Sending secure information via an SSL connection

When shopping online and on other websites where you leave personal information, this information must be sent and encoded via a secure connection. This is made possible by using what is referred to as a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection.

What is an SSL certificate?

Besides that SSL connection, you also need a certificate that proves that the connection is secure and that you really are the owner of the website. To make this possible, there are what are referred to as SSL certificates. These are digital certificates that are delivered by authorized companies such as Verisign, Comodo, Thawte and Geotrust. Upon request, these companies check if the identity of the buyer of the certificate matches the identity of the owner of the website. It is perfectly possible for someone to register a typo domain that looks like the domain of your web store. This person can then obtain a certificate with the typo but never with your company name. Customers can then immediately see that they are purchasing goods from a fraudulent organisation. More »

According to renowned market research company Forrester, the e-commerce sector still has the wind in its sails, because in the US, it will grow from 243.7 billion dollars in 2009 to 271.3 billion in 2010, and even 295.4 billion in 2011, to finally reach 341.8 billion dollars in 2013.

Surprising is the fact that it is not the traditional service provider sector that will deliver profitable results in coming years, but it is the retail sector. In 2009, it held 58.5% of the market and in 2013, this percentage will be 62.3%. Travel is in decline (from 35.9% in 2009 to 32.9% in 2013), as is the online sale of tickets (from 2.5% this year to 2.3% in 2013).

Forrester even dares to make detailed forecasts per sector. Those that will grow the most are the following: food & drinks (79.1%); art and collections (77.1%); nonprescription drugs (62.7%); jewelry (61.8%); car parts (61.1%) and home electronics (53.6%). According to Forrester, the sector that will grow the most is the online sale of furniture (105.5%).

If you have a company in one of these sectors and you are not online yet, it is – if you believe Forrester – the ideal moment to also offer your products online.

In 2009, .be celebrated its 20th anniversary. At the beginning of this year, the millionth .be domain name was registered. The Belgian extension remains popular. In 2009, for the sixth year in a row, the number of new .be reached a new record peak (232,746). That is 4.4% more new registrations than in 2008.

What is surprising is that the percentage of individuals who register a domain name grows. In 2008, it was still 30% and in 2009, this percentage went up to 34%. DNS.be, the managing entity of the Belgian domain names, acclaimed this increase: “The benefits of having one’s own domain name are considerable. If you have your own e-mail address, things are much easier e.g. when switching Internet provider, because you do not miss a single e-mail and you do not have to notify all your contacts each time about your new e-mail address.”

In comparison to its neighbouring countries, Belgium has less domain names. Nederland has 3.7 million .nl domains, Germany has 13.4 million .de domains and France has 1.6 million .fr domain names.

Obviously, by this, we do not refer to the cold weather we’ve endured for the past weeks, but we refer to the term, the hype, that everyone is talking about: cloud hosting and cloud computing.

Do you not know what we are talking about? Do not worry, because you are not alone! A survey conducted by research company Portio revealed that 56% of the European IT decision-makers do not know what cloud computing means. And yet, this new technology has many benefits for your company.

The technique: virtualisation, what is it?

Cloud Hosting is based on the concept of virtualisation. This technology eliminates the direct dependence between the software and the hardware that runs this software. The idea of cloud computing is indeed to focus not on hardware, but on what your application or website needs: memory, computing power, storage capacity and bandwidth. The word “cloud” refers to the Internet and the parts and the actions that are not exclusively carried out via one single machine or server anymore. More »

Everyone has now become aware that Haiti is in need of financial help. On Thursday 21 January, VTM and Eén will broadcast a live benefit show, hosted by Martine Tanghe and Stef Wauters. On Friday, all radio stations (JOE fm, MNM, Radio 2, Studio Brussel and Q-music) will form “Radio 1212”, with the purpose of collecting as much money as possible for the victims in Haiti.

Combell is happy to support this initiative and provides the technical infrastructure that is necessary to process credit card donations online. The infrastructure comprises 3 powerful high-end level dedicated servers. One of these three dedicated servers processes all donations made via the call centre. The other two dedicated servers process all donations made via the website www.1212.be. An extra high-end level dedicated server is left on standby in case extra processing power is required or to be able to perform extra fast operations in case of a possible incident.

We hope that this action will be a huge success!

A recent American study revealed that in recent months, an increasing number of web shoppers clicked on paid search results (such as Google Adwords). According to the study conducted by NetElixir, there was an increase of 11%.

The number of web stores advertising via this channel also increased. In comparison with 2008, in 2009, there were about 10 to 12% more advertisers per keyword. Of course, this also resulted in a price increase for advertisers. The prices per click increased especially in the categories of clothing (+10%), consumer electronics (+7%) and flowers and gifts (+6%).

Are you also interested in advertising your products in Google’s paid search results? Each Combell customer receives a free marketing budget of 50 euros or 75 euros to advertise in Google Adwords.

On the Internet, everything goes fast. Only one hour after it was publicly announced that the Dutch Jasper Schuringa avoided an attack on a plane in the US, an American registered the domain name jasperschuringa.com. jasperschuringa.nl was also registered by a company from Enschede. Domain hackers lie thus constantly in wait. The sites will probably be filled with commercial links.

Last month, the same happened to golfer Tiger Woods. Almost immediately after the announcement of his supposed car crash, TigerWoodsCrash.com, TigerWoodsAccident.com and TigerWoodsInjured.com were registered. Now that Google attaches more and more importance to Realtime-Search and that current events get a higher ranking, these domain names are often big business for domain hijackers.

According to a report published by McAfee, domain names from Cameroon (.cm) are the most dangerous. This is due to the fact that, most of the time, the extension is entered by people who actually want to visit a .com. On such typo .com domains, cybersquatters place spyware, adware and other risky content. Almost 40% of the Cameroonian domain names are infected this way.

Other dangerous extensions are .cn (China), .ws (Samoa), .ph (Philippines) and .su (the former Soviet Union). The safest extension in Europe is Ireland (.ie). Belgium came 81st and the Netherlands 84th (ranked from the least safe to the safest extension). The complete report can be found here .

Recently, the yearly election of the CIO and ICT Manager of the Year took place. For a couple of years, Combell has been sponsoring this event, organised by the trade journal Datanews.

Christiaan De Backer, Chief Information Officer of TomTom, was elected CIO of the Year. In addition, 2 ICT Managers of the Year were also elected. For the public sector, it was Rudi Van De Velde, CIO of the Universitair Ziekenhuis Brussel. For the private sector, the honour went to Luc Pluys, ICT manager of Van Genechten Packaging. All the nominated had to present their file to a professional jury consisting of notorious IT specialists, professors and representatives of several user groups.

Until December 31, 2009, you get a free Asus Eee PC 1005HA and 1 month free server hosting if you subscribe to a 3-year dedicated server contract. Be quick and check out our dedicated server offer or get in touch with our sales team via our toll-free number 0800-8-567890 or via e-mail.