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  • Harry

    Learn how to fight email spam

    Harry 6:24 am on March 17, 2011 | 0 Permalink

    Spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), has been growing at ever increasing rates. To protect your email accounts against unwanted spam, SmartyHost has integrated the following spam filters on the email servers:

    • Spamhaus block list: Our mail server will reject connections from know spam senders using a real-time block list supplied by Spamhaus.org. This is a conservative block list that only lists known spam senders.
    • Greylisting: Our servers will temporarily reject any email from a sender that can not be recognized. The legitimate sender will try to deliver the email again, whereas the spam sender will probably not retry the delivery. For more information, please visit greylisting.org.
    • SpamAssassin: All emails that are forwarded on or delivered to a local email account will also be scanned by SpamAssassin. It assigns a score to each email, where the higher the score, the greater the likelihood that it is a spam email. If it is over a certain score, the email will be marked as spam and deleted.

    These methods will filter most spam emails. There are also some end-user practices that can help to protect your email account further.

    • Stop showing your email address on your website or other websites.
      Try to use an online form on your website. For more information, see Sending emails from a website using FormMail.pl
    • Use different email addresses for different purposes.
      It will reduce the risk of exposing your personal email address to the spammers.
    • Disable “catchall” setting in Toolkit.
      “catchall” is a wildcard email account. It will catch all of the emails addressed to the email accounts that do not exist. For example, if a sender misspelled your email address in an email, the email will be delivered to your “catchall” account. However, if spam senders make up a random email address under your domain name and send spam to it, you will receive them as well. For information on how to disable the “catchall”, see Configuring an email address to bounce all messages
    • Watch out for the check boxes when signing up for services.
      When you buy things or services online, be careful with the “subscribe me” check box or similar check boxes as they are often selected by default. It might allow companies to send you newsletters that you don’t want, or even allow them to sell or give your email address to the third-party companies.
    • Avoid replying to spam emails.
      Doing this will only confirm that your email address is live. It will lead more spam emails to you.
     
  • Harry

    Choosing the right keywords

    Harry 6:24 am on March 17, 2011 | 0 Permalink

    It’s important to make sure you’re using unique keywords for each page of your website.

    Its also important to make sure that those keywords are not generic. Instead it is far more effective to select ‘long tail’ keywords, which are made of more specific words or phrases.

    For example, if you are running a personal training company, then you should avoid using broad terms such as ‘exercise’ or ‘weights’, because it is unlikely that you will rank well for such broad keywords.

    While these keywords can bring less traffic to your website, they will often bring more relevant traffic as well. This means that visitors to your website are more likely to convert into customers.

    If you would like some help with building your keyword strategy we can help you with our expert Traffic Optimiser package.

     
  • Harry

    Backing up websites through the Offsite Backup

    Harry 6:24 am on March 17, 2011 | 0 Permalink

    We’re very proud of our state of the art Platinum servers because they provide high security, speed and reliability. Protecting critical data is an essential element in the SmartyHost hosting strategy. That’s why every hour, we take a ‘Snapshot’ of every hosted website and database.

    We are telling you this because…regardless of how reliable your host is, it’s good practice to keep a local backup of your website files. In fact, we recommend you back up your files every time you make a change to your website. The new SmartyHost Toolkit takes all the hard work of this by allowing you to take a local back-up of website files, email and databases with a click of your mouse.

    Learn how to back up your website using your Toolkit with the following tutorial.

     
  • Martin Schneider

    2010 Christmas Opening Hours

    Martin 5:24 am on December 20, 2010 | 0 Permalink

    Yet another year has flown by and it’s time to break out the tinsel and fruit cake again!

    We’d like to wish you and your family a very happy and safe holiday season, and thank you for being a loyal customer in 2010.

    If you need to contact us over the Christmas period, our support team will be manning the phones and online support throughout (excluding weekends and public holidays). You can contact us by calling 1300 721 465 or via the ‘ask a question link’ in your Toolkit.

    Christmas opening hours (all times AEDST):

    Friday 24 December: 8.30am-5.30pm
    Monday 27 December: Closed
    Tuesday 28 December: Closed
    Wednesday 29 – Friday 31 December: 8.30am-5.30pm
    Monday 3 January: Closed

    Once again, have a wonderful Christmas and we look forward working with you in 2011.

     
  • Harry

    How to control what Google can see

    Harry 10:30 pm on October 27, 2010 | 0 Permalink
    Tags:

    You can control which pages Google sees with a robots.txt file.
    Not sure what a robots.txt file is or does?

    What is a robots.txt file?
    A robots.txt file is a fundamental part of your website; if you don’t have one then the Google Bot which crawls through your website doesn’t know what to look for.

    Also it means that it could index pages you didn’t want it to, meaning that those pages you thought were private are now in the public domain.

    How do I set one up?
    We’ve prepared some simple instructions on how you can create your own robots.txt file.

    If this all sounds too hard, then we’ve just launched a new product which takes care of all the hard work for you, check out the Traffic Activator.

     
  • Harry

    Getting more out of your email

    Harry 10:30 pm on October 27, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:

    Thanks to Platinum upgrade, you now have the ability to better manage your email accounts. We thought it might be a good idea to breeze through some of the common settings.

    Catch-all addresses
    You can make the best of your catch-all account. The catchall account is a wildcard email account. You can use it to catch the emails addressed to non-existent or mistyped email accounts at your domain name.

    Read more on how to configure your catch-all account in Toolkit.

    Vacation messages
    While you are on holiday, you can enable the vacation message. This way, people who try to contact you through email will get a helpful auto reply message.

    Read more on how to enable a vacation message in Toolkit.

    Bounce-all
    If you want to disable a particular email account you can use the ‘bounce-all’ option. It will keep the existing email settings and bounce all emails sent to these addresses.

    Read more on how to configure an email address to bounce all messages in Toolkit.

     
  • Harry

    Web statistics and how they work

    Harry 1:54 am on September 28, 2010 | 0 Permalink
    Tags:

    You spend a lot of time and effort on your website. You’ve submitted it to search engines, spent money advertising online. Has it given you a good return on your investment? SmartyHost can tell you.

    All our hosting accounts now come with Urchin 6 – so you can track the number of visitors, pages they viewed, where they came from and much more… Click hear to find out more

     
  • Harry

    Setting up your email client - POP3 vs IMAP

    Harry 1:53 am on September 28, 2010 | 0 Permalink
    Tags:

    One of the most common questions our support team receives is how to configure an email client such as MS Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird or even their iPhone.

    To create an email account in one of these clients, you’ll need to decide whether to use POP or IMAP.

    If you’re office-based or only check your emails from one computer, POP3 is the way to go…

    Click here to read more

     
  • Harry

    Fighting Spam

    Harry 1:54 am on August 28, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:

    Ever check your emails to find your inbox clogged with unwanted emails – from cheap Viagra pills, to ‘insider’ tips on stock market shares that are about to boom? It’s Spam!

    At SmartyHost, we use industry leading practices such like Spamhaus, Greylisting and SpamAssassin to protect you from Spam, but there are also a number of things that you can do to help fight the battle… Click here to read more

     
  • Harry

    Backing up websites through the Offsite Backup

    Harry 1:53 am on August 28, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply

    We’re very proud of our state of the art Platinum servers because they provide high security, speed and reliability. Protecting critical data is an essential element in the SmartyHost hosting strategy.

    That’s why every hour, we take a ‘Snapshot’ of every hosted website and database. Eight of these backups are available at all times, covering the most recent six hours, and the two preceding midnights.

    We are telling you this because…regardless of how reliable your host is, it’s good practice to keep a local backup of your website…

    Click here to read more

     
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