SoftCom Corporate Blog

It has been 100 days since I’ve taken over as CEO of SoftCom so I thought I’d give you a quick overview of my first hundred days at the helm. Before I take you through the highlights of the past few months, I’d like to say a few words about the genesis of SoftCom and how the name came about, as I get asked this question quite often.

It was 12 years ago that we embarked on this journey; a few friends from high school with a big dream. We were young, ambitious and ready to do whatever it took to succeed. However we were not quite sure exactly where to start. After a few days of discussions, a decision was reached. We were going to try our hand at web hosting, which was relatively new back then. It was meant to be one of the several technology services our founding group was going to pursue. With that decision behind us, we moved on to the next challenge, finding a name for our business. After some deliberation, the name SoftCom Technology Consulting emerged as the front runner, and was subsequently chosen as the name of the company. Collectively, we thought the name SoftCom was a good fit as it was the name of the computer club, which was instrumental in building our passion for technology. The “Technology Consulting” part was added to reflect our intention to offer an array of technology services.

As the business evolved, we realized providing web hosting services was our passion and that’s where we wanted to concentrate our efforts. At times, we felt our company name did not accurately reflect this and debated dropping the “Technology Consulting”, as well as acquiring a matching domain name. For one reason or another, the decision was always put off until later. That is, until last week. As of June 8, 2009, SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc. is no more. We have renamed the business as “SoftCom Inc.” and moved the web site to its new home at http://softcom.com.

The first order of business for us as we entered a new chapter in the history of SoftCom was to review our purpose and values. This was an arduous process but a necessary one to communicate the right message to our customers, partners and employees. I invite you to visit our “About Us” page to read about our Purpose & Values, and welcome any questions or comments you may have.

The next challenge for me was to fill the role I have long occupied as the head of Technology at SoftCom. I am very pleased to say we were lucky to find a perfect replacement in Mark Salerno, who is an industry veteran with 10+ years of experience in the web hosting space. Mark has most recently worked at Network Solutions as VP, Research and Development. He brings a wealth of subject matter expertise as well as years of executive management experience to SoftCom.

In addition to hiring Mark, we have brought on board Celal Ulgen as our Chief Marketing Officer. Celal is no stranger to SoftCom. As a matter of fact, he was one of SoftCom’s co-founders and we are thrilled to have him back. During his extended hiatus from SoftCom, Celal was quite busy making a name for himself as a marketer in the web hosting industry. Most recently he was involved in the Venture Capital markets focusing on infrastructure, e-commerce, and web services investments.

On the new development front, we have accomplished a number of different things. Just to name a few, we have launched mail2web.com Community Portal, wrapped up mail2web Live Exchange 2007 migrations and upgraded myhosting.com infrastructure. Many more exciting developments are in the pipeline, such as the impending mail2web.com re-launch slated for later this week and the long awaited control panel overhaul ready to kick-off in just a few weeks. We hope you will like the new mail2web.com design and would be generous to us with your constructive feedback. Please share your thoughts with us on the forums… We are listening.

As our journey continues, I will continue to write on this blog and bring you updates on the progress we are making as the new SoftCom, literally and figuratively. Stay tuned!

Thank You,

Turker Sokullu
CEO
SoftCom Inc.

Good day,

I wanted to take the time to inform you, as a valued customer of SoftCom, of some recent changes in our management. Tony Yustein has,  effective immediately,  resigned as President and Chief Executive Officer of SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc. We wish Tony success in his future endeavors.

Co-founder and former Vice President of Operations and Software Development, Turker Sokullu has been appointed as a director and the President, Chief Executive Officer, and Secretary of SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc. Firat Eren has also been appointed as a director and the Chairman.

These changes in management  will not affect the day-to-day operations of our company. We will continue to provide the same quality and service you have come to expect from SoftCom and look forward to the future with hope as we continue to work for our valued customers.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Greetings,

It has been more than a year since we introduced the Softcom corporate blog. In that time we have made many changes and improvements to our products and services for both mail2web.com and myhosting.com. The response to the blog has for the most part been very positive. That is why we have added two new blogs, one for each of our brands.

Under mail2web.com we offer both free and premium services. The main products we sell are Microsoft Hosted Exchange ® email and the business collaboration platform Windows SharePoint Services ® (WSS 3.0). The address for the blog is http://blog.mail2web.com/

The myhosting.com brand is our shared hosting platform. We offer hosting of both Microsoft Windows ® and Linux platforms as well as POP3/IMAP4 email hosting. The blog address for myhosting.com is http://blog.myhosting.com/

We will still continue to occasionally post to the Softcom blog about broad issues and things that are related to the company as a whole. We will for the most part post entries on the mail2web.com and myhosting.com blogs. If you are looking for details about how to subscribe by RSS I recommend you checkout Tim’s post here.

I hope you enjoy the new blogs.

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

About a week-and-a-half ago, we launched a new feature in both of our Control Panels.  Some customers may have already noticed and started taking advantage of this feature. This new feature allows you to view all of your past and current Customer Support cases. This includes all email correspondence, chat correspondence, and even telephone correspondence with our Customer Support department.

What is the advantage to you as a customer?

• You’ll always have access to all the Customer Support history linked with your account.  If you’ve forgotten what the solution to a given problem, go back at any time and have a look.
• If you’re away from your email but still want to check the status of a Support case, now you can.
• If for some reason you didn’t receive our reply email, you can view everything and even reply from your Control Panel.

We hope that you’ll find this feature useful, and if you haven’t already… try it out now!

• mail2web.com Control Panel
• myhosting.com Control Panel

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

We have made some changes to our Affiliate Program. Effective immediately the pay outs have been increased to 4 times the monthly fee for the plan. This is a great time to join the program or if you are already an affiliate to make even more money.

Here are the basics of the program:

• The program is free to join.
• We provide you with an online tools to manage your account and access the resources you need.
• Payouts are based on the schedule below. As a rough guideline they are approximately equal to four months fees for the service.
• After a referred customer signs up they must stay with that service for a minimum of 90 days and their account must be in good standing.
• Payments options are by check, PayPal or Account credit (for existing customers).
• The minimum payout will be $100.00 US.
• Payments are made once a month for qualified sales.

For all the details you can check out our website: http://softcom.biz/Affiliates/

Sign up for our Affiliate Program and start making money now!

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

**Exchange payout is per domain with at least one active professional seat

When I ran a small business a few years ago the most important thing for me was to appear anything but small. I knew that one way my customers and suppliers validated my company was from my website, and as online searches for products and services become more common, this will increasingly be a source of business credibility.

Would you do business with a company that had a website with the contact info listed as bob@hotmail.com? That is why I am always amazed when I see someone with a website using a bulk email address like Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo on the site. These emails addresses can be obtained anoymously and as such, can’t be traced.

Well the good news is there is a simple solution:

All myhosting.com web hosting accounts include domain-based email accounts and unlimited email alias or forwarding accounts.

When I ask customers why they continue to use their bulk email address, they often say, “so many people have that address and I don’t want to lose any email.” However, there are a few simple things you can do to keep using your bulk email address and use a domain-based email address. And still only need to check all your email in one place.

The best case would be to setup an email account on your domain for each person or department like bob@youdomain.com or accounting@yourdomain.com then you can send and receive email using these addresses.

The instructions below cover creating a user on your mail server. In order to create a user, you must login to the Email Management Console. This can be done directly from your Control Panel or by logging in directly through your web browser as outlined below:

1. Open your Web browser and type the following in the address bar:

http://emailadmin.domain_name or http://emailadmin.myhosting.com/

2. Now you will need to Log in:

Type in your Admin email address for the username and your password.

3. Click Add User under the Manage Users section.
4. Enter the desired User ID. This will be the email account. Example, entering “joe” as the User ID will create the email account joe@yourdomain.com
5. Enter and Confirm the desired Password for this account.
6. You have just created an email account. On the left hand side you will see your newly created account under the Users folder.
7. Click on this User ID you have just created and you will be able to configure the following settings:

o User Profile
o Change Password
o Mail Forwarding
o Inbound Rules
o Vacation Message
o Auto Responder
o Advanced Options
o Manage Mailbox
o SMTP settings

8. Repeat the above steps to create additional email accounts for your domain.

Then simply forward your current email to that address, here are some links on how to do that:

Gmail - Hotmail - Yahoo

Another option would be to create an email alias on your domain that forwards to your bulk email address (email aliases are included free!). In that case something like info@yourdomain.com might be the most appropriate. An Alias is a reference on the server where email is sent, that will redirect email to the account or email address you specify. To create an alias for your domain, please follow the instructions below.

1. Open your Web browser and type in:

http://emailadmin.domain_name or http://emailadmin.myhosting.com/

2. Now you will need to Log in:

Type in Admin email address for the username and your password.

3. Click on the “Aliases” folder on the left side of the page
4. Click on “Add Alias”
5. Complete the fields accordingly.

New Alias Name: This is the actual alias name, and is the address to which the sender will direct mail. For example, if you wanted to receive mail sent to info@domain_name you would type ‘info’ in the field.

Resolves To: This is the e-mail address(es) or user account(s) to which any email will be routed. If the alias represents an existing user on your domain, simply type in their UserID (the part before the ‘@’ symbol in their email address). If the alias represents an email address, simply type the email address into the field. If you want an alias to resolve to more than one user, simply separate each entry on a new line.

6. Click Save.

Creating email addresses on your domain is easy and lends credibility to your organization. If you want a complete corporate email experience – one that allows you to send meeting requests to your customers, share calendars and use all the great features of Outlook 2007, including mobility – I suggest you check out our Microsoft Exchange Email offering.

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

When looking for a good web host, there are a lot of important factors to consider. WebHosting Talk, a forum devoted to web hosting, recently published a survey indicating that reliability, security and support were considered the three most important factors – as identified by SME customers – when selecting a potential web host.

These are relatively easy things to investigate. Netcraft.com – an independent 3rd party that doesn’t provide hosting services – monitors the performance of hosting companies and makes their findings publicly available.

When investigating support, look for a 24/7 tool free telephone number on the website and make sure it’s included with the plan you want to subscribe to.

Security is a little more involved: What is their datacenter like? Have they had any major security breaches? How long have they been doing business? (this is important as companies who haven’t figured this out don’t tend to last very long).

But there are other factors that aren’t discussed as much. One of them is having something called a dedicated IP address which can have a major impact on site security.

An IP address, for those that don’t know, is the 12 digit number behind a domain name used to resolve a request. Domain names were invented because people can’t remember really long numbers so a name was essentially mapped to a number. For example if you type 168.144.1.9 into your browser you will go to http://www.softcom.biz. Either the domain name or the IP will work.

Because there is a limited number of IP addresses available, many hosting companies give their customers shared IP addresses (many domain names under one IP address) and then use programmatic methods to resolve any request for a domain name on a shared IP address. Visitors will be able to reach a website hosted on a shared IP address but there are some shortcomings.

The main shortcoming is SSL security. If you are running an eCommerce site or any type of content that requires encryption, you will want to have a dedicated IP address. Otherwise visitors will get a warning that the site name doesn’t match the name on the SSL key.

There are also SEO or search engine optimizations concerns to consider. Many people have found that sites with a dedicated IP address do mysteriously better in search engine results than those utilizing shared IPs. This isn’t proven, but why take a chance with something as important as being indexed in the major search engines.

myhosting.com was fortunate enough to get a large block of IP addresses when it was founded 10 years ago and provides a dedicated IP address with all its Windows sites. As for support and reliability – you won’t find anyone better.

John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

I was at HostingCon in Chicago last week and I heard someone comment about whether “email was still the killer app.”

Besides being a slightly useless thing to say, it occurred to me that email never was a killer app. A text message is a message.  Rather it’s the tools used to manage messaging in combination with the protocol that makes for the better experience.

Truth is a lot of people I speak to don’t understand the difference between POP3 email, IMAP4 email and MAPI services. As a result, they don’t understand why Microsoft Exchange is so expensive (Microsoft Exchange email is based on MAPI) and so useful.

Let’s start with POP3. That’s the basic email that comes with most hosting plans or is provided by your ISP or cable company. The most important thing to understand about POP3 is that your messages are stored on the email server until you access them through a common POP3 client like Outlook, Outlook Express or Eudora. 

When you connect to your POP3 email account through one of these clients, all your unread email messages are downloaded to your local machine for you to read. They are removed from the server.

The one exception is checking your POP3 accounts through the mail2web.com email retrieval application (mail2web.com). This webmail application allows you to preview your messages, on almost any remote mail server , before they’ve been downloaded. 

We get a lot of complaints from mail2web.com users who think we’ve deleted their emails. What actually happened was someone opened Outlook on their desktop and downloaded all their messages off a POP3 server.  Now those messages reside in someone’s office / home PC and can’t be easily accessed.

IMAP4 is different in that email is stored on the server. There is an added bonus of being able to create folders to manage your messages. When you connect to an IMAP4 account, the messages are not downloaded to your local computer but instead are previewed for you, recording what has been read and what hasn’t and allowing you to move messages to folders you created. 

This is important as IMAP4 accounts give you the ability to access your email from multiple locations and computers and maintain a synchronized copy.

 All the email accounts provided with hosting plans on myhosting.com are both POP3 and IMAP4 compatible. Apple’s iPhone uses the IMAP4 protocol for email syncronization which you can use with our Exchange hosting plans or our myhosting.com email acccounts.

But the killer app is Microsoft Exchange based on the MAPI protocol.  Okay,  I hate the term ‘killer app’ . . . but it’s the best messaging platform on the market.  MAPI is an ‘aware’ protocol and by that I mean it is constantly listening for changes on the server and then communicates those changes to you, however you are connected (browser, desktop, mobile device). If you are running Outlook with a full Exchange account (our Professional account) you don’t have to constantly click send and receive to see if you have new messages. Changes are pushed as they are recorded on the server.

Like IMAP4, all messages are stored on the server but Exchange also stores your calendar, contact, journal, tasks and much more. All this data is ‘aware’ of changes and communicates those changes immediately. You can also share real-time data with others in your organization and collaborate in a way you could never do with POP3 or IMAP.

Of course all this enhanced functionality requires extensive hardware to support. While diskspace costs have gone down considerable in the past 5 years, even the best SCSI drives have a maximum rate at which they can read or write data.

Exchange hits this maximum quickly with very few active users. And that’s just one of the reasons why Microsoft Exchange is so much more expensive than POP3. Microsoft’s monthly license fees – charged directly to Exchange hosters - also adds to our costs.

But it’s still much less than what your business pays for phone service and in my opinion, just as important and effective for running an efficient business.

John Carthy
V.P. of Sales and the Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Things are always changing in the web hosting industry, and it’s our job to stay on top of them. We’ve been hearing about Longhorn for years, but now we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. The release of Longhorn will soon become a reality with the release of Windows Server 2008 early next year.

But what will that mean for you? Part of Windows Server 2008 is IIS7, or Internet Information Services version 7. IIS7 is the web server application that is one of the core pieces of the puzzle, at least for hosting companies and customers. And so in advance of the Windows Server 2008 release, we’ve prepared a beta program for you to try out IIS7. This beta will give you the opportunity to test the platform and give you a jump on getting ready for the official release of IIS7 and Windows Server 2008.

Here’s a brief list of just a few of the features you’ll see in IIS7:

• A Flexible and more extensible web server for developing and deploying web applications
• A fully modular architecture consisting of 40 pluggable modules, built on top of all public extensibility APIs
• Use the web framework of your choice including classic ASP and ASP.NET
• Distributed configuration system that enables settings to be stored in web.config files so applications can be easily XCopy deployed and preconfigured
• Minimize development and downtime through powerful new diagnostic capabilities including access to runtime info and automatically tracing failed requests
• More scalable web server for delivering reliable web hosting to a broader set of customers

For more information, check out IIS.net. And although it’s a bit old, this interview at the O’Reilly Windows DevCenter may also be of interest.

Initial reports indicated that FrontPage Server Extensions weren’t going to be supported under Windows Server 2008, but recently we’ve heard that there are now plans to support them. This is good news for Windows hosting users with legacy FrontPage generated content!

Of course we’ll keep you up-to-date with any further news and developments… And in the meantime you can log into your Control Panel and activate your IIS7 Beta account today.

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

What is Microsoft SQL?

“A comprehensive database and analysis solution, SQL Server delivers the performance, scalability, and reliability that demanding Web and enterprise line-of-business environments require. New Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) support simplify data access and interchange, while powerful analysis capabilities enhance data value. Enhanced availability features maximize uptime, advanced management functions automate routine tasks, and improved programming tools and services speed development.”-Microsoft/SQL Server Data sheet

So What?

Well that means that with a myhosting.com hosting account and MS SQL database plans you can build a dynamic, scalable website that is reliable and affordable.

To make things ever better we now have a FREE starter plan!
For more information or to signup click here.

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.