Owncube

Posted on April 29, 2016by Perry Toone with No comments

[box type=”info”] We found serious security and compliance violations with OWNCUBE. This hosting provider should be avoided at all costs. [/box]

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Hosting Plans

Owncube is a new hosting company that seems to offer many different features such as its own social networking site amongst other things. The servers packages are pretty good deals for the money but they are stripped of features that you would expect in an a WHM or cpanel environment.

The 24/7 support is also a bit odd as we tested it a few times, always got a response from the same person who should take course in customer service. Sometimes response time will vary from 12 hours to 36 hours. ‎As the person managing support is in Germany and not available during US business hours. The support at Owncube is actually shocking, I don’t think I have dealt with such an unprofessional business in all my years on this planet. Because they are new and their support ticketing system has a few bugs, I once received a response that they were going to suspend my account for contacting support multiple times. Another time we were extorted to pay $75 otherwise service would be cancelled.

Due to Owncube policy and lack of transparency, Owncube does not give permission to publish responses from tickets. I really wish you could see for yourself how bad they are at understanding how servers work. They litterally just make stuff as the cause of the problem. This forum post at ownCloud.org also mentions similar troubles.

Reliability
Another thing we noticed with Owncube is they would often great issues. Not renewing a cPanel license was a recurring problem. Even after paying Owncube for the license, it would regularly expire. I would email them and response times would get longer and longer. Sometimes the response would be. “we will response within your SLA.”

The SLA response kept changing, and getting longer, unless you pay more money of course. Even after paying extra for something that was originally included in your contract, it did not fix the problem.

Abrasive Support

The responses you get from Owncube are hilarious. I tested the server and found many issues. The response was shocking.

We have noticed that over the 6 weeks or so we have been receiving a lot errors regarding etags when using the sync client. This is for numerous folders, and they have different sync accounts. Things were working pretty well prior to this.

Some research shows me that there is potential that changes to Apache could have caused this.

The reply was confusing, shocking…

please explain your issue. Etag errors are not related to the service, they can cause because of different things and are no fatal errors

Here is another user’s concerns about Owncube that seem to be common with what I found from testing the service:

I also noticed them changing the rules just after the support tickets. It was so annoying because you expected help and then they told you that they do not support something that was supported a couple of hours ago. Nothing is codified and no information about the features and rules is available to the user.

I just talked to one of those friends I mentioned above and we laughed at how Sandra Wedl, the support person, insisted that he “was the ONLY ONE having problems while THOUSANDS of other users are happy with the service” (again, capitalization is theirs). It sounds even more pathetic when you see those blog comments and forum posts complaining about them.

edit: Now that I see the company’s CEO is also like this, it seems they are just some lowly opportunists, far away from Open Source ideals. They are not worth any potential user’s attention.

Here is an email thread I had with owner of Owncube…

PS.

i checked the SLA in ticket #300631 – Server down

and i dont find ANY reply that was longer than your ordered SLA 24h business days/hours MO-TH 08-17 and FR 08-12. all answers where done within this ordered SLA, so there is nothing shocking on our end, or where do you see support is delay with replies longer than your ordered SLA ? i dont see it.

Am 23.12.2016 um 20:54 schrieb OwnCube management:

Dear

please dont contact me on my private email, i am not a supporter and i see your ticket about one account that is having a issue is in progress and our technicals are checking this. I see all other acounts are fixed since a while and i dont see ANY account down for WEEKS as you wrote. Also we handle your request within your privateSLA with low prio because its not a business usage account.

Have great christmas

Regards

Friedrich Stagl

Am 23.12.2016 um 20:15 schrieb:

friedrich,

 

I just wanted to point out that the support on owncube.com is shocking. Been down for a number of weeks and support have stopped replying to tickets.

What does Twitter say?

As you can see from Twitter, there are serious issues at Owncube. It is also concerning to see how Nextcloud actually recommends this company. Many issues stem from Owncube not renewing services that are essential to their operation or spam reports. It seems Owncube is popular with spammers! What a surprise. Another surprise, Owncube recently annonced they were closing their Twitter, or just no longer replying to customers on Twitter.

Customer Reviews

This is what our users think of Owncube

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3 important reasons to use Google+ for your hosting business

Posted on January 15, 2016by Perry Toone with No comments

Google+ has always been an enigma for most small business owners. There’s a lot less talk about Google+ compared to the big 2 social networks – Facebook and Twitter. Add in Pinterest or Instagram and it’s little wonder why Google+ fades into the background.

While most small businesses are busy building a large Facebook Like count or Twitter Follower number, there are a select few small businesses who are reaping significant benefits from using Google+ to market their business.

So before you dismiss Google+ as something you just don’t have time to look into right now, have a read of these 3 ways / reasons to use the social network that has in excess of 300 million active users (btw in 2013 Google+ officially became the the 2nd largest social network behind Facebook)

 

1. Google+ Authorship

The number 1 reason you need to be using Google+ is that it allows you to claim authorship over the content you write across the internet.

You’ve probably noticed for a while now that when you make a search on Google you sometimes see search page results like this. Notice the profile pictures next to some of the results.

 

These profile images are pulled from the author’s Google+ page under the Authorship feature that Google uses in it’s search results.

You might be asking, “Well that’s nice, but what’s so special about the profile images?”.

Having Google+ authorship can significantly increase the traffic your get from search engines. Studies have shown that having an image appear next to your website content in a Google search results page can increase clicks and attention (take a read of the study by Search Engine Journal).

Most businesses online are investing into content marketing so it makes a lot of sense to make sure that whatever content your product on your blog or when guest posting somewhere else, you want to have your profile image show up to get more clicks.

Google+ Authorship, a no brainer and something every small business should leverage. Here’s how you setup Google+ Authorship.

 

2. Google+ is your main local listing on search results

If you have a physical component to your business like a call center or service center then you absolutely must be on Google+.

Your business Google+ page is the main listing that people searching Google see when they make type in searches like “cafes nearby” or “greek restaurant in ___(insert suburb/city)___”. Here’s an example of one I tried

 

Not only does the George Street Cafe have a strong position on the search results page, they also have their full address available, a pin on the map and a star rating. That’s definitely going to catch the eye. So where does all that info come from? Well George Street Cafe’s Google+ page of course.

 

If you have a physical location that needs to be found by customers you need to be investing time into Google+. Get all your important information up there (like address, opening times etc), put lots of pictures and encourage reviews from your customers.

 

3. Effective Influencer Outreach

Google+ offers a lot of really useful ways to get in touch with influential figures in your industry.

Say for example you’re running an online jewellery store and there is a particular blogger who you think will really love your pieces. You want to get in touch and discuss how you could work together.

Google+ offers a great avenue for doing this because it’s a lot easier to get someone’s attention. The reason for this is that notifications via Google+ show up quite prominently even when people are just checking their Gmail inbox.

 

There are a number of ways to get the attention of an influencer via these notifications. Here is a list of different methods

  • Mention them in a post
  • Share a post with them directly
  • Share a post and you’re in a circle they subscribe to
  • Comment on a post they created
  • Comment on a post after they comment on it
  • Add them to a circle
  • Suggest new people to add to their circles
  • Tag them in a photo
  • Tag one of their photos
  • Suggest a profile photo for them
  • Comment on a photo after they comment on it
  • Comment on a photo they are tagged in
  • Comment on a photo they tagged
  • Start a conversation with them
  • Send them an invitation or update an event
  • Remind them about events
  • Any activity on events they created

The idea is to warm up the influencer by consistently getting their attention over a period of time. Once they get familiar with you it’s a lot easier to strike up an introduction and get the conversation going.

But wait there’s more
Another thing that has just been released this week is that you can now contact people on Google+ even if you don’t have their email address.

Normally if you wanted to drop a more detailed message to an influencer you would need to do it via email, thus beginning the long hunt for their email address.

Now with Google+ you can message a person you’ve connected with on Google+ without their email address.

If that influencer hasn’t added you to their circles (that’s Google+ version of being friends on Facebook) you can still message them but it will move to a separate section. Read all the details of the new Google+ communications feature.

 

Next steps?

If you haven’t already the first thing you need to do is setup your Google+ profile with all your important information. First step is log into your Google Account and go to Google+. Don’t forget to setup a Google+ business page as well.

Once you’ve got those done try and dedicate some time, even if it’s 2 hours a week, to learning more about Google+ and how you can use to market your business better.

Why you need to backup your website

Posted on January 13, 2016by Perry Toone with No comments

If your website disappeared overnight, without a trace, what would you do?

Do you have a secure backup you could use to restore the service?

For a lot of people, backing up their website is a secondary consideration. They put faith in their hosting provider that their site is going to be safe.

But it’s not always the case.

Servers sometimes fail. Hackers with bad intentions can also wreak havoc. Or maybe you have a dispute with your web developer.

These are all great  reasons to make sure that you have your website well and truly backed up and stored somewhere safe.

If you’re doing a project with TweakDortks we want to make sure that you have a full backup of your website before your project is put into the marketplace. That’s why we ask you the question: “Do you have a secure copy of your website?”

If you don’t have a secure backup of your website, we’re happy to do it for you. If you want to do it yourself here are some tips to get you started:

Three tips for keeping a backup of your website

1. Keep your backups up to date

While having an out of date backup of your website is better than no backup, it can still be painful having lost a lot of work. The more frequently you backup your website the easier it will be to restore your site if it goes down.

2. Store your backups separate to your main website

Storing your backups on the same server as your website is going to cause issues. Instead you can transfer it to your computer, onto a hard drive or use a service like ownCloud. If you want to be thorough with it, store a copy in all three places.

 3. Backup everything

WordPress has a built in function to export your content out of your website. But don’t be fooled – this doesn’t include any file uploads you’ve done (like images on your posts) and won’t include your theme files. This is particularly important if you’ve been tweaking your website.

Things you want to backup:

  1. WordPress Plugins
  2. Your WordPress Themes
  3. All Images and Files
  4. WordPress database

Backing up your website doesn’t need to be difficult, there are plenty of tutorials online to help you do it.

Thexyz have just rolled out a new feature that allows you to choose between managing your backups yourself or getting TweakDorks to do it for you. At the end of the day we want to ensure you’ve always got a copy of your data, and for some people the easiest way to get that done properly is to outsource it to TweakDorks.

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