Business Brunch with emerion

The office is located in the 16th floor of the tower which one is 138 meter high, containing 37 floors. It offers a beautiful view for the perfect vision, as well as an optimal infrastructure. “The rooms are flooded with light, and it is a very nice working environment for the employees,” says Bernd Hilmar, the CEO of emerion. “We look forward to work in a business park, where are also other companies, with whom we can work together.”

Emerion invited to a house warming party at the new office location and Bernd Hilmar welcomed the guests and presented the company. A pleasant get together ended with interesting conversations.

Is your business involved publishing a website that is rich with media elements like large videos and images? Then you must focus on the limit of monthly transfer and high storage capacity while searching the right web host.

If you are starting up an eCommerce website then it must require management of inventory and shopping cart. Look out for the web hosting service provider that provides easy installation of eCommerce software.

When you are building an online business, then it is better to look out for a host that includes simple documentation and a client’s forum where it is possible to interact with other customers and gather valuable information on the services.

You may come across some hosts that claim unlimited service on certain aspects at very cheap price, be aware of them. These hosts can be doing overselling by putting the patron on a server that cannot cover the entire allowed limits. Overselling is a widespread practice that boosts up earnings in the cheap shared hosting market. Mostly, the customers or patrons make use of just a little of the offered resources and do not recognize that they are on an oversold server.

There are many hosts that provider free domain name registration, but it is definitely advisable to work with a dedicated registrar for managing the domain names. If you find that your web host is not handling the domain names properly, then you can easily change to another host. However, most of the web hosts offer the basic services that one needs for a start-up online business. All you need to do is a little of research to get the best services at best price.

One very good example of a genuine web hosting service provider that you can use for your start-up online business is emerion. This provider hosts the sites not on a single server, but on a network of superior enterprise load a balanced server to make sure that it carries out excellent performance when the spikes of traffic are rising.

Letter of the Domain Renewal Group

The Domain Renewal Group is a company that uses similar tricks like the well known Domain Registry of America/Europe (DROA). The company sends out letters that look like invoices to the registrant of a domain which is due to renewal in a couple of months. The letter explains that the registrant has to renew his domain name if he wants to keep it. But taking a closer look, one can see it is just a bad offer to change the provider.

The message can be ignored if it was not actually sent by the provider that registered the domain. If the domain was not transferred in the meantime, it is only renewed by the current provider who registered the domain name.

If your domain was registered with emerion, or you transferred your domain to emerion, a renewal request may only be sent by emerion. You receive a renewal request if you use the domain parking feature and your domain name is not set on auto-renewal. If you use web hosting services from emerion, the domain name is renewed automatically.

The Domain Renewal Group acts like the Domain Registry of America (DROA). By paying the overpriced domain fee, you agree to transfer the domain to this provider. But without additional steps it does not work to transfer the domain name to another registrar. emerion as well as many other providers lock domains to avoid unwanted transfers.

Original letter of the Domain Renewal Group

Thus you need to be careful with these letters. If you pay the supposed domain fee, your money weill be gone and there is no way to get it back. At least the domain name cannot be lost that easily.

So if you receive letters like the one shown here you can safely throw it away.

Web browser: Gateway for Viruses

The web browser is the gateway to the internet to browse web pages, but cyber criminals are using the bugs of the software to make them the gateway for viruses. But not only the security leaks of web browsers are used by hackers, they also use vulnerabilities of the software installed on the hosted website.

Popular targets are well-known programs like Joomla, Wordpress or Typo3, but also Java script, which one is widely used for web 2.0 applications and user friendly interfaces.

Hackers are using cross site scripting to execute malicious code from a remote server.

What does malicious code do?

Hackers try to get control over the surfers computer with malicious code, so that the criminals are able to use it for their needs. In most cases they use it for spamming, but also for attacking other servers. The users PC will be added to a botnet, which is a seperate network controlled by the hackers.

Important: Regular Updates.

Actually there exists no software, which one has no security leak. Criminals try to detect such security leaks in well-known software, like in web browsers, because they can use it as gateways to install a virus on the victims computer. There are security leaks in software used for web sites, and it can be used to spread out a virus, because this sites are often visited with web browsers containing security leaks.

Once such a security leak is detected and officially confirmed, the software vendor publishes an update of the software. The most common problem is, that a lot of users do not implement the update. So the really important thing is, to update the browser immediately, once a new update is available from the vendor.

Updates of software used by the web site.

The software used by your web site is also very important. Every contact form or even a whole content management system you use, can have a security leak, where it is possible to execute malicious code. It is important to keep this software up to date all the time. Otherwise it may happen that you as operator of the web site become a distributor of viruses.

If you are just a surfer, you should keep your web browser up to date. If you operate a web site, you also have to take care to update the installed software on your web server.

What about the web hoster, shouldn’t he take care about security of the systems?

Reliable hosting companies like emerion operate all web hosting packages on well-maintained servers. The servers themselves have an operating system, which must be continuously maintained, as well as the server software and management software.

With a web hosting package the customer gets his own space on the server, where he can install his “own software”. This can be a popular script as well as a complex program. The variety of such scripts is very large, and so the possibility of security leaks, which can be abused by hackers.

Software installed by the customer on his own web space cannot be maintained by the web hoster. For the self installed programs the customer has to take care about updates.

Due to security leaks in scripts a customer installs on his web space, it could be possible that the hacker gets access to the whole server system, if the OS is not up to date, or if the system is not configured properly. Security has a high priority for emerion. The software, as well as the operating systems are always up to date. Basically the systems are configured that they are easy to use for the customer, but there is no possibility to break in. But this does not release the customer from the responsibility to maintain his self-installed software.

Clearance

Sometimes the web hosting industry is like a huge clearance. A lot of hosting providers advertise with increasingly cheap offers and they try to be better than their competitors by creating hosting plans with a spectacular amount of services.

As a customer sitting in front of the computer you can study all these offers, but it’s not easy to find out the key benefits.

So what should I expect from my web hosting company?

• The right price/performance ratio

There are some web hosting companies selling hosting plans very cheap with an huge amount of services you never can use. It’s not easy for a customer to find out, if the performance is really available as outlined in the commercial, as long as a usual website does not need the resources. If you really need such high resources, it is possible that the site slows down or the hosting is cancelled due to policy reasons. But also a technician who is operating his own server in the living room is able to sell a very cheap hosting. He has no costs for the data center, for the backup, for the failover power, and so it’s easy for him to offer a cheap product. But is it really reliable, as you expect it from a web hosting company? How much you like to spent for your domain name and your web hosting is always up to you, but you should be aware, that a reliable service is valueable and could not be that cheap.

• Availability of a helpful Support

Did you ever experience at hotline calls, that you were supported every time by another staff member and you have to explain your problem again and again from the beginning? If a support is not well organized, it is exhausting and could cost you a lot of additional money and time. It is important how you can reach the support. Is it available by email? Can I call for a local rate and do they speak my language fluently? How long is the turn around time of an inquiry? The support staff should be really helpful and they should be able to give you not only a default answer.

• Functionality

You register your own domain name, you publish your web site, you set up your email addresses to be available via email. Even a low priced product does not excuse , that the service is partially not available or you have to pay additional fees for the support.

emerion found a way to offer low priced products with service quality. The top hosting plans are hosted on the same high available shared system as the first quality-products. Even the support is available for these products without additional fees. There are just fewer services than in the first quality products, but you don’t buy a compact car to mutate it into a van.

The competitive hosting plans are available starting at
€ 1,98 p/month, domain name included!