Understanding Customer Experience: A Deep Dive into Web Hosting Satisfaction

4GHadmin | 27 November 2023
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Understanding Customer Experience: A Deep Dive into Web Hosting Satisfaction

If you say you’ve got a lot riding on something, it doesn’t necessarily mean someone or something is in the saddle or anything of the sort. There’s no actual riding going on, and instead what it means there is the potential to be successful or unsuccessful with something you have value in. For any business of any size these days they will have a lot riding on their website, and the value they’ll have it is growth and profitability. You go into business to make money, and a website is increasingly how your customers are going to find you these days. So reliable Linux web hosting in Canada is going to be a priority for these folks.

And fortunately consumers do have options as there are many web hosts in Canada that have reasonable pricing for reliable web hosting. Competition exists in any business, but in ours here we need to have exceptional customers service to go along with everything else people will want to be assured of with their web hosting – uptime guarantees, dedicated Linux server hosting for large e-commerce websites with heavy traffic from online customers, SSL certificates for transaction security, and much more.

And that’s what we strive to do here. The majority of Canadian web hosting providers will have online help feature for customers and you get live real-time assistance related to anything with your web hosting package. We do too, and we also make a point of offering a money-back guarantee that our Linux web hosting in Canada is as rock-solid and affordably priced as you’ll find anywhere in the country.

Right Touch

Customer trust when it comes to web hosting isn’t built exclusively on technical capabilities. Yes, you need to be known for web hosting that has sites alongside the information superhighway all day every day and reliably, but there also needs to be a very responsive human element to the way you offer customer service.

We see customer service as a term that encompasses the overall perception and interactions a customer has with a company during the time that they are receiving a paid service. The majority of customers like the affordability of shared web hosting plans and the simplicity of their needs is met quite nicely with them. But it’s not these members who will have customer service inquires as often as those who are enjoying dedicated Linux server hosting.

That may be due to the complexity of what they’re doing with cPanel controls, and that’s perfectly alright. Customer experience contributes significantly to the way a customers will be satisfied or not with their Canadian web hosting provider. There can be various elements to this, including the ease of website setup, the performance and reliability of hosting services, customer support availability and satisfaction, and what’s seen to delivered in the way of overall value.

Timely Responses

Being readily available and quick to respond does wonders for the way your customers will evaluate you as a much-needed service provider for their business. Needing assistance with technical issues is a common inquiry where the web hosting provider will do very well for themselves in this area if they don’t have much downtime between when a customer service request is submitted and then when it is responded to.

Website setup and onboarding questions will come in frequently too. A customer may have a question about selecting a hosting plan, and then registering a domain after choosing Linux web hosting in Canada before they encounter some speedbumps with configuring their website. These days you need to be able to provide your help in a hands-on interaction between the customer and a user-friendly control panel and dashboard.

You’ll also want to have additional tools available to paying subscribers that increase their usability factor with their web hosting and in doing so make it more likely they’ll be satisfied and continue to renew their domain name through you. Examples can be website builders, one-click application installations, automated backups, security enhancements, or performance optimization tools.

Meet Every Expectation

There’s been industry-wide research suggesting that 81% of customers will purchase again if they’re entirely satisfied with the customer service they’ve received. But if that’s not what they believe they’ve received then the same estimates are that 76% of customers will switch to a competitor. This likely also applies for Windows web hosting in Canada. Every host is going to be aware that good and reliable web hosting is going to be a part of these people’s operating costs for the long foreseeable future, and it’s very much in their interest to retain these people as customers.

Keep in mind too that these same satisfied customers may well recommend their web hosting provider to their friends if they have had a great customer experience. This can lead to new customers coming on board, and this will add to the ranks of your loyal customer base.

In the bigger picture, we always need to striving to demonstrate care, be responsive, and show a commitment to customer satisfaction. Hosting providers can genuinely go the extra mile by focusing on select aspects.

Aim to Be Seamless Across All Channels

Customers these days will be contact companies through social media, website forms, live chat, email or phone. You should be focusing on how to accommodate inquiries equally as quickly and thoroughly no matter how they’re sent to your web hosting customer service representatives. And that means being able to accommodate customers even if they’re moving from one platform to another. Customers will often expect that an agent has the necessary access to their account to address their inquiry effectively too.

Other commonalities that you’ll hear dedicated Linux server hosting providers talking about in their relation to good customer service in web hosting is see everything from an elevated view and making notes about trends seen with needs, difficulties, and goals. Identifying and correctly analyzing them can help you address areas where you can be better with your service offering, and the big-picture benefits of that don’t need to be explained.

Speaking for ourselves, we’ve been a leading Canadian web hosting provider for so long that we feel confident we can receive, handle, and provide the right solution for any customer service inquiry we receive connected to any aspect of what customers are able to do with controlling their website through cPanel here or anything related to administration and account services.

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Unveiling SSD Storage: Enhancing Performance in Our Hosting Plans

4GHadmin | 20 November 2023
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Unveiling SSD Storage: Enhancing Performance in Our Hosting Plans

Unveiling SSD Storage: Enhancing Performance in Our Hosting Plans

There was once when tubes were on the top of the electrical circuit kingdom but since then solid state drives have really taken over based on their reliability. Vintage guitar amp enthusiasts will argue otherwise, but everyone else who has an understanding and appreciation of this kind of engineering will know that solid state really is tops for working reliability and the ability to withstand shocks to the system. Without going into too much detail that’s the reason that SSD storage is a big part of why SSD web hosting is superior for most.

That reliable performance has everything to do with these drives’ integrated circuit assemblies and the way the make data storage different – and better. Traditional hard disk drives wouldn’t have had tubes, but that’s not the point here. What is the point is that the reason SSD drives are better is because they don’t run as hot, they don’t run as loudly, and they are a lot more shock resistant. But what is even more important as it relates to being better is that they use less power, are much less likely to fail mechanically, and – last but not least – you don’t need to defragment them.

Your Canadian web hosting provider will need to be writing them over, and sometimes much more frequently than you’d think so using these drives in Canada is the sensical choice to be offering hosting customers who only have one priority with this – reliable uptime for their website and reasonable prices on SSD web hosting in Canada. These compact storage devices have become the backbone of modern hosting plans, and they’ve given websites a whole new level of performance and reliability.

NAND Flash Plus 1

A simple definition for SSD drives is that they are a type of storage device that uses semiconductor memory technology equipped with NAND Flash memory rather than spinning disks to store and retrieve data. They are almost like a larger-scale and speedier version of the USB flash drives you have at home, but sitting in a computer instead. Faste access times is definitely the foremost benefit of SSDs compared to HDD drivers, and their higher read and write speeds make all the difference in the world.

These drives also have no moving parts and are more compact than most hard drives. Their ability to handle multiple input/output operations simultaneously also makes them the better fit for web hosting needs since websites must often access a great deal of information from different sources – databases, images, audio files, and more.

SSDs are also nicely versatile for web hosting providers because they can be compatible with preceding drives’ file systems and they can store different types of website files fairly reliably too. Another big plus is the way they can have the same interface connected to a web, and that contributes to lower-cost operations in a significant way.

Super Speedier

You can actually watch and see how data retrieval becomes a lightning-quick process with an SSD drive compared to an HDD drive. Web pages do load impressively faster, and that’s high on the priority for anyone who has their website hosted by us. If a website is slow, you’ll need to find a solution before you go down in SERP rankings.

SSDs score much higher for reliability too, and it is even more emphatically clear with the way that up until recently hard drives were still considered relatively reliable despite having moving parts. Moving parts will often be the first that start to fail because of ongoing wear n’ tear with conventional hard drives. And even in the event something like this happens with an SSD drive you have a much more likely chance of recovering the data.

The long and short of it all is that SSD storage with SSD web hosting is so much better for the seamless navigation and interactions that webmasters want to hear of website visitors experiencing. By harnessing the power of SSD storage, website owners can significantly enhance the overall user experience.

Less Power Usage Too

Solid state drives consume less power than standard hard drives do, and experts familiar with the technology will tell you they often use 5 watts or less per cycle. This means an environmentally friendly choice too, and many of the type of people who will choose 4GH for web hosting in Canada will want to see that as part of a company’s values.

Dedicated hosting plans with SSD web hosting are always going to provide sites with the best performance environment. But we can also see that SSD storage brings a competitive edge to shared hosting plans, with multiple sites being together all on one single server and often with a smaller data center connected.

The lightning-fast read and write speeds of SSDs give shared hosting more of what it needs to run smoothly and not be putt-putting at times when there’s not enough bandwidth available to allow for traffic spikes.

Best for All Web Hosting

SSD drives are also a big part of why all our different web hosting package options can be relied on for optimal performance when paired with the strength of having 2 large data centers in Canada. We offer SSD storage with every hosting package we have here and we definitely make the grade for reliable and fast web hosting that has the best SSD servers being a big part of why we’re able to offer that. SSD web hosting can push your website’s performance into a new stratosphere, and site visitors will be extremely pleased with lightning-fast speed, and provides the reliability and stability your online presence deserves.

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Mastering cPanel: Your Comprehensive Guide to Efficient Website Management

4GHadmin | 14 November 2023
Reading Time: 6 minutes

8 Essential Tips to Boost the Performance and Speed of Your WordPress Website

For many people, their high level of proficiency with whatever they’re good at is the result of their growing up with it. Now to have grown up with web development and operations you’d have to be a fairly young person right now given the Internet isn’t even quite 30 yet. Those youngsters are going to be the most capable of being a webmaster and operating/managing a website, but for those of us who were born decades before the advent of the information superhighway that may not be such an easy thing to do.

Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re like any good Canadian web hosting provider in the fact that we get that, and that’s why most of us will provide our recipients with cPanel controls that make the processes a lot easier and doable. The ease of use and far-reaching functionality of cPanel is the reason it has become as ubiquitous as it is for website management through a web host. Others are good, and some would even say equally good but cPanel is the industry standard for anyone enjoying the best Linux shared hosting.

We’re inclined to say it’s intuitive, but we realize that some may not take to it as easily or get a handle on it as fast as we might. So for this entry, we’re going to provide a comprehensive guide to efficient website management with cPanel. And for anyone weighing their options for the best Linux web hosting in Canada, it may be that this demonstration is part of what makes going with either shared or VPS hosting here even more convincing. So let’s get into it.

Ideal Interface

cPanel controls and sets various aspects of your website, and that’s a necessity as ever website needs an interface operating behind it and used to tailor the site preferences so that it runs and displays exactly as you’d like it to. This includes email accounts, database connections, and FTP settings available through cPanel’s easy-to-use interface. It’s a WHCP – web hosting control panel – and as we mentioned every web hosting provider will have one that they make available to customers.

The reason being they’d be inundated with requests, demands, and all sorts of ‘can you do ____ for me’ inquiries to the point they’d never be able to operate the business.

cPanel is a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) that works very well for simplifying website management and server administration tasks for users of all technical backgrounds. It’s a robust and user-friendly control panel that has been integral in the web hosting industry and continues to be to this day.

With cPanel you can configure almost anything related to your website and web server, and some of the most popular customization is with email creation and management, domain redirects and management, website file and database managers, and implementing optional security features. You can also change server and software settings, and dictate how frequently your site will conduct backups or enact restores. cPanel will always be present with Windows web hosting Canada plans, and it can be configured to work with many web hosting plans and dedicated servers, too.

Getting Started

We’ll start with access here. You can access cPanel from your web host’s dashboard with the username and password provided to you with the onboarding communication. It shouldn’t require anything more than entering those credentials and then you should be in your cPanel and ready to take control. Navigation is nicely simple with a responsive and intuitive interface. On the left of it, you’ll see all your products and services you can manage. You’ll also find a submenu under Tools, and this is where most of the settings we’ll need in this tutorial will be.

All tools are split into categories in the center for easy access, but you’re able to reorder any of these by clicking and dragging them with your mouse, and over time you’ll find you use some more than others and these can be repositioned to the top. On the right sidebar is where you’ll have your general server information, along with your site’s current domain name (URL) and IP address from which the last login occurred. Plus there’ll be some very basic statistics about the site’s storage, bandwidth, and file usage.

The entire panel has a nice and simple point-and-click interface design, and most people learn to make their way around it fairly quickly along with customizing their site without much in the way of struggles or difficulty.

Basic Website Management

For most people their website management involves handling essential tasks such as creating email accounts, managing website files, and handling databases. A significant number of sites being hosted here at 4GoodHosting our with any other web host in Canada will be WordPress sites. In the event yours is the same, you’ll need to start by knowing how to install WordPress from cPanel.

Inside your cPanel dashboard, locate the ‘Softaculous Apps Installer’ icon or simply search for ‘Softaculous’ in the search bar. Click on the ‘WordPress’ icon or search for ‘WordPress’ within the Softaculous interface. What you’ll see next is an overview of WordPress along with an ‘Install Now’ button, and when you click on it that will start the installation process. That’s all there is to it.

Next, let’s discuss creating email accounts in cPanel. Go to the ‘Email Accounts’ section and select the domain that you want to have a custom email address for. Go ahead and pick a username for your email account that represents you or your website, and then your next step is to set a strong password for added security. You have the option of using the Password Generator here if you don’t have a strong password of your own.

Customize Email Settings

Customizing various settings is possible after creating your email account. Your options here will include autoresponders where you set up automated responses for your email account, forwarding for redirecting messages to another address, and spam filters to limit unwanted emails.

From there we’ll move to managing files and your FTP account in cPanel. This is advisable as understanding File Transfer Protocol (FTP) can give you greater control over your site’s file structure. With FTP, you can directly upload files to your account’s storage from your computer via an FTP client like FileZilla, or another free FTP client software.

Uploading and managing website files is possible by accessing the ‘File Manager’ in your cPanel dashboard under the ‘Files’ section, and for most they will look for the ‘public_html’ folder for the main website. Click ‘upload’ and select the files you want to upload from your local computer and then once they’re in place you can move, rename, or delete files as needed using the File Manager’s interface.

Database Management

Databases are integral infrastructure for websites, and that’s very true for those powered by content management systems (CMS) like WordPress and others that are standard with the best Linux web hosting. You will want to know how to set up and manage databases, and in the cPanel dashboard you can go straight to the ‘databases’ before clicking ‘MySQL Databases.’ Enter a name and click ‘create database’ to create a new database. You can then add a user to the database, along with assigning privileges to those users or limiting them with custom permissions.

Connect your website to the database using the provided database details. Connecting your WordPress website to the database is best done with the first install wizard or automatically if you’re taking advantage of 4GoodHosting’s Managed WordPress Hosting, which is recommended if you want maximum functionality and page loading speeds for your WordPress website.

PhpMyAdmin will likely be your primary tool for configuring or creating a MySQL database and accounts, but it’s good to know you won’t see it on your cPanel as it comes out of the box. It is a separate application you can launch from inside cPanel and again you’ll go to the Tools submenu to find it.

cPanel for Advanced Website Features

Not all sites are built simply or function basically, and for ones that have greater needs, a webmaster will want to be able to fine-tune and optimize their website to a greater extent. Security and backups are a priority for a lot of people with these sites, and the good news is that implementing security measures to your account is now easier than ever.

cPanel offers a range of tools to help you safeguard your online space. The latest versions of cPanel come with a strong two-factor authentication system that provides fantastic security beyond the usual username and password combinations. cPanel will also provide you feedback on the security strength level for your password(s). Hotlink protection is another good feature, and it prevents other websites from directly linking to your files so that they’re not able to advantage of your account’s bandwidth.

Two-factor authentication for an additional layer of security is also good, and you can also browse and choose SSL certificates that secure data sent between your website and your visitors. This enhances security and your site’s credibility will be boosted in the process.

Performance optimization can also be a part of the equation and benefits of having cPanel at your disposal, and that’s what we’ll conclude with here. Look into Gzip compression, image compression, and various other optimization tasks, and you also have the option of trusting in the process and going with cPanel’s Optimization option to compress all content on your website for better performance.

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8 Essential Tips to Boost the Performance and Speed of Your WordPress Website

4GHadmin | 07 November 2023
Reading Time: 5 minutes

8 Essential Tips to Boost the Performance and Speed of Your WordPress Website

It’s hard to think of examples where complexity is preferable to simplicity, at least when you look at whatever it is for an end-user perspective. There are times when architectural complexity is needed for any number of different interests, but when it’s you that is doing the building and using of it then you probably want everything to be as simple as possible. That certainly applies to websites, as most people who don’t need anything too fancy with theirs are going to be fine with a simple yet functional and fairly good looking one too.

For many that’s a WordPress website, and the ease of use with putting one together and maintaining or upgrading it is why WordPress websites are more numerous that other type of site. Good Canadian web hosting providers like us here at 4GoodHosting are receptive to that popularity and will offer managed WordPress web hosting plans that are optimized for these types of sites. They are also decidedly affordable for people who aren’t leaning on a website to be the most focal point of whatever is they’re promoting for themselves with Toronto web hosting

So going the simple route with a WordPress website is a great place to start if you’re claiming a domain name for the first time and you’re ready and eager to make yourself visible on the information superhighway. There are also ways to make your WordPress site function ever better despite it’s barer-bones simplicity, and that’s what we’re going to look at with this blog entry.

Speedier is Important

Optimizing website speed isn’t a nice-to-have for WordPress website owners, and nowadays it’s really something that you can’t do without at all. There’s been research that’s indicated nearly half (47%) of consumers won’t give a web page any longer than two seconds to load. This is something nearly everyone can relate to, as no one is willing to tolerate or be patient with a page that doesn’t load sufficiently quickly.

There are several strategies you can implement to speed up your WordPress website to go along with the speed benefits that come with Toronto web hosting optimized for WordPress sites. So without any further talk here are our actionable steps that can increase your website’s ability to load with the type of speed that visitors are going to expect with it.

  1. Optimize Images

Images are an integral part of having the right type of engaging content, but they can also be a part of the reason why your pages aren’t loading quickly enough. What you can do here is compress your pictures before uploading them and this is the easiest way to remedy this situation and you’ll quickly see that your images don’t look any worse because you’ve compressed them.

There are a number of free plugins that you can use to do this, and you can also consider using the modern WebP format, which gets high marks for its high compression rate and excellent visual quality.

  1. Leverage Browser Caching

Browser caching is a means for storing frequently visited elements of your website in a visitor’s browser. The advantage to this is in the way that it lets you load the cached elements like images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files swiftly any time that same user returns to your site. Plugins are ready to make this step easy for you too, and ones like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache can be used to make browser caching a part of your WordPress website’s functionality.

  1. Use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

You’ll find that most WordPress websites will be utilizing a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is a distributed network of servers for delivering your website’s content from a server nearest to the user’s location and chosen from many available ones around the world. The way it speeds up the delivery is based on shortening the physical distance the data needs to travel, and just like that you’ve got faster page loads and an increased likelihood of your site visitors sticking around. Look into any of the best ones out there, including CloudFlare and MaxCDN, that integrate easily with WordPress.

  1. Go with Lightweight Themes and Plugins

When a WordPress theme is too heavy, it can detract from the website’s page loading speeds. Choosing lightweight themes with fewer file sizes and features is the better choice here, and if it can be paired with cleaner and more streamlined code it can really go a long way with decreasing the complexity of your website’s structure. You can be increasing selective of plugins here too, because you never want to have too many of them. An excess of plugins can mean more HTTP requests, and that will mean more of the slowdowns we’re trying to avoid here.

  1. Minimize External HTTP Requests

Continuing with talk around HTTP requests, the biggest problem is when they’re directed towards external scripts like fonts and tracking codes, something that happens quite regularly when servers get requests. When this happens delays with page loadings may occur. Auditing the site to identify any unnecessary external requests is advisable, and you may find ones that are detrimental but won’t affect your site’s functionality and aesthetics if you remove / replace them.

  1. Prioritize Database Optimization

It’s common for a WordPress database to become cluttered with unnecessary data over time, and often the culprits are post revisions, spam comments, and transients. It’s smart to clean and optimize your database regularly so that your site’s performance benefits from it. Most Toronto web hosting providers will have several WP plugins available through their control panel for site webmasters to remove unneeded data and streamline your database, and again this will contribute to faster loading times.

  1. Enhance Mobile Responsiveness

A website that is fully responsive for mobile web browsers is of paramount importance in an era where most people go online via their smartphones more often than by any other means. It’s a standard recommendation that WordPress website operators optimize their site for mobile devices, and that is best done with responsive design techniques and testing performance on various devices and screen sizes. This may be a more laborious process, but it’s something you can and should do if your aim is to deliver a seamless and fast browsing experience for mobile users too.

  1. Go Enterprise Level

This last suggestion if probably a more obvious one, but there are different type of WordPress web hosting available and enterprise level ones will be more expensive. But they’ll also give your website much more in the way of the built-in resources needed for optimized performance, and boosting loading speeds in a big way as part of that. Higher level WP hosting packages in Canada are definitely recommended for Toronto web hosting or anywhere else in the country, and multi-level caching with dynamic caching technology that is engineered explicitly for WordPress is the biggest reason why these advanced WordPress web hosting options are worth the added expense.

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