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Whilst looking at the stats for www.cleartext.net I noticed that we got more links from Windows Live than Google so far this year! Is Google slipping, or is Microsoft getting a handle on search, or is it all to do with Search Engine priority in IE7 ? 

Not sure how I missed this, but I did;

‘Dell will acquire MessageOne, a provider of on-demand e-mail management, compliance and archiving services, for $155 million in cash, the two companies announced Tuesday. Dell said the deal would add to its growing portfolio of software-as-a-service offerings

Rest of the story here.

I’m getting p*ssed off with BigPond throttling my connection 3/4 of the way through the month, I have a 10Gb cap but rarely reach it, when I do there’s always a spurious multi-gigabyte download in a time slot when I wasn’t at home, or online.Last time this happened their tech support told me it was physically impossible to download the amount of data showing on my account in the alloted time, the connection just can’t do it.BigPond, sort your usage tracking out and stop ripping off your customers with dodgy billing. Sure I can get a credit, but that doesn’t help when I’m trying to finish some work off online tonight!Now I have to hit Save and wait while my 64k ‘broadband’ link tries to post this….

200 million cellphone users hit by SMS spam tidal wave in China 

Recently reported by Sophos, go here for their story.

Support is our driving force at Cleartext, if customers are happy they spend more and give you a bit of leeway when things go off the rails. It’s for this reason I’m recommending JoomlaPlates as a Joomla template provider.

During a recent ‘free’ web site project I needed a good template and selected one of JoomlaPlates, their php is good and the CSS is well documented. To my dismay there was a small bug in the CSS when displaying some rounded corners in IE7.

I needn’t have worried because with a short time of telling them I had the fixed up CSS in my inbox. Good work, excellent support.

Online Armor gets Firewall of the Year from Computerworld Editor in Chief, Scot Finnie. Go here for the full article on Scot’s blog.

I just noticed that one of our competitors is missing a CTO, the previous candidate lasting around 9 months. Of course I shouldn’t complain about a competitor being rudder-less, after all a technology company without good direction means more business for those of us with it.

I used to wonder why companies would want to archive their email externally, given they’d almost certainly be charged a premium. That is until I got a call from a client needing help ‘fixing’ a tape archive that wasn’t restoring.

Of course, it’s all about media rotation, or not having to do it. Hosted archiving not only removes the tedium of having to backup and restore email archives, it removes the need to continually refresh the media archives are stored on.

We all know how difficult it is to find a floppy disk drive now, imagine digging out a 5 year old tape and wondering if there’s still a working rape drive to match!

No it makes sense, let your service provider handle the data and worry about backup, restore and media rotation. Just make sure the service is secure and that the search and retrieval works well.

My previous post has prompted me to drop this post in from the new Cleartext Systems web site, which isn’t live yet. (will be by the end of the week).

We’ve (Cleartext via Cool Bananas) been a NetRegistry reseller for many years and recently started using Media Temple in the USA for customers asking for virtual servers. Recently customers have been asking about offshore hosting.

When should I use Australian hosting?

Australian hosting is fine for most companies hosting requirements, if you’re a typical Australian small to medium business then any of the myriad of hosting companies can provide enough storage and data at a reasonable cost. We recommend NetRegistry because they are reliable and provide excellent customer support even if their plans aren’t the cheapest.

Why use offshore hosting?

If you’ve been watching the news you may have realised that Australia is ‘broadband challenged’, the cost of internet connections and the amount of data (stuff you can download) is far more (and far less respectively) than you can get from US based hosting companies.

This becomes an issue when you want to deliver rich media content like audio and video via your web site or web based application. Most Australian based hosting plans just don’t offer enough disk space and data transfer at reasonable price points. This is when you should consider US based hosting.

What is hybrid hosting?

We’ve coined a new phrase, “Hybrid Hosting”, this is a hosting setup where your main web hosting is based in Australia, probably because your primary audience is in Australia, but rich media hosting is offshore, typically in the USA.

This setup has several advantages;

• It keeps your web site ‘local’ and always available in the event that Australia suffers a ‘disconnect’ from the rest of the world. This is rare, but has happened.
• It keeps costs down by allowing you to select a hosting plan from an Australian provider for your web pages and then store your rich media content on a comparatively cheaper host with lots of space and data in the USA.
• Any outage in international connectivity only effects your rich media (audio and video) not the main web site pages.

This approach produces some interesting options for organisations moving into Web 2.0 with all the things that entails, RSS, Podcasts, streaming video and audio.If you’d like to discuss hosting then please give us a call with your web site requirements and we’ll work out a reasonably priced, reliable hosting solution for you.

Whilst looking for stats on broadband I went to the OECD Broadband Portal and spent an hour getting depressed by reading the various reports, snippets like this aren’t good reading if you live in Australia!;

Prevalence of explicit bit/data caps among surveyed offers, by country.
Australia was one of four countries with 0% of plans with ‘No explicit bit cap’, the USA was one of 10 countries with 100% of plans with no explicit bit cap.
(OECD Broadband Statistics, October 2007.)

Average broadband monthly price per advertised Mbits/s in USD.

Australia was $21.34 compared to the USA at $12.60, in a range from $3.09(Japan) to $97.43(Turkey).
(OECD Broadband Statistics, October 2007.)