Apollo Hosting- Company Blog

Another year, another blog in review. Good timing, too, since I'll be on vacation next week. Mostly reminds me that I'll have to write another on the day I get back. I'm sure there'll be tons of fodder for the Jan 2 blog, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

The Blog

In terms of the blog, the war on the spam claimed most of the comments section. For those of you wondering why you can't post comments to old blogs, it's basically because old blogs are magnets for comment spam. I discovered it's about 2 weeks, (ironically, how often I generally post) before the top post will start getting hit. So now I turn off comments in the last post when the new one goes up.

Not sure whether it's an attempt to be sneaky or some kind of brief detente with the 2 week window. I'm guessing "sneaky". Perhaps they don't think people will be as vigilant on older posts as newer posts. Anyway, if you want to comment on a post, you've got 2 weeks to do it. The folks who developed Gallery got in on it, and another Robotech fan. You can too. I don't discourage on topic comments in the least, it's just they need to get there before the spambots do these days.

Don't get your hopes up on a PR6 backlink, though, as the layout of the template I use doesn't insert the URL on the main page, only in the "permalinked" individual version. Those permalinked versions are taking a bit longer to accrue PR. The earliest entries have gotten around PR3, and that's a year-and-a-half ago. Interestingly, my initial, ever so salacious inaugural entry has not picked up PR. Sadly, I cannot convince the spambots their efforts are wasted. I can't excise the referral bots that make the Urchin logs for this subdomain a pointless exercise, either.

2006 Features

Apollo started the year with a couple feature updates, replacing our site builder and premium spam filter products with the shiny new Site Symphony and MailBoxCop respectively. Both products were significant improvements over the pervious offerings and have been going strong ever since.

Site Symphony is a easy way to get a good looking website, and that's something a lot of people like. I know the feeling, as being more intimately familiar with more complex ways to arrive at the same result; I can appreciate the convenience that Site Symphony provides. If you're primarily concerned with getting your message out fast, but with a good look, then Site Symphony can provide that quick fix for you. Upgrade and you'll have access to a wider variety of tools to really kick that message up the proverbial "notch."

Hard not to like MailBoxCop, as it defends my work email address. My address (which, no, you will not be seeing here) is about 5 years old now. Anyone in a similar situation, or even older, knows that, despite best efforts, you're getting spam, probably a lot of it. In my case, even without having this email plastered all over the website or anywhere else, still gets about an average of 30 junk mails a day. I know, some of you are saying "wow, you're lucky", and I probably am, but doesn't mean I don't appreciate not seeing the vast majority of it cluttering up Outlook every day.

In the fall we partnered with ScanAlert to provide PCI compliance scans for sites with an online store that take's credit cards. This service is required by the major credit card companies, to ensure a reasonable amount of security is provided to customers shopping online. The quarterly scans are provided free for a year and, going forward, at a significant discount. Those who wish to provide customers with a even greater since of security can enjoy discounts on ScanAlert's HackerSafe program, which also graces Apollo Hosting's website.

One of our more recent and largest changes was our new Control Series Dedicated Servers. These new servers represent a huge leap in terms of resources and power over our previous offering, at a far more economical price. Perhaps the latter is what the price minded will like most. The Control Series includes advanced features for which others charge extra, such as Plesk domain management software and advanced operating systems. If you don't fit the "off-the-shelf" models, we can even custom build a server for you.

Finally, we deployed Windows Hosting, which rounded out our product line by filling in something missing for some time. We want to provide as robust a selection of solutions as we can, and Windows had been, to that point, an omission on our part. Customers had asked about, and we now have it available. Toss in unlimited database with MS SQL Express, and you have a pretty powerful solution for all your ASP.NET development needs. We also include .NET templates and a few other goodies for no extra cost, to really push your development needs into overdrive.

2007 - What's Ahead

Actually, though I'd like to "tease", I really can't. I can assure all our customers that we will continue to bring you new features and services, just like in 2006 and in all the years before. Even now our developers and admins are working on some new features for the first part of 2007. Our focus will be on improving the customer experience by revisions both to our website and to our procedures, as well as adding value to our hosting plans, as we have been doing for some time now.

So, I'll close with the same, nice, safe "Happy New Year" that closed out the last Blog-In-Review. Oh, and don't forget some nice, shiny Gift Certificates for all your last-minute holiday shopping needs for those webmasters on your list.