Sunday, 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.
Click Here to Learn More
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Wednesday, 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
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Wednesday, 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.
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Sunday, July 19th, 2009
SmartFile is a division of FTP Hosting. Starting as a web development company and later adding hosting to our suite of services, we soon realized a need for moving and storing large files. As a result, we launched FTP Hosting, which specialized in moving large files, but was developed and marketed to the savvy computer user. In order to capture broader market, SmartFile was conceived. 10 years later, with a new design, more features, and an easier to use interface, SmartFile now offers our users a place to store, share, and backup files.
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