IPv6 stands for Internet Protocol version 6 and it is the all new version of how computers will communicate on the Internet (some computers already speak the IPv6 protocol, as do some web sites). With the last of the IPv4 address space about to run out in late 2011, any new devices, computers or web sites connecting to the Internet after that date will now connecting via IPv6.  IPv6 has been designed to handle the growth of the internet, for 100’s of more years – and is the standard going forward that websites, and online businesses need to be ready for.

This means that new cell phones, and home computers as well as web sites will soon be be only on the IPv6 address space.  In order for these new devices to communicate and talk to the ‘old internet’ that resides on IPv4 a sort of proxy system will be created by service providers to connect their subscribers to who need to reach the ‘old’ IPv4 internet web sites of online destinations.  The problem with this is that by forcing everyone through a proxy to ‘gateway’ to the old network, will create bottlenecks and lower quality service (as well as security issues for ecommerce enabled web sites).  So to avoid this congestion on the 1-lane exit ramp between IPv6 and IPv4, what you need to do is make sure your web site or dedicated web server has both an IPv4 AND IPv6 ip address assigned to it.

If you ignore IPv6, or are with a web hosting company that doesn’t support IPv6, you are going to jeaporadize client relationships, and lost sales.  If you don’t connect your web site or dedicated web server to the IPv6 network you will force your online visitors coming from the next generation IPv6 network to go through those IPv4 proxy aggregation choke points, and force your potential and current customers into a lower quality (and less secure) experience reaching your online business.

So, is your web site ready for IPv6?  If the answer is “no” or “I don’t know”, you need to get started with IPv6.  Many of you probably still remember the countdown to Year 2000, and the great computer glitch that never came.  Well IPv6 is coming, and it will be in 2011 and 2012 that everyone will be forced into that reality, you better be ready for it.  The good news is it only takes a few minutes, and no disruption to your web site to enable it for IPv6.

To get your web site ready for IPv6 doesn’t take a lot, you need to contact your datacenter and/or web hosting provider and make sure they are IPv6 ready.  If they are not yet IPv6 ready, you have a bigger challenge ahead, as you have to wait until they get ready.   Internet providers have to upgrade their routing infrastrcuture, put in special software, and train their staff, as well as spend a lot of time configuring their network to be ready for IPv6.  If your internet provider hasn’t done this, it’s getting late in the ball game so you should call and ask when they will be ready.  If they answer “we don’t know”, its time to find another web hosting provider before 2011 hits.

If you are with  web  hosting provider that is IPv6 enabled then the next step is pretty easy, contact them and order an IPv6 ip adddress for your web site or server.  Due to the added time/configuration and labor of the new IPv6 network it’s likely the web hosting provider may charge you a small feel for the setup or small monthly fee, but then you can rest asured you are ready for the future.

Once your web site has its IPv6 address (which may looks a little strange, for instance www.turnkeyinternet.net  as the following ‘IPv6’ address:  2064:7c00::1 ) but the good news is you don’t have to remember those strange looking IPv6 addresses.  The wonderfull world of domain names and dns settings has already long since solved this since the early 1990’s when IPv6 was first concieved.  You simply need to add an “AAAA” record in your dns for your web site pointing at your new IPv6 address, and that’s it!  Your traditional web site IPv4 address already has a domin name “A” record – so by simply adding this “AAAA” record for your domain name, you now will be both IPv4 and IPv6 enabled and ready for the future.    This means that if someone types in www.yoursitename.com if they are connected to an IPv6 network, they will get your IPv6 address and route there directly.  If someone is on the old IPv4 and type in www.yoursitename.com they will get the IPv4 address and go straight there. In no way will either party have to go through a proxy or congested IPv6 to IPv4 system – and your online business will perform at it’s best no matter which network your web visitors are traveling from!

If you own a hosting company, chances are good you have a large number of customers paying a very low price for shared hosting services. But, for all you know, those customers are doing good business—despite the low price tag on their hosting. So, how can you make the most of this potential source of income without investing a ton of money in infrastructure and software development? By reselling online business solutions from TurnKey Internet, of course!

What Services?
Every business needs an ecommerce solution, right? Every business needs robust office email with collaboration tools. Every business needs web conferencing, monitoring and secure backup services. If you don’t provide these things to your clients, they will get them elsewhere. If they’re getting their other services elsewhere, it may not be long before they switch their hosting over too, consolidating their business with one company that has it all. You need to make your company the company that has it all. The more services you have to offer, the more clients you will keep, and the more money you will make.

What they Don’t Know they Need
As advanced as business has become, still many small business owners are behind the times. Part of the reason for this is simple fear of the technology—but another reason for this is ignorance of the simple solutions that could be increasing their sales ten-fold (and yours too, as a reseller of the services they need). The first step in making a successful resell, is education. Let your clients know about the tools you have to offer, and then sell them those tools. It may just be as easy as it sounds.

Your Monthly Percentage
The beauty of reselling is the consistent income that perpetuates itself with no additional work from you. You don’t have to worry about tech support or phone troubleshooting. Once you’ve made the sale you don’t have to raise a finger while you watch your profits go up and up.

TurnKey has it All!
As we move into the fall months, we will be releasing our full suite of online/cloud business solutions. We have already released TurnKeyMail, TurnKey NAS Vault and TurnKey Newsletter. These are three robust, action-packed SaaS solutions that you can start reselling to your clients today. Follow the links to learn how you can increase your monthly income with the clients you already have. You have nothing to lose!

As the available domain names grow scarcer by the second, many of us are left wondering how to choose a domain that will make any sense, let alone one that will drive traffic and brand our companies. While there are still many great domains out there, especially if you’re a creative thinker, the short, sweet, easy to spell, easy to say domains are not quite so forthcoming. If you have a very specific branding idea or an absolute favorite name that just isn’t available (for any price), misspellings might be your best shot at finding a name you love. Often, you will only have to switch two letters, or add a “k” in the place of a “c” to find an available name. You may even end up with a name that is more memorable and unique than the original name you wanted, and that sets you apart better then the dictionary spelling of a common word ever could.

Why would I want a misspelled domain anyway?
In addition to the cute, web 2.0ness of a misspelled domain, you may also end up growing your traffic wholly by accident, or, if you are particularly shrewd, wholly on purpose (I won’t tell). The name of the game is targeted traffic—if you choose a name like “hoogle.com” (which isn’t available, but permit me the example) you will end up with boatloads of traffic from the fat-fingered and, in America, that’s a lot of people. You will also end up with a bunch of people who are looking for a search engine. If you happen to be Bing, this is excellent news.

Which Misspellings Work Best?
As I mentioned, you’re aim is to target your traffic, so start out by finding your most popular competitor. You can choose to go the blatant route and pick a misspelling that is obviously keyboard-based (again, like hoogle, or like godadsy) or you can think like an English teacher and switch i’s and e’s, a common mistake for many spellers. Regardless of your tactic, be sure to pick a company that is offering the same products or services that you are offering. Get as close as you can, because the end goal is to make a sale. If your products are too different, that visitor will just correct their misspelling and vamoose.

Analyzing Traffic
The Internet is an incredible tool, as exemplified by the convenient misspelling traffic analysis provided by many different websites, for free. Investigate the traffic reports for misspellings that are not yet owned via Google keyword search. You may also want to consider domains that relate to distinct events, rather than existing companies. For example, if you are a vendor selling soccer equipment, consider a misspelled world cup player or team for your domain. There were millions of misspelled searches during the world cup. If even a small percentage of those people had come across your online store, you would have made some great sales—especially if you’d been clever enough to offer team jerseys at deep discounts to hardcore fans. And maybe even some vuvuzelas?

“Borrowing” Traffic
So, it might not be the most morally righteous thing in the world, but traffic on the Internet is not an entirely fair enterprise to begin with. Google ranks websites based, in part, on existing popularity. This means, we all start out at a disadvantage. Google also encourages website owners to populate their content with keywords and search terms—so, in a very real sense, we have no choice but to cater to the search engines from square one. A misspelling is not copyright infringement. It is not illegal. However, you can further protect yourself (and brand your very own company as a stand-alone) by choosing a misspelling that is it’s own catchy word or phrase. The less your domain relates to a recognizable brand while still sending you misspelling traffic, the better. So, while Godadsy might be a little obvious, Fodadsy is very much it’s own thing. While two letters isn’t quite as good as one, you’ll still get the fat-finger traffic while maintaining your very own name that is recognizably yours. You can always buy Godadsy too and point it to Fodadsy for a little thing I like to call the best of both worlds.

A Word of Caution
If you are a business owner who already has a domain, you may want to consider buying up all the possible misspellings of your name to protect yourself from just this type of traffic squatting. It’s nefarious and slightly dirty, but it works. Use it if you need it and watch out for it if you don’t.

Everyone has heard the expression: ignorance of the law is no excuse. Well, from the feedback I am getting it seems that many companies and organizations haven’t taken that very seriously when it comes to email system compliance. While people in the financial, insurance and medical industries are scrambling to comply with the new regulations, others may still not be aware of the laws they are violating every day. Have you heard of the following …

Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (commonly called GLB or GLBA)
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
Hedge Fund Transparency Act (HFTA)
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (commonly called SOX)
US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4)

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) apply to any organization that has the potential to be involved in litigation in the U.S. Federal Court system. The amendments, which went into effect on December 1, 2006, mandate that companies must be prepared for legal discovery. Every organization must know where their data is and how to retrieve it. This regulation covers any organization in any industry. You are required to have the ability to produce all electronic documents, including email, for a minimum of seven years.

Considering that the average employee sends and receives multiple emails daily, the storage capacity alone needed to achieve seven years of backups is more than most office servers can handle. The most reasonable and cost-effective way to maintain this level of compliance is by utilizing a virtual email or cloud-based email server. This will provide you with the number of email accounts you need, at a price you can afford, and also include the necessary systems for archiving and retrieval. Their storage capacities have the ability to expand as needed with no additional cost to the clients.
If you are considering an upgrade to your email system, you may also want to think about technologies like Active Sync for communication with smart-phones.

Check out our offerings for fully-compliant and affordable email systems to protect your businesses! Our offerings include Active Sync with SOX and HIPAA compliance, Microsoft-exchange level features and much more.

For all of you who have not had the opportunity to take advantage of our $25.00 & $100.00 Visa Gift Card promotion you are in luck! We have extended the Visa Gift Card promotion through September 30, 2010 @ 10:59 PM EST.

In case you forgot, all you need to do is purchase a qualifying package on a new order, put in 25VISA or 100VISA during checkout and keep the product active for 60 days. Within 6 to 8 weeks you will receive a $25.00 or $100.00 Visa Gift Card if you are located within the United States. If you are outside the United States, you will receive either a service credit or a PayPal payment.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Welcome to Tim Kirsch, Director of Business Development and the latest addition to our team! Tim hit the ground running and has already organized several great new TurnKey initiatives that are getting us more local attention every day. We are all looking forward to working with him on all of our new product releases and marketing projects. Welcome to the TurnKey family, Tim!

What attracted you to the hosting business?

I have always been interested in technology of any kind and how it can improve the business process of any company. My career has included both sales and management positions and I have always been excited to learn about new and better technologies. Turnkey has a product mix that any business or organization would be a potential candidate for. Knowing from experience how advancements in technology can improve results, I felt the plans that Turnkey’s management shared with me for the new business solutions coupled with the new hosting facility currently under construction, were very intriguing. I feel like I am getting in on the ground floor of a company on a huge upward swing. This is something that is extremely unusual in today’s economy and something I am excited about being part of.

How did you find TurnKey?

Before joining Turnkey, I owned and operated a small online marketing company that needed a dedicated server for a particular online project I was spearheading. My office was in the same building as the office for Turnkey so after going online to check out if they had what I needed I went down and met with them to make a deal on the dedicated server. Over the next several months I got to know the owner and the staff. I guess they got sick of my stopping down to see them so much they felt I should probably just come work here.

What aspect of your job brings out the best in you?

I guess it would be meeting with clients and coming to understand their business. I look forward to being able to match businesses with our products and services, to help them grow their businesses.

Do you have any hobbies?

Yes I have many hobbies. First and for most would be continually trying to improve my golf game. I also enjoy any outdoor activities such as skiing, hiking and swimming. During the winter months I am devoted to following the Siena Saints College basketball team.

How many times have you suffered through the embarrassment of a missed appointment or a deadline? How many times have you forgotten an important file for a business meeting? Nothing makes an employee look worse than being unprepared. It is a huge challenge keeping up with the lightning pace of business when your tools, reminders and data are floating all over the electronic ether. As someone with her fair share of ADD and a penchant for doing a million things at once, I can attest to the personal toll my unconsolidated data storage habits have taken on my sanity and professional development. For these reasons and more, TurnKeyMail has been a game changer.

I’ve tried appointment books, wall calendars, outlook tasks, desktop schedulers, post-it notes on my bathroom mirror—I’ve even tied a literal string around my literal finger and forgotten what it was there for. For a girl who wants to make it in the IT industry, being scattered is a fatal flaw. Enter: TurnKeyMail.

Yes, I’m a TurnKey Internet employee, and it is possible that my loyalties are somewhat biased, but I can’t underestimate how much easier my life has become with all of my business files, appointments, projects and correspondence in one place. It’s kind of like having a personal assistant keeping track of me. In the same way that a mail search function allows you to be totally disorganized and still find things, TurnKey Mail’s follow-up flagging, email and task linking and file storage allow you to keep every appointment, deadline and file in order and ready at a moment’s notice.

The word of the day is “synchronization.” Sure, everyone is talking about the cloud but how many people do you know who are actually seamlessly synchronized—computer to phone to iPod to iPad to Outlook to server? By synchronized, I don’t just mean online. Plenty of people with smartphones can check email via a web browser, but can they access their files? Can they pull up that video presentation from their home computer and that excel file from their work computer and that css file from their server, from wherever they may be, anytime? Are they going to be reminded, simultaneously, by their phone, ipod, home computer and work computer about that Monday morning meeting they scheduled three months ago?

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier. It is supposed to protect us from our own human frailties, make us more efficient, faster, more agile, less responsible for keeping every detail in our brains every second. So much of the time technology has the exact opposite effect—it makes our lives more confusing, scattered, broken and frustrating. The whole mission of TurnKey Internet is to make life easier, to make business easier. A TurnKey solution is a ready-made, all-in-one, user-friendly solution, not just another technological road-block. For me, TurnKeyMail has truly lived up to its name. It has made my life easier. It has made me more efficient. Above all, it has done what technology is supposed to do: step in to help with the things we find difficult. Now I can focus on the things I’m good at instead of stressing over the things I’m not.

Watch the TurnKey Mail Video:

Learn more about TurnKey Mail

Cloud computing has become increasingly popular, even while many people (industry leaders included) continue to waffle about exactly how it should be defined. The basic consensus is that cloud computing is ubiquitous, offering resources to many users at a time, over the Internet. It doesn’t matter where, geographically the programs or applications themselves reside because they are all plugged into the cloud. Everything is available remotely, from anywhere. While the cloud is often confused with the grid (think the SETI@home project) the cloud is differentiated by its infinite scalability: it can grow as big as you need it to be, quickly, without any interruption of service. Of course, grid computing and cloud computing are not mutually exclusive, but cloud always allows for multiple users while grid does not (though grids can be used for cloud computing if they are multi-use enabled—confused yet?)

Cloud computing has grown in popularity with the rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS). Numbered are the days of downloaded software. SaaS lives in the cloud, making it remotely accessible to multiple users with scalable juice. It allows you to run complex programs and processes without having the firepower of a super high RAM computer. SaaS is easy to implement and requires no big up-front investment. It is also perfectly suited to today’s business professionals who use multiple computers and portable devices to work on collaborative projects.

One of the many benefits of the SaaS cloud is that software licenses are issued to individuals instead of to computers. This means an individual can access a program from any device. This removes the tethers—it gives every person the freedom to work from anywhere on any project. It enables small businesses to maintain completely remote offices, resulting in huge savings and increased productivity.

The SaaS cloud also reduces costs and hassles associated with software problems, maintenance and support. SaaS is the responsibility of the company providing the licenses, not the individual. How many software problems are caused by conflicting programs, insufficient hardware or simple employee error? SaaS eliminates these risks.

As businesses have enjoyed the many benefits of SaaS, many companies have focused their efforts on developing new SaaS business products for more efficiency and ease of use. Since we are in the business of making businesses more efficient (and easier to run and manage) the last few months have seen us roll out our own line of SaaS products. We pay very close attention to the needs of our business clients. Through feedback, reviews and our own business experience we have developed tools that combine the best of all possible worlds: features, efficiency, ease of use, attractiveness and speed. So far we have launched TurnKey Newsletter and TurnKeyMail, two SaaS solutions that provide necessary cloud infrastructure tools to businesses. As the fall gets underway, we will be launching more TurnKey SaaS solutions that will grow our clients’ businesses over the coming months. Bring your business up to speed quickly, easily and for less than you’re paying now. [Learn more].

As you may know, cloud computing is remote computing—housing your data on many different servers, worldwide, with remote access to files and software and an infinitely scalable (grow-able) infrastructure. What you may not know is that cloud computing has been around for a very long time. While it has only recently become the go-to hot potato, for years many businesses have been utilizing cloud services to run things behind the scenes. There is no foreseeable end to the cloud—it is growing every day as more people realize how powerful, cost effective and useful it really is—and for many small and medium-sized businesses, the sooner they implement cloud services, the better for their bottom line.

Emerging Technologies

As the cloud goes mainstream, businesses everywhere are capitalizing on the new technology—both internally and as a potential area for expansion. The faster you move your business to the cloud, the faster you will be able to incorporate new technological advances into your business model. The longer you wait, the more difficult getting a handle on the new services will become. Start now, start small, and soon enough your business will be launching ahead of your competition. It is not every day that an opportunity presents itself to take a giant business leap forward without any risk to the business’ foundation or to day-to-day operations. You can get cloud services up and running while everything else stays in place then, when you are ready to switch over, do it seamlessly and without any glitches.

SaaS

As I have discussed in a previous post, software-as-a-service is a key component to what makes the cloud so beneficial for businesses. Accessing software from anywhere, paying licensing fees for individuals instead of computer work-stations and eliminating the cost of downtime and maintenance are just some of the reasons the SaaS cloud makes sense. Paying for exorbitantly expensive software and IT support is one of the main factors holding many small businesses back from challenging their larger competition. Check out TurnKey Internet’s cloud SaaS solutions.

Cloud and the Environment

IT infrastructure is extremely costly, from a monetary and environmental perspective. Housing, cooling and powering your business servers requires a large amount of energy. From an individual business’ perspective, this matters, but it also matters on a macro level: providing a networked server cloud for all your clients is far more efficient than providing a dedicated server for each one. As more and more businesses move to the cloud, we will reduce carbon emissions exponentially. That alone is a good enough reason to switch.