1. Great Logos Make Great First Impressions Before your sales person knocks on the door, before your truck pulls up, and even before they call you, potential customers consider your logo when they decide whom to trust.

Wayne Stuetz, founder of The Sodfather Landscaping in White Plains, New York, understands how that first impression gives them an edge. “People are always asking for a t-shirt with my logo on it. My logo is very memorable, and once a person has seen it, it’s hard to forget.”

When people can easily remember your logo, you have a competitive edge.

2. Attract New Customers Your customers see hundreds of logos a day-and they know a good logo when they see one. By sending the right message to potential customers, your logo helps them choose you over the competition.

The Lawn Rangers, in Pearland, Texas, have seen the fruits of a good logo. “When customers initially see the logo on our estimate sheets, trucks and website, they feel good about us,” said co-owner Aaron O’Donley. “And unless there’s something you can show potential customers to convince them their expectations will be met, they will turn to the competition. Our logo helps us persuade them.”

3. Stand Out from Your Competition Flip through the phone book and you’ll quickly see that potential customers have plenty of landscaping company choices. You’ll also notice very few logos stand out from the crowd. Differentiating yourself from your competition is critical in winning the battle for customers.

The Lawn Rangers do that with color. Instead of the usual greens and blues, they use a warmer color combination that stands out. Original uses of colors, words, shapes, and fonts can set your logo apart from the rest.

4. Keep Loyal Customers Good service is the key to keeping your customers. But what happens when a competitor moves in with shiny trucks, clean-cut employees, a professional look and promises to match your service? If your company image isn’t as good, your customers may be tempted to try the competition.

Don’t put your business in that position. “A great logo convinces high-end customers who look for a loyal, long-term relationship to choose you over the next guy, who is probably waiting around the corner,” adds Stuetz.

5. Earn Trust with Professionalism What convinces people to choose an established landscaping business over a couple kids with lawnmowers? Often it’s the professionalism of the business.

“People see our professional logo, and see that we’re here from year to year, and that builds trust,” said Tina Zoltan, owner of Oak Leaf Landscape in Groveland Florida. “If we can send the message of professionalism through our logo, a lot of the work is done for us.”

You get software:  Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (or R2 if available) Web Edition plus SQL Server 2008Web Edition… so you’ll actually be in license compliance, something I bet most small Windows hosts are not. You also get Visual Studio Pro, Expression Studio 2 (or 3) or Expression Web 2 (or 3) to design and develop websites. 

Plus you get Support and Training from Microsoft and the network partners, and best of all, sometime in the future you’ll get “Visibility & Opportunities” – meaning probably a directory or providers and sales leads.

You can be in the program for up to 3 years, but one thing to note,  a $100 fee is due at exit. So it’s not totally free, but pretty dang close.

We do recommend that you make changes to you site’s files on your local machine and then upload them (with WinSCP) all at once.  But what if you need to make a change on the fly? Sure you could log in with PuTTY and use vi,vim, nano, or one of a dozen other editors. But WinSCP can help you out there too.   You can use your existing Windows based editor with WinSCP. Personally, I love EditPlus, http://www.editplus.com/, it’s small fast and has a lot of features. But it doesn’t work over SSH (at least not last time I looked anyway).

First, setup WinSCP to get to your server like you normally would. It will need the FQDN or ip address, port number (you’re not using 22 anymore right?), your login, and your key file.  Go ahead and save the session… Now on the left side tree menu, select Preferences, and then select the Preferences… button, and a new window should appear with new left side tree navigation.  A few down, there is a leaf called a Editors, select that. It should look like this:

Click the Add button.  Select the External Editor radio box, then click Browse. Find the path to your editor, in my case that was c”\Program Files (x86)\Edit Plus 3\editplus.exe - you’re may be different depending on OS version and what program you want to use. Under editor autoselection, you might want to change the association, say EditPlus for php files or .conf files. There’s another option there too… Inside the Add dialob box, there’s an “Associated Application” – then specify the type of files you want opened with your default Windows application for that extension. For example, I use CorelDraw for .cdr and .psd files, and Windows will automatically open CorelDraw for me if I double-click in Explorer. With the Associated Application radio box, that is extended into WinSCP as well.  So inside of WinSCP if I double-click a .cdr or .psd file, CorelDraw opens automatically, and when I click save it is transferred back to the server. This is even great for using different types of editors for different files.

You probably need to change the order in which programs are checked in the list. WinSCP goes from top to bottom until it finds an editor it can use for the file. So I’d put “Associated application” at the top, then your prefered text editor(s), then WinSCP’s internal editor at the bottom.

Sometimes, you’ll have issues with backup copies that programs make, or you may just want to keep them saved locally… Sometimes this is easily accomplished. For EditPlus, go to Preferences, then Files. There is a checkbox called “Create backup file when saving”, check it if it’s not. Then hit the button next to it “Backup Options”, select your local backup directory, and check the “Create backup file of remote file in backup directory” box. And you should be good to go.

Caution… As with any changes to a system, before you use this for real (ie a real configuration file that matters to you), create a dummy file out in a directory you don’t care about, and TEST it. Make some changes to that file. Check that it works as you expect BEFORE using this for real production files. Of course, best of all is to not use this on production files directly, but to edit them locally then transfer when you’re sure they’re right, but as you know life doesn’t always work that way.

The more you can make your customers self sufficient the less time you need to answer the same questions over and over. That leads to more time available for other things such as building services, finding new customers, etc.  That’s why we all start working on Knowledgebase (KB) building pretty quickly. But some people aren’t good at visualizing. That is they don’t take written instructions and mentally translate that into what they will see and do. Others do… For the ones that do,  knowledgebase articles work great. I’m one of those people. I’d rather a short KB instruction and then I can go do it… Others need to be shown. That’s where DemoWolf hosting video tutorials comes in.

DemoWolf has over 3600 ready made tutorials for practically any hosting related subject you’d want. Not only are there the normal cPanel, WHM, DirectAdmin, etc. but other subjects such as PuTTY, Paypal, and transfering domain names. They have tutorials that are textual with pictures (think pop up video  but instructional not comical) as well as with voice-over.

I highly recommend DemoWolf tutorials… We’ve just recently started to use them ourselves and are getting positive feedback already. Check out their site at http://www.DemoWolf.com   and check out the bundles and save 50% or more. If you have questions, I’m sure you will find them most helpful as well.

I’m sure you’ve all seen them. They’re all over the web, twitter, and every other imaginable outlet they can get into…  “10 Best Webhosts”. Every one I have looked at shows pretty much the same hosts over and over, or at least several of the same. But if you go do your research at an indepenent site, such as http://www.WebHostingTalk.com/, then you will find that several of these “best hosts” have absolutely horrendous reputations and wouldn’t be touched with a 10 foot pole by most people “in the know”.

So how did they get on a “10 Best” list? Simple, they paid for it. Not directly usually… No they offer affiliate programs where affiliate sites get paid to either send traffic their way, or if the traffic produces a sale.  Not very honest is it?  Oh don’t get me wrong… There’s nothing wrong with running an affiliate program. My problem is with the “10 Best” sites. What they’re doing is simply recommending hosts based on how much they are getting paid to say that they’re “best”. To me that equates to nothing but lying, plain and simple. By creating this “10 Best” site you are implying that you tested them, and that there’s some methodology to coming up with what is “best”… but the only methodology involved is how much money the affiliate program is putting into your pocket. To me you are nothing but bottom feeding scum… IF you are going to do one of these lists, at least be honest about it. Call it the “10 best paying webhosts”.

Binary Canary’s, http://www.binarycanary.com, slogan in “We alert you first”. For the past several months we’ve been trying them out, and honestly… they DO! We run redundant Nagios systems – one in each datacenter monitoring pretty much everything. But often Binary Canary will be the first to let us know if something happens.

The service has been excellent. We had tried out Just Uptime, and had an account with Hyperspin for a long time. Just Uptime’s service had false positive as well as negatives, and had several outages that we never heard a word about except through hosting forums. Hyperspin performance is excellent but comes at a price. Service wise, Hyperspin and Binary Canary seemed about equal. There are differences in reports, but as far as notification goes both seem to be of very high reliability.

So it comes down to price… Hyperspin for 10 monitors at 1 minute intervals is $120 per month ($86 and change if you’re a reseller). Binary Canary on the other hand is $5! No I didn’t leave off a zero. It’s $5 for 10 1 minute monitors! And if you upgrade to the Power Plan you get for 30 monitors, letting you  monitor the same 10 sites from EACH of their 3 facilities (Seattle, DC and London) for $10 a month. That’s a bargain! … Now if they’d make it where I could get multiple uptime badges on a single page for a server status page (something happens with the javascript I think where it shows the same badge repeatedly – but didn’t really dig to see what’s happening), that would be icing on the cake.

Disclosure: We have NOT been compensated by binarycanary.com in any way for this review, nor do we expect to be. We have found a service we feel to be reliable while providing quite a bit of value at an extremely reasonable price, and we thought we’d share that with you. (We’re like that.)

Quick Update: Binary Canary’s developer did some work yesterday, and now in FireFox the uptime badges work like you would expect. IE 7 and 8 have issues (but then when don’t they???)  You have to give them credit… within hours of hearing about my wanting multiple badges on a single page they started addressing the issue.  I suspect they’ll get the IE goofyness ironed out too. If you want to see multiple badges on a page you can go to our server status page at http://www.LagniappeInternet.com/servers.php