Month: April 2018

April 17, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Voice recognition in smartphones isn’t exactly new, but pairing it with AI and this level of functionality is. Here at 4GoodHosting, part of what makes one of the best Canadian web hosting providers is the way we don’t need to be coaxed to keep up on developments in the digital world. We realize the immediate relevance all of these mobile trends that keep coming fast and furious have for both us and our customers who are in business on the web. Nearly every business or company has been working to optimize their local SEO, and now voice search optimization has become more of a priority as well. Given the increasing predominate of searches and queries submitted by voice and process by digital assistants like those mentioned above, there’s good reason for that. Here’s what we know about the best ways to optimize pages and content for voice search. Ensure Good Page Speeds Siri has made quite a name when it comes to helping people get the information they need without having to enter anything manually, and they don’t have to follow any set method or tradition for conducting their search. They’re free to use the feature in whatever manner they want. But if a page doesn’t load quickly, they’re going to move on. Voice search engine optimization is important, and let’s note that page speed plays a major role in voice search SEO. The average voice search result page loads in 4.6 seconds, which is 52% faster than the average page. This definitely raises the bar of what’s ‘acceptable’ and you need to make sure you’re in line with it. HTTPS is Better That extra character at the end of your URL prefix makes all the difference in the world now. HTTPS websites dominate Google’s voice search results, and more standard HTTP sites lag far behind in popularity with voice-based search results. Take note again that 70.4% of Google Home result pages are secured with HTTPS. Voice search results are significantly more likely to use HTTPS than other websites ranking on Google’s first page. As a result, implementing HTTPS may improve your chances of appearing as a voice search result....

April 10, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The continuing boom in digital technologies - and in particular for mobile video streaming and online gaming - now has mobile devices making up nearly 60 percent of the entirety of data traffic. Come 2020 that’s expected to rise to 80 percent and it’s an indication of how totally wired we’ll all look to be in the not so distant future. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re in a spot like any other Canadian web hosting provider where we see the incredible benefits this type of mobile connectivity is going to provide for us, but we’re also obviously aware of the operation challenges that these data demands are going to put on data centers across Canada. Every online activity involves massive amounts of data that’s stored in different data centers, and while there’s many different sizes of them it is the large data centers that may overheat on account of the billions of gigabytes of data being created and used all around the world. Data centers and their IT equipment – servers, networking and storage equipment - consume mammoth amounts of energy to run AND work to cool the heat which emanates from the IT equipment going at or near capacity much of the time. In fact, cooling is far and away the biggest consumer of electrical power in nearly all data center, and sometimes they may take up to 40 or 50 percent of all the power being used in certain ones. Here’s something else to consider; this round-the-clock global data center energy consumption eats up roughly 3% of all globally generated power, and makes up 4% of greenhouse gas emissions. That puts the ICT industry at par with the airline industry in as far as those emissions, but it’s the data centers that are said to have the fastest growing carbon footprint among the entire ICT sector - to the tune of almost 1/4 of global carbon dioxide emissions from ICT. There have been energy efficiency improvements, but it’s predicted that data center energy use will grow by 4% between 2014 and 2020. Technological Advances in Cooling The biggest change from recent years is that demand for data centers among...

April 2, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

When you set out to build a website and - in the bigger picture of things - an online identity you are probably going to focus most on layout, graphics, content, SEO, marketing, and advertising. These are all vital components of a good website, but it turns out that where you choose to host your website also factors in as well. Here at 4GoodHosting, so much has gone into making us a top Canadian web hosting provider, but without a doubt seeing to it that our clients and their websites are optimally located and enabled has always been a priority. We definitely understand that before you choose your website’s design or content, you need to choose a good web host who’s got the infrastructure in place to protect your rankings. One of the factors Google and other search engines look for when indexing web pages is how fast they load. Now while it’s true that a good Canadian web host won’t necessarily get your website listed on Google’s first page, it is true that a lesser host will ruin your credit with Google and other search engines. Between a provider’s server type, location, speed, and uptime there can be an affect on your website’s relevance with search engines. It’s definitely something to consider. Here are five web host traits that search engines that Google will see unfavourably for search engine rankings. Slow Speeds This one’s probably fairly obvious. A website that is clocked to load slowly will be disadvantaged. Search engines aren’t going to rank your website high in the search results when it’s too slow, and that’s in the interest of keeping visitors on a page. Most site visitors will click off a website if the page is too slow to load. Between 7 and 10 milliseconds is considered to be the optimal speed, but anything over 100 milliseconds isn’t good. Your homepage should load in under 1 second, and there are many ways to test this. Google ‘free website speed checker’ and you should be able to find them easily. Excess Downtime Even the fastest loading website is going to be disadvantageous if it’s down too often. When...