of familiarity and comfort and the ability to manage their environment from a single unified interface.

Customers should understand that backup and storage is typically not included with a standard dedicated server. It is usually purchased as an optional add-on service. However, a problem in the market is that many hosting companies are not aggressive about educating and selling customers about the importance of data protection. Even worse, many hosting companies do not even have an affordable, fully functional and easy to use solution. Customers that value their data and want backup and storage services should look for a hosting company that has the breadth and quality of services they are looking for.

JaguarPC’s Data LockBox

JaguarPC has been in the hosting business for over a decade and offers its customers Data LockBox, a backup and storage solution built on R1Soft’s industry-leading Continuous Data Protection (CDP) software. CDP enables customers to back up their servers by providing near real-time replication of their data. JaguarPC installs the CDP software on the customer’s server and it takes snapshots and duplicates the content and data onto a separate backup server. Because the data replication process is continuous, customers are able to restore their servers to a designated point in time in the event of hardware failure or disaster. CDP provides bare metal restore capabilities – bringing back the original state of the server, complete with the entire operating system, settings and data. No re-configuring or re-installation of the operating system is required.

Data LockBox brings a number of other features and capabilities to the table.
CDP backs up incrementally, copying only sectors of a disk that have changed since the previous backup. Combined with standard compression technology, this reduces storage utilization and CPU overhead significantly and enables the replication process to be completed within minutes. CDP also features full data encryption during transmission and in storage, ensuring robust levels of security. Other features include a MySQL database add-on, true database in-memory backup, event logs, reporting capabilities and support for both Windows and Linux-based virtual machines.

With Data LockBox, customers receive access to a web-based control panel, which allows them to manage their data protection capabilities and instantly restore content directly from the backup systems. Customer can also set backups to take place on an hourly basis. The level of control provided through the management tool gives customers that prefer to be hands-on the flexibility they are looking for and enables them to access their solution remotely and on a 24/7 basis.

Data LockBox supports servers running on both the Linux and Windows platforms and can be used to backup hosted servers, on-premise servers, office workstations and personal computers. JaguarPC also provides back up servers – powered with free versions of R1Soft – to other hosting companies on a white label basis.

JaguarPC has been in the backup and storage business for several years, having been one of R1Soft’s beta testers and original hosting partners. With a long history hosting for the SMB and enterprise community, and a strong technical grasp of storage technology, JaguarPC is uniquely positioned to meet the data protection needs of customers.

About JaguarPC

JaguarPC, founded in 1998, is an industry-leading provider of web hosting services to small and medium-sized businesses, government agencies and non-profit organizations worldwide. Customers enjoy the flexibility of choosing from a full suite of hosting solutions, ranging from shared hosting and virtual private servers to dedicated hosting and managed hosting. JaguarPC also operates a reseller program, helping smaller organizations jump into the hosting business or augment their current offerings. Each JaguarPC hosting plan is backed by a world-class data center infrastructure and network, and supported by a rock solid customer service operation. With over a decade of experience, JaguarPC helps organizations realize their full potential by capturing the power of the Internet.

To learn more, please visit: http://www.jaguarpc.com.

JaguarPC, an industry-leading provider of end-to-end web hosting services, today announced that the web site building software tool RVSiteBuilder Pro will be available with all shared and reseller hosting packages.

RVSiteBuilder Pro is a hosted web site building software application that features an intuitive WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) user interface and a large library of ready-made templates that allow users to create a professional looking web site in literally minutes. A wide selection of themes allow users to create a web site for almost any purpose, whether it be a blog, photo gallery or a web presence for a small business.

RVSiteBuilder Pro enables users to build much more than plain vanilla web sites. Several new features can be conveniently integrated into a web site through a point and click interface, including photos albums, hit counters, guest books, blogs and FAQ guides. There is also a supply of free media such as commonly used banners, buttons and icons, along with a library of images.

“JaguarPC is always looking for a way to add value to our hosting offerings,” stated Greg Landis, CEO of JaguarPC. “RVSiteBuilder Pro is an easy-to-use software application that anybody without technical experience can use to build an attractive, professional looking web site. This is the essence of value and we are providing it free to our shared and reseller hosting customers. It is further proof that JaguarPC is committed to enabling customers to realize their full potential on the Internet.”

RVSiteBuilder Pro recently released an updated version of its software (version 3.0), adding an updated navigation system, a new blogging application, database capabilities and improvements to the Ajax-enabled user interface. A total of 16 new templates have been added to the library in this newest release. RVSiteBuilder Pro has a library of 646 templates.

For more advanced users, there is an online Flash editor and users can also download templates, customize them and then re-upload them for future use.

RVSiteBuilder Pro supports all major web browsers and operating systems. It is available in multiple languages, allowing customers around the world to build a web site in the language they are most comfortable with. Languages supported include English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian-Portuguese, Finnish, Norwegian, Turkish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Slovak.

You’ve probably heard quite a bit about “social networking” lately. But what is it? Through sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, you can network with others who are in your field, as well as business contacts, customers, and potential customers.

When the Internet became popular, people checked to see if a business had a website. If they didn’t, that customer may very well have gone to a competitor who did have a website. These days, customers—current and potential—are looking to see if a business has a Facebook page, or a Twitter page (we do!). It’s free and easy to set up an account with these sites, and once you do, you’ll have the ability to connect with people in a whole new way.

Through Twitter, you can easily give quick updates about company news, sales, and promotions. You can even give a link to a new blog post, or promotion, which in turn could mean increased sales. With Facebook, you can draw in customers and potential clients in a non-invasive, laid-back environment. Sure, you have a product to sell, but through Facebook and Twitter accounts, you can give that extra level of service without the “in your face” tactics that many businesses use.

The opportunities are endless with Twitter and Facebook. You can keep your customers up-to-date through Twitter (or Facebook, for that matter), which will increase customer confidence, as they will be able to see that you’re quickly resolving the problem, and that you care enough about your customers to provide updates.

While it’s understandable that some may be hesitant to embrace social networking, it’s clearly taking the Internet by storm, and those businesses who don’t embrace it may find themselves left in the dust, as customers flock to customers who keep up with the times.

Don’t let your business be left in the dust. Let your business flourish, and gain even more customers by not only creating accounts with social networking sites, but actually taking full advantage of it by interacting with customers, and constantly keeping your content fresh and updated. Update your Twitter page daily, even if it’s only just once. Respond quickly to direct messages, and comments. Respond quickly, too, on Facebook, MySpace, and any other social networking sites you may join. By doing this, you’ll impress your customers, and enjoy one added bonus: word of mouth, which is part of the wonders of networking.

Please tell us a little about yourself.

Im 32, a father of 3, and when I’m not shackled to a desk I enjoy spending time with the family, fishing, and playing guitar. Anyone that knows me will tell you I’m very big on core values in every person we hire, and every project we take on. Core values such as honesty, integrity, and respect are often set aside in the modern world and particularly behind the veil of anonymity of the internet. I believe this is precisely the area where people should adhere to those values the most. If you do, a reference is as easy as saying “google me”.

Can you summarize your educational experience for us?

I graduated high school in 94 and joined the Airforce in 95 where I spent 7yrs learning and growing as a person. I took some college while in the USAF but eventually the demand and excitement of JaguarPC led me to exit the USAF and go at hosting full time.

What do you consider as your accomplishments up to this point?

That I’ve managed to keep a healthy marriage, raise 3 kids, and all while running a very demanding business for 10yrs. Hitting milestones such as 100, 500, 1000 servers has been exciting as well.

Any failures you’d like to tell us about?

Nobody grows as a company or person without some failure. More importantly though is the lessons you take away from the experience. One big failing in the past was letting my excitement get the better of us by not planning properly for our growth. There is no growth worth hurting a reputation built up by a decade of hard work. Now we work our hardest on preserving that ideal.

What is your primary occupation?

Whatever my staff, clients, and partners need from me. I wear the CEO title but the truth is that even with 75 people working for me I still enjoy getting involved in the daily activities where it all got started. Our company is all about reflecting that person touch.

How do you manage your time? Will you describe what you do on a daily and/or weekly basis?

Between my wife and my iPhone I’m able to stay on top of things pretty well most of the time. My week involves a lot of email between my staff, management meetings, networking with other professionals, going over reports from the various areas of our companies, and of course some daily interactions with clients on forums, instant messengers, and the phone.

Do you oversell?

We don’t, except for our shared hosting plans. None of our reseller, VPS, or hybrid plans have any features that are oversold. The shared technology we use and our vast experience lets us manage the shared environments so well that we simply never run into the tiny things some watch all the time like disk space. Simply put, we just can’t run out of disk space. Even as we speak all our clients could increase their usage immediately by 500% and it wouldn’t cause alarm. Like cell phone minutes and bandwidth, the prices of storage are so minute these days its hard to justify placing a limit and letting a 2tb system only collect dust while 80% of the space sits wasted. Overselling as a means of marketing actually is the best way we can tell clients “use more, if you don’t nobody will” . And our system is setup so you have to have 80% of an initial quota actually used before you request more, but you can request more as many times as you want and its automatically added.

Tell us about your control panel, is it based on cPanel and what makes it special?

In our shared environment we use cPanel exclusively, but for VPS, hybrid, and dedicated servers we offer and support a wide range of control panels and software. We have developed a proprietary platform that ties into our servers, billing, software, ips, staff, and pretty much our entire operation. I wouldn’t want to imagine running a company this size and complex without it.

As part of your managed services you propose monitoring, does that include proactive responses?

Yes. And we have some really exciting improvements coming to our operation in the next 30days that will improve that response greatly by adding new methods of alerts and new tools for clients and our staff to respond to those alerts.

You propose VPS solutions on JaguarPC and yet you operate wowvps.com too, why?

Wowvps.com was started off for two reasons; we didn’t want to mix our managed Virtuozzo offering in jaguarpc.com with the unmanaged xen VPS offering. And we wanted a fresh place to kickoff our VSControl software that took years to develop and perfect. We will begin offering the software to the public this year. Finally there is a xen based vps hosting control panel that hosts can rely on.

You have offices in multiple cities and you have also remote technicians all over the world, how do you manage them?

With our software, and my great management team. If I had to manage a staff this size on my own it would consume my day. I empower the managers of the various departments to give them a chance to really make a difference in peoples lives and in the companies growth.

Do you own your data centers?

Not yet. We run colo cages, racks, and other specialized agreements with facilities in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, the UK, and Singapore. We are expanding to other cities as well as currently planning our own facility.

You have a very active community, how did your business benefit from it?

It hasn’t stopped benefiting from it yet . Our clients are equally as awesome as our staff. Often clients are eager to learn things for themselves or just might be curious about something. When they take those issues to our community not only does it reduce our own support load, it builds a sense of community, adds content, and perpetuates itself.

What can we expect from JaguarPC in the future?

We love taking the lead and pushing boundaries of what defines a product. We were right out front pushing vps long before most even knew what it was. In fact I had to request from the owners of WHT to get vps categories and forums added many years ago. We plan to do more of the same and push the envelope of whats possible. This year is no exception, we have some great deals coming very soon made possible by a few unique partnerships we just finalized.

What does the future hold for Greg Landis?

Only God knows for certain but I’ll keep doing what I do best. Because its working for me. I do plan to continue pursuing our larger plans, building data centers, and diversifying Landis holdings in many other non-hosting related opportunities as well. So far I’ve been very fortunate and enjoy spreading it around. Ask me again in another 10yrs

One of the biggest gripes I had about my iPhone was that I couldn’t sync my Google Calendar with the calendar function included with my iPhone. I ended up using the Google Calendar on the web, and setting up text message reminders. This only worked when I was setting appointments / important dates when I was near a computer. While on-the-go, I had no easy way to add a new event or appointment. Google created a barely functional iPhone-friendly calendar page you could view via Safari, but it was pretty much a “view only” page. Google claimed you could add dates, but when doing so, I had some interesting results. You could not delete or modify any events.

All that changed yesterday when Google announced Google Sync (beta) for the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones along with a contacts-only version for many other devices. Now you can sync your contacts AND your calendar and it works both ways. I was all over it yesterday and promptly followed the detailed instructions to set this up and I am impressed with the results so far. Since it’s beta, there will be a few glitches such as auto-complete not working quite as well, but so far I’m not seeing any deal-breakers and am quite happy to finally be able to have my calendars synced!

A word of warning: Be SURE to back up your contacts before setting up Google Sync. Google provides this warning as well:

When setting up Google Sync on your iPhone or iPod touch device for Contacts, the iPhone will delete all Contacts. Please safely backup all your iPhone Contacts to Google before setting up Sync.

Google has made several changes and/or added new features to their already existing features. For example, you can now Spice up your inbox with colors and themes. This change I embraced as I am always on the lookout for a new, colorful, appealing, and/or easier-to-navigate theme for the products I use.

Then Google changed the Google Reader interface. This change annoyed me quite a bit at first as they actually made some things harder to find, such as how to “show all” or “show updated” items. It took me a week to figure out that I needed to click the tiny little down arrow to the right of “Subscriptions” to get to those menu options. When they announced the change all they said about that particular change was:

• The “Show all – updated” controls are now in the Subscriptions options menu.

I kept looking for the word “Options” and didn’t realize it was a tiny down facing arrow. Once I figured that out and got used to all the changes I like it well enough. But I think the prior interface was actually easier to navigate. Maybe it’s just me?

Yesterday Google announced “A new Google Sitemap Generator for your website“. I haven’t played much with this yet and I liked the old one well enough for my personal web site. Have you had a chance to mess with it and see if the changes are for the better?

Google even changed their favicon. While the new one is more colorful, it’s going to have to grow on me a bit for me to like this change.

Today Google announced even more changes such as Changes to engineering and Changes to recruiting.

Google is changing all over the place. None of them too dramatic in the grand scheme of things, and most are improvements in my opinion. What has been your experience?

JaguarPC, a leading provider of end-to-end web hosting solutions for over a decade, today announced the launch of its new comprehensive rewards program for JaguarPC customers to earn points towards rewards such as service credit, free hosting, upgrades and more.

“JagRewards” consists of a points-based client loyalty rewards program with various points for different actions. No expiration dates on JagRewards points means customers can redeem points for a variety of benefits including free product and service upgrades.

One of the most attractive features of JagRewards is the retroactive application of points for existing customers, which rewards long-time loyal customers of JaguarPC. The retroactive feature is automatically applied to all JaguarPC clients. Long-time customers of JaguarPC will be pleasantly surprised to find pre-populated balances in their rewards account based on the bills paid and time with JaguarPC through the years.

JagRewards awards points based on criteria such as length of time with JaguarPC, services and plans purchased, payment history and referring new customers. Some sample reward points include:

-2,500 points for signing up with JagRewards -2,500 for each referral
-1 point for each dollar spent
-250 points for each month you do not require support -50 points per month as an active client

Points can be redeemed for extra services and features on their accounts or credits for outstanding bills. Some examples include service credit, free hosting and hosting upgrades.

“JagRewards is all about thanking our loyal customers and having fun while doing it,” says Greg Landis, president of JaguarPC. “It’s an opportunity for users of JaguarPC to experience the solid reliability and dedicated service we offer while making and saving money at the same time. It’s a win-win situation, and we’ll be looking to constantly evolve the program based on feedback we receive.”

To learn more and sign up for JagRewards, please visit www.jaguarpc.com/services/rewards.php.

About JaguarPC

JaguarPC, based in Houston Texas, provides high-quality Internet hosting solutions to small and medium-sized businesses, government agencies, prominent individuals and non-profit organizations worldwide. JaguarPC’s core portfolio comprises information technology and business hosting services, as well as programming services. JaguarPC’s complementary subsidiary business is Devpond software, a web software company. JaguarPC is owned by Landis Holdings Inc., which also includes WowVPS!, ResellerZoom and HostingZoom. Learn more at www.JaguarPC.com