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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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]