IN THIS ISSUE:

• Automatically Install Brand New Portal Versions
• Enhance Your Website
• Let’s Communicate Effectively

Automatically Install Brand New Portal Versions
CrystalTech is able to personally deliver the latest in advanced portal technology to your electronic doorstep. The most recent examples of this “just in time” distribution service are the updated the versions of DotNetNuke (DNN) available for installation on a .NET 1.1 or .NET 2.0 shared hosting plan. Now on our ASP.NET 1.1 servers, we have updated DNN to version 3.3.4 while on our ASP.NET 2.0 servers, we now offer version 4.3.4!

Along with security enhancements, these releases provide stabilization from previous versions. DotNetNuke was designed so anyone can easily create, manage and publish web content, regardless of their technical skill level. Along with an easy-to-add and use blog and forum, DNN includes site wizards, help icons, a convenient user interface and other built-in tools for robust functionality and simplified site management.

Not only do we support these latest versions of DotNetNuke, we offer an easy install tool for our ASP.NET Intermediate customers and above that eliminates the difficultly and time involved if you were to install DNN yourself. Log in to the Control Center and first add a SQL database from Database Admin. Next, to access the installation feature, from the menu item Resources, click on DotNetNuke Install. For more information, see knowledgebase article #968.

Enhance Your Website
Faster than a speeding bullet: The CrystalTech Support Team is often asked by customers for methods and techniques that site administrators can use to optimize their websites in order to improve performance. Below you’ll find a few methods that not only enhance your site’s performance, but also help the performance of the server as well.

• Number of site files
  We recommend maintaining the contents of folders often by removing any unneeded files, especially documents and those larger multi-media files like images, movies or music. By lowering the number of files, you can reduce the space used on your plan and thereby reduce the likelihood of disk space overage. While there is no minimum amount of files per folder, the recommended maximum number is 10,000. If your application needs to support more than 10,000 files, we strongly suggest splitting them up into multiple folders, or cleaning the folder out more often. By implementing these simple suggestions, the read and write time to files will be enhanced by the Microsoft Windows native file system (NTFS).
   
• Web Page and File Size
  Generally, files over the size of 8 MB are cumbersome to transport back and forth across the Internet. Furthermore, files that are part of web pages should be much lower in file size. Optimize a web page by making it no larger than 150 KB with regular images between 5 and 20 KB so that they load fast.
   
• Access vs. MS SQL or MySQL
  If you are utilizing a Microsoft Access database with your website, one strong recommendation would be to change to SQL or MySQL. Access uses a file server system approach where each user reads and writes directly to the raw data tables, making it ideal for use as a desktop solution at home.
  
  However, Access is not optimized for use with a large number of concurrent connections and does not scale for large databases. As more users connect to an Access database, the performance starts to degrade rapidly. Even moderately-trafficked websites can easily have 5 or more users at one time which can cause Access to lock the number of connections.
  
  MySQL and SQL, which utilize a more efficient client-server structure, can support hundreds, even thousands of concurrent users for a much more secure and stable level of performance. Since they can be configured to effectively accommodate multiple users with a high level of uptime, reliability and scalability that Access cannot offer, they are ideal for an online production environment.
   
• Database Queries and Page Loading
  When a website runs a SQL script against a database, it should be optimized enough for the page to load in under five seconds, and preferably under one second. There are a number of ways to ensure optimal SQL scripts. Create SQL queries that are generally under one half of a page. Also, if the query must search through more than 500 rows, create an index for those corresponding sections.
  
  To create a SQL index, list the unique ID and columns for each table that need to be used in the index. Send the list to our customer support team for processing.

Let’s Communicate Effectively
We want to reach you! As a reminder, please keep the administrative email addresses listed on your account up-to-date. Administrative email addresses receive important notifications that could affect the websites you have hosted with us. This includes updates, maintenance notices, storage and bandwidth overage notifications and other critical information.

To check and see which emails are listed as your admin contacts, login into the Control Center and from the menu item Customer, select Customer Information. You will see these listed under ‘E-Mail Information.’ You can add, edit and delete email addresses in the five fields listed and click on ‘Save’ to make these current. We suggest listing at least two and having one of those be outside of the CrystalTech network (i.e. Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.). This way, if there is ever an issue with your mail server, you will still receive notifications. Also consider adding the email address of your mobile device for instant notifications.

By making sure your admin email addresses are current, you not only give yourself peace of mind that you will receive all important notifications, but you will also help us provide the best levels of support possible.