Customising HostPay

Customising HostPay


From our hotly anticipated video series on how to customise a HostPay template, i’m pleased to announce the release of the second installment.
In this video you’ll find out how to create gradient images, change the background colours of page elements, changing bullet styles and also how to change button colours.
In the third and final installment of this video series, we’ll be finishing off the skinning of the front-end template and also how to make changes within the control panel. Part 3 will be coming soon!
As usual, all the videos can be found within the video section of your customer control panel or alternatively you can check out our YouTube channel (Make sure you subscribe to be the first to know about new video releases).
Remember, you need to have HostPay installed before you can follow this tutorial, luckily we have a demonstration on that as well!

Any questions or feedback please leave them in the comments box below!

Refer a friend payments doubled

Until the end of October we are doubling the amount we will credit you for referring a brand new web hosting customer to us. This covers the Starter Pro, Home Pro and Business Pro products, and runs up to (and including) 31st October.

Up to £60 per referral
Choose between Amazon vouchers or Heart Internet credit and we will now pay you…

Product	Amount
Starter *Doubled*	£10 £20
Home *Doubled*	£20 £40
Business *Doubled*	£30 £60
Reseller	£40
Dedicated server (dual core)	£50
Dedicated server (quad core)	£60

Referring a friend
Log in to your Heart Internet control panel and go to ‘Refer a friend‘. Type in the email address of the person you want to refer to us and click the ‘Refer a friend now’ button. That’s all there is to it!

Read more about our web hosting refer a friend program or log in to your customer control panel and refer a friend to us!

Free web hosting CSS/ HTML template (plus newsletter template)

Free web hosting CSS/ HTML template (plus newsletter template)


We have converted another one of our HostPay templates in to a HTML/ CSS template and thrown in an exclusive newsletter template (using the same branding) for good measure! The web template comes with a home page, product page and generic content page and is fully W3C compliant. The newsletter has been tested across the likes of Outlook, Hotmail Yahoo and Google and looks pretty darn good in all of them. Here are some screenshots…

Home page

Product page

Newsletter

You are free to use them for personal or commercial purposes, however you are not permitted to copy, display or engage in any licensing, sub-licensing or distribution of the template. This essentially means you can’t copy the template to your website and offer it as a download yourself or distribute it amongst your customers/ members.

Go here to download all the files for this free web hosting template and newsletter.

6 steps to writing a newsletter that people will read

6 steps to writing a newsletter that people will read


A couple of years ago we re-launched the Heart Internet customer newsletter to great success. All the metrics we use to benchmark newsletters went through the roof; open rates, click through rate, conversions and revenue. Here’s the approach we took to make this happen.
Before we get on to the ‘how’, I’d like to quickly touch on the ‘why’. Customer newsletters, in my opinion, should be a no brainer. A good newsletter that is sent regularly will increase sales and revenue for immediate purchases, keep you in contact ready for future purchases and provide customers something to pass on and share.
1. Segment your customer base
If you sell multiple products which are targeted at different audiences don’t group them all in to one mailing list. Each audience has different levels of knowledge, different motivators and varying degrees of interest in a subject. A newsletter that goes to all your customers is only partially relevant to each segment.
2. Content that benefits them
A newsletter is not an excuse to copy and paste your press releases, write about the MD’s thoughts on the industry or provide a detailed explanation of widget X’s specifications. Give your customers content they want to read and keep these two questions in mind; “Is it interesting?” and “Is it useful?” This could be promotional prices, articles to help them improve an aspect of their business/ life, competitions/ prizes, new products/ services/ features they can use etc.
3. Take your time
The customer newsletter should be given the same care and attention as any other marcomms. You wouldn’t quickly knock up a magazine advert in 10 minutes and send it out, and you shouldn’t do the same with your newsletter. I receive newsletters from design agencies that have clearly only been written and built minutes before they are sent (or at least they look like it). At Heart Internet it takes a week from starting the first draft through to it being sent out.
4. Keep it short
No matter how long you spend on it and how ground breaking the content is, no one will read an email that rivals War & Peace. Short punchy paragraph are the order of the day with links taking people to a full article hosted on your site if they want to read more. Get straight to the point and skip the introductory paragraph about your company, they are your customers, they know who you are.
5. Clear calls to action
Research has found your newsletter has only got 51 seconds before the reader loses interest and only 19% of recipients will fully read a newsletter, the rest will scan the page. With such a short time and general lack of involvement, make your calls to action (e.g. click here to buy) prominent using buttons, highlighted text, arrows and any other disturber that fits in with your design.
6. Cross reference across all channels
Rather than duplicating our efforts writing content just for the blog and just for the newsletter, we regularly run blog articles through the newsletter. This catches customers who don’t read the blog and raises the awareness of our blog. After each newsletter we see a clear increase in visits to our blog.

Free web hosting template (CSS/ HTML)

If you are looking for a free web hosting template check out our free resources page with free web templates, icons and email templates (including the one below): http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/reseller-hosting/reseller-hosting-resources.html

We have converted one of our HostPay themes (click here to view the HostPay themes) in to a CSS/ HTML template free for everyone to download, Heart Internet customer or not. It is 100% free, you can make any changes you want to it and you can use it for any type of website you see fit, personal or commercial.

The free web hosting template is fully W3C Standards Compliant and comes with a home page, a hosting information page plus a generic ‘content’ page for anything else you may need. Here are a couple of screen shots:

Download
Click here to download the free web hosting template as a ZIP file: Download

Some small print…
We want you to enjoy using this template, but we also want to take credit for its design. With this in mind, you are not permitted to copy, display or engage in any licensing, sub-licensing or distribution of the template. This essentially means you can’t copy the template to your website and offer it as a download yourself or distribute it amongst your customers/ members.

Customising HostPay

Over the past few months we have been inundated with requests to create a series of videos on how you can customise the look and feel of a HostPay template.

Well, the wait is finally over! You spoke and we listened! Fresh from the Video production studio (Well, me and my laptop) is the first in a series of step-by-step video demonstrations taking you through the process of customising your HostPay template.

The first video from this series is giving you an overview of changing your HostPay templates, swapping in your company logo, CSS tips plus a brief explanation on transferring and editing files.

All the videos can be found within the video section of your customer control panel or alternatively you can check out our YouTube channel (Make sure you subscribe to be the first to know about new video releases).

Remember, you need to have HostPay installed before you can follow this tutorial, luckily we have a demonstration on that as well! – 

In the next installment of this video series, you can expect to get into much more detail about changing background, link and text colours and also creating new pages. Part 2 will be coming soon!

Any questions or feedback please leave them in the comments box below!

New Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 hosted email packages launched

We’re happy to announce that we’re now offering hosted email packages built on Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. All Exchange email hosting includes:
•    Free Microsoft Outlook 2010
•    Access to your email via Outlook or Outlook Web Access
•    Mobile access (including iPhone, Windows Mobile and iPad support)
•    Enterprise level virus and spam protection.
All our business email hosting is safe and secure thanks to our state-of-the-art data centre, which is manned 24/7, 365 days a year. There are no set up or hardware costs, you can easily transfer in any existing data, and you can also take advantage of secure email access from almost any platform, device or web browser.
As well as increasing business productivity with all the advanced and updated features Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 offers, you can save money by leaving all the maintenance and day-to-day running to us. Our professional email hosting solutions are easy to set up and use so you can reap the benefits straight away.
Whether you’re a new or existing customer, you can benefit by adding Exchange Server 2010 to your web hosting package or using it as a standalone product. If you’re a reseller, you can expand your web hosting services to include business email hosting or sell email packages separately as a dedicated product reseller.
Find out more about Exchange Server 2010 email hosting with Heart Internet.

New Customer Navigation Features

New Customer Navigation Features

we are writing to let you know of two small (But highly useful) additions to the customer control panel. The focus we had when creating these features was “How can we improve control panel navigation” and as a result we implemented both “Quick Find” search and added a breadcrumb navigation, we believe with these new additions to the CP that our customers can now locate pages & settings much faster than before.

Quick Find
Quick Find is located on the customer control panel index and acts as a smart search box, you simply type what you’re looking for e.g. “Domains” and Quick Find will return pages associated with that keyword, for example: Domain Search, Transfer a Domain, Manage Domain Names etc. Quick Find should eliminate all those extra clicks you would previously need to navigate the control panel and get to the content you need much faster.

Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumb navigation has been implemented at the top of the customer control panel to help users identify their current location and also act as a way to jump to the parent pages associated with the current page.

For example if a user was within “Payment Gateways” within the HostPay section, the navigation would be as follows:
Reseller Control Centre > HostPay > Payment Gateways

SRV Records

SRV Records


We have recently received several requests for the ability to add SRV DNS records to domains, and we were happy to oblige. For those who don’t know, DNS stands for Domain Name System and is how a computer translates a domain name like heartinternet.co.uk to the address of the actual computer that the website lives on.
There are many types of DNS records that describe how to find different services such as the web, and email servers. SRV records let some more modern programs find out how and where to connect to potentially any service. SRV records have only been widely adopted in relatively new protocols like SIP and XMPP, but it is expected that they will become more commonplace as additional protocols are developed.
With an SRV record you can specify different servers for the same service and split the requests between them in whatever ratio you decide. This is called load-balancing and is mostly only used for services with a high volume of users. It is also possible to specify two servers and have the second only be used if the first becomes unreachable. This is called redundancy and helps to prevent downtime on important services.
Our DNS management page now includes sections for managing your SRV records, but you should only use them if you need the records and are confident with what you are doing. You could potentially break your entire site in just a few wrong clicks. If you need an SRV record and are confident of your ability then click on the link, choose the domain to manage and click on the shiny new DNS Management icon.
Our support database has a more technical description of SRV records, which is advised reading if you are going to be adding records.

New! 2 Stylish HostPay Templates Released

New! 2 Stylish HostPay Templates Released

Fresh from the creative depths of our web design workshop has emerged a pair of brand new HostPay templates. These templates have taken on a different look from our previous releases as to give our customers a greater choice when selecting a style for their web hosting company.

Both templates have adapted characteristics of modern looking web 2.0 sites you may find online, this breaks away from the more traditional style of design web hosting companies have used over the years and gives you something that’s completely different, but still conveys the right message. Each templates homepage caters for a large promotional pitch at the top, this can be changed to anything you desire, we’ve also added a sprinkle of jQuery magic to one of the templates, to create a slideshow effect that dynamically rotates various messages. We’ve taken the time to include a couple of blank message templates which you can change accordingly using your favorite graphics package (Mines Fireworks!) or use it as a basis to create your own! As usual the templates are built with XHTML/CSS and are fully W3C standards compliant. 

We hope you enjoy these new-look templates and would certainly love to hear what you think about them!

Screenshots below:

Template 1:

Template 2:

Web Hosting Simplified | Infographic

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Web hosting is not something everyone understands right away. It can take a bit of research. When starting a new site it’s very important to be able to choose the right hosting. If you’re creating a website which you have high hopes for and want to expand, it’s very important to be able to choose a host which will help you scale. Most websites are ok with shared hosting but when you’re a site which is getting millions of views you’ll need to move up to VPS or dedicated hosting – they can handle a lot more visitors at once.

The top 100 web hosting countries

Last week we showed that the top 1 million web sites in the world were hosted in almost 8,000 different cites. If these top sites were evenly distributed across the world, there would be about 5,900 sites hosted in each nation, but is that really the case?

Following up our own 2012 study, we present this year’s survey of the top 100 web hosting countries. What do you think the major developments were since last year?

Top 20 web hosting countries

In total, we identified 191 different countries that hosted one or more of the Alexa top million web sites. This means that over 90% of the world’s nations host at least one of the top million sites. But they are not at all evenly distributed. To start of, here is a chart of the top 20:

Some comparisons with last years study:

• The top 4, with the United States, Germany, China and the United Kingdom, have not changed.
• The United States is still in a big lead, hosting about 42% of the top million sites. Germany, in second place, host only about 7%.
• Russia is up to 5th place from 7th, passing France and Japan.
• Poland is up from 13th place to 10th, passing Brazil, Italy and Spain.
• Italy is down three places to 13th.
• Singapore and Sweden are both new on the list.
• Hong Kong and South Korea has lost their places on the list since 2012.

US vs Europe and Asia

Grouping the European and Asian countries into regions may give us some perspective of just how crushing the lead for the United States is.

If we compare the United States, with 42.1% of the sites, to Europe, with 31.4%, it may not be the exact same numbers as last year but they are well within the margin of error. Asia is far behind both Europe and the United States, hosting  just over 11% of the top sites.

It should be noted that these three regions together hosts almost 84% of the sites we where able to scan.

Top 100 countries

In addition to the top 20 chart, here are the top 100 nations.

Top 100 web hosting countries

Ranking 2013	Country	Sites	Ranking 2012
1	United States	421,228	1
2	Germany	70,587	2
3	China	35,908	3
4	United Kingdom	35,500	4
5	Russia	35,245	7
6	France	34,498	5
7	Japan	29,898	6
8	Netherlands	25,632	6
9	Canada	18,116	9
10	Poland	12,109	13
11	Spain	12,062	11
12	Brazil	10,807	12
13	Italy	9,764	10
14	Turkey	8,498	14
15	Ukraine	8,401	16
16	Czech Republic	7,319	17
17	Australia	7,299	15
18	India	7,254	18
19	Singapore	5,479	22
20	Sweden	5,201	21
21	Hong Kong	4,641	19
22	Romania	4,417	27
23	Korea (South)	4,252	20
24	Denmark	4,170	25
25	Ireland	4,109	24
26	Switzerland	4,014	26
27	Vietnam	3,944	28
28	Iran	3,925	32
29	Thailand	3,921	23
30	Indonesia	3,671	30
31	Virgin Islands	3,397	36
32	Hungary	3,044	29
33	Taiwan	2,901	31
34	Austria	2,351	33
35	Argentina	2,291	34
36	Belgium	2,275	37
37	South Africa	2,096	39
38	Malaysia	1,996	35
39	Bulgaria	1,994	42
40	Norway	1,961	38
41	Israel	1,775	40
42	Portugal	1,757	41
43	Bahamas	1,739	45
44	Finland	1,687	43
45	Slovakia	1,372	47
46	Lithuania	1,333	46
47	Pakistan	1,225	44
48	Mexico	1,156	49
49	Latvia	1,107	51
50	New Zealand	1,040	48
51	Greece	914	54
52	Belarus	900	53
53	Kazakhstan	864	55
54	Slovenia	859	52
55	Chile	839	50
56	Luxembourg	665	57
57	Estonia	657	56
58	Croatia	579	58
59	Colombia	458	59
60	Serbia	443	61
61	Saudi Arabia	375	63
62	Cyprus	362	65
63	Panama	346	60
64	Venezuela	338	64
65	Azerbaijan	324	68
66	Philippines	324	62
67	Egypt	319	69
68	Iceland	319	75
69	United Arab Emirates	303	67
70	Georgia	244	71
71	Moldova	221	70
72	Malta	217	-
73	Costa Rica	211	73
74	Uzbekistan	203	-
75	Peru	175	66
76	Mongolia	168	74
77	Macedonia	134	81
78	Bangladesh	122	80
79	Ecuador	121	77
80	Sri Lanka	116	78
81	Kuwait	108	86
82	Bosnia and Herzegovina	107	85
83	Uruguay	101	84
84	Kyrgyzstan	86	89
85	Morocco	86	82
86	Curaçao	84	83
87	Cayman Islands	79	79
88	Armenia	76	87
89	Dominican Republic	75	88
90	Nigeria	74	98
91	Jordan	69	93
92	Bahrain	65	-
93	Tunisia	64	-
94	Cambodia	63	-
95	Seychelles	60	90
96	Qatar	59	92
97	Kenya	57	91
98	Algeria	51	-
99	Puerto Rico	49	97
100	Liechtenstein	47	94

As you can see, five countries are new on the list: Algeria, Bahrain, Cambodia, Malta and Tunisia. The ones that have fallen out of the list are Belize, Bolivia, Mauritius, San Marino and Syria.

Will web hosting in Asia catch up?

Last year we asked ourselves if the rest of the world would catch up with the United States. Looking at this year’s results, there are no signs of that happening any time soon.

What will be interesting to see is what will happen to web hosting in Asia. More than 25% of the Internet users of the world already live in Asia; will that start to show in hosting locations to? Let us now what you think.

About the data: The data was collected February 27, 2013, with a Pingdom-developed script that successfully scanned 907,625 out of Alexa’s top 1 million sites. The remaining sites failed to be scanned for various reasons. We should point out that web hosting is a constantly moving target, so where a particular site is hosted may have changed by the time you read this.

Spam Web Hosting and SEO Rankings

Most of the Web's 150 million active domains use shared hosting. It's more accessible from a cost perspective, and in general does not come with any less features or functionality than dedicated hosting does.

But when you use shared hosting you are essentially "sharing" hosting space with other websites - some of which may host spam. And as we all know, spam is bad and can result in not just poor experiences for users but could it also affect your position on the search results?

In a new Google Webmaster Help video, Matt Cutts discusses the topic and whether or not a site that is hosted by a service that hosts spam has anything to worry about in terms of a negative impact on search rankings. The short answer is no, it doesn't - but there are some "fringe" cases to consider.

“Typically a hosting company has a lot of different stuff on it. Some of it will be good. Some of it will be bad,” says Cutts. “There will be some spam, but just because you happen to be on an IP address or using a hosting company that also hosts some spam, that doesn’t mean that you should be affected.”

Noise Filter: WordPress Attacks Hammer Web Hosts

A WordPress attack is impacting web hosting providers and their customers
Related Topics: hackers and hacks, joomla, security issues, wordpress, wordpress attack
A large-scale attack – powered by 90,000 web servers – has been launched against WordPress blogs with weak admin credentials, and web hosts are being warned to update passwords immediately.
The attacks have also extended to Joomla websites, and Go Daddy has been working at mitigating the Joomla and WordPress attacks this week.
A post by KrebsOnSecurity says that analysts from a range of security and networking firms have tracked “an alarming uptick in so-called ‘brute-force’ password-guessing attacks against websites powered by WordPress, perhaps the most popular content management system in use today.”
Marc Gaffan, co-founder of Incapsula, a security firm, told Krebs that the WordPress attacks are creating chaos at some web hosting firms.
It’s hurting the service providers the most, not just with incoming traffic. But as soon as those servers get hacked, they are now bombarding other servers with attack traffic. We’re talking about web servers, not home PCs. PCs maybe connected to the Internet with a 10 megabit or 20 megabit line, but the best hosting providers have essentially unlimited Internet bandwidth. We think they’re building an army of zombies, big servers to bombard other targets for a bigger cause down the road.
HostGator has warned its customers of the WordPress attack, and encouraged customers with WordPress websites to change their passwords to something that meets the requirements specified on the WordPress website: something with upper and lowercase letters, at least 8 characters long, and including ‘special’ characters.
The main force of this attack began last week, then slightly died off, before picking back up again yesterday morning.  No one knows when it will end.  The symptoms of this attack are a very slow backend on your WordPress site, or an inability to log in.  In some instances your site could even intermittently go down for short periods. We are taking several steps to mitigate this attack throughout our server farm, but in the same breath it is true that in cases like this there is only so much that can actually be done. The servers most likely to experience service interruptions will be VPS and Dedicated servers hosting high numbers of WordPress installations, due to the incredibly high load this attack has been seen to cause.
ResellerClub is also working hard at mitigating the WordPress attack, but says it has noted the issue before.
To give you a little history, we recently heard from a major law enforcement agency about a massive attack on US financial institutions originating from our servers.
We did a detailed analysis of the attack pattern and found out that most of the attack was originating from CMSs (mostly WordPress). Further analysis revealed that the admin accounts had been compromised (in one form or the other) and malicious scripts were uploaded into the directories.
Today, this attack is happening at a global level and WordPress instances across hosting providers are being targeted. Since the attack is highly distributed in nature (most of the IP’s used are spoofed), it is making it difficult for us to block all malicious data.
Melbourne Server Hosting has seen signs of attempted WordPress and Joomla access as well.
Like many other hosting providers, we’ve seen signs over the past 48 hours of increased attempts to access and compromise popular CMS and blog web applications such as WordPress and Joomla.
Whilst there is the clear risk of having your CMS compromised, the more immediate threat posed here is that of a denial of service attack, which will render your sites slow and in some cases, completely exhaust the resources available to your services causing a system crash.
For web hosts that use CloudFlare, their customers should be protected from this brute-force WordPress attack as CloudFlare has rolled out a fix to all of its customers automatically, even users on the free tier.
We just pushed a rule out through CloudFlare’s WAF that detects the signature of the attack and stops it. Rather than limiting this to only paying customers, CloudFlare is rolling it out the fix to all our customers automatically, including customers on our free plan. If you are a WordPress user and you are using CloudFlare, you are now protected from this latest brute force attack.
Because CloudFlare sits in front of a significant portion of web requests we have the opportunity to, literally, patch Internet vulnerabilities in real-time. We will be providing information about the attack back to partners who are interested in hardening their internal defenses for customers who are not yet on CloudFlare.
Tony Perez at Sucuri Blog says WordPress knew that it wasn’t equipped to handle brute-force attacks.
It was not long ago that I was sitting on a call with other members of the WordPress community in which we were talking about brute-force. When asked why WordPress core didn’t offer more out of the box features to address the issue, the response was it’s just not a relavent issue.
As interesting a response as that was, the latest trends seem to contradict that statement head on. It goes to show us that with the technological improvements things like latency and other network considerations are becoming less of a barrier to entry for attackers.
Talk back: Have you seen any suspicious attempts at logging into WordPress or Joomla sites? Has this WordPress attack impacted your customers yet? Let us know in a comment.