Enertiahost Blog

Here’s an interesting article from BBC news on how a radio reporter helped track down the bad guys.

“The mastermind of a “vast international spam network” has been ordered to pay a fine of $15m (£10m) by US courts.” – BBC News

Estimates are that 90% or more of all email is spam. We do our best here at Enertiahost – in the face of overwhelming odds - to deal with spam. We have a couple of different filtering systems in place, and we feel like we’re catching a very high percentage of spam email (as well as virus/malware).

However it’s still good news when people who are “the number one worst spam gang on the internet” get caught and prosecuted. It’s estimated in the BBC article we link to above that these guys may have been responsible for one third of the planet’s junk email. Here’s how the numbers look for that:

Statistics, extrapolations and counting by Radicati Group from August 2008 estimate the number of emails sent per day (in 2008) to be around 210 billion. That means about 2.5 million messages are sent every second. It’s hard to believe, but those numbers indicate that the spammers in this story were sending 70 BILLION messages a day.

One of the most frequent requests we get here at Enertiahost (and our sister company Web Host Canada) is for duplicate invoices and/or a complete account history. This is often needed for tax purposes.

The good news is that you can retrieve and print this information for yourself whenever you want from the control panel. Simply log in and click on “Billing Statement”. You’ll see a list of all your transactions with Enertiahost from newest to oldest. Click on the one you need, press the printer icon at the top right, and you’re done!

Take some time to play around with the control panel. It’s very robust and allows you to do everything you need to manage your account with us.

A couple of stories here from the BBC indicating that people are still falling for phishing schemes.

Hotmail

Gmail

It obviously bears repeating; NEVER give out your username and/or password to anyone. Ever. Not by phone, email, snail mail or in person.

Legitimate companies will never solicit you for your personal information, so assume that if you are ever contacted and any personal information is requested that it is a scam.

Here’s a really cool and useful new tool from Google. All you have to do is insert a small code snippet into your HTML and it will detect the language preference in your visitors browser. If it determines that their preferred language is something other than English, it will prompt them to push a button an have the entire thing translated into their language of choice.

It’s no substitute for professional translation, but it’s pretty great for free.

One of the questions we get asked most here at Enertiahost is “How do I get to the top of the Google rankings” Our answer is usually something like “If you figure it out, let us know and then write a book. You’ll be rich.”

Truly, search engine optimization (SEO) for websites is a business unto itself. Getting to the top and staying there is the goal of every website owner on earth. It’s an exhaustive topic, and NOBODY has all the answers. If they tell you they do, they’re lying.

But we have to start somewhere. With that in mind we’d like to point you in the direction of this video featuring Matt Cutts of Google. In it, he explains how Meta Keywords are not used at all by Google for their page rankings. This isn’t so much a “what to do” as it is a “what you don’t need to waste time on”.

We have the same goals for enertiahost.com as you have for your site. As we discover tricks and tips, we’ll post them here, so check back often or subscribe to the Enertiahost RSS feed.

If you are a Windows user, it would be a good idea to investigate this offering from Microsoft.

You will have to be proactive  because “It’s not being included as part of the operating system or as an automatic update,” said Cliff Evans, head of security and privacy at Microsoft UK.