How would you feel about getting a little extra cash, right before the Holiday shopping season? All you need to do is tell a friend about Earthnet and send an email to referrals@earthnet.net to let us know who you referred. If that customer signs up, you win!
- If you refer a colocation / dedicated server customer to Earthnet, and if they sign a contract with us, you will get 50% of their first month contracted price, as a check or a credit to your account (your choice). For example, if you refer a $500 a month customer to us, you will get $250!
- If you refer an ISP customer (dialup or DSL) to Earthnet, and they stay with us for at least 3 months, then you will receive credit for one free month of DSL or dialup service!
Did you know you can tap the expertise and experience of the Earthnet Staff for consulting and managed services on IT infrastructure located outside of our datacenter?
Count on Earthnet for:
- firewalls
- switches
- office networks
- VPNs (management/setup/troubleshooting)
- web wervers
- mail servers
- backups
- security audits and remediation (systems and networks)
- PCI remediation
- consultation (system setup, project planning, security, etc)
Call 303-546-6362 or email sales@earthnet.net for more info!
Backups are like flossing, everyone knows they should do it, yet very few people actually do it, and when you are lying on the dentist table getting a root canal, you wish that you had done it. You don't realize just how important it is to do backups until you hear a strange clicking sound coming from your hard drive. What would happen if you lost a hard drive? Multiple hard drives? An entire server?
Backups apply to home computers as well as business systems. Oscar winning director Francis Ford Coppola had an external hard drive stolen earlier this year. On that drive were many personal and professional files including family photos and future movie scripts. All gone. Even I, a humble sys. admin., have even been burned by having no backups. I had a hard drive crash with no warning. I had several years worth of videos that I edited that are now gone. I should have known better.
The bigger problem, though, is people who think they are doing proper backups but aren't. I've seen it many times. Someone's hard drive crashes, so they go to their backups only to realize that they're no good. The backups are for an old directory that's no longer in use and the most recent data wasn't backed up, or the backup data is corrupted. This happened earlier this summer to Business 2.0 Magazine. Just a week before their June 2007 issue was to go to press, their system crashed. When they went to restore their backup they realized that their backup system wasn't working properly. Everything was lost. Luckily, they had recently sent a copy of the text to their legal department for review. They had to work overtime to redo the layout in time. They were lucky.
"The bigger problem, though, is people who think they are doing proper backups but aren't."
Verifying the integrity of your backups is just as important as doing them. In school they would have regular fire drills to make sure everyone knew what to do if disaster struck. Similarly, you should have regular “Restoration” drills, where you rebuild systems from their backup. That way, you know that your backups are good and you are backing up everything that you need. If you see that they're no good you can fix them before the necessity arises.
If you do currently have a backup solution, great! When was the last time you tested your backup? What would happen if a system died and your backup was no good? Do you have multiple backup solutions?
If you currently have no backup solution or want another we do offer a backup service. This service is performed by our dedicated backup server. This server has 14 hard drives in a Raid 10 array (meaning multiple drives will have to fail before any data is lost) boasting 3.4 Tera bytes of storage. For more information or to sign up, contact us to discuss the options.
Backups are something that no one takes very seriously until they are sitting there with a dead server and their job on the line. Don't learn the hard way. If you don't have a good backup and restoration policy, create one. If you don't regularly test your backups, do it. If you don't have redundant backups, think about adding another backup solution. A little planning now can save massive headaches when disaster strikes.
Spam has become and unfortunate part of our online lives. As your ISP we continuously attempt to update spam filtering software and hardware to limit your exposure. If you have your own domain name (yourcompany.com) then we have spam filtering services that might help reduce how much spam finds you. Although nothing will completely eliminate spam, there are some things each individual user can do that will keep their spam from increasing in volume. If you are really just completely innundated then you might want to start by changing your email address and starting fresh. Try this tip to keep your address out of the hands of Spammers:
Use an "Unguessible" email address.
Spammers often try to guess at your address so any address that uses names that could be found in phonebooks or real words often get more spam. If you make one up that doesn't contain words or names you will have less spam. Longer addresses that start further down the alphabet are even better. Use mnemonics to make it something you remember but that is meaningless to almost everyone else.
Example:
John and Ann Smith, were married in December 1969, and have a son named Lee and a dog named Spot:
>>
jnan1269lest@yourisp.com.
It's harder to remember for your friends, but it will help guarantee that most email sent to you is legitimate.
Stay tuned for a new tip, in our next newsletter.
After a couple outages with the provider who provides the modems that
answer your dialup connections to Earthnet, and their unresponsiveness
in solving the issue, we decided to go with a different company who
could offer our customers better service and more choices for access
numbers nationwide. There are now more than 25,000 access numbers
across the USA! Most people have already made the change, but here's
the nitty gritty of it:
- The phone numbers to dial in have changed.
You will need to update your dialup access phone number. (see below)
- Currently you log in with your user name like: johnt
All that
you need to do is add @earthnet.net after your username on your dialup
connection screen, so the username above becomes:
johnt@earthnet.net
Your email username remains as it was. All of our dialup numbers are
available here, and are searchable by state:
http://earthnet.net/support/dialup/dialup_numbers_search.htm
Detailed instructions for Windows and Mac can be found on this page:
http://earthnet.net/support/dialup/dialup_change.htm
You may find one number works better than others, so feel free to try
different ones if you have any troubles.
Earthnet will be observing the Holidays during the following dates.
You may reach our helpdesk, as always, by emailing help@earthnet.net.
Business customers with equipment in our datacenter may utilize our
premier support number for emergencies.
THANKSGIVING WEEK END:
Our office will be closed
from Wednesday, Nov 21 at 5pm
until Monday, Nov 25 at 9am.
CHRISTMAS WEEK + NEW YEAR'S DAY:
Our office will be closed
from Friday, Dec 21, 2007 at 5pm
until Wednesday, Jan 2nd, 2008 at 9am.
If you are an ISP customer (DSL or dialup), and you have connectivity, please email help@earthnet.net for fastest support, or visit our support website for online self help, at www.earthnet.net/support. If you have no way of connecting to the Internet, please leave a detailled message on extension 12 at 303 546 6362. A technician will call you back as soon as possible, if necessary.
If you are a colocation customer, with physical servers hosted at our location, and if you have an dire emergency, you can reach us anytime by calling the answering service. However, if you have a non-emergency, please email our helpdesk at help@earthnet.net, your ticket will be given top priority. If you need work done by our technicians, please fill out our work order form at http://earthnet.net/workorder.php.
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