Though we have been working towards building a program that will support large email lists for some of our clients, we can accross a really neat program that is a far superior product then we have seen. Aweber is a powerful email marketing tool that allows any small company use opt-in lists to market to their subscribers.

Aweber is a great tool for a company just starting out or even large businesses that need to boost their marketing. Aweber's tools allow you to create and manage multiple email lists, create custom forms for new subscribers, track subscribers, track click throughs, and so much more. Aweber is a powerful tool for creating and managing email marketing campaigns! Go to Aweber's web site for more details and pricing: www.aweber.com

Email marketing is an effective tool to build trust in potential and frequent shoppers. Email marketing is also a very cost effective tool that can always be changed to run new specials, create new buzz about a product or company. Email marketing also allows the end recipient to unsubscribe any time.

Unlike snail-mail, we still get the junk mail in our inbox.

Take a free test drive on Aweber: www.aweber.com

 

At In The Sun's web hosting some of clients have large subscription based email lists. There is one that has about 40,000+ emails that go out on a weekly basis. With this we had to be very careful how we sent out the emails so our email server won't get blacklisted as spam. So after a few weeks of answering questions regarding Yahoo!'s protocols for sending email we received word from Yahoo! that emails from our outgoing server will be accepted by them.

This is good news and it shows that we must be doing something right!

Though the process was tedious we understand that everyone must do their part to control spam!

Thank you!

Some of our shared hosting clients have large email lists that need to be sent out on a monthly or weekly basis. These subscription based newsletters had to be set up so the end recipient can easily unsubscribe or the email address can be deleted from our client's database. We also needed to set these newsletters up so they won't look like spam or clog up our outgoing email server.

Thanks to John Starkey's assistance we were able to setup these large newsletters so it would not significantly impact our outgoing email server during peak hours. The newsletters are sent out a few at a time every 30 minutes until the entire list is completed.

Next challenge is to automatically delete bad email addresses from the databases!

Stay tuned!

In The Sun has reached over 100 hosted web sites in March 2008. This may not sound like a big deal, but to use this was a goal we needed to reach. With the addition of www.lavajavabean.com, www.tgp-tn.com, www.hallsauto.net, www.jimheckmanties.com and many others we have surpassed our goal of 100 hosted sites by the end of 1st Quarter 2008.

In The Sun continues to maintain its own web servers so there is no third party company involved. Our clients deal directly with us with personalized customer service. Most of our customers use their own access to the Plesk control panel to add and maintain email addresses, but if issues arise help is only a phone call away.

Thanks to all our clients and their trust in us for their business!

See you at 200 hosted web sites by 3rd Quarter 2008!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! In 2007 we saw some significant growth in hosting and development. We choose to update our server capacity and we are liking it. We can offer great prices to our clients and give package incentives for those that choose to pre-pay their hosting.

We have updated our web hosting prices to reflect the trends in the market place and to offer more disk space and services to our clients. Here are some basics of our new prices and services:

Premium Hosting - starting at $14.99 per month includes: 1 GB of disk space Multiple domains 20 email addresses 100 GB of monthly data transfer PHP/ MySQL Daily data backup Redundant power and Internet service AWSTATS/Webalizer Control Panel Access More Info

Secured Hosting - starting at $24.99* per month includes: 2 GB of disk space Up to 5 domains 50 email addresses 300 GB of monthly data transfer PHP/MySQL Interchange Shopping cart access Daily data backup Redundant power and Internet service Dedicated IP address AWSTATS/Webalizer 2 Year SSL More Info

Ultimate Hosting - starting at $34.99* per month includes: 10 GB of disk space Up to 10 domains Unlimited emails 500 GB of monthly data transfer PHP/MySQL Interchange Shopping cart access Daily data backup Redundant power and Internet service 5 Dedicated IP address AWSTATS/Webalizer 2 Year SSL More Info * Premium Hosting and Secured Hosting must be secured by a valid major credit card. We are a family oriented business and do not host gambling web sites, dating web sites, or pornography. Please read our AUP. ** Free web site transfer is included when transferring from a similar web server; i.e. from Linux to Linux. We will disclose any additional programming to make your site compatible to our servers.

The time has come again to do some updates. Our hosting business has been growing by leaps and bounds. We just upgraded to a new web server with total disk space of 250 GB, and over 1000 GB of montly data transfer. Our server is running 3 250 GB hard-drives that are set to mirror one another for optimal uptime. We needed to upgrade to offer our clients additional processing power to send out newsletters.

We want to make sure everyone understands we are against spam and we do our best to keep spam to a minumum, even when our clients send out large emails through newsletters. We first make sure the web site is CAN-SPAM complient and we make sure the newsletters sent out by our clients are complient also. We are also in communication with major ISPs to make sure the newsletters and mail servers are not being blocked due to the large amount of emails going out. We also assist our clients in making sure any emails that bounce back are deleted from the newsletter database.

So now we can offer our clients more processing power, more disk space and better customer service through our web based interface for the web server. If you need to host a web site or you need additional storage that can be accessed remotely by many users, we can help!

Hackers! Who really likes a hacker? Well I have to admin they do come in handy when you need to know how secure your web site is. We have seen other web sites that were password protected get hacked and malicious emails sent out to all their customers. That is not pretty. But now we can analyze the situation and learn from it. Do people or customers get offended or hurt? Initially, they may. Depending on how fast your hosting company or development team can respond to a situation really makes the difference. What is the point of all this? A short relationship with a hacker can go a long way! We did recently have a case where we took over a web site and did not realize there were some links cached from the previous site on certain search engines. We saw hackers trying to get in and were alerted via email to the threats. We immediately took down the pages that were threatened, changed the directory, installed an SSL, and updated the robots.txt file which disallowed search engines from indexing areas of the web site. Hackers will come and go, but a good hosting and development team that can assess a threat and make a decision. We may not have been able to stop the threat, but we acted quickly to limit the loss for our client. We were there when they needed us.

We at In The Sun - Internet Development are always looking at the latest trends to learn and see how or if we should offer these services to our clients. We have been using one software component which is vital to our oppertions and that is Interchange, www.icdevgroup.com. We have been using Interchange shopping catalog for many years and have seen many different versions and changes to the open-source software. One thing we have seen is the consistent versitility and stability to Interchange. If your company is looking to get online or update your shopping cart, look for yourself at the features Interchange offers. To name a few, Interchange offers multiple pricing levels for customers, dealers and wholesalers. Interchange also includes tracking for affiliates which is useful for utilitizing dealer or wholesaler promotions. Interchage's administration interface is dynamic, but easy to use. Permission levels are available for mulitple users. Interchange makes it easy to manage customers, orders, products and even inventory in one central administration area. With our expertise in using Interchange we can take your customer's shopping experience to a whole new level. We can create templates inside the secured shopping area that will give your shoppers the same look and feel as the rest of your web site. Not too many shopping cart programs allow customization like Interchange.

It is here, if you haven't heard, Google Checkout. This awesome service is great for those who are looking to utilize Google's Adwords for marking in the pay-per-click world. In The Sun - Internet Development is looking towards our Google Checkout certification and having the ability to offer Google Checkout features into Interchange (our preferred shopping cart program). With the name of Google Checkout and the versitility of Interchange you can take your customer's shopping experience to a whole new level. Did you know that with every dollar purchased through Google Checkout you can earn $10 towards Google Adwords? Google Checkout even offers competative rates for merchants. This is one thing all merchants should get on board with - Google Checkout and free money towards Google Adwords! Give us a call today to help you help you on this powerful train of marketing and e-commerce tied into one!

As I mentioned in a recent news post, we recently moved our hosting to a new facility. On our new dedicated hosting servers we have installed a spam filter. The spam filter works with serveral 'Black Lists' that monitor IP addresses which are known for sending spam. Some of these IP addresses are owned and maintained by Internet Service Providers, like Brighthouse, Earthlink, AOL, BellSouth and so on. At times your ISP may give you a dynamic IP address which means you don't have a standard IP address assigned to your modem but it may change every few days, weeks or months. Some spam filters recognize this dymanic IP addresses as potential spam addresses and will black list a dymanic IP address.

So if you are hosting your web site through our servers and may have issues connecting to the outgoing mail server your Internet Service Provider's IP address which has been assigned to your computer may be black listed and may be blocked by our email server spam filter.

There are two ways to fix this situation. One is to call your ISP and request a static IP address that is not black listed. Sometimes this may cost more, but it will enable to send emails through our email servers. Keep in mind your recipient's ISP may block your ISP's IP address too. In that situation there are no winners. The second solution is to use your ISP's outgoing mail server to send out your emails. But again your recipient's ISP may block your ISP's IP address.

Since we do not allow our clients to use our servers as spam we strive to keep our IP addresses off the black lists. Our advice, pay the few extra bucks to get a static IP address and go around the spam!

Happy emailing!

During the month of June we moved all our non-ecommerce web hosting to new dedicated servers. Our new web servers are located in Dallas area, out of the hurricane prone South Florida. Our previous hosting facility suffered serveral days of down time from hurricane Wilma and we felt it was time to make the leap to a new web hosting facility.

I admit we had a few bumps through the transition process, but for the most part things went very smooth. For moving over 35 web sites over a period of a few weeks while we had major projects going on was no small feet. Our new servers are running PHP 4.2.1 and some of our old servers were running 4.01, which means we had to do some testing and upgrades to a few web sites.

Some of the issues we ran into were mostly from local area networks not updating their DNS records. One client is on a T-1 connection through BellSouth. We saw that BellSouth took over 5 days to update their DNS records. We went out of our way to call BellSouth on behalf of our client to make sure BellSouth understood the web server was setup correctly and we could ping to the domain name outside of the client's network. What a mess that was!

So now with our new heavy duty dedicated servers we can offer faster response, better uptime, lower maintenance, and more customizable options.

Thanks for your patience to all our clients. We can assure you the transition to these new web servers is for the better.

In the world of doing business on the Internet over the years, one thing we have learned is that no one person or company can do everything or know everything. We have learned some valuable lessons in this. We have always felt that we wanted to do it all. And why not? Why should anyone have to go to different places to get things done. Yeah we might pay a little extra at Publix for shampoo then say at Walmart. But if we are already at Publix and don't feel like looking for a parking space, standing in line, and on and on.

So the point is, we are getting ready to bring on some experts in the field of Search Engines. A few years ago we had some good training on Search Engine submission and optimization. We could not compromise our time in development, hosting, and design to accomodate search engines. We didn't have the staff for it.

We are now working on developing a team of experts to work with our development and design team to build a search engine service. This service will include, Search Engine Optimization, Searh Engine Submission, Pay-Per-Click campaigns, Ad-Words and many weekly and daily traffic monitoring. We will soon offer this as a value added service to our new and existing clients and as a separate service. We will be able to also work with our clients to develop content specfic web pages that will bring more traffic and more recognition.

At In The Sun, LLC we are always looking at ways to offer our clients and potential clients more than the average web design or hosting company. We offer ways for churches and ministries to make money online through our bookstore, centralfloridachristians - bookstore our music download store, Burn Lounge Store, and custom built shopping carts, online giving and recurring partnerships.

In The Sun - Internet Development's goal is to serve the community of Central Florida. We are not here to sell our service or make money off what businesses and churches don't need. We want to serve businesses and ministries in the area with integrity and value.

Thank you for allow us to serve your business needs.

For those that don't know, In The Sun, LLC owns and manages 5 directory type web sites, Central Florida Christians, South Lake Online, Tampa Christians, Miami Christians, and Jacksonville Christians. We are in the process of making major changes to these web sites, including much needed calendars for events, better information management, and newsletters to all businesses, individuals, and churches in each web site.

These web sites were designed with the community in mind. With the traffic for these web sites growing every month we need to help the respected communities keep up with what's going on around the areas.

Each expect site will be completed within a few weeks while we are working on our paying current projects!! There goes the weekends!

After much debate and finally time to put it together we launched our newly redesigned company web site. Now we have easy to find buttons for our main catagories of service, web hosting, e-commerce, web development, and domain name registration. We also incorporated some dynamic content so our clients and potiential clients can keep track of what we are upto.

This is our first company news update. As we continue to grow stay tuned for more information about new services to help your business.

Thank you,
In The Sun - development team