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

4GHadmin | 31 August 2015

Cloud_Traditional_Hosting_4Goodhosting

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 stored in a public cloud. You are also depending on a second party to safeguard that data.

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

4GHadmin | 24 August 2015

JP-building-opt-in-email

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.

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To Brand or Not to Brand

4GHadmin | 17 August 2015
Brand Branding Marketing Commercial Name Concept

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.

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4Bloggers: Top-Rated WordPress Free Plug-ins

4GHadmin | 10 August 2015

Wordpress Various Colorful ShapesNeed 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.

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

4GHadmin | 03 August 2015

Drone spying through window your living room. Privacy policy concept.

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.

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