Flat Rate Toll Free Numbers

How would you like to have a toll free number for your business without the worry that you’ll never know how big your bill will be each month? What you are looking for is flat rate toll free service. Your bill is the same every month and you’ll get dozens of features included at no extra cost. Best of all, there’s no risk to try it because you can get a 14 day free trial of flat rate toll free service.

The flat rate service from iTeleCenter is just $49 a month for unlimited calls. You pay no per minute charges, no extra fees for features, no activation fees, no surcharges or hidden fees, no confusing plans and no contracts.

What are some of those special calling features? You get professional grade business phone service such as an auto attendant with main greeting voicemail to email or text transmission, multiple extension mailboxes, online faxing, follow-me call forwarding and 30 additional features.

How about the numbers available? You have two choices in how you pick your toll free number. The first way is to simply select from a list of 10 assorted numbers that are available. These have the prefixes 800, 866, 877 and 888. If you see one you like, just click on the radio button and proceed to order it. If not, then click the “generate more numbers” button and you’ll get a new list.

The other method is to search for a custom vanity number. What is a vanity number? That’s a phone number that spells out a word or phrase using the letters that appear on the numbers of the telephone dial. You can specify any available toll free prefix, or limit your search to 855 or 866 or 877 or 888. You can also use * for wildcard digits. Those are digits where you really don’t care what number comes up. Let’s try a couple of examples and see what we get.

Say you’re in the water conditioning business and want a memorable toll free number to advertise. We’ll say any prefix is OK and that we want the term “water” to be in the toll free number. Enter “water” into the search box and press the search button. Voila! Here’s what we get. There are 10 different toll free numbers available and they all spell out water within the number. You can choose from (877) 95WATER, (855) 60WATER, (877) WATGER88 and another seven options. Don’t much care for these? Click on the Generate More Numbers button and you’ll get another 10 options. These include (855) WATER08, (855) WATER30 and seven more that are similar.

Got the idea? You may want to play around with this search engine a bit to get something that relates to your business and is easy to remember. Note that 855 is a newly added toll free prefix. You’ll likely have more options with the 855 prefix than the others because it has only been available for about a year.

What makes this system better than old-school toll free number ordering is both the interactive vanity search feature plus instant availability of your chosen toll free number. That’s right. You select the number you want and then place your order online right away before anybody else gets the same idea. That starts your 14 day free trial period. Play around with the features, decide how much of an asset this is for your business, and keep using that number as long as you keep your toll free service.

Do you think that a toll free number will increase your opportunity to make more sales and keep customers happy? If so, you can have one for your business right now. It only takes a few minutes to select a number and get it in service. Go ahead and start the 14 day free trial on flat rate toll free service.

Backup and Recovery For All Businesses

Let’s face it, businesses are vulnerable. Not just to the vagaries of the economy or whims of the environment. Your greatest vulnerability may be sitting on your desk or mounted in the racks of your data center. Without backup and recovery, you are one violation of Murphy’s Law away from major headaches.

What is most at risk? Your data. At one time, all business records were on paper and the big risk was fire. Today, most business records are electronic and the big risk is corruption or erasure. One thing that can go wrong is that somebody accidentally changes or deletes something important and there is no copy. Another is that an entire day’s, week’s or longer data set is wiped out by a disk crash. Once again, no copies means you have to start all over to recreate what was lost.

Don’t depend on backup CD ROMs or DVDs written whenever somebody remembers to create them or has some free time. You expect the rest of your business processes to be more robust. Give serious consideration to doing the same for your valuable electronic data files.

Acronis specializes in backup and recovery for all size businesses from home offices right on up to major corporations. They offer backup and recovery across the network and for standalone Windows servers, Linux servers, workstations, and online backup. Other solutions include server disk management, server system deployment, recovery for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Exchange SBS, recovery for MS SQL Server and workstation system deployment.

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 is based on a unified platform consisting of a suite of modules that work together to support disaster recovery, data protection and migration. Together they perform single-pass backup and de-duplication for all your files, folders, applications and operating systems. This includes coverage of disks, files, virtual machines, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. Backups can be targeted to tape, disk storage or the cloud.

The latest migration, of course, is to the cloud. Acronis Backup and Recovery Online gives you secure and cost effective offsite data protection. Why offsite? While local storage protects you against disk failure or accidental file deletion, it won’t help if a flood or tornado comes roaring through town. Your precious backup tapes and disks can easily be smashed all over the countryside along with your other computing assets. That’s why you should consider offsite storage.

In fact, the most efficient and robust solution can easily be a combination of onsite and offsite backup. Why? While offsite backup gives you protection against complete loss of your local facilities, you are dependent on a bandwidth link to get to your data. Most companies have far more LAN bandwidth than they do WAN bandwidth or Internet connection bandwidth. In-house bandwidth is relatively cheap and 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps can be had for commodity prices. Once you leave the building and depend on a third party provider to connect you across town or across the country, the cost of bandwidth gets pricey fast.

What this means in practical terms is that you can get your files back a lot faster over your own network than you can bringing them back on the cloud. For a single small file, this is no big deal. But if you lose a Terabyte disk, it can be awhile before you have it restored through your telecom link.

Acronis addresses this security vs accessibility conundrum by offering an integrated solution that combines their Backup & Recovery 11 software with their online cloud product. Most backup solutions do one or the other, not both. This integration means that your administration efforts are made easy, while you enjoy the benefits of convenience and protection.

Are you a bit squeamish about what could happen to your business if technical or other disaster strikes unexpectedly? Sleep better knowing your data is protected. Check out Acronis Backup and Recovery Solutions now.

Customer Service Using Clouds and Social Networks

Customer service can make or break a company. You’ve heard how it is so much cheaper to keep an existing customer than get a new one. You’ve no doubt also heard how good customer experiences amount to free positive advertising for your company. On the other hand, one frustrated customer can do a lot of damage, especially these days when social networks make it easy to spread the venom.

Here’s the carrot and stick. Create an excellent customer service system for your company and you’ll be rewarded. Do a crummy job and you’ll be punished royally in the marketplace. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to take the high road in customer service. What you are seeking is a ready-to-go, easy-to-use customer support system that integrates the new social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, along with traditional contact methods like email and toll free numbers. Here it is, take a look...



Does this sound like the type of system you’ve been wishing you had someone to develop? Forget paying the big bucks for a proprietary in-house system. Assistly has already done the heavy development lifting and is ready to go to work in your organization. Not so sure? No problem. Take the Assistly free trial offer and see if works for you. There’s no commitment. You don’t even need a credit card. Give it a go for 30 days and then see if you can bear the thought of giving up the best customer service tool you’ve ever used.

Assistly is fond of saying that they aren’t just about satisfying customers, but wowing them. That’s the new paradigm is an economy stuck in the doldrums. When business is booming, there’s more than enough for everyone and customers come to accept so-so service. These days customers know that their dollars are valuable and vendors are plentiful for just about anything they want to buy. If you want to stand out and be sought out by prospects and repeat customers, you need some special magic. Where better to sprinkle the magic dust than in the one part of your company that interacts the most with potential and current customers?

Assistly has a fair number of well known and respected businesses on-board with their cloud-based customer service system. Can you really afford to blow off the potential for something that can really goose your sales when they’ll let you try it a month for free? If you sell anything to the public and aren’t already thrilled with your customer service results, take a closer look at what Assistly has to offer your business.

Email Hosting Without A Website

One of the advantages of having your own website is that you can also have your own email at the domain name of your website. For businesses, organizations and many individuals that personalized email is so valuable that they may go ahead and have someone build and maintain a site just to get the email advantages. Did you know that there is such a thing as email hosting without a website? There is, and it’s a lot less expensive.

Personalized email has important advantages. It’s hard for businesses to get taken seriously with a Hotmail or other free webmail address. Gmail has a more professional cache than most, but it does nothing to identify your business or other organization. All of these are online services. If you want what’s called POP email that you open and save on your computer, you need a different type of email service. Your Internet Service Provider will generally give you POP email, but it’s at their domain name. Once again, no personal identification and not a business image.

For a personalized email address, the thing to do is buy yourself a domain name. This will cost you somewhere around a dollar a month. This is all you really have to spend as a minimum. What you do is use the email forwarding feature of your domain name to send incoming mail to the email account you have now. In other words, mail that comes in to YourName@YourDomain.com will be forwarded automatically to YourName@Gmail.com or YourName@YourISPsDomain.com, as examples.

The next step up is actual email hosting. What email hosting does is provide the email servers but not the web servers for your domain name. Why do that? Not everyone wants or needs a website. If everything you do is offline and nobody is going to look for you or your business through a search engine, then a website is just money down the drain. Perhaps you are well established with lots of visitors on a Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter account. Website? Why get into building your own website? But you may well want a personalized email account.

There are two types of email servers you’ll be using. POP or POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) servers are the ones that deliver the email to your computer. These are for incoming messages. When people talk about a having a POP account, this is what they are referring to. You set the preference on your email program to the address of the POP3 server. You’ll also need to set up a username and password so that you and only you can get your mail. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) mail servers are for outgoing mail. You tell your email program what SMTP server to use so you can send, reply or redirect email messages. Another type of server is called IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). This is a competitor to POP3. If you need it, make sure your hosting provider offers this service. Most do.

The most basic email hosting will run you another dollar a month. That’s two bucks a month to have both a domain name and email hosting. For that, you get 1 GB of disk storage on the server, up to 10 separate email accounts, virus protection and Webmail access. Yes, you can have web mail at your domain name so you can access your mail online from a different computer than the one that has your email program.

Want more email accounts or more disk space? A deluxe email hosting service runs $1.99 a month for 5 GB of storage and 25 user-defined email accounts.

A business email hosting account is more sophisticated. The one offered by Domain.com offers cloud collaboration and secure sharing, similar to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint. Employees can share inboxes, contacts, calendars, tasks, and files to improve teamwork and productivity. You get push email, push contacts and push calendar with immediate sync that is Exchange ActiveSync compatible. You can access your account anywhere, including web, desktop or smartphone. Anti-virus and anti-spam is built-in. Document storage is centralized and document sharing is encrypted for security. This service is both Microsoft Windows and Outlook friendly. All this runs you $4.99 per user per month.

If you don’t need the collaboration features, you may be interested in mobile email hosting for $1.99 per user / mo. That gives you the ability to keep your mobile phone in sync with your email, calendar and contacts. You email is secured with encryption, plus anti-virus and anti-spam to keep trouble out of your inbox.

Do you like the low cost and personalization benefits that you can get from email hosting? If so, check out domain names and email hosting plans from Domain.com. You get a lot of benefit for a small amount of money.

BlackBerry Picking On Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday is the new traditional time to find great online special offers, much the same as Black Friday has become that tradition for bricks and mortar stores. With that in mind, let’s have a look a one very special product line this year. It’s the BlackBerry device from Research in Motion.

BlackBerry has long been the choice of business users for mobile voice and data connectivity. RIM has made it their mission to support corporate IT services with the performance and security needed for serious business use in the field. But, how affordable are the popular BlackBerry models?

Make no mistake about it, BlackBerry devices are expensive technology. That doesn’t mean you have to pay a bundle for the model of your choice. In fact, shop now and you can get 19 different BlackBerry phones free when you order them with new wireless service. The others range in price from $9.99 to $149.99. Not bad for devices that retail for up to $600.

Just what is available at no charge for as long as these special offers last? How about the new BlackBerry Torch? Yes, it’s free when you order it with AT&T wireless service. The Torch offers the BlackBerry OS6 operating system on a combination touchscreen interface plus a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard. You also get an impressive 5 Megapixel digital camera with flash, continuous auto-focus, digital zoom, face detection integrated GPS location tagging and video capture. The full touch screen features a full HTML Web browser with pinch-to-soom and tabbed browsing. By the way, the BlackBerry Torch is available in black, red or white.

The BlackBerry Tour is a popular smartphone for Verizon Wireless users. it’s an international 3G phone with 3.2 Megapixel digital camera, GPS support for VZ Navigator Global navigation services. Yes, this phone runs on both the 800 & 1900 CDMA bands for Verizon and GSM 850, 900, 1800, and 1900 for overseas. Your worldwide tour will be more enjoyable with the BlackBerry Tour, especially since you got it free.

The BlackBerry Curve has been so popular that it is available on most cellular networks. That includes AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and NEXTEL. There are various models, so check out the details to make sure you get the features you want in a Curve phone. Some have WiFi and/or 3G for fast downloads. Color choices include the classic black, graphite gray, violet/purple, red, white, titanium and fuchsia.

The BlackBerry Storm2 is available free on the Verizon Wireless network. It has a brilliant 3.25 inch display, WiFi, 3G in 150 countries, a full HTML Web browser and a 3.2 Megapixel digital camera. Yes, that’s right. It’s free while you can get it.

Are you a bold person? By that I mean a fan of the BlackBerry Bold. It’s another free BlackBerry model for the AT&T wireless network. You’ll get free access to more than 20,000 AT&T WiFi hotspots nationwide with this very smartphone. It also features international connectivity for data in 185 countries and voice roaming in over 215 countries.

Which BlackBerry you pick is a personal matter. What’s important is that you get your choice at the best deal... preferably free of charge. That means you need to do your shopping now while the best deals are online. Check out the complete selection of BlackBerry phone models right now and get free shipping along with your free phone.

Advantage of Independent Toll Free Numbers

You may have a toll free number that you got from your telephone company, or you may be considering one. Toll free numbers have tremendous advantages for all size businesses when it comes to sales and customer service. If you shop carefully, they are so affordable right now that even the smallest start-up companies and independent professionals can have their own toll free number. You’ll have the most flexibility if you order an independent toll free number.

What’s an independent number and why is that important? Independent toll free service is not associated with your landline or cellular phone bill. You'll have the ability to have your toll free number ring to any telephone you wish. You can even change your mind and have it ring to another phone anytime you want.

So what difference does that make? It makes a huge difference if you move or want to switch to another phone company. You may or may not be able to take your telephone company supplied toll free number with you. If they allow it, there can be a high fee charged to transfer the number to another service. Otherwise you’ll have to start all over with a new toll free number and change all your advertising and business cards.

You also won’t likely have the ability to decide which phone your toll free number rings to. If it is attached to your landline phone service, that’s the number that will ring when toll free calls come in. That may be no big deal if you are always at your desk or have a full time receptionist to take the calls. Otherwise you can be out and about when you get that important call that means the difference between sale and no sale. If you can’t grab it, the prospect may go elsewhere.

The alternative is an independent toll free service such as Kall8. With Kall8 toll free service, you get to pick from their suite of available 866, 877, 888 or 800 toll free numbers. Find one you like and by the time you are done placing your order online, your number will be ready to accept calls. You get an online control panel that lets you decide if toll free calls will come to your cell phone, home phone, or business phone. Change that any time you like. Some sales people switch it between phones depending on where they happen to be at the time.

You also get Kall8 toll free number features that include voice mail that you listen to online, by calling in or by having a sound file sent to your via email. Any incoming FAX messages will be converted to graphic files and sent to you via email. You also have conference call ability, so that you can conduct a conference call with up to 25 participants at any time for as long as you like. Even use your toll free number in reverse as a long distance calling card at the same rates.

That’s a lot of capability for just $2 to order an 866, 877 or 888 toll free number and $2 per month to maintain the service. Incoming calls are 6.9 cents per minute from the 48 contiguous states and a bit higher for calls from Alaska or Hawaii. Traditional 800 numbers are $5 each and $5 per month for service, plus the 6.9 cents per minute rate for incoming calls.

Yes, you can transfer an existing toll free number to Kall8 if your current provider allows it. If you want to do that, you’ll find forms on the ordering page that you can download and fax-in to start the change process. If you want to start with a ready-to-go number, you can simply order Kall8 toll free service online and be ready to use your number in just a matter of minutes.