Category: Domain Related

November 15, 2017

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Part of being successful in today’s advanced digital technology world is being able to update your marketing strategy along with the advancement of new platforms. It was 8 years ago that Morgan Stanley, one of the most renowned Fortune 500 companies, predicted a rise in popularity of ‘Mobile Web’ compared to ‘Desktop PCs’ would be coming by 2014. That of course was spot on, and we all now know the broader and more overarching value in keeping a website responsive and mobile friendly. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’ve established ourselves as a top Canadian web hosting provide, and part of what’s given us that opportunity is the way we strive to be as informative as possible with anything from which our customers stand to benefit. We host a large number of e-commerce and business websites. While we haven’t had to convince these folks of the value of having ‘responsive’ websites, we have had to provide more clarification of just what that involves. We’re happy to do so here as well, with hopes that it adds value to what is already very affordable Canadian web hosting! Mobile’s Mega Relevancy Anyone’s who’s not considering mobile web traffic in their analytic data is likely losing significant revenue. While mobile web technology hasn’t entirely overtaken desktop, it’s quickly on its way to doing so. Be explicitly aware via which devices these new customers are entering your website and embrace how responsive web design will benefit your online marketing strategy. Defining Responsive Web Design Here’s a straightforward and sufficiently non-technical explanation - Responsive web design is one where the page loads and then operates with full functionality, whether you access the website URL with a desktop browser or a mobile browser. Site fixtures will rescale, as the page size will be taken into account. It’s important to understand that there are no separate version of mobile sites or tablet or desktop versions with responsive web design. The website is oriented for maximum flexibility, opening as it should with any respective device. The benefit of this in simple terms? Visitors enjoy optimal readability on all their favorite digital devices. And when it comes to the construction of...

November 7, 2017

Domain Related

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Upon being first introduced into public servers – and not that long ago, really - cloud storage and cloud computing was a mysterious entity entirely foreign to the general public, but oh boy did its advantages ever become readily apparent. Cloud storage and computing quickly made significant changes to the way people put their computing devices to work in every way possible, as well as redefining the way companies do business. However, as is always the way in the digital world, the same question is always ready to go. “What is next in the evolution of personal and business computing?” Here at 4GoodHosting, we have cemented ourselves as a leading Canadian web hosting provider with affordable rates. Behind all of us here is a genuine interest in developments in the E-world and all that goes along with it. Anyone who’s been as curious as we’ve been over the past decade plus will now that nothing stays ‘new’ for long, and that the engines driving technological advances in computing aren’t one to rest on their laurels. Let’s have a look at what’s the general consensus on what’s next – if anything – after the Cloud. Wholesale Changes Aplenty The cloud has been much more than just a place to store and access data, it has indisputably been an opportunity for growth in the IT world. This has been especially true for people beginning to understand the benefits of mobile business. If we were to list them all we’d fill your screen 20 times over, so let’s look only at the main developments: Company Data Instantly Accessible From Anywhere Companies have been trying to figure out more cost effective ways to do their work since the beginning of commerce itself hundreds of years ago. The Cloud has made it feasible to work from almost anywhere, provided there’s an Internet connection. Having an employee or contractor working remotely saves any company quite a bit in overhead costs. It also allows employees to set their own pace and often motivates people to increase their own leisure time by performing their work more efficiently. Without the cloud, only companies that that could afford multi-million dollar...

October 23, 2017

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

This past week has seen an explosion of cautions extended to people using home Wi-Fi networks (which of course is pretty much ALL of us) regarding a security risk that makes private information and personal content increasingly vulnerable to theft or misuse. It’s certainly not the first time such an issue has come to the attention of the digital world, and it won’t be the last. This one, however, is particularly noteworthy given the fact that it has such far-reaching and widespread potentially negative implications for anyone who’s on the web via a Wi-Fi connection – at home or elsewhere. Here at 4GoodHosting, we strive to be on top of trends and developments in the industry to go along with being a premier Canadian web hosting provider. This ‘heads up’ should be especially welcome for business owners operating an e-commerce website, but we imagine it’s going to also be well received by your average web browsing guy or gal as well. Malevolence from your Modem? Credit for catching this new flaw goes to a team of Belgian researchers. They’re the ones who recently discovered a security vulnerability in the WPA2 protocol. The WPA2 protocol is a system of rules that dictate how your Wi-Fi networks function and behave. As mentioned, it’s a near ubiquitous and wide-reaching ‘standard’ – it’s installed and in use with almost every single modern Wi-Fi modem or router. We’re going to go ahead and assume that includes you, and as such this warning is one you’ll want to take note of and follow the precautionary measures we’ll lay out here. The research has indicated that there’s a loophole in the WPA2 rules that’s creating the possibility for hackers to tap into a Wi-Fi network and grab sensitive information that’s being relayed back and forth over it, with one example (and likely the most disconcerting of all the possibilities) being stealing your credit card details when enter them in the process of buying something online. Another possibility could be snagging your password when you enter it into the login for a particular website. Here is a good read on the issue in detail, via the official website....

October 17, 2017

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Over the past few months we’ve devoted a post or two to rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and how they’re still worth taking note of despite the fact they haven’t ‘taken off’ quite like people expected them to. Different people have different takes on whether they will ever become a legitimate player on the global currency scene, but we believe that there is in fact going to be a demand for currencies that are not internationally regulated by any specific bodies and can be uniform from one country / currency to the next. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re a leading Canadian web hosting provider who also takes a keen interest in developments in the digital world. That’s likely a hallmark of any good provider –staying on top of trends and the like and choosing the most relevant ones to share with their customers. Right then, let’s continue. Not-So-Harmless Browsing It would seem that Internet ads are now the least of your concerns when it comes to annoyances. Recent news indicates that the websites you visit could now be prompting your computer to do what’s called ‘cryptocurrency mining.’ So with an existing understanding of what a cryptocurrency is, we now need to ask what exactly cryptocurrency mining is. The entirety of the creation, management, conversion, and transaction of digital currencies demands a lot of computing power. Each block of transactions involves computer owners around the globe racing to solve a very challenging cryptographic puzzle, and winning means you get paid in the relevant cryptocurrency. Contestants, known as “miners”, up their chances by building up their processing capacity. Most commonly this is done by building server farms in remote locations where electricity is cheap, but they are always searching for inexpensive ways to mine for cryptocurrencies more effectively. Conversely, website publishers are always on the hunt for new ways to generate revenue. The standard means – subscriptions, ads, etc. are often insufficient. They don’t have much appeal for most users, can be hijacked, and the big search engines like Google typically take their cut of revenues. So increasingly these days they are resorting to an unscrupulous approach. They’re offering miners access to the...

September 25, 2017

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The world of digital and fibre-optic technologies continues to grow in leaps and bounds, and this week we saw one of the most profound examples of just how much of a priority the business world is placing on web-based technologies. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re a leading Canadian web hosting provider who always has a little more wind in our sails due to the fact that we’re so passionate about anything and everything that pertains to our industry. As such, the news that a high-capacity fibre optic cable that left Virginia Beach, USA much earlier in the year has now emerged on the coast of Spain is a profound development that definitely excites us and is very much worth sharing with our customers. ‘Marea’ (Spanish for ‘tide’), as the cable has been named, has been funded by Facebook, Microsoft, and Telxius – a subsidiary of the Spanish telecommunications giant Telefónica - and is the highest-capacity cable to have ever crossed the Atlantic. In terms of significance, it represents a weighty shift in the balance of power in the submarine-cable industry. Up until now, transcontinental cables have been funded by telco consortia, and the arrangement tended to be that they would offer capacity on those systems to customers like Facebook and Microsoft for a price. Recent years have seen skyrocketing demand for global bandwidth, and that trend has made it so that the largest of these customers have had no choice but to join in the funding of construction projects which always cost hundreds of millions of dollars at a minimum. This one is worth that level of investment and then some. Marea is more than 4,000 miles long and boasts transmission speeds of up to 160 terabits per second. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly 16 million times faster than the average home internet connection and equipped to stream 71 million high-definition videos simultaneously. It’s well understood that international network bandwidth and traffic have been growing in leaps and bounds, although the growth rate has been slowed notably in recent years. The fact, however, that this bandwidth and traffic grew at an annual rate well in excess of 30% between...

September 7, 2017

Domain Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Before any website makes its way up onto the information superhighway, the domain name attached to it must be registered with a hosting provider. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re a top Canadian web hosting provider among many and we can certainly take care of that basic and straightforward formality for you. What we’re going to discuss today, however, is the way that your domain name’s extension (.com being the most common) can have direct and measureable results on your SEO, and search engine ranking more specifically. Let’s review the basics briefly; a domain name is a unique internet address that is made up of a name and extension (such as .com, .ca etc.). This extension is also referred to as a Top Level Domain (TLD) and it is the most relevant part of your domain name. We’ll move now to putting you in the know with factors that influence choosing the right domain extension and how it dictates your SEO rankings in a significant way. Various Types of TLDs In the infancy days of the Web, domain extensions were initially introduced to facilitate browsing across different domains. There were 6 general top-level domains (gTLDs) marketed to folks looking to get themselves up and running, and we saw different domain extension for different types of organizations. Some may be surprised to learn that the .com extension was actually introduced for websites for commercial purposes, and has nothing to do with the term computer. Much more common nowadays are domain extensions with a country code, also known as country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD). These took off between 1985 and 1990, and examples of these types website name domains are .ca for Canada, .kr for South Korea (who have the fastest internet speeds in the world) .in for India, .co.uk for the United Kingdom, etc. 1998 saw the creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an international nonprofit organization designed to keep the Internet secure and stable. New gTLDs were released in 2001, including .info and .pro, designed for informational websites or those representing certified professionals. The number of domain extensions has quickly expanded since. There are now even...

August 29, 2017

Domain Related, Hosting Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

A big part of what makes an elite offensive player who he is on the ice is the ability to think the game one-play ahead. Gretzky was less concerned with where the puck was and more with where it was going to be next, along with knowing exactly what he’d do with it once the puck was on his stick. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re a top Canadian web hosting provider who similarly likes to look ahead at trends is the web and app hosting world that will dictate how we should adapt to best serve our customers. This blog post is based on data from a comprehensive report from 451 Research, and it gives significant insight on where the marketplace should be within 2+ years. It highlights in particular the meteoric rise in demand for managed web hosting in Canada, and how growth for web and application hosting has slowed predictably in recent years. That’s not necessarily cause for alarm, though - it just means the plays are slower to develop now. Technology is evolving. All you have to do is take the pulse of your own web or app hosting business. Workloads tend to be moving out of the web and app hosting category, and that’s true of some products as well. Many are responding by shuffling the IT services deck for data-gathering purposes. More and more service providers are specializing, serving a narrower or niche target market. New service categories are emerging, and we realize that we need to analyze the user preferences of our customers very insightfully right now to see where we can best put the bulk of our services technology to work for you. Here are the numbers of the report, with three statistical predictions: As a category, web and app hosting will grow from $18.2 billion in 2015 to $25.8 billion by 2019. Total hosting revenue will increase at an annualized rate of 15.5%. What’s interesting is that the “balance of power” in terms of revenue drivers has shifted. Managed hosting is growing at a far faster rate than web/app hosting. Here’s how that 15.5% breaks down: Dedicated hosting should grow about 5.7% per...

August 15, 2017

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Video content has become so standard in every aspect of the digital world, from news to sports to commercial videos for business and many more examples of where you’ve been able to watch video from your computer or smartphone over the last nearly 20 years in much the same way you were only able to do so with a TV prior to that. Behind that capability was Adobe, and their much-heralded and long-ubiquitous Flash plug-in multimedia player. It’s been a staple for pretty much every device since it emerged in the late 1990s, but now it seems it seems its working life is drawing to a close. Here at 4GoodHosting, we take pride in being a top Canadian web hosting provider and we believe that a small part of what gives us that distinction is in being in touch with all the reaches of the industry within which we operate. Given that dynamic multimedia content delivery is an important component of many of the websites we host, we feel this is a relevant topic for our blog this week. Adobe has announced that it will stop updating and distributing Flash by the end of 2020. That’s right, the 2-decade long reign of the most commonplace media player will finally come to an end. Until that time, Adobe will continue to partner with Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Google to offer security updates - including patches - in their browsers but no new Flash features will be forthcoming. The 20 year run as the undisputed ‘go-to’ guy for video within web browsers has been an impressive one, but one can’t deny that Flash and its more outdated versions have become prime targets for hackers because of the extent of its distribution and inherent security vulnerabilities which unfortunately allowed intrusion far too easily very often. Flash’s Legacy As mentioned, Flash emerged in the late 1990s, and its popularity was firmly cemented with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer becoming the default browser in Windows. Quickly leaving low resolution GIFs or blinking text behind, Flash allowed designers and developers to make web-based video, and animated, interactive content that could play on any computer or within any browser....

July 17, 2017

Domain Related, Hosting Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 7 minutes

You’ll find many business owners (or their e-commerce shot callers) that are proponents of having multiple domains for a single venture. Others will insist it’s an unnecessary expenditure if you utilize and position for your single domain with maximum effectiveness. For the average person, being able to make the correct determination here may well be beyond what they’re able to objectively determine, so let’s spend a little time this week to help those of you asking ‘is it better to have multiple domains and websites for a business?’ Here at 4GoodHosting, it’s our mix of solid hosting, competitively priced packages, and excellent customer support that makes us a good Canadian web hosting provider, but we feel another aspect that sets us apart is the level of insight we have into our industry and all of the subject offshoots that come from it that will be of interest to our customers. Having multiple domains means carrying more than one website for the same company. The general logic is that it’s especially wise to do so if you have a product or service that appeals to different audiences. A site that’s tailored to the viewing / interacting / purchasing preferences of each respective target audience. Typically you will aim to customize the messaging, sales content and collaterals, and other marketing strategies so that they’re more likely to be ‘hooks’ for that demographic. For example, a website for communications professionals will use a different approach than one for a staffing agency, for example, and this means that so a cross-over product (e.g., copy / scan / fax machines) might prove to be challenging to pitch effectively on a single site. It’s in these situations where the business will often consider having 2 (or more) sites with different domains so as to maximize the effectiveness with which they promote themselves to multiple specific buyer demographics. From the SEO Standpoint Only Should you take the decidedly narrow view and only consider search engine optimization (SEO), any reputable SEO expert will advise you that multiple domains can hurt your page ranking. That’s because having several keyword-rich domains pointing to your website is of no real specific...