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ipHouse on the road – Small Business Resource Expo
Apr 30th
ipHouse was on the road last week. We had a booth at the Small Business Resource Expo at the Earl Brown Conference Center in Brooklyn Center. The Expo is a nice gathering of local companies that had great attendance from a wide variety of local small business owners. Eric, Aileen and I got dressed up pretty and spent the afternoon talking to small business owners about everything from email, to colocation, to our new Virtual Server offerings.
Hey! Congratulations to Doug Snyder from Soulo Communications who won a Kindle 2 wireless reading device from ipHouse. Doug was smart enough to stop by our booth and drop his card into our fishbowl, now he has a Kindle. (And a mention on the ipHouse bog, what more could you want?)
It was great meeting ipHouse customers (“I’ve been with you guys since…”), and potential new customers (“I’ve heard of you guys, do you do…?”). We plan on participating in more of these events in the future. Check out the blog and we’ll let you know where we’ll be. And were open to suggestions, so let us know of any events that we might not know about.
See you on the road.
-Andy
Cookie Monster
Mar 28th
Cookie Monster sounded better than the title “What will they think of next.
Well THEY have thought of a way to track and sell information about you using cookies placed on your computer while shopping. I have been a privacy hawk when it comes to cookies for a while (more on that below). As such I was surprised that a NYTimes article was the one to inform me about a newish Internet marketing technique that uses behavioral targeting and cookies across multiple sites. Read the article quick or you may have to register for their website to read it. Basically there are companies (the two biggest are eXelate and BlueKai) that work with online merchants to place tracking cookies on your computer and mate them with information about your interests.
Those interests may be garnered from products you add to a shopping cart, to search terms on those websites, and pages/products you read about on the websites. These Cookie Monsters then essentially sell the cookies with targeted information to buyers. I suppose there is an argument that “you are going to get ads anyways so and might rather look at targeted ads rather than random ones”. But what would stop a online store from pairing these “anonymous preferences” with your personal information they get from their shopping cart? I suppose the Cookie Monster’s terms of service say they can’t do that, but I am sure it will happen. After all, anti-spam companies are now spam-promoting their anti-spam services.
So, there you go – yet another thing to worry about.
If you are paranoid about cookies (like me – go ahead make fun of me in comments)… I use Mozilla Firefox and have privacy preferences set up to block all cookies. For sites that I trust that require cookies, I add that domain name as an accepted cookie. Firefox also lets me add these exceptions with a condition that deletes the cookie at the end of the browsing session. Therefore when I went to BlueKai’s preferences page to see what info they have about me I got a pleasant message “We currently do not have anonymous information of your online preferences.”
While we are on the subject… Google recently announced behavioral targetting although they call it “interest-based” advertising. When I read Google’s disclosure it just doesn’t seem as intrusive and open to improper capture of preferences with personal data as these other solutions. Just in case I’m drinking the Google Kool-Aid, here are a couple other blogger takes…
- Eric Snyder
Superior Web Hosting and “The Day the Music Died”
Feb 9th
Last week there was a whole lot of news reporting on the 50th anniversary of “The Day The Music Died.” Early in the morning of February 3rd, 1959 a small plane crashed near the Mason City, Iowa airport killing Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper.
The three, along with Dion and The Belmonts played their final concert the night before at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa.
So what does this have to do with an ISP in Minneapolis? Well, besides the fact that I have a copy of the Surf Ballroom concert billboard on the wall of my home office (for years I was rather obsessed with the tragedy), there is a tie-in here.
The Surf Ballroom’s website commemorating the 50-year anniversary was hosted by ipHouse. (By the way, this site was designed by another ipHouse customer, Sassafras Design) As I said, there has been a ton of media reports lately and many of them have focused on the Surf Ballroom.
So in light of the media buzz, we thought to review the performance and reliability of the site over the last few months. The increase in web traffic the website saw was quite staggering and perhaps a testament to how important this day was to a lot of people.
Check this out:
Comparing single day web statistics from 11/2/2008 and 2/2/2009 the website had a 13,596% increase in web browsing. Yes, that number is correct, 17.6 MB on 11/2 and 24.1 GB (2,410 MB) on 2/2.
From another perspective, the site had 2,738 hits on 11/2 and 247,884 hits on 2/2. That is a stunning increase in traffic.
And we handled it.
The folks at the Surf Ballroom verified the website hosting was flawless during this heavy load.
While many ISPs claim to have burst capability, ipHouse’s web hosting cluster delivers. A common trick that some ISPs use is to speed cap or limit GB of transfers. On ipHouse’s clustered web hosting – we don’t do this – our cluster can handle all the transfers requested of it…even if your traffic increases by 13,000 percent!
To find our more about ipHouse clustered web hosting, go to http://www.iphouse.com/web-hosting-service.html or call us at (612) 337-6320.
Rave On!
- Andy
Ice Phishing
Dec 16th
So, how about that minus 20 degrees this morning – that cold enough for ya? Along with these near record lows last night and this morning, we received reports from a few users about a Phishing Scam that claims to be about their webmail account. This latest version asks the user to respond with their webmail username and password. This latest round has several give aways that are good reminders of what to look out for with scams in general.
Phishing is spam that attempts to extract personal information from the recipient. Here are some quick points about Phishing:
1. Email asks for your password: ipHouse will never ask for your password via email. This is a common policy with many companies so feel free to make it your own policy: Never send a password via email even if you think you know the recipient.
2. Strange reply-to address: The reply-to email address is not an official email address. ipHouse employees and internal addresses are all @iphouse.net. This latest round had the reply-to as an email address in Brazil (.br) or a yahoo.com address. A general rule for anyone is to always check a provider’s website for valid contact information. When going to their website type in the address yourself or use an existing valid bookmark. Do not click a link in an email even if it looks valid is it may be a “masked” URL whose destination is a different address.
3. Credit card fraud. While this email was looking for passwords, many Phishing scams ask for credit card numbers. And for decades there have been phone-based credit card Phishing scams. ipHouse will never ask for your credit card number via email nor ever via a call we initiate. Feel free to make it your own policy with everyone – never send a credit card number via email and never give your credit card number out to someone unless you initiate the call.
4. Spam filters don’t catch everything. While our multiple levels of Antispam catch most Phishing expeditions, some can get through. This one was harder to catch as it didn’t have any off-site hyperlinks and had enough words that it looked valid to the filters. We don’t publish for spammers how we adjust but trust me that we do adjust. Of course we do want to see what might get through. For example, yesterday alone ipHouse blocked 1,463,418 spam, Phishing, and viruses. We pride ourselves on an extremely low “false positive” rate. If a spam or Phishing message does get through, please forward it with full headers to spam@ipHouse.net. If you have an individual question or concern, our Support team can help.
5. Learn more! Here are some links to several sites’ take on Phishing:
- Blogs about Phishing: PhishingScam
- Popular OS: Apple, Microsoft
- Popular Guides (always with a grain of salt please): WikiPedia , About
- Trade/Industry groups: APWG, National Cyber Security Alliance, AARP
- Government: Stop-Think-Click
- Eric
ipHouse Sponsors MPR PublicRadioCamp
Jul 14th
This past Saturday, July 12th, ipHouse sponsored PublicRadioCamp with Minnesota Public Radio. The event was held at the UBS Forum at MPR in downtown St. Paul. The goal of the event was to corroboratively remix and mashup MPR’s content, data, audio, and meta-data. ipHouse’s Eric Snyder joined the public, MPR employees and Jon Gordon of Future Tense in finding innovative new ways to use MPR’s resources.
