Aileen Horwath
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Homepage: http://www.iphouse.com/
Posts by Aileen Horwath
Do you want a Kindle?
Oct 29th
ipHouse has been getting out to events more in the past 5 months than we have in the past 5 years. We are having fun meeting customers face-to-face and learning about how you use ipHouse services.
At some of these events we have held a drawing for a free Amazon Kindle. Personally, I have a Kindle and I love it. Do you folks feel the same way? Do you want a chance to win a free Kindle? Should we be giving something else away? Please send us your opinions and ideas.
Our next event is the 55th Annual Minnesota CPA Tax Conference on November 16th and 17th at the Minneapolis Convention Center. This is a well-organized and educational event put on by the Minnesota Society of Certified Public Accountants. We look forward to seeing you there.
Manage your email with Aliases
Oct 21st
Mail aliases allow mail to more than one email address to be delivered to the same mailbox. Large companies use aliases all the time. Now small companies and individuals can as well. All ipHouse mailboxes now include 2 aliases.
If you are a small business with just a couple people, you can use addresses like sales@mydomain.com, support@mydomain.com and billing@mydomain.com and have all the email delivered to the same one or two mailboxes.
The use of aliases gives your business a more professional look while at the same time making it easier for your customers to remember how to get in touch with you.
Within your mail client, you can setup rules that sort or mark mail differently, depending on the alias it was sent to. If all your billing mail, for example, is in the same folder, it makes it easier for you to read through all of it before you post invoices.
If you are an individual user, aliases can help you track who is selling off your email address. Just setup a couple aliases that you can use when responding to different offers. Then watch to see which of your mail addresses are receiving any unwanted email.
Setting up your aliases is easy. Just go to our customer account management system ipMom and click on Aliases.
Cloud Computing and Sys Admins
Oct 16th
More and more these days I talk to people who are trying to figure out how and whether cloud computing fits into their business model. Cloud computing is really a new version of the old style of mainframe computing where diverse groups share the computing power and storage of large systems. Cloud computing, ideally, will be engineered to minimize or eliminate single points of physical failure. Physical system failure, however, is only one item of many that can affect your system’s performance and uptime.
Hardware configurations, including manufacturer choices, operating systems versions and configurations, firewall rules and ongoing maintenance of all the above heavily impact the performance and reliability of your systems.
Regardless of whether you have computers in your broom closet, colocated at your ISP or deployed in the cloud, your company needs a good system administrator looking out for your network and machines. Good system administrators know the pros, cons and quirks of different hardware, operating systems and network configurations. They know about possible vulnerabilities first because they are on private security lists you don’t even know exist. They’ve got your back. George Reese of enStratus, expanded on this in a recent post that compares programmers and sys admins.
One of the big differences between an ipHouse virtual machine (which is essentially deployed in a local cloud) and deploying a server with one of the national cloud providers, is the sys admin expertise that comes with your ipHouse machine. We work with you to make sure the system configuration is optimized for your business applications. We can also administer the machine for you, keeping it securely patched and up-to-date.
Happy Birthday RFCs!
Apr 7th
Forty years ago today Steve Crocker published the first Request For Comments – beginning the process of creating universal standards for what would become the Internet. At the time Steve Crocker was a graduate student at U.C.L.A. working with a small group of students and faculty on a simple network that linked four computers at U.C.L.A., the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The development of this primitive, packet switching network, was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of United States Department of Defense during the Cold War and was named ARPANET.
Because ARPANET was developed at universities and funded by the government instead of private industry, the underlying functionality, processes and standards were developed and discussed openly. When Steve Crocker published RFC 1, his first summary of of procedural rules for the Network Working Group, it was truly a request for comments. This open discussion of standards for creating and managing the infant network was unique and greatly shaped the development of the Internet. The rules for how the network operated, and to a large extent how the Internet operates today, are based on a process Steve Crocker refers to as “rough consensus and running code.”
The Internet was able to become the global network we know and love today in part because anyone could freely access the protocols, follow the published standards or RFC’s and join the network. This openness is still a critical component of how we at ipHouse run our network. We are Internet old-timers. Many of us have been on the ‘net and working in this Industry since the early ’90s. Being honest with our customers is one of our core business values. One that we believe enhances the power of the Internet to bring people together.
Speed Testing Your Connection
Jan 27th
Yesterday Minnesota Public Radio did a story on mapping broadband service in Minnesota. Affordable, high-speed Internet connections are becoming a critical component for educational and economic development throughout Minnesota and the world. Both the Blandin Foundation and the Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Taskforce are working hard to increase the availability of broadband throughout the state.
Because it isn’t cheap to bring broadband service to rural areas, knowing which areas are most in need is necessary to determine where to best spend limited resources. The Minnesota Commerce Department is working with Connect Minnesota to map Internet connection speeds throughout the state and is promoting the Connect Minnesota Speed Test as a way for consumers to check on the truthfulness of their ISPs. While this is a great goal, there are significant technical problems with the Connect Minnesota Speed Test.
