Reading Time: 6 minutes On the internet, email is the standard communication medium. It’s the go-to communication for brands. Email is the most direct channel, it boasts a higher ROI than any other channel and it helps build loyalty and relationships on a much deeper level than any other channel. Right now, more than half the world is connected to an email account. By the end of 2017, email addresses are expected to increase, to about 5 billion accounts worldwide. When sending emails to your small business customers, you need an effective strategy. 1. Welcome Email First impressions are everything. And a welcome email sets the tone for the relationship. So, roll out the red carpet for your customer. According to Experian, welcome emails generate 4x the open rates and 5x the click rates compared to other bulk promotions. Moreover, studies found that subscribers who receive a welcome email increase their long-term engagement with a brand by 33%. Therefore, greet your new customers. Let readers know more about your small business. And tell them what type of emails they will receive in the future. Write in a conversational tone. A welcome email is like a virtual handshake that accepts a new member to your group. It should be inviting and warm. Also, consider the timing of your welcome email. It shouldn’t be two weeks after the customer bought your product or signed up for your newsletter. 2. Adoption Email An adoption email is designed to keep your customers engaged with your products. Once they make a purchase, you want them to actually use it. Adoption emails can be distributed in a timed sequence or to correspond with specific behaviors or actions taken. Like a good concierge, adoption emails acknowledge where recipients are in a progression, offer suggested solutions, and reaffirm motivations for the original purchase decision. These type of email campaigns lead to faster adoption of the products or services being offered, greater incremental revenue, and increased customer loyalty. So, start sending emails with links to video tutorials and how-to guides. And urge customers to contact you if they have any questions or concerns. 3. Thank You Email Build rapport with your customers. Your...
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Reading Time: 3 minutes The name of the organization with seen to remain the same, “ICANN”, but the people is power over the organization is about to shift, without your vote, Oct 1st to an assemblage of the world body politic, mostly compose of despots and dictators. The effect of this is still yet to be seen, but one key person involved in today’s political fray, presidential candidate Donald Trump, opposed the lackluster plan. Basically, the current domain name system as you have grown to know, and trust, is about to go under changes that could easily lead to intimidation and censorship against free speech. Protection of grassroots political speech is also at risk. The world can go on with less adult websites, but the world simply won’t be as good or nice of a place without freedom of speech in other regards. The founders of America frequently stated that the citizenry must always be vigilant and jealously guard their rights and freedoms. This is the attitude now on the podium of Donald Trump; the only candidate opposed to the plan to hand over control of the internet to a conflicted party of those seeking ever more power in the world. U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is currently conducting verbal opposition to the semi-secretively planned transition of oversight of the internet's domain name system (DNS) management from the US-based governance to the UN, a global organization of political stakeholders from around the world; which could abrogate and hand-over control of the internet itself to authoritarian regimes such as China and Saudi Arabia and others; foreseeably threatening online freedom. Internet DNS is basically a directory for internet-connected devices that helps translate domain names to numerical IP addresses. He strongly contends that the US Congress should act swiftly block the handover, scheduled to occur next week on Oct. 1 2016, or as his campaign policy director Stephen Miller stated "internet freedom will be lost for good, since there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost." The ‘handover’ of the internet DNS was proposed in March 2014, implying the transfer of oversight from the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names...
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Reading Time: 4 minutes Intel has recently unveiled its ”7th-generation” core processors, with the promise of improved performance. (Credit: Intel Corporation) A new 7th generation processor die is pictured to the left. The new processors have new numbered codes to identify them as 7th generation, but, these codes also mix the “Core m” name in the with the “Core i” branding. “Core i” processors have always been powerful processors for high-end laptops and “Core m” processor are typically used in in smaller and less-powerful devices. However, processors which were formally called the m5 and m7 and now listed under the i5 and i7 lines. Intel stated on their website that the renaming decision is intended to make it simpler for consumers to select a processor - but we think the naming convention will just befuddle our customers. Consumers can still identify the ‘Core m’ chips in the ‘Core i” range by looking out for a ‘Y’ in the number. Here is an example for the uninitiated: “Core i5-7Y54” is a former “m” chip, but the original “Core i” line will continue with model codes such as “i5-7200U”. New product class now known as“Kaby Lake“: “Kaby Lake” is the code name for Intel's 7th generation Core processors. It is a relatively a minor upgrade over 6th-gen “Skylake” release, yet it is still an significant improvement which makes 2017's pc and laptop market ever more interesting. Kaby Lake is a minor upgrade which means there are really no major structural changes to overall design and what the processor capable of. Previously, each generation saw a reduction in process size, smaller and lower power consumption and a more powerful architecture. read_more These trends in how we consume and create content, in how we communicate and interact, reflect what Intel terms the “ immersive internet” . The immersive internet is found on a powerful enough computer to deliver ever more lifelike experiences, in games or general use. From Intel’s own recent press release, here are the 7th generation’s improvements: Faster and more responsive: Intel’s engineering and manufacturing teams have drawn even more out of our 14nm process technology with what we call 14nm+. 7th...
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Reading Time: 11 minutes As a website owner, the impact of your website speed on traffic, conversions and revenue should not be underestimated. A report by Akaimi found that 46% of people on the internet expect a wesbite’s pages to load in less than 2 seconds and 40% of people will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Many other studies have been published on the impact of website speed, another study found that a 1 second delay in site loading time resulted in a 6% conversion decrease, and 12% decrease in page views and a 15% decrease in customer satisfaction. As you might already know Google uses website speed as a ranking factor. So, having a slow loading website will negatively impact the following: Brand image and perception in the mind of your visitors Traffic & page views Conversions Sales Before you start optimizing your website to load faster, there are two things you should consider: First, go and check your current website load-time via Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights. This helps you to compare the speed increases once you have tweaked your site. Secondly, make sure to back-up your site as some of the methods require tweaking/editing files that can mess up your site. Here’s how to back up WordPress website and here’s how to backup any other… Here are the tweaks, in no particular order. Just pick ones that you think can be easily performed first. 1) Remove Unnecessary Plugins & Add-ons Unnecessary plugins and add-ons can reduce your website speed by A LOT, and it’s especially important to pay attention to them if you use blogging CMSs like WordPress or Drupal. For reference, you might be able to increase your page load times for 4 second to 1.5 seconds. It’s very important to note that it’s not just about the number of plugins you have installed on your website but about the quality as well. A website with 50 plugins can load much faster than a website with 10 plugins if the website with fewer plugins have crappy plugins. Generally, you want to avoid plugins that load a lot of scripts and styles, plugins...
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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...
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Reading Time: 2 minutes (US & Canadian News) Microsoft actually championed a huge victory in regards to user privacy {which certainly has affect on Canadians using Microsoft products and services: Email, Cloud Storage, Skype, etc.) on July 28th. An appeals court has ruled that a federal warrant to seize email from a Microsoft server in “Ireland” is invalid. Federal investigators received a spy warrant (for email contents) as part of a criminal investigation in December 2013, which touched off a debate between the tech-industry and law enforcement about jurisdiction & data storage. The timing of this coincides with Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) - where the company’s president and chief legal officer Brad Smith promoted a vision for the internet that "respects people’s rights" and is “governed by good law.” Microsoft said: “We obviously welcome today’s decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The decision is important for three reasons: it ensures that people’s privacy rights are protected by the laws of their own countries; it helps ensure that the legal protections of the physical world apply in the digital domain; and it paves the way for better solutions to address both privacy and law enforcement needs.” Privacy protections for information stored on paper should persist as data moves to the cloud. This decision helps ensure this result. — Brad Smith (@BradSmi) July 14, 2016 Microsoft has publicly acknowledged a need for cloud providers, particularly those based in the U.S., to win back over consumer trust. Representatives for like-minded lobby groups include: the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), i2Coalition, plus big tech companies such as: Rackspace, Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and Verizon - and notably in this case Ireland’s Parliament - and each submitted briefs in support of Microsoft’s initial statements and position. “We conclude that Congress did not intend the SCA’s warrant provisions to apply extraterritorially,” the judges said in the ruling (PDF). “The focus of those provisions is protection of a user’s privacy interests. Accordingly, the SCA does not authorize a US court to issue and enforce an SCA warrant against a United States‐based service provider for the contents of a customer’s electronic communications stored on servers located...
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Reading Time: 6 minutes There has been a lot of buzz recently about “Cloud Hosting”. But how does that really relate to how websites are hosted, with the great majority of hosting accounts hosted in a manner known as ‘shared hosting’. Cloud offers distributed scale-out storage as well as virtualized infrastructure. However, more than 9 of 10 websites out there are small business, personal or hobbyist websites - which see no visible benefit to the site administrators or the site visitor when served from a conventional standalone shared server compared to from a virtualized and distributed cluster of servers. The benefits of a cloud or hosting based on a clustered arrangement of servers are recognized with larger scale websites, deploying enterprise level applications, or websites is expected to suddenly serve enormous spike in traffic at times - such as hosting a video conference with hundreds or thousands of participants. At 4GoodHosting, we have been serving out thousands of long-term (and happy) hosting customers for well over a decade. Our servers today are state-of-the-art and powerful. About every two years, we upgrade our shared hosting server with new faster equipment, RAID hard-drive data redundancy, plus disaster recover servers, and also solid-state SSD storage for SSD-hosting customers. Our up-time for the past year has been better than 99.9%; and besides infrequent server restarts, our shared hosting servers have been 100% reliable. Whenever a hard-drive, in one of our dozens of shared hosting servers, starts showing a sign of wear-and-tear (and we have special monitoring software for that), we replace it immediately with no downtime for our clients - due to our redundant RAID storage architecture. So, in order to keep our hosting consistently low, we plan to continue hosting our customer’s website on state-of-the-art stand-alone shared hosting servers. We don't see shared hosting or virtual private server (VPS) hosting going away, we see it continuing strong into the future. Also, we believe in standard monthly pricing to give our customer’s more peace of mind; as we strive to keep our prices as low as possible across the board. Shared hosting and virtual private servers have traditionally offered standardized pricing which is not variable. In contrast, the...
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Reading Time: 4 minutes What is meant by NoSQL databases? NoSQL databases schemas and applications have now emerged into the mainstream as a modern tool for organizations battling big data requirements. But what does NoSQL actually imply, and what advantages and disadvantages does NoSQL deliver for data storage? Here is everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask about NoSQL. To begin with, NoSQL”is not a specific database product. It is a term that refers to a general category of database methodology and techniques; and a handful of vendors have implemented NoSQL administration in different ways. Yet all NoSQL products share a basic defining characteristic; which is that NoSQL implementations do not use the “relational-database” model of traditional SQL-style databases; such as currently ubiquitous in shared hosting “MySQL”. “Traditional” DBs Gaining an understanding of exactly what NoSQL means requires a recap on how most databases today have typically functioned for the past several decades. With a relational database like MySQL, the database architect or programmer needs to define and detail in advance where the data is going to be stored. Different tables are created, different pieces of data are stored inside different tables, and data is retrieved based on table structure. So MySQL, and other relational databases, are close to perfect if you know ahead of time what structure your data will be represented in; and also have a sense of how much data that will need to be stored. But what happens when your storage needs not so predictable? What if your applications data storage needs to be highly scalable? Relational databases don’t work quite so well in those situations. Simplicity, Openness, and Scalability NoSQL allow you to stream data into a database without defining a formal storage structure ahead of time. As a result you do not need to write as much cryptic code for an application to interact with the database. Also you can retrieve data quickly without having to tell your application where precisely to pinpoint what data you want within a large, rigid, syntactically very sensitive database structure. NoSQL DB’s also tends to scale better as they are designed to be able to run easily on...
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Reading Time: 3 minutes Is your website becoming much more popular? If you are searching for reliable yet inexpensive, and fast loading website hosting, “shared web hosting” or “V.P.S.” (Virtual Private Server hosting) service are two good, but not identical, options. The most common choice, to do it at rock bottom costs, shared hosting, but for many businesses the limitations of shared hosting eventually becomes outgrown. Migrating from a shared server plan to a VPS (or an entirely “Dedicated” or “Standalone Server) is typically the next step. 4GoodHosintg provides free upgrade migration services; to solve any nervousness when you may decide to upgrade your website to its own server. Some signs you have outgrown Shared Web Hosting: Skyrocketting Traffic For low traffic websites shared hosting is ideal. If you are noticing your traffic increase consistently, or if you are offering high-bandwidth content such as video(s); you may need to upgrade to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) for dedicated bandwidth, and for a lower-latency (faster) less congested network connections. When your business/website grows in size: your email, disk space, CPU & RAM (Random access memory) requirements will also eventually surpass your existing shared hosting plan. The growth of your business will often dictate the need for upgrades. Choosing between VPS and dedicated server Perhaps you would feel best serving your website by renting your own private server (standalone web server with it’s own dual power supply). However, first consider the differences between VPS and Dedicated servers - to find out which one is best for your application; including cost, as VPS are less expensive than leasing dedicated equipment in our data center. In either case, 4GoodHosting offers numerous advantages: such as 24/7 customer support, “RAID” hard drive and SSD redundancy, dual-coast back-ups, disaster recovery servers, plus the flexibility of upgrading or downgrading your server hosting package whenever you need with free migrations. read_more Maximum Security of your data If your business or organization is dealing with alot of company confidential data - then you should ensure the security of your data. By choose self-contained VPS or Dedicated Server hosting, you will more secure control over who has the ability to access your data. For VPS...
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Reading Time: 4 minutes Every day across the internet, hackers, malicious users, and cybercriminals, for whatever motive they may have, compromise thousands of websites. Their hacks are even sometimes invisible to users, but can remain harmful to visitors viewing the page, including the site owner. Unbeknownst to webmasters for some amount of time, their site has become infected with various forms of harmful code; some have shown able to record keystrokes on visitor’s computers, and even steal login credentials for financial account or online banking. You may ask: Is it my web host’s responsibility to protect my website? The answer is: both yes & no. Your web host, like 4GoodHosting, has implemented strong network security mechanisms and various other security measures to ensure your website works optimally. However, keeping each website secure is also the responsibility of the webmaster. Shared hosting is also by nature an “unmanaged” environment. This implies that each customer is responsible for updating their applications, website code and implementing security precautions to protect their website files and CMS (Content Management Service - such as Wordpress/Drupal/Joomla). Over the years we have seen various and some recent vulnerabilities with popular applications such as WordPress. Sometimes these breaches through Wordpress have impacted customer websites; because the site owners’ did not keep their applications up to date - even after receiving notifications that their installation needs to be patched due to vulnerabilities that have been identified. Some examples of these attacks are: SQL injections, Code injections, template holes and many more. If your site gets hacked what should you do? Here is where you should ask yourself: “Do I want to handle it myself? Or get help?” Here at 4GoodHosting we follow a well thought out and rigid methodology that enables us to automatically scan for and identify malware/hacks on our customers’ sites. We have built a rigorous process to resolve and fix the attack, “hack” as soon as possible. We employ the following steps: 1) 24/7 Monitoring 2) Scanning of the site 3) Assessing the damage (hacked with spam or malware) 4) Identify the vulnerability 5) If necessary, Quarantining the site 6) Validating backup files 7) Clean and maintain the website read_more However,...
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