Hosting Invoice – Domain Renewal Letter is a SCAM

November 20th, 2012

It seems like it is 1999 all over again. Some of our customers and others we have spoken to are getting the Official looking Hosting Service bills and DNS or Domain Renewal or Domain change letters in the mail. Back in the day, this was a big problem and it appears the SCAM is cycling again.

NEVER renew a domain or even send money for Hosting Services from a letter you get in the mail or from a phone call. 98% of the time they are a SCAM

. Many of these letters are asking for you to sign and pay or sign, or just pay a hosting services or domain renewal and submit it back to them. The ones that are just asking for you to send money in for a bogus hosting service that sounda close to your current service or even mention your website name, is typically bogus. Once paid, your money is gone, you will never see that money again…it’s gone.

Some of these letters are so Official looking that you figure you should respond anyway. What some people do not do is read the small print or how it is worded, allowing them to TAKE control of your domain and lose it.

Find a company that  uses Domain Locking on all the domains it is in control of for no additional fees. This prevents random domain stealing. Check to see if your domain is locked and know who your domain Registrant really is. 

Not Sure who your hosting with or how holds the keys to your domain? Call your hosting company. Call YourHost.com if  they cannot answer the questions, regardless if you are a customer or not and our Technicians will help determine the validity of the letter and who is your real host and controlling registrant, like Tucows, Register.com, NetworkSolutions, enom, Godaddy, etc.

E – Staff 714 842-8511 Option 2 support

Sample of the Fraud Specimen

DNS Hosting Scam Invoice

Categories: Blogging, Talk

Letter from the President

October 30th, 2012

Since Monday night October 29th, 2012, our team at YourHost.com stands vigil to the citizens to the eastern seaboard.

The unprecedented natural disaster, displacement, death, destruction, and loss that is “uncommentable”. Having personally been in the middle of a natural disaster, this is not a short term thing. It will be going go on for many months looking forward.

None of understands why these things happen. One thing for sure: that our people as a city, state, nation are strong will stretch themselves again, and pull ourselves UP by it’s bootstraps.

We have several customers in the affected areas, including some of our competitors, which we will pray to the Lord for their well being and safety and willingness bonding as a community that pulls together.

How can you help? Donate directly to the Red Cross Text $$ donations To: 90999  put the words Red Cross in the send box. Text Visual image

Website Donate Link

#PrayForTheEast

E

 

Categories: General

How can you tell if they are they using Joomla or WordPress?

October 16th, 2012

First of all, what the heck is WordPress or Joomla?

These Open Sourced Content Managed Systems or CMS’s rapidly taking hold as the foundation  of the general website design for more and more companies, organizations, and churches.

What good are they? In a nutshell, they allow the organization to manage their website without hiring or having to be a full fledged designer.

Q. Do you still need a designer with a CMS?

A. It depends.

Q. When do you select one over the other or for that matter the other CMS systems out there?

A. Simply put, WordPress is designed as a Blog to be a website. You need to tweak the WordPress template to become almost anything you want it to be, but it can be costly.

There are thousands of developers and free and paid templates you can choose from that install with ease, and your off and running.

****Be careful, you can get stuck with an old, outdated, security riddled, templates that are no longer supported, so you may need a pro to find one for you and then it is not 100%. Even with a pro, you will be ultimately responsible for the upkeep of your WordPress template and design.

The majority of WordPress users work with the “out of the box templates”and will not modify or customize the site.

Then, there are the designers-developers, that find a template and fully customize it to do what they want it to do. WordPress also has tools called plug-ins that allow you to “Stretch” the WordPress capabilities.  get it ? It seems simple but can be complicated.

What is Joomla?

Joomla is a CMS that is designed to use templates as a webpage and through Plug-in’s and Modules. Pretty much, one picks Joomla to have the ability to expand the site with many different elements in it.

How do you tell the difference?

There are tell-tail ways to see if the site you are looking at is a WordPress or Joomla. This is a rule of thumb and large corporations find ways of masking these login’s for obvious reasons.

You can type in either – “/wp-admin” or “/administrator” after the main domain name and a WordPress or Joomla logo will appear with a login spot. If you get an error, then it is probably not either one.

I.E.

http://domainname.com/wp-admin (for WordPress)

http://domainname.com/administrator (for Joomla)

 

YourHost.com designs traditional websites or in Joomla or WordPress.

Try it….

E

 

 

 

 

 

Pinterest, Gaining Social E-commerce Traction?

September 24th, 2012

In recent years, social e-commerce has been rapidly evolving. We are constantly being bombarded with new information and by nature of “overload-protection”, we tend to discount or delay the review of these new social tools until they become mainstream.

Today’s business marketing, specifically in the e-commerce climate takes multiple ways to effectively market your products or services and a essential part of marketing are social tool.

For example you may devote the following percentages – 15% Emails, 2% FB, 5% Blog, 4% Twitter, 2% RSS, 3% Forum,
and now Pinterest?

Keep your social antennas up at all times and quantify what works for you, along with how much time and resources you need to devote to Emails, Facebook, Blogs, Video media, YouTube, Twitter, etc. They are becoming vital parts of the marketing picture. Some or all will work for you and some are a complete waste of time and resources. Some of these tools are now a part of the cost of doing business.

Pinterest, the brainchild of, Ben Silbermann, born into a family of doctors in the Mid West ((Des Monies, Iowa) , influenced by his childhood hobby of pinning insects and bugs of all kinds on a piece of cardboard, drying them, tagging them, and putting them in shadow boxes. Sound familiar? …it should it is the basis of Pinterest pinning

Pinterest, on the outside looks like a new flavor of “Instagram”, but it is much more than that under the hood. Pinterest has devised a better way to organize what I would call “Visual Emotions Commerce”.  According to Fast Company Magazine, currently, 80% of Pinterest users are influential Women buyers, but that is also changing as it imbeds itself into the mainstream.

Across the web, the average sale resulting from a Pinterest user following an image back to its source and then buying the item is a $180 sale, according to research from the e-commerce firm RichRelevance, compared with $80 for FaceBook users and $70 for Twitter users.

In short, Pinterest has been well thought out and is a place where one can relate emotionally-charged images and thread them into an e-commerce conversions. 

New ShopSite Pinterest Feature for YourHost.com Customers!

 

Pinterest is great for sharing recipes, fashion trends, gifting ideas, decorating ideas and so forth.  It does this by “pinning” to your Pinterest page a photo of, say, the finished dish for a recipe, thereby sharing it.

ShopSite Ecommerce, hosted by YourHost.com has Pinterest integration, along with Facebook and WordPress, and other social integrations.

To web savvy person can place HTML code on your pages for Facebook “Like” buttons or Twitter “Tweet” buttons.  If you are using ShopSite v11 sp2, then from within ShopSite you can tell it to automatically put the “follow me on Pinterest” image on your pages and the “Pin it” button on your More Info (product) pages.  To enable these buttons, go to Merchandising > Social Media > Pinterest.  Once there, you’ll get the configuration screen (shown below) to select what you want.

 

Streaming Media and it’s Role

More and more products have demo or visual videos, some from YouTube, and some hosted on a CDN like YourHost.com. I think both are necessary. YouTube keeps it social, and in-house media keeps it more professional and predicable. See the 3 reasons to be cautious with YouTube.

You were asking for more HTML5 ready adaptive skins and here they are … See them here

Have a topic you want to read about?

Let us know what you want to hear from your Internet provider?

YourHost.com staff writers

Sources – DHills,ShopSite, Fast Company

SAM Broadcaster

September 21st, 2012


We have been hosting Live Streaming for since 1997 with our first Radio Broadcast from a phone booth in Warez Mexico, that’s 2million years in internet time.
What does that mean to you. :D ?

We have skill along with a killer backbone, support group, and solid network so your radio station can be cleanly streamed around the world with continuous clean speed.

We thought it might be good to let you know that we have started hosting SAM Broadcasting users. Low key…Were here if you want call or email us.
Audio or Video

714 842-8511 ext 115

Eric Kirkhuff / The Streaming Guy