It's All About Fraud We recently encountered a significant problem with a long-term client. We received a text message stating that they overpaid and that we need to Venmo them the money. The next day, we received a voicemail from an unknown number early in…
What is New in 2025? We are ending the fourth month of 2025, and we have been very busy at Simply Web Services this year. First, we upgraded all the website hosting packages, adding a ton more space and features to each one. We have also…
How SPAM Blacklists Work We have all heard of SPAM Black Lists, but do you know how they work? On the surface, they are designed to maintain a list of IP addresses and domains that are associated with known spammers. They are used by email…
The Ultimate Guide to Updating WordPress Securely Keeping your WordPress website up-to-date, is extremely important. It is necessary for security, speed, and new features. If you're a new site owner or a more experienced one, updating WordPress can be easy — if you follow a few simple…
How Much Does a Marketing Agency Cost? This is a common question we get - and our answer is always, it depends. What does it depend on - What would you like us to do? Everyone would like to have a massive online presence, and…
Why Isn’t My Business Showing Up on Google? Google has been a "participation required" placement for companies that want their potential and existing customers to find them Not being found on Google is frustrating and affects your overall visibility.Some common reasons your business is not…
Site of the Month - January 2025 - SungardenSoaps Site of the Month is a semi-regular feature for our blog where we feature a Simply Web Services customer and their website. The site of the month for January 2025 is SunGardenSoaps.com. SunGardenSoaps.com is the website…
Winter 2024-25 Newsletter As we all start winding down the year, counting our blessings, and looking forward to the new year, we wanted to thank each of you for the belief you have in Simply Web Services. This year held a few surprises for us…
How to Respond to Reviews As a small business owner, you should be monitoring your online reviews. There are many different places where a review can be posted. A positive review is great and can boost your online reputation, which can attract new customers. A…
Beware of Emails Stating Your Account Has Been Suspended First and foremost, Simply Web Services will never send a client an email stating that you need to give us your password. Second, if you think something is fishy, ask, we are here to answer your…
Pay-Per-Click: What It Is and Why You Would Use It The concept of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a simple one: high-traffic search engines such as Bing and Google sell listings in their search results to businesses and individuals, which are displayed above the organic, non-paid…
Upgrading WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system, referred to within WordPress as Themes. WordPress was created as…
What Is WordPress - Non Geek Speak WordPress is a program or app (more commonly known as a Content Management System or CMS), and to extend its capabilities, like a large opening slider or slideshow for example, you add plugins to it. You also have…
New Way of Doing Email The new server setup has a new way of doing email. We are now using an outgoing email service that monitors all outgoing email for policy and SPAM. This is designed to stop or slow the spread of SPAM. Think…
The Move to a New Server Was a HUGE Success Minus a few minor growing pains here and there, it went very well and we couldn't be happier and we hope that you are as well. Here is the skinny on who, what, when and…
WOW! That Was a Long But Successful Weekend! Afternoon! We have launched the new servers – it was a long weekend, but the move was overall successful. We have only had a few unique to the specific client glitches that are currently all fixed. Each…
Server Migration The migration to our new server is coming along well. This new server will have twice the physical CPUs, three times the CPU cores, and twice the CPU clock speed. It will have twice the RAM, and we are moving from classic spinning…
SPAM Is Out of Control Lately, we have been experiencing a huge influx of SPAM emails, but this time, things are not what they seem. Our email server uses a software application called MailScanner, which checks every email message and gives it a score. The…
Email Attachments and MailScanner MailScanner is a highly respected open-source email security system design for Linux-based email gateways. It is used at over 40,000 sites around the world, protecting top government departments, commercial corporations, and educational institutions. This technology has fast become the standard email…
Using Outlook to Block SPAM Does SPAM have you down lately? If you are using Microsoft Outlook, you can actually control some of the anti-SPAM features, and when used correctly, you can greatly reduce the amount of SPAM that makes it to your email inbox,…
Email Phishing Part 4 of 4 Following on the heels of the previous phishing emails, this one is supposedly a HUMAN RESOURCE INTERNAL MEMO, and yep, you guessed it, I'm getting a raise., Yahoooooo!!! It's about time, lol. Human Resources Internal Memo Clicking on the…
Phishing Team Part 3 of 4 While I was drafting the previous Phishing post, this one came in. This time they tried to make it look like there was an Urgent message in Teams for me. If you are not familiar with Teams, it is…
Weekend Phishing Trip Part 2 of 4 According to my email, I'm getting an increase in my salary, nice! It looks like I'm being Spear Phished for some reason, but they didn't do their homework on me, as the first email, I got earlier (see…
Let's Go Phishing Part 1 of 4 Recently, I (Joe) received an email that looked like an email that our email server would automatically send out to an email user. It came from support@simplywebservices.com, and it was to joe@simplywebservices.com The subject was "Pending messages couldn't be delivered,…
WordPress - Is It Time To Update WordPress: It Is Extremely Important To Keep Your Site Updated I would estimate that more than 95% of the websites on our servers have WordPress as their CMS (Content Management System). Why not, it is extremely flexible and…
What is Pixel Tracking? Did you know that email marketers use a dirty little nearly invisible trick to track you and to keep tracking you?It is called 'Pixel Tracking' and it is when they insert a "microscopic" pixel or image into the email code, that…
SEO: This Company Can Make me Number One... When an SEO or marketing company tells you that they can make you #1 on Google or another search engine, then you need to first ask yourself the following questions: If they can make me #1 for…
Google SPAM Call Google (posers) spamming you with calls? We can tell you how to opt out of them. Have you reached to answer your phone, breaking your focus, to find that it is someone saying they are with Google and they can help you…
Fall Is Here Fall is a great time to revisit your marketing plan for the upcoming new year. We suggest you take part of a day to review your plan to determine what is working, what needs to change, and how you might accomplish it. …
Why You Should Not Do SEO Of Your Website by Yourself Are you thinking about doing your own SEO for your small business? I want to caution you and educate you on how much of a niche and there are so many pitfalls that if…
ADA Compliance SCAM There has been an email floating around for some time now about making sure that your website is ADA-compliant. Before we get into the email itself. I want to first talk about what is ADA Compliance.ADA is referring to the Americans with…
Essential Elements For Online Businesses Often business owners face the question of how important is a website for their business. Well, a corporate website should always be considered an investment and is directly related to the revenue that a business generates. A website is a…
WordPress Plugin Ultimate Members If you are using the Ultimate Members plugin for WordPress, then you really need to get it updated soon. Versions that are lower than 2.6.7 are subjected to a vulnerability that will allow regular users to become admins of the website. This…
What Happen To My Embedded YouTube Video If you're having trouble embedding YouTube videos and all you are seeing is this dreaded “Video unavailable – Watch on YouTube”, then this post is for you. You have your web page exactly how you want it, which…
New Server It has been a very bumpy ride, but we are finally at the point where we can announce that the new server is ready.A few months ago, we started down the road to replacing our aging servers. The plan was to have this…
The popular password manager, LastPass has recently issued a security notification about an incident they experienced. Below are the details: Dear valued customer, In keeping with our commitment to transparency, we wanted to inform you of a security incident that our team is currently investigating.…
Site of The Month - October 2022 - Flues-n-Ducts.com Site of the month is a regular feature for our blog where we will feature a Simply Web Services customer and their website.The site of the month for October 2022 is Flues-n-Ducts.com. Flues-n-Ducts.com is the website…
Mobile Web Site The SBA (Small Business Administration) states that 4 out of 5 small businesses don't have a mobile website. Mobile is now 60% of all web traffic. There is a huge difference between a responsive website and a mobile website. A responsive website…
Video Marketing & Branding YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world (Google is #1). YouTube receives over one billion visitors a month! Businesses with small budgets but great videos can gain new customers and new visitors to their websites. Businesses can also…
Samsung is the Latest Tech Company to Get Hacked The below is from Samsung regarding a breach on their system. If you own a Samsung account, we recommend that you change your password(s). Dear Valued Customer, At Samsung, security is a top priority. We are…
Sit of The Month - September 2022 - OCASFriends.org Site of the month is a new feature for our blog where we will feature a Simply Web Services customer and their website. The site of the month for October 2022 is OCASFriends.org, operated by Friends…
Facebook Marketing It’s apparent that social media is not just a spot to hang out with your friends and shoot the breeze, it's BIG business! Having a Facebook page gives you an opportunity to promote and grow your business. Simply Web Services has packages that…
The popular password vault software appears to have been compromised, they sent the following to their clients: Dear valued customer, We are writing to inform you that we recently detected some unusual activity within portions of the LastPass development environment. We have determined that an…
It appears that the popular American streaming media service and client-server media player platform announced that they experienced an attack against their network. They sent the following to clients yesterday. Dear Plex User, We want you to be aware of an incident involving your Plex…
Domain Name Price Increases Upcoming On January 3, 2020, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) announced major changes to the contract they have with Verisign. ICANN and Verisign made these changes without consulting or incorporating feedback from the ICANN community or internet users. …
Field of Dreams There is a well-known quote from the movie "Field of Dreams". That quote is "If you build it, he will come" (yes, it is 'he', not 'they'). The above quote can apply to a website project. Just because you have launched this…
Sit of The Month - August 2022 - FredericksburgAirportShuttle.com Site of the month is a new feature for our blog where we will feature a Simply Web Services customer and their website.The site of the month for August 2022 is Belman Limousine and Airport Transportation…
What is Reputation Management? Any successful business or organization will need to manage its reputation with potential new customers. In today's online world, a company's reputation can go from hero to zero overnight, and the really sad part is you as the business owner really…
What is Shared Hosting? Shared website hosting is where a hosting company will host more than one website on a server. This is a very common practice in the industry and almost every hosting company does this here is why. If a server costs $1,800…
What is a Dedicated Server and Do I Need One? A dedicated server is a server that hosts just one website at a time, or in some cases one client at a time. This client may host several websites on their Dedicated Server. Dedicated servers…
How Many Websites Can A Server Support? This is a great question and one that I think deserves an answer. However, that answer isn't going to be really straightforward as there are several variables that can change. But the way the modern website is set…
What is Black Hat SEO? Black Hat SEO is the direct opposite of White Hat SEO. In Black Hat, the concept is to get great results, period at all costs. This very often includes unethical tactics that are later picked up by Google, which in…
What is SEO? SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process or technique of improving your website/blog so that it ranks higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) on Search Engines (SE) like Google, Bing Yahoo, etc., for certain keywords. Typically people focus on appearing…
Is Your Printer Spying On You? Did you know that many color laser printers print tiny, nearly invisible yellow dots in a pattern that identifies the printer that printed the output?(photo from Wikipedia)I'm not joking and this isn't something out of some SCI-FI movie, this…
PHP Security Flax Fixed On 02-17-2022, fixes and the vulnerability report (CVE-2021-21708) were released. A proof-of-concept exploit based on using PHP to query a database shows that the bug can be used to crash the PHP process, so a working Denial of Service (DoS) attack…
WorPress Plugin Updraft and Updraft Plus need to be updated A new 'vulnerability' has been exposed in Updraft and Updraft Plus. Updraft and Updraft Plus are WordPress plugins that are designed for backing up, restoring and cloning your WordPress installation. It is described as "The…
Gaping Security Hole discovered in WordPress Elementor plugin To be specific, the vulnerability is in the popular Essential Addons for Elementor plugin for WordPress. This is a premium plugin that is used to add features to the Elementor plugin and the solution to fix is…
Site of The Month - February 2022 - AverageJoeWeekly.com Site of the month is a new feature for our blog where we will feature a Simply Web Services customer and their website. The Simply Web Services team sat down and went through a very long…
Google - "People Also Ask" Also known as Google Answer Box, Featured Questions, Featured SnippetsAn "answer box" is a Google feature that is usually displayed in a box that tries to answer a question directly, the answer is usually short and concise.Google’s "People Also Ask" section…
Phishing Email Here is a new spin on an old trick. This phishing attacker hopes that you will fall for the warning and click on the link to change your password. "Phishing is the fraudulent practice of sending emails purporting to be from reputable companies…
53 Plugins and 40 Themes from AccessPress Hacked WordPress admins who use any plugins or themes downloaded from AccessPress are being urged to take action after researchers discovered that backdoors were installed in many of the app maker’s products months ago. The attack was discovered…
Navy Federal Credit Union (NFCU) - Phishing Email Recently there has been a spear-phishing email going around for Navy Federal Credit Union (NFCU). The email has been coming from notification@noreply.com and contains a base64 encoded html attachment (Navy Federal Credit Union Attach Form.html). The attachment…
Are You Still Paying for Antivirus? I was recently reading this article "Still Paying for Antivirus Software? Experts Say You Probably Don't Need It", where the author is stating that most people really don't need anti-virus software and they really don't need to pay for…
Cyber Insurance, Explained In our four-part post on Cyber Security Scans (1) (2) (3) & (4), we talked about Cyber Security Insurance, and that resulted in the required scans.Cyber security insurance protects businesses against computer-related crimes and losses. This can include targeted attacks, such as…
Cyber Security Scans - Update We have achieved a 100% for this client on their insurance companies Cyber Security Scan. This includes their website and their office computer setup.
Cyber Security Scans - Part 3 After addressing over 900 plus findings on the Cyber Security scan report, I found many of the findings were not from IP's in my subnet and not related to the website being scanned. I started to parse the results…
Cyber Security Scans - Part 2 In our previous Cyber Security Scan post, we started to talk about the findings of the initial scan. Here are the rest of the scan results. There are a total 87 findings in the "DNS HEALTH" section There is…
Cyber Security Scans - Part 1 This will be a multi-part blog post, explaining one of our newer services we offer and how we were successful for one customer. Simply Web Services, LLC, has always offered Cyber Security Scans as a service, but we never…
Facebook Wi-Fi Facebook is launching Facebook Wi-Fi, which is a method for customers to use your wireless network connection (Wi-Fi), to connect to the internet. Directly from Facebook's email marketing, promoting Facebook Wi-Fi. How It Works Facebook Wi-Fi will allow people to connect to your…
GoDaddy Has Been Compromised This is directly from GoDaddy: On November 17, 2021, we discovered unauthorized third-party access to our Managed WordPress hosting environment. Here is the background on what happened and the steps we took, and are taking, in response: We identified suspicious activity…
What is Reputation Management At Simply Web Services, our job doesn't have to stop when your website project is complete. Many of our clients continue with Simply Web Services for hosting, SEO, Online Marketing and Reputation Management. We continually work to optimize your success on…
Welcome to our new blog, you will also notice some older posts that we feel are still worth reading. Enjoy
HeartBleed Got You Down? We have been getting a ton of questions about HeartBleed and how it has affected you. So we have come up with a list of popular web sites and if you need to change your password. Keep in mind, that hackers…
Hackers Among Us So far in the month of October we have had five web sites hacked, plus two major attacks against some of the commercial software applications we use daily at Simply Web Services. And one email password compromised. All the attacks this month…
Siri offers the latest backdoor into your iPhone With two lockscreen holes and a fingerprint sensor that can be fooled with woodglue, we thought we’d given diehard iPhone fans a horse that was already dangerously high enough for them not to get down from. Read more here
Recycled Yahoo email addresses still receiving messages for previous owners – passwords included Yahoo announced in June 2013 that it was going to recycle inactive email addresses by giving them to other users who wanted them. Addresses and Yahoo IDs that had been inactive for…
iOS 7 Lockscreen Hole Discovered Already Lock screens have a chequered security history, with Android having its recent share of problems, too. The main reason is complexity, one of security’s mortal enemies. You can understand why some exceptions to a phone lock might be desirable, or even required…
Privacy – Government Is Tracking Verizon Customers’ Records The National Security Agency is obtaining a complete set of phone records from all Verizon U.S. customers under a secret court order, according to a published account and former officials. The account provides fresh evidence that NSA’s…
Privacy – US orders Google to hand over user info to the FBI In March, a US federal judge sided with the privacy advocacy group, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), to overturn the constitutionality of National Security Letters (NSLs). The letters, the judge wrote, violate free-speech…
Now this one is rich. 🙂 Imagine the scene. You buy a second-hand laptop using it to, among other things, have secret sexy video chats with your significant other. Unbeknownst to you, naked photos of you are being taken by a company hired to track…
Here is a place that claims for a monthly fee they will get you better placement and will also submit your web site to 500,000 Search Engines, Directories and Specialty Sites – but you MUST act now. Well for only $99 a month, this sounds…