We made some changes to our hosting packages, but we think you’ll like what we have to offer. Our hosting plans now include:

• Increased network security and a larger systems operations team, providing additional performance monitoring.
• More disk space and data transfer for hosting accounts.
• A new control panel with improved layout and navigation, custom designed from the ground up, based on user feedback.
• Access to more than 200 tools and services for managing your website, domains and email, including more one-click application installs.
• Advertising bonuses such as a $75 Google Adwords Credit, $50 Facebook Credit, $25 Yahoo Search Credit and Free YellowPages.com Business listing.

As we stated in our Five Core Values post, we’re thinking big, growing, and aiming to delight our customers. We hope you enjoy the new added features to our plans!

Netfirms has been in business for over 12 years. We often get asked to share insight on what drives us. Recently we put pen to paper and articulated the values we’ve always known to be true. We are proud to count amongst our customer base many successful entrepreneurs making a difference in the world around them. We hope our core values will inspire you to discover yours.

Here are our Five Core Values that guide our behavior:

Online forums are a great way to bring individuals together for open discussions, to ask questions and to build communities related to topics of interest. In fact, forums can be considered the most original form of social networking. With the rise of Facebook and Twitter, online forums are now becoming popular again as all businesses, large and small, look to develop communities around their product, brand, and business.

Vanilla Forums (vanillaforums.org) recently released version 2.0 of their software and we’d like to take a minute to tell you why we will be integrating them into our services for our clients.

Vanilla Forums are unlike any other forum software on the market due to its simplicity, easy customization and extreme versatility. It is open-source, free to use and, much like WordPress, works on a plug-in framework so developers could build the features they want or take advantage of the 40+ plug-ins currently in their database. They boast a rapidly growing customer base of 350,000+ and to provide an example of the flexibility of its framework, the software has even been used to power web pages like the Firefox Add-ons site. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/?browse=featured)

The best part is even the most novice users can take advantage of this robust forum solution as it can be implemented without writing a single line of code. Anyone can seamlessly build a community platform into their existing web presence and connect with their customers and partners in a highly social way. It avoids the feature-bloat of most forum software and is already being used by companies like O’Reilly Media, and many more.

If your business is already running a WordPress powered site, Vanilla could be easily themed and integrated and you could even use their Vanilla Connect (Single Sign On) to manage users across both platforms. By using both WordPress and Vanilla, businesses can build better customer relationships and a more personable user experience for minimal cost and time investment.

Also, much like WordPress, there are many plugins that could be enabled to create everything from a basic discussion forum to a highly efficient intranet for employees to a full-fledged social network.

For a great breakdown of all the features and benefits of Vanilla Forums 2.0, I suggest reading this post from Appstorm. http://web.appstorm.net/reviews/communications/vanilla-forums-hosted-online-communities/

You could also watch a brief video of the founder embedded below.

Video Interview with Founder of Vanilla, “A WordPress for Forums” from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

To learn more about Vanilla Forums please visit them at www.VanillaForums.org.

Today we announced the official launch of Ready-to-go Websites™, a selection of pre-built, industry-specific templates and bundled plug-ins that let customers build websites in minutes. These sharp, attractive and professional designs come pre-populated with sample content, are standards compliant, and social-networking friendly. Best of all, Ready-to-go Websites™ are available FREE to all Netfirms web hosting customers.

For more information, please check out our press release.

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