26th Jun 2020 | General Information, Security and Safety, Web Hosting, Websites
These are odd times.
To say the least.
Many people have been furloughed or wondering what to do with their lives. Will they have a job? Are they happy with the job they have?
With so much spare time, many people have taken this as a opportunity to think about their future.
However, money is scarce.
Many people are choosing to PIVOT to new careers, but budgets are tight.
Part of launching a new business is having a website to go with it… but just getting some hosting and an installation of WordPress is only the start. What about SSL certificates, forms for people to request you contact them, a high quality theme… all those cost money. Then there is the hosting… some is just so slow that you will lose customers.
I saw these problems and came up with a solution.
It is a package with everything you need set up. All you do is give us some text and graphics. We will put them up for you and get you going. At that point you have an amazing website package. When we totted it up, if you purchased it yourself the components would cost £450 per year. That would stretch most starter budgets. As we have mass buying power, we offer it all for £247… and it is all properly configured… and backed up… and the software is regularly updated, minimising data risks. Even if you completely ‘break it’… we can have it back to the previous days configuration in under an hour.
So, you have one fewer thing to worry about.
You save money.
You have a full, working website. (Unlike some other providers who give you a ‘reduced functionality’ website.)
How much?
Just £347 (inc VAT!) per year.
Look at what some of our recent clients have done with it.
Your Path . Guru – where Em Melrose will gently help you find Your Path
Ty Llwyd Fach – Socially distanced camping
Perky Wales – Expert counselling from Gwilym Roberts
All of these are on our super-fast hosting.
So, what have you got to lose?
To book yours, go to Pivot Sites – we set it up for tutors, dog groomers and virtual assistants… but so many others are making use of it.
3rd Jun 2020 | General Information
Just finished recording a new podcast with Kim Jones of HGKC. Kim and her company offer high-quality coaching for small and medium-sized businesses. In these unusual times they are producing a range of podcasts to help people navigate their businesses through these choppy waters. You can see the full programme here: HGKC Podcasts
During the podcast I refer to some tips that can be really helpful for people who want to let people know that their business is still open (or what they are doing during the lockdown). There are also tips about growing your business or even changing your business! To get the tips, just sign up on this form. (Or the one that pops up on the website.)
27th Apr 2020 | Consultancy, Defeating spam, Email, General Information, Web Hosting, Websites, WordPress
Most web hosters won’t admit it, but email from websites is a NIGHTMARE.
It used to be really easy and cheap to set up email to send from a website, for instance when a form is filled in on the website inform the owner of the website.
As it gets more complex, many hosting companies take a set it up and keep fingers crossed approach.
At Cloud Genius, we monitor that even this aspect of your website is working.
In the old days the web server sent out the email.
The problem is that spammers used to use servers to send out millions of spam emails in a day.
So, web hosting companies have gradually clamped down on this.
Even if you do send an email from your web server, the chances are that the recipient will block it… assuming it to be spam.
What is worse, if someone else on your shared hosting is sending out spam all YOUR emails will be treated as spam, too.
Your emails will not be received and you won’t know!
For this reason, we send our webserver emails via the client’s Office 365 account.
This gives them the same reputation as if they came from the client’s normal email. (Google for Business works just as well.)
This process is slightly more complex.
At Cloud Genius, we monitor this connection so that if it starts to fail we get a message via Slack to tell us which of our clients is in difficulty.
Part of our service that puts us above the rest.
7th Jan 2020 | Consultancy, General Information, Salesforce, Websites
I recently heard a great story about a man with a hammer… bear with me as I have a more up-to-date version.
The story starts with a submarine captain. His submarine is broken. This is a big problem. The submarine had a large crew. Every day that he was stuck in dock would cost a lot of money. Not only that, but he had a mission to complete. He was desperate to get going again. He asked around the docks and could not find anyone to fix his craft.
Eventually, his first officer managed to find an old chap with a hammer. The captain was sceptical, but invited the man aboard. He went straight down into the engine room. The man looked at all the pipes, took out his hammer, tapped a pipe and the submarine sprang back into life. The captain was overjoyed. He asked the man to invoice him. The invoice was immediately produced: £2,002.
The captain was staggered and challenged the man.. why so much money? All you did was tap a pipe it only took a few seconds.
The man patiently explained: Cost of tapping the pipe £2. The thirty years learning where to tap the pipe – £2,000.
A client of mine has been trying to integrate their website and their email and their CRM system. So far they have worked their way through 3 volunteers. The volunteers were great people, but they did not have the experience and knowledge necessary. They had not put in the time to build up the certifications, the years building up experience (through mistakes as well as successes). Although the volunteers were committed, they did not have all that experience and all those certifications.
The lack of functionality has cost their organisation dear… possibly thousands in lost donations, wasted time, etc.
When they came to us, we were quickly able to see the issues and get everything working closely together.
Like the man with the hammer we then have to send in our bill. Although it is not free, it will save them thousands. We are not ‘cheap’, but we try to offer great value.
Let us help you!
23rd Dec 2019 | Defeating spam, e-Commerce, GDPR, General Information, Passwords, Security and Safety
Let me tell you of an IT company. It had started off small so the director had chosen a favourite password ‘D0neit01‘
This was some time ago, so the fact that it had numbers in made it really secure. It wasn’t particularly long, but it was memorable. Much better than other familiar passwords, like ‘Password01’ or ‘letmein’.
There were five of them working for this company and they were all really good friends. Three directors and two minions. They were working with cleaning companies and whoever would take them on. They realised that their level of service was a cut above everyone else’s, so they realised they could aim higher.
With one of those flashes of inspiration that sometimes hits small companies they realised that they could start working with the finance industry. They already had some contacts in that area of business and, well, those clients had money. It was a sure-fire hit!
Success Breeds Success
A few years later and they had an impressive portfolio of clients. Around a hundred in the bespoke finance industry. Hedge-fund managers, bespoke bankers, investment companies. Their clients loved their high level of service. In part this was because an engineer visiting site knew what the top admin password would be. You’ve guessed it.
By this point about a hundred of their clients were investing more than $1B each. (Yes, 100 x $1,000,000,000 = $0.1T). Which starts to look like a significant part of the UK’s GDP.
Some of the companies demanded ’secure passwords’ with funny characters in. For those companies the password became ‘D0nit01!’. Engineers knew that if the ‘low security’ password didn’t work you could use the high security one. Simples!
One of the managers was tasked with looking for a password manager. This would be able to hold all types of password. It would be able to fill in passwords automatically. You could give different members of the company different levels of access.
It came back with a price-tag of £10,000.
That was a lot of money.
The directors were not convinced that it was necessary.
An Innocent Mistake
One day, one of the directors was logging into a client, let’s call them ‘securefinance’. Their website was ‘securefinance.com’. The director had not noticed that in their speed they had typed ‘securefinance.co’. The website looked EXACTLY like securefinance.com so why would they notice?
Over the coming months they started to notice that some of their clients were failing. In one bad incident a client lost $0.1B in a week! That client immediately started the process of winding down. It was sad – they were a difficult client, but they had been a good payer.
You are probably going to guess what had happened. That fake website had grabbed the entered username and password and was now beginning to use it on lots of websites. They were getting lucky. They were also trying password variations automatically. So they were picking off both the ‘low’ and ‘high’ security clients.
Bad Guys Collaborate
They had also submitted the successful usernames and passwords to a database that is maintained by hackers. (Yes, this really does exist.) So lots of other people were trying these passwords… but they were not using them themselves. They were getting computers infected with ‘malware’ to try them. That IS the job of a lot of malware. If the malware successfully logged in then they would update the database. If the password failed then the bad guys were untraceable. Either way the bad guys win.
By now, clients were getting picked off at an increasing rate.
It was looking very bad.
Several consequencies could have happened, including a significant impact on the UK economy, jail terms and collapse of the IT company. This is based on a true story. The directors were potentially negligent, so could have lost the shirts off their backs.
The Good News
A good password manager is available for FREE. It has greater capabilities than that old software costing more than £10,000.
There is an Enterprise version which has all the granular controls you require for a little bit more.
With a password manager, doesn’t that mean that I am committing all my passwords to a database protected with ONE password? Surely that is a really BAD idea? Yes, it would be UNLESS you set up 2 factor identification. This means that you have a code to type in that is sent to you or generated on an app on your phone in addition to the password. As a hacker will not have both access to your password AND your phone your database is safe. It is also highly encrypted and if you lose your phone or your admin dies there are very secure ways to recover the database.
Here is the manager we use: Lastpass It is not the only one out there, but it is very good. We manage more than 1,500 passwords with it. All our client’s passwords are unique, long and very complicated.
You might not be managing billions of dollars, but you wouldn’t want to lose what you have.
