Last night a group of us from Beacon attended the 2010 NCTA 21 Awards event in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The North Carolina Technology Association (NCTA) did a fantastic job organizing and planning this event.  They had a record turnout of over 800 attendees!   As a proud sponsor and partner of NCTA, Beacon presented the Life Sciences Company Award, which was one the 21 awards presented last night.   Since my partner was “unfortunately” in Vegas attending Pubcon, I had the “opportunity” to present this award in front of a huge audience.

As you can imagine, it was a little nerve racking – especially because I was not sure of the correct pronunciation of the winning company (TransEnterix – my apologies if I messed it up).  This was a great honor for me as well as for Beacon.  This provided us with another opportunity to get some great visibility in front of the best technology companies in the state.

NCTA is a great organization whose primary mission is Making North Carolina Number One in Technology and Technology Number One in North Carolina.  I highly recommend joining this organization and this link will provide you detailed information about the benefits of joining.   Click here for more information.

I heard a funny story a few weeks ago about Spam.   Apparently, if you work for the company who makes Spam the food product, you refer to this as unsolicited email and not as SPAM – they are very serious about protecting their brand.   Well, in the IT community, IT professionals call this spam and we despise spam – shall I say unsolicited email – because it makes our lives miserable.

The good news for those who host with us at Beacon Technologies is that we use our Barracuda Spam firewall to take a big bite out of Spam for our customers.  

Here is a report that demonstrates the effectiveness of our appliance:

This is your Daily Traffic Report from the Beacon Technologies Spam Firewall at 10.21.5.20 for 09/23/10.

Breakdown of traffic per hour:

Inbound Traffic

As you can see in this report, our spam filtering makes our life much easier when it comes to filtering out “unsolicited email”.   We process a lot of email on a daily basis as detailed on this report.   In one day, Barracuda identified 89% of the incoming email as spam, 160,000+ email messages – and blocked them  – so our staff and customers don’t have to deal with it!   This means our spam firewall is doing a great job of preventing spam…ummm…”unsolicited email”.

Our engineers monitor and fight spam on a daily basis, the barracuda is an appliance that we (I) cannot live without.   This is just one of the many benefits of our managed hosting services here at Beacon Technologies.

OK – it was not those YMCAers, but the kids from the Spears YMCA Counselors in Leadership Training camp who came by for a field trip to visit Beacon a few weeks ago. We gave them a brief overview of our business units and their respective functions – the lead counselor was busy keeping the kids awake!

Actually, we did a great job relating the business world to a sports team, which certainly was something they could relate to and kept it entertaining.  We then headed off to TW Telecom to show them our hosting facility.

I actually called ahead of time to let my rep know we were coming by for a brief tour.   Unfortunately, my rep did not read my email closely and the Operations Manager was extremely nervous when I showed up with a busload of kids.   It was a very funny moment when we arrived (had to be there to enjoy it) but everything worked out fine as we toured the facility in groups of 10 and everyone was well behaved.

In the end, it was a great visit and made all of us feel good to give back to community as well as getting some kids interested in career opportunities in Information Technology.

Yes – it’s been quite a while since I last made a post in the Beacon Blogosphere!!  So, I thought I would comment on some of the new enhancements to our hosting arena – some of these enhancements have been here a while and some of these features have been added recently.

We have made several enhancements to our infrastructure over the last 18 months.   Here are some of the hi-lights:

• Increased Internet connection to 100 Mbps to improve our network capacity
• Upgraded all the switches and firewalls to support Gigabit network which increased our network performance
• Installed new servers to increase web site performance
• Implemented VM Ware to allow us to provide virtual dedicated hosting solutions
• Upgraded to SQL Server 2008
• Installed a new Barracuda Spam Firewall
• Installed a new SAN to increase our storage capabilities

We continually strive to provde state-of-the-art solutions and technologies for our hosting clients.  If you need a hosting partner please consider Beacon as we have experienced engineers and flexible pricing options to meet your needs.  

It’s important to remember that at Beacon we provide manage hosting solutions so you can focus on your business and leave the hosting issues to us.

In my first blog, I went over some essential features that you need to look for when selecting your hosting company.  So, the next step is to look at several tools and services that will enhance both your web site and your hosting experience.

One of the most important tools for your hoster to have is a Content Management System (CMS) which allows you to manage your site’s content any time you need to change content on your site.  A good CMS tool can allow for collaboration and site management as well.  It’s very important to continually market your company well and having a CMS tool makes that task easier.  A good CMS tool has an easy-to-use interface and requires only that you have skills in using any basic word processing software.

Since a good CMS tool makes managing your site a much easier task, I want to go over a few features to look for when selecting a CMS tool.  Here are some of the essentials to look for:

Creating & Editing

• Browser-based access
• WYSIWYG Editing – Just like a standard word-processor
• Spell Checker
• Site Preview
• Easy-to-use Interface

Collaboration, & Approvals, Security

• Flexible Users and Groups
• Content Access Rights
• Check-in/Check-out Content
• Workflow Management
• Audits & Reporting
• Version Control
• CMS Training

Publishing

• Scheduled and Manual Publishing – publishing options offer full control and ease of use.

• Automatic Archiving lets you set expiration dates for time sensitive content.
• Friendly URLs improve search rankings with legible URLs.

There are many more features that CMS tools can offer but those are some of the important features that you want included when choosing your CMS tool.  So, when considering hosting options don’t forget these handy tips, and if you need help just gives us a call.

Welcome to my first blog on Web hosting. Since I’m a big sports guy, I relate this “blogging” debut to a rookie getting called up to big leagues. So, forgive me if I have “opening day” blogger nerves but I hope you’ll find the post informative when choosing a hosting option.

There are several aspects to having a successful web site, but one of the most important components is having a dependable web hosting company. Once you’ve made your investment developing a great looking site, and you’re running your entire business on-line, the last thing you need is for your site to be down or hacked or be incredibility slow. So, it’s important to choose the right hosting company that has the features you need for your web site to be running efficiently 24x7x365. Here are three important factors when evaluating hosting solutions:

• Reliability
• Redundancy
• Scalability

So, let’s break down each of these items to identify the important features of each one.

Reliability Features

• It’s important to utilize the same company who developed the site
• 24x7x365 Technical Support & Monitoring
• Web Analytics to provide important data about your site’s usage and traffic patterns
• Test and Production systems so you can review/test your site prior to releasing it to production (Live)
• Industry leading hardware and software providers – some companies use “white boxes” which are custom built servers made from scratch.  You want good warranty support on your servers and your software from industry leaders

Redundancy Features

• State-of-the-art data center that includes multiple Internet connections, redundant air conditioners, UPS, diesel generators
• Daily, Weekly & Monthly backups
• Offsite backups
• Dual power supplies in your server
• Dual firewalls
• RAID systems for disk storage in your servers

Scalability Features

• Web and application servers that are separate from your database
• Your bandwidth can be expanded to meet your site’s evolving needs within a few business days
• The ability to go with dedicated servers
• A Content Management System (CMS) which allows you to have multiple authors for your web content

The bottom line is that your hosting company needs to be able to grow with your business as well as having all of the features needed to manage and monitor your web site.  So, when considering hosting options don’t forget these handy tips, and if you need help just gives us a call.