Category: Domain Related

September 12, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Twitter is now adding ‘read receipts’, typing indicators, and automatic web-link previews to its “direct messages” giving it chat-like functionality. These new dynamic Twitter Direct Messages allow you to see who is reading and responding to your messages. Below is a recent tweet from Twitter itself: New! Direct Messages are more dynamic than ever with read receipts, typing indicators, and web link previews. pic.twitter.com/VEU92V5Gqj — Twitter (@twitter) September 8, 2016 Over the years that Twitter has been mainstream, the “tweet” has morphed from a simple 140-character text message now beholden to more creative expression featuring: hashtags, images/photos, videos, vines, and now more. Twitter has added the ability to poll your community, react quickly and cleverly with GIFs, and share and enjoy Periscope broadcasts in Tweets. You can now do a lot in a Tweet. In the coming months Twitter will be making changes to simplify tweets including what counts towards the 140 character limit. For example, @names in replies and media attachments (like photos, videos, & polls) will no longer use up valuable characters. Here’s a summary of planned changes: · Replies: When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group. · Media attachments: When you add attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, that media will no longer count as characters within your Tweet. More room for words! · Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: We’ll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed. · Goodbye”.@: These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Re-tweet it to signal that...

August 22, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Mobile advertisements are the new big market arena and will likely stay that way for a long time. That is, perhaps until we become telepathic? Mobile ad spending will account for more than 60% percent of the industry by 2017. Smartphones, tablets,even watches are already what today’s shopper uses to discover products and services across the internet. Perpetually siphoning in endless content and digital social venues. Shopkeepers and service providers have already smelled the blood. Nowhere is this shift to mobile more noticeable than with Facebook. Facebook interaction is also mostly happening over mobile devices; more than a billion daily active users/losers. Over 80% percent of ad revenue on Facebook revenue is mobile. If you are hoping to rope in conversions/customers from FB advertising, the double your mobile. First, beware of the common FB advertising money-pit-falls. Don’t Ignore call conversions As people are naturally staring at their phone in hand whenever noticing an interesting digital advertisement, they usually prefer to call rather than type. The number of mobile advertisement call conversion to businesses is expected again to triple over 35 billion inquiries by 2019. Call conversions are not something most digital marketers have given much attention to - yet click-to-call and ‘whatsapp’-type free-voip functionality is heavily re-landscaping the marketplace. Today’s supercomputer phones are still phones. Even better, click-to-call is therefore the easiest conversion path for consumers considering a purchase. Motto of this paragraph is to make sure to optimize your FB ad campaigns for call conversions. · Include an easily-readable phone number or call button on every ad or banner on your website. · Test your ad’s “call now” button; your ad’s main call to action. · Do your best to accurately measure “cost per lead” to prove and/or improve ROI, return on your “advertisement” read_more Location, ditto, ditto Somebody close to your store or business is going to most likely be a higher-quality lead; rather than someone at a different state, or country. (chuckle) So FB now offers “geo-targeting” options to help you get your advertisement into the eyes of the most lucrative prospects, and even at the right time. For example, you can aim your ads to consumers...

August 15, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Tim Berners-Lee is a famous name on the internet. Back in the early 1900’s Tim was the programmer, at the right place at the right time, who first successfully served a webpage from a web server to a client computer through the newly invented “http” (“Hyerptrext Transport Protocol”). The web was initially dreamed to be a decentralized democracy, enabling free speech forum of all networked computers around the world. However, in recent years, the attraction to big brand services, such as Google, Youtube, Facebook, Yahoo, you name it - has caused a ‘centralization of the internet” - making it ever more easy for those corporations, and America’s “NSA” to spy on the bulk of your online activity. Now Tim is again wishing to help restore the web to a decentrailized, more open, more free, more private internet. He is spearheading a project named “Solid”. The goal of it is to let you solely “own” your personal data. Digital Trends recently reported this in detail. With “Solid”, you store your data in “pods” (personal online data stores) that are hosted wherever you would like. But Solid isn’t just a storage system: It lets other applications ask for data. If Solid authenticates the apps and — important — if you’ve given permission for them to access that data, Solid delivers it. The paragraphs below offer a quick summarization: Solid’s name is derived from the phrase “social linked data” and it stores your data in personal online data stores, or pods. You can then choose which applications have access to your data and how much of it they can see. According to the website for Solid, the system is "modular and extensible"; and relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards & protocols. Development of the project is taking place at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute. Solid has similarities to ”Diaspora”, a social network that was built on a decentralized architecture, but which failed to become the “Facebook killer” data ownership and privacy advocates were hoping for. Thank you for reading the weekly 4GoodHosting.com blog.

August 8, 2016

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security, Security Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

You may have heard of the 3 more popular content management applications: Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla - but you are not sure which one is best for your needs. Perhaps you remain curious; so we will focus the the two ‘other’ choices besides Wordpress: Drupal & Joomla. Each particular CMS will provide the basic functions of: adding, deleting, and publishing various types of content. Each program has different strong points (and weaknesses) which should be considered whole-cloth, prior to making your ultimate decision. First write down your business’ objectives and goals. This should be is the first step in selecting the best CMS application suited for your particular business needs. Ultimately, optimally serving your business’ unique target audience. Choosing the right CMS (by the way, easily confused with CNS (Central Nervous System)), is the backbone for your project it will save you a great deal of headaches later. A reliable web host, with super customer support, also saves you from initial and future headaches. With 4GoodHosting.ca you can get both ultra-reliable hosting and the CMS of your choice for free: Joomla, Drupal, or of course; Wordpress - or any of the 200+ free scripts we offer you with any of our hosting package. Drupal: In 2016, there is an estimated 1 million+ websites built atop the Drupal CMS. Drupal is common to government offices, universities and colleges, Non-government Organization, Canadian & otherwise global enterprises. America’s White House website is taking advantage of Drupal’s strong website security features. Drupal is a comprehensive, expandable, powerful content management framework suitable to be the foundation of virtually any type of website. Drupal’s Advantages: * Tested Enterprise-level security; advanced control over URL structure * Lots of functionality - including advanced menu management, graphics modification utilities, poll management, and administration/users management * Built for high performance; pages load fast because of its defaulting caching features * Ability to handle large amounts of content & data * Extensive selection of themes, modules & extensions * Ideal for community platform sites (requiring multiple users - admin, editors, logged in users requiring customized content, private groups, etc.) * Large robust community generally responsive to inquiries and concerns. * Good SEO...

July 25, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

For company names- how much “creativity” is just too much? Google is undoubtedly the most recognized domain name the whole world round. More people have typed in g o o g l e . com than any other domain; Youtube, Amazon, you name it. These are 10/10 (perfect) domain names. Here we will contrast and compare to less easily memorable domain names. A lot of companies with good plans, and good service or products have failed at their current choice of business/domain/brand names. It’s never too late to change your company/domain name. The proliferation of domain-name squatting has led online start-ups to resort to increasingly ridiculous branding. So many companies, especially technology companies, have and still are making quite a mockery (some would argue an ‘evolution’) of the English language. The saddest part is that it is often not their business model or core company’s fault that their start-up business has flopped over time. Reviewing failed start-ups in the past couple of years, it has become obvious that about 9 out of 10 companies that have gone downhill over time - have had domain names that made it quite difficult to tell what they did (by looking at the name of the company/domain ). In contrast, if you look at the companies in the Fortune 100, you can pretty much figure out what they do - Shell Oil, International Business Machines, United Parcel Service, Microsoft, etc... Most of the successful company's have names that match what they do - making it pretty clear upfront. Fledgling companies, that have had to spend more than a minute, teaching each consumer ‘what it is they do’ have inadvertently positioned themselves to swim against the tide from day one. It takes a lot of skill with the English language - to think up the best names and brands that are catchy to consumers within a particular service or product-line. But there is the additional modern problem of coming up with a domain name that isn’t already taken or “squatted”-upon. For example: think up a dozen-or-so names for a new business and then look them up to see if those domain names are available. read_more...

July 18, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Question: Does your business (or personal) site also have a blog on it? Have you considered adding a blog but aren’t sure about the return on your time investment? Adding a blog is free (Wordpress, etc.) but we are not talking a standalone blog which “is” the website. (Standalone blogs are typically created around an interest or hobby, a cause, usually as a way to attract web surfers - in order to generate advertising income for the blogger.) In this article we will review the top reasons for making the decision to add a blog to your website. TOP 3 reasons to add a blog to a business website: * 1st - search engines eat them up and keep coming back for more. Blogs are particularly savory to the appetite of Google’s stomach (and the other various search portal out there). * 2nd -it a marvelous way to provide current, or chronological information, to educate and entertain your visitors about your: industry, products, services, etc. * 3rd - a blog gives a more ‘human’ face to your website - making it potentially more appealing than your competitor’s sites. 1) Blogging SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits Every webmaster, that is paying attention, would like for their website to appear on the “first page” of the search engines for particular keyword searches. Considering the bigger picture, the reality is there are a lot of other sites (and webmasters/marketing agents) striving for the same high ranking spots. Search engines wisely don’t reveal the secrets they use to determine or program which sites will display above others, for a given keyword search. However, we all can agree that search engines rank higher for fresh, relevant, high-quality content. Google (and others) have the same goal as webmasters: they want their visitors to keep coming back. So logically they need to make sure the most relevant, high quality, (and often fresh/recently-updated) links are returned for searches. A problem many small to medium sized businesses currently face is that their websites lack extra text content. The typical site contains 1-2 dozen pages of static page content. Also it is not uncommon for the pages to *not contain*...

July 11, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

External fraud is the enemy of all businesses. It can be argued that internal fraud is also an enemy of business, but this article will focus on common types of fraud that customers commit against a variety of e-commerce businesses - especially ones that sell tangible items that need to be shipped. Knowing what people do to trick businesses out of their own products (and time) can help defuse these techniques. How much is customer-driven ecommerce fraud costing online businesses? Customer-driven fraud cost merchants billions (with a “B”) every year. Some reports and statistics show that the level of fraud exceeds 10 Billion each year. Where online business really feel the pinch is with “charge-backs”. When the payment processors receive a complaint from a customer - they tend to believe the customer. Keeping investigation time to a minimum they typically process a charge-back transaction again the merchant. More often than not it is the merchants who are getting the short end of the stick. Customer-driven fraud has been on the rise. It has simply been easier for the payment processor to screw the merchant - even when the facts points the other way. Also, online transactions are often “card-not-present” situations, therefore making online stores particularly vulnerable to “stolen-card” fraud too. One type of fraud, particularly on the rise, occurs when scammer-customers order physical (or digital) goods, with the covert intentions to make a false claim to their bank (or even their victims bank) that products were “not delivered” - and fraudulently demand a charge-back. Fraud stings online merchants of all kinds, no matter how big or how small. In fact, it is on the rise in online world because E.M.V. [ (E)uropay, (M)astercard, (V)isa ‘smart card’] controls have made it more difficult to commit fraud over the counter. So thieves have been shifting their energy to e-commerce storefronts - which are more vulnerable to credit card fraud. [ EMV is a technical standard for smart payment cards and for payment terminals and automated teller machines that can accept them. EMV cards are smart cards (also called chip cards or IC cards) that store their data on integrated circuits in addition...

July 4, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

OpenVPN has become the most widespread VPN (Virtual Private Network) protocol used by today’s commercial VPN providers. However, did you know you can set up your own VPN service on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) which provides a closed environment situated as a physically remote server? If you lease a VPS from 4GoodHosting you can do anything you want with it, such as installing any operating system, and basically treating the VPS as your own personal remote server. If you are interested in running a VPN service on your VPS then this article will be helpful. Using automated installation scripts, the process has become easier for the average person to use. The following is how to install OpenVPN on your own VPS server running Centos 6.x or 7, Debian (or Ubuntu) Linux. - download an auto-installer for OpenVPN, such as this one openvpn-install - Next: login to your VPS (as root) and run the following: - wget http://git.io/vpn --no-check-certificate -O openvpn-install.sh; chmod +x -openvpn-install.sh; If you are not logged in as root you type: sudo ./openvpn-install.sh The OpenVPN auto installer will execute and it will then prompt you for more information as follows: 1. The script will first autodetect your public IP address. (if you have multiple IP addresses on your VPS you can set it via the script to utilize a specific one.) 2. Next, type in the port number used for incoming OpenVPN connections (or use the default of “1194”). Any port can be used, any random one will likely do - as long as it is not in-use by other application server, or service. Select whether to listen on port 53 too; which is useful for covert connections. 3. Next, you will be asked for a name of client certificate. You can use anything such as “user1”, “anonymous”, “johndoe”, yourdog’s name, etc. That’s all the OpenVPN installer needs to know. Subsequently it will download the packages, generate the encryption keys and certificates and then after that it will attempt to start the server. OpenVPN uses 2048bit RSA keys for authentication and the 128 bit Blowfish algorithm for data encryption. If everything went smoothly, the auto-installer will notify...

June 27, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 8 minutes

If you are not currently using a VPN ( a “Virtual Private Network” [remote server connection]) to help restore privacy to your online world, then you probably are not aware that about 20% internet users worldwide in 2016 already periodically use a VPN to help them connect to the full global internet; especially in totalitarian countries that ban such services such as youtube. People’s motivations vary from reason to reason (and there are quite a number of good reasons; many of them we’ll cover in this article). Reasons typically vary from a desire for privacy & increased anonyminity and general security, to overcoming censorship, and even *improving* their internet connection globally as some ISP restrict, limit (or as it is termed “shape”), connection speeds to certain websites - making them less attractive to use, some ISPs block p2p (peer to peer connection such as torrents) , and some VPNs supply data buffering to help even out slower, or shaped/moderated, connections. How did VPNs come about? In this article we will go over the history of this technology of how VPN use has generally progressed over time. In a subsequent article we’ll go more into advanced topics such as encryption. The Beginnings of a Secure Internet In the late 1990s, PPTP (that is “Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol”) was developed. PPTP was the first internet protocol for creating virtual networks. This is one aspect of technology Microsoft was a leader (instead of a follower or hijacker in some cases) in pioneering; as much of PTPP was initially developed in-house at Microsoft. Microsoft saw the growing need to allow internet users to have a secure/encrypted connection to work effectively and securely from home - for companies to be able to provide a work-from-anywhere infrastructure. PTPP a big milestone event and henceforth set the stage for the birth and evolution Virtual Private Networks. VPN Technology Over the years, different types of VPN technology have come about. Today there are different types of VPNs (mainly Personal and Corporate) with different protocols (PPTP, OpenVPN, L2TP/IPsec, SoftEther, SSTP). How does VPN security work? A VPN is technically a WAN (Wide Area Network). the front end (that is, your...