Over the past few days we have been experiencing sporadic performance issues with our central storage array, which has lead to some secondary issues with services such as e-mail and hosting becoming temporarily unavailable. During these periods of degraded performance, some users may have encountered problems connecting to the mail server, the LimeDomains homepage and some free hosting accounts were temporarily offline.

At no point were any e-mail messages dropped or deleted - any inbound message that arrived while the mailserver was not accepting connections would have been temporarily queued and eventually delivered. The paid hosting server farm was also not impacted by the outage.

At this point, all services are back up and operational.

Here’s what we are doing to ensure this does not reoccur:

We have already taken delivery of several high performance SAS arrays and will be transitioning services onto this new equipment over the next few weeks. We are also taking steps to compartmentalize services so that temporary load spikes do not impact customer facing services.

Finally, we are putting a process in place to ensure that you are fully informed of the current status of any service issue and the resolution ETA. Look for a network status link on our homepage in the next few days, and more frequent updates in this forum during both planned and unplanned outages.

Thank you for your continued support and patience.

As a part of our regular website maintenance & upgrade process, we will be involved in some unsightly inner-workings behind the curtain, which include integral changes to our software & hardware components. The routine maintenance process is scheduled for:

- Saturday, January 16th beginning 00:01 AM till 05:00 AM ET.
- Sunday, January 17th beginning 00:01 AM till 05:00 AM ET.

This probably won’t cause much trouble, but we thought it’s better to alert you about more than we required, just in case!

Some websites may be inaccessible for a short period of 4–5 minutes anytime during this maintenance window.

Domain services & other Hosting services (File Management, FTP management etc) would remain unaffected during this window and be accessible from LimeDomains control panel.

With our sincere apologies to our users for the inconvenience, we truly hope that you’d bear with us & we shall be able to provide you with a more well-behaved website than ever. So hang on tight and we will be back shortly!

It’s human tendency to get enticed by pictures. People love to share pictures with friends, family, and colleagues, and image galleries are a popular feature of any community-focused web site.

“…..words & pictures can work together to communicate more powerfully than either alone”—William Albert Allard

If you complement the content of your website with pictures, it enhances the impact of your website manifold. You can easily build user retention and drive traffic with easy to edit and manage image gallery with the help of Image Gallery Applications.

With Image Gallery Applications, you can:

• Upload and share images with friends, family, and colleagues
• Manage image galleries and edit photos quickly and easily
• Build traffic, increase readership and user retention
• Customize the image gallery as per your exact needs

Let us give you an overview of some highly customizable Image Gallery applications we have in store for you at LimeDomains.

Coppermine

Coppermine, an easy-to-use, multi-lingual web-picture gallery script, offers full multimedia support and handy features like thumbnail creation, and also privacy control with user & group management. LimeDomains currently supports version 1.4.21 of Coppermine.

Some of the features of Coppermine are:

• Its all features are compatible with web interface.
• It features user management, and organizes them into multiple groups.
• It has multimedia capabilities & offers multi-picture upload facility.
• It allows image rotation & offers image caption, title & user-defined fields for all images
• Some popular plugins: Master Template, Timeline, Calendar etc.

ZenPhoto

ZenPhoto, an online gallery application designed to be ‘a simpler web photo album’, helps in dynamic image processing, creation of folder-based albums, simple image management, online uploads, editable titles and descriptions powered by AJAX etc. LimeDomains currently supports version 1.2.1 of ZenPhoto.

Some of the features of Zenphoto are:

• It helps in the creation of dynamic albums.
• It’s highly customizable with preset themes.
• It’s highly flexible with EXIF & IPTC support for images.
• It has spam filter options & watermarks.
• Some popular plugins: Slideshow_Flash, Zenphoto Sitemap etc.

Gallery

Gallery, an easy-to-configure, intuitive web based photo album organizer, helps you to blend photo management effortlessly into your own website whether it’s a small personal site or a big community site. LimeDomains currently supports version 2.3 of Gallery.

Some of the features of Gallery are:

• It helps in easy administration of multiple photo albums.
• It offers auto-image rotation, RSS publishing, numerous images/albums.
• It offers Mirroring albums using which users can mirror their albums on any desired remote server.
• It has a lot of customization options, attractive themes etc.
• It can be integrated easily into varied CMS.

Get started with adding these image editing and gallery management tools to your web site—all at LimeDomains.

‘Join us on Twitter’, Join us on Facebook etc. –These are some of the commonly seen expressions and integral components of every organization’s marketing strategy. Almost every company is aware of the power of social media marketing but confused about the ways to leverage its power for building network & get maximized gains from the same.

Well, the answers to these concerns lie in clear understanding of the importance of social media networks, which paves way for social media marketing (SMM). As per ComScore reports, today 734.2 million or two-thirds of the world’s 1.1 billion Internet users, 15 & older visited at least one social networking site in May, 2009.

To gain success in SMM, you must be able to clearly define the primary objectives of your SMM campaign. Here is a list of some common goals, valid for most businesses. However, you need to decide what suits you the best as a short-term objective, to be achieved first. 

• Brand visibility & promotion
• Customer Relationship Management
• Community Involvement with your Product
• Lead & Sales generation
• Polls & Surveys
• Hiring

Now How to execute it?

• To best leverage the power of different Web-based SMM platforms, it’s vital for you to align your core business objectives with the appropriate SMM strategy. Your strategy must be a product of your business goals and target market. For instance, if your niche target audience comprises of professionals then it’s recommended that you concentrate largely on platforms such as LinkedIn, Ecademy, Xing etc.
• Choose the most appropriate goals listed above and then the right channels to use the power of social media networks. Once you’re done with that, you can now start thinking on the lines of leveraging the power of each selected channel.
• Spread the right message about your brand on different chosen platforms on a consistent basis.
• Clearly segregating the short & long-term SMM objectives as SMM offers both short as well as long-term returns.
• Concentrate on quality, not the quantity of implementation of your SMM campaign.

We, at LimeDomains, also understand the profound significance of social media marketing, and therefore have created our groups on some prominent social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter.

Join us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter!