We’ve been reviewing our affiliate scheme against the competition and believe we have the leading scheme in the industry. With the Heart Internet scheme you can earn 10% commission on all domain and hosting sales by referring new customers online.

Enrolling in our affiliate scheme is free of charge and we supply a range of banner and button sizes to place on your Website. When a visitor to your website clicks on any of these banners they are sent to our website and a special piece of information is stored on their computer (called a cookie). Cookies are used by many companies, including Microsoft, Amazon and Argos, so are widely accepted by computer users. The cookie stores your affiliate ID so that when that customer places an order for services from our website we know that the customer came from you.

Once an order is placed we automatically credit your account with 10% commission for web hosting and domain names from that sale. As long as you reach £15 by the end of the month we will automatically credit the amount you have earned to your bank account. If you don’t earn £15 in a given month we simply keep carrying this amount over until you reach £15.

To join simply login to your account/sign up for a new account and click the “Affiliate Link” once you have logged in.

Heart Internet takes the strain off creating your own forum and allows its users to install phpBB 2 & 3 easily from its extensive library of scripts.
 
phpBB is a high-powered, fully scalable and customisable open-source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel and helpful FAQ.

Below are some Top Tips in helping you run your own forum and get your community off to a good start.

Start off Small
Many forums make the mistake of creating too many categories too soon. If you’re just starting out with your forum, you’re going to create a negative atmosphere if you have plenty of categories but with zero or very few posts. Plan out the minimum amount of categories your forum needs and use those for now. Once the community becomes more active with regular posts and contributing members, you can start to introduce more categories that will suit your target audience.

Make the Forum Appear Active
When you first start building your forum, it’s important to create a sense of activity, as it will be less likely that users will register to a forum which appears to lack enthusiasm and where there are no new topics being created. If you’re determined to make your forum a success then you should either get friends to sign up and post topics or create multiple accounts that you can login and post as, so inevitably you’re answering your own questions to begin with, but it makes the forum appear more active.

Creating & Running a Successful Forum
Every member that is newly registered to the forum should be sent a “Welcome to the Forum” message via the private message system. This is a really nice touch that new members will appreciate, it doesn’t have to be unique to every user, you could have a standard template that you can simply copy from and paste into a message.  It’s a good idea to include links in your welcome message to the most popular categories on the forum , encouraging new members to participate. Give them the opportunity to introduce themselves to the community, add a link within the message to the “Introductions” forum on your board and make sure you greet them with a reply.

Reply to Posts as Soon as Possible
Make the right impression by subscribing to all forums so you will be alerted of new threads and posts. Login and reply as soon as you can, if you are unsure how to answer the question, it may be worth searching the internet to see if it has been answered before and use that information to help, be sure to credit the original source.

Hire Moderators
Over time you will find it harder to monitor your forum as post rates and the amount of new registrations increase. It’s almost impossible for yourself to monitor the forum 24/7 for inappropriate content, such as spam and advertising.  It would be highly advisable to hire a moderator to help run your forum, approach the active members on your forum and ask if they would like to help improve and grow the community. Due to their commitments to the forum, it’s likely they will accept your request and be happy to help. It’s advisable to create a set of rules and instructions for moderators to follow so the forum is still run in exactly the way you want. Also, try to hire a moderator who is in a different time-zone so when you’re asleep, the forum is still being moderated.

Remove Spam
Nothing can turn visitors away more quickly from a forum than spam, so make sure you keep a watchful eye on members trying to sell unrelated products and remove posts that do not serve any purpose or that are offensive. It’s advised to create a forum for “General/Off Topic” posts so members can chat about other things which are not forum specific.

Send a Regular Newsletter
Send a regular newsletter to your forum members which includes the latest popular topics and encourages them to participate. It’s a great way of reminded members about your forum and also a way of generating traffic back to your boards.

Useful Links:

Support:
http://www.phpbb.com/support/

Modifications and Styles
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/

We have made a major update to eXtend control panel today which we have been working on for some months. We have lots of new features including a new interface, file manager and many more CGI scripts.

If you are a Heart Internet Reseller we have soft-launched eXtend 2.0 so you can preview it, try the demo and create a custom brand if you want to. Once you commit a custom brand all your control panels will move to the new version. We will automatically move any Resellers who have not moved themselves on the 31st March.

If you would like some more information on this then please visit the eXtend 2.0 page or our news page.

Do you use HostPay at all? HostPay is our domain name and web hosting shopping cart that is included with the Reseller Professional package.

I just wanted to remind you that if you do, then there is a separate newsfeed of updates we make to HostPay. You can view the newsfeed by logging into the Reseller Control Centre, clicking HostPay and then scrolling down the page to the newsfeed section.

There have been 4 updates this week including:

 - Renewal Manager
 - Hosting Packages
 - Delete Shopping Baskets
 - Google Acceptance Logo

Over the past few years I’ve always carried a USB drive around with me containing files that I need for home and work, but recently I’ve ditched it for a service that provides 30GB of online storage space for free. Who provides this service? Well, we do actually. It’s called the Heart Drive and if you’ve not used this innovative file storage system then I strongly suggest that you give it a go.

Heart-drive is an online storage service for all of your files.

Your files are stored centrally online so you can access and work with them from any computer or mobile phone. There’s no software to install, all you need is a web browser - one quick login and you are instantly connected to your personal drive.

When you want to listen to your music or watch a movie you can stream them direct from Heart Drive, wherever you are. You can even embed your favourite multimedia in your emails, blog and web pages.

If you’d like to sign up, just pop over to http://drive.heartinternet.co.uk

 We are quite pleased with ourselves today! Computer Shopper, Britain’s biggest technology magazine has awarded us “Best Buy” for our Starter Professional web hosting package.

Here is a short quote on what Computer Shopper had to say:-

“Nottingham-based Heart Internet is the latest project from the team that originally developed WebFusion and 123-Reg. With 2.5GB of storage and a generous 20GB monthly bandwidth limit, the Starter Professional package has impressive specifications, and the email capability stretches to 1,000 1GB POP/IMAP mailboxes, complete with webmail access and spam protection.”

The Starter Professional is a good way of getting your company, club, blog or personal website online. Click here to find out more.

To read the full article on the Computer Shopper website click here.

Fancy working for Heart Internet? We have a number of positions open at the moment, all based at our Nottingham offices. For more information please visit http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/jobs.shtml

After reading Jonathan’s blog article about how bandwidth has changed over the last ten years it got me thinking about the hardware we use in web hosting. I’ve just placed an order for additional web servers of the following spec:

Dell 1950

• Two Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X5460, 2X6MB Cache, 3.16GHz,
• 8 GB 667MHZ FBD
• Primary HD: 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15.000 rpm Hard Drive
• Secondary HD: 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15.000 rpm Hard Drive
• Perc6i SAS RAID Controller
• dual Broadcom® NetXtreme II 5708 Gigabit Ethernet NIC

When we launched WebFusion in 1997 we built our own servers for the first year then started to use equipment from Penguin Computing. We selected Penguin as they were one of the first companies to supply rack mounted servers to the Linux community. They are based in San Francisco and we often had to wait up to four weeks for delivery – having said that they always put toy penguins in the packaging to ease the wait! The spec of the servers in 1998 was:

 
• Two 300 MHz Pentium II w/256K Cache
• 128 MB ECC 100 MHz SDRAM
• Integrated Adaptec 7890 Ultra2 SCSI Controller
• Primary HD: Quantum 9.1 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
• Intel 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Adapter

Of course in 1998 we only gave 10MB disk space with each account and bandwidth was limited by the fact that nearly everyone was on dial-up, so these servers coped fine. Today’s websites are much more demanding of servers, so even though the spec is significantly higher, we still only put the same number of accounts on each server as we did ten years ago.

We upgraded our bandwidth today, adding 50 Mb to our current infrastructure, it’s the second time we have upgraded this year. There’s nothing particularly special about this upgrade, except that it got us talking about how much our bandwidth requirements have changed over the last few years.

When we setup WebFusion in 1997 (which we sold some years ago) we started with a 64 KB line, that cost £20,000 per year! We had 600 websites on it before we needed to upgrade and we used it for our office Internet access as well. When we upgraded we went to 128 KB and it was sometime before we hit 1 MB. Back then most hosting companies had a spare room with all their servers in and “air conditioning” was provided by a couple of fans. I remember that the largest hosting company at the time had 2 X 2 MB lines and this seemed quite unbelievable.

Fast forward 11 years and it’s predicted that 2 out of 3 households in the UK will have broadband by the end of the year, so I think we will be adding to our network capacity again fairly soon.

We have updated our Joomla installer to 1.5.1 today. We had been planning on moving to this version in the next few months anyway, but recently some serious security vulnerabilities have been identified in previous versions of Joomla, so we felt we should upgrade our copy now.

To install the new version log-in to your eXtend control panel and go to the CGI/PHP Scripts section.

An overview of Joomla 1.5 is available on the Joomla Website. If you are looking to upgrade your existing Joomla site then there is a helpful article on the Joomla Team Blog on how to do this.