Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

Over the years, we often been coined as leading innovators in Windows Web Hosting and (my favorite): The Windows Hosting Experts. Our work with Windows Server 2008 is an example of just why we are considered as leaders. We started working with IIS7 in 2006 with the earliest betas of Longhorn (later to be called Windows Server 2008) and first introduced our customers to a beta version of IIS7 hosting on ‘LongHorn’ at the start of February last year.  Then we released Windows 2008 Dedicated Server Hosting back in November of last year and earlier this month we got the go-ahead to start offering Windows 2008 dedicated hosting using the RTM build and have quietly been promoting and deploying dedicated servers running the production version of Windows Server 2008 ever since. Today is the official launch of Windows Serer 2008 and soon the rest of the world will join in and follow suit but as leading innovators in the hosting Industry and the Windows Hosting Experts we are proud to be able to state we brought Windows 2008 Hosting to you, our E-Business Partners, in such a way that you had the opportunity to be among the first exposed to Windows Server 2008.

Today in Los Angeles, Steve Ballmer will keynote the global launch of Windows Server 2008. This event will be followed over the coming months with launch events all over the globe as well as a virtual launch experience.  You can learn more about the Launch events as well as register for a launch in your area at the heroes happen here website. 

With all the fanfare there are of course a few questions that have come up regarding Windows Server 2008 in a hosting environment and I thought I’d spend a little time discussing the most common questions here.

What are the different flavors of Windows Server 2008 and will you offer them?

There are currently five versions of Windows Server 2008 in the family: Enterprise, Datacenter, Standard, Web and Itanium. Each version except Itanium can support Server Core which is a reduced footprint installation of the OS.  Each version except Itanium and Web can support Hyper-V, Microsoft’s new Virtualization platform. 

Of course, each version is also available as a 64bit and 32bit operating system. It’s rumored that Windows Server 2008 will be the last Server OS to support 32bit

We currently support all versions of Windows Server 2008, except Itanium. All of our dedicated servers deployed today with Windows Server 2008 can support either the 32bit or 64bit version (available upon request).  Here’s an overview image of the different versions and the full details are available from the Microsoft website.

What’s new or updated in Windows Server 2008?

Microsoft has available a table detailing the different versions and what’s new or updated in each on available on their website. Below is a screen shot of this table.

How do the different versions of Windows Server 2008 Compare?

Below is a table outlining the different technical features and specifications of each version this is available from the Microsoft website.

Below is also a table showing the different server roles available in each version, also available from the Microsoft website.

Lastly, the image below shows the differentiated features in each version of Windows Server 2008, also available from the Microsoft website.

What’s this Hyper-V and why is there a with and a without version of Windows Server 2008?

Hyper-V is the new Virtualization technology from Microsoft, it’s currently in BETA and will not be fully released until mid-year 2008. We can install it upon request but the default install is without Hyper-V.

How much is each Windows Server 2008 license on a Dedicated Server?

This is the big question, just how much money is it going to cost! The good news is during the initial launch period we’re installing Windows Server 2008 Web Edition, FOR FREE!.  Afterwards current monthly pricing (which could change) is as follows:

• Windows Server 2008 Web Edition: $25
• Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition: $50
• Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition: $150
• Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition: $250

The recommended setup would be Web Edition for front-end servers (web servers) with Datacenter Edition for back-end servers (database servers, application servers). You’ll notice that pricing from 2003 to 2008 has changed considerably, in the past you were able to license a dedicated server with standard for about $25/month per CPU and now it’s $150/month per CPU and this change is hosting industry wide. The reason for the change is that the previous licenses were “un-authenticated” licenses and Microsoft has discontinued “un-authenticated” licenses. Because of this change all licenses are now licensed as “authenticated” and thus the higher price. It should be pointed out that authenticated licenses were always this much.  Because of this change in pricing we except to see more licenses of Web and Datacenter editions going forward.

What kind of promotions are you running?

With the launch of Windows Server 2008 we’ve created a very appealing bundle:

• A Dual Core Xeon based Dell Server with 1GB of memory and 2 160GB drives
• A Free SmarterTools Bundle ($500 Value)
• A Free license of Sharepoint Designer to all Windows Server 2008 Dedicated Server Customers
• Free Licensing of Windows Server 2008 Web Edition
• and A Free Month of hosting!

This package is priced at just $190/month.

Where can I learn more about Windows 2008 Dedicated Hosting?

You can learn more about our Windows Server 2008 Dedicated Hosting offering by going to our Windows Server 2008 Dedicated Server page. If you’re a developer
and considering a new dedicated server, we recommend you review our Windows 2008 Developer Dedicated Hosting page. Finally, if you attend any of the launch events, you’ll receive a flyer in your bag of goodies with a link to our developer ready Windows Server 2008 dedicated hosting landing page.

When will we see Windows 2008 Shared hosting available?

We’re currently working on our roll out of production Windows Server 2008 shared hosting as we have been for the past year. Because Windows Server 2008 offers so many new features and capabilities we feel it would be an injustice to not offer as much of these features as possible with the initial launch and this has been the delay. Expect to see an announcement of Windows Server 2008 shared hosting in the coming days.

When will we see Windows 2008 VPS Hosting?

Unfortunately, this will most likely be a few months away, but should happen before the middle of the year. Since Hyper-V is still in beta and Windows Server 2008 is still relatively new there’s still a fair bit of work to be done.

What’s next?

This year is going to be a very exciting year for not only Applied Innovations but the entire web community. The release of Windows Server 2008 is bringing so much change to the hosting industry that we’re all extremely excited. Whether, you’re an ASP.NET developer, a PHP developer or just a web designer, 2008 is going to be a year dedicated to you and one you should be equally excited about.  My advice, stay tuned and as the technology evolves and is ready for production you can rest assured that Applied Innovations will be among the first to bring it to you.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Consider it a little gift for the holidays, AppliedI.net has commissioned the design of 3 FREE wordpress themes and are providing these completely free to our wordpress hosting customers and the wordpress community at large. Best of all, if you install wordpress now through our one click installer these 3 themes will be immediately available for your use. We’re also including the PSD files so you can update images as needed.

To install any of these blogs just download them, unzip them and then upload the entire folder in a subfolder in your wp-content/themes/ folder. Then select them from the theme manager in WordPress.

Free WordPress Theme #1 – Gone Fishing

Gone Fishing is a fully W3C validated theme that is also widget ready! The included PSD file is layered and labeled and easily modified if you so please.

DOWNLOAD    or    DEMO

Free WordPress Theme #2 – The Awesome Blog

Awesome Blog is like no other blog design you’ve probably seen.  It should be easy to modify and tweak to your own settings. We’ve included the PSD file with this blog so you can adjust the header banner with your own text or logos.

DOWNLOAD    or    DEMO

Free WordPress Theme #3 – The Sleek Blog

The Sleek Blog is a 3 column blog that is just simply sleek.  It’s a very clean design that’s easy to read and not overly colorful or overwhelming.

The sleek blog also includes the PSD file so the banner images can be modified to your needs.

DOWNLOAD    or    DEMO

We hope you find the three blog themes easy to use and enjoy them. If you make any changes to the themes and wish to share those changes with the community feel free to drop us a line and we’ll make sure it’s posted. 

Happy Blogging!

Popularity: 5% [?]

WordPress has become so popular that I’m 90% sure that you have at least heard about the name. WordPress is in reality a blogger-like application that can be installed onto your own web hosting account.

With it you can even create your own community of bloggers, each person with his/her own blog, or you can have multiple authors on a single blog as well. Everything was thought of.

WordPress isn’t only this though. In essence yes. But it can be more, much more.

Many people, including myself use WordPress for more then just blogging. On my particular case, it’s the only CMS and it’s actually the platform that delivers all my website’s content to visitors. Everything dynamically!

In fact, I predict WordPress will turn into a full Content Management System such as Joomla, phpNuke or Post-Nuke. It really has the power for it. Actually it’s way more powerful and it can be much more secure then the ones I just mentioned. It’s all about patience and time to secure it.

Don’t worry, it isn’t insecure. But just like every other popular application, vulnerabilities are found more easily, and unfortunately they also become public from night to day. Again, a few tweaks here and there will kept your site secure from all the threats.

One of the things I’ve done on mine was to promptly restrict admin access to my IP only. Even if you have a dynamic IP and cannot do this, you can always restrict the IP range to your ISP. This is done by using rewrite rules.

More information on this can be found at:
http://blogsecurity.net/wordpress/article-210607/

Having this covered, WordPress can be your best pal on content management. Especially with the new tool from Microsoft: Windows Live Writer.

So with WordPress you’ll be able to submit new articles and update existing ones without even having to open a browser window.

What else could we ask for?

Plus with so many themes and plugins being developed for it, you can even sell cars through it. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? WordPress can do everything, really. Like I said it’s just a matter of putting time and effort into it, and it will become the perfect CMS for you, guaranteed.

Some interesting links:
Installation guide by Jess Coburn (Appliedi.net)
WordPress’ official plugin directory
WordPress’ official theme directory
WordPress compatible Hosting

Popularity: 2% [?]

Applied Innovations is pleased to announce we’re not only fully compatible for WordPress Hosting but we now offer WordPress as a One-Click install through our powerful, yet easy to use control panel. We’ll explore WordPress and demonstrate how easy it is to get WordPress running on our webservers.

Why WordPress, and Why WordPress on Windows?

WordPress is a freely distributed, standards-compliant, fast, light and free personal publishing platform. Based on PHP and MySQL wordpress is very powerful and extensible. WordPress is also one of the most widely adopted and used blogging engines today and powers the very blog you’re reading.

As a Windows hosting provider we support PHP and MySQL on all of our hosting servers and WordPress is just one of the many applications we host that is built around PHP and MySQL and we’ve extended our hosting platform to make your PHP/MySQL hosting as easy and powerful as it is on any hosting platform. One of the additions you’ll find on our hosting platform is helicon-tech.com‘s Isapi-Rewrite. Isapi-Rewrite 3.0 is a mod-rewrite compatible isapi filter that brings full mod-rewrite compatibility to your Windows hosting account. For wordpress this means you’ll be able to make full use of permalinks and search engine friendly URLs without any extra work! In addition we support the latest builds of PHP with Windows optimized binaries for maximum performance and compatibility.

Installing WordPress at AppliedI.net

1. Selecting the WordPress application pack

Within your domain settings of our control panel you’ll find an option for Application Packs.

The Application Packs are a series of common web applications that we support as one-click installable apps. By using the application packs you’ll be able to install some of the most requested and commonly hosted applications without having to upload anything, without having to edit any files and with minimum effort on your part. This makes installing applications like wordpress even easier than they already.

2. Entering basic configuration settings

Once you select the wordpress application pack you’ll need to enter a few settings. You’ll want to decide what folder you’ll install it in and enter that folder, if it’s not the root folder. You’ll want to either select an existing MySQL database or create a new database and if creating a new database you’ll want to enter the database and login credentials you’ll use. By default wordpress prepends wp_ to all of it’s tables so if you already have a MySQL database for another web application you can share that information here.

3. You’re done, almost!

Once you click the install button on the configuration page the control panel copies over the wordpress files and edits the configuration files for you, next step is to execute the web based installer within wordpress. Easiest way to do that is to open the url:

http://YOURDOMAIN/wp-admin/index.php (where YOURDOMAIN is your domain name)

or you can just go directly to http://YOURDOMAIN/ but you may notice the CSS isn’t quite right and some of the images may not display correctly but don’t be alarmed it will still install fine.

Once you open the install page you just need to make a few basic settings and we’re done.

4. Setting WordPress Email & Title

As with any WordPress install, you’ll want to enter your blog’s title, your email address (make sure you use your real email address because it will email you your username and password to this address) and click the install button.

5. Now you just need to log in.

Once you click the install button, you’ll wait a few minutes for a screen like:

That’s it your blog is now installed and you’ll be able to login and finish configuring the blog.

What’s next after it’s installed?

After you’ve installed your blog you’re all set and can begin blogging immediately. You’ll log into the admin interface at:

http://YOURDOMAIN/wp-admin (where YOURDOMAIN is your actual domain)

and begin configuring it. You’ll be able to enable new plug-ins and themes. We’ve taken the liberty to enable a couple extra themes for you (about 6 actually) so you’ll have a few more choices and we’ve installed some of the most common plug-ins for you that you can enable if you like.

Look for a future blog posting on advanced wordpress on windows tips and tricks that will help you extend wordpress even further.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Everyone has heard that e-commerce sites require SSL Encryption in order to be successful.  But what about the differences between all of them? What about getting a final explanation for their general purpose? This is why I sat down to write this article today.

Basic comparison between all the certificates we offer: »» Positive SSL: 128/256 Bit Encryption and 99.3% browser compatibility rate. No warranty, no trust logo and no EV Auto-Enhancer™ included.
——
»» Instant SSL Pro: 128/256 Bit Encryption, 99.3% browser compatibility rate, $100,000.00 warranty and corner trust logo. No EV Auto-Enhancer™ included.
——
»» SGC SSL: 128/256 Bit Encryption, 99.3% browser compatibility rate, $250,000.00 warranty and corner trust logo. No EV Auto-Enhancer™ included.
——
»» EV SSL: 128/256 Bit Encryption, 99.3% browser compatibility rate, $1,000,000.00 warranty, corner trust logo and EV Auto-Enhancer™ included.
——
»» EV SGC SSL: 128/256 Bit Encryption, 99.3% browser compatibility rate, $1,000,000.00 warranty, corner trust logo and EV Auto-Enhancer™ included. This certificate also includes the patent-pending SGC technology (we’ll cover this further in this article).
——

Alright, so now all the features are exposed. You might be wondering “aren’t they all just certificates anyway?”. I do understand your concern for spending a little bit more. But the answer is no, they aren’t exactly the same product.

In terms of functionality, I’m pretty sure you won’t notice any major difference between all of them (probably with the exception of both SGC and Auto-Enhancer technologies), but the most important aspect of them all and what you should wonder is:

“What kind of impact will a certificate have on my sales and how will they help me to convert a prospect into a customer?”

As a concerned and responsible businessman/woman, this is the right thing to do.
In fact I cannot emphasize this enough. It’s the most important aspect of them all – your business image and position on your prospects’ minds. Remember: first impressions are everything, and most of the online consumers will buy on impulse. In a simple sentence, this means you won’t have any competitors if you do things right. Doing things right would mean to analyze your competitors web sites and writing down what you can do better then them.

One of the things you can do is to transmit more trust to your customers. More then your competitors do. If they don’t pay attention to this, then you just found a way to stand out from the crowded market you’re in. You’ll be the “secure” vendor.

Let your prospects feel safe, let them know they are providing their financial information to a responsible company. Your company. This is why I have to praise Comodo’s SGC and EV Auto-Enhancer™  technologies. They will help you to do this; and here’s how:

EV Auto-Enhancer™
This technology will actually turn your prospects’ browser address bar to green. They will know they’re on a safe place, and that you invested on this technology exactly to remind them of this fact.

“Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificates are the next generation SSL Certificate because they help protect against phishing attacks. They work with high security Web browsers (e.g. Microsoft IE) so that visitors to Websites with an EV SSL Certificate will see a “Green Address Bar”. EV SSL Certificates represent a new industry standard for e-merchant identity verification developed by the CA/B Forum.“

Source: Comodo’s Official Web site

Here’s an example of this technology in action:

SGC™
This technology will actually force the certificate to rely on our server’s Cryptography capabilities, rather then just using what your clients’ browsers are able to support. With Sever Gated Cryptography (SGC), you will actually be able to guarantee a high level of encryption during critical data transmission like you have never been able to do before.

“128/256 bit SSL Certificates designed for securing leading web sites. Server Gated Cryptography (SGC) enabled certificates upgrade the encryption capabilities of older browsers from 40-bit encryption into full 128/256 bit encryption – ensuring your website protects and is trusted by the highest number of internet users possible.” Source: Comodo’s Official Web site

TrustLogo™
This technology will reinforce the trust your prospects deposit on your web site (hence the TrustLogo name) by authenticating your business contact information directly from Comodo’s secure servers.

Here’s an example of this technology in action:

Sales Conversion Tips

• Make sure you place your trust logo on all your web site pages. This should imperatively be done as you never know which page will trigger a “buy-now” reaction. Having your trust logo displayed on the page that triggers this action will actually add weight to the decision.
• Keep reminding your customers that your site is secure, otherwise the green bar wouldn’t be displayed. Make sure you emphasize the fact that this identity verification isn’t done by your company, but by a 3rd party company which is reliable and trustable (Comodo). Always add links to your explanations so your customers can confirm this by themselves.
• Never forget to mention that even if their browser has a limited decryption level, your web server is prepared to add the extra security they need when exchanging sensitive information with your organization.

That’s it for SSL. I hope you enjoyed reading it and most of all I hope to have clarified most of your concerns before deciding which certificate suits best your organization.

To conclude this article, here’s our SSL Certificate products link:
http://www.appliedi.net/ssl-certificates/

Sincerely,
Andre F

Popularity: 1% [?]

Yesterday while sitting in my dentist’s office, a gentleman was talking to one of the office managers about their online presence and how his company could help them market their business better, especially online. He kept emphasizing that can really help get the hits online and one of his key points that he kept repeating was:

“we get over 21 million hits a month to our directory, don’t you want some of those hits on your site too? We can send them there!”

I just couldn’t bring myself to break it to him that the number of hits your website gets has absolutely no real value. 

In the early 90′s, when the WWW was just in it’s infancy, hitcounters and counting the number of hits your site got was all the rage and hit counters like these:

were found on almost every single website out there. What these little scripts did was each time the image was called it would increment and that would be used as a way to show the number of visitors your site received.  So when your boss asked “Well, we’re spending all this money on a website, what’s it doing for our business” you could say “look at all the hits we got this month”. 

Why Counting Hits is a Waste of Time.

There’s really three definitions we need to make:

• Visitors – Visitors is the number of people that come to your site. You can break this down further into the number of new visitors and the number of returning visitors.
• Pageviews – A Pageview is each time a page on your site loaded. If you want to www.appliedi.net/default.asp that would be one pageview, when you click on asp.net hosting and are taken to a new page, that would be another page.
• Hits – Hits are the number of items loaded from your site. The homepage on www.appliedi.net has 48 objects on it, when you load that page you’re making 49 hits against my webserver (1 hit for the page itself and 48 hits for all the other images, flash animations, css and JavaScript files you’ll pulling from my site).

So by just loading our homepage, www.appliedi.net, you generated 49 hits! But you were just 1 visitor (either you were 1 new visitor or 1 returning visitor) and you created 1 pageview. So as you can see the number of hits a website receives really provides no real data. What you really want to know is how many visitors your site had and then how many pageviews (generally each visitor will load more than just one page so pageviews should be higher).

Web Analytics Evolved

So because website owners like you want more realistic data, web analytics has evolved and provides far more data and ofcourse Applied Innovations provides one of the best web analytics applications, SmarterStats. SmarterStats key features are:

• Track your website’s growth and forecast Internet trends
• Features over 130 report items, plus Geographic Reporting
• Log compression saving 90% of your disk space
• Email Reports
• Enhanced data mining available

And ofcourse you can view your Visitors, PageViews and if you really want it, your hits!

A picture is worth a thousand words so here’s a few screenshots from the SmarterStats reports for http://jesscoburn.com (Jess’s personal blog)

Visitor and Page View Trends

Bandwidth Usage

Top Referrers

Search Engine Stats

Top Pages

Visitor Demographics

Browser Details

href="http://www.appliedi.net/blog/images/Iget21millionhitstomydirectory_A35E/image_13.png" atomicselection="true">

I know that’s a lot of pretty pictures and since this is a personal blog site, it doesn’t get alot of traffic, but this should provide a pretty good idea of the reports available in your smarterstats accounts.

How do I get SmarterStats for Free?

So now that you’ve had a taste of smarterstats you’re probably wondering how you can get it right? The good news is, it’s included for FREE with 75% of our shared hosting accounts and available as an add-on for a small monthly fee for those accounts it’s not included in (mainly the valueplus and reseller accounts). If you order a new windows dedicated server or Windows VPS Server, you’ll get a free SmarterTools bundle which includes SmarterStats, SmarterMail and SmarterTicket licenses for free!

If you want to learn more about smarterstats, I recommend you log into your shared hosting control panel and click on ‘advanced analytics’ or you can visit SmarterTools.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Applied Innovations uses SmarterMail 4.3 for our windows shared hosting mail servers, Windows dedicated servers and Windows 2003 VPS Servers. One of the reasons we moved to SmarterMail 4.X was the promise of better spam fighting techniques and that Greylisting alone could deliver a reduction of over 80% in total spam making it through normal spam blocking measures (keyword filters, RBLs, blacklists, etc).

What is Greylisting?

The quick explanation of greylisting is: Each time a message is received if it’s the first message your mail server has received from the sender’s mail server, the mail server says “Sorry I can’t take this message, I’m busy. Please try again in a few minutes”. A normal mail server will wait a few minutes and then try the message again at which time your mail server will say “Oh Hi! It’s you again, sure come on in.”  and the message will be delivered.    Then after that for a period of time any more messages from that same sending server will be delivered without the delay.  

This simple technique of delaying messages believe it or not is currently an extremely effective anti-spam technique.  The reason it’s effective is that spammers try to send millions of messages as quickly as possible. If they get a “sorry, I’m busy” message they simply move on to the next email address in their list of messages.  They don’t have time to worry about retries because they’re sending so many messages and they really don’t care.   Whereas a real mail server does care about retries and will retry the message.  So that’s the secret sauce to greylisting.  You can get more information on greylisting from Wikipedia.

So my messages get delayed, why all the hooplah?

Yeah it’s a pretty basic concept isn’t it. It’s pretty much the same technique you’ve been doing to telemarketers for ages “Sorry he’s not here, please call back later”. But does it work?  Well, here’s some stats from a couple of our mail servers that should answer that question:

Server #1

Server #2

That’s just two of the mail servers we operate for our shared hosting servers but between those two mail servers more than 1.5 million spam messages were blocked. So yes, it works.

There’s no such thing as a free meal, right?

Yes it’s an old cliche. Of course, if you prefer a little more modern of a saying how about “With great power, comes great responsibility”.  Greylisting does come with it’s negatives.

1. For one when that first message from that one mail server comes through, it’s going to be delayed and you *might* notice the delay. For very busy mail servers though and people you interact via email often this is not a problem. Plus if you have that one user that’s time sensitive you can disable greylisting for their account or for the entire domain if you wish. 
2. Eventually spammers will figure out how to get around this but don’t worry the SmarterGuys from SmarterTools are already working on this (and we have a couple other surprises in the works already ourselves).
3. Mail from a server that doesn’t support retries may not get delivered. All of the web servers we operate are whitelisted and this hasn’t caused a problem for most of our customers (I’d say under a dozen have had an issue with greylisting out of 10,000+ and we’ve disabled it for those customers).

When it’s said and done, Greylisting Rocks!

Yes, that’s right, Greylisting ROCKS!.  Greylisting has proven to be a very effective tool against spam at with very little impact on normal day to day email activities.

By implementing greylisting many of our clients have reported a 80% to 90% drop in spam and the numbers above are testament to those claims.

If your host doesn’t support greylisting and you’re just fed up with all the spam, I encourage you to checkout one of our shared hosting promotions going on right now and start benefiting from the reduced spam.

Popularity: 1% [?]

How great would it be if you were looking for an ASP.NET hosting discount and someone told you “sign up for a year of web hosting at just $99.95 with our company and you’ll get a rebate check for $325!”.  CHA-CHING! Right? Dreaming you say? No you’re not dreaming.  It’s more than just a dream, it’s a reality and here’s how.

$175 in Free Search Engine Pay Per Clicks

AppliedI.net has been busy building relationships for our customers so that they can receive special offers and discounts unique to them.  One of the places we’ve seen a lot of interest in from our clients is that of search engine pay per click advertising. So we’ve been busy building a lot of relationships with search engine marketing companies. Today we have the following special offers:

• $75 free pay per click credits from Microsoft adCenter on MSN.com and Live.com.
• $50 free pay per click credits from Yahoo!
• $25 free pay per click from Miva.com
• and $25 free pay per click from enhance.com.

So that’s not too shabby of a deal. $175 in free pay per click credits, for nothing more than signing up for hosting and then activating an account with the different search engine companies. Oh and here’s a secret, we’re working on a new deal that could generate another $100 in credits!

$150 PCI Compliance Scan from ScanAlert

Now I said, $325 so where’s the other $150? Well, It’s here at AppliedI.net thanks to scanalert.com. Thanks to our partnership we’re able to provide a Free year of PCI compliance scanning (needed for all e-commerce based websites and a generally good idea for any website in my opinion that keeps any type of personal information) that’s normally $149.  But this is the gift that keeps on giving because each year you can renew for just $19.

Great $325 in offers. Is that all you have?

Nope! It just doesn’t end there we have all kinds of great offers in our marketplace and are adding new offerings almost weekly. In fact we have 3 in the works that should be released within the next couple weeks. The marketplace has become a favorite spot for our hosting customers (second only to this blog naturally which BTW, you should subscribe to.) and we have yet even more surprises in the works to launch that should be equally exciting.

Recently we also announced that we’d do free installs of aspdotnetstorefront for our customers looking to adopt aspdotnetstorefront as their e-commerce platform, that’s a $50 discount right now.

So how do I get to this marketplace?

It’s in your control panel. Shared hosting customers and resellers will find it as an icon tagged “Marketplace” when they first log into their control panel. Dedicated hosting and VPS hosting customers will find it within the billing portal for their accounts.

So how does this translate into free hosting?

Well think about it. You’re going to sign up for hosting, our VS-1 would be $269 a year (including a free domain, 4GB of diskspace and 250MB of SQL2005 database space, support for asp.net, silverlight, xaml, php, etc). If you’re hosting aspdotnetstorefront we’ll do the install for you so that’s $50 right there you just saved making your year of hosting only $219 now.  Then you sign up for the free PCI scanning courtesy of scanalert.com and your one year of ASP.NET hosting with full 24/7 technical support has dropped to just $69 as you just got $150 product for free.  Then you sign up for the MSN pay-per-click program and pocket $75 in free pay per click ads that you were going to buy anyway and you just made $6 and have a full year windows webhosting with a Microsoft Gold Certified Hosting Partner.  Next you sign up for the Yahoo, the Miva and the Enhance programs and pocket another $100.  Now you have $106 in your pocket that you just saved that you would have spent on online marketing anyway AND you have 12 months of professional ASP.net 2.0 AJAX ready hosting with full support for the .NET Framework 3.0 and the ability to run PHP5 (and PHP4 if you need it) as well as MySQL5 and MySQL4.  Oh and did I mention you have $106 in your pocket you would have spent on advertising?

Now my example said sign up for $99 a year plan like our asp.net hosting discount promotion and you’d get $325 in free offers so that translate into one year of reliable, professional webhosting and $226 of extra discounts and offers outside of the $99 you spent. So it’s not _A_ free rebate offer but rather a combination of several special offerings but when it’s all said and done, no matter what windows hosting account you sign up for, it’s a great deal!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Silverlight is Microsoft’s new cross browser, cross-platform web technology for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.  Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, Ruby and integrates easily with existing web applications.

Today Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac and Windows based operating systems.

Silverlight was previously code-named WPF/E. Applied Innovations has supported Silverlight hosting and the delivery of Silverlight based web applications since the release of .NET Framework 3.0 on all shared hosting, dedicated hosting and Windows VPS hosting plans are silverlight compatible and ready.

On Friday, Microsoft announced the release of Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate and the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh for both Windows and Macintosh based operating systems. If you haven’t experienced Silverlight now is a great time to install the browser plug-ins and experience it. If you have already installed an earlier version of silverlight then you’ll be happy to know it automatically installs updates for you.

What can I do with Silverlight and what are others doing?

Probably the best way to experience Silverlight, is to experience Silverlight. Many consider Silverlight as ‘Microsoft’s answer to Flash’ but it really goes beyond that. I do believe it builds on the idea of Flash but provides a very open API and really offers next generation technology.

Below is a demo of “Silverlight Airlines” a Silverlight based application showing just what you can do with Silverlight to develop a new rich user experience.

Silverlight Airline Sample

During a keynote at MIX this year, Scott Guthrie demo’d the power of silverlight with an Airlines example. Using managed code they were able to easily program Silverlight to create a rich user experience within the browser. you can view the demo online, download the code and even read David’s blog for more information about this sample.

NetFlix Next Generation Video-on-Demand player.

Also at MIX 07 this year, Netflix demonstrated a next generation video on demand player built in silverlight. The Netflix video player actually allows you to watch a video over the Internet with a friend in a different location. So while traveling you can start the video, link up with the Children back home and experience the same video experience over the Internet. You can learn more about the Netflix video by watching the online video.

This is just a sampling of what’s available using Silverlight, if you visit the Silverlight Showcase you can see more real-world Silverlight applications and even download the source code to begin building your own Silverlight applications around the ready made examples.

What do I need to run Silverlight applications?

To view silverlight applications today, you’ll need to install the Silverlight plug-in, currently available for Internet Explorer and Mozilla on both the Mac and PC.

What do I need to develop Silverlight applications?

You can begin developing on Silverlight today!  you’ll need to download the runtime and tools. If you’re using Javascript you can download the Silverlight 1.0 (RC) or the 1.1 Alpha release if you plan to use the .NET languages. For more information on these two different versions you can visit the features matrix.

Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate – Mac or Windows
The runtime required to experience Silverlight.

Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh – Mac or Windows
The runtime required to view Silverlight applications created with .NET

Microsoft ASP.NET Futures (July 2007)
This release includes Silverlight controls for ASP.NET

After you’ve installed that then you’ll want to download the Visual Studio developer tools to start developing Silverlight applications and the Expression designer tools to start designing your Silverlight application. For more information on these tools you can read the Silverlight overview.

The Silverlight Developer Tools:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
The next generation development tool.

Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha Refresh for Visual Studio (July 2007)
The add-on to create Silverlight applications using .NET

The Silverlight Designer Tools:

Expression Blend 2 August Preview
Professional design tool to create user interaction for Silverlight.

Expression Media Encoder Preview Update
Feature that will be part of Microsoft Expression Media that allows you to create and enhance video.

Expression Design
A professional illustration and graphic design tool to create Silverlight assets.

For Silverlight Documentation, samples and add-ins, you’ll probably want to download the SDK’s:

Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Software Development Kit Release Candidate
Download this SDK to create Silverlight Web experiences that target Silverlight 1.0 RC. The SDK contains documentation, samples along with templates for Visual Studio and has also a ?Go Live? license
that enables building commercial applications.

Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Software Development Kit Alpha Refresh
Download this SDK to create Silverlight Web experiences that target Silverlight 1.1 Alpha. The SDK contains documentation and samples.

You can Learn from samples and Documentation and Microsoft has made many of these available today:

Visit the Quickstarts to create your first application.
Download a sample from the Silverlight gallery.
Have a question? Visit the Silverlight Forums.
Read the Silverlight documentation.
Stay informed, subscribe to the Silverlight RSS feed.

The final puzzle piece: Silverlight Ready Hosting

Finally, you’ll need Silverlight Hosting and Applied Innovations is Silverlight hosting ready on all hosting plans. If you plan to use any of the Visual Studio 2008 features that make use of the beta .NET Framework 3.5, you’ll need to run these on a Windows VPS or Windows Dedicated Server today.  As always with beta releases we don’t deploy these on production servers but will make available Free Beta shared hosting servers shortly.

Developers are encouraged to try out our developer VPS hosting plan which is an ideal platform for testing new technologies like this!  With our developer VPS plan you’ll have full control of the operating system and be able to extend the server as needed for your application.

AppliedI.net is excited about the release of the new Silverlight 1.0 RC and 1.1 Alpha plug-ins and looking forward to watching Silverlight based websites develop in the coming months. We believe this technology will bring the Internet user experience to a new level and really expand on the adoption of Internet applications for mainstream applications. Today, Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming the new business model for applications and Silverlight will only encourage it’s adoption.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Over the past several months we have been working diligently to provide a new support portal for our hosting customers. At Applied Innovations we strive to provide not only the best technologies and tools to our hosting customers but to make these tools easy to use and our support knowledgebase is no exception to this commitment. 

What’s a Knowledgebase?

The knowledgebase (or KB as it’s also referred to) is a self-help support portal located at http://support.appliedi.net/. This portal provides thousands of articles and references for our hosting customers on everything from flash tutorials on how to setup email in Outlook to how to install and configure dotnetnuke.

Why the change? I liked the old system!

The old knowledgebase was great but overtime it began lacking features and functionality that we wanted to provide to our customers. An example of this is the auto-suggest feature in our knowledgebase. 

From within the knowledgebase if you go to http://support.appliedi.net and submit a new support ticket as you’re typing the support ticket message contents you’ll see a search results panel appear suggesting articles that the knowledgebase believes are related to your question.

 The image to the left shows 3 different suggestions based on body of my support request.

By providing this type of live feedback to our hosting partners you’ll have easy, instant access to the answers within the knowledgebase.

The new knowledgebase also does a full text search on articles providing better results and more accurate matches.

Auto-Suggest is a great feature but it’s not the only reason we selected this new system. We wanted a solution that would provide better integration of livechat and email support. With this new system you’ll be able to log into the support portal and see all your past livechat and email support requests.  We find that often the same client has the same question and by providing a support request history you’ll be able to search through your past support requests quickly and find the answer to that past question.

What’s to come?

The Applied Innovations knowledgebase (http://support.appliedi.net/) has been a key part of our hosting service since our initial webhosting launch in 1999. Over the years it has continued to be redesigned and improved upon and this is but the latest improvement. 

Our knowledgebase is accessed thousands of times each day from clients across the globe and is updated almost daily with new articles and information and we recommend you visit it frequently.

We hope the new changes to the knowlegebase are a welcomed addition to your hosting services.

[tags]appliedi.net, appliedi support, webhosting support, support knowledgebase, asp.net support[/tags]

Popularity: unranked [?]