Top 3 Questions at the Rochen Hosting Sales Desk

Posted by: Wendy Robinson Date: July 30th 2010

Wendy RobinsonEveryday I answer emails from existing and potential customers about our services at Rochen. The questions vary and some are more specific then others. However, I’ve noticed a trend in some of the things people ask and would like to shed some light and offer the answers to the top three sales questions here in this post.

The #1 Question at the Sales Desk is “How can I upgrade my Rochen Hosting Plan?”

As I tell people all the time, “It’s Easy.”

How Easy it?

If you are currently on a Rochen shared hosting plan that no longer meets your needs, you can upgrade anytime to a larger plan simply by opening a support ticket in our My Rochen customer portal a member of our technical support staff will be able to assist you to make the necessary changes to your account. As our support staff operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you can upgrade whenever it is most convenient for you.

Do you know what the best part is? There’s no downtime in it for you. Other then your extra storage space and bandwidth, you won’t feel a thing!

Question #2: “Can I use your services before I redirect my DNS?”

Yes, absolutely.

When you sign up for an account with Rochen we give you a temporary url to use. With access to a temporary url you are able to upload your website to our servers before you switch your DNS and transfer the site permanently. This gives you the opportunity to view and test the functionality of your website, and clear up any issues. When you’re ready, just point your DNS to our nameservers (which you receive from us via your Welcome email). All done accordingly, you should experience no downtime as the DNS propagates.

Switching your DNS may vary depending on your domain registrar but is usually a simple process. Never cancel your domain registration on the assumption that you can re-register it with Rochen. We do not handle domain registration.

The third most common Inquiry is actually a tie between: “How many email addresses can I have with my plan?”, ” How many databases do you limit per account?” and, “How many subdomains can I have?”

The answer to all of the above is that we don’t actually limit those features in number.

With your Rochen hosting plan you can have as many email addresses, databases and subdomains as your plan’s available space allows.  It’s simple too and doesn’t cost you anything extra. All of these can be managed, by you, via your cPanel account in just a few steps. Email addresses are even easier to set up now with our Google Apps utility which is an available alternative to Rochen’s own email service included in our plans.

I hope to do more posts like this as new questions come in.  That’s all for now though! Thanks for reading.

If you have any questions about our services, you can reach us at sales@rochen.com, browse our Knowledge Base or ask a question in our customer forums.

-Wendy

Wendy Robinson joined the Rochen team in June 2010 as a sales support staff member. She is also currently involved with the Joomla! project as a member of the Community Leadership Team.

WordPress 3 and Rochen Hosting

Posted by: Brad Baker Date: July 12th 2010

Rochen is a specialist hosting company with extensive experience hosting a number of todays most popular open source scripts like WordPressDrupal and Joomla, among others. With this blog post we’re highlighting one of these excellent projects, namely WordPress.

WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging platform, and the same one we use here on our own Rochen blog has recently released their newest version, WordPress 3.

Some of the new features added are:

  • WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation.
  • New Custom Menu Management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
  • Support for Shortlinks.
  • Ability to set the admin username and password during installation.

A full list of the changes can be found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0

Many of these cosmetic changes  help provide a smoother user experience, as well as that, additional developer tools and changes have added even more power to WordPress.

If you currently run a WordPress Blog on Rochen, be sure to login to your admin panel and follow the links/steps to upgrade to WordPress 3.

We’ve included a Video highlighting some of the new features and changes in WordPress 3 for our readers below:

In my next blog post, I’ll focus on Joomla and the upcoming Joomla 1.6 release which is now already in Beta. Look out for that!

- Brad

Brad Baker has been a member of the Rochen team since early 2003 and is a founding member of the Joomla! Open Source Project. He currently is part of the Joomla LeadershipTeam, and also blogs here.

Joomla and WordPress Hosting and Security Presentations from CMS Expo. Rochen Discount Code Extended.

Posted by: Chris Adams Date: June 3rd 2010

Last month Martin, Adam and I from the Rochen team attended CMS Expo in Chicago, IL as Diamond Marquee Sponsors. It was a fantastic event where we got to meet a lot of our existing customers, potential customers and connect with various people in the Joomla, Drupal and WordPress communities. We’re a technology services company that primarily deals online but nothing beats meeting face-to-face.

While at CMS Expo Adam and I delivered two 90 minute presentations on “WordPress Hosting and Security” and “Joomla Hosting and Security“. I have linked both of these below in PDF format in case anyone wishes to review them. Rochen also had a fantastic 20 ft x 10 ft booth setup at CMS Expo which I have attached a picture of as well. Apologies for the poor quality – it was taken with an iPhone.

Download “WordPress Hosting and Security” Presentation

Download “Joomla Hosting and Security” Presentation

In the last slide of the “Joomla Hosting and Security” presentation you may notice we discuss a new Joomla Utilities plug-in for our control panel that we will be releasing in beta here at Rochen later today. This new tool will make managing and keeping your Joomla sites secure a lot easier. We plan to develop similar tools for both Drupal and WordPress as well. More details on this to come very soon.

(I would also advise reviewing my original blog post on Joomla Hosting Security from September 2008.)

Disclaimer: Security advice and best practices change over time. The details posted in the above presentations are correct, to the best of our knowledge, at the time of posting. For the most up to date security information please consult with your web hosting provider and site developer directly. Please always seek expert advice.

Second to last, you may have noticed that we launched a new website at the start of May just before CMS Expo. We are still tweaking the design a little and also building out the pre-sales FAQ sections but we are very happy with it so far.

Finally, at CMS Expo we issued a promotional code for 20% off your first invoice with Rochen for any Business Hosting, Reseller Hosting or Managed Virtual Server (MVS) solution. This promotional code has now expired however we have decided to re-activate it with this blog post through until midnight UTC on Monday, June 7th 2010. The promotional code is: CMSX

Rochen’s hosting platform is purpose built to deliver the very best performance and tightest security for database driven dynamic scripts like Joomla and WordPress. If you would like to discuss your hosting needs then please contact us via sales@rochen.com and we will be happy to assist.

Thanks for reading.

- Chris

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen Ltd.

Rochen @ CMS Expo: Submit your questions, $550 free tickets giveaway and more.

Posted by: Chris Adams Date: April 12th 2010

Next month is going to be extremely exciting. Members of the Rochen team (including myself) are going to be attending CMS Expo in Chicago, IL on May 3rd, 4th and 5th. This will be my first time attending CMS Expo but my fourth visit to the beautiful Windy City. Chicago is my second favourite city in the United States after San Francisco.

CMS Expo is the leading business and learning conference in North America for content management systems including (but not limited to) Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. As you may already know Rochen is huge within the Joomla community. We host tens of thousands of Joomla powered websites including the official Joomla sites at www.joomla.org. Rochen is also a Platinum Development Sponsor of the project too, helping to support the ongoing development of Joomla version 1.6. We provide support to popular third-party extensions like Akeeba Backup and VirtueMart as well.

While we remain absolutely and totally committed to the Joomla project, we are hoping at CMS Expo this year we can spread our wings and push our hosting services to users of Drupal and WordPress more than we have previously.  Rochen already hosts thousands of Drupal and WordPress sites, but we are not nearly as big or well known within these communities as we are within Joomla.

Chris speaking at previous event.

WordPress and Joomla sessions presented by Rochen experts
Adam Boswell, from our support team, and I will be presenting two sessions at CMS Expo. “WordPress Hosting and Security” at 8.30AM on Tuesday, May 4th and “Joomla Hosting and Security” at 2.30PM also on Tuesday, May 4th. We still need to request an update to the CMS Expo website to correctly reflect our sessions and also reflect that I am going to be offloading some of the heavy lifting to Adam and not doing these sessions solo!

We have base presentations made up for both sessions, but we would very much like to tailor these to fit attendees needs. If there is any pressing hosting or security issue you would like us to address during these sessions then please post a comment at the end of this blog or Twitter us @rochenhost and we can try to work your request into the sessions.

Adam and I look forward to any feedback you can provide!

FREE CMS Expo tickets. $550 giveaway.
Rochen is one of the two main Diamond Sponsors for CMS Expo this year (along with Arc Technology Group). We are going to have a fantastic 20 x 10 ft booth at the conference, so please stop by to talk about any kind of hosting related issue or just to say “hello!” Whether you’re looking for a small shared hosting plan, a multi-server redundant cluster to handle 100 million page views or something in between then we will be happy to talk things over with you. We will have Rochen swag to giveaway at the booth too!

Furthermore, we have two free tickets to giveaway to any current Rochen customer. Each ticket is for one day conference access and would normally cost $279. If you are a current customer and would like a free ticket then please open a support ticket through the My Rochen Portal with the subject: “Free CMS Expo Ticket” and we will get that taken care of for you. This is on a first come, first serve basis and we must receive your request before the end of the day tomorrow, Tuesday April 13th 2010.

For anyone who misses out on a free ticket you can also use the promotional code: ROCHEN via the CMS Expo website to receive a 10% discount on any CMS Expo ticket. The free ticket offer is for current Rochen customers only, but this promo code can be used by anyone.

Teaser of Rochen's green campaign.

Green Hosting Campaign @ CMS Expo
Rochen are looking to highlight many issues at CMS Expo (shameless plug: including our redundant clusters to attendees needing to host larger or enterprise sites, our rock solid shared hosting, Rochen Vault twice-daily managed backups, our ‘out of the box’ compatibility for the most popular CMS scripts) but one in particular we have decided to draw attention to is our green hosting initiatives.

We will be running a green hosting campaign at CMS Expo, which we think will draw attention to our green hosting in a subtle but clever way. I think when it comes to being green it is something most hosts handle badly or in a scammy and dishonest way, so we hope to be able to promote this as one of our strengths at CMS Expo. While our green hosting is clearly a marketing tool Rochen uses, I think it is more than that due to the way we have implemented it through partnerships with Green Mountain Energry and our continual technology improvement process. E.g. data center cooling. Learn more here.

I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at CMS Expo next month and hopefully being able to help with your CMS hosting questions!

- Chris

P.S. Rochen will also be launching a new website prior to CMS Expo. So keep an eye out for that too.

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen Ltd.

The Rochen Engine Room: Joomla! Extensions Site Hosting

Posted by: Brad Baker Date: April 7th 2010

Brad BakerRecently, while starting off my Melbourne JoomlaDay presentation I asked the following question: “Which of the Official Joomla! Sites is the busiest?” A number of people correctly answered: “The Joomla! Extensions Site!”. I thought I’d use this blog post to provide a little background information and figures we at Rochen have gathered with regard to the hosting of this site.

Bandwidth Graph for the corresponding period:

JED Traffic Graphs March 2010

Not far behind this site in terms of traffic are the Joomlacode.org as well as forum.joomla.org websites. Rochen host both of these sites as well, with Joomlacode.org hosted on a cluster of servers. Hopefully in the future I can do a similar post with more details on some of the other Official Joomla! sites we host.

I’ll leave the finer details with regard to users and extensions listed to the JED editors who will hopefully follow up this post with one of their own.

If your business requires the same level of security and stability that Rochen is able to provide to the Joomla! Project, be sure to get in touch with our sales team. Do you follow Rochen on Twitter yet?

- Brad

Brad Baker has been a member of the Rochen team since early 2003 and is a founding member of the Joomla! Open Source Project. He currently is part of the Joomla LeadershipTeam, and also blogs here. You can find him on Twitter @xyzulu

Rochen hosts Joomla past the 2 million post mark

Posted by: Brad Baker Date: April 1st 2010

Brad BakerPeter Martin, from the Joomla Community Leadership Team, recently posted the following article on the Joomla! Community site: 2,000,000 forum posts. Rochen is proud to be behind all 2 million of these posts. From a small beginning in September 2005 Joomla has grown to be one of the worlds most popular CMS (Content Management System) in the world.

Rochen has been behind the Joomla project all the way providing for the infrastructure needs of the project. Currently we host the official Joomla sites across a cluster of servers. Does your Joomla Website require the same kind of support and stability? Be sure to make contact with our sales staff so we can tailor a solution to suit your needs.

All our staff here at Rochen wish to congratulate the Joomla Community on this milestone and look forward to many more milestones with them in the future.

- Brad

Brad Baker has been a member of the Rochen team since early 2003 and is a founding member of the Joomla! Open Source Project. He currently is part of the Joomla LeadershipTeam, and also blogs here. You can find him on Twitter @xyzulu

Rochen makes Google Apps simple

Posted by: Chris Adams Date: February 28th 2010

If you are already a customer of Rochen, you may have noticed within the past few days a new “Google Apps” icon has appeared within your control panel.

Recently we have seen more of our customers adopt the powerful collaboration tools that Google Apps has to offer. E.g. calendar, docs, groups etc. Some customers also take advantage of the email functions.

Rochen customers have always been able to use Google Apps in conjunction with their account, but as with most hosting services have had to make manual MX and CNAME record changes to their DNS zone file.

This is all a thing of the past, Rochen customers can now integrate Google Apps with a few clicks using a simple but powerful new tool within their hosting control panel.

I have attached a couple of screenshots below.

googleappsscreen1

googleappsscreen2

The new Google Apps integration tool can be found under the “Mail” section of the hosting control panel. More information on Google Apps can be found at: http://www.google.com/apps.

I welcome any feedback customers may have regarding this new tool. Rochen are working to build several more tools like this, so any feedback you may have as to where we should focus our development resources going forward would also be welcome.

- Chris

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen Ltd.

Rochen responds to terrible situation in Haiti

Posted by: Chris Adams Date: January 15th 2010

The thoughts and prayers of everyone here at Rochen are with those who have lost their lives in the terrible earthquake that struck Haiti on Tuesday, as well those people who survived this disaster but are now trying to find clean water and food and begin rebuilding their lives.

Google have posted a series of satellite images on their blog showing the truly devastating impact of this natural disaster with before and after images: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/posted-by-soandso-soandso-team.html

Rochen has made a donation to the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) in the United Kingdom. The DEC is an umbrella organization for 13 humanitarian aid agencies, including the British Red Cross and Oxfam. These organizations are actively working to deliver immediate assistance on the ground in Haiti.

In addition to making a financial contribution towards the relief effort, Rochen counts amongst our loyal clients organizations like the World Food Program (WFP). We are working, as always, to ensure our hosting infrastructure remains operational and running at optimal performance so that organizations like the WFP can get on with the work that really matters to the Haitian people.

If you have the means to do so and would like to help with the situation in Haiti you may find the following links useful -

http://www.interaction.org/crisis-list/earthquake-haiti

http://www.dec.org.uk

Thank you for reading.

- Chris

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen Ltd.

Rochen Annual Roundup

Posted by: Chris Adams Date: December 11th 2009

Although I won’t be covering everything from the past year, I am writing a quick blog post to update you on a few recent items. You may also wish to check out our 2009 blog archives.

KSplice Uptrack
As those of you who follow us on Twitter (@rochenhost) may already be aware we signed an agreement with Ksplice Inc. in October to deploy their Uptrack technology across all of our servers. Uptrack allows for seamless Linux Kernel updates without the need to reboot our servers, resulting in improved service and uptime for our customers. This is especially beneficial for customers using our Managed Virtual Server (MVS) service where Kernel reboots could take some time to complete. We are offering this service at no extra charge.

I am pleased to report that Uptrack is now successfully deployed and operational across the vast majority of our servers and we will have rollouts to all servers fully completed by the end of December. You can read more about Uptrack and how it will benefit our customers in the official press release here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/rochen-ksplice/rebootless-technology/prweb3069574.htm

Joomla Day in Viet Nam and Joomla Developer Conference in New York City
Brad Baker from Rochen’s team, who is also a volunteer member of the Joomla team, attended Joomla Day Viet Nam in Ho Chi Minh City on 1st November. Brad delivered a keynote address to the gathered community members on Joomla hosting and security. Brad reported back to me that the enthusiasm about Rochen and our services was strong, so we look forward to continuing to grow our customer base in Viet Nam through 2010. As one of the fastest growing centers for technology in the world, we believe Viet Nam is going to emerge as a market of growing importance for us.

Brad Baker prepares (center seated) prepares to deliver keynote.

Brad Baker (center seated) during Q&A session in Ho Chi Minh City.

Martin Rouf from our team and I both had the pleasure of attending the first Joomla Developer Conference this past weekend, held at Columbia University in New York City. On the first day of the conference Rochen made an announcement along with one of our customers, PICnet Inc, that we would be jointly contributing $10,000 USD towards the new Joomla Sponsorship Program.

Rochen believes contributing to Joomla in this way is the right thing to do for our customers as many of them use Joomla within their businesses, especially our reseller hosting clients. We also believe this announcement will benefit the wider Joomla community, even those who are not customers of Rochen. You can read more about this announcement and the sponsorship program in the official press release here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/joomla-hosting/sponsors-rochen-picnet/prweb3302454.htm

Chris Adams (right) prepares to speak at Joomla Developer Conference.

Chris Adams (right) prepares to speak at the Joomla Developer Conference in New York City.

Rochen was the lead sponsor of both events in Ho Chi Minh City and New York City.

UK Hosting
It has now been almost 6 months since we launched our UK hosting services, giving customers the choice to host on either a US or UK server with Rochen and pay in either US Dollars or British Pounds. Whether a customer chooses our US or UK location they will benefit from the same great customer support backed by enterprise services like Rochen Vault Managed Backups, in the knowledge that the entire service, including the physical servers and switches, are owned and managed by Rochen’s experienced engineers.

Based on the research we did before we launched the UK service we knew it was going to be successful, but it has outperformed all of our expectations. We were going after two key groups with the new UK service. Those targeting their website towards a UK or European audience and needed solid rankings in Google UK, Google Spain and other such indexes; and European businesses storing data that can’t be located outside of the EU due to data protection laws.

When we launched our UK hosting operation we did so completely out of existing cash reserves, so did not take on any debt. Today the operation is now cash flow positive and turning a nice profit. It is in fact the fastest growing area of our business ahead of our US hosting offerings, so we are extremely pleased with the outcome so far. Rochen is fully committed to both the US and UK / European sides of our business going into 2010 and beyond. It is important not only to look at the technical side of things when considering a web host, but the financial too. Rochen believes in steady and controlled growth that doesn’t result in a compromise of our high service standards.

VAT Rate Change
Starting in December 2008 the UK Government lowered the rate of Value Added Tax (VAT) from 17.5% to 15% to help with the economic situation. Some businesses did not pass this rate cut along to their customers and simply pocketed the extra 2.5% themselves as additional profit. Here at Rochen we passed along this rate saving from day one to our customers. As previously announced by the UK Government the rate will return to the 17.5% level on 1st January 2010 and as such the rate Rochen charges our customers will return to this level as well. Rochen only charges VAT to customers located within the European Union (EU), with a few exceptions.

Discount Promo Code
If you are not already a customer and are looking for some rock solid hosting this holiday season you can signup using the promotional code: XMAS and this will offer you 15% off your first invoice with Rochen. This code is valid through until 31st December 2009 and can provide even greater savings when paying annually with applicable plans. This beats any other public promotion we are currently running.

Finally, thank you to all of our customers’ through this year. I truly appreciate your loyalty more than you know. We have a lot of exciting developments in the pipeline for 2010. Everyone at Rochen wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Very Prosperous New Year.

- Chris

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen Ltd.

Rochen Staff and more JoomlaDay Events

Posted by: Brad Baker Date: October 20th 2009

Rochen keep in touch with their customers and the wider Joomla Community through our support and attendance of JoomlaDays and Joomla Events around the world. We try to keep our clients informed via our Twitter stream: @rochenhost make sure you follow us.

Recently on the list of events we attended and supported was the Sydney JoomlaDay 2009.
Thanks to all the people behind this event, the day was both informative and enjoyable. I was able to meet up with a number of current customers (and hopefully future ones) and discuss with them their needs and plans for the future. Here’s a small picture I took at the end of the event: http://yfrog.com/0sdfqj If you attended this event and missed the coupon code we shared, please get in touch with me.

Later in the year we’re proud to be providing support to the Joomla! Developer Conference in New York City on Dec 5 and 6 2009.

Other JoomlaDays currently being planned in 2010 that we will also attend include: Melbourne JoomlaDay 2010 and CMS Expo 2010. We may be able to have more than one staff member present at some of these future events as we try to contribute to the Joomla Community by sharing our knowledge and services of Joomla Hosting, after all, we knowhow to host Joomla sites being the Official Hosting Partner of the Joomla Project.

In the nearer future, you can catch us in Vietnam at the JoomlaDay Ho Chi Minh City on November 1 2009. We’re not only attending this event, but also providing sponsorship.

If you have any questions regarding your hosting needs (present and future) and you can attend any of these events, be sure to let us know and we’d be happy to arrange to spend some time with you.

- Brad

Brad Baker has been a member of the Rochen team since early 2003 and is a founding member of the Joomla! Open Source Project. He currently is part of the Joomla LeadershipTeam, and also blogs here.