Tuesday, September 9, 2008

The Community and it's Security

I joined Nullshells 2 years ago, with one point in mind, security. Nullshells always offers the best security, with up to date servers, and encryption better than most banks. I was able to access IRC using SSL, making my connections anonymous. With the power of FreeBSD, I was able to ensure that other clients on Nullshells Networks couldn't see my files and folders, and I had peace of mind that the admins wouldn't look through my stuff.

Not only do I have secure and encrypted communication to and from the server using SSH, I can tunnel data, allowing me to surf the internet, without my identity being revealed. SSH also provided me with a place to backup my data securely, and with Nullshells data redundancy, I knew my data is always safe there.

Monday, September 8, 2008

NullShells Networks has awesome Web Hosting

Whenever I put up a new website here at NullShells, I'm always amazed at how fast it all happens. At NullShells I can create a website on my account with email, FTP and DNS in less than five minutes.

Recently, I was migrating a site from a company that I paid a year in advance for cPanel/WHM hosting and the migration was all extremely fast. This company had given me a "too good to be true" package which was the only reason why I was there: unlimited everything with a WHM Reseller account for almost nothing. However, it was a scam, and from now on I plan to host all my stuff at NullShells.

Thanks to being scammed, I've learned an important lesson about web hosting. There really are a lot of fly-by-night web hosts out there and you have to be careful about which host you choose. In addition, my experience with cPanel has been really frustrating, slow and even unreliable. I remember so many times Fantastico didn't properly install applications and I spent hours setting up a website that I already had done in cPanel. I also know that with the ISPManager control panel the whole process of getting my website up was so much easier.

So guess what? NullShells Networks is in the business of hosting websites! Yes, we really are! For the price of a single gormet coffee you get the ability to host up to 5 domains with FTP, email, perl, mySQL, Ruby on Rails, etc. You also get access to our top quality support and the ability to host your website on one of the finest networks on the east coast. Don't believe me? Try us out, mention this article and you'll be entitled to a fully refundable 7 day trial period.

If you have websites hosted at another company then you should really consider contacting us. There are a lot of great web hosts out there but I personally think we're one of the best. Feel free to ask us about customizing a package for you; we can usually price match or set you up with a pay only for what you use deal. Get more and pay less with NullShells Networks!

Friday, July 11, 2008

10++ Reasons to choose NullShells Networks

There are a lot of good reasons to sign up with NullShells Networks. However, we can't fit everything that we'd like to say here, but I'm going to try to fit some of it.

1. Less Confusion. From day uno you will have access to contact an account specialist. Your sales, technical support, and billing issues will all be handled by our talented team.

2. We always honor our plans. If our prices go up, your rate plan is locked in at the original price; if they go down you have the option of changing to the lower price.

3. Shell-centric services. One of our strengths is that all our services are shell-centric. We cater to people who want to have the ability to execute commands in the control panel but also in the console, even when it requires special permissions. Sometimes control panels are not the preferred tool...

4. Customizable plans. We're happy to set people up with a plan that includes features designed specifically to meet their needs. Even when those features are not listed on our page. Some of our customers that utilize custom services pay less than they normally would pay with another company.

5. We can GROW with YOU. Our page may not reflect us as being a full-service provider but our company has the ability to help you get setup with the services you need. We can customize services specifically to ensure that your mission critical operations are are highly available and fault tolerant.

6. Sensible Pricing. We don't offer mythological service plans with 1TB and Unlimited Bandwidth for $5.99. All of our customers could fully utilize their plans and our services would still have the same level of performance, reliability, and availability to which our community is attuned. We would also still be able to stay in business. You can expect fair and sensible prices from us. We can try to give you the lowest price possible; feel free to customize your plan and ask to "pay only for what you use". We don't mind haggling on details and pricing, and we'll do our best to match any competitors pricing. Honestly.

7. Top Notch Customer Service. We're a small company and we give our customers the attention they deserve. As the customer service manager, I can tell you that our customer service is paramount. Members of our team can be contacted individually via our web page, email, mobile, irc, aim, icq, msn, yahoo!, skype, and jabber. Our support is handled from our home office and a special alert is sent out every time a contact message is sent via the web page. We answer all inquiries as fast as possible; so far this year our average response time has been under 1 hour.

8. Undersold servers. Our servers are not only optimized, but they are all very much undersold. In nearly 3 years none of our servers has ever had over 100 users. (we had 99 on one at one point). Currently all of our servers have under 50 users.

9. We think ahead. We are positioned with established upgrade paths for our organization and our customers. Either of which can be initiated with little to no downtime. We believe thinking and planning ahead is an important part of being proactive, which is an integral part of our activity. We are always looking for opportunities to improve our reliability and performance, and we stay up to date with the latest security updates and patches.

10. 99.9% Uptime Best Effort. We make our best effort to keep 100% uptime, all the time. Our services are monitored 24x7x365 and they restart automatically upon detection of failure. Our servers themselves are monitored by an expanding distribution of networks which span across the entire globe. We have a team of technicians in North America, Europe, and even Asia that are ready to respond to failures around the clock.

11. NullShells Networks loves you! Really, we have a great team; we are caring, compassionate, and understanding. Our entire community is really unique. In short, we feel that providing quality services with a professional yet personalized experience is what customers really want.

Monday, June 2, 2008

Welcome to the NullShells Networks Official Blog!

We are excited to announce our newest addition to your blog reading list. In the meantime you may have questions about who we are and what we do; you may be a current customer looking for more information. Either way, keep your eyes peeled, because you will find that we're going to be writing all about ourselves and what we like to do on our servers. We are going to let our community shine, then you may see our network in a new way. Until then you may take my word for it, NullShells Networks rocks!

So what's coming next? Well, our next several posts will probably be tutorials and commentary about some of our more recent updates. Lately we've been doing a lot of work and we haven't had a chance to announce it all. I personally really appreciate all of the guidance, love, and other support that I have received from this community. A lot of changes would not have been implemented without help from the members of our community.

Our community is thriving! We started back in October of 2005 with a very small and restricted invite only community. Then, we offered free shells with compiler and IRC access, along with the ability to host websites. We originally offered our services from a desktop sized tower server in a large closet running on cable internet. Now, we have servers at major data centers in two states and plans to have a network that spans three continents by next year. We've come very far from where we were, but in 2008 we've still held true to offering free shell accounts. We're also quite happy to also be offering a suite of premium shell and web hosting services to anyone in the entire world.

I also want to express my gratitude for all the great colleagues I have met through NullShells Networks, and on our EFnet IRC channel #nullshells. I'm honored to have had the opportunity to befriend so many bright and kind professionals. While you wait for our future posts, feel free to join us on IRC.