One of the most ubiquitous parts of a web site is the “contact us” form.  Other types of forms abound  — for collecting customer requests, quote requests, surveys, customer feed back, etc.  In the vast majority of cases, all of these forms send their data to a program on the web server which collects the data and sends someone an email message with the content.  Web form to email.

Quick and easy.  However, the quick and easy solutions to setting this up do not take care of things such as:

Read the rest of this post »

The situation: your organization needs to collect information from clients through from(s) on your web site, but that information is sensitive. So, you need to be absolutely sure that the information is transferred from the users of your web site to you in as secure a fashion as possible. This means that

1. no one but you (or optionally your authorized staff) can intercept or read the information,
2. the information is never stored insecurely anywhere
3. the information cannot be modified without your knowledge

Why would this high level of security and privacy be necessary? There are many cases where they are essential; some of these include:

Read the rest of this post »

Doctors and medical professionals are feeling a growing pressure to get their business online (i.e. even use of electronic prescriptions is being pushed).  This includes making available protected health information to patients via a web site and collecting similar private information from patients or would-be patients. If doctors can show that they are using digital systems with their health care practices in a meaningful way by 2011, they may be eligible for some serious money (part of the proposed stimulus package — the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH)).

However, where the health information of an identifiable individual is involved, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the official compliance document.  So, what do these requirements mean and how can HIPAA be followed in the context of a website?

Read the rest of this post »

LuxSci’s web hosting now supports "WebDAV" (aka DAV)  which, combined with our easy-to-use access controls, allow for the use of your web space for access-controled file sharing and access-controlled calendar sharing.

LuxSci’s web site control panel now enables administrators to easily define users with passwords and user groups for managing access to their web sites. Administrators can use this interface to specify which users and/or user groups have read-only and/or read-write access to any directories in their web sites. Different web site directories can have different access controls.

LuxSci’s web hosting tools now permit you to easily create permanent redirects for you web site(s). You can permanently redirect all requests from http://www.yourdomain.com to http://yourdomain.com or from http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com or from your domain to any URL of your choice. This permits you to easily map one web site onto another or redirect from web site to another in a way that is search engine friendly.

LuxSci has always provided automated web site statistics that enable you to see your web site traffic in detail. LuxSci has changed the software used to generate these statistics from “WebLog” (which is no longer supported by the vendor) to the “Webalizer”. All web site statistics files are now also saved in a directory accessible via FTP so that account administrators can download and archive their monthly web traffic reports (which are otherwise only kept on the server for 12 months).