Happy Holidays to all XE Technology Solutions past, present, and future clients!
Happy Holidays from XeSolutions!
December 18th, 2009XE Technology Solutions on Twitter!
December 16th, 2009
After much deliberation, upper management has finally decided to put XE Technology Solutions on Twitter! In bringing the company on to this up and coming social network site, we hope to add another means for XeSolutions customers to interact directly with the company. We hope that customers will fully utilize this new means to contact us for support, general concerns, and to just keep in touch! To do so, we invite all customers to “follow” us!
For non-XeSolutions clients, we will be running weekly “Sunday Specials” that will only appear on our Twitter page. If you are in the market for any web services, definitely check out our weekly specials!
To view the XE Technology Solutions Twitter page, simply go to http://www.twitter.com/xesolutions
Hasty Host Acquisition Complete!
December 12th, 2009
We are very excited to announce that the Hasty Host acquisition has been completed! At this time, not only have all accounts been migrated to us but the public Hasty Host nameservers have been changed to point to our servers. Any client using private nameservers should contact our support team as soon as possible so that we can help re-route them correctly.
All clients should be advised that although we did our best to mimic the server configurations of the old Hasty Host server configurations, we needed to change some settings for security reasons. In the event that you notice any errors on your website, please contact our support team immediately so that we can get them resolved for you as quickly as possible.
Once again, welcome to the XeHost family! I am certain that you will enjoy your stay!
XeHost Acquires Hasty Host!
December 4th, 2009
We are very pleased to announce that we have just acquired Hasty Host. By now, all Hasty Host clients have been notified of this acquisition and have already been moved into our billing systems. We expect to have all Hasty host clients moved to our datacenter by the end of next week.
The following e-mail was sent out by Sean to all Hasty Host clients regarding this acquisition:
Greetings!
My name is Sean Frank and I am the Chief Executive Officer of XeHost. After much negotiation and planning, we are proud to announce that we have officially acquired Hasty Host. On behalf of the entire XeHost team, we would like to welcome you!
We have been providing quality hosting services since 1999 and our reputation for stellar support and uptime speaks for itself. I have every confidence that you will find your stay at XeHost to be very rewarding. We currently have an industry-leading 15-minute average response time guarantee on all support tickets. From this point forward, we request that you submit all support inquiries directly to us (over the next few days the Hasty Host website will point to our domain). To do so, simply go to http://clients.xehost.net and click “Client Area” to login (login information is below). Once logged in, click the “Submit Support Ticket” link to submit a ticket to our support department.
I’m sure you are concerned that things will change or that you will need to update your hosting settings. Rest assured, we will make the move to our servers as quickly and painless as possible. We plan to move all clients over early next week and do not plan on having any downtime in the process. Realistically, if I did not send out this e-mail, you would probably not even realize that your website was moved to a different server. You will receive more updates from me about this closer to the time. Additionally, you will be able to view a copy of these updates both in your client area and in our company blog (http://blog.xehost.net).
In moving to our network, you will experience a number of different upgrades. Most importantly, we utilize premium bandwidth that will result in decreased latency and faster page loads for you. Although XeHost’s hosting packages are slightly different than those of Hasty Host’s, we will be happy to honor current hosting packages and pricing for as long as you wish to remain with us.
****IMPORTANT****
You will no longer need to access your Client Area through Hasty Host. All of your Billing and Support needs will be handled through http://clients.xehost.net – our official Client Area. Your login username is simply your e-mail address and your password has been reset to: ******* . In the event that this password does not work for you, simply use the “Forgot Password” link below. Please feel free to change this password once logged in.
By the time you received this e-mail, your PayPal subscription to Hasty Host will have been cancelled by someone from the Hasty Host billing department. This means that you will need to manually pay your first invoice with us. When you pay this invoice, if you choose to use PayPall as your payment method, you can create a new subscription so that you have automated billing once again. Alternatively, we also accept Credit Card and Check/Money Order payments. If you’d like to switch to either of these payment methods, simply submit a ticket to our billing department (or e-mail me directly) and we will be happy to assist you.
We welcome your questions, comments and concerns. Please contact us if you have any questions and we will get back to you right away. I invite all of you to e-mail me directly at sean.frank@xesolutions.net . Thank you and we are looking forward to serving your hosting needs for many years to come!
Best Regards,
Sean Frank
Chief Executive Officer
XE Technology Solutions
http://www.XeSolutions.net
R.I.P Geocities
October 29th, 2009
Just three days ago, one of the internets most popular websites officially closed its doors. That’s right, as of October 27, 2009, GeoCities has officially closed.
For those not familiar with it, GeoCities was a web hosting service that was founded in 1994. Originally, it was named Beverly Hills Internet (BHI for short). Over time as it continued to grow, many companies invested heavily in advertising with GeoCities. By June 1997, GeoCities was named the fifth most popular website on the internet. In January 1999, during the peak of the dot-com bubble, Geocities was purchased by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in stock.
GeoCities certainly served as a major asset to the internet. It enabled thousands if not millions of people to easily develop websites and to get involved with the internet. According to a Compete.com study, geocities.com attracted at least 177 million visitors in 2008 alone. Heck, before XE Technology Solutions was conceived many of us had websites hosted with GeoCities. It is with great saddness to see this legacy end.
For all of the previous GeoCities customers who have recently switched to our service, welcome and I assure you that you will enjoy your stay with us!
Business Secret: Find a niche
October 22nd, 2009One of the key secrets to making any business succeed, especially web hosting businesses, is to find a specific niche and to pursue people within that niche as a target market. In certain industries, such as the web hosting industry, startup costs are very low which makes it very it easy for new companies to enter the industry. In industries like these, sometimes there are hundreds if not thousands of different companies for the consumer to choose from.
In an industry like web hosting that has literally thousands of different companies for the consumer to choose from, how do you differentiate yourself? Many of the top companies in the industry spend hundreds of thousands a dollars a year to build a brand for themselves as leading hosting providers in the market. Most companies, however, do not have the sort of funds required to build this type of a brand. So what can they do? Well, it’s simple, find a niche!
What is a niche?
According to Dictionary.com, a niche is a distinct segment of a market. In other words, it is a certain group of people within the entire market.
What are some examples of niches?
Well, there are many. Example niches of the web hosting industry include a YouTube clone sites niche, phpBB forums niche, WordPress blogs niche, etc. Essentially, any “community” or “grouping” of specific but related websites can be considered a niche.
Why is this important?
A previously stated, in today’s hosting industry where there are thousands of different providers out there; it is extremely difficult to develop a recognizable brand name for your company. However, if you choose to target a specific niche instead, you are decreasing the amount of competitors that you have drastically. This will make it a lot cheaper and more realistic for you to develop a brand name for yourself and thus for you to succeed in the industry. In essence, you are creating a “specialty” for your company, which would make it more appealing within that niche than one of your competitors who does not target the same niche.
Should I only accept sales from people within the niche that I target?
Absolutely not, you should still be open and willing to accept sales from everyone. However, it is important to invest a large majority if not all of your marketing resources towards your niche.
Server Upgrades – tiger.xdns1.net
July 20th, 2009
This evening at about 11:30 PM EST, tiger.xdns1.net will be taken down for approximately 5 minutes as we load a backup 250GB harddrive as well as an extra 4GB RAM.
These upgrades are mainly being performed in response to the hundreds of websites recently transfered over as a result of the Proto-Host acquisition. We hope that these upgrades will further help to improve our service for both Proto-Host and XeHost customers alike!
Proto-Host Acquisition Complete!
July 18th, 2009
We are very excited to announce that the Proto-Host acquisition has been completed! At this time, not only have all accounts been transfered over to our servers but the nameserver IPs have been updated as well. By now, all Proto-Host clients should be running their websites off of our servers.
As per the e-mail sent out to all Proto-Host clients yesterday, below are the updated IP addresses for the two generic Proto-Host nameservers:
NS1.PROTO-HOST.COM- 67.214.163.202 NS2.PROTO-HOST.COM- 67.214.163.203 NS1.PUBLICHOSTSERVER.COM- 67.214.163.204 NS2.PUBLICHOSTSERVER.COM- 67.214.163.205 All clients should be advised that although we did our best to mimic the server configurations to those of the Proto-Host servers, we needed to change some settings for security reasons. In the event that you notice any errors on your website, please contact our support department immediately so that we can get them resolved for you as quickly as possible. Once again, welcome to the XeHost family! I am certain that you all will enjoy your stay!
Proto-Host Update
July 12th, 2009
Over the past week, we have been working hard to help the Proto-Host customers to get situated and to give them a chance to explore both our billing and support systems. Today, we have officially begun to move all accounts from the old Proto-Host servers to our own servers. All clients have been notified of this transfer and will be notified once again once the transfer has been completed. Here is a copy of the e-mail that Sean sent out earlier today:
Hello, You are receiving this e-mail because you are one of the former Proto-Host clients that is now apart of the XeHost family. You should have received an e-mail from me about a week ago regarding this acquisition. If not, please feel free to head over to our company blog to take a look at a copy of the e-mail I sent out. Our blog is located at http://blog.xesolutions.net I hope that by now you have had a chance to familiarize with our billing panel and our support systems so that in the event that you have any questions, you know where to reach us. If not, I'll just remind you that our billing panel is located at https://billing.xesolutions.net and our support desk, in addition to being accessible in the billing panel, is located at http://support.xehost.net. We are going to begin to work on transferring all Proto-Host websites on to our servers. As a result of this change, you will transferred to a higher performance server on a more stable, premium network. Please note that we will complete this transfer with minimal to no downtime at all! If you are on the old Proto-Host nameservers, no action will be required on your end at all. If you have created your own nameservers, I will send out another e-mail once the transfer has been completed so that you can update your nameserver IPs. If you notice any errors appear on your website within the next 48 hours, please contact either myself or our support team immediately so that we can get the issue resolved for you. While we are doing our best to match the configuration on the new server with that of the server you were previously on, there will be some minor changes for the better. Thanks, Sean Frank Chief Executive Officer http://www.XeSolutions.net
We hope to have all of the websites transfered by tonight! I will post an update here once all of the websites have been migrated.
XeHost Acquires Proto-Host
July 6th, 2009
We are very pleased to announce that we have just acquired Proto-Host. By now, all Proto-Host clients have been notified of this acquisition and have already been moved into our billing systems. We expect to have all Proto-Host clients moved to our datacenter by the end of the week.
The following e-mail was sent out by Sean to all Proto-Host clients regarding this acquisition:
Greetings! My name is Sean Frank and I am the Chief Executive Officer of XeHost. Recently, we have acquired Proto-Host. On behalf of the entire XeHost team, we would like to welcome you! We have been providing quality hosting services since 1999 and our reputation for stellar support and uptime speaks for itself. I have every confidence that you will find your stay at XeHost to be very rewarding. We currently have an industry-leading 15-minute response time guarantee on all support tickets. To submit a ticket, simply go to http://support.xehost.net I'm sure you are concerned that things will change or that you will need to update your hosting settings. Rest assured, we will make the move to our servers as quickly and painless as possible. We plan to move all clients over early next week and do not plan on having any downtime. We utilize premium bandwidth that will result in decreased latency and faster page loads for you. Although XeHost’s hosting packages are slightly different than those of Proto-Host’s, we will be happy to honor current hosting packages and pricing for as long as you wish to remain with us. ****IMPORTANT**** You will no longer need to access your Client Area through Proto-Host. All of your Billing and Support needs will be handled through https://billing.xesolutions.net - our official Client Area. Your login username is simply your e-mail address and your password has been reset to: ****** . Please feel free to change this password once logged in. We welcome your questions, comments and concerns. Please contact us if you have any questions and we will get back to you right away. Thank you and we are looking forward to serving your hosting needs for many years to come! Sean Frank Chief Executive Officer XE Technology Solutions http://www.XeSolutions.net
On behalf of everyone here at XeHost, welcome! I am confident that you will enjoy your stay with us.