The push for PCI compliance is a serious one for merchants and service providers and there are several deadlines that are important to remember. The most recent is right on the doorstep: July 2010. It is a software mandate issued by Visa that merchants have to switch to approved software for processing credit card transactions, and countless merchants are scrambling to make the cutoff date. Small businesses especially are at risk of being hammered by the penalties for noncompliance.
Most of the dates for compliance have passed, some are scheduled out as far as June 2011; it all depends on which credit card industry applies to you (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and/or American Express), and if you are a merchant or a service provider. This website had some pretty helpful information in all of those areas.
NetHosting is in a good position; its data center is both PCI Compliant and SAS 70 certified, which offers a stable foundation for merchants who also need to meet those requirements. As deadlines pass and more draw near, hosting in a PCI certified data center is a great way for a merchant to achieve it’s own certifications, and is in fact the only way, as part of PCI compliance requires that a merchant stores and processes its data in a certified facility.
The Corporate Sports Challenge is fast becoming the hottest event of the summer for dozens of local companies. Each year there’s a bigger turnout than the year before, and this year was no exception. For the 5th Annual Sports Challenge, NetHosting donned the best looking shirts on the field and competed with volunteers from many other companies who were all there for the same reason–and no, that reason was not to win the Traveling Trophy. While taking home the trophy would have been a nice plus, the true motivation behind the Annual Corporate Sports Challenge is to raise funds for two outstanding organizations: Kids on the Move and UVU Athletics, and it was definitely an awesome experience to participate.
Kids on the Move provides a network of support for at least 1400 families of children with disabilities in the Utah County area and offer an invaluable opportunity for these children to receive specialized care and instruction. We had a killer time battling our competitors for such a worthy cause and look forward to the chance to do it again next year!
“Putting all your faith in a vendor’s claim to be SAS 70 certified is one of the riskiest move you can make on behalf of your company,” the article cautions. The same is apparently true for Type I or Type II certifications.
The argument is that there may be a conflict of interest when the company is paying their auditors directly, and the highlighted comparison was of the subprime loans that were the impetus for today’s financial crisis. They were signed off by auditors that were on the payroll of the companies needing the recommendation.
The question that follows is, “So, should I never trust a company that pays for a third party auditor?” That is absolutely NOT what this article is trying to communicate. But any company looking to invest in the services of another should definitely practice some caution instead of trusting a company implicitly when it claims to be certified. It’s never out of line to ask for a report.
Read the rest of the article here, and jump to the other article it cites: www.SAS70Wiki.com
So we decided to give our social media a large push for 2010. Everyone has been telling us that Social Media is the way of the future and if you’re not there you are no one. Well, we want to be someone! We want to have a strong following online but it’s a little hard to do that when you only have 25 people following you. That’s when a friend recommended Socialkik to us. They are a service that helps companies like ours to get Facebook Followers.
I didn’t quite know what to expect other than a couple hundred followers a couple weeks after I paid them. I came to find out that they are a great service that I would totally recommend to everyone! They got us far more fans than we paid for, the followers aren’t junk, and they actually comment on things that we are doing. Give them a try!
BestCloudServer.com is the expanding resource for curious cloud consumers across the country. The goal is to inform and direct those curious consumers to solutions that will enhance their professional and personal online ventures, not hinder them.
Interest in the cloud is rising from all corners of the global cyberverse and people are naturally questioning how to make cloud technology work for them. They’ve heard about the good and bad, pro and cons, dos and do nots, and they want to know where they stand. Of course they do! That’s the drive behind the website’s growth.
Serving as a central location for highlights of articles on the latest cloud news, BestCloudServer.com will also start ranking the leading cloud providers out there to help in the decision making process when it comes time to choose.
Apple Juice
Frozen Strawberries
Too Much Spinach
Conclusion: Well, there was just too much spinach, as you might imagine. It had a definite veggie aftertaste that just did not sit well on the taste buds. The good news is we managed to save it by adding ice cream. The bad news: in my own portion I thought I’d be cool and add some vanilla protein, thereby rendering an otherwise savory smoothie completely unpalatable. My stomach hurts 
A week ago, Google announced a change to how its search rankings are calculated. This will virtually affect every business with an online presence. The change means that a website’s Google ranking will now be influenced by the speed of its website. Faster websites now feature higher in search results, and slower websites drop down in the search results.
Google Stated “Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.” I don’t know if this has to do with Google and it’s energy conservation policies or just a stunt to get people to speed up their websites but I think it’s a good move.
Although they say that speed is going to be a bigger factor they later said “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.” Which leads me to believe that it’s not going to be as big of a change as we thing.
Website performance has become the newest cost of doing businesses for the modern organization, large or small. At NetHosting we focus on getting your website to load as fast as possible. We dedicate the time and resources to becoming your partner. We want the best for you and for your website. As your partner we are available to make your website load faster around the clock. Talk with any of our dedicated hosting support and we would love to assist you in making your website load faster then ever before.
NetHosting specializes in a number of areas and we thought it was about time we joined the information superhighway to share a little of what we know about a few of the hottest topics in the industry, so we’ve created these websites. Take a look!
One of the key subjects we wanted to address was cloud hosting. The buzz around the subject of cloud hosting (or cloud computing) is astounding, and people are scouring the web for information on what it is, does, and how to make it work for them, which is why we’ve released www.whycloudhosting.com and www.bestcloudserver.com, where we’ve highlighted several articles to narrow your search and give you varying viewpoints to test your opinion and knowledge of cloud hosting.
We also know a thing or two about Colocation at NetHosting, as we are hosted in a state-of-the-art Class A facility in Utah. We include even more information about the colocation facility at Fibernet Corp. on these five sites:
www.colocation-utah.com
www.colocationutah.net
www.utahcollocation.com
www.provohosting.com
www.oremhosting.com
Additionally, NetHosting has significant experience in PCI Compliance for e-commerce sites and SAS70 certification for service organizations, as we’ve recently attained both credentials. Take a look at our posts on www.pciecommerce.com and www.sas70wiki.com.
Finally, with all excitement behind Apple’s release of the iPad, people have been looking for ways to get their new gadgets online and cruising the cyberverse. Find the answers you’re looking for at www.ipadhosting.com.
April 14, 2010 – 10:48 am
A cup of raspberry/cranberry cocktail
KeyLime Nonfat Yogurt
Frozen Blueberries
Frozen Pineapple
Vanilla Ice Cream
Frozen Strawberries
Decision: It grows on you! The first few bites are a little odd, and then four bites in you realize it’s delicious. I think that’s called a phenomena. Our original intent was to limit fruit content to just blueberries and pineapple, but we tossed in a few strawberries at the end to thicken it up. The strongest taste was definitely the pineapple.
Ingredients:
1 whole banana
handful of frozen strawberries
bigger handful of spinach
apple juice
few scoops of vanilla ice cream
Conclusion: It’s a good thing we like banana, because that’s all we could taste. We forgot to take video, but here’s a picture of the end result. The flecks of spinach-green are more for show, because I seriously could not pick out its taste through all that banana.
888.504.4678
