Web Hosting blog from Just Host

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about Just Host winning an award, then two come along at once! Just Host has once again been awarded the Best Budget Host Award for October as part of FindMyHost.com’s Editor’s Choice Awards. This is the fifth time we’ve won this award and are really grateful for FindMyHost’s continued support of Just Host.

Just Host has also been awarded the Top 10 Web Host Gold Award from HostAZ.com which only goes to 10 hosting companies worldwide for commitment to excellence in web hosting. HostAZ.com give Just Host a 5 star rating overall as well as specifically for our technical support and customer service.

At Just Host we are really proud of all the Awards we’ve been given by the wide range of web hosting review sites. I remember receiving the email giving us our first award and it definitely is just as exciting today to get these awards as then. You can view all of the awards we’ve been given here http://www.justhost.com/awards and I have to say I can’t believe how many there! Go Just Host!

Sophy / Marketing Manager

Just Host is really proud to announce its partnership with Design Fusions, one of the latest offering from the JDI Group. Design Fusions is a web design company specifically catered for people new to the web and having their own website. The company was created with many of Just Host’s customers in mind and a feature that sets them apart from many other web design companies out there is their three packages, Home, Business and Business Pro.

As Just Hosts customer base widely varies between home users to large businesses, Design Fusions wanted to cater for every customer and to make sure they only paid for exactly what they need. Design Fusions has launched with three packages, each including features such as Professional Markup, XHTML/CSS Valid Markup and Bespoke Pages. The Business Package caters for Blogs and eCommmerce sites while the Business Pro also includes Custom Branding.

It’s easy to see the talents of the Design Fusions team from viewing the case studies on the site. The previous sites created look professional and easy to navigate and an added bonus is every package is fully customizable so if you need something specific on your site such as an image gallery, Design Fusions can handle it! Getting a quote for your site couldn’t be easier, just visit http://designfusions.com choose your package and then ask for your quote!

Sophy / Marketing Manager

At Just Host we understand the different needs of our clients and how everyone has different priorities for their website. One of the many options we offer our customers is to Go Green with their site. This special upgrade gives our clients the chance to run a totally environmentally friendly site by moving to one of our 100% energy efficient servers.

The Go Green upgrade gives each user a green badge for their site to display their commitment to the environment and their site then becomes Just Green eCertified. The importance of taking care of the environment is so high on people’s agendas in the current climate and this has had an effect on the way web hosting companies run their businesses and products.

Just Host’s Go green feature is 100% carbon neutral friendly and gives the client the reassurance that they are hosting with a company who is thinking about the future and wants to help preserve the environment. The Go Green upgrade can be added when you sign up for your Just Host account, just click to Go Green and Just Host will handle the rest!

Click here to get your green site hosted with Just Host

Sophy / Marketing Manager

One of the many features that are included in all Just Host web hosting accounts is FREE Google Adwords Credits. It’s easy to get confused with such offers and to be unsure of how relevant each of these are to you and your website. I wanted to personally highlight how affective this feature can be and can open up a whole new world when it comes to marketing your site.

Google Adwords are an essential marketing tool for a massive number of businesses nowadays. Not only do they allow you to advertise on the most widely used search engine on the web, but they can be 100% tailored to your business so that you are only advertising to your target audience. You will find the ads at the top of each Google search and down the right hand side. For competitive terms such as ‘web hosting’ the number of companies fighting for the top spots is very high, but on more specific terms you’ll see only carefully targeted adverts.

Just Host has teamed up with Google so that we can offer you free credits so you can give the adverts a try and see the affect they have on your business. The cost of the adverts is on a cost per click basis so you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and the cost of the click is based on the key words that you are bidding on. For small businesses in niche markets Google Adwords is an ideal tool to put your business right in front of your target audience for a few cents and can be much more effective than big scale print ads.

If you’re already a Just Host customer and have not set up your Adword account yet you just need to login to your control panel and you’ll find your free $25 credits waiting for you.

Sophy / Marketing Manager

1) Use a spam filter!

It sounds obvious but it is surprising how many people do not use spam filters to protect their inbox from spam and phishing email. Here at Just Host we offer all our customers an open source solution called Spam Assassin that requires no installation on your part and most importantly it won’t cost you an arm and a leg!

2) Keep your email address private.

Don’t publish your email address ANYWHERE on the web, if your email address is posted on a public guestbook, blog or forum your inbox could very soon be cluttered with junk email. Automated bots crawl the web collecting these addresses 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

3) Create a spare email address.

Treat your spare email address as your public one, use it online in forums, chat rooms and when subscribing to mailing lists and promotions. Remember your spare email address is a temporary one, don’t be afraid to change it often. And remember, if you are already a Just Host customer you can create an unlimited number of email addresses so you can change your email address as often as you like.

4) Handle with care.

You should never respond to any email address that you believe to be spam, this just tells the spammers that you are there and that their email addresses are reaching your inbox! You should also consider turning read receipts off, these are often used to determine whether the emails are reaching a live inbox. Finally, NEVER use the unsubscribe link unless you actually remember signing up to receive mail from the sender originally. This again is just another way for spammers to determine which emails are reaching the sender.

5) Use disposable mail.

If you are forced to enter an email address somewhere on the web where the authenticity of the website is questionable, use a temporary email address! A service like 10minutemail.com will give you access to a working email address so that you do not have to risk using your personal address on a web site you do not trust. Once you have finished, simply exit the website and you can leave knowing you will never receive any unwanted mail as a result of it.

The fight against spam has been ongoing since the first recorded incident in 1978, this affected 393 individuals. More than 30 years later and spam is on a whole new level reaching billions of internet users worldwide. It may not be possible to completely eliminate spam but we can all do our bit to reduce the impact it has on our inbox. Just be vigilant online and treat your email address like your house number and zip code, you wouldn’t post that everywhere would you?

Luke Kendall / Affiliate Manager

Anyone who has searched for web hosting today on Google will have probably noticed Just Host featured twice on the first page of results, the first our usual listing and the second a Google news article celebrating some exciting news.

Just Host has just been voted the number one web host by the 100Best-Web-Hosting.com website, and this of course means yet another award image for the site!

Anyone who browses the blog from time to time will have noticed we often share our awards with our blog readers. Every now and then, we scratch our heads trying to think of some text to accommodate the award. I believe the repeat success from web hosting review sites like the 100Best-Web-Hosting.com speaks for itself though, and I would like to thank Matt, the admin behind the 100Best, and our clients for making all of this possible.

Luke / Affiliate Manager

As well as the massive increase in staff, Just Host’s office has also seen some further new additions that have dramatically helped us improve customer service. A screen has been implemented in the Billing Office that lists the number of emails in each support queue along with the average response time and the average wait time. This not only helps our managers keep on top of their teams performance, but also motivates the billing reps to constantly be bringing the response times down to improve customer service.

The Order Team also has a new feature in their office in the form of six clocks. The times shown are spread across the world and include New York, London, Sydney and Beijing as these are some of our main customer bases. As the Order Team now work well into the night these clocks will help them keep aware of the times around the world so at 9am they can be straight on a call to the relevant countries.

After having reached 100,000 customers, 108,009 now to be exact, Just Host is truly focused on constantly improving our customer service for our impressive customer base. We will be continuously making improvements like this, both within our office and in our control panel to ensure our customers are getting the best web hosting service possible.

Sophy / Marketing Manager

After a drastic increase in the Just Host Billing team in the last few months I’m really happy to say that the Verification team has also welcomed some new members over the last few weeks. The Verification team handles the processing of all of Just Host’s orders and ensures that every order passes our fraud checking system. Sadly web hosting is very prone to fraud so checking the validity of each order is an essential role and must be handled very carefully.

Our two new Just Host team members are Ceri and Jodie who will be working opposite shifts, one covering the morning shift and the other working way into the night to ensure maximum coverage for our clients. Obviously, the majority of Just Host’s orders are processed manually, but because of the extra precautions needed some orders will be held for this further verification. The calls also allow us to answer any questions new customers may have which we find really beneficial.

I wish all of our new members, Billing and Verification, the best of luck and am really happy to welcome them to the team.

Sophy / Marketing Manager

Web Hosting has a new member of the elite 100,000 club this week as Just Host reached 100,000 hosting customers. Amazingly it has taken Just Host just 18 months to reach the milestone which is a phenomenal achievement and an indicator that great customer support and uptime really pays off. This comes after months and month of hard work from the whole Just Host team, who have focused on providing the best customer service possible at every possible point of our clients journey with us.

I remember processing our first client’s hosting order manually before we had the automated system in place that ensures our customers hosting accounts are set up instantly and their cPanel logins emailed to them within minutes. I also remember when our support team consisted of a handful of technicians, now on the last count they exceeded 200! Remembering the early days makes me realize just how far we’ve come in such a short time. Just Host quickly became one of the fastest growing web hosts in 2009 and we are showing no signs of stopping.

The effort that our team have put into ensuring customers have any pre-sales questions answered, then sending their account details to them instantly and later assisting them with any support or billing queries they have is astounding. I think it’s this dedication across the team that has got us to this milestone so quickly. Thank you to everyone for all their hard work and a huge round of applause to every single person for helping Just Host become one of the world’s largest web hosting companies.

Sophy/ Marketing Manager

It’s that time of year again when Just Host packs our bags and heads out to meet with fellow ‘web hosters’ at Hosting Con 2009. Hosting Con is one of the few events which brings together a huge cross-section of people from the web hosting industry and is a great place to pick up new ideas and features for our customers.

This year Hosting Con is being held in Washington DC at the Gaylord National Resort and is being organized by iNET Interactive, who are brand new to the role. The attendees will include shared and dedicated web hosts, web hosting review sites, control panel providers and web hosting support services.

We are really looking forward to the event and can’t wait to meet up with our friends from last year. We’re hoping the conference schedule will inspire us with lots of new features that we can introduce to our service that will really benefit our customers.

Sophy / Marketing Manager