I know… I’m about to break the hosting vow of silence – you know, the one that says you never make it easy for someone to cancel because then they’ll… um, well, they’ll cancel.

If they can’t find out HOW to cancel that means they WON’T cancel even if they WANT to cancel and then they’ll just sit there on your servers unhappy and pay you perpetually! Muahahahaha!

Actually, that’s not really how it works.

Run! Run and don’t let them see you leave!

There’s a prevalent suspicion that the best way to leave your hosting company is to sneak out the back door behind everyone’s back, hoping they don’t notice. Then, when you have moved everything you come back to inform your old hosting company afterwards, victorious and triumphant that you left them without their having ever getting wise to your move thereby thwarting any attempt they would have had to be vindictive in destroying your site or services early in retaliation for your rejection of them! Ha!

So, first off, I have to point out this isn’t a middle school love relationship.

The idea that a professional company will retaliate against you just because you rejected them is pretty lame – now, there’s a caveat in that just as there are bad web designers, there are bad hosting companies and some are not professional. Most are, though, and hopefully you have an idea which one you’re with (and if you’re with us, hopefully you know we’re not certifiable or anything). This industry isn’t all that huge and a lot of us know each other. We pass clients back and forth all the time, and its not unheard of for two hosting companies collaborate on a move so that it goes well for everyone involved. So, relax. No need for cloak and dagger stuff.

While you’re moving from here to “there”, you’re still our client and its our responsibility to give you good, sound advice on the best way to gather your toys so that you can easily plunk them down in someone else’s sandbox. That’s just part of the service you pay for, and since you pay until the last day you are here, it is help and advice you should feel entitled to expect.

We can’t give you advice on your new host – that you’ll have to get from them. But in our case, we would definitely prefer that we know so that we can make sure everything goes smoothly and we don’t do anything that could screw things up for you (like move your site to a different server and overwrite DNS settings you changed and the like). Saving and moving a lot of files also may mean that your resource usage explodes, and if we know what’s taking place we’re less likely to put a stop to your processes thinking there’s a problem because of out of the ordinary usage.

So, tell us. It goes better for you and we’re happy to help whether you are coming in the door or going out the door.

We want you to cancel

Ok, let me clarify that heading – no hosting company generally wants to lose your business (unless you are one of those clients and that is a subject for another article). Obviously, if there’s something we can do or change or offer you to make things better for you here, we want that chance to make it right if we can do so.

If you are absolutely, 100% moving hosts, then we absolutely, 100% want you to cancel your account formally so that we know you’re gone. Why?

1. While we do audit the servers to see what sites are not resolving here, it involves auditing 6 servers and several thousand sites. Manually. It’s a big undertaking, and we don’t generally do it more than quarterly – if you don’t formally cancel, you’re going to pay for services you don’t use.
2. If you just take your credit card off recurring billing thinking that’s a cancelation, its not – it’s taking your card off so we can’t charge you. Your billing account will remain open, and your account on the server will remain installed, which means…
3. You owe us for the time your account is installed regardless of whether it resolves here, regardless of whether you login. We still have to secure it, back it up, monitor it, and those services are still provided to you. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t using it – we treat all accounts as if they are and perform services on them that we expect will be paid for. (I know, you figure you’re never coming back so it doesn’t really matter, but you’d be surprised at how many return clients we get. It’s never a good idea to burn bridges, just in case.)
4. If you just walk without canceling, you leave an unmonitored login sitting on the server and that additional login point of entry that is unmonitored puts the servers at a slightly elevated risk. If its not needed, we would far prefer to shut that door down.

While we hate to bring it up, we do need to point out that if you just walk without canceling your account AND you leave your card on file, we will continue to charge you for the service, and you will legitimately owe that money by the contract. If you think to yourself “I’ll just dispute the charges and get the money back”, think again.

We can, and will, provide the card companies with your contract (the TOS), and documentation showing you were installed, and a search of all tickets with your domain name in it showing you never canceled, and in every case where we have done this the former client lost the dispute. You may be the first to win one for the team, but I wouldn’t bank on it (no pun intended). We take our reputation with our merchant bank very, very seriously and defend accusations of fraudulent charges vigilantly if they are used as a way to get something for nothing.

Of course, the easiest way to keep this from happening is to simply use the cancelation form. There’s a link to it in the Terms of Service itself, and if you search the FAQ for “cancel” you’ll find it there as well. We also send the link out in past due notices so people can grab it easily.

It’s Just Business

Most hosts have a target market and while I’m sure every CEO sometimes dreams of hosting the entire world, the simple fact is there are a wide variety of companies with a wide variety of specialties, and no one host fits all (no matter what the marketing crap suggests).

Generally, we all recognize we cannot perfectly serve every client and every need they may have, and we don’t take it personally when people find something that fits them better somewhere else. While we’re sorry to see you go to another host, we’re certainly not surprised or stunned or hostile about it – hosting customers have gotten savvier over the years about what they need, what they want, and most seem to recognize different companies have different strengths and weaknesses.

So, don’t assume a cancelation is going to immediately get you the cold shoulder from your old host. Since they know your site, they are the best resource you have to help make sure the transition to a new hosting home goes smoothly.

If you take the proper steps and keep everyone informed, you’ll be happier with all the companies you’ve dealt with than if you try and perform a slipshod move without utilizing all the resources available or following all the rules (formal cancelation) you should be following.

A few years ago, DrakNet started a few initiatives aimed at doing a little bit for the world, and getting our clients involved in doing a bit for the world with us. While lots of companies write checks, we wanted to choose projects that people could make some level of an investment in rather than us simply writing blog posts tooting our own horn for taking the money you gave us and donating it.

We do, though, want to toot a horn or two here and give you an update on how those initiatives are working out.

Kiva

We began lending through Kiva.org, who’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty through microlending. The principle behind Kiva’s person-to-person micro-lending website is to empower individuals to lend to unique entrepreneurs around the globe.

We chose Kiva for a few reasons. One, alleviating poverty is always a good thing. Two, entrepreneurship is something that’s near and dear to our hearts since DrakNet is an entrepreneurship itself and we love the idea of supporting small business owners all over the world. Three, Kiva is an ongoing endeavor that we can share with our clients – like us, you can see who the loans go to and watch the course of the loan and see the updates the same as we can.  We feel that helps people feel involved in the initiative itself. (We also often solicit people’s participation by asking people to choose the next country we lend to via Twitter.)

As of the time of this writing, DrakNet has made 31 loans in 22 months (as well as giving away two gift certificates for the “winners” to loan our money themselves), far surpassing our original stated goal of one loan a month. We’ve also had five clients join us in Kiva lending, and those folks have made an additional 36 loans, bringing the total number of loans originating in one way or another with DrakNet’s initiative to 67.

Statistic Name	DrakNet	Avg. Kiva User*
Number of Loans Made	31	5.1
Number of Successful Invitations	5	0.24
Number of Loans Made by My Invitees	36	0.81
Number of Gift Certificates Given	2	0.39

We’ve really enjoyed participating in the Kiva program, and look forward to making more loans in the future.

World Community Grid

The World Community Grid brings together people from across the globe who donate their idle computer time to create the largest volunteer computing grid benefiting humanity. DrakNet was officially welcomed as a World Community Grid Partner on June 2, 2009.

Thanks to clients joining us on the DrakNet team, we’ve managed to rack up quite a bit of run time:

Team Name		Status Joined-Retired		Total Run Time (y:d:h:m:s)		Points Generated		Results Returned
DrakNet		5/18/08 – Current		1:019:05:22:53		372,810		675

The above are our overall totals, and below, you can see our statistics by project.

Statistics By Projects

Statistics Last Updated: 2/5/10 00:06:02 (UTC) [3 hour(s) ago]

Project	Points Generated	Results Returned	Total Run Time (y:d:h:m:s)
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy – Phase 2	30,289	109	0:024:05:36:08
Help Fight Childhood Cancer	42,151	63	0:038:12:26:48
Nutritious Rice for the World	22,765	69	0:022:01:40:08
Help Conquer Cancer	78,164	134	0:077:02:14:35
Human Proteome Folding – Phase 2	83,851	132	0:097:23:22:43
FightAIDS@Home	76,271	106	0:081:04:35:07
Influenza Antiviral Drug Search	11,937	18	0:011:06:10:08
The Clean Energy Project	2,473	3	0:001:22:33:16
Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together	24,909	41	0:029:22:44:00

Our current team rank is 4,016 – keep in mind, that’s with a team of 5. Yes, just five. There are thousands of you (ok, not that many thousands, we’re a small company and all) and only FIVE people are on our team – and 2 work here!

We’d love to expand our team and rise in the rankings, so if you have a computer that wants to moonlight as a world saver and all around humanitarian, think about downloading a client and joining the Grid on Team DrakNet.

It’s far cooler than Team Edward or Team Jacob. Really!

Those of you that follow us on Twitter and Facebook got to sneak peak at the new forum, and now that the forum URL has propagated, we wanted to let everyone else know about it, too.

We’ve nuked the VBulletin forum that we had after discovering that we had a bit more activity in the comments section once we switched to social media login, and Get Satisfaction is a customer service forum that allows you to login with your various Facebook and Twitter and other “whatever the kids are doing these days” accounts to participate in the forum.

It’s also much less likely to be spammed (at least at this juncture – I imagine if you give it time, the spammers will find their way around just about anything in order to sell you Viagra), and I personally like the format quite a bit more than a “plain old” vanilla Bulletin Board system.

If you have a ticket that you think someone else would benefit from seeing answered that doesn’t require us to actually dig in your account or that would need to be private for security, we urge you to submit it there so other folks can see and find the answer or participate in the discussion. We have three official representatives monitoring and responding to discussions, and they’ll be marked as such so you’ll know who’s who.

To encourage folks to utilize the new forum, we’re going to give away a $25 credit at the end of each week in February to a random name that was active on the forum in submitting a question – sorry, folks, submitting praise won’t count because we’re adamantly against paying anyone to sing our praises.

Though you can submit a question or and idea AND a praise, and that’ll be ok.

We hope you like the forum and if you don’t have one of those new fangled social media logins, there will still be an area to sign up.

Finding a decent web designer or developer is a monumental task, and finding a designer or developer that you can trust more so. Hiring someone to work with you is often an excellent idea if you simply don’t have the knowledge to create the site you envision in your mind – it is also fraught with pitfalls.

Do I need a Web Designer or a Web Developer?

You might be surprised to find out that there really is no clear distinction between titles – people can hang a shingle on the door and call themselves whatever they want. While its generally believed that a “Developer” is more technology minded and understands more about the backend, and a “Designer” is more artistically minded, understanding more about the facade, that simply isn’t always the case.

What you need is someone that comes highly recommended, who has a portfolio of sites that you can look at, with companies and businesses similar to yours that you can speak to with regards to their ability, and their reliability, and what the experience is like working with them. You don’t want your friend’s nephew’s girlfriend who knows a little about code to take over your business site, but on the other hand, you don’t want a template generation business that costs an arm and a leg tossing you a cookie cutter site for an enormous amount, either.

Take some time, and interview more than one person or business. Prices, artistic visions, talent, and knowledge will be all over the map. Just because they can make a good presentation on their vision for their company doesn’t necessarily mean they can do the same for your company. You want someone that can marry your vision of what you want with their talent and what they know about the web that you don’t, and the only way to find out how good they are with that (and how easy it is to get them to do it) is by talking to other clients that have worked with them in the past.

By the same token, you want someone knowledgeable enough to be able to tell you when you are off base on some part of your vision – The comic “How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell” is a perfect example of what you want your designer to stop you from doing. Once you do your due diligence and are assured they are capable of of creating a fantastic site, you need to trust them and listen to them when they explain the pros and cons of your ideas.

Once you hire someone, don’t hand over Keys to the Kingdom

A lot of people, once they hire someone to “take care of it” just pass off the keys to the web site like they’re handing over a car and then book out of the process. A good portion of the time, this is fine.

But sometimes, that’s just a bad idea.

Once you hand over the administrative login to your site, your web designer has access to absolutely everything. Your mail accounts – and your mail. Your logs. The ability to lock you out of your own site if they get upset. If you have handed over the keys without becoming familiar with the structure of the site, what’s there and what shouldn’t be there, you are at a serious disadvantage if something in the relationship turns sour and your designer turns out to be the monkey above – cute and funny until he gets mad. And then when he gets mad, the poo throwing begins.

“Poo throwing” could take the form of your designer/dev getting angry and wiping out the files on your site. They could upload nasty messages embarrassing you in front of your clients. They could wipe out your emails. Would a professional designer or developer really do this?

No, of course not – but most people, especially people that host on shared hosting, do not do the due diligence we outlined above, and most do go with the “friend’s nephew’s girlfriend” web design model because its cheap and the person sounds like they know what they’re doing (even though you generally don’t know enough to judge whether they know what they’re doing), and boy, do people get in trouble when that girlfriend catches him cheating on her, or he dumps her.

You surely would have a contract for the design (Right?), and you could, of course, sue for damages if someone would be vindictive and unprofessional – but ask yourself if you would bother. Likely not. Most people don’t for small sites, and small amounts of money and damage.

None of the things we are outlining are made up – in nearly 12 years, we’ve seen these things happen, and more than once.

We recommend that you never, ever give your cPanel password to your web designer or developer. There are some things they may need you to do for them, like create a database. If you aren’t comfortable doing that, change the password for them in your cPanel and then change it back when they are done. But someone working on your site should, for the most part, only need access to your web site’s files, so create them an FTP account with access to the site only.

If your designer demands unrestricted access to your cPanel perpetually, consider finding another designer. If they don’t understand your concern and approach to security, their approach to security may be lacking.

When the Unthinkable Happens

The web designer or developer is:

gone, mad, locked you out, stole your files, deleted your email, not returning calls, [insert catastrophe here]

The first thing you need to do is install the backup you have been taking to get your site back the way it was. You do have a backup, right? These are files you paid to have created, and a site design you likely cannot recreate without the site designer. If you don’t have a backup, you’re flushing money down a toilet. While we have a backup for catastrophe purposes, things can always happen if the stars align right and that backup could be corrupted. You paid for the design and the site – keep a copy.

The second thing you need to do is change all of the passwords – and for that, you need to know what your site’s admin area is supposed to look like, and what should and should not be there. Now is not the time to begin getting familiar with how cPanel works, and what accesses it offers.

But I hired someone because I don’t wanna know all this stuff!

You don’t have to become a tech guru, but you do need to know how to secure your site if you are ever left high and dry by someone you have handed carte blanche access to. You can email us but if you have 17 FTP accounts (14 for clients and 2 for your designer), we won’t have any idea which ones belong and which ones don’t.

Your knowledge of your site should be such that if you are abandoned, end the working relationship, or if something crazy happens with your designer that you can and are able to step in and secure it and will be familiar enough with it that you can protect it until you find someone new.

So, we promised, when we rolled out the DNS editing, that we’d tell you how to install Google Apps yourself if you didn’t want us to do it for you. Unfortunately, life intruded and we forgot. Luckily, we were reminded, and here’s the promised post 2 weeks late.

What do I need to know before installing Google Apps?

Most people go to Google Apps for the email as its a fantastic webmail app with all the Google-Search goodness, its free, and it gets you a lot more space. The difference between Google Apps and a regular Gmail account is that Google Apps works directly with your domain – there’s no forwarding this, pop that, program this to answer as that kind of stuff. It is where your domain mail goes.

Now, it *is* where your domain’s mail goes – your email will never, ever come here for your domain again. Once the MX Records are changed, they handle your mail. If you have problems with mail delivery, you go to them, not us.

That means you are giving up nearly every feature under “Mail” in cPanel – mailing lists, forwarding, pop accounts, the whole nine yards. With Mailing Lists, discussion lists, this is a big deal because you don’t have any functionality in Apps to replace it. With forwarding, not so much – Google Apps is giving 50 accounts on Standard at no charge, and using their settings you can filter and forward. (For those trying to get around our off site forwarding ban, here’s your answer – we don’t care if you forward from your Apps account. It’s not our IPs that would get Blacklisted and, frankly, Google is way too big for anyone to even think about blacklisting them.)

If you are having problems now that we use tokens in getting your mail from work in webmail from work, this is also your answer – Google Apps operates on a regular web server port, so unless your company blocks Apps specifically, you won’t have a problem getting mail and you can pull your stored mail into Google Apps (though set aside some time to re-tag it into different folders).

There is no cost for Google Apps to Google if you used standard, and there is no discount off your hosting because you’re not using our mail accounts.

I still want to do it – how do I set it up?

First thing you’ll need to do is go open a Google Apps account. You do that at

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

and click the “Get Started” button. On the first page, you’ll click “Administrator: I own or control this domain“, and give them your domain name, no www. or anything attached – just domain.com, and click “Get Started“.

The next page is where they gather the account information and its all pretty straightforward. If you aren’t a company you don’t need to provide company names, though we have had clients make up some, like “Local Deity” as a Job Title. Once you get through all that, making sure to check that you know you have to change your DNS, click to go to the next page, which will be “Set up – Create your first administrator account (step 3 of 3)“

This administrator account is going to be two things – your main login to administrate all of your Google Apps account, and a Gmail Apps account, so if you have an email address you’re using its a good idea to put it here.  Pick a good password, make it through Captcha, and agree to Google’s TOS. Once you do that, the fun of changing DNS begins.

OK, I have the Apps Account – how do I hook it up?

Once you agree to Google’s Legalese, your next page will welcome you to Google Apps. Now, you have an Apps account at the moment, but its not activated – Google wants you to prove that this is your domain. You can do that by either uploading a file, or creating a CName record. Since we are going to have to play with the DNS eventually we may as well start now, so click “Change domain.com CNAME record” and then click continue.

Google wants you to create a cName pointing to its site so that it can verify you have control of this domain. Leaving this tab or window open, open up a new tab or window, and go to cPanel, and then click on “Advanced DNS Zone Editor”.

Ok, back on Google’s page, #2 says “Use the following unique string to create a new CNAME record for the domain.com domain:” and that string will look something like google72c80c5640c1fd7f - we want to put that where it says “Name”. Just cut and paste it.

For TTL, look down below to see what your TTL is on all your other records – cut and paste or type whatever that number is in the TTL field.

Under “Type” we want a CName, and the CNAME is always going to be google.com. Hit add record.

Now, go back to your Apps window and tell Google you did this by clicking “I’ve completely the steps above.” It will bring you to a set up guide to introduce you to the service – busy work for you while they verify the CNAME. You can come back to this later – since almost everyone gets Apps to get mail, let’s go ahead and set that up now. Click “Dashboard“.

Your dashboard is going to show you all your Apps. If you notice, your Email app says its not active. We want to change that, so click “Activate Email”.

Activating Your Email

When we set Google Apps up for you, we do not set up more than one user. Changing MX Records will, as we said, change all mail handling from us, to Google. Obviously, if you have only one email account set up on Apps and you have 30 email accounts on your domain that you are switching to Apps, this would be a bit of a problem, hence why some folks want to do this themselves.

If you have more than one email account on your domain, you do not want to change your MX Records now. The message:

“If your domain already has email addresses, please be careful
changing MX records. To avoid disruption in email service, be sure to
create the same set of user accounts with the control panel before
changing your MX records”

applies directly to you. You will want to click on “Users and Groups“, and on that page “Create a new user” for every email account that you are moving first, ensuring that email will go one place or the other, and not get lost in the transition. Once you have done that, you can join the rest of us back at the “Activating Email” page.

“Set up email delivery”

So we should be on the activating email page which says “Set up email delivery“. (Again, we get to it by clicking “Dashboard” and then clicking “Activate Email” under the Email area). This is where you are actually, formally going to change email delivery from our servers to Google. The instructions for “any hosting company” are fine as long as your DNS is here and for the purposes of this post, we’re going to assume that they are. If they are at your registrar, use the drop down list to find how to edit DNS records for your registrar and follow those instructions instead of these.

In your second window, Navigate to the “Home” panel, and find the “MX Entry” button under “Mail”. At the bottom, you’ll see “MX Records, and it should say “0″ under priority, and the destination is your domain name. If you have any need to change this back at any time to our servers, you’ll need to delete the Google servers and return the record to just what you see now.

But for now, we’re going to nuke that puppy, so click “Delete” under actions. Really. Go ahead. It won’t blow up, I swear.

Under #4 on the Google page, you will see a set of records you have to input. At the moment, they are the following:

However, these can and do change periodically as Google balances mail load so you will want to put in the server addresses that google gives you. You want to cut and paste the MX Server Address into the destination under “Add New Record”, and then its proper priority in, obviously, the priority field. When giving you the MX addresses, Google gives you the trailing period, which is necessary in an MX Record – however, cPanel adds that in for you and it will give you an error if you actually cut and paste that, so instead of

ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.

you will want to cut and paste simply

ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM

and leave off that period at the end.

You should wind up with a Cpanel listing that looks similar to this at the end:

Go back and report to Google that you’ve completed the steps. Once your email is verified, it should begin being delivered to your Apps.

There is one more thing you need to do, and that’s enter in an SPF record now that this has changed. If you have one, you will see it under the Advanced DNS Zone Editor, so lets go back there.

Adding the SPF Record

If you have an SPF Record, you will see a record that is designated “TXT”, and will have a line with quotes around it that starts with v=spf1. You will want to click the edit button to edit this record, and replace whatever is in quotes with

v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all

where it asks for TXT data – the quotes are important, so don’t leave those out. Here’s ours, to give you an idea of what it should look like:

If you don’t have one already, you’ll want to add it just like you added the CNAME, only this time choose TXT, and cut and paste the SPF Record, quotes and all, into the TXT Data Field.

After doing all this, your Google Apps should be good to go!

BUT WHAT ABOUT ALL MY MAIL ON THE SERVER!!!

Oh, right.

Log into your actual Gmail Apps account for the email account you want to pull over. You can get straight into your Mail account, bypassing the dashboard, by going to https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com (replace your domain.com with your domain name, obviously).

Login, and click “Settings” at the top, then the second tab is “Accounts” – click that. The second box says “Get mail from other accounts:” – click to add a mail account you own. When it asks you what your email address is, tell them you@servername. For example, if I wanted to get the mail from jen@draknet.com on the server to jen@draknet.com in my Gmail, if I say jen@draknet.com is my email, Google gets a little suspicious and tells me I can’t do it. So, use the server name, which in this case would be jen@weedle.drak.net. Click next step.

Now, your login name is still going to be your email address, so you’ll use that for your login. For the pop server, use the server name (just the server name, nothing else). Then use your regular password. Once you add the account, Google should begin pulling your mail down – if you don’t archive or label it, it will just appear in your inbox, so you may want to create a label to be able to sort through it later, and archive it there so you can start off with a clean inbox.

We received this email from e-onlinedata yesterday with regard to “Card Not Present” transactions, and wanted to pass it on to our e-commerce customers. In this case, if you have any questions about the information, please contact your merchant bank whether that is e-onlinedata or another Merchant Provider.

Since this information is coming from Mastercard, this applies to all online merchants, not just those through e-onlinedata.

e-onlinedata wants to inform everyone of changes expected from the Payment Brands regarding practices that are considered “Brand Damaging”. As you may be aware, both Visa and MasterCard are taking action in response to increases in consumer disputes related to card-not-present and direct response products and services. e-onlinedata is endorsing the adoption of Best Practices to support our merchant base in conducting business in a manner that protects both businesses and consumers from fraud. To date no formal announcement has been received, however e-onlinedata is issuing this communication now in an effort to educate and assist our agents/merchants in complying with anticipated Payment Brand mandates and actions.

MasterCard has recently warned the Acquiring community that “Negative Option” enrollment will be considered a “Brand Damaging” business practice. “Brand Damaging” is a very broad term and is still being defined, but in light of recent fines to our counterparts, we must be proactive. Indications are that MasterCard will require immediate termination of merchants identified as using this business practice, along with any other practices considered “Brand Damaging”. This follows recent policy changes from Visa regarding descriptor formats and disclosure of corporate entities related to Direct Response offers, with the intent to enforce all chargeback and transaction monitoring programs as defined by the associations.

e-onlinedata cannot accept merchant applications for products and/or services employing “Negative Option” enrollment, in addition to the following practices:

• Marketing models that employ “Free-Trial”, “Deferred Billing” and/or “Shipping Only”. Customers must be receiving a tangible good or contracted service in exchange for charging of payment cards. Incentivized discount offers are acceptable when the cardholder is receiving something in exchange for payment, however we will be unable to support accounts engaging in hidden or delayed charges and ‘free’ offers that are not truly free.

• “Cross-Selling” and “Up-selling” business practices. All sales should be directly between the business entities (merchant) processing the transaction and the cardholder, with cardholder authorization for all purchases.

• Per Payment Brand guidelines, the use of multiple merchant accounts, billing descriptors and merchant processors may be viewed as an attempt to avoid chargeback monitoring programs and is prohibited. Perceived non-compliance has led to termination of processing relationships. e-onlinedata will review the business consideration for opening multiple merchant accounts to ensure compliance with Payment Brand guidelines.

• Transactions generated from internet traffic and all other lead sources must be managed and monitored for potential fraud using an approved system. Third Party service engagement may be a requirement for account approval.

The FTC has recently published guidelines regarding “Negative Option” enrollment programs and is taking a very aggressive position against merchants utilizing/employing this business practice. Recommendations take in part from the FTC’s website may include but are not limited to the following:

• Material terms should be disclosed in a clear, concise manner. Unnecessarily long or inconsistent terms are viewed as an attempt to mislead the consumer.

• Terms should be disclosed in a conspicuous manner, clearly placed and labeled on websites in a location that indicates the importance and relevance to the transaction. Fonts and colors must be easy to view.

• Material terms must be disclosed prior to completion of the transaction and before a financial obligation is incurred by the consumer.

• Customers must provide affirmative consent to any offer, examples include a mandatory “I Agree…” statement checkbox, where the customer is acknowledging the Terms and Conditions of the offer and consents to be entered into continuity program as a result of completing the transaction. Pre-checked boxes do not qualify as affirmative consent.

• Merchants must not discourage or make difficult in any way the disclosed cancellation procedures and all cancellation requests must be honored in accordance with the stated terms of the transaction.

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We’ve had a few folks ask us about various tools that we use to deal with organizing social media, and decided we may as well blog our personal preferences because… well, because everyone else does. Despite social media not really being a part of “web hosting”, it’s become obvious that businesses and sites with personal connections tend to fair better.

We are by no means experts. In fact, we may be the only people on social media that don’t have “Social Media Expert” in our description – but these are some tools we found that work for us and we’ve been asked about them often enough that we thought we’d go over them here.

Remember, this is just what we use, and how we use it – people’s preferences for their social media “stuff” are varied and many. Feel free to outline your favorites in the comments. These are just ours.

FireFox Addons

Currently, our latest It Girl is Yoono. One of the reasons is that its a Firefox Add On, and Firefox is my particular browser of choice. Frankly, as monitors get bigger I find that I have way more real estate than I really need, and I’m just used to maximizing my browser. Yoono fits nicely into the side (though I moved it to the right side using another add on), and allows me to keep up with most social media streams.

One of the benefits with Yoono for me is that the DrakNet tab for the “corporate Twitter account” can be kept clean by not updating its live stream – its not that we’re not interested in you. Really, it’s not. The corporate account follows almost everyone back which opens it up to a vast amount of noise, spam, ridiculousness and it can be very difficult to separate the noise ratio from people actually talking to us. It’s also an incredible waste of time to click to check it every time someone utters a move in a Twitter game. The Yoono tab lets us silence everyone, and only be alerted when someone DM’s us or sends an @ reply, making our response much faster.

Since you can have two Twitter accounts with Yoono, I can use my personal Twitter account for the normal, narcissistic random stream of consciousness, as well as following those accounts that I need to see everything on “just in case”, like our Data Center’s and software companies we work with. On this end, Yoono’s “hide updates” comes in handy – some people (myself included) occasionally just tweet too damn much, and you wanna turn them off. This allows you to do that individually without un-following them. That comes in handy during high-stream times, or when someone is going on and on and on about an issue you just don’t care about.

Yoono also really integrates with your browser, allowing you to switch accounts with a drop down click. Love that feature.

To us, Yoono has a good balance of control, great features, and again, we love that its a browser sidebar client. (They also have a desktop version as well). Yoono currently supports Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, Linked In, MSN, AIM, GoogleTalk, and YahooChat, though we currently use it for Twitter and Facebook only, and called it a day.

Puny URL 1.6 by suskind is a barely used (7,518 Downloads) FF plugin, but personally, we find it to be the simplest URL shortening plugin out there and despite Yoono having the “Share” feature, we still use it due to its ease of use. Right click, hit the “Create Puny URL” in the menu, and its done and copied to the clipboard. Simple, fast, and dependable.

Services

Want to program Tweets for later? We use Twaitter. Their interface is clean and simple and, most importantly, its so far been far more reliable than other services that we tried.

Want to manage your followers? Tweepular is an awesome service – when its up. It’s normally all happy, with a dancing bird, with cheery, vivid gem colors – however, its been down now for over a month and since it claims its coming back, we’re going to include it here because we do think it was the best. When it was up. If it gets back up again, it would be useful.

So, there’s a snippet of what we use – what do you like?

(Or, you know, if you hate Twitter, Facebook, and all that other stuff, let us know that, too!)

Ok, folks, if you have all annual accounts, this won’t affect you – your billing will stay the same. If you are semi-annual, quarterly, or most especially monthly, listen up, as we’re making some changes that hopefully will shine clarity on your billing.

We started using our billing software way back in 2002 – I think we were like the 11th paying customer they had if our billing account number is to be believed. We love Ubersmith, and they keep making it better and adding things we would have loved to see in 2002, and we would love to use now. Problem being that much of their settings work independently and there is no real way to make a mass-global change, so some things that they added that were awesome we just have no feasible way to implement other than manually – and in some cases its not worth the manual effort to retroactively apply it, and its not fair to have some folks have access and not others.

We have realized that billing can be confusing. The grace period system is great – except that it picks up everything renewing during that time period and picking 31 days will leave some double charged on some months and not charged on others. The standard due date is great, except it leaves some people being invoiced after they already have a balance because again, there’s that pesky “days have different numbers of months” thing. Back when we started with Ubersmith, there was no ability to prorate service. The day we installed you was your start date – and that could be any day of the month. That made it a lot more complicated to figure out a system where:

1. The due date was clear, universal, and before your service can get suspended.
2. The invoice was far enough in advance that those who have to go through committee, accounts payable, or who just needed time to budget because they ran into a pinch had enough time to do it.
3. You could clearly understand what date your service with us was in serious trouble.

An invoice date on the 10th, due on the 20th, with 31 days in advance meant that if we billed like that in January, it would renew and invoice packages up to Friday, February 20, 2009. Same billing run in February? It’ll renew up to Monday, March 23, 2009 – which leave a play of 3-4 days in the middle of the month where someone monthly could wind up having a skipped charge, and then a double charge the following month, because if your package was on the 21st, it was not in the January time frame, but was in the February time frame. And, oh, so was March, too.

While not technically a double charge because you’re not paying for the same time twice, it was nonetheless patently annoying both to us, and to people that got caught in the grace no man’s land.

Unfortunately, Ubersmith does not have a built in system to go by calendar dates. The Prior Billing is always a static number of days, presenting the same problem. A grace would be the same regardless of how many days are in the month. It just couldn’t do what we wanted it to do through its interface.

So, we done hacked it.

The first thing that’s changed is ALL of the monthly packages are renewing on the first. Since we can’t prorate you folks after your package starts, your packages have been manually edited and your next renewal date is on February 1st regardless of when you were supposed to renew. Since we “pushed” the vast majority of you out instead of pulling you back, that means you all got a few weeks free (if you had to be pulled back, you got a credit). You’re welcome.

All monthly accounts, without fail, will be installed to have a package renewal on the first of the month, which means whenever you order a package you will pay the prorated fee for the month you’re installed, and the next full month. Then you’ll be billed every month thereafter. We will be doing the same with quarterly and semi-annual accounts in the future, but we will not go back and change the older ones – since you’re not in danger of double billing, there’s no particular need.

All invoices for monthly, quarterly and semi-annual accounts will be on the 1st of the month. Your due date every month will be the last of the month whatever date that happens to be – for you monthly folks, the “how late can I get away with paying before being suspended?” just got a whole lot easier to understand. You’re all on the first, and you will have a full calendar month to get that payment in. If you don’t by the due date, it is now a real and not “symbolic” due date and if you don’t pay by the due date, you can assume with great confidence the following day your suspension may take place. The due date is now an absolute, real, and final due date if you are monthly.

You quarterly and semi-annual folks have a little more detective work, at least those installed up to now. Your due date may be before your package actually renews – you can assume that if your package renewal date comes and there’s no payment, you may have an issue. If you would like to be moved to a 1st renewal so that you too can have the serious, immutable, this is the DUE DATE due date, send a ticket in and we’ll be happy to do it for you.

I know, I know, everyone’s going “The first? I hate the first! EVERYTHING is due on the first!” and we totally understand your issue. We cannot change your invoicing date because of the method we are using to change the dates based on the calendar months of billing. What we can do for you, though, is let you pick the day you want your card to be charged. Since you now have a full calendar month to get the payment in, you have a full month up to the 28th of any date to choose from. Just contact us and let us know what date you want the card to be charged, and we’ll be happy to program it in. This was simply the easiest, most universal, and clearly understood way we could set it up.

We’ll be editing the FAQs and TOS and so on in the coming days.

This afternoon, there was a failure on Alakazam during a routine distillation of Apache. While initially, a setting was changed, this setting was in a separate file that could be included or left out of an Apache restart. Once Apache failed, we deleted the lines that were included, and distilled Apache again. All distillations of Apache came back as successful, however, when restarting Apache, it would fail.

Once we checked the configuration file for Apache to see if we could spot the issue, we did – the configuration file being generated was completely and totally empty. We attempted to rebuild it and though it again stated it was successful, the configuration file remained blank. We completely recompiled Apache with cPanel, and Apache was unable to complete a recompile. We then forced an update, recompiled, and it failed yet again. That took about an hour.

What happens now demonstrates one of the reasons that we’re so incredibly open about what type of web host we are.

We are a small (or mid-sized, depending on who’s metrics you’re utilizing to pigeonhole yourself into a meaningless category) web hosting company, deliberately. We don’t really advertise, we just do what we do, people tell people, and that’s how we’ve grown. We are not a web hosting company with an owner that sits around and collects checks while outsourcing every function because its a money-making endeavor, this is a hosting company because I truly love web hosting and I created myself a job that I would love doing.

Very early on, I made the decision to go with Managed Servers despite the extra cost, and I have never wavered from that decision. Yes, it costs us way more for the servers than a lot of our competitors, and yes, I could be making a buttload more money choosing cheapo servers at a crappy data center, or unmanaged servers where they’re just left to spin on their own. Some people have questioned why I “overpay” for managed servers when I know how to administrate a server just fine, and rarely ever have to go “up tier” for anything at all.

This is why. Because there are times when 3 heads on duty can’t solve a problem, and there are times when you can’t deliver a Class A experience unless you’re a Class A bohemoth with staff to spare and experience with hundreds of machines and thousands (ok, millions) of problems. Tonight we at DrakNet hit a frustrating wall in our attempts to solve the issue.

Luckily, we are in a stellar data center, with an absolutely incredible staff that we can call on at any time for any reason and we can borrow them to come work for us for a bit. And that’s why you don’t choose “cheap” – you can have it fast, right, or cheap, just pick any two. (Although, ironically, I pay less at our current data center than I did at another data center that sucked eggs.) We generally don’t call on them for a whole lot because we’re pretty self-sufficient, but when we call on them we need them OMG RIGHT NAO!!

And we get them.

So, thanks go out to Scott Sullivan and Patrick Hawkins at Liquid Web, who were able to wrestle Apache into submission. We’d love to tell you why it happened, but no one really is totally sure why it happened. The credit, though, goes to them because the only thing we really did was yell help, and they kicked her back up.

A lot of hosting companies hide their dependence on their data center, or the roles that their data centers play in their success. Our set up as a host is not much different than some of the largest players on the market who don’t have their own data centers – no, I won’t name names. You know who you are.

We’ve never done that because we don’t think its a problem that we’re not almighty eggheads that can solve every single thing all the time, and we feel intensely about the role that Liquid Web plays in our success. We also feel its our responsibility to be honest about our company, and there’s no reason to hide or minimize our business set up, or play down their role to make ourselves seem bigger or more than we are. We feel its a great asset to you have two companies simultaneously watching over your sites who are truly intent on making sure everything runs smoothly, and Liquid Web deserves the credit for giving us a fabulous foundation to serve you.

Their safety net’s not too shabby, either.

If you wonder why we chose to discontinue offering dedicated servers and VPS’s and partner with Liquid Web, why we recommend you to their server service when there is far more profit to be made selling slices and boxes, its because we truly think they’re the best and we couldn’t begin to compete in an arena that they accomplish so much in. We’d be remiss in trying to sell an inferior product. (Yes, we think we kick their ass in shared hosting, but that’s another post for another time).

So, thanks Liquid Web for saving our rear yet again, and thanks clients for being patient and not screaming at us while we fought what turned out to be a serious issue.

Though if you need to, there’s a comments section – have at it!

All accounts now have DNS Zone editing available in their cPanel, under their “Domains” button. This is a very handy button – and it can totally take your web site offline if you enter things incorrectly. Anyone cheering about this button likely knows enough about DNS to know what to do with it, so we’re going to focus this more on the folks going:

“Um. Cool?”

Simple

Under “Domains”, you have two buttons, one marked “Simple DNS Zone Editor” and one marked “Advanced DNS Zone Editor”.. As you could kind of figure from the name, “Simple” gives you less of an ability to get into trouble, while advanced lets you shake up the house.

Under Simple, your first option is to add an “A” Record. An A (address) record is a DNS record that can be used to point your domain name and host names to a static IP address. This can be useful if you have a home computer on a static IP you want to be able to get into and you don’t want to remember the IP address, or you have remotely hosted billing software that allows you to point to their IP to make it look more like your own with a subdomain. An A record has to have an IP address.

When putting in the subdomain, you would only include the first part – so, say I wanted shop.drak.net to go to Alakazam for some reason, and Alakazam has the set up to take the name and apply it and all that jaz. I would enter “shop” where it asks for name, and “67.225.155.190″ where it asks for the address, and then hit “Add A Record”. That’s it.

A CName is a little bit different. CNAME stands for “canonical name”. A CNAME record maps an address to its canonical name. When a name server looks up a name and finds a CNAME record, it replaces the name with the canonical name and looks up the new name. So, if I wanted shop.drak.net to point to myshopsomewhere.com, I would put “shop” as the name, and “myshopsomewhere.com” as the CNAME.

Advanced

Advanced also lets you add something to the above, which is TTL. TTL is an acronym for Time To Live and refers to the capability of the DNS servers to cache DNS records. It represents the amount of time that a DNS record for a certain host remains in the cache memory of a DNS server after the latter has located the host’s matching IP address.

OK, english? A very, very, very simplified explanation:

For the very first time, you’re trying to visit a site on our servers. Your computer and ISP and so on ask the registrar where to look, and the registrar says “go to DrakNet’s DNS”, and so you do. Our DNS servers say “here’s the site on this server over here and btw, the TTL is 14400″, and so that’s how you know where the site is. The TTL we gave you is 4 hours – what that means is that we promise that information won’t change for 4 hours, so don’t bother asking us until then. The site will be there – but in a few hours, it may not be, so go ahead and ask us again – but not until then.

The servers that need that information keep it and assume that the site will be at X location, and that’s where they will send you up until its time to ask again.

This cuts down on constant requests to the DNS servers.

Advanced gives you access to your own main domain’s record as well, so you can change its TTL, or delete it altogether. Though we don’t suggest you do that.

OK, but what do I do with it?

Most of the time, you won’t need to mess with any of this information at all. There may be times, though, that you’ll sign up for a service like Google Apps or Etsy and they’ll give you an option to extend a domain name or subdomain name to their location to brand it more as yours. If they tell you to add an A record or CName to your DNS records, now you’ll know where to go to do just that.

Later on this week, we’ll take you step by step through setting up Google Apps yourself, if you’d like to do so.

*The above graphic came from our fabulous data center’s Knowledge Base, and we ripped it off mercilessly because they love us and probably won’t kill us for it. Follow the link to read a great, simplified overview of DNS written by Liquid Web.