Archive for category Newsletters

Happy New Year!

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these.  And, for that I apologize.  But it’s not (entirely) because I’ve been lazy.  Nope!  I’ve been busy.  In the past few months, our client base has grown–and grown quite well, I might add.  We’ve lost a few clients, and we’re sorry to see them go, but that’s the way business works.  The main thing is that we’re moving forward and getting bigger.

The Good

As I said, we’ve been growing.  We’ve also been adding to our services and tweaking the ones we already have.  A large part of our growth has come from the launch of our Small Biz Niche package.   The Small Biz Niche allows businesses to enter the world of company websites, without a huge overhead or time commitment.

Just today, I was reading an article that says “46 percent of small businesses surveyed said they did not have a website“.  My question is “Why not?!”  For only $120, you can have a powerful, easy-to-use company website.   That’s less than a small ad in a weekly newspaper.

The Bad

Google still hasn’t offered us a bazillion dollars to buy out our company.  {sigh}  Maybe next week.

We’re not perfect.  On occasion, things go wrong, and we don’t always catch them when they do.  That’s where we rely on you guys.  If something isn’t working the way you think it should be (or has in the past), drop us an e-mail or send an IM.  Let us know.

Recently, an upgrade to our system software caused a strange glitch in webmail.   A customer got a hold of me over IM and let me know.  It was fixed within a few minutes.  No problem.   Later that day, I was talking with another client, and she mentioned that she’d been having that problem for “a while”.  Ack!  Had we known about it, we could have fixed it earlier.

Please please don’t be afraid to give us a friendly nudge to let us know if something’s wrong.   Sometimes it’s a quick fix, sometimes it’s a serious issue–either way, we want to fix it!   And… to be honest, sometimes is your fault.  But we’ll let you know, and maybe we’ll even be able to help.

The Ugly

We’ve also been dealing with some not-so-pleasant stuff.

Y’know how I said “sometimes it’s your fault” a few seconds ago?  Well, that can be a bit problem.   We had been having issues with repeated infections of a couple sites.  Paul was right on top of it and stamped out the nasty bugs as quickly as the cropped up.  But they kept cropping up!  He was finally able to track down the problem:  one of our clients had her personal computer infected by a virus that was stealing her passwords (and who knows what else!).   The black-hats kept getting in because they had the keys.  This is our worst nightmare (okay… not the worst–that would be the one where we’re forced to watch a musical remake of Twilight starring David Hasselhoff and Rosanne Barr–but it’s pretty high up the list).

Please make sure that your anti-virus is up to date.   We don’t want to have to cut off your service.

And the Frog Prince

Hey, we can’t end on an ugly note!

A lot of our ideas come from our users, and a lot of the improvements we make are are inspired by questions, suggestions, and yes, even complaints our customers have.   We like that!  We like to hear from you–and not just when things are wrong. 

During some random conversations with friends and co-workers, we’ve come up with a couple ideas for new products.  Since you already know who we are and how we work, I thought I’d ask your opinion.

Kid’s Niche:

A very small, very inexpensive website built on WordPress and designed specifically for the 10-to-15-year-old market.   We’d price it low enough to encourage parents to get the kids to pay for it with their own money.  And we set up the parent as the site admin–full and complete control of the site–so that they can keep track of what their child is doing.   There’s a lot of concern about social networking sites and kids; parents are afraid of who’s out there, and how little control they have.  This would give the kids something of their own, while allowing the parents to watch what’s happening and step in if need be.

Freelancer’s Clearinghouse:

We know a lot of geeks.  A LOT of geeks.  And, like everyone, those geeks are often looking for a way to pick up a little extra cash.  We’ve been tossing around the idea of bringing these freelancers under our roof and letting them put their services up for bid.   Is this something you’d like to see:   Designers, coders, artists, photographers, and techs available for hire through a list provided here on Geek Niche?

Let us know what you think.  Let us know what you want  (from us–hopefully that’ll cut down on the smart-ass replies).

OMG!! A NEWSLETTER!!

THE END IS NIGH!!

yeah yeah.  I know.  It’s been forever.

That doesn’t mean we haven’t been working for you.  Actually, we’ve been working quite a bit, but none of it was anything sexy or exciting (unless you have a fetish for billing software updates…)

Doing Business

Many of you are business owners–some large, some small.  You understand that running a business involves making difficult decisions–and then living with the consequences.  When we started this business over 4 years ago, we did so with the intent of making things easy for our customers.  (Okay… we did it with the hopes of getting filthy stinking rich, but we wanted to get that way by making things easy for our customers.)  One of the choices we made was to go with the Plesk Control Panel.  Plesk wasn’t one of the more popular control panels out there, but we felt it was the best choice for our clients:  powerful, but simple to use.

Plesk was a small company and experienced some growing pains.  Then it got bought up by another company–which also bought up our billing software company.  Now, Parallels is working very hard to make Plesk a single-source solution for webhosting.  But… this has meant more growing pains.  Paul has been working continually with the Parallels team to work out the kinks in the system.   You haven’t seen any of this.  For you, things have been running along like they’re supposed to.   And that’s exactly the way we want it.

A Two Man Cavalry

I had an incident today that–after the fact–made me stop and look at what it is we do.

I got a call from Pat, the local computer fix-it guy.   A local business discovered that their website had been hacked.  Severely.  These people know very little about computers, but they know that they depend on their website to bring them business.   They called their webhost to ask for help, and were told “that’s not our problem, fix it yourself”.  They called Pat, and he called me to say that the was sending their buisiness my way.   I stopped by their office, talked to the owners, and told them that we could have their site cleaned up and transferred in a couple days.  The only hold-up would be getting login information from their current host.

Most webhosts don’t care about your troubles.  If your site is hacked, that’s your problem, not theirs.  They will, however, be quick to turn off your site if they feel that it’s going to hurt their servers.  If they offer any help at all, it’ll certainly cost you a fat hourly fee.

Paul and I don’t work that way.  If your site is hacked or down, you lose business.  We want you to be successful and make a lot of profits (because that means you’ll need a bigger website, and we get to make more profits from that).   Geek Niche gives away thousands of dollars in free tech support every year.   And not just basic stuff; Paul has spent long hours digging through security logs and site code to find diabolical hacks that are affecting our customers.   Other hosts charge up to $100/hour to do this–if they’ll even do it at all.   On more than one occasion, we (okay… mostly Paul) have put in 10 to 15 hours tracking down hacks, cleaning code, patching the holes, and letting the customer know what’s going on.  We’ve spent even more time taking what we’ve learned and protecting our other clients before they fall victim to these hacks.

I’m not saying all this just to brag.  Many of you have never had a website before.  You’ve never had to deal with other webhosts.  So you may not realize that the way we work isn’t normal.  Yes, we’re abnomal–but in a good way!

We’re a small business.  We know all of you by name.  We appreciate that you’ve chosen us to host your websites.  We just hope that the appreciation goes both ways.

A Babe in the Mix

We’ve recently added a new personality to the mix here at Geek Niche.   We now have an accounting department:  and her name is Michelle.  Michelle has graciously volunteered (yes, volunteered) her services as our accounting department.  She loves playing with numbers and actually knows what she’s doing (she has far more experience and knowledge than I do).  She’s already helped to find places where we can reduce costs without affecting service at all.   That makes us very happy.

On the other hand, she’s also going to be our  new billing enforcer.  If you’re naughty and don’t pay your bills, she’ll be the one who’ll come knocking on your (electronic) door.  Oh… did I mention that she likes to wrestle for fun?  We like Michelle:  It means both Paul and I get to play “good cop” on the rare occasion that we have a problem.

Gettin’ Googled

It hasn’t been officially added to the order forms yet, but we’re working on a new service for those of you who are running business sites.  The “Google Pack” sets up a suite of Google applications for your website.  We will create a Google account (which is yours to keep if you should ever be so foolish as to leave us).  This account will include:

• A Google calendar embedded in your website so people can keep up with regular goings on and special events.
• Setting up your business in Google Maps, so you’re included in map searches and business searches
• A custom Google map embedded in your website so people can instantly get directions to your place of business
• Share documents with employees and others with Google Docs
• Instantly communicate with employees, customers, vendors, and others using Google Talk.
• As an add-on:  Creation of a Google AdWords campaing.    Advertise your site on Google for pennies a day.  AdWords sites show up in the side bar of Google searches as well as on other sites showing Google ads.  (Google AdWords requires extra payments directly to Google.  Talk to us about how to budget your advertising.  As  little as $10/month can greatly increase your business exposure.)

If you run a business, Google can provide some very powerful tools to help promote it.  Let us help you make your business grow online.

Referral Program

Just a reminder:  If you refer someone to us, you earn a reward.  If you refer someone to us and they stay with us for at least a year (or pre-pay for an entire year), we’ll take 10% of their bill off of yours.   So, if they’re paying $5/month, you get a 50 cent credit.  If they’re paying $20/month, you get a $2 credit.  Sign up enough friends, and your site will be free.

Happy New Year!

No… it’s not January.   But it  is almost 1 year since I’ve posted a newsletter.

Okay… before you start yelling at me, let me explain:

Nothing really happened during the spring and summer.   And while I may like the sound of my own voice, I didn’t think you’d want to listen to me ramble on about utterly irrelevant stuff just so that I could fill up space.   In the late fall, we started a slow migration to a new Data Center and new servers.   Except for a few people who have special requirements, we didn’t advertise this.  It has been, however, an upgrade for everyone.   After that, to be perfectly honest, I’d gotten out of the habit of writing newsletter posts.   Sorry.

But now I’m back!  And I even have news!

New Servers

As I said, we’ve moved to a new Data Center and new servers.  On a day-to-day basis, this really doesn’t mean anything to you. Things will continue to chug along as they have in the past.   However, the move has opened up some great new possibilities for all of you.

The new DC allows us to offer dedicated servers at a very affordable rate.  What’s a dedicated server?  It’s a room of your very own.  Right now, most of you are on a shared server.   That’s typical for web-hosting.  It means that you’re sharing space and resources with other clients–like roommates in an appartment; you each have your own room, but you share the kitchen, bathroom, laundry, etc.  That’s not a bad arrangement.  Everyone gets their own space, but the expenses are shared.    The problems arise when things aren’t shared equally–or when one person needs more than everyone else.

On a shared server, everyone shares the resources.  If one person hogs the bathroom, everyone else suffers.  On the flip side, in order to make it fair for everyone, we have to limit how much time each person can spent in the shower.

A dedicated server solves that.  It’s your own place.  Yes, it’s a little more expensive, but if you really need your own space, it’s more than worth it.  A dedicated server means that it’s all yours.  No sharing with anyone.  Use it however you want, there’s nobody to complain.   That’s right…  the bathroom is all yours!

The other advantage of a dedicated server is scalability.  As we grow, we have more and more customers who don’t fit into the pre-fab boxes that most web-hosts (including us) provide.  If you’re operating multiple websites or websites that are–or might be–growing, a dedicated server might be what you’re looking for.  Going back to the “house” metaphore, a dedicated server is a “stretchy” house.  It can grow when you need it to.  Need more room?  Need more utilities?  Not a problem.  We can take care of it in a matter of minutes.

Dedicated servers aren’t for everyone, but if you think you might want one, let us know.  We’ll work with you to find the best solution.

Tweet?

Are you on Twitter?  If so, you might want to follow us.  We’ve set up a Twitter account under the name “geekniche”.  We’ll be using Twitter to send out quick updates about server status, maintenance times, and other issues (but NOT what we’re having for breakfast).

Empire of the Geek

For a while now, Geek Niche has been working on projects besides our basic web-hosting.  Both Paul and I have projects that we want to pursue, so we’ve expanded our range to include the Geek Niche Projects.  If you–or someone you know–are looking for something special, but don’t now where to go, take a look at the Projects page.  We just might have something that fits.  And if not…?  We’ll create it!

There’s more news, but I’ll save it until next month.

Yep, it’s time for the monthly newsletter (published semi-randomly).

For those of you who are using WordPress as your CMS, there’s a new version out: 2.5 It was just released this weekend. I’ve upgraded one of my sites to use WP 2.5, and I’ve been poking around to see how it works. This upgrade includes some major changes, so I’m going to suggest that you not upgrade unless you really know what you’re doing. It’ll take a while before I’m ready or able to offer any tech support for this version, so if you do choose to upgrade right away, you’ll be on your own for a while.

Speaking of WordPress and upgrades… I couple weeks ago I said I’d be doing some upgrading of this site and pulling it all into a WP CMS. Well… I got distracted and spent my time helping clients, so that didn’t get done all the way. Today is a cold rainy day with nothing going on, so I’m going to work on getting that completed today. If you find any problems with the site, please let me know. Also… If you have any suggestions on how to improve the site, please send them my way. One of the suggestions that we’ll be implementing is a page for current customers. This will have links to log into your control panel and billing accounts.

Over the past few years, we’ve gained a couple customers who are infamous for “breaking things” or finding the limitations in our system. This happened again last week. We discovered that the system breaks down if you try to purchase 2 packages on the same account. If you would like to do this, don’t worry. We can accommodate you. We just have to go in and tweak a couple things by hand. Just let us know you want to do this, and we’ll make sure that it’s set up and ready to go for you. And, of course, that goes for any problems or “non-standard” situations you might find yourself in with our service. We’re more than happy to tweak things in order to make it work better.

One big piece of news from behind the scenes: Parallels (the people who make the Plesk control panel we use) have just bought ModernBill (the billing & sign-up software we use), so there’s a good chance that the integration will improve and make things faster and easier for both us and you.

Thanks to all of you who’ve chosen Geek Niche.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President & Town Crier
Geek Niche, Inc.

Okay… I’m a little late. But at least it’s here!

We’ve been busy while we’ve been gone. We’ve been adding new clients, helping existing clients expand, and doing the stuff we normally do. We’ve also been expanding. There are two new Geek Niche projects out there. Both are fledgling projects, so there’s not much there, but they are up and running and ready for customers.

The first project is PhotoNiche.org Photo Niche is a specialty site designed for photographers and models. It currently has 2 versions: the Gallery and the Light Table. The Gallery is for showing off photos to everyone. It’s a great way for models and photographers to have an inexpensive site where they can store and display their work. The Light Table is a special storage site that allows photographers to upload images for specific clients only. If you don’t now the name of the file, you can’t see it.

The second new project is VoteNiche.org (are you sensing a theme here?) Vote Niche is a political site dedicated to local and state elections and candidates. Candidates can create a well-crafted and easy to update web presence without needing any knowledge of code. Integrated blogs allow the candidates to present their ideas and platforms, while the public forums allow both candidates and voters to debate the topics at hand.

These projects are just two more ways we’re tying to take over the world provide useful niche products for our customers.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.

Happy September!

(Did that work? No? Rats!)

I know that it’s been a long time since I’ve written one of these. For September and the first half of October, nothing was going on, and I figured you didn’t want to sit there and read my silly ramblings. Then… things started to change behind the scenes, and I wanted to wait until various details were worked out before talking about them.

Your Account

First off, Paul has been doing some serious work on upgrading and improving the quality of the invoicing section. For those who don’t remember from the original e-mails you received when you signed up, you can look at all your invoicing, pay an invoice, change contact and credit card information, view your account details, and more.

It’s all available on your ModernBill Account Page. The username and password should be the ones you supplied when you first signed up.

Also, as full account holders, you have a lot of control over your account; e-mail addresses, databases, subdomains, web-user accounts, Ap-Vault installations…. the list is rather long. You can access all of this via the Plesk Control Panel. Again, the username and password should be the some ones you supplied when you first signed up.

If you can’t log into either of those sections, please let us know. We can provide a temporary password to get you into these sections. You should then be able to set a new password.

The emergency page has moved.

In the very rare occasion that the Geek Niche servers are all off line (tsunami, nuclear apocalypse, breaking of the 7th Seal, etc.) we’ve set up a Geek Niche emergency page. This page is entirely independent of our servers and even our data center (the place where all our servers are kept). I have generously offered the pathetic excuse for “web hosting” offered by my ISP as our emergency page (it’s not like it’s good for anything else). Well… I’ve changed ISPs recently, which means that my “personal web page” (pardon me while I stifle my giggles) has changed, also. The new Geek Niche Emergency Page is located at: http://webpages.charter.net/geekniche

If you have reason to believe that our servers have been taken over by hostile alien invaders (or something) check the emergency page for information.

A new addition to the family

Geek Niche is always looking for more an better ways to serve the needs of our clients and our potential clients. As part of this, we’ve launched a new site dedicated to photographers and models. It’s called PhotoNiche.org Currently, it offers a couple very simple, but effective, solutions to models and photographers who are looking for a web presence that offers more features, customization, and security than the various free sites out there.

PhotoNiche is still in its infancy, but we expect it to grow into a strong and vital member of the Geek Niche family.

On a more serious note

The biggest news (and the most important reason this newsletter has been delayed for a while) is a change in our roster. Barry Bonds will be replace by Brett Favre as the goalie…. oh… wait… I’m getting all confused. The real change is that Jason has decided to step down from his position as Vice President and owner. His resignation will take effect January 1st, 2008. Jason’s put a lot of hard work into this company, and still believes in it, but has decided that his family comes first (especially since it seems to be growing faster than the company). He’ll continue working with us for a while as a consultant and secondary administrator, however, so things will continue on smoothly during the transition.

And in conclusion….

…I’d like to thank the Academy… oh…. wait…. wrong speech.

So… yeah… Umm… Have a happy holiday season.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President & Royal Scribe
Geek Niche, Inc.

Hello once again.

As usual, the summer months have been fairly quiet. And, as usual, we consider that to be a good thing. Personally, I figure that the less you hear from us, the better things are.

There’s been a couple upgrades and tweaks going on behind the scenes which you might want to be aware of. First of all, Plesk as been upgraded again, and that means that some of the items in the Application Vault have been upgraded as well. It doesn’t look like there are any new applications, however.

In regards to applications and upgrades: An unfortunate aspect of the internet is the evolution of annoyance. There are a lot of people out there who are too smart and too bored for their own good. They spend their days thinking up new ways to attack websites and the servers that host them. And once they find a way, they tell their friends… and pretty soon it’s out in the wild for any punk with a computer to try out. This means that applications which were perfectly secure a year ago are now wide open to serious attacks. Those attacks affect everyone on the server. While we’re continually vigilant about what’s happening, we can’t be everywhere at once. As owner of a website, it’s partly your responsibility to keep your applications up-to-date.

Right now, our biggest dangers are Gallery and phpBB. If you aren’t running the latest version of either of these, I strongly encourage you to upgrade. If we find that one of your applications is presenting a security risk to the server, we may have to delete it. We really don’t want to do that. Just go to the website of the application, download the latest copy, and follow the instructions. Usually, it only involves uploading the new files over the top of the old ones and then clicking a couple buttons.

As part of our recent security upgrades, we’ve setup some new “rules” for the servers to follow. This could possibly affect some of the applications you’re running. If you notice any problems with any of your applications, let us know and we’ll tweak things to make it work.

Other than that, I hope your summer is going well.

See you next month.

—
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc

Hey there!

I hope you’re all keeping cool during this sweltering start to the summer. I live in Wisconsin; we’re built to handle 40-below temperatures and feet of snow. This hot & muggy stuff is brutal.

I actually have some things to talk about this month. Isn’t that a shocker?

We’ve had a few “black hats” sneaking around in the digital alleyway spray-painting the walls and throwing stones at the windows. Paul & Jason have been on top of things, however, and beat off the intruders with virtual baseball bats.

Hacking is a serious problem. Every server out there is constantly being hammered by everything from script-kiddies to serious threats. Last week the Department of Homeland Security revealed that they had 800 successful incursions into their servers over the last 2 years. We’ve had 3. And in each case, it was discovered within hours and shut down with little or no damage. If you look at it mathematically, we’re 266.6 times more secure than the Dept of Homeland Security!

If you ever suspect that your site has been hacked contact us right away. Catching the hack early not only means minimizing any damage, but also finding out how they got in and plugging the hole. The fact that we’ve been able to catch every one of the hacks within hours, and only 1 actually did any damage is a testament to the diligence and skill of the two guys handling the technical side of things.

In happier news: Geek Niche is going public! For the last 2 years, we’ve gotten almost every customer by word of mouth. That we’ve gotten as many as we have is a big boost to our egos. Well, on July 3rd, we’re running our first public advertisement. We’ve bought the sidebar ad on Something Postivive. The fun part is that we have no idea what it’s going to look like!

For those of you that don’t know, Something Positive (S*P) is a webcomic. It’s a cynical, scathing, sometimes rude and always funny webcomic. The author does custom-designed ads using characters from the comic. When I contacted his advertising manager, I gave him information on who we are, what we do, and what our attitude is (“we’re not afraid to make fun of ourselves”), and told him to do whatever he wanted.

Okay… I’m just a little bit scared.

Even though we’re doing the whole “real advertising” thing, word of mouth is still our best advertising. And we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is: we have our kick back rewards program in place. Recommend someone to us for hosting and, after 3 months, you’ll get 10% of their hosting fee credited to your account. They just have to e-mail us and let us know who recommended them to us. If you like what we’re doing for you, send your friends our way–you could end up getting your hosting for free!.

Happy Independence Day to all you Americans. And for those who don’t care to celebrate that, may be one of the other holidays this month will be more your style…

Fireworks Safety Month
Light the Night for Sight Month
Anti Boredom Month
Baked Bean Month
Hot Dog Month
National Ice Cream Month
July Belongs to Berries Month
Purposeful Parenting Month
Recreation and Parks Month
Tennis Month
Adopt a Rescued Rabbit Month

Therapeutic Recreation Week (1-7)
Coral Reef Awareness Week (15-21)

Or any one of the many many holidays celebrated around the world.
(Check out the Earth Calendar for more holidays)
–
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.

Yay! Summer is here! (Unless you’re in the southern hemisphere, in which case: Yay! Winter is here!).

Last weekend marks 2 years in business for Geek Niche. That’s like 397 in web-years. I’m very proud to say that, of the few customers who have left us, not one has said it was because we weren’t doing a good enough job. It’s a simple fact of business that you can’t make everyone happy, and some people are going to complain no matter what. The fact that we haven’t a customer like that in 2 years is really impressive. Thank you.

There’s been a number of little tweaks going on behind the scenes in the last month. Nothing huge, just minor upgrades and improvements. One weird side-effect of this has been some “wonkiness” with the billing schedule. Some of you may have noticed that you received two invoices rather close together within the last month. This is a result of our billing software finally catching up since the major upgrade we did earlier in the year. Because of the timing of some invoices and our desire to make sure that things went as smoothly as possible for you, some people weren’t invoiced between late February and Early April (this would be the March billing cycle). The billing software did a little bit of catch-up in May, and this resulted in the May and June invoices coming rather close together. If you think you’ve been billed in error, I’d ask that you first check your credit card statements to see if you may have skipped a payment earlier. If you don’t have your records, or have questions about your billing, let me know. I can give you a list of payments received over the last 6 months.

It looks like smooth sailing for the next month. We don’t have any major upgrades or changes planned.

On a completely unrelated note: Congratulations to our partner Jason and his wife, Thea, on the birth of their 2nd son, Johnathan.

Now… it’s summer… shut off your computer and go outside! You know… That big room with the blue ceiling? Yeah. That one. GO!

Well, it’s May 1st now, and not a whole heck of a lot is happening at the Geek Niche ranch. So I won’t bother rambling on like I normally do about obscure things. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, it’s spring time, and we should all be outside enjoying the spring weather… the sun, the flowers, the random storms, the occasional hurricane…. y’know… all those things that make spring time special.

Until next time, here’s hoping that your month properly proportional of sun and rain, and that your life doesn’t get too interesting in the wrong ways.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.