Spam-proof your dedicated server!

November 13, 2007 | 1 Comment

I wrote about a great cpanel firewall add-on that I found a while back.

The same company that designed configserver firewall, has two security packages that are designed to help maintain a cpanel/whm dedicated server.

I recently purchased the “cPanel Service Package + MailScanner” package for one of the servers that I manage.

Here’s what you get for $125:

iptables SPI firewall (csf)
Login failure detection (lfd)
Stop unnecessary processes
Logcheck
Logwatch
WHM configuration check
OpenSSH configuration check
Install and configure Rootkit Hunter
Install and configure Chkrootkit
install mod_security
Host spoof protection
Operating System check
Name server configuration check
Disk check
Kernel check
Apache tune and check ***
MySQL tune and check
Enhanced log rotation
Day of the week backup rotations
Secure /tmp /var/tmp /dev/shm
Install and configure ConfigServer Explorer (cse)
Install and configure ConfigServer Mail Queues (cmq)
Install and configure ConfigServer Mail Manage (cmm)
Perl installation check
Delete unnecessary OS users
Disable open DNS recursion
Enhance path protection
Remove SUID/GUID from binaries
PHP hardening
Exploit check
Disable vulnerable phpBB installs
Initial cPanel configuration
Enhance MailMan performance
Install MRTG graphs
MailScanner Server service
One week of informational tickets

While this is all great, what really caught my attention was the improvement with the email that the server was handling. Continue reading…

Posted by jestep | Filed Under General, Security

Online business will benefit from aggressive retail cross-selling

November 2, 2007 | 5 Comments

I am sick of shopping at retail stores (Putting aside mom-and-pop stores). I like going down the street to buy something, but I can’t buy a candy bar anymore without being offered a warranty, two magazine subscriptions, and a credit card. The cross-selling situation is getting to the point where I and others avoid shopping at retail locations. I avoid going into a number of stores simply because I don’t want to deal with being offered a bunch of crap that I don’t need. I have no problem saying no, but i just don’t want to have to. I bought a laptop from Circuit City, a while ago, and I had to literally walk out of the store for the salesman to stop adding the warranty to the bill. I’ve known more than ten people who’ve been talked into several hundred dollar warranties because they were pressured into buying them. They were hardly any improvement on the manufacturer’s warranty. In the past few months I have been observing other people’s reactions to this retail mess, and I’m certainly not the only one who is sick of it.

Lets compare up-selling online and in retail.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under General

Get Adobe Acrobat Pro (non-academic) legally for under $250

October 19, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Here’s a good way to get a full and legal copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 for just over $200. This is not the academic version, which is only licensed for non-commercial usage.

Adobe Acrobat is a ridiculously expensive piece of software, and unfortunately many businesses truly need it to survive. I’ve tried a lot of the cheap and free PDF software, but nothing that I’ve found compares to Acrobat Pro, especially when you need to make electronic forms, and other more advanced PDF tasks.

Luckily, Adobe substantially reduces their price for an Upgrade product over the full retail version of the software. What this means is that if you own Acrobat 5, 6, or 7 Standard, you can purchase the Pro upgrade for about 1/3 of the retail price of Acrobat.

Get on eBay and search for ‘Adobe Acrobat 5′, or ‘Adobe Acrobat 6′, and look for a legal copy of the standard edition of either one of these. A Buy it Now version should cost around $60, and you may be able to get it on an auction for under $50. Once you get the software install it on your computer, and activate it. You don’t need to register it, but normally you will need to activate it.

Next you will need to purchase an upgrade copy of Acrobat Acrobat 8 Pro, which you will install over Acrobat 5 or 6. The upgrade version is readily available for $150.

Now you have a perfectly legal, full version of Acrobat 8 Pro, and it cost just over $200. Still ridiculously expensive, but you saved over 50% of the retail version.

Enjoy…

Quick Note: The upgrade is available in 4 versions. Mac Standard to Pro, Mac Pro to Pro, Windows Standard to Pro, and Windows Pro to Pro. Make sure you get the correct upgrade version or the upgrade will not work. If you have Acrobat 5, 6 or 7 Pro, you need the Pro to Pro upgrade, and 5, 6, 7, and 8 Standard need the Standard to Pro upgrade.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under General

What domains to block in your Yahoo search marketing account

October 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Yahoo recently added the ability for advertisers to block domains in their search marketing accounts. At first I wasn’t sure how to use this feature, but after some investigation and a cross reference with my analytics, I think that it will be a very effective tool to help eliminate bad traffic, if it’s related to a specific domain.

First thing you need to do to make sure you are using yahoo’s built-in analytics or configure your own analytics to report on all traffic from your yahoo campaigns and run a report by the domain that the traffic is coming from. You want to sort that report by the overall clicks from a particular domain.

Here’s an example of the report that you need (signifigantly reduced for readability).

Now if you look under the conversion column in this report, you will see that a few of these sites have provided no conversions.

These are the sites that you want to block from your PPC campaign. In this case the wealthygeek.com (3/1039 = .29%) is a conversion rate that I am not willing to pay for, so I’ll block it and others with poor converting traffic.

I would make sure that you have at least one month of traffic and PPC statistics, three months or more if you don’t get a lot of PPC traffic. Remove domains that tend to provide a lot of traffic but no conversions. If a site can’t provide a 1% conversion rate, it’s probably not worth keeping. Depending on your past history you may want to set your threshold above 1%.

Just remember that even if your PPC traffic goes down a bit, your overall cost is going to go down with it, and your overall conversion rate is going to go up.

Warning: If your ads attract poor visitors, it wont matter what website they’re on, so don’t use this method to optimize your account if you aren’t getting sales. This tool is useful only to remove sites that just send bad traffic. You should always be testing new key phrases, and new ads, and eliminating the ones that can’t provide cost effective traffic.

Yahoo also has a Q&A post as there have been a ton of question since this feature was launched.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under General, Marketing

Showing passion in your product descriptions

October 16, 2007 | 3 Comments

One of the most effective conversion boosters is writing personal (but professional) product descriptions for the items that you offer. Manufacturer descriptions are often so chocked with technical terminology, and gaudy self-promotion, that buyers simply ignore them. People want to know that real people are on the other end of a website, and writing unique product descriptions is one of the best ways to show that you are real, and that you care.

Keys to a personal (and professional) description:

Describe the basic features that people are interested in.
Explain what you like about the product.
Explain why the product is better than others.
Explain how the buyer can benefit from the product ***IMPORTANT***
Give appropriate alternatives to the product.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under General

Three simple optimizing tricks to speed up your site

July 30, 2007 | 2 Comments

I’m not going to go whipping a dead horse here because optimizing a website’s speed has been covered so many times that it is pointless to re-post the same thing all over again.

There is more to making a website faster than just the size of pages or html. Sometimes just changing where a script is called can make more of a difference in website loading time than reducing the overall page size by 50%. Here are a few tricks to speed up the actual loading time of a website without making major changes to the website itself. These are very effective and can be implemented on most websites in just a few minutes.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under General, Usability

How to track craigslist ads

July 26, 2007 | 6 Comments

Tracking craigslist ads can be a little tricky because javascript, flash and other useful scripting languagaes are not allowed. It is possible however to track ads using a simple image tracking program. This is limited compared to full-featured javascript tracking script, but it will at least give some idea of the amount of views that your ad is getting.

This should also work on myspace, and other networks that allow html, but do not allow javascript or flash.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under General, Marketing

10 tips to maximize your ecommerce productivity

July 11, 2007 | 4 Comments

I started this out with five and quickly went to eight and finally split into two five part categories, where I’ll stay. This is for the ecommerce businesses that have only one person or just one person that runs all of the online stuff, for webmasters, and for anyone that spends a lot of time developing online. From web design, to marketing, database programming, and shipping, these tips are to help you maximize your efficiency because there just isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done.

Personal:

Wear a suit to the office.
Optimize your computer monitor situation.
Make a daily schedule, and stick to it.
Work on one task at a time.
Outsource if you can’t do something yourself.

For your website:

Make very good use of FAQ and self help pages.
Properly integrate and automate payment methods on your website.
Make sure you are using a good website host.
Optimize advertising landing pages.
Optimize your website’s structure and navigation.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under General, Usability

Where wikipedia fails

June 29, 2007 | Leave a Comment

I love the idea of Wikipedia. A user generated encyclopedia, where people decide what information needs to be addressed under each topic. Theoretically, people who are well studied or professionals in a particular field can contribute to a topic and make it a great resource of information. However, I feel that the current Wikipedia is a complete failure.

Wikipedia’s failure can be summed in a single word: ‘accountability‘.

Because there is no accountability for what is written, people write about topics that they have no business writing about. Because there is no accountability for creating false information, people correct topics that they have no business correcting. And because of the lack of acknowledgement due to the lack of accountability, the people who actually do have the knowledge and ability to write informative, professionally and concise, don’t!

Here’s how I would fix it: Give credit to those who write, and penalize those that spam and those that create inaccurate or personally biased information.

I have seen several good contributors driven completely away from Wikipedia because their articles were mutilated, or some passerby thought their resources were spam. The articles that those authors had created or edited to a professional level, have since been reduced to garbage. I myself have downgraded to only removing spam links (which is a daily event) and no longer actively contribute content. When 10-year-olds question the whole concept, maybe it’s time to make some changes!

Posted by jestep | Filed Under General

404 error, File not found: What your custom error pages must contain!

June 26, 2007 | 1 Comment

When a visitor reaches a page on your website that doesn’t exist, by default they get a nasty, ugly document, that very well may end any future interaction with your company.

It is extremely important to create a custom 404 error document for your website. More than any other error page, you must customize your 404 error page to hopefully route those lost visitors back to your mainland.

404 error’s are for the most part unavoidable. I have never seen a website that doesn’t serve a 404 error every once in a while. Whether you mistyped a link, the visitors misspelled a page in their address bar, or anything else, at some point your server will send a 404 error.

Posted by jestep | Filed Under General, Usability

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