Month: August 2015

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Data Privacy: The One Big Benefit of Traditional Hosting when compared to Cloud Hosting

August 31, 2015

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The above diagram shows you the architectural difference between cloud hosting solution and traditional hosting solutions. Cloud service partitioning of the overall system stack, as outlined above, only started to become generally promoted in 2008-2009. Traditional dedicated servers, shared server hosting accounts, and VPS hosting were offered all over the internet more than full decade before the word ‘cloud’ became the latest buzzword. This article is a bit different than most every other ‘cloud hosting’ article published so far. How? Well, there has been alot of hype over the past several years about the cloud approach to web hosting. Although cloud hosting is becoming an increasingly popular method of web hosting, there are some disadvantages to that arrangement. As with each kind of hosting, there are pros and usually at least one drawback associated with each type; and each has a significantly different cost. Hosting a website in a public cloud offers some benefits that we will review below, but there is one very significant drawback - which is an inherent lack of control over security/privacy of a company’s business data. This means that your information could be vulnerable to hackers and unauthorized users. After all you would be storing your ‘private’ business information out there in some unknown rather geographical location in ‘the cloud’. Would you simply trust that? If you just have a small website, that showcases your company with some simple functionality such a contact form, then a traditional shared hosting account or VPS (Virtual Private Server) is completely adequate; as it has been for a long time. Shared hosting has been the status-quo since the late 1990s’. Regarding software applications and databases that deal with your actual business data: such as your customer lists, their ordering information, your customer’s personal information or credit-card/banking information, you would logically want that information to be kept ‘in-house’ or internal. Your company’s most important data is usually the proprietary software that your company has developed (usually at great expense), or your company’s entire customer database (which is usually tied together with your customer’s personal credit card or banking details). This is something that you would not normally want to have...

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Help secure your business’s future by growing your business’s email list

August 24, 2015

Hosting Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

You may already have an established list of current and former clients for your business. Your website gets traffic, your phone rings, and over time your business grows. If you have a physical storefront as well, with floor traffic coming in the doors each day, best to try and not let any seeds of current or future opportunity just slip in an out. At the very least, try to get their email address. Before they leave, ask them to sign your guestbook or let them know that you would like to email them any future special offers. We’ll go over some techniques in the article to help you grow your email list for your business. However, if you are not providing your audience with a way for you to stay connected with them when they are at a distance from your business, then you are missing out on a valuable opportunity to maintain relationships with these customers or prospects. Ignoring them could dampen the growth that your business could otherwise achieve by continuing to inform or influence them concerning new promotions or things your business is doing. read_more Adding more than Social Media offers Facebook can really be a waste of time and effort in more ways than one. Twitter is less of a waste of time, but it can be difficult to get results from. Setting up a FB page or building up followers on Twitter is a struggle and at the end of the day/month many of those contacts can come and go - as you are really just borrowing them. Uncountable people have put days, weeks, and months into building their fan bases, but if one day Facebook decides to censor or limit your ability to deliver your message(s), you will be no better place than when you started. On the upside, by growing an email list, you will be able to direct your message like a laser beam and communicate with your audience exactly when you want and on your own terms. You will be contacting a fertile list people who might be interested in buying your products, signing up for services, or returning to your...

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To Brand or Not to Brand

August 17, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Brand Branding Marketing Commercial Name Concept Branding is an important concept in marketing. It is a persistent form of advertisement and valuable for the continued success of your business. In this article we are going to explore it in depth. Most every company has a brand whether the owners or operators of it are aware of it or not. However, not every business has a brand that matters significantly. So what makes a brand “matter”? What qualities make a brand appear boring, and what makes some brands appear outstanding? Let’s examine what makes brands matter and how to possibly transform your brand from boring to brilliant. Understanding“Brand” Your company’s brand extends beyond a logo and what the colors and design of your website. Branding is what kind of feelings are invoked in the minds of people, the known reputation of your company; their positive, neutral, or negative thoughts are the backbone of your brand. So branding is a complex and difficult thing to measure. Apple Computer is of the best example of brand, so we’ll use it here again. When you think of Apple, you mostly like thing about modern, sleek, thin, elegant, and generally beautiful design. What does the Apple brand make you feel? In other words, think of your brand as the experience you deliver to your users. Brand is built on every aspect from looks to customer service to reliability. Increase your Branding How do you develop a brand that grabs people’s interest? It does take more than a fancy website and fancy logo. It takes asking the right questions. read_more A. Why is your business different? People have more choices than ever. Differentiating your brand is good idea. By catering to every type of customer you wind up strongly appealing to no one. But by taking a unique stand about what you believe is best, you can create a brand that others believe in as well. Think about it: Why would a customer choose you over the competition? B. Additional Value Statement(s) Your personal values likely are the core reasons for doing business in the first place. Why are you doing what...

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4Bloggers: Top-Rated WordPress Free Plug-ins

August 10, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Need some starter help sorting through over 40,000 WordPress plugins? That’s a lot of functionality, and most of it is free. You could spend hours just learning about the basics. This article is here to help save you time. Here are some popular ones that we thought you should consider. 1. Google Analytics Google Analytics (sometimes annotated “GA”) is a valuable tool for measuring and optimizing the performance of your website. In particular the Google Analytics plugin (by Yoast) makes it quite simple to install GA on into your WordPress installation. This plugins delivers all of the benefits of GA. It is being utilized on more than 1,000,000 sites. 2. WordPress SEO WordPress is a great content management platform for search engine optimization. The Yoast SEO plugin for SEO builds upon WordPress’s SEO features. SEO optimization methods are always changing adapting to Google’s ranking algorithm updates, but what will ease the pain is this plugin. It is updated regularly every couple of months to stay updated with current SEO best practices. 3. Intuitive Custom Post Order Intuitive Custom Post Order is a plugin to help you easily re-order the way WordPress displays your posts. This should really be a feature built-in to WordPress. Otherwise without a re-ordering plugin, you will not be able to easily re-arrange the ordering of your blog posts as you see fit. read_more 4. WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart allows you to add an 'Add to Cart' button for your product on any posts or pages. This simple shopping cart plugin lets you sell products and services directly from your own WordPress site and turns your WP blog into an ecommerce site. It also allows you to add/display the shopping cart on any post, page or sidebar easily. The shopping cart shows the user what they currently have in the cart and will allow them to change quantity or remove the items. 5. No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA Simple plugin for adding the new No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA by Google to WordPress login, registration and comment system to protect against spam. Features: * Option to activate CAPTCHA in either login, registration, comment or combination...

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Windows 10 – Is your privacy, your soul, worth the “free” price? And When does an upgrade become a downgrade?

August 3, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 12 minutes

Summary: "All your data belongs to us." ‘Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don’t know.’ – Steve Wozniak, Apple Founder There are many reasons why Microsoft is offering Windows 10 for free... People like free things and the whole Windows 10 roll-out implies revenue comes from harvesting data and providing it to advertisers, and other agencies, who’s non-productive "peeping-tom" jobs train them to want to know exactly what we are all up to; analyzing every nook and cranny of our otherwise private lives; such as our conversations with our spouses. The core of the Windows 10 issue regarding privacy seems to be right there. People want things "for free" and companies are more than happy to oblige, since people don't mind paying with their privacy. Windows 10 has all sorts of user spying and profiling baked right in. Also, it might be logically stated that you, or a class action suit regarding everyone’s privacy, can’t be eventually thrown at Microsoft because this operating was given out "optionally" and "for free". All of Windows 10’s features that could be considered invasions of privacy are enabled by default. Sign into Windows with your Microsoft account and the operating system immediately synchronizes settings and data to the Microsoft’s servers. That includes your browsing history, saved favorites, and the websites you currently have open - in real-time - as well as saved application states, website and Wi-Fi network names, passwords and any mobile hotspot passwords. Signing in with your Microsoft email, Live or Outlook, account means Windows has access to your emails, contacts, and calendar data. The new Edge browser serves its users personalized ads. Even the Solitaire game is also tied into the mix and now comes with targetted ads. We are stunned that the settings, in fact, all default to “incredibly intrusive”. From experience, we know that almost for certain most average people will just accept the defaults despite any realization of any degree of risk and have no idea how much personal, business, and otherwise private information they are unwittingly and automatically giving away. read_more 1....

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