If you want to accept credit cards online, you will need to set up a credit card merchant account with a reputable firm. There are a lot of merchant account providers out there, however, GreenGeeks has teamed up with e-onlinedata to make it easy for our customers to obtain merchant accounts and use the Authorize.net gateway. Authorize.net will integrate into the shopping carts that we provide, such as OSCommerce, CubeCart, WHMCS, etc.

The offer we’ve got for our customers is something that can’t be beat!

• NO Annual Fees
• NO Application Fees
• NO Address Verification (AVS) Fees
• NO Leasing
• NO Termination Penalties
• 2.19% VISA/MasterCard Qualified Discount Rate
• $0.25 per Transaction
• $10.00 Monthly Service Fee (includes Monthly Statement)
• $25.00 Monthly Processing Minimum
• Toll Free 24/7 Tech Support and daily Customer Service Support

Get started and start accepting credit cards with your own merchant account today!

“My WordPress Blog Got Hacked” is something that we as a hosting company hear all the time, which is unfortunate. What’s even more unfortunate is we as the web hosting provider often get blamed for it by our very own customers. I can’t really blame our customers for this either, I guess they just don’t know it can happen — So hopefully, this blog post will help bring some awareness and help prevent their blogs from being hacked.

It’s not uncommon for a WordPress site to get exploited, you’ll often see an image of some pirate or a bunch of statements claiming that you’re a sucker for getting hacked. Doesn’t really look all too professional when your visitors see this. If you feel that you’re the only one out there, you’re not. If you think that WordPress is the wrong CMS to use, that’s not the case. With a proper setup, you could avoid being defaced.

WordPress has put together an entire My WordPress Site was hacked FAQ page, dedicated to help WordPress users prevent their sites from being hacked and for those who have been hacked, preventing it from happening again. Check it out, it will be helpful in preventing your WordPress installation from being exploited.

I do want to point out a part of the FAQ, where it says to check with the hosting provider.

As far as the hosting environment goes, we take security very serious here at GreenGeeks. We have a multitude of security measures in place to prevent a wide-spread type of exploitation of scripts. So you’re safe there. We regularly update our servers, scan them for vulnerabilities and do what we are required to keep our customers safe.  The general rule of thumb for protecting yourself from being exploited is: Always upgrade to the latest version, don’t use unknown plug-ins and keep regular backups.

Karl D.
GreenGeeks / Systems Administrator

We use WordPress to run our blog and we’ve only recently launched it (maybe 1.5 months ago). I logged into the administration section of WordPress and found 500+ comments and thought to myself WOW.

I did end up saying “WOW”, except it was for the sheer number of spam comments instead of legitimate comments.

Knowing that WordPress is a very popular blogging script, I set out to search a solution to this problem on Google. Here’s what I searched for: wordpress comment spam plugin, and I found: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Akismet.  I love Google!

I followed the instructions, and installed Akismet. Clicked on the Filter Spam and BAM! All the spam was gone. I haven’t seen any spam since. So, if you’re running a WordPress blog and have comment spam, I suggest installing Akismet!

Karl D.
GreenGeeks / System Administrator

When customers are looking to switch hosting providers, they usually stage the setup of their web site before completely switching the DNS (domain name servers). We provide you with a temporary URL so that you can see how your site will look before you switch your domain’s DNS. The problem comes when some scripts require you to access the script through a valid domain name. This poses an issue because you haven’t switched the domain’s DNS and don’t want to until you know the script works 100%.

Here is an easy work around:

1) Upload your site / databases, etc to your new web hosting account with GreenGeeks

2) Locate your hosts file on your computer (On Windows XP, it’s located at C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\etc\HOSTS) and add the following line at the end of the file:

IP_ADDRESS    www.yourdomain.com yourdomain.com

Obviously change the IP_ADDRESS and yourdomain.com to the appropriate values. The IP_ADDRESS can be found in your welcome e-mail and also inside of your cPanel account.

3) Hit save, close all your browsers. That’s it.

Now when you load your web site from your computer, you will be able to see your site as if the DNS was pointed to our servers. You can fully stage the setup and ensure all components of your site are in working order. The rest of the world will still be loading from your actual server (since you did not change the domain’s DNS).  You can remove the line in the hosts file whenever you’re done staging and your computer will reference your ISP DNS servers as usual.