March 7th, 2010
Branding is one of the most important aspects of any business, large or small, retail or B2B. An effective brand strategy gives you a major edge in increasingly competitive markets. But what exactly does “branding” mean? How does it affect a business like yours?
Your brand is your promise to your customer. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it differentiates your offering from your competitors’. Your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be.
The foundation of your brand is your logo. Your website, packaging and promotional materials–all of which should integrate your logo–communicate your brand.
You might ask, “How does this pertain to FTP hosting?”. SmartFile knows how important it is to protect your brand, so we have included the ability brand your FTP site with any Smarter package or higher. Our FTP branding allows you to use your logo, your color scheme, and your own domain name (uploads.yourcompany.com). We also have included your logo and contact information with every email notification the SmartFile system generates.
After your site is branded, SmartFile becomes completely transparent. This allo3s you is and to protect the thing that makes your company unique, your image.
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Posted in New Features | No Comments »
December 23rd, 2009
Every business is trying to save money, but no industry knows that better than the construction industry. They have felt it the most during this rough economic time. As a result they are looking for new ways to not only save money, but become more efficient.
To receive bids from their sub-contractors most of them mail printed plans or burn CD/DVDs. Both of these methods can be very costly. One SmartFile customer estimates the that her time, the CD and the postage can cost between $5 and $7 a CD. With as many as 300 subs on one job so it becomes expensive. Also, because subs are mobile they have a tendency to misplace the disc, which not only cost more money, but it also slows the process down.
With SmartFile she can now upload all of her large PDF and CAD files to a project directory. With the File-2-Email feature she can email her subs a link for them to download the all of the files quickly. This has proven to be a very efficient process and has saved them countless hours on burning disc.
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Posted in Construction Business | 1 Comment »
October 28th, 2009
We use a lot of open source software at SmartFile. Therefore, when we have the chance, we like to give back to the community.
We recently implemented more detailed graphing and monitoring using Cacti and Nagios. If you are unfamiliar with these open source software packages, I would urge you to check them out as they are incredibly useful.
Today, we are happy to provide the a plugin for Cacti to monitor proftpd, the FTP server we use at SmartFile. The plugin allows Cacti to graph the number of users connected to the FTP server as well as the number of active uploads/downloads.
To see our posting in the Cacti forums which provides this plugin as well as instructions, please see the link below.
http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?t=34722
We will use this blog to release other contributions from time to time.
Tags: cacti, open source, proftpd
Posted in New Features | No Comments »
October 21st, 2009
Source: Indianapolis Business Journal
Writer: Chris O’Malley
Date: 10/19/09
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in In the News | 2 Comments »
October 5th, 2009
Emailing large files can impossible for most. Most emailing providers limit your attachment size to 10MB per email. This can be difficult when you have a manufacturer in China needing an important CAD file to start building the widget that is going to make you millions. Or how about a client in Malaysia needing the PowerPoint presentation you spent all night on to deliver the big speech.
Recently China blocked a big player specializing in emailing large files. I won’t mention any names, but if you Google the term “Emailing Large Files” they will be the top result. Obviously this has caused a huge problem for them and their customer base.
Did you know that SmartFile allows to not only FTP and share large files, but you can also email them too? We have also just introduced a feature that allows you to email directories of files, thus allowing you to send one link to several files. You can also define how many times the file is downloaded and set an date for the link to expire. Pretty cool, huh? Best of all our service works in China!
Posted in Emailing Large Files | 2 Comments »
September 14th, 2009
Smartfile host data for clients of all types and sizes. A business vertical that is increasing for us is in medical transcription storage. Medical transcription, also known as MT, which deals in the process of transcription, or converting voice-recorded reports as dictated by physicians and/or other healthcare professionals, into text format.
Often times the people that service this industry work from home or service multiple locations. This then requires a central location that offers secure online storage and file sharing. SmartFile offers a HIPAA compliant platform that is easy for any skill level user to use. With features such as link-2-email and 2-factor authentication SmartFile is a good fit for all size medical transcription companies.
Posted in Medical Transcription | 4 Comments »
September 8th, 2009
Most business do not derive revenue from IT, therefore in an effort to cut cost many businesses are trying to find ways to decrease their IT budgets. This even holds true for information technology businesses. Why allocate a server, Internet bandwidth, and a intellectual resource just to host a Microsoft Exchange Server for only 15 people? You can outsource this headache for just $8.00 a mailbox and never have to worry if some script kiddy is going try to take it down.
The same idea same holds true for FTP access. Why allocate a server, and tie up your Internet bandwidth to have a product that is not nearly as flexible as Smartfile. For just $9.95 a month you have a safe and secure off site back up and file access system that anyone can administer.
Posted in FTP Hosting | 3 Comments »
August 26th, 2009
Unfortunately for us we are not the only company on the block offering online file storage and FTP Hosting. Although we do seem to be the only company offering unlimited users for all of our packages. That is right, I did say ALL of our packages are measured in space, and not by how many people have access to that space.
If you are currently using another service, don’t be surprised if you are charged extra every time you add a user. I can assure you there is NO technical reason for the extra cost, but maybe they have a business reason. Could it be greed?
Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »
August 26th, 2009
Sometimes the most useful and exciting features in software are also the simplest. While this may seem counter-intuitive, I can back this up with an example from the most recent smartfile.com software update. We included a number of useful features:
- A new tree-view for browsing directories.
- Ability to extract and compress archives.
- Support for international file names.
- Time limited accounts (expiration).
But one in particular (at least in my opinion) really makes the software much more flexible. From the title you can probably guess that this feature has to do with linking. You would be correct, the feature I am writing about today allows our users to create an ‘external link’ to a file within their FTP space which can be used to directly download a file without logging in. Such links were originally conceived to allow users to email files to colleagues quickly without having to set up a new account for them. First let’s take a look at how the feature works.
- The user first locates a file to create a link for.
- Then they choose the expiration and usage count options that suit their needs.
A whole host of possibilities is enabled by this simple feature. Image hosting for eBay or similar can be accomplished by setting the usage limit to unlimited and expiration to never. The link can then be used in the src attribute of an HTML img tag. File hosting can be done by placing the link onto a website to make files available for download. Links can be sent via email, instant messages or services such as Twitter or Facebook. We are currently working on an API that would allow links to be created programmatically from a shopping cart or other external application, this would enable digital distribution of pay content or software.
Posted in New Features | No Comments »
July 22nd, 2009
FTP (File Transfer Protocal) has been around since before me. I think??? There are hundreds of companies trying to replace FTP with their own version of software or services that move files. Unfortunately no matter how innovative they think they are, it’s hard to replace a good thing.
FTP programs allow us to move any size file, yes even Terabytes of data, and not having to worry about the browser timing out. FTP can be great if you drop your connection. It is intelligent enough to pick up where you upload/download left off. If you like speed, which I’m sure you do, you can’t beat the speed of a direct FTP connection to your files and directories. Best of all, you are not limited to the number of files you upload or download a time. So go ahead and move your 10,000 picture library with just a few clicks. Or you can always do the alternative of selecting 5 pictures at time just to wait for them to upload.
We have worked hard to incorporate FTP into the core of the SmartFile service. Just don’t let the fear of the unknown be the only thing slowing you down from speeding you up.
Posted in FTP Hosting | No Comments »
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