Beacon is proud to announce the launch of two micro-sites for A Way to Go Travel.  The client is a full service, award winning travel agency that has been in business for over 15 years. The new sites feature basic information on specific Excellence and Secrets resorts, quote forms, news, specials and testimonials. Along with website design and development, Beacon also provides hosting services for both sites.

Click on the images to visit Go Excellence Resorts and Go Secrets Resorts.

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.

I was going to write about the Peloponnesian War, its ramification on the course of Western Civilization and how that ancient struggle correlates to the Microsoft vs. Apple battles we see today. But, in addition to the fact that I really don’t know very much about the Athenians or Spartans, that war was fought, as my son Tyler would say, “a very long long day ago”.  Instead I’ll write about how in ASP.NET you can prevent an error from being written to the server’s application log.

Let’s look at the “A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client“ error that can show up on an ASP.NET page.  This error is thrown when potential HTML or other script tags are entered into a textbox of an ASP.NET form. This error gives you something looking like …..

The error itself isn’t a bad thing since it helps prevent script injection attacks.  (If you want to allow script tags to be entered on your form there are several things you can do. Check them out here.) Our problem was that when an unaccounted for error is thrown in ASP.NET, the error is written to the server’s application log. We have a utility that reads the application log and email’s the system administrator any errors that show up. Our administrator had to screen all of these emails in looking for one’s that we really needed to see.

The solution is to put some code into the Application_Error method of the global.asax file that will trap and remove the error that we don’t want to log.

Notice that after clearing the error we need to redirect to another page. If, after clearing the error, we allowed the page to load, we would see a blank page. (The error that would have been displayed is erased by the Server.ClearError() command).

You could also include the code in the page’s “Error” event.  However, you would have to include the code on every page instead of in just one place.

So, if you have any interest in preventing an ASP.NET error from being written to the server’s Application log, consider using the Application _Error method of the site’s global.asax

Virtualisation and Sorcery: We’re all apprentices now
VM utopia too good to be true?
By Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics posted in Virtualisation Lab, 29th March 2010 09:02 GMT
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/29/virtualisations_apprentice/

This is a great article on the state of virtualization at this point in time and what devices are adopting virtualization.  Virtualization of desktops may be a better way to manage costs as far as hardware, management and downtime.  Your desktop machine life cycle could double due to desktop virtualization depending on how it is implemented.  I think desktop virtualization is still in its early stages but is definitely a way to look lowering management costs in the future.

Take a look at my old blog post on some information on server virtualization Virtualization: Who Cares?.  We have virtual servers available here at Beacon for the fraction of the cost of dedicated server.  You get your own resources and segmentation without the cost of a physical dedicated server.  Contact our sales department for more info!

We are ready. We are ready for a great 2010. This will be the most exciting year ever for Beacon Technologies and a very successful year for our Clients!

Why will 2010 be so great? Our People.

I am a Business Development Manager here at Beacon. I have been selling Beacon’s quality solutions for over 10 years and I have always been proud of our work with our focus on:
• Website Design and Development
• Web Marketing Services with Google Analytics
• Cascade Server CMS Development
• Managed Hosting

This year will be great for many reasons but the most important reason is the people working here. Never before have we been so smart with our approach, strategy, solutions and most importantly our people. We have very carefully and selectively grown our Web Marketing Team and we can confidently put our team up against the best web marketing minds in the business. We have an exceptional team of very smart, energetic, innovative, team-focused, and personable marketing experts. Beacon’s clients are now receiving expertise from a large group of experts that work as an organized team with synergy and collaboration.

I am confident that we can provide you with a well organized, carefully considered, innovative strategy! Our goal is to deliver a strong ROI so you want to continue to invest in our support.

Our Web Marketing Services include:
• Business Consulting
• Organic Optimization
• PPC Pay-Per-Click Management: Adwords Qualified Company
• Google Analytics: One of a handful of GAACs in the U.S.
• Website Conversion Optimization: One of a select few GWOs
• Return on Investment Reporting and Analysis
• Social Media Marketing: We have creative and innovative expertise on staff to support your SMM efforts.

Call me to talk about your business.

Patrick, 336-232-5668

Patrick Flanagan

pflanagan@beacontechnologies.com
# 336-232-5668

Since 1998, Beacon Technologies has specialized in helping companies with high-end, custom, full-service web solutions. We act as consultants to our clients and we support the design, development, hosting, maintenance, and marketing of websites and web applications.

Now, in effort to reach out to a larger client base and support smaller companies, individuals, and entrepreneurs Beacon is offering its services in a packaged solution that will be more affordable to smaller businesses. We are proud to introduce you to Beacon Express.  With our Beacon Express division, all businesses can take full advantage of the internet and the experience that has made Beacon Technologies a recognized leader in web services.

Beacon Express provides:

• Custom Design
• Home Page plus up to 5 content pages
• Hosting
• Email up to 5 accounts
• Spam and Virus Protection with Barracuda
• Domain Registration and/or Transfer
• Google Analytics – monthly report
• Google Local & Yahoo Local Submission
• Unlimited updates to your website content
• SEO Friendly Design for visibility in major search engines
• No long-term commitment…cancel anytime

The best part might be the price.

Visit Beacon Express to learn more, www.beaconexpress.com.

Ever notice how most disaster recovery/business continuity articles seem to overlook a critical component of the plan – the people.  The best plans, the most technically advanced hot data centers, are of no value if you have no people to run your business.

There is plenty of information available on the internet on how to prepare for a natural or man-made disaster.  I want to share a few thoughts about the human side of a disaster.

Let’s say a hurricane or tornado has struck your region.  Your building survived, your data center is operational and you’re ready to get back to business.   Who is going to show up in the morning?  The victims of this disaster (your employees and co-workers) have just been traumatized by the loss of their home and are more concerned about the welfare of their families and their own survival than they are about their jobs.

Can your key employees travel (even if it’s to work at the same place)?  Are they willing to travel?  Given the choice to stay home, care for their families, and salvage whatever’s left of their house and possessions, how many will rush to their jobs instead?

Even if their families are safe and their homes secure and they are willing to get to work, can you contact them to find out?

Miles of telephone and power lines have been torn down by high wind.  Cell phone towers are out of service or so overloaded that few calls get through.  You need to reach them if only to find out if they’re all right.  What are you going to do?

Even supposing you can contact them and they’re willing to help, how do you get them from where they are to where they need to be?  Count on the roads being littered with trees, power poles, sections of roof, covered in water and generally impassable.  The street signs have all been destroyed.  How do you find your people?

Are you going to invest in redundant hardware, the most sophisticated backup solution, the most detailed disaster recovery plan and forget the people who have to implement that plan?

Think you don’t need to worry about it and that it can’t happen to you or your business?  On September 15, 1995, Hurricane Marilyn tore through St. Thomas and damaged 80 percent of the buildings, left roads closed for days and power disrupted for weeks.  Disaster Recovery teams used runners on foot to get information around the island.

Your may not remember Hurricane Marilyn, but I’ll bet you remember Hurricane Katrina.

Now, I won’t claim to have all the answers to these questions, in fact I don’t have any answers for these questions.  So…

What do you think?  How do you prepare your people and organization for a major disaster that can disrupt your business and your co-workers’ lives?

Over the past few years virtualization, a method of running multiple computers on top of one host computer, has been steadily picking up in the enterprise as a way to ease costs and time of administration of company servers. Depending on the products that you use, whether it be VMware, Xenserver, Hyper-v or any other product the features vary.  Personally ever since the release of VMware ESXi into the free world I have been driven toward VMware products.

VMware’s ESXi Hypervisor gives you a host operating system with a small footprint of 32MB on disk.  Having this small of a footprint on the host side gives more resources and horsepower to the guest operating systems that are virtualized.  When you install ESXi on your server and once you get it configured for your network all the administration can be done through a console on a Microsoft Windows machine.

So enough with the technical marketing stuff, why should I go buy monster machines with tons of disk space just for virtualization?

- Security

If one of your virtual machines is compromised the rest of your virtual machines and the host are unaffected.  Once you install certain business critical applications onto separate virtual machines if one goes down the rest stay up.  You can consolidate your servers and keep downtime minimal.

- Performance

With virtualization you can assign virtual machines certain amounts of resources based on the total amount you have on the host machine.  This can let you prioritize certain resources based on the types of applications you use in the virtual machines.  This is also a good way to gauge the resource usage of your application.

- Consolidation

You can move several servers depending on their use to one machine and make it virtual.  They have products that will take your single server machine and turn it into a virtual machine file so you can move it (VMconverter).   Once you begin consolidating machines you can save on rack space and the amount of power you use.  In the future you will save on costs of hardware and hardware support because you will buy fewer servers.

- Maintenance and Downtime

Virtualization can make patching and updating a lot easier.  Once a month or so before you put on your operating system patches you can take a snapshot of the virtual machine file which contains all of your operating system and application data.  If disaster hits and patches or updates bring down your application you can revert back to your previous snapshot.  With having a snapshot before this upgrade you can decrease downtime significantly and have you application back up in no time.

There are many more benefits to virtualization that can lower costs of hardware and administration. If you wish to look into virtualization further you can visit the VMware website by going to: http://www.vmware.com or drop me a comment with questions.