The Cloud Brings Ease of Use to both IT managers and business owners. The complexities of setting up and maintaining office servers and desktop applications can be replaced with a click of a button for scallable IT On Demand with TurnKeyCloud’s Virtual Desktops and Cloud Servers.

TurnKeyCloud simplifies compliance requirements for your business with our Cloud Applications which provide instant compliance such as HIPAA and SOX compliant email and PCI / PA-DSS eCommerce Compliance.

TurnKeyCloud Saves You Money

TurnKeyCloud takes IT on Demand further by helping you greatly reduce your IT costs – no more expensive servers in your office to replace every few years and no need for expensive IT consultants. For example, TurnKeyMail our Enterprise Email Solution can provide you with a robust feature rich email and collaborative solution for your entire office for $19.95/mo. Compare that to the cost of placing a microsoft exchange mail server in your office ($20,000 and up for the server, software and installation by a traditional IT Company).

TurnKeyCloud is Reliable

TurnKeyCloud solutions are housed in our Enterprise Grade Datacenter providing redundant network, power and data systems to ensure continous access at all times. Our Cloud Servers offer self healing redundant systems – should a server go down (for maintenace, or mechanical failure) it self heals and replicates to a new server within minutes. Data backups are automated and stored off site – providing you not only the best in reliabilty but the peace of mind of data security as well. Compare a Cloud Server to running a server in your office, if the disk drive fails, or power goes out – what would you do? With TurnKeyCloud, your cloud server is back online automatically with our self-healing technology.

TurnKeyCloud Protects Your Data

TurnKeyCloud solutions are all protected by internal backup systems, offering daily, weekly and monthly backups of all your servers, virtual desktops, and applications. We remotely backup these systems, provide you with easy access to snapshots in time for restoring data should you need access to the data. Our Cloud Servers and Virtual Desktops utilize advanced encrypted connection protocols to protect your data, and ensure your business and staff always are protected.

TurnKeyCloud is Green Friendly

Cloud sourcing IT is not only reliable, cost effective and instant – but it also helps save the environment. That server in the office running your business email, or company CRM, or other applications will be drawing power 24 hours a day to keep it connected to the Internet. Even when there are no emails to deliver, – the disk drive, the fans, the power supply all are drawing electricity.

With a Cloud Server – our cloud infrastructure is up to 30 times more energy efficient versus leaving that office server online all day. Cloud Servers are more efficient because of the core design model of virtualization and how resources are allocated on demand. For example, TurnKeyCloud through its datacenters provides services to clients from around the world. A client in Asia typically will have highest usage when clients in the United States are at their lowest – so over a 24 hour period the TurnKeyCloud system dynamically and efficiently can allocated resources on demand to ensure you have the maximum performance while greatly reducing your typical energy foot print.

The cloud is IT on demand. The cloud is a scalable, reliable and cost effective way of accessing information technology at any time from any where.

The technology of the cloud revolves around the benefits of moving expensive and complicated IT out of your office into an efficient, scalable, and secure data center. This data center is where your IT equipment, office servers, desktop applications, web applications, business software and data can all be accessed easily, at a much lower cost, and securely via the Internet.

TurnkeyCloud is IT On Demand

TurnKeyCloud offers ready to go Cloud Applications that help any business be more efficient, communicate and collaborate with ease. Our instant on technology can have these Cloud Applications running for your business within seconds, and save you both money and time versus trying to deploy similar solutions in your office. Our Cloud enabled Virtual Desktops let you connect your computer work environments together with employees across the room, town, or globe with a shared desktop, suite of Microsoft Office applications, and access to files and folders in a secure environment. Cloud Servers offer instant replacements and instant capacity for your office servers. At the push of a button you can deploy additional services, cloud servers, increase speed, increase storage capacity, increase the number of users all without having to call your IT company and schedule an expensive site visit.

How Does the Cloud Help My Business?

Cloud Sourcing your IT (Information Technology) provides significant Cost Savings, increased reliability for your business, instant access to computer resources or applications when you need them, green friendly benefits to both you and your community, and access to powerful software tools to help your business grow and be more efficient.

How is Cloud Hosting Different?

Traditional hosting servers run applications in a linear design without extensive redundancy or scalability. The traditional method until now when hosting a server, web site or application is to place it in your office on a single computer. Although the hardware on this computer may have some limited redundancy such as a spare disk drive- it is inevitable to have some form of business disruption from loss of power, exceeding the capacity of the computer or network, hardware failure, human error, or simply having a software crash. This disruption could cost a business significantly in lost data, lost time, and for the IT company you have to hire to come in and fix everything.

With the TurnKeyCloud Hosting model, the single point of failure is replaced by a scalable on demand network of computing resources that are hosted in our data center with multiple redundant ultra-high capacity network connections, on-site generators, precision cooling systems, and leveraging green-friendly practices. The single server design model of yesterday is now replaced by sophisticated SAN (Storage Area Network) file servers, multiple clustered HyperVisor virtualization based systems, and control module nodes that ensure a reliable always available experience for your servers and software applications.

Today, spam is a fact of life. Because of the daily spam deluge (and those over-zealous anti-spam systems) many email communications require a follow up phone call… “did you get my email?”

You may not realize it, but if you send emails through your web hosting server or virtual server and operate a web hosting business, web development business or host your email with a web hosting company, you have likely had some trouble getting your emails through. Often the reason is that your server has been used to send spam without your knowledge. Most of today’s web hosting companies employ automated protection to stop such things, and catch abuse before it gets out of hand. But spammers are getting more clever and an increasing number of stealth spamming techniques can bypass these systems.

Many web hosting companies resell web hosting, and their resellers (unbeknownst to them) send out spam. This can result in the blacklisting of the entire server, and everyone on it, which will keep most (if not all) emails sent from the server from ever reaching their destinations. Of course, it is the web host’s responsibility to carefully monitor their clients and web sites on their server(s) to make sure this never happens. Traditionally, this hasn’t been too difficult. Today’s modern web hosting systems employ advanced abuse tracking and header info in every email making it easy to catch and stop this type of abuse before it becomes a problem.

Lately, however, this has become a lot harder. There is a new wave of spam abuse that hides under the radar, bypassing the web server’s normal email system(s) by opening up a small cgi program, which then operates as a small mail sending server, which then floods spam out onto the Internet. Unfortunately, none of the traditional monitoring systems are able to detect this sort of stealth spamming. Naturally, for this reason, it has become very popular.

Fortunately, here at TurnKey, we’ve figured out a fix for web hosts and developers using cPanel (this will work on other servers, such as Plesk and DirectAdmin as well). Our fix will stop stealth spam dead in its tracks! Until it is a built-in a feature in all hosting companies’ server offerings, make sure you ask your web hosting company to set this up for your server. Alternatively, you can pick a web hosting company that takes care of it themselves (like TurnKey Internet).

First, login to your cPanel server via the unix shell and install CSF firewall. Follow the usual instructions here:

mkdir /usr/local/src
cd /usr/local/src
wget http://www.configserver.com/free/csf.tgz
tar xfz csf.tgz
cd csf
./install.sh

On a cPanel based server, all the default settings are what you want, with 2 exceptions:

Open the configuration file in your favorite text editor (/etc/csf.conf) and change the following lines:

TESTING = “1” change to TESTING = “0”

NEXT:  you need to change 2 more lines, the SMTP_BLOCK and SMTP_ALLOWLOCAL to the following values:

SMTP_BLOCK = “1”

SMTP_ALLOWLOCAL = “0”

This will block outbound emails from anyone other than the mail server software, and prevent any unauthorized access to the mail daemon from local scripts.  Your web hosting clients, and web pages will still be able to send email like before (they use a proper method of communicating to the mail daemon already, this above trick is just to block stealth spammers from working).

restart the firewall by typing:

/etc/init.d/csf restart

If all goes well your server will now be protected by a firewall with an added check to prevent spammers from sending emails that avoid the normal php_mail or other local mail sending method (which lets you track and log all emails, put in abuse headers by default, etc.).

Next time on Ask the Expert, we will show you how to optimize your server to really cut down on abuse from spammers.

In this, the first of our new series, Ask the Experts, our President and CEO, Adam Wills, tackles our first question:

How can I choose a dedicated service web hosting company?

Take it away, Adam…

1) Work with a reputable, real company.

It may sound obvious that you should  be looking for a reputable, real company, but the reality is that  many of the web hosting companies that claim to be, aren’t.  There are thousands upon thousands of web hosting companies in existence today, many of which claim to offer dedicated servers.  However, the shocking truth is that many of them are 1-man operations that lack infrastructure, support and a positive track-record. So, the first step in choosing a dedicated server host, it to research the company that offers it. Visit the Better Business Bureau website. Look for an independently verified reputation. Make sure there is an organization in place to back up promises like service-level guarantees.

2) Purchase directly from the company that owns the hardware (i.e. do business directly with the datacenter and carefully review any businesses that are middlemen or resellers).

Many clients come to us on the heels of devastating experiences with other hosting providers. Often their websites just disappeared along with the supposed company they were doing business with. Here at TurnKey Internet, we support resellers. There are a great many excellent reseller companies with pristine reputations and wonderful customer service who have been in business for years. However, like with any business, there are plenty of not-so-reputable resellers out there too. When a reseller doesn’t pay his hosting bill with his provider, his servers get shut down. If your website happens to be on one of those servers, your website gets shut down too. The best way to avoid this is by researching your reseller or, better yet, by going directly to the source– the web hosting company that owns their own infrastructure and datacenter. You will not only get the piece of mind an established, brick-and-mortar business provides, you will also get a better price by cutting out the middleman.

3) Work with companies that offer a large selection of the latest technology.

A wide variety of the latest server hardware and models is a sign of the health and longevity of a dedicated server provider. For instance, today the hot CPU chips for entry level and mid-range dervers are the Quad Core Intel i5 and i7. The high-end and enterprise-level CPUs are typically the multi-CPU configured, Quad Core Xeon E550x series. Make sure the company you choose has these products available.

4) Make sure the company you choose has a wide range of support and backup options.

Most web hosting companies will claim to have top-notch support. You should always try before you buy. Test phone numbers and live chat and note response times. Also, make sure the company offers a premium managed support and backup service option. If a company is not able to offer options like server hardening or firewall setup, it is a sign that company is not a full-fledged dedicated provider. While you might not need to take advantage of these services at the start, it is always good to know they are available, should you need to upgrade in the future.

Here at TurnKey Internet, we go out of our way to help potential clients feel comfortable. We always offer all the latest technology and we take time to explain who we are and why what we offer is unique.  We display our better business bureau A+ status and independent reviews right in the footer of all our web pages. We provide links to news organizations that have written stories about our company, and in general try to help potential clients understand the all that we offer. Whether you choose TurnKey Internet or another established web host (and we hope you choose us!) doing a little research can save you lots of heartache and ensure that you have a positive  hosting experience.

Adam Wills
President and CEO