Archive for category Newsletters

Yes, you’re seeing correctly. It’s actually 2 newsletters in 2 months. Don’t worry, I’ve contacted several experts and have been informed that this is not, in fact, a sign of an approaching apocalypse.

However….. The real fact of the matter is that not much is happening that you haven’t been informed about already. This, of course, makes it a little difficult to write up a nice long newsletter.

Upgrades for the operating system and the Plesk control panel are still in the works, and we’re looking at a more rubust and secure backup system to include in the upgrades. I’ll be sure to let you know before any of that actually happens.

We’re approaching the end of our first year in business, and we’re doing well. We’re not millionaires yet, but that’s okay. We’re willing to wait a few more weeks for that to happen.

All of us here are very happy with the way business is growing, and we’d like to thank you for picking us out of the swarm of other webhosts out there.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.

As the inaugural post for the new Geek News blog, I’m just reposting the last newsletter that was sent to you via e-mail. There is a bit of new information, so you might want to read through this again.

Hello again.

It’s me, your benevolent dictator…err.. I mean “company president” with yet another of my semi-annual newsletters.

The past few months have been busy for us, and the next few look just as busy. And that’s good. We’re keeping busy because we’re adding new customers. When starting up a new business, the conventional wisdom says: during the first year expect to lose money hand-over-fist, during the second year expect to fall short of a profit, during the third year you’ll be doing good if you break even. Well, we’ve been in business for under a year, and we’re actually making a little bit of money, and growing at a steady and maintainable rate. That’s fabulous!

That growth means we can work on improvements and upgrades. In the coming weeks, we’ll be looking at moving to newer, better servers. As part of this move, we’ll be upgrading our operating system, and the Plesk control panel as well. This migration may require that we take the servers offline for a short period, but we’ll do everything we can to keep that time to a minimum. I’ll make sure to give you ample warning, so you’re not caught by surprise.

I know that our growth hasn’t been without a few bumps along the way. I’d like to say “thank you” for your patience and understanding as we make our way through these growing pains.

You may have noticed that occasionally at night or in the early morning, you’ll see a “Plesk Default Page” instead of your site. This isn’t anything to worry about. As part of the back-up process, Plesk turns off your page for a few minutes. This is to ensure that it grabs a stable snapshot of the data.

The upgrade to Plesk 8.0 should significantly decrease the time these backups take. Right now, we’re arbitrarily scheduling the backups for during the night. If, however, you’re a night owl–or in a very different time zone from us–and would like your backups to be moved to a different part of the day, please let me know. I’ll do my best to accomodate any scheduling requests.

I’ve been pretty lax about sending out newsletters, and I’m going to change that; this will be the last newsletter that will be e-mailed to you….

…Instead, I’ll be installing I have installed WordPress on our site and am doing the updates there here.

In addition to keeping an archive of what I’ve said (uh oh… maybe this isn’t such a good idea…) WordPress has an RSS feed, so you can just plug the feed into your favorite RSS reader, and be notified when I post something new. The existing forums, however, will be going away. They really aren’t being used by anyone, so it’s not a huge loss.

At this point, I need to insert a new bit of information: One of the reasons I chose to get rid of the forums is phpBB’s lack of security. I knew that it had some pretty large holes through which hackers can gain access and corrupt the data. Well… it looks like I was prophetic in my concerns. Our forums fell prey to a hacker. The overwrote our data with their own, effectively deleting the forums and all the data contained within. A hacking of this type does not give the hackers access to any of the other data on the site or server. It just lets them destroy the forum they choose to vandalize.

Our Application Vault includes phpBB as one of it’s options. If you’ve chosen to install this, be aware that you are very suseptible to vandalism. This is not something over which we at Geek Niche have any control. This is a flaw in phpBB.

If you’re using phpBB, and are concerned about your data, please let us know, and we can work on setting up a special backup for the data. It will be up to you to let us know if your forums have been hacked, however.

For those of you who didn’t know, Geek Niche has a sister-site: geekniche.org (www.geekniche.org). gn.org is a little repository for WordPress themes and plugins, as well as a number of useful stand-alone applications. All of them are free to use as you want. Head on over and check out the shiney new layout I built over the weekend.

N.B. If you have WordPress installed on your site and haven’t upgraded to 2.x yet, I highly recommend you do so. 2.x is not yet available for the Application Vault, so we can’t offer it as a one-click install, but we’ll help you with upgrading if you need it (it’s really really simple). 2.x has added some wonderful security and anti-spam features–as well as a shiney new interface–that make it much safer and more robust.

That’s all for now. I’ll let you all know when the upgrdes are due.

—
M Blaze Miskulin
President