7 Tips For Securing Your Domain Names

While it is important to register a good domain name, securing that domain name is equally important. Just imagine that one fine morning; the number of visitors to your website has suddenly dropped to zero. If you own an eCommerce website, you might be making online sales worth of hundreds of dollars but if the domain name privacy is not taken care of, your business will get negatively affected to a great extent.

Any person who is able to get access to your account through your domain name registrar can hijack your domain name thereby diverting your site visitors to his / her own website. This person will also get access to your emails. If the hacker managed to steal your domain name by getting it transferred in his / her name, with a new registrar then you will have to go through a long and expensive legal battle to get the domain name back.

It is clear that loosing the domain name can be a disaster. Here are 7 important tips to secure your domain name:

Renew Your Domain Name Regularly

The simplest way to lose a domain name is failing to renew it at the right time. It is important to setup a renewal process, this can be as easy as scheduling a recurring renewal reminder present in your desktop calendaring program. This reminder will warn you well in advance about the renewal of your domain name. Many registrars now enable the website owners to synchronize the domains so that the date of their expiration is the same, this makes it extremely easy to manage more than one domain names.

Generally you can renew the domain names for one, two or five years, but be careful in terms of selecting any time span that is beyond one year. Renewing the domain name is something that might slip your mind if you don’t have to do it regularly. You can also opt for having your domain names renewed automatically; however, as a result of this you might lose track of your domain names and their expiration dates.

Verify The Contact Details Held By Your Domain Name Registrar

Your domain name registrar must send a reminder email before the renewal due date of your domain name. The registrar can also contact you in case of any payment issues or if someone has requested to transfer your domain name. Therefore, it is important to make sure that the current contact details that the domain registrar has are up to date. It is crucial to make sure that the contact details are updated in case if the person who is responsible for managing the domain names in your organization leaves. It is also a sensible way to white list he address of your domain registrar in the spam filters in order to ensure that you receive every email sent by the domain registrar.

Secure Your Account

Any person who had the access your account on the domain registrar’s website also has the capacity to hijack your domain name or transfer it to a new owner. Therefore, it is important to keep your account secure. This means that you must ensure that your account is protected with a long and strong password that is hard to guess for the hacker. You should also enable additional authentication methods like the two-factor authenticating process by utilizing a security token or a one-time pass code sent by an SMS to a mobile device (if this option is offered by your registrar). It is also important to check that the account password has changed if the person who is responsible for managing your domain name leaves your company.

Use Registrar Lock

Most of the registrars provide with a service called ‘Registrar Lock’, at times this is also known as ‘domain lock’ or ‘transfer lock’. This lock helps in preventing your domain from getting accidentally or illegally transferred without your consent. When the domain is ‘locked’ the transfer process can only take place when you log in to the account and unlock the domain. It is obvious here that the registrar lock will not protect your domain name from someone who has the access to your account. However, this system will prevent someone from trying to transfer the domain by impersonating you through calls or emails.

Choose Domain Privacy

Domain privacy is a service that is offered free of cost by many registrars or they might imply a small monthly charge for this. It is crucial to have domain name privacy. Through this option, you can prevent your name, address and contact information from being freely available in public. The domain name thieves might use this information for transferring your domain name to some other user or for contacting you and revealing your password for fooling you.

Use EPP (Extensive Provisioning Protocol)

EPP offers another layer of protection for your domain names. If this service is supported by your domain name registrar, it will enable you to select a unique Authorization Information Code (AIC) for every domain you have. In case you change the web hosting account or the domain name registrar, this AIC has to be given to the new service provider before initiating the process of domain name transfer.

Use Permanent Email Addresses

When you mention your contact email address, make sure that you are not using one from a free service that might get expired in case you don’t renew it. In case that happens, a person can use this information to impersonate you in correspondence with your domain name registrar. You can also use the ‘forgot password’ feature provided by the registrar for having the password emailed to you.

You can get a lot of benefit just with a little precaution. Maintaining the domain name security is as important as maintaining the security of your hosting account.

Read More

10 Great Tips For Marketing Your Reseller Hosting Business

In comparison to any other type of business, a reseller hosting business is fairly easy to start. A reseller has to only focus on ideas instead of spending time on building the server infrastructure and maintaining it.

When you have your reseller hosting business idea in place, your next big challenge is getting customers for your business!

Here are 10 handy tips that will help you to market your reseller hosting business:

Set Up A Blog

This is the most basic and also one of the most efficient aspects of getting success in your reseller hosting business. Content is still the king. You must set up an interesting and informative blog that features a wide variety of content that will interest your audience. If people like reading the posts from your blog, they will share it through the social media websites and this will help in increasing your brand awareness. Through your blog, you can share insights about your business and you can also write about many questions that your customers might be having.

Google Adwords

If you don’t have good search engine rankings in Google, then you can opt for Google Adwords for getting your website ranked in midst of all the competitors. Google Adwords is a paid option and it might get a little expensive if you are targeting a specific product or a specific search term that has less competition. However, if done correctly, Google Adwords will ensure a good return on investment.

Referral Program

When you sign up for reseller hosting, you get access to WHMCS as your billing software. WHMCS provides inbuilt affiliate and referral systems. You can use this system to create a competitive referral program and then you can encourage your existing customers to refer more customers. Creating and running a referral program is less expensive as compared to Google Adwords and it also has a better reach.

Customer Reviews

People describing your business and services is of more value than you describing it on your own. It is very important to take customer reviews and testimonials, whether good or bad, they should be featured on your website. You should also create your company profiles on the online review websites and encourage your customers to write reviews for your company.

Social Media

Social media websites are great for marketing any type of business. Create informative company profiles on all the social media websites and share informative and interesting content through them on a regular basis. You can share your blog updates, links of other articles, interesting images, videos, infographics, offers and discounts etc. Make sure that you are posting on a consistent basis and it is also important to work on growing your social media network. You can create polls for encouraging discussions. It is also crucial to reply to comments as soon as possible.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO marketing is very important for getting good amount of genuine traffic to your website and for securing good search engine rankings. Create and post content based on the keywords you are working on and try to get high quality backlinks through all the SEO activities. This will help you to secure top rankings in Google and this will also help in increasing your customer base as well.

Opt For Alternative Search Terms

Optimize for keywords and phrases that have less competition. In place of opting for a keyword like – ‘web hosting’, you can opt for a more specific keyword like –‘WordPress web hosting’ or ‘Joomla web hosting’. You can also consider writing a complete informative guide about setting up a WordPress website – ‘Set up your First WordPress Website in 5 Easy Steps’. People are more likely to link to an informative article rather than a product description. At the end of your guide, you can mention about the WordPress hosting services that you provide.

Opting For Local Searches

It is a good idea to opt for local searches and to go for the local audience. Brand your hosting business as the business of your own country. You can translate your website content to your own language. Usually, you can set up a multi-lingual website through your control panel; however, in case your preferred language is not represented in the control panel, it is alright, there would be no problem for the people to use the control panel in English. Most of the business owners and vendors look for local business partners and you can be their local web hosting solution provider.

Know Your Customers

As a web hosting reseller, it is important for you to have an understanding about what type of customers you are targeting. You must have a clear idea about your target audience whether they are small businesses, startups, bloggers, web developers or large organizations. It is important to devise the marketing strategies in accordance with the type of customers you are targeting.

Work On Developing Your Brand

As a reseller, you have complete control over all your business prepositions. For instance, you can completely customize your billing portal (WHMCS) by replacing the WHMCS logo for your own company logo for branding purposes. You can gradually work on making your brand familiar with your customers through customized billing portal, social media websites, customized email templates etc.

Above mentioned are some really easy ways to increase your market share and to increase the visibility of your own business brand. Irrespective of the size of your business, if you constantly keep making efforts towards presenting your brand and your hosting solutions to the people, you will definitely find the right audience and thereby you will be able to drive more growth for your business.

Read More

Everything You Need to Know About Email Hosting

Emails play a very important role in any online business. You as a business owner might be using emails on daily basis for having a conversation with your clients. So, it is important that this conversation remains safe as you are having many business deals through emails. No doubt you are using free email services such as Gmail, Rediffmail, Yahoo, etc. But are they really safe when it comes to securing confidential information about your business?

I would like to ask a simple question prior to talking about email hosting. Do you use free email service? There are many email users who ignore paid hosting and always use free email hosting. Being an entrepreneur, you share several important documents such as invoices, bills, client contacts or other pieces of information via emails. This information is also stored in your email account. Therefore, you can’t afford to lose customers, subscribers, etc. by having a generic email such as your.business@gmail.com over your domain like info@your.business.com.

You might deal with several email-related scenarios that might affect your business significantly. These include email hacking, password stealing or simply forgetting password. What if one of these scenarios happens with you and you are using a free email service? You will be sweating out until the issue gets resolved, right?

To avoid such a situation it is always better to opt for email hosting service.

What is Email Hosting?

A service that hosts your emails on a server is called as email hosting. You have to buy a server or rent it from the email host. The server handles your complete data for sending as well as receiving emails. This service is much different from Yahoo and Gmail.

This service offers a unique property of renting out a server for just hosting your emails. This method is used by businesses to set up email addresses via a domain name. Since emails are sent directly via the server itself, instead of going through free webmail sites, this service stands as unique.

Clients just need to connect their registered domain name to their email servers. This combination can then be used to generate unique usernames for each email user that accesses the mentioned server. For example, an employee of a company will receive a unique email address as “JohnDoe@domainname.com”, and the server will host all of the incoming and outgoing emails to this email address.

Server is the other unique property of email hosting. Free webmail sites serve different users at one time but the email host offers a dedicated server. It means the server operates only for a particular number of email accounts. In case the requirement of any client exceeds the capacity of their current server, it is possible to scale up and share the content on multiple servers.

You get reliable and efficient service with paid email hosting. There are many web hosting companies that offer you with email hosting service. Also, the email hosting service offered by such companies supply you with POP3 email and basic spam/virus protection and other features. You will find some of the free email hosting providers which as supported by ads. But if you are a small or medium sized business (SME) entrepreneur, then you won’t consider one of these providers for your business email, as they offer inadequate service in comparison to a professional email hosting service.

What Are the Types of Mail Servers?

POP3 Email Hosting

In POP3 email hosting, the email is downloaded from the mail server and stores it on your machine. It allows you to read your emails offline but you won’t find some or all the emails downloaded available on the server. This might lead to confusion, particularly when you access your email from multiple machines. For instance, if you download an email on your phone (or send it from your phone), it won’t be viewable on your laptop.

IMAP Email Hosting

In IMAP email hosting, the mail server is synced to the software on your machine, allowing you to see the email as it stays on the server. You get a uniform view of your email with IMAP so that you can see the same email and folders whenever you access your email. Also, since everything is stored on the server, you can store your draft and sent emails on the server with IMAP to recover them from any client device. IMAP also offers features such as folder sharing, IDLE, seive filtering, and subscriptions.

ISP Hosting

The Internet service providers offer you with mail servers that work for standard personal email communication. You can use this service to send emails in bulk. There is a limit on the number of emails one can send by the ISP servers. In case, you want to send emails in a bulk, you should opt for email hosting service from a web hosting provider or an independent email hosting company.

Cloud Email Hosting

If you are working with a small company with a limited budget, you don’t have the disaster recovery infrastructure and processes the Microsoft, Google and other big cloud providers have. So, in case you are serious about the disaster recovery for your email, you can go with private email cloud providers.

Similar to other cloud-based services, cloud-based email offers benefits such as operational efficiency and reduced costs. You don’t need to spend money on hiring IT staff for managing internal email servers or physical server equipment for maintenance. Cloud hosting offers high scalability. You can either scale up or scale down the resources as your user count changes, helping you to keep your costs sufficient.

Cloud servers always remain up-to-date with the latest security patches and recent technological advancements. They offer benefits such as increased bandwidth requirements, less costs and firewall requirements as compared to other services. Additionally, your email is placed on the internet and so even if your system crashes, everything remains safe on the cloud.

What types of email services are available?

A hosting company might offer several types of email services. Each service’s value depends on your needs. The one vital common feature of all email services is email filtering. It helps in reducing spam and protects your inbox from viruses. Depending upon the restrictions of a hosting company, the incoming email gets filtered through some rules that ‘tag’ or ‘divert’ malicious or unsolicited emails as those are sent to your account.

Basic Email Hosting

In this email hosting, one can use POP3 and IMAP hosting with an email client such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird.

Email-based Collaboration Services

You get email enhanced by additional collaborative software with email-based collaboration services. This generally includes features such as calendars, address books, folders, task lists, etc. which can be shared, viewed as well as edited among a group of people. Businesses and other organizations that need to collaborate online can reap the benefits of these types of services.

Email Filtering Relay

Email filtering relay, a useful spam fighting tool, helps you to filter the spam emails when you have your own in-house mail server, but need to outsource spam and virus opposing to the cloud. It accepts emails on your behalf. Prior to sending the other emails onto your in-house server, the email is filtered for spam and other unwanted email.

Benefits of Email Hosting

Costs: Hiring professionals is very cost-effective as they save your money for spending additional resources on installing mail servers and maintaining technical teams to run them. Businesses also get more credit with email hosting as their email address contains their business domain name.

Security: The mail servers offered by professional email hosting services are equipped with industry standard encryption. Due to this, it is ensured that the data sent to the server or from the server will remain encrypted whenever you sign in to the moment you log out. It means that all sensitive data can’t be intercepted or compromised. You will always get secure access via POP or IMAP with email hosting solutions. Passwords and usernames are well encrypted when sent from clients to servers for authentication. Popular mail clients like Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc. are supported by the highly reputed providers. Also, Linux clients and pocket PCs and PDAs are supported by some providers. Mail services should be safe and efficient and this is ensured by email hosting plans.

Disk Space: Email hosting solutions providers offer adequate storage space after signing up. Some providers offer you storage in MB while some offer it in GB per mail box. Companies that offer flexible email hosting plans will provide you with more space if you need it by upgrading your service.

Spam Protection: Your email account remains safe from the malware and spam, as email hosting solutions block them with email spam filtering tool. Their innovative filtering methods like blacklisting and white-listing allow users to define configurations for automatic sending of spam mails to quarantine folders rather than inbox.

Address Book: Address book offers a convenient method for the users to store contacts and then recover them easily. Both public and shared address books which offer access to the public network directories are provided by most of the email hosting services.

Wrapping Up

Businesses require email to have important conversations with their clients. It means emails play a vital role in communication between team members, customers, and vendors. If your business is mainly dependent on email and you are looking for reliable email services without the hassle and in-house server cost, email hosting is the best. There is a great demand for high-quality email hosting support as these services eliminate the additional costs of hiring the human resources to manage in-house email servers.

Read More

10 Benefits Of Data Storage In A Cloud

Cloud services have geared up for being the most suitable option for storing data online digitally. In the earlier times, most of the companies used to depend on the in-house servers for storing their growing collection of data and online files; but today storing data online on cloud servers is the next big thing as it allows unlimited storage. The best thing about storing all the data in the cloud is that it ensures affordability and the data can be easily accessed from anywhere in the world.

Here are 10 biggest benefits of online data storage in the cloud:

Usability And Accessibility

Users can easily drag and drop the files in the cloud storage. It is easy to save all the files and data in the cloud, no technical knowledge is required for this purpose. The stored files can be easily accessed from anywhere in the world with just a few clicks and an internet connection.

Disaster Recovery

It is recommended for every business to have a backup plan in case of an emergency. After all, losing important business data can cause huge losses to any business. Cloud storage is the perfect backup plan for businesses. It creates a backup of the files stored. These files are stored at a remote location and they can be retrieved and accessed at any time.

Security

Business owners can be sure that once the data is stored in the cloud, it is safe. The best thing about using cloud storage is that server data is distributed across redundant servers and the data stored in the cloud is safeguarded against any type of hardware failure. Cloud servers also provide automated backups and snapshots in order to make sure that your data is safe.

Cost Savings

Businesses and organizations can reduce annual operating costs by utilizing cloud storage. Affordability can be ensured if data is stored online in the cloud. Users can ensure additional cost savings because internal power and resources are not required separately for storing the data.

Easy Sharing

Data stored in cloud storage can be easily shared with clients and colleagues in an easy and secure way. You can easily share access to a particular cloud environment or to the complete account with some other user.

Automation

One of the biggest issues that most of the business owners face is creating data backups and scheduling the backup in a way so that the daily operations don’t get hampered. With cloud storage technology, the tedious task of data backups is simplified through automation. You simply have to select what you want to backup and when you want to backup and your cloud environment will take care of the rest.

Collaboration

Online cloud storage is also an ideal platform for collaboration purposes. A cloud environment enables multiple people to access, edit and collaborate on a single file or document. People can access the cloud environment from anywhere in the world and collaborate in real time.

Scalable Service

Cloud hosting enables vertical as well as horizontal scaling and the best thing about cloud hosting is that you only pay for the resources that you actually use. You can scale your cloud hosting environment whenever required and you can also define the attributes of scaling the cloud. This ensures more flexibility and large storage space.

Read More: Cloud Hosting

Synchronization

While using local file storage you can only access your data from a certain location. With cloud storage, the daily devices can be your access points like your PC and your smartphone. Accessing files and synchronizing them can be done easily with any device through an internet connection. Therefore, the stress of transferring the documents from one device to another is reduced as it can get complicated at times. Moreover, the files stored in the cloud storage remain the same across all the devices and they can be automatically updated after making any changes. You can always view the latest version of the updated file through cloud storage.

Convenience

The amount of convenience and peace of mind offered by cloud storage system is amazing! Even if you store data on transportable devices like external hard drives or flash drives, some kind of manual intervention and physical handling is required. The data that is stored in a cloud is backed up online and it can be accessed from anywhere. Information is automatically saved as it streams in. There is no need for you to save, label or track information. The convenience of online cloud storage enables you to completely concentrate on your work without getting stressed about data loss.

Read More

Quantity Vs. Quality: Is Dedicated Hosting Important For Single Websites?

Dedicated server hosting is considered to be an exclusive and luxurious form of hosting; overshadowing the other web hosting counterparts like shared hosting, VPS hosting and reseller hosting. Many web hosting users have outgrown the web hosting platforms like shared hosting, VPS hosting etc., resulting in inevitable switch to the dedicated server. The main reason behind this is that their websites need something more than what is offered by the traditional web hosting platforms.

While hosting many popular websites necessitates the use of a dedicated server, the question is – is dedicated server hosting required for single websites as well?

As mentioned above, one of the predominant reasons for switching to the dedicated server platform is because there is a high level of incoming traffic that creates the need for more hosting resources. A website having high volume of incoming traffic will demand more memory, bandwidth and CPU. This goes on to say that whether you are operating a single website or 100 websites, the need for a dedicated server cannot be ignored, irrelevant of the size of the website.

As the resource requirement increases, the software needs also grow and a dedicated server hosting platform usually provides with more hardware as compared to the other hosting platforms. It is important to analyze what your website needs and what resources are offered by the individual server. Make an informed decision instead of tying down yourself with a hosting server that does not meet your website requirements.

Apart from managing the increased website traffic, another reason to opt for a dedicated server is your faith in your website. Yes you heard it right! By selecting a shared server, you might be locking your website in a space where there is little room for growth. The time requires you to foresee the future growth of your website and opt for a dedicated server at the right time. Think about it – when the traffic of your website starts increasing, you will have the hosting space to accommodate it. Doing this is much easier than migrating your website at a later point of time.

Ultimately, the level of traffic and resources stands above the number of websites you have. A dedicated server hosting package is the best solution you can get and even though it is an expensive option, it is completely worth the money you invest in it.

The best thing you can buy for your website is the speed and resources and this can be done with one dedicated server hosting package. There is no need for you to share the server with any other websites, thereby protecting your website from any outside interference.

If your website is already capable of pulling a large number of visitors, then utilizing the dedicated server solution is a great choice. A dedicated server hosting solution is also a great platform for a website with high ambitions and for a website that invests in the future.

In the case of single websites, if your sole website brings in 1 million customers, the needs of your website match with the same requirements as 10 websites having 100,000 visitors each.

Therefore, irrespective of the quantity of websites, you need to ensure the quality of the hosting server!

Read More

VPS or Shared Hosting: Which is the Best for Your Business?

Have got a bright idea for starting a business? That’s great! You might be excited to share it to the world. It means you might be planning to design a website and prior to that you will need to select a hosting plan.

It’s very unfortunate that in web hosting, one type doesn’t suit all businesses. While looking for the hosting plans, you will come around several web hosting options. The hosting plans will differ in terms of storage size, bandwidth, system memory and CPU power which will confuse you a lot.

Let’s take an example of backing a cake. It requires a keen attention to create the details on the cake. When you know your options for web hosting, it will help to avoid the results similar to a half-baked cake, when setting up your website. Though you redesign a website or create a new one, you will require a hosting plan that offers everything to make it live successfully.

“Where shall I start from?” This would be your first question. It’s a fact that many people that are starting their first website often select shared hosting or VPS hosting. For the experienced businesses, a dedicated server would be the right option, but there are majority of businesses that are just stepping into the world of Internet. In general, if you own a e-commerce website that receives high traffic or site that delivers large volume of content such as Forbes would get the most benefits from a dedicated server. But if you aren’t thinking of expanding to such a big level, you will surely be searching for shared hosting or VPS hosting. The two key factors – what you want to achieve with your site and the level of traffic that it will receive will help you to decide on your hosting plan. So, let’s check the two choices.

Meet Shared Hosting

“Shared” the word itself tells you that it’s about sharing. You might have always learnt about sharing things with others since your childhood. So, shared hosting is similar to that.

Shared hosting is termed to be the most basic form of web hosting. In this type of hosting, multiple websites are hosted on a single physical server. A web server is distributed to operate and serve multiple websites in shared hosting.

Since you will share the same server as the other websites, you will use the same storage, bandwidth, database, etc.

It’s popular because it’s quite affordable and easy to maintain.

Benefits of Shared Hosting

Affordable pricing is the significant point here for the popularity of shared hosting. Therefore, it makes the easiest option for individuals or businesses to select for their website, if they have a low budget.

The next reason for people preferring shared hosting is its technical maintenance. This responsibility is completely taken by your hosting provider and so, you don’t need to be skilled for operating and maintaining your site. Also, thanks to the most popular and user-friendly CMS, WordPress with which many people can develop their own website and so, opt for shared hosting with no programming skills required.

So, if you have a small website on which small amount of traffic is expected (for example, 500 visitors per day), then shared hosting will be the perfect option for you.

Meet VPS Hosting

Also, known as “Virtual Private Server,” VPS is highly robust and offers several features which you won’t find in shared hosting. Though you technically share a server, you get a dedicated portion of it which is just for you.

Benefits of VPS Hosting

The most important features your get in VPS hosting are the amount of space and bandwidth. This is significant if your website is going to generate high amount of traffic or if you expect an extensive growth in the future.

With VPS hosting you get the complete power required for optimal performance then may your website traffic be low or high. Your site will always have the access to the required resources so that it performs well anytime the visitor browses it.

With this, you get the surety of two significant things – reliability and stability that helps in reducing or eliminating the downtime issue. An unplanned downtime leads to losses in billions financially each year for the big companies. Also, small companies face the downtime heat when they start losing sales due to it.

VPS hosting offers you the control to expand your site in the future without any hassle. You can scale up or down as your website grows or slows down with VPS hosting. It means you get maximum flexibility.

You get the SSH root access to your website with the control panel offered with VPS. If you are expert technically, you can even configure the settings as per your requirements. Due to this, you get more customization which isn’t at all possible with shared hosting.

VPS plans offer you more security as compared to the shared hosting plans. Therefore, big companies opt for VPS hosting as security is their top concern.

Below are the six points of difference between VPS and Shared Hosting:

1. The Server Resources

In shared hosting, the server resources are shared unlike dedicated hosting in which the user gets a dedicated server to complete the needs of his site. VPS stands in between the shared and dedicated server. A VPS comprises of bunches of same server which act as dedicated hardware units. The website is completely managed by the webmaster via the control panel. This allows you to customize your website that shares the server with other sites but not like the shared server.

2. Performance

In terms of hosting a server, the higher the resources are, the more improved your performance will be. With VPS you get improved overall performance because of the high bandwidth offered. If enhanced technologies are implemented on a shared server, it will surely accelerate the server performance. Nowadays, latest technologies are used even in shared hosting to offer hassle-free usability and so, performance isn’t an issue anymore.

3. Security

VPS hosting offers you strong security features and also allows the users to install certain services in order to upgrade to superior security options. You can also consider shared hosting as a safe option but only one thing that matters, is the use of a common server. If there is a mistake by anyone or one faces a technical issue, it can also affect the other users on the server. You should opt for shared hosting only after enquiring about the amount of resources and the expertise offered for website security.

4. Price

If you are looking for an affordable web hosting option, shared hosting is the solution as it is one of the most economical options. Since you share the server, the cost ultimately gets divided among the other users. But in VPS hosting, you need to pay more as you get the virtual environment which allows you to manage your website independently. So, prior to selecting any one of these, find out your budget and the features you need to for your website to remain online.

5. Server management

In shared hosting, the hardware is completely handled by your web host. While in VPS hosting, you need to manage the hardware. For shared hosting you need to select a web host that monitors all the aspects of the server. You don’t need to look after the technical maintenance when your website is hosted on the shared server. All the basic management functions are offered to you without paying additional cost or spending extra time.

VPS hosting is also of two types – managed and unmanaged. Managed VPS hosting is similar to shared hosting while in unmanaged VPS hosting you need to manage everything.

6. Scalability

Scalability is the major point of difference between shared hosting and VPS hosting. In shared hosting, you have limited storage and server space which you shouldn’t exceed. If you cross the limit, you will get internal errors from the host. But a VPS can handle high traffic. This is because you are allowed to scale the resources whenever there is high traffic on your website.

So Which Option is Best for Your Business?

At the start we saw the example of baking a cake. After the cake is baked the icing is done on it. But what if you fall short of the icing? It will spoil your cake and your efforts will go waste.

Similarly, if you choose the wrong type of hosting, it will result in lack of resources.

You decision might be wrong in terms of storage space – if you are running a large site, scalability – if your website is just growing or money saving – if you require a cheap hosting plan. May it be any website and business, you should take the decision properly when considering shared or VPS hosting for successful hosting.

Read More

Managed Web Hosting – A Variety of Options to Consider

Managed web hosting is the perfect web hosting solution for novice users, as it lets them enjoy the benefits of a web hosting account without having to deal with the administrative tasks that are commonly associated with maintaining your own web hosting account.

Why Are There Different Types of Managed Web Hosting?

There are various types of managed web hosting plans available, all of which give the end user a certain degree of control. For the highly inexperienced user on a lower budget, there are completely managed plans that involve little to no administrative work. Depending on the package, the amount of work that needs to be done by the end user will vary greatly. For the users that demand the least amount of work, there is fully managed hosting, while other more experienced webmasters may opt for partially managed web hosting.

Fully Managed Web Hosting

Fully managed web hosting may sound as if it web hosting on autopilot, however this is often not the case. Therefore it is important to make sure you know what you are paying for before deciding on a particular plan. In general, fully managed web hosting is the easiest type of web hosting you could purchase. Users usually need only to specify their needs and make whatever adjustments they see fit, and the server is autoconfigured to take care of the rest for them. As mentioned before, this is most definitely the most beneficial form of web hosting for novice users.

Partially Managed Web Hosting

Partially managed web hosting is a bit different than fully managed web hosting, as the end user will need to perform more administrative functions to keep their website performing optimally. While this may sound as if it is a disadvantage to fully managed web hosting, ultimately the user has more control over the server with this kind of web hosting. While inexperienced users may not want the burden of control, more capable webmasters will find it absolutely necessary to possess full or at least partial control over their web server.

Control vs. Convenience – Which is Right for You?

If you can’t decide which kind of managed web hosting would be right for you, you may want to use this simple  comparison to decide – control vs. convenience. If you need as more control then you may want to consider partially managed web hosting. However if you are looking for the simplest web hosting plan available, then you will undoubtedly benefit from fully managed web hosting. If you are going to purchase a fully managed web hosting plan then you should make sure you are paying for a fully automated service. Likewise, if you decide upon a partially managed web hosting solution, you should make sure you fully understand what aspects of your web server you’ll be able to control.

Regardless of the decision you make, be sure it is an informed decision that you will not regret after the fact. Making the right decision the first time around will save you a lot of time, money and frustration.

Read More

5 Reasons Your Next Hosting Should Be In The Cloud

The internet has enabled the creation of a large informational content framework, all of which is made available almost instantaneously to Internet users. In this virtual domain, individuals and legal entities can store data, texts, spreadsheets, photos, audios, videos, presented in interfaces with sites, blogs, among others.

Behind the scenes of the internet, we have a large technology park, which connects people all over the world and a group of professionals who support with providing various services, of which we highlight the web hosting providers – essential services so that creators can take their message to all concerned.

The hosting of sites has variable limits according to specific plans and technological models adopted by each provider. These services have been evolving and improving significantly over the years, with shared servers, virtual private servers (VPS), dedicated servers, or cloud-based servers. All these modalities coexist well in the market and currently have practically the same cost range for the client.

Hosting on a shared server and a virtual server has physical limitations on the processing, storage, and memory capacity of the equipment, which can cause slow screen loading or literally leave your website down at times of peak traffic. Already on a dedicated server, if well dimensioned, it reduces significantly the technical problems but there is the physical limitation of the hardware.

Hosting in the cloud is a new architecture that we’ll cover in more detail below so that you get the hang of reading. Check out!

What is Cloud Hosting?

In this mode, a site is hosted on a number of physical machines, which work seamlessly distributing the processing, data storage, and memory loads. In this way, you can expand or reduce the resources used by a site on demand. You can apply cluster or grid technology or be supported by a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

What is Cluster Technology?

In cluster technology, two or more servers working together as one, being managed by a specific software for task distribution.

What is Grid Technology?

The grid technology uses several computers in a local or long-distance network, constituting a large virtual machine, with high processing rates, and the tasks are divided among all these machines.

How does a CDN Network Work?

This type of network stores the site content on multiple servers, installed in multiple geographic locations around the world. In this way, the Internet user accesses the site of their interest, the server closest physically to their location, with high speed and the data traffic requires less bandwidth.

Now that you have acquired important concepts and insights about this essential internet service, know why your next hosting should be in the cloud.

1 – Scalable Features

In cloud hosting, the resources used by the site are adjusted according to demand, considering the volume of data traffic, becoming virtually unlimited, since it is possible to use multiple servers simultaneously.

2 – High Availability

Due to the redundancy of equipment working together, even if there are failures or defects in some component of a server, another will be immediately triggered and take over the tasks in progress. This ensures high availability of the site, without discontinuity or service interruptions. Even if something unforeseen occurs, be it of small or large proportion, it will still be possible to maintain services transparently for the user.

3 – Processing Speed

In case of peak traffic, access to the content of the site becomes more agile, since the task will be directed to the server with greater availability (in the case of a cluster or grid infrastructure), and/or closer to the internet user (in the case of infrastructure). In this way, there is no latency and no occurrence of site instability.

4 – Ease of Use

Until recently, great technical knowledge was required for server configuration. Today it is not necessary to master technical knowledge, there are usually templates for automatic website creation and video teaching tutorials that allow any user to host a website in a few minutes – its use is as user-friendly as the use of traditional plans. In some companies, the settings are also automatic, and the control panel is intuitive and user-friendly.

5 – Favorable Cost-Benefit Ratio

In the 90s, in order to host a website, one had to have a high-level technical knowledge and the costs of the service were high – consequently, this limited the public significantly. With a focus on digital inclusion, site automation and configuration automation capabilities have been developed over time and new technology architectures for support, site management, and data traffic have emerged, expanding access to previously unreached audiences, improving performance and lowering service costs.

With each passing day, the cost of using cloud hosting has become more affordable and technological advances have contributed to the refinement of its technical and operational features, optimizing the results achieved.

With this growing technology improvement, hosting providers are adopting cloud technology, which ensures fast and secure access to their customers’ websites and drastically reduces the occurrence of a technical failure, unavailability, instability, and discontinuity of the services provided. Thus, the responsibility for the site and its followers will have a high level of satisfaction guaranteed.

For the end user, this migration to the cloud is imperceptible, so at some point, your hosting will be in the cloud and you may not even be aware of it, but you will surely be satisfied with the service provided and the browsing experience.

Read More

Emphasizing “Reliability” in Web Hosting

One would think that with all the web hosts on the market, picking a reliable provider out of the bunch would be a fairly easy process. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all. Reliability is essential for a website, especially one that handles business transactions or other mission-critical functions. In fact, it can make the difference in whether people become frequent visitors to your site, or simply make one trip and never come back at all. While most companies will advertise a 99.9% uptime guarantee and make the claim of being reliable, not all are in the position to provide you with a dependable service.

The Importance of Reliability

Why is it so important to invest in a reliable web hosting solution? The easy answer would be the peace of mind that stems from knowing your site is always up and running. Just imagine trying to log into your site to make updates or add new content and not being able to do so because the service is down. These days, web users expect more and more from webmasters so if you can’t ensure accessibility, they will not be coming back to your site after suffering a miserable experience the first time. Many businesses have crumbled and never really get off the ground because their websites either ran incredibly slow or were not available at all. If you are concerned about people being able to view your website, signing up with a host that can assure its availability is a must.

Aids in Credibility

Reliability is not only essential to your website, but your overall web presence as well. On the hosting marketplace, 99.9% has become the standard for uptime so you should expect and accept nothing less from prospective web hosts. Some even have infrastructures in place that allow them to exceed this figure. If a hosting company cannot provide you with a reliable services, the chances of you obtaining success online are very slim. A website that runs slow or is always down because of technical difficulties is one that will send visitors clicking their way to competition and cause you to lose substantial potential revenues. The web host should be the partner that helps you succeed with a website or online business, not lose money and ruin your credibility.

Obtaining a Reliable Solution

Accessing a hosting company’s reliability can be difficult without actually being a customer. In fact, most web host’s appear very professional and dependable on the surface. However, there are a few approaches you can take before signing up. For example, reviews serve as a great source of information as they tend to carry a lot of useful details about certain companies. Aside from price and features, many of them also hint at the host’s reliability and overall quality of the service. A good mix of expert and user reviews can go a long way in helping you decide what companies are worth a closer look as well as those that should be avoided.

Read More

Debunking the Six Myths of Reseller Hosting

We are living in the fast-growing world of internet, where several businesses have increased their customer base by creating their online platform. But many local or small business owners don’t know about whom to approach for entering the online world. No doubt they might get successful in designing the website either from the web developers and designers or using WordPress.

What next? Is it over here? No, that’s not the end. The next step is to host the website on internet and for this, one has to find a web hosting service as well as the provider for it.

It might have struck your mind many times, “isn’t it possible to start a web hosting business?” Then you might have even given a thought upon the requirements such as space to keep your servers, technical staff to handle queries, the server maintenance, hardware, etc. This means you need to invest high. But what if you get all of this without investing much?

Reseller hosting allows you to start your own hosting business at a budget-friendly price. There are several businesses that have setup their reseller hosting business and are earning good returns. Though this is a fact, still many of them are either confused or have some fears and myths that may affect their business, if they decide to become a reseller.

Below are some common misconceptions/myths about reseller hosting that need to be debunked:

Myth #1: Having a reseller web hosting account is not easy

You may find reseller web hosting quite daunting at first, yet it’s the best way to start your own web hosting business. It can be costly to start your own web hosting company from scratch but with reseller hosting you don’t have to worry about the risks.

In reseller hosting, the responsibility of buying equipment, building an infrastructure, hiring staff, etc. is completely taken by the hosting provider. You simply rent a server or a portion of it and decide on the packages, prices and sell the resources to your clients. You can calculate your profit from the difference of charges at which you sell hosting plans and the price you pay for the reseller hosting package.

Myth # 2: You can’t sell the services as your own brand

The next myth is that your audience will easily recognize that you are a hosting reseller. Since people opt for direct business-to-business relations, you have very less chances of gaining customers. But fortunately, this is just a myth.

The reality is that the web hosting companies allow you to use your own name for your hosting business with the ‘White Label’ feature. Your clients won’t even know that you are reselling the hosting services to them.

Myth # 3: Hardware knowledge isn’t required

Many have the misconception that when you are planning for a web hosting business, you just need to have a basic knowledge about web hosting. But along with this you need to know the server type, basic server configuration, RAM, etc. that you get from the hosting provider.  Of course, you don’t need to have the in depth technicalities for example, how does your drive spin?

Just having the knowledge about the types of drives, storage space required by a basic website, the types of web hosting, etc. is enough.

Myth # 4: Providing support is a massive obstacle

As a reseller, it is compulsory to offer technical support and assistance to your clients. Yes, technical support is important but you don’t have to worry about it, as it is completely taken care of by your hosting provider.

Your hosting provider needs to employ the support staff to handle server setup issues, service upgradation, reboot issues and more, so that you can contact them for any of your client’s technical issues. Therefore, check if your hosting provider is offering the technical support for reseller hosting. Don’t trust the provider blindly.

Myth # 5: It’s a competitive business vertical

Web hosting industry is highly competitive as compared to other business verticals. Due to this, many hesitate to invest in reseller hosting and start their own business.

On the other hand, since several businesses are entering the online world, the requirement of web hosting is also increasing. Have you ever seen a web project been live and running on internet without being hosted somewhere? No, this isn’t at all possible.

You can start a reseller hosting business either for part-time or full-time, depending on your situation. Additionally, if you are a web designer or a web developer, with reseller hosting you can get significant additional advantage by gaining the attraction of new clients.

So, starting a web hosting business is very easy with reseller hosting in comparison to other businesses as this might lead to a road for earning great profit.

Myth # 6: Reseller gets customers only for the first few months

A reseller gets customers only for a few months. This isn’t true because every business is trying to enter the online world today and it is possible only with a website. For a website to be available to all, it needs to be hosted on the server. Therefore, web hosting is always in demand.

Since businesses are now learning about the importance of online platform, it is easily possible to win new clients. You simply need to gain their trust. Reseller hosting is a profitable business and you can earn good income from it.

Final Verdict

So, if you are planning to become a reseller then you need to clear all the above misconceptions first. Anyone having the knowledge about basic server hardware can start a reseller hosting business. Your hosting provider manages all the technical issues and queries of your clients. You don’t need to get your head stuck in them and think on the solutions. Also, you can increase the number of customers easily as web hosting is essential for any website to be live.

With any other business, it isn’t guaranteed that you will gain profit; you might also get into loss and debt. While in reseller hosting, it is guaranteed that you will earn profit only.

Read More

How Referral Marketing Can Benefit Web Hosts

Even if the niche of web hosts are fully loaded with a lot of companies they are still one of the easiest to promote because you could write your own experience about them. There are also tools like GTMetrix, to help you see how fast and reliable your site is. And for web host businesses your customers usually stick with you unless something bad happens. Referral programs are the best way to promote this type of business.

The benefits of customer referral programs

Even statistics show that when it comes to buying or trying anything, people would consider recommendations from people they know over ads. And that makes referral programs a very powerful marketing strategy. Online reviews could also help boost the power of a referral program.

When it comes to referral programs, it’s more likely that your customers would be referring you to people who are looking for web hosting. Just like when you’re a wedding planner, your customer would refer you to another person they know that’s planning to get married, they definitely won’t refer you to a person looking for a house as it’s not the slightest bit related. When it comes to referrals, it is more aimed at your target audience which makes it more effective.

And the last best thing you could get from referral programs is the fact that it could turn into a cycle. Your customer referred you, the referred person enjoys your service so they refer you, and it goes on and on. Eventually, your program would grow and so would your business.

How do you setup a referral program?

So, are you finally convinced that referral programs could really make a difference for your web hosting business? Giving rewards in exchange for customers is totally worth it, especially if you get to prove that they will be happy with your service. So here are some things you should do as of setting up a referral program.

There are five things you should do when you are planning to start a referral program.

1. Find out what your customer would be happy for you to offer

If you have the right incentives, your referral program would definitely work. And they type of incentives would vary from your target audience to another. You have to make your reward one of the reasons why they want to promote you (aside from being happy with your service, of course). In order to know what incentive to use, you have to be able to understand your customer, and in order to achieve that you have to build a relationship with them and ask them or give them choices to choose from.

Rewards vary from cash, discounts, free trials, etc. You can offer them free services depending on their payment method whether they pay monthly or not. Just don’t forget to plan everything out before even starting.

2. Make your customer want to refer you

Your customer would more likely promote you if it’s simple and quick to do. Everybody has their own preference when promoting, some prefer their blog, some on social media, some on forums, etc. So make sure that you allow them to choose where they are more comfortable to promote you in an easy way. But remember to always make your customer happy because that would be the main reason why your customers would want to tell their friends about you.

3. Choose the referral software that would match all of your needs while still being good to your pocket.

There are a lot of referral programs that you could run on your own website. You can usually add them as a plug-in or add-on. But make sure that whatever you choose is compatible with your website or else it would be useless.  When you have figured how your customer would want to refer your business, you can start looking for referral program software that could do what your customer wants. Every referral software has their fair share of uniqueness when it comes to features and interface, so It’s usually more of a personal decision that should match your needs.

4. You’ll have to promote your referral program

Not all of your customers would know if you have a referral program or not, having one wouldn’t mean they would automatically know. You’ll have to advertise and promote it.

You could advertise it by sending out emails, through social media posts, texts, invoices and so many other ways. You could also create a landing page for your referral program that entails details about what you offer, what they could expect as rewards, and what your customer needs.

5. Make getting a reward easier

Some of your customers could be too busy or just not interested in joining a program. And those that do, should be prioritized to be kept happy. The more that they become happy with the benefits you give, the more that they continue in promoting you.

Another way to make getting rewards easier is by making the process simpler. Set up automated transfers if you are paying cash to make it quicker. No matter what your reward is, make sure that you keep it simple to achieve and be released.

How to promote your referral program

Make use of your email list

When you’re still starting to promote your referral program, you could make an email blast that would share all the necessary details. You should include a call to action button in it that would attract your customers by clicking on it and signing up. Email marketing is a way to market what you offer and at the same time keep your audience engaged. You also have to make sure that you use it to share new updates as well as upcoming updates to your email list. To make your email list better, it’s ideal to divide them into segments. That way, whenever you send out emails you could make it more targeted to their interests.

Let your website proudly wear it

Your referral program should have a real estate on a landing page. You can achieve this by adding a call to action on your website. There are many ways to do that, you could add a link on your header, a sidebar, and even a smack dab in the middle of your page to make customers sign up would do its work.

You could use website menus

If nobody is aware of your referral program then obviously it won’t work, right? So go ahead and make everyone aware that it exists! In the last 5 years, referral programs have been the bomb, people today aren’t just aware of it, they’re even aware of how to use them and what they’re for, actually, they even search for it! So if you don’t have a menu item or a section on your page dedicated to, it’s such a shame. You have to spark the curiosity of your visitors in order to increase your chance of turning them into your very own ambassador.

Bots

There’s a shift in paradigm in the world of technology as it’s being swept by a revolution of bots. Every brand are putting an effort into adding a bot interaction with its users. While many people who are focused on marketing have considered bots, there’s more focus on the ways it could boost ROI. But can you imagine if bots have the capability to upsell your referral program instead of just customer support and bookings?

Web Push Notification

For marketers around the world, web push notifications are such a fancy. Even when there’s obviously a debate on the rise of mobile between this, the web still is continuing to thrive. Web push notifications come in to get the attention of dormant users and also works as a playground for people who are promoting referral campaigns.

Bonus strategy to get more customers

Join Forum Discussions

For every niche, there are different forums, and in this forum, you will see people that are more likely interested in you. Join forums that talks about web hosting, try to contribute as much as possible and build a relationship with people in there. On your signature, you can use your URL to your website or to a page where you post special offers so when they click it could spark an interest. While helping people in related forums you are making more people know that you exist, meaning you are bringing more traffic to your business. Remember, be active and don’t just go there to invite, that could turn out negatively.

Read More