Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

Outside of the Applied Innovations staff, few people know this. One of the reasons I started Applied Innovations was because I had been doing web development for a handful of local companies and understood the frustration these companies were feeling with their hosting providers.

I noticed that the companies these customers of mine were working with often held their customers captive and would demand outrageous fees to help with the simplest tasks. I thought, “C’mon doesn’t anyone offer a hosting service that actually cares about the customers success?” It seemed to me that these businesses didn’t realize that if their customers succeeded and grew that the hosting company would also succeed! It’s a simple business concept, help your customers and your business will grow, but no one was making it happen.

This is the concept that Applied Innovations was founded on. Help your customers grow and succeed and you too will grow and succeed. Every day we build on that concept and today is no exception as we’re launching a Customer Advisory Panel.

What is a Customer Advisory Panel?

Today, we’re taking that caring approach our company was founded on a bit further. We’re organizing a Customer Advisory Panel. This will be a subset of our customers from our various business units helping us to understand their business and their needs and in turn helping to drive the direction our services and product offerings take.

Why Join the Customer Advisory Panel? What’s in it for me?

So let’s cut to the chase, what’s in it for you? Why should you help? It’s simple, Applied Innovations is a customer focused business and as such we listen to our customers and provide the services and products that our customers ask for. By participating in the Customer Advisory Panel, you’ll have a bigger say in the direction these products and services take. You’ll be able to voice your own business needs and that of businesses like yours and make sure the services we provide address your needs!

It’s pretty simple really, you get to tell us what you want. Then you’ll get early access to these new services and products and provide us feedback across topics like: features, functionality and price! You’ll get to make sure we’re meeting the needs of your business and the businesses like you and have a bigger say in what we do.

What’s Required of me on the Customer Advisory Panel?

If you decide to participate, you’ll be asked to take a survey from time to time and we may have you speak with one of our product managers or our executives from time to time. You’ll get early access to new products, services and betas before our other customers do and you’ll have the ability to provide direct feedback in these services ranging from features and functionality to price.

I don’t believe you’ll find it distracting and I think you’ll actually enjoy it. What kind of services? Well this is hard to say but here’s some ideas:

• We’re thinking about launching an online backup service. You’d get free access to the tools and be able to test it out for a few weeks. You’ll ultimately help us decide if this is a service our customers would benefit from and if so what would be a reasonable price for this service.
• Another service we’re talking about launching is email push services to smart phones. This is similar to the features in exchange but without the large price tag! You’ll get this service enabled for free during the beta period and then help us determine if it’s useful to you or just a novelty.

Most importantly though, you’re not required to have web hosting experience! You know your business and you know your business needs and I’m betting there’s plenty of businesses out there just like you with the same needs. That’s what we want, you to be an expert on you!

Why’s Applied Innovations doing this? What’s in it for AppliedI?

It’s this feedback that we hope to receive that will allow us to focus on services that our customers actually want and ultimately are willing to purchase. You’ll gain solutions to your business needs and help us focus exclusively on the services and products that bring value to you and your business! At the end of the day, you’ll be helping us to launch only services that help you and we won’t waste time investigating or bringing services to market that don’t help you or bring value to your business. It’s a win for everyone!

Sounds Great, how do I start?

The first thing you need to do is take our current Customer Survey. This is the type of surveys we’ll be asking you to participate in from time to time.

This current survey is meant to help us better understand our customers and why they opted for the service they’re currently on. It’s segmented based on the type of service you have and if you have more than one of these services with us (for example, if you have shared hosting accounts and a dedicated server) feel free to take each survey that relates to you.

• Shared Hosting Customers: take this survey.
• Shared Hosting Resellers: take this survey.
• VPS Hosting Customers: take this survey.
• Dedicated Hosting Customers: take this survey.

We’ll be closing this round of surveys out in the next week so hurry up before it’s too late. As a thank you for taking this survey, I’ll make sure you get a Free Travel Mug and you’ll be entered into a drawing to receive a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate! It’s a pretty good deal for taking 5 minutes of your time.

If you decide you don’t want to join the Customer Advisory Panel then I hope you’ll still take this survey. It will be a tremendous help to us.

Best Regards – Jess

Popularity: 11% [?]

Applied Innovations has rolled out an enhanced Helm Control Panel that allows you to specify a separate authorized Technical Contact for your account. This means we’ll be able to more efficiently communicate information to our customer base by separating technical communications from billing and account management communications.

Prior to this update, you had the option of designating multiple contact emails, but there was no way of designating the type of information each contact would receive. So everyone got the same communications, be they technical, billing or account-related. Makes for a lot of unnecessary and duplicate email.

Now, just go into your Control Panel and add the appropriate data for your Technical Contact, and we’ll be able to get information directly to the people who need it.

Thanks to all of you who suggested this improvement!

Popularity: 10% [?]

You count on Applied Innovations to be the Wizards behind the curtain, keeping your website running seamlessly, with no delays or downtime, no glitches or hiccups. In this short video demonstration of Live Migration, have a peek at some of the “magic” that we’ve got up our sleeves.

Live Migration is the movement of a virtual machine from one physical host to another while continuously powered up and running its applications with no perceived downtime by the machine’s users. This means that we can move a live website from one server to another – to do maintenance or updates – without any impact on the user experience. So your site visitors can be conducting transactions, uploading files via FTP, processing forms, whatever. They’ll never know that anything changed; no latency or broken connections or interruptions.

Live Migration is a function of Hyper-V, just one of the enabling technologies built into Microsoft Windows Server 2008, and it’s a key element of the bag of tricks that lets Applied Innovations “do our magic.” Our VPS Hosting plans powered by Hyper-V allow us to offer a cost effective platform at a fraction of the cost normally associated with this level of performance.

In this short video demonstration, we reveal all the secrets behind Live Migration. Suddenly, the hush of anticipation falls over the crowd…

Popularity: 4% [?]

The highly anticipated and much talked about Rapid Domination blog is finally here.

Rapid Domination is a free resource for all of our current and future clients that will include expert SEO and Marketing advice to help you reach your business goals. Some of the topics we will be covering include:

• Basics to advanced search engine optimization (SEO)
• Link Building
• Pay Per Click advertising
• The importance of utilizing social media marketing
• Blogging
• Podcasting
• Creating professional Videos
• Marketing tactics

This will truly prove to be a valuable resource that will help you achieve top results in the search engines, drive traffic to your website, increase your conversion ratio and rapidly dominate your competition.

Accessing the Rapid Domination blog is very simple.

If you are a shared or reseller hosting customer login to http://control.appliedi.net and click on the Rapid Domination icon located on the right lower portion of the User Main Menu Screen.

If you are a VPS or a  Dedicated hosting customer login to https://secure.appliedi.net  and click on the Rapid Domination icon below the extra features section in the user main menu page.

Why are we giving such valuable information away for FREE?

We always strive to go above and beyond our clients’ expectations and offer service and support that is unparalleled in the web hosting industry. With the recent downturns in the economy, it’s more important than ever to focus on your marketing efforts and grow your business while your competitors stand still. We want your business to grow.

With the introduction of Rapid Domination, we will also be developing other valuable resources such as video tutorials, webinars, site reviews, offering question and answer forums and much more.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Failed Request Tracing (also called FREB) is an IIS7 request-based tracing tool that helps figure out what exactly is happening to web server requests and why. Poor performance on some requests, authentication-related failures on other requests, or even server 500 errors from ASP or ASP.net were a nightmare to troubleshoot in previous IIS versions since the web server would never tell you much of what was going on. FREB simplifies the process by capturing the trace of the problem when it occurs and by showing you a granular view of what is happening at the web server level. In other words, Failed Request Tracing allows you to look under the hood of your car and plug in a diagnostic tool that can tell you what is wrong with any of the engine components.

To use FREB, developers or web server/site administrators simply create a set of rules that will trigger a trace. Once triggered, FREB will log that request to disk and pull in all the relevant trace information.

Once a trace output is created the IT professional looking at the XML based output with a browser may easily determine if the problem is web server or code related.

Rules may be created that can trace virtually any request on the server, including PHP or other development frameworks. This is a similar feature that is also part of the ASP.net framework which by the way may also be integrated with the FREB output as long as you have tracing enabled  for your asp.net application.

This short video tutorial demonstrates the entire FREB process with a PHP based website.

In order to enable this feature on shared hosting services you must contact our support staff as it does require some higher level administrative tasks that are not yet delegated in IIS 7. It is also important to mention that there is some overhead associated when FREB is turned on and therefore it is good practice to have it turned off when you know your site is running with no known problems.

You can learn more about FREB and Windows 2008 hosting by visiting our knowledgebase or by visiting appliedi.net/iis7-hosting.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Are you interested in trying the Kentico Lite CMS?

Much like other applications we’ve recently introduced, Kentico is now as easy to install through the control panel as a few clicks. Kentico Lite has many features bundled with it right out of the box. See the following Knowledge Base article for instructions on installing Kentico Lite and begin using this wonderful CMS.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Community Server 2008 Express is now available for FREE to Appliedi Innovation’s web hosting customers in a few easy clicks from the control panel. Community Server 2008 is a premium content management system (CMS) and Social Networking application from Telligent, the people who made the application that powers myspace, Microsoft’s xbox website and other major sites. Some of the major built-in features include blogs & forums (with integrated Search), photo, file, and media galleries, and a control panel. There is also a built-in email server that can make the forums work more like an email discussion where email replies are automatically generated on the forum. Community Server 2008 is a CMS similar to Dotnetnuke, Kentico, or Joomla, etc.

Our Community Server 2008 application pack has been custom coded into the control panel to make the process as painless as possible. It literally takes less than 5 minutes to install. Please see our support article that explains the process. This express edition can also easily be upgraded to other versions of Community Server 2008.

Popularity: 3% [?]

New SSL certificates (or renewals) ordered through Applied Innovations web hosting, will now have slightly more functionality. Our e-commerce hosting customers will now be able to call their websites securely from either www.acme-hosting.net or just acme-hosting.net. This is more convenient, because it used to be that you would have to call your website securely usually with “www” in the url. If a customer came to your page without a “www”, then your shopping cart would have to redirect to “https://www”   In some cases this would be a headache to the web developer. Well, with this new feature, that will be a thing of the past!

Popularity: 6% [?]

A great deal of our e-commerce web hosting customers choose to order Instant SSL certificates from Applied Innovations. For the $99 price tag we install the highly secure 256-bit encryption SSL certificate for you, you get $100,000 warranty from Comodo, and you also get the Trust Logo free. 

Today, Applied Innovations has been informed before the official news release, that Comodo will be updating their Trust Logo. The Trust logo is getting a much needed aesthetic facelift, and becoming more useful by allowing a customer to hover their mouse over the graphic to activate a Java Script that tells them more about who you are. This equals more trust, which potentially equals more sales. You can see the demo of the new graphic here. 

Here’s the Old Trust Logo:

Here’s the New Trust Logo (To see how the Javascript works, please click the above link to the demo): 

Comodo has also had the scrolling “CornerTrust” logo for a while now that essentially has the same Javascript mouse-over feature as the new logo, but the CornerTrust required a graphic to hover on the corner of the customers browser. This new logo is a stationary option.

For instructions on how to install the new logo, please see this Support page.

Popularity: 31% [?]

We are pleased to announce that we are offering Graffiti CMS as a part of an easy to install Application Pack available to all of our shared web hosting customers. Customers who install this CMS on their site will be able to take advantage of Graffiti’s simplified content management system that brings together the best of proven CMS platforms and the convenience of modern publishing systems, like those found in common blogging apps.

Here are some of the advantages of Graffiti:

     No need for a database! Well, that’s not entirely true, but Graffiti does implement VistaDB, which eliminates the need for a SQL server and connection information.

·         Easy Customization with the use of pre-existing themes or by creating your own theme using Chalk (http://graffiticms.com/support/advanced-options/)

·         Search engine friendly URL’s, Smart redirects, and structured content that will help take your sites rankings to the next level.

·         Graffiti CMS is built by Telligent (http://telligent.com/) the same people who developed Community Server (http://communityserver.com/) community platform used by companies like Microsoft and MySpace.com

Installation takes just a few clicks of the mouse using the application pack feature on your control panel’s domain menu.

Interview with the Developers (Windows Media Format)

Customers who sign up for any of our shared hosting plans will be able to immediately take advantage of Graffiti’s features.  Although Graffiti will execute under the Value Plus plan, we recommend you run it under a VS-1 if you are looking to use this application in a production environment. Click here to see some of our Knowledge Base articles on how to get started. It’s literally installed in about 3 clicks.

In the near future we plan on offering this as part of a “Software as a Service” (SaaS) hosting solution so be on the lookout for that.

Popularity: 10% [?]