CloudFlare, a web performance and security company, is excited to announce our partnership with Orpheum Hosting Solutions! If you haven’t heard about CloudFlare before, our value proposition is simple: we’ll make any website twice as fast and protect it from a broad range of web threats.

Today, hundreds of thousands of websites — ranging from individual blogs, to e-commerce sites, to the websites of Fortune 500 companies, to national governments — use CloudFlare to make their sites faster, and more secure. We power more than 40 billion monthly page views — more than Amazon.com, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple and Bing combined — and over 25% of the Internet’s population regularly passes through our network.

Faster web performance

CloudFlare is designed to take a great hosting platform like Orpheum Hosting Solutions and make it even better.

We run 14 data centres strategically located around the world. When you sign up for CloudFlare, we begin routing your traffic to the nearest data centre.

As your traffic passes through the data centres, we intelligently determine what parts of your website are static versus dynamic. The static portions are cached on our servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours, before we check to see if they’ve been updated. By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.

CloudFlare’s intelligent caching system also means you save bandwidth, which means saving money, and decreases the load on your servers, which means your web application will run faster and more efficiently than ever. On average, CloudFlare customers see a 60% decrease in bandwidth usage, and a 65% in total requests to their servers. The overall effect is that CloudFlare will typically cut the load time for pages on your site by 50% which means higher engagement and happier visitors.

Broad web security

Over the course of 2011, CloudFlare identified a 700% increase in the number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) we track on the Internet (see the chart below). As attacks like these increase, CloudFlare is stepping up to protect sites.

CloudFlare’s security protections offer a broad range of protections against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about our approach is that the system gets smarter the more sites that are part of the CloudFlare community. We analyze the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped.

In time, our goal is nothing short of making attacks against websites a relic of history. And, given our scale and the billions of different attacks we see and adapt to every year, we’re well on our way to achieving that for sites on the CloudFlare network.

Signing up

Any website can deploy CloudFlare, regardless of your underlying platform. By integrating closely with Orpheum Hosting Solutions, we make the process of setting up CloudFlare “one-click easy” through your existing Orpheum SiteWorx control panel. Just look for the CloudFlare icon, choose the domain you want to enable, and click the orange cloud. That’s it!

We’ve kept the price as low as possible and plans offered through Orpheum Hosting Solutions are free. Moreover, we never charge you for bandwidth or storage, therefore saving you tons via reduced bandwidth costs.

For site owners who would like to take advantage of CloudFlare’s advanced offerings, we also offer a ‘Pro’ tier of service for $20/month. The ‘Pro’ tier includes all of the ‘Free’ tier’s offerings, as well as extra features like SSL, a full web application firewall, and faster analytics.

We’re proud that every day more than a thousand new sites, including some of the largest on the web, join the CloudFlare community. If you’re looking for a faster, safer website, you’ve got a good start with Orpheum Hosting Solutions, but the next step is to join the CloudFlare community from within the SiteWorx control panel.

We wanted to provide an update on some of the things we’re working on here at Orpheum Hosting Solutions.

CloudFlare Integration

CloudFlare is a really neat service that provides enhanced redundancy, security, and analytics for websites. The next version of SiteWorx will have a plugin to allow for native CloudFlare integration for your website. This means that, with the flick of a switch, it’ll be really easy for you to access CloudFlare’s content delivery network and security mechanisms, making your website faster and even more secure than it is now! This should be available within two weeks from now, and available to all Clustered Hosting customers.

Virtual Fax Service

We have a couple of Business hPBX and iVoice customers already testing this out, and so far the feedback is great. The Virtual Fax Service lets you eliminate your physical fax machine and replace it for a fraction of the cost of your current fax line! We will formally unveil this soon once we have the backend looking the way we’d like it to, and have fully fleshed out the pricing details.

New Support Staff

Orpheum is growing really well, and soon we’ll be bringing in some new support staff to help lighten the load. The new staff will be trained to provide the same level of service as the existing Unrivaled Support Team, and we hope that adding a few new people will reduce the response times and make it easier for the administrative and Tier 2 folks to focus on getting things right.

We also are going to be looking for developers this summer to help us start building out our service portfolio so that we can start offering things like cloud computing (Infrastructure as a Service). We want to give developers the chance to work on something really cool, so when we need you, we’ll let you know!

There are tonne of web hosting companies out there, including Orpheum. Some compete purely on price, but the old adage is true – you get what you pay for. Any free web hosting service either has very strict, and harsh, limits on how much disk space or bandwidth your website can consume, or they make it very obvious that you’re using a free service through the use of ads or co-branded URLs (e.g. http://YourBusinessName.HostingCompany.com). This doesn’t look professional, and probably isn’t how you want to present your business.

Instead, you need to purchase a domain name (e.g. YourBusiness.ca). Then, find a professional hosting company that charges reasonable rates, has good customer service, references/testimonials, and is willing to answer questions before you sign up. Pre-sales support levels are usually a good indication of what post-sales support will be like. Also remember that there is no such thing as “Unlimited.” Every web hosting company offering “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth will have a “fair use clause” in their Terms of Service that states the host can cut you off if they believe you’re using more than your fair share.

At the same time, don’t over pay. $15 or $20 a month is far too much for a company to host a small website designed to get your business online and noticed.

The other thing to look for is a web hosting company that makes it really easy for you to get started. Some companies offer web design services, typically starting at around $500. Other web hosting companies take a different approach, giving the entrepreneur/small business owner the tools they need to get started, like the ability to install a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal with just a couple of clicks.

WordPress, in particular, has many templates (called “themes”) available that make it very easy for you to have a professional looking website up and running. All in, including the domain, your first month of hosting, and a nice WordPress theme, your small business can have a website up and on the web for under $100 plus a few hours of time spent writing content and inserting some images.

You can also take advantage of your hosting account to install your first customer relationship management (CRM) solution, like vTiger CRM or SugarCRM, and host it on the same account as your website. A CRM solution takes some learning, but there’s no reason for a small business to pay $20/month/user until you can actually afford it. By the time you have 500 or 1,000 customers in your CRM, it’ll be time to upgrade to a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server anyway. Now you’re in full control of your software, and your customer information – that’s not the case with many software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, like Salesforce.com.

You could also install your own web-based analytics software (Piwik), live chat software, e-commerce solution (Magento, Cube Cart), or project management software. All available for free, and available to be hosted on the same account/plan as your website.

Now, when you’re ready for a more sophisticated website, that is when it’s time to start looking for a freelance developer, or a web design/development company to take over. Many are turning to the same tools I mentioned above, but the designs they create are entirely custom, built to your specs, and designed to really help your business succeed.

The bottom line is that, especially when you’re starting out, you have very limited capital to invest in an online presence. You know it’s a necessity these days, but that doesn’t mean you have to commit thousands, or even hundreds, of dollars to your first website. Take advantage of the tools available to you from your web hosting company, and do it yourself the first time out. Having a decent, self-designed website is better than not having a website at all.

This is the first blog entry in a series we’re calling “Small Business Evolution” is going to be about that last topic – phone lines.

Phone lines are not the most glamourous topic in the world, but they’re certainly an important one. Many small businesses feel having a phone line of some sort, whether it’s a landline or a cell phone, is a prerequisite for doing business. And in reality, it is, because lots of customers still prefer the phone over email or instant messaging/chat. You need to serve your customers in the manner they feel most comfortable with.

On the other hand, most small businesses simply call the incumbent phone company in their area and get set up. It’s the easy thing to do. Call Ma Bell, get a phone line or two, perhaps a fax line, and then buy some phones. The downside? That service now costs roughly $50 a month depending on where your business is located.

$50 a month for the privilege of making and receiving phone calls.

Many of you have heard of Voice over IP (VoIP) in its various incarnations. The most popular flavour of VoIP is called a SIP trunk, which boils down to an Internet-based replacement for traditional landlines. Here at Orpheum we call it the Business iVoice service.

Calling it an Internet-based replacement is a bit of a generalization though. The signal certainly travels over the Internet for a period of time, but as soon as it hits the provider’s infrastructure, the conversation then traverses a private network. This private network is shielded from the typical jitter and packet loss you can experience with consumer-grade, very low cost solutions.

The benefits? Depending on the SIP trunk provider, prices range from $20-40 a month. Even on the high end, you could be saving your business $120 per year, per line. That increases exponentially if you can replace multiple phone lines with a few SIP trunks instead. Of course there are a few things to consider before replacing landlines with SIP trunks, such as:

• Your business needs a high speed Internet connection – each phone call typically requires 128kbps (that’s less than watching a YouTube video)
• If your business’ Internet connection is DSL, you’ll need to get the ISP to turn on dry-loop DSL or switch to cable Internet
• If you don’t have high speed, make sure you put together an report comparing your existing expenses with the potential expenses to make sure it still makes sense to make the switch
• If you don’t have an Internet connection, there are other reasons for installing one
• You can switch to a high speed debit/credit terminal, eliminating the need to wait for debit/credit transactions to finish before making a call
• You can also use the opportunity to eliminate a traditional fax machine with an IP fax service, driving further efficiencies
• If you want to keep your existing phones, you will need to purchase a voice gateway – this voice gateway converts the connection from a digital to analog signal, making your traditional phones useable

There can be start-up costs, but these are minimal. The long term advantages in cost and time typically weigh heavily towards replacing traditional landlines with SIP trunks. In addition, business-oriented VoIP providers provide very high quality phone calls. Calls on SIP trunks are so good some customers have said they’re even clearer than traditional phone calls.

This is just the first in a series of blog entries designed to help small businesses make incremental steps towards increasing their use of new business-oriented solutions and applications. Our intent is to help small businesses save money, save time, and ultimately streamline and automate their processes so that they can spend more time running the business, and less time on non-revenue generating activities.

Spearheaded by rtraction, Orpheum is happy to join in the search for Canada’s Worst Charity Website (or CWCW, if you prefer). The rules are really simple and all laid out. Really what the CWCW contest is looking for are things like:

• Sites that look like they were built in the GeoCities era (or Tripod, Angelfire, Homestead, etc.)
• <blink> tags
• Scrolling marquees
• “Under Construction” images
• Clashing colours

And so on. We’re Canadian… we’re a generous bunch of folks, so chances are you know of at least one charity that you love, you support, but their website leaves a lot to be desired. Well, don’t worry! Now is your chance to help that charity win a $25,000 online makeover complete with a new website, new web hosting (that’ s us!), marketing services, and much more.

So hurry! Nominations end February 21 at 12pm Eastern!

Our Clustered Hosting Platform comes with a 100% uptime guarantee, and that’s exactly what we delivered in January. Pingdom checks orpheum.ca every 5 minutes to ensure we are up and running. orpheum.ca is hosted on the Clustered Hosting Platform along with our clients’ websites.

This report from New Relic shows how long pages take to render in the browsers of visitors from all of PHP-based websites Orpheum hosts. What you see here is that some websites take longer than others to load, and this has lots of variables baked into it like: webpage size, the visitor’s computing power, the visitor’s web browser, the visitor’s country, the size and length of any PHP code, and so on. Most of the time we’re doing pretty good, and this snapshot only accounts for the last 30 minutes.

So there you have it. A small peek into the happenings of a burgeoning web hosting company! We’ll produce a similar report for Feburary next month.

A .PRO domain is the perfect way to establish a professional identity and connect with your client base online. In a competitive job market, stand out with a .PRO domain.

.PRO domains are:

• Professional
• Competitive
• Unique

Create a competitive edge in the job market by choosing a .PRO domain to build your professional online identity. In fact, only licensed professionals, businesses and organizations are eligible to register .PRO domains. And because .PRO is exclusively for registration by the professional community, using a .PRO TLD automatically identifies the registrant to their customer base as an accredited expert in their field.

The best part is that the .PRO domain is international! The letters PRO begin the word professional in a lot of different languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, Norwegian, Maltese, Lithuanian, Latvian, Indonesian, Galician, Filipino, Estonian, Dutch, Danish, Croatian, Catalan, and Albanian.

Since .PRO is a TLD exclusively reserved for use by the professional community, it is preferred by licensed professionals in fields such as:

• Medicine
• Real estate
• Consulting
• Engineering
• Internet
• Law
• IT

Your .PRO domain is a great way to connect with your client base. Use your .PRO domain to:

• Promote a business
• As a digital calling card
• As a commerce site
• Blog

And until February 15, 2012 .PRO domains are only $9 for the first year! After this promotion expires, the price will increase to its regular $14 per year.

Welcome to the new year. 2011 was a great year for Orpheum as we began offering domain registration, and moved our clients to faster, more powerful servers. It was a banner year, and we’re ready for an even better 2012!

With that, I would like to formally introduce our new IP-based voice services to you. We have two distinct offerings to help your business save money, increase communication flexibility, and drive more value out of your Internet connection.

First, a quick primer. Voice over IP (VoIP) has been around for quite some time now, and it allows you to replace your existing, high cost land lines with more efficient, less expensive Internet-based lines.

But, of course, your business needs enterprise-grade VoIP. You need the confidence that you and your customers can discuss critical details without worrying about your phone line. Orpheum is very happy to announce that we’re delivering just that, at a fraction of the cost of traditional land lines.

For just $25 per month, you can replace your land line with an Orpheum Business iVoice line, saving your business money, bringing additional flexibility, and unlimited long distance within Canada and the USA. Click here for more details about Business iVoice now.

In addition to Business iVoice, Orpheum now offers a replacement for your legacy phone system. Business hPBX is a virtual PBX, hosted and maintained by Orpheum, giving your business the ability to grow, live long, and prosper without expensive changes to a traditional, on-premise phone system.

Each employee can have their own extension and direct number, along with time saving features like Automated Attendant, Conferencing, Find Me-Follow Me, web-based administration tools, and much, much more! Business hPBX is just $25 per month for one number/extension, with discounts for organizations with additional employees.

We hope you’ll contact us and ask any questions you may have about either iVoice or hPBX, and that we can let you focus on making your business grow… not on paying the phone company!

Introducing new bigger, better hosting plans! Our Clustered Web Hosting plans have all been expanded and increased, with disk space and bandwidth allotments doubled, tripled and even quadrupled! Web 1 is now Web 2, Web 5 is now Web 10, but our new high end plan, Web 100, gives you 100GB of disk space and 1TB of bandwidth each month!

We’re also bringing our own email hosting effective immediately. Clients no longer have to use Google Apps – instead, we’re giving you the choice of hosting email on Orpheum’s servers or we can still setup Google Apps for you absolutely free of charge. The default now is to host your email on our servers, but that’s easily changed just by asking!

The best part? Through all of this change and increase in features and functionality, we’ve kept our prices the same. Web 2 is still just $6 per month, and Web 100 is just $21 per month. We love our customers and just couldn’t wait to unleash some goodness on them!

Treat your website right. Host with Orpheum.

- Derek

That’s a $5 discount off each .CA! Now, you may be asking, why .CA? Well…

The benefits of a .CA domain

.CA is a globally recognized and trusted domain extension that identifies your connection to Canada.

Why choose a .CA?

• .CA is Canada’s Internet identity, reserved for Canadians, recognized and trusted worldwide.
• Customers will have a short .CA name that says they’re Canadian, not a long .COM name that says they’re one of almost 70 million organizations that most Canadians view as American!
• Canadian customers want to buy from Canadian companies.
• .CA domain names are trusted because they are kept safe and secure in an independent national registry.

Give your Canadian business a leg up over generic .NET and .COM domains by securing your .CA today. Hurry, this special promotion ends October 31, 2011!

*Renewals and transfers not eligible for this promotion. Sorry!