M6.Net News

After a lot of work under the hood with Plesk we’ve rolled out a major optimization of all Plesk Servers with dramatic speed increases. This was a seamless process with no downtime. We’ve updated our weekly and monthly Plesk optimization procedures.

Personally, I prefer WebSitePanel and use it for my personal web sites but we understand most like Plesk’s Simple UI. I’ve heard a few other hosts have dropped Plesk altogether but with what we’ve worked out after much work in the depths of Plesk we can run it as  fast as a fresh install with no accounts.

Being aware of the role of content in generating targeted visitors to a website and promote their online presence, people increasingly use blogs to distribute quality content under a variety of niches. Successful online businesses realize the more content sites they have the moe successful they will be. Hence, administrating these sites involves a lot of time-consuming processes, which includes content creation, user registration, changing themes, adding plugins, etc. The Multisite feature of the WordPress is an excellent solution for people who maintain multiple blogs, websites or content management systems.
What you can do using Multisite Feature?
With a single wordpress installation, you can add many numbers of blogs or sites to form a multisite network. Using this tightly coupled network you can be a network admin to run all these sites from one point. Initially, you can choose unique themes for different blogs under the multisite feature in a single control panel of your wordpress. Specialized or common plugins can be added to each blog with little effort. You can define the users and their roles separately for each website in a single window. You can have different set of users assigned for different sites and still you can be a master user or admin for all these sites.  A common database can be shared between all the websites preserving consistency of data. Backup and upgrading of individual wordpress sites are done in a single click.
How to use this Multisite Feature?
You can either configure your existing wordpress to include multisite feature or create a new wordpress with a multisite feature. Multiple sites can be represented using sub-domains like niche1.mysite.com, niche2.mysite.com or as sub-directories like mysite.com/niche1, mysite.com/niche2 etc. Given the role of SEO, sub domain techniques work better since search treats all these sub-domains as individual sites and any backlinks coming from these sites will be considered as inboud links unlike in sub-directory technique where links coming from those sites will be considered as internal links.
To create a multisite network click Network link in your WordPress dashboard. Enter the network admin details such as title, email, etc. Add ‘blogs.dir’ directory under your main wordpress folder ‘wpcontent’. In case of upgrading an existing wordpress site you need to edit wp-config.php and add code related to multisite configuration at the end of the file.
(define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true)
Get into network settings from your dashboard and add multiple sites. That’s it, now you are ready with a single control unit for all your wordpress sites.

People seldom confine wordpress as a tool to create a blog and don’t think beyond that to create a small or medium-scale business website using it.  In practice, wordpress assists you to enhance your online presence by blogging, which is essentially an effective web 2.0 SEO technique.  Still, wordpress is an excellent CMS tool to create and maintain your static pages at ease.

Designers or WordPress!

It is a general perspective that you need to spend a lot to get anything with reliable quality, and everything offered for free lacks value. There are few exceptions, and certainly  wordpress is an exception. WordPress offers excellent CMS support for maintaining your static website pages where you display your products, talk about yourself, your support features and content. One particular feature which may attract all webmasters to wordpress is its ability to edit or update the website content as and when you wish with little or no knowledge in web programming.Wordpress makes it easy so you do not need to contact a professional designer every time you want to modify or update content and especially if you want to change the design. With wordpress – just change the theme!

What get from wordpress?

First of all, you can get the source code of wordpress for free. Then, you can select amazing designs for your website from a huge collection of wordpress themes. With these basic entities, you can kick-start your website right away and build your online presence. Pick suitable plugins to secure, run php codes, analyze traffic statistics, improve SEO, and add social buttons and what not. Most importantly, every problem with your wordpress can be addressed with the help of support teams available in various forms, including forums and blogs dedicated to wordpress. Additionally, the wordpress developers’ community serves to customize every feature of wordpress to match your typical requirements.

What you need to do?

• First of all, you need to have a strong desire to put your business online.
• Collect all wordpress elements and put it together to design a nice looking professional website.
• Add informative content to different pages of your website.
• Of course, most importantly! Choose a reliable Windows Hosting company to publish your website. WordPress quick installs are offered by many leading hosting providers like M6.NET which means you can launch a professional website with a few clicks in a few minutes.

We now support WebSitePanel alongside the Plesk Control Panel due to WebSitePanel’s greater performance. You can still choose to run your sites on Plesk but you now have the choice of WebSitePanel or Plesk. For customers and resellers with a lot of domains and busy sites, we seriously recommend WebSitePanel.

Each week, to keep Plesk running smoothly we have to run numerous optimization tasks across the Plesk database and web server which quietly run at low usage times in the wee hours of Saturday and Sunday. We believe we have mastered the art of running Plesk optimally but it is at an efficiency cost to our operation and can cause large customers performance problems.

In the past Plesk has caused a number of our customers to experience frustration with our service and we have seen many hosts suffer the same frustrations with their customers. Many hosts have dropped Plesk all together due to the problems it can cause and the sheer cost to run it. We’re confident running Plesk due to our extensive experience with it, and hosting all sorts of Windows based products over the last 14 years. We run Plesk without issue thanks to the number of customization scripts we’ve developed to keep it running smoothly and the procedures and processes in place to keep it optimized. We have very specific metrics we keep Plesk within and everyone is happy.

With WebSitePanel we can better balance our operations; continue to offer Plesk for customers who want Plesk and offer WebSitePanel for those who run busy web farms and resale operations.

WebSitePanel reminds us of the time we developed our own control panel. It is far more flexible and is based on a much better Architecture. WebSitePanel is built on Windows for Windows Servers, whereas Plesk was a port from Linux. There are a number of features in WebSitePanel that experienced webmasters, designers and resellers will appreciate. Plesk is great for new users but WebSitePanel, as far as we are concerned, rules for serious work.

There are significant benefits to running website panel:

With WebSitePanel all customers can use a single FTP account for all domains under their user account whereas with Plesk there is an FTP login per domain

Integration of WebsitePanel with Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer and Web App Gallery allows you to install all supported applications in 1-click.

In addition to regular file operations, the File Manager allows you to zip and unzip files through the web browser.

It has an excellent feature which allows you to back up your hosting space, including domains, websites, mail accounts, Databases, files and other website resources in just a few clicks.

You can easily control your IIS Remote Manager using this new control panel. You can smartly schedule multiple tasks including calculation of server disk space and bandwidth, backup database, send email notification, check website availability and ecommerce related tasks like generate invoice, activate paid invoices and etc., in a given period of time.

Resellers of our hosting packages create custom DNS servers and override default DNS servers and create custom hosting plans with Website Panel. These features give you great control and management over your reseller plans.

tis the season for Malware making it on to people’s web sites.One very big reason to keep your AntiVirus software up to date and working 100% is protecting your online presence. If you do not run AntiVirus software and get a virus, these viruses then infect your HTML, PHP and ASP, ASPX files and when you upload they then go and start the whole  process infecting other unsuspecting visitors to your site. Google is very good as detecting these and then will warn future visitors to your site about the high risk of visiting.We also get abuse reports and have to stop the site, require the customer to clean their system and then clean their website and we have to check and then start it again.In being more proactive with these issues I went and tested a whole range of desktop and server based scanners. I tried MCafee, Kaspersky, Norman and bunch of others and you know which one came out on top detecting where others passed it as 100% clean! – CLAMwin. Clamwin is a free open source virus, malware, spyware scanner. You can download it from www.clamwin.comI am working on architecting a solution based on clamwin to detect new files being uploaded to servers to check them first and block them unless they are clean. That way we hope to stop your sites from being shown as high risk on Google Searches even if you have been tardy with your antivirus scanners or very, very tardy and having none at all. You have no excuse – go and download ClamWin – it’s free, it’s open source and yes you’re a fool if you dont run something like this. http://www.clamwin.com

We’ve upgraded Plesk Control Panels to 9.5.4.

We’ve also integrated SQL Server Backup and Restore in all Plesk Control Panels. You can now directly create a SQL Server Database and upload your Backups and be up and online with your database in minutes. You can also do a backup of your databases at any time and download to your local machine.

We’ve been busy throughout December cleaning, balancing, upgrading and optimising our server infrastructure ready for a big 2011. We’ve now got an average of 80%+ headroom in CPU/Memory in all instances.

For a time we’ve been extremely lenient with a number of suspended accounts (non payment accounts) considering the tough economic environment everyone is experiencing. We have a number of older backups which will expire in early January so if you have been suspended and want to be reactivated please contact us before the end of the first week of January.

We also have some very big specials available till the 31st December with the following coupons. For a limited time you can get some big savings on the lowest priced Windows Reseller Accounts.

Prodeveloper Yearly only $279 ($120 off – save 30%) with this coupon: PXMAS2010 – till 31st December 2010

Designer Yearly only $159 ($40 off – save 20%) with this coupon: DXMAS2010 – till 31st December 2010

Flex Yearly only $100 ($19 off – save over 15%) with this coupon: FXMAS2010 – till 31st December 2010

Netstarter Yearly only $50 ($9 off – save over 15%) with this coupon: NXMAS2010 – till 31st December 2010

As always, as we have done for the last – almost 13 years now! – we’ll be operating 24/7 through the holiday period.

Welcome…

I know it’s been a long time since my last post but we’ve been head down working on the operations of M6.Net, upgrading servers and working to improve our technical support response times and response quality – gearing up to release a range of new Windows hosting products in the coming months. Plesk is soon to release Plesk 10 which is a significant upgrade and Microsoft is rolling out new initiatives to support Windows Designers, Developers and Resellers of which we will be taking part in and offering.

Upgrades

Over the last 9 months we have progressively upgraded all servers to Windows 64 Bit providing greater headroom in processing power and memory. This also equates to greater stability and server performance. We’ve also moved all old customers from our old servers, retiring our in-house developed control panel which served customers well over 10 years.

We are scheduled to be upgrading the Plesk 9.5x control panel to Plesk 10 during October. Plesk 10 is expected to provide improved control panel speed and reliability as well as support for ASP.Net 4 and a range of new features. We’ll update further as we get closer.

New Hosting products coming soon….

Right now we’re working on VPS, Dedicated and CLoud hosting products which we will start rolling out in early 2011, starting with VPS. As we have for the last 12 years we are planning on offering the most flexible, most inexpensive VPS, Cloud and Dedicated products. if you have any special requests or wishes for these new products please feel free to email me (michaelg@M6.net)

Here’s a free tool we made for Writers – WritersFocus. It is Software designed for Writers to have a full screen and minimize distractions. It can block out other windows alerts and includes a diary and many other features. I developed it out of my frustration with not having a MAC like full screen writing tool on the PC, plus I wanted to have a full screen diary.

We have upgraded all Plesk Servers to the latest 9 release across all Ples Windows 2008 and Windows 2003 servers. This has increased performance dramatically on all of servers. Plesk 9 provides customers with a number of new features and enhancements to make their hosting experience incredibly smooth.

Rakesh and the team have dealt with a number of small issues behinds the scenes and done a great job handling a lengthy and involved process, in what was a fairly major upgrade.

Here’s a free Network Diag tool we developed for doing quick diagnositics on a domain – showing WHOIS, Ping and tracert in one report. It works from the tray so you can quickly check domains/ip’s and also recheck them from the menu.