It’s no fun to get those frantic 3AM phone calls from upset clients, because instead of their website they’re getting some ugly **SERVICE FAILED** message. Your cell phone, office phone, emails, twitter are all going crazy. You ring up your datacenter only to find they don’t provide 24/7 support or are an unmanaged provider. This is exactly the problem our service fixes – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

We have Linux & Windows server administrators in our offices 24/7 working on our regular support queues. If you need DEDICATED ADMIN ATTENTION NOW, we can pull one of the admins off the regular queue and get them on your emergency support ticket for you. Our emergency server support package includes 2 hours of dedicated admin time. If you need more time than that, we’ll give you an estimate on how much more time is required once we hit that 2 hour mark and will await your approval to continue.

Check out the service page for more details >>> Emergency Server Support Service

For our recent redesign, we needed to reach out to some of our clients for our testimonial section. Many were pleased to provide, but several were very hesitant. This was a reply to a request from a great client of ours:

“We’re very happy with your services, but to be honest we really do no want to provide a testimonial. We don’t want our customers to know we’re outsourcing our support.”

This was not unexpected though. We are very used to our clients not wanting to associate their business with…The Dirty Outsourcing Word. We’re perfectly fine with providing support behind the scenes. However, we wanted to take a moment to review some of the stigmas with outsourcing.

#1) Communication Is Difficult With Outsourced Support.

We do not place staff members from our offshore locations on our outsourced telephone support queues. No, not because they are not fully capable server administrators and support specialists. Simply because, yes obviously they have accents, which are easily detected once on the phone. Many people hear such accents, instantly lose all patience, and get frustrated – even with the easiest problems. To avoid all of this for our clients, we do not use offshore staff for phone support.

That being said – some of the smartest people I’ve met come from India & Pakistan. All of our new hires have English grammar and reading comprehension certifications for institutions of higher learning. Many have studied abroad here in the US, in the UK, and throughout Europe. Their written language is great, this is a huge requirement of ours.

#2) Outsourcing Support Removes US Jobs.

When people hear outsourcing, they instantly think of off-shoring. We do have offshore facilities, but we do also have our US based staff. The more US based support services we sell, the more jobs we create. We’re not moving our US slots offshore to save costs. We market our US based services to many different types of local based businesses, as well as many online businesses as well. Outsourcing can increase your sales & satisfactions, which will ultimately create the demand for more support. This means we have to hire more staff – more jobs, which stimulate the economy and do a great justice for all.

#3) I Do Not See The Benefits Of Outsourcing.

When the company you contract with does things properly, there are a multitude of benefits.

• Save Money By Outsourcing
  Let’s assume you want to hire someone for 24 hour coverage of your customer support queues. Now, let’s assume you’re paying them $7 per hour (less than minimum wage here in the US) for 24 hours, 30 days. You’d need to spend $5040 per month for that coverage.

  This does not guarantee that these staff members have the skill set to properly support your customers. This only gives you one staff member per shift (what do you do with high support loads.) And does not take into account hassles such as payroll, taxes, vacation & sick time, and many other issues that pop up with your own internal staffing.

• Increase Customer Satisfaction

24/7 customer support is not something that is only accessible to large enterprises. Small businesses can utilize outsourcing services to provide support at any time of the day to their customers.

Outsourcing does not have to be a dirty word. We treat each and every one of your clients, as if they were one of our own. The happier your clients are the more you grow – the more you grow, the more we grow. Its a win win situation when it is done right.

It has been a long journey to this day. A day where we can take a step back and look our website – a reflection of our company’s service, culture, and personality – and say wow. Take a quick look at the progression of our website over the years. Each step a bit better that the former.

Now don’t laugh at us, heh we’re not web designers. Some of these might be scary, but we’re not ashamed of where we came from. Check them out:

We do a lot of local business work, but have also been pushing more recently a lot heavier online. As such, we needed a nice clean site, that was easy to navigate and appealing to the eyes. And so began the search for a new design firm to work with.

Finding a designer is not an easy task. We have found a few in the past that were good, but overall we’ve found designers are a dime a dozen. Not proud to say, but we’ve also paid about a couple grand to a designer that never delivered and never gave us a penny back in refunds – more on that lovely story here: Jerett Patterson ( Long story short, use escrow services! )

We Found A Diamond In The Rough

Oh, it feels so amazing to be Asantefied!!!

(Or Asantified…Sam when it catches on, you know who coined the term heh.)

Sam Asante, and the rest of to Vissol Design Team (Bob Shannon & Kyle Kramer) – you guys rock! Like knights in shining armor, they came to us and have effectively changed the face of our business for the better. Not many things make me say WOW, but these guys did it.

We set a deadline for completion, and even though there was this incredibly huge anxious feeling, it was a great feeling. Remember how Christmas Eve or the night before your birthday used to feel, when you KNEW what you were getting was amazing? The best thing about the experience was every day with them provided a pleasant surprise. Each and every page of our website (including my favorite page) was given dedicated time & love it feels like.

From Chicken Scratch To WOW!

Remember I said we are not designers. We can close our eyes and see what we want, but putting it together is completely different story. So don’t laugh at my chicken scratch!

Now, how in the world Sam managed to go from that chicken scratch to WOW, I have no idea! But somehow he did it, and had an amazing preview of the progress within just a couple hours. Now that felt like some dedicated attention! They have other large clients that they work for, but with incredible levels of communication and their eagerness to satisfy, Sam & the Vissol team managed to make us feel like their #1 and only client.

You can check out the design work they did for us at SeeksAdmin & SeeksAffiliates. It has been a pleasure working with Vissol, we’ll definitely be doing more work with them in the not so distant future! I highly recommend them to anyone.

The website has been re-organized to improve usability, and its navigational structure has been updated and outdated pages have been removed. The integrated live sales chat is now available 24/7, and existing customers can take advantage of a completely overhauled internal private intranet (which will be unveiled in the coming weeks).

“By our nature, SeeksAdmin operates behind the scenes. We provide mission-critical back-end IT and customer support for hosting companies and other online businesses, so they can focus on growing their revenue without worrying about IT. Today, we’re working to expand the SeeksAdmin brand so we can better tell our company’s story and broaden our appeal. Improving our website is a necessary first step,” said Steven Clarke, CEO of SeeksAdmin.

SeeksAdmin has specialized in Linux server administration for years. In the last several months, however, it has sharply increased its portfolio of Windows Server administration services. Base server administration for Windows Server now starts at just $69.95 per month. The most popular Full server administration plan for Windows Server starts at only $99.95 per month.

SeeksAdmin has also increased the size of its Windows Server administration team, enabling it to deliver unprecedented 30-minute maximum response times on some Windows Server plans. The maximum response time can be further reduced to a 15-minute interval with priority upgrades on tickets.

SeeksAdmin is unique in its personal approach to customer support. It provides end-users with direct chat and telephone accessibility to the technicians working on their ticket. Through its rigid Service Level Agreement (SLA), SeeksAdmin guarantees top-notch and timely technical support for virtually all problems, large and small. SeeksAdmin maintains support teams in the United States (New York), the United Kingdom, India, and Pakistan.

To learn more about SeeksAdmin, please visit http://seeksadmin.com.

About SeeksAdmin

A leader in outsourced technical support and server administration, SeeksAdmin serves hundreds of businesses internationally across a broad range of industries. With support offices in the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, and New York City, SeeksAdmin offers a competitive edge for its clients. The company has been serving clients since 2002, and operating online since 2004.

Media Contacts
Steven Clarke
SeeksAdmin
media@seeksadmin.com

Dan Garon
Press Advance
(866)801-5087
media@pressadvance.com

This is most likely the train of thought behind many of the bloggers you find on a typical company blog. Alright, alright, I agree – we’re guilty of the same. The SeeksAdmin blog has pretty much been dead web space, where the management team would come occasionally rant here and there about the most random things.

We’d like to be a little more helpful here in this space – for both our valued clients and the random visitor looking for assistance in a wide range of areas. So herein we’re committed to blogging with purpose! Bare with us as we setup proper categories to properly sort our server administration guides, and other resources. The great guys over at Vissol (review soon to come) have finished our design. After we finish up with that, we’ll be right here blogging away with purpose – helping you!

Directadmin Server Migration Guide

There are millions of articles out there about cPanel server migrations, even about Plesk migrations, however (as far as I know) there is not actually that much about Directadmin server migrations. While migrating a single account from a directadmin server is a relatively simple process, transferring a whole server on the other hand is not so easy and requires you to do some tricky things. This article plans to lay out the basics of the migration process which will help you transfer your websites using directadmin.

The first steps in any migration is setting up the server. I will assume that you have already setup the server security as well as making sure the configurations of php, mysql etc are the same with the same modules and version numbers. I have also assumed you have changed the TTL on all the domains on the old server to a lower time.

To continue the server setup process we take a system backup of the old system. To do this we log in to the directadmin control panel and select the System Backup option under Admin tools as shown in the image on the left. Make sure you unselect httpd data, and the home directories, but you must select all of the folders and files listed in the bottom section. Once you ensure that everything is selected (or unselected) as appropriate press the Run system backup now option.

The reason we have skipped the home directories and httpd data is that these are often large and an be synced manually using an rsync process from server to server. It is also a good idea to remove the mysql databases and then run them at a later date as well to ensure there is no data loss. I advise you not to use the ftp option as in our experience Directadmin has some issues with ftping them over and they never seem to work if you do this.

Once the backup has been completed we need to rsync over the data and restore it. I will give an example command so that you can synchronise the folders of the two servers using rsync. This is submitted on the local machine the backups were just run off

rsync -rave ssh –delete /local/backup root@REMOTEIP:/backup/

So now we log in to the new folder and restore all those files that were backed up. Restoring them is a simple, but tedious process. The backup will be split into folders so there will be an etc folder and in there will be named.conf.tar.gz etc. The restore of these files is as simple as extracing them in the correct location and more details on this can be found here. Now its time to synchronise the home direcotiries which will synch the http files as well as mail files for all domains. I advise that you stop ftp service running on the old server so that there is no data loss during the process caused by people uploading files. To sychrnoise the home directories, login to the old server and submit the following command

rsync -rave ssh –delete /home root@REMOTEIP:/home/

This command may take a while so it is a good idea to run it using screen in case you lose connection. This will also allow you to leave it running in the background. The great thing about rsync is that it does not use huge amounts of resources, and it will keep the ownership and permission of files. Once that is completed it is a good idea to stop mysql on the old server so that no databases can be updated causing data loss and then we can restore the databases. To backup all databases the command is (NOTE: You will require either root or da_admin user for this)

mysqldump -u username -p –all-databases > databases.sql

Sometimes errors can occur which stop the mysqldump, so if errors appear add the –force tag which will keep going even when an error occurs within a table.  Then transfer this file over onto the new server using rsync of scp and then restore it using the comand: (with username root or da_admin)

mysql -u username -p < databases.sql

This will restore the mysql backups. You should check they all exist by checking the /var/lib/mysql directory’s size.

Now we need to change the IPs on the new server as when we transfered the backups all of the files included the old server’s IPs. Luckily Directadmin have a very nice little script for us to do just that.

cd /usr/local/directadmin/scripts
./ipswap.sh 1.2.3.4 4.3.2.1

Where 1.2.3.4 is the OLD server IP and the new server IP is 4.3.2.1. This needs to be completed for all IPs on the server, a list of which can be found in Directadmin under the IP management tab. Then all the services must be rebooted so that the IPs update under all the services. You can now change your server IPs at the nameservers.

A quick way to ensure that the servers are pointing at the correct domain is using the multi-server setup tool. On the new server login and go to the multi-server setup tab and input the old server details, press add and make sure the multi-server setup is turned on.

Test your connection and ensure that the connection is working. If it is we are ready to sync the changes using the following command:

echo “action=rewrite&value=named” >> /usr/local/directadmin/data/task.queue

This will queue a synchronization of all of the DNS records from the new server to the old server ensuring that the domains will be pointed at the new server ensuring all data will work.

Just a quick update that if you are looking for the old posts I am sorry, we decided to start a-fresh with a new blog and new posts to share with you. Once again we will keep it up to date with whats happening in the company as well as quite a few neat little articles, tips and tricks for managing your servers!

So hope you become a regular reader our blogs, and see you soon!

Finding a designer is a daunting task.
We only work with designers that have rave reviews.  They cost more, but you get everything you pay for and more.  And our latest experience, which is underway now is my inspiration for this post.  I’ll save the best for last though.  We have yet to give thanks to good designers we’ve worked with along the way so here goes.

Drew @ Tenfour Studios

Drew is a talented designer.  It has been a pleasure working with him on projects throughout the years.  He is very willing to work with you to provide an end product you’re satisfied with.  Drew put together our logo/brand for us.  He also gave us our first, much needed make over from our old template days to a much more professional look. We have worked with him several times in the past, and would certainly do so again.

• Creativity: 4/5 – When given free realm to design, the output is inspiring.
• Pricing: 5/5 – Can’t go wrong, his pricing is very affordable.
• Communication: 3/5 – Response times in some projects was lacking and lead to some delays.
• Overall: 4/5 – We’d recommend him to anyone needing work done.

Chris @ Loudobject

We found Chris a couple years back, and he was also a pleasure to work with.  He did the SeeksAdmin website that has been up to date for the longest period of time.  We got nothing be positive reviews from our clients regarding the changes. He also did our soon to be launched consumer pc repair site. He is very affordable, and is always willing to go that extra step to complete the job and ensure your satisfaction.  Once again, I would not hesitate to work with him on additional projects.  He did give up designing for a bit to pursue his clothing line, but I do believe he is back and available.

• Creativity: 3/5 – Only low here because I feel a lot of his designs have the same exact feel, setup, icons, etc.
• Pricing: 5/5 – Most affordable pricing I’ve seen for any designer that actually came through with a good end product.
• Communication: 4/5 – Good updates via msn messenger.
• Overall: 4/5 – Pleasurable experience that paid for itself time and time again.

David @ BannersGalore

All thumbs up for.  Great friendly service, great turnaround time, and great end product.  Overall, I have nothing but great things to say about his services.  Here is an example of a banner he put together for us.  It was part of a large set that he did for us in under 48 hours.  Great price, always creative, fast turnaround.  For banners I give overall: 5/5.

Leigh @ Bannaz

Leigh makes incredible flash banners.  Check out his portfolio, it is amazing and it speaks for itself. He has also put together great print ads for us for our PingZine ads, and more. Leigh gets an overall: 5/5.

Jerett@ Carbon12Studios

We were referred to Jerett by one of his happy clients.  The portfolio of sites he was allowed to share with us was very impressive.  His presales chats with us, and the goals he set with us as far as increasing usability of our site were all very inspiring.  We’re in the midst of the design process right now, so we’ll need to update this review mid-september after its completion.

[UPDATE] Jerett is a good designer but terrible at communication, organization and meeting deadlines. The project is now over 4 months overdue and we have received promise after promise all of which are broken. For the full story please view the comment below or go to http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=6520923#post6520923

Overall: Sales 5/5 Service 0/5 — We strongly advise avoiding working with Jerett Patterson

With the growth of the internet also came the growth of hacking. It has increased so much so that according to Zone-H there are over 2,500 recorded hacks each day. Some people may be surprised by this figure, others wont be. In my opinion that is not the surprising fact, the shocking fact is that the number of reported hacks is growing by 40% each year!!! Are the hackers getting smarter?

Generally the hackers will get in due to one of three reasons:

1. Out of date scripts – Everything from Kernels to Apache have updates and a lot of these updates are to fix security bugs. So if you are running out of date scripts with known security holes. A lot of hackers will take advantage of these holes and gain root access to your server
2. Insecure Scripts - Most of the hack attempts that we have to deal with at SeeksAdmin are due to insecure scripts such as PHPbb, VBulletin or many other common scripts. If these are not kept up to date they are very dangerous allowing a hacker to gain root access.
3. Insecure Passwords: Not much explanation is needed, if you have a short or weak password it is easier to guess and it can easily be brute forced.

So what can you do? Well keep everything up to date, and use a decent password? It wont ensure that you are 100% secure however it will go a long way to stopping you being hacked.

At the moment SeeksAdmin is concentrating on security and we are trying to raise awareness in security and how to keep your system secure. In accordance with this we are offering a FREE remote scan and a $5 local scan. After these scans you will receive the security holes in your system and we will recommend a few things you can do to help secure your system. We also have free security consultation so if you have any questions please contact us at sales[@]seeksadmin[dot]com

Well in the past few months I have really wanted to put an emphasize on selling some Fully Managed servers. There are a few reasons for this, firstly I have dealt with a lot of different data centers, and with a lot of clients and a lot of the time there is a lot of what I will call “lag” when it comes to us telling the client of a problem and when they tell the datacenter to fix it.

So why buy of SeeksAdmin instead?

Well there are a few reasons for this, but effectively by doing so you cut out the middle man and on a lot of that “lag” that may occur. If you have a problem and we need to contact the data center, we do it and we do not need to wait. This can stop major downtime as we can react instantly. This in itself is a major benefit as it can avert major disaster, but there is more.

We get our servers from the Softlayer datacenter located in Dallas, Texas. They are arguably the best datacenter in the world at the moment. I have to admit at being one of Softlayers largest fans, this is because they are dedicated to their clients and are always updating their services and technology. For more information just read my review which is in this blog, I don’t want to clog this post up with to much about them. Anyway, I did have a point, and that is that all our staff members have worked with and know the Softlayer system and staff. This means if your server doesn’t boot or you forget your password, we can immediately get the server up in single-user mode and sort the problem instantly.

The last advantage is probably the smallest one, and that is that it makes your bill management easier and saves you the trouble of having to contact the datacenter. This may seem silly but in the busy world we live in those extra minutes (or hours) can be everything.

Management Portal
Before there was always one huge advantage of going with the datacenter instead of going with a reseller, and that was simple. The management portal where you can reboot, and manage your server. However we at Seeksadmin have spent a few months developing our own portal to provide you the ability to see your server stats, the hardware, the bandwidth usage and graphs, to allow you to reboot the server, to control the port speed and more. This has definitely been a major project and I am very proud of it having done a lot of the work myself.

Our portal gives you every feature you need and is on par with Softlayer’s own portal. We now provide every advantage and more of going with the datacenter. Our prices are equal to the datacenter and you also can get your management from us.

This is more of an unusual blog post from me, a bit of sales pitch here and I feel a bit like I have gone around in circles, and I am sorry for that, but I thought it was important to mention our new servers and also the portal. I will make another post in the coming days with screen shots of the portal and a full feature list, but for now I will keep you waiting just that bit longer.