iWeb Communities: Blog

Montreal, November 24 – iWeb is pleased to announce the following changes in the company’s management structure; Cyrille Mertès, formerly Vice-President of IT & Infrastructure is now Chief Technology Officer and Marc Trudel, formerly Senior Director, Customer Experience, becomes Vice-President, Operations.  Mr. Mertès will be actively involved in the evolution and development of new technologies within the company while Mr. Trudel will overview most operational activities other than sales and marketing.

The newly created role of Chief Technology Officer will enable better synergy between iWeb’s Infrastructure, Development and Technology groups.  Mr. Mertès will lead those groups with high availability and automation in mind.   “iWeb’s efficiency depend on the technologies that automate our processes.”, said Mr. Mertès.  “Automation will be our primary focus in the year to come”, he added.

Marc Trudel joined iWeb early in 2008 to spearhead the company’s customer service reorganisation project.  Having since then raised customer satisfaction levels, he has also reengineered support processes by eliminating multiple weaknesses and integrating multiple operational functions into the customer service groups.

iWeb’s management team also includes
Eric Chouinard – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Martin Leclair – President of Products and Technologies
Philip Tousignant – Chief Financial Officer
Marc Guindon – Executive Vice-President of Resources
Sylvain Leclair – Vice-President of Sales and Marketing
Hugo Dénommée – Vice-President of Development and Automation
Michel Thivierge – Human Resources Director

About iWeb.com (iWeb Group Inc.)

iWeb is a worldwide provider of Internet hosting services and IT Infrastructure, with three secure data centers in Montreal. Since 2004, the company’s compounded annual growth rate has been above 75%, making it one of Canada’s 100 fastest growing companies according to PROFIT Magazine.

Founded in 1996 in Montreal, iWeb now generates more than 60% of its revenues from abroad; and has over 170 full-time employees providing Dedicated Server Hosting, Co-location and Web Hosting services to more than 21,000 customers in 150 countries. iWeb’s shares are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSX-V: IWB), for more information please consult the Company’s website: http://investors.iweb.com

For further information:

Philip Tousignant
iWeb Group Inc.
Chief Financial Officer
(514) 286-4242 ext. 149
ptousiqnant@iweb.com

We are already at the end of the first week of the T-Shirt design competition on CrowdSpring. We would like to get your advice on the submitted designs last week.

There is only 7 days left to send your T-Shirt design and have the opportunity to win $500. You can submit yours on the website CrowdSpring.

Here are the top models we’ve retained. Which one do you prefer?

1	2	3
4	5	6
7	8	9

Since we now have a T-Shirt printing facility in our iWeb-CO offices, we thought about using the iWeb community and CrowdSpring for the creation of a unique design for iWeb.

We have therefore submitted a design competition for the website CrowdSpring.com which will allow you to send over your best ideas for a iWeb T-Shirt. The winner will get $500, a T-Shirt copy, and the pride to have his/her design to be worn by hundreds of people.

For those who’d want to submit their feedback on the designs, it’s very simple. You can write your comments on the website CrowdSpring.com for each of the T-Shirts. You can also use our blog to share your opinion. How? We will publish between 16th and 23rd of November all creations directly, in a blog post here, and you can then write a comment with your notes.

The competition will finish midnight, 23rd November 2009. For more information, please visit our page on CrowdSpring. You can view there all the details on what kind of design we’d like, as well as restrictions.

We hope to see many of you participating, either sending designs, or commenting on other’s.

Who knows… maybe you’ll receive a iWeb T-Shirt by post!

Maybe you’ve heard about the new feature on Twitter: lists. It’s a tool which allows you to create a list or group in which you can add users.

The benefit of those lists is that it will easier for you to follow someone. For instance, iWeb can create a customer list, hosting news, competitors, employees etc. It would allow you to create groups from the website, where you can easily find the information you are looking for.

There are already people saying that the influence of someone on Twitter will be proportionnal to the number of lists he or she is belonging to. This makes sense, although many Twitter users don’t send their tweets via the website. They use applications like Tweetdeck, Tweetie and others, because following is much easier, with new tweet alerts, or user mentions.

People using Tweetdeck already have many created groups depending on the interests / jobs. Are those people going to Twitter to create lists manually, while they are not yet supported by their preferred Twitter application? I highly doubt it.

We must wait several weeks before a Twitter application uses well lists, and members using this to classify their friends lists. This application must allow the creation without going to the Twitter website, and users should be able to modify lists from the application.

Until then, lists are going to be used mainly by people wanting to try it out on the Twitter.com website, but they will come back quickly to their tweetdecks. Since it won’t be used fully, we can’t say then that it’s a metric to measure Twitter influence.

Soon yes. Now, not yet.

For its next edition in October, the webzine TheWhir has decided to create the star team for the web hosting industry. There are several sections such as “The marketer”, “The Customer Servant” and “the social media Star”.

You can add the name of the person and iWeb in the text fields “Vote-in” of the forms here. Here are our suggestins from iWeb:

• THE MARKETER: Sylvain Leclair – iWeb (VP Sales and Marketing)
• THE CUSTOMER SERVANT: Martin Leclair – iWeb (President Products & Technologies)
• DATA CENTER DESIGNER: Cyrille Mertes – iWeb (VP IT Global Infrastructure)
• THE EMPIRE BUILDER: Eric Chouinard – iWeb (CEO)
• THE SOCIAL MEDIA STAR: Jean-Luc SansCartier – iWeb (community manager)

We thank you in advance of your votes and your trust in iWeb. If there was a vote for best customers, be sure you’ll have ours!

We will be going for the first time at the annual conference cPanel will be hosting at Houston from 5th to 7th October 2009. For this opportunity, iWeb will be represented by Simon Boulet, IT Director, and Jean-François Chevrette, IT architecture speclalist.

Like our partners Microsoft and R1Soft, we will be attentive to the conferences covering improvement and new products for cPanel. We want also to know more about Enkompass, the new control panel from cPanel compatible with Windows and IIS7, and at the same time ask questions to engineers who developed this software.

Did you know that…

- the first customer who used cPanel in a iWeb dedicated server was on 10th September 2004?
- our control panel PanelBox for our shared hosting offering uses at its core cPanel?
- migrating from a competing control panel to cpanel is free (an offer by cPanel)?
- we offer cPanel licensing for our colocation customers, or if the server is not even hosted at iWeb?
- you can contact for free cPanel if you have problems with your control panel?

If you want more info on the cPanel conference on their website, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter..

If you want to meet Simon or Jean-François at the cPanel conference, please leave a comment on this post and we will get you in touch with them.

The iWeb blog is now available to the Hispanic web community, who can join the English and French readership which relies on the blog to keep abreast of the trends and issues concerning Internet hosting. The blog is available here.

With posts dating back to 2001, the iWeb blog is one of the first blogs dedicated to web hosting to be published on the internet.

“The iWeb blog has been our preferred communication tool for many years now,” confirmed Martin Leclair, who co-founded iWeb in 1996. “With the blog, we can share everything; especially news and trends. The blog is our main communication tool in case of emergency. ” says Martin, who learned Spanish while spending several months in Latin America.

The blog is divided into three categories; “iWeb”, “web development” and “web hosting”.  Please sign up to the profile that most resembles your interests and your professional or technical profile.

We invite you to sign up to receive new posts by e-mail, to share your thoughts and especially to give us your comments and feedback

Since it’s friday and the weekend is nearby, we are holding a very small game, with one of the competitors winning a mystery prize at the end.

Throughout the company’s history, iWeb’s website changed dramatically and we want you to find the chronological order of the pictures shown below.

You can simply put your answer as a comment below, starting from the oldest to the most recent.

We will annonce the winner monday on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.

Good luck!

edit : The winner is Jerome Paradis.

1	2
3	4
5

As a web hosting company, or even as a web company, iWeb has a long history with Wordpress. We have thousands of wordpress installs on our shared hosting and dedicated servers platform, and iWeb was also very early in using Wordpress, at the beginning to post status updates as well as important company news. We sponsored also WordCamp Montreal recently. No doubt it’s a compelling publishing platform, with its open-source development model, its powerful plugin and theming system, and its strong community of users and developers.

One of the direct consequences of the platform’s popularity is the constant attacks and hacker attempts. There are blog comments spam, but also bots and hackers who would try to take control of your website. For instance, we’ve had a security issue with Wordpress and the iWeb blog early this week, with a hacker logged to the dashboard. Fortunately, the issue was dealt with quickly, and we’ve introduced new measures that would prevent a similar issue, from technical measures to measures preventing social engineering.

It’s easy to overlook wordpress security, and the story above is a good example on how every Wordpress blogger should spend time on the issue. For instance, Wordpress released an update to their blogging platform last week. The 2.8.4 version fixes a vulnerability where a hacker could get access to the admin dashboard of a wordpress blog. If you haven’t updated your wordpress, you should do it now. Here are other tools which might help you:

• The Wordpress codex has an extensive resource on how to harden your Wordpress install
• The Wordpress Security Scan plugin scans your site for security issues, checks passwords, file permissions, database security. It also hides Wordpress version and secures the admin area.
• The login lockdown plugin allows you to control login usage. It prevents for instance scripts or bots doing dictionary attacks
• The Wordpress login logger plugin allows you to have logs on who tried to log into the admin area.
• WP DB Backup is a plugin which makes a copy of your wordpress database. Useful in the case a hacker went through your wordpress and publishes or deletes existing articles.

There also other efficient tactics such as preventing access to wp-admin apart from selected IP addresses, through the .htaccess file. Users or bots with an unknown address will be greeted with a 403 response.

Of course, the minimum you can do is upgrade to the most recent version, especially if it’s a vulnerability fix release, which is the case for the 2.8.4 release.

iWeb Group Inc. (TSX.V – IWB), a worldwide provider of Internet hosting services and IT Infrastructure has been invited to make one of the opening presentations on the final day of the Canaccord Adams 2009 Global Growth Conference on Thursday, August 13th 2009 at 8:00 A.M. eastern time.

Eric Chouinard, iWeb’s President and chairman will be presenting iWeb’s perspectives on the future state of Internet services to the investment community at the 29th edition of the conference, which is being held over three days at the InterContinental Hotel in Boston.

Conference Details:

- Canaccord Adams 29th Annual Global Growth Conference
- August 13, 2009
- InterContinental Hotel, Boston, MA
- More information can be found at: www.canaccordadams.com

About iWeb Group Inc. (iweb.com)

iWeb is a worldwide provider of Internet hosting services and IT Infrastructure, with three secure data centers in Montreal. Since 2004, the Company’s compounded annual growth rate has been above 75%, making it one of Canada’s 100 fastest growing companies according to PROFIT Magazine. iWeb has also been named one of the top movers and shakers among Canadian IT companies in the 2009 edition of the Branham300.

Founded in 1996 in Montreal, iWeb now generates more than 60% of its revenues from abroad and employs over 170 full-time employees. Providing Dedicated Server Hosting, Co-location and Web Hosting services to more than 21,000 customers in 150 countries. iWeb’s shares are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSX-V : IWB). For more information please consult the Company’s website: http://investors.iweb.com

For further information:

Bernard Dahl
Director, Communications and Public Relations
iWeb Group Inc.
(514) 802-2801
bdahl@iweb.com

Philip Tousignant
Chief Financial Officer
iWeb Group Inc.
(514) 286-4242 ext 149
ptousignant@iweb.com