Category: Hosting Related

November 2, 2015

Hosting Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Do you already have a blog? If so, you might have a potential money-maker on your hands. When you find yourself investing your time & energy into something like a blog, it’s only natural that you eventually get paid for it, not only to help sustain yourself, but to also be able to push yourself further to offer more. A blog by itself meets all the criteria of a full website, and therefore it is possible to use it to create a small business. By posting interesting, high-quality content, and by adding in the right measures for optimizing SEO (Search Engine) exposure, you can gain hundreds if not thousands of visitors. If you have a stream of visitors, you can you convert that into a revenue stream. So how do you go about making money with blogs? Here we list the most popular advertising techniques that paid bloggers utilize daily: The quality of your content should never be compromised for the sake of advertising revenue. If your content becomes overpopulated with advertising techniques then it will only corrupt the flow of your content, it will seem too commercialized and you will surely lose readers over it. 1. Create or Promote a Product A great way to earn money is to produce and ship a product and make some extra money from that. It can be a digital (downloadable) product too; such as e-book or even an online course. Creating your own digital or physical product as a blogger should be an exciting path to online success. Types of products a blogger might create and sell: Retail (or wholesale) merchandise Ebooks, Webinars, Online Courses Software, Plugins, Apps Video, Audio, DVD Reports Note: a successful product launch also begins with great timing. You probably will feel a sense of urgency in introducing your service or product, but rushing could also foil your ambitions. If after second thought, postponing your product launch until everything is perfectly in place could mean the difference between experiencing no traction or receiving glowing reviews. 2. Use of Affiliate Marketing What is affiliate marketing? It’s very likely that you’ve heard it before. Affiliate marketing is the process of...

August 31, 2015

Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The above diagram shows you the architectural difference between cloud hosting solution and traditional hosting solutions. Cloud service partitioning of the overall system stack, as outlined above, only started to become generally promoted in 2008-2009. Traditional dedicated servers, shared server hosting accounts, and VPS hosting were offered all over the internet more than full decade before the word ‘cloud’ became the latest buzzword. This article is a bit different than most every other ‘cloud hosting’ article published so far. How? Well, there has been alot of hype over the past several years about the cloud approach to web hosting. Although cloud hosting is becoming an increasingly popular method of web hosting, there are some disadvantages to that arrangement. As with each kind of hosting, there are pros and usually at least one drawback associated with each type; and each has a significantly different cost. Hosting a website in a public cloud offers some benefits that we will review below, but there is one very significant drawback - which is an inherent lack of control over security/privacy of a company’s business data. This means that your information could be vulnerable to hackers and unauthorized users. After all you would be storing your ‘private’ business information out there in some unknown rather geographical location in ‘the cloud’. Would you simply trust that? If you just have a small website, that showcases your company with some simple functionality such a contact form, then a traditional shared hosting account or VPS (Virtual Private Server) is completely adequate; as it has been for a long time. Shared hosting has been the status-quo since the late 1990s’. Regarding software applications and databases that deal with your actual business data: such as your customer lists, their ordering information, your customer’s personal information or credit-card/banking information, you would logically want that information to be kept ‘in-house’ or internal. Your company’s most important data is usually the proprietary software that your company has developed (usually at great expense), or your company’s entire customer database (which is usually tied together with your customer’s personal credit card or banking details). This is something that you would not normally want to have...

August 24, 2015

Hosting Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

You may already have an established list of current and former clients for your business. Your website gets traffic, your phone rings, and over time your business grows. If you have a physical storefront as well, with floor traffic coming in the doors each day, best to try and not let any seeds of current or future opportunity just slip in an out. At the very least, try to get their email address. Before they leave, ask them to sign your guestbook or let them know that you would like to email them any future special offers. We’ll go over some techniques in the article to help you grow your email list for your business. However, if you are not providing your audience with a way for you to stay connected with them when they are at a distance from your business, then you are missing out on a valuable opportunity to maintain relationships with these customers or prospects. Ignoring them could dampen the growth that your business could otherwise achieve by continuing to inform or influence them concerning new promotions or things your business is doing. read_more Adding more than Social Media offers Facebook can really be a waste of time and effort in more ways than one. Twitter is less of a waste of time, but it can be difficult to get results from. Setting up a FB page or building up followers on Twitter is a struggle and at the end of the day/month many of those contacts can come and go - as you are really just borrowing them. Uncountable people have put days, weeks, and months into building their fan bases, but if one day Facebook decides to censor or limit your ability to deliver your message(s), you will be no better place than when you started. On the upside, by growing an email list, you will be able to direct your message like a laser beam and communicate with your audience exactly when you want and on your own terms. You will be contacting a fertile list people who might be interested in buying your products, signing up for services, or returning to your...

June 29, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

If you haven’t thought abut enhancing your website with responsive design features by now, you’re at risk for losing some business in the future. How? The reason for the huge shift is due to the way people are browsing the Internet now days. A sub-optimal design/layout experience may occur for those who browse the Internet on a smaller-screen device. By 2016, browsing by mobile device is expected to exceed desktop use; making it ever important that your website will be easily viewable on the variety of screen-sizes. The acronym “RWD” stands for Responsive Web Design RWD’s beginnings go back to mid-2010, yet it is still fairly new to the majority of business website owners. Most simply defined, it is a website design using HTML5 features that automatically adjusts your website to fit on a desktop, and tablet, or smartphone. If you ever have browsed a website on a mobile device, and it loaded the desktop version then you understand it can often be difficult to navigate, zoom in and pan around. Users probably won’t be that impressed or may choose to keep surfing. Google has the incentive to give higher rankings to responsive websites, and they are implementing such factors in their ranking algorithms. A summary of how it works: ImageAs shown above, the webpage content has been adjusted and re-sized when necessary to fit into the confines the particular screen’s resolution. The methods of RWD utilize what is termed ‘media queries’ to sense the resolution of the device the webpage is being displayed on, to subsequently scale content and images on the screen. Years ago, web designers would develop a conventional desktop site, and secondly an entirely different mobile version to try to accommodate many of the many different mobile devices. read_more Big Reasons To Utilize RWD Beyond readability on all devices, there are several other benefits, the first being: A. Google gives RWD websites some weighted preference Google has deemed RWD as a best practice for websites. A responsive website having one URL (as contrasted with m.yoursite.com or mobile.yoursite.com) and the same coded structure allows Google to fully crawl and index your website, while Google also takes note...

June 8, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Being mobile friendly is the current ‘big thing’ going on in terms of search engine ranking for websites. If you are not just doing simple updates to your website, but rather replacing large portions of it in full, there are considerations to keep in mind. Maybe you are just handing your site redevelopment to a third party? There are several other things at play than what can be visually seen, replacing your site structure could bring down your site’s rankings causing it to drop in terms of SERPs (which are “search engine results pages”) So the following are some tips and guidelines to follow in order to keep your site safe from new Google penalties and to get your site maximum visibility in Google. Unfortunately, we all have to become Google conformists. Our society, our global culture as a whole, unfortunately believes in continuous centralization of power. Resistance is apparently futile. 1. Create a website map of your site The first step is understanding where everything is placed on your website. If you have implemented SEO methodology in the past, then most likely at least a few pages rank well SERPs, and you don’t want to lose those gains when your website structure changes. read_more Screaming Frog - http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ is a free online tool that details your current website’s map. You can then begin matching it up to your new site design. 2. Concerning Your Website’s Platform Different underlying technology for your website can have influence on your website’s ranking. Is your site straight HTML, HTML5, WordPress, or some other CMS? When you’re creating the new site, are you staying on the same platform, or are your changing it? The platform you or your web developer choose is an important consideration. SquareSpace, Wix, Weebly are easy to setup, but can be limiting for future SEO efforts. WordPress offers a full SEO experience due to the many choices of third party plugins, for example, “WordPress SEO” offered by Yoast. Most importantly, make sure your website/platform has the capability to use 301 redirects, which has the power to re-link the former page location on your old site to your new site (more...

June 2, 2015

Hosting Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Dear 4GoodHosting customers , As you probably are already aware of social media (ie. twitter, facebook, etc. ) is an extremely valuable tool for promoting your website content. Other associated services, like ‘addthis’ and ‘sharaholic, make it 1-click simple to share content whether it be images, articles, comments, or other activities from websites to facebook, twitter, linkedin, pinterest and many more social media outlets as well. (as pictured above) You have probably seen this in action already in many places on the internet. If you haven’t done so already, in this blog we are going to show you how to easily set up social media sharing buttons and tools on your website. By doing so you will be extending your website’s visibility and leveraging what is known as “inbound marketing”, or increasing your visibility from the inside-out (free) rather than the outside-in (paid). You already have great content on your site, so you want to leverage that fact. The following social media buttons/tools will help you fully enable that. read_more There are two choices that we wish to promote, notably “addthis(.com)” and “shareaholic(.com)’ Both services have an easy sign up process. The process ultimately gives you a snippet of code that you can inset into your web page html code next to the content that you would like to be socially promoted. Another technique, if you run a Wordpress blog or other popular CMS, is to utilize plugins that such services make available to help share your content easily. Additionally these plugins also enable you to optionally ‘monetize’ your content, if you choose to show advertisements which are typically placed at the bottom of your article/page. We did an internal review of ‘addthis’ and ‘shareaholic’ and decided that shareaolic offers the most advanced features. We subsequently added social media buttons on our company blog posting Shareaholic’s Wordpress plugin. Shareaholic states they currently socially enable over 300,000 websites of all types and sizes. Shareaholic.com guides you through how to implement the top five social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest) on your website, blog, and other content. The Difference Between Follow Buttons & Share Buttons Which of the two types...

May 19, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

In this week's blog we wish to describe some marketing techniques to help you market your website for free. For free? Yes. The advent of the internet has given birth to marketing techniques now known as "inbound marketing" - that doesn't rely on funding traditional, often expensive, marketing campaigns. Inbound marketing is an overall technique that a company, or perhaps just your personal website as well, can use to market itself through blog posts, seo optimization, press releases, electronic newsletters, whitepapers, social media, article writing and other similar creative methods that you might come up with. That is a list of marketing tools that don't really require money upfront if you are willing to do the work to assemble and publish the materials. Inbound marketing is also commonly referred to as "content marketing" as well. Inbound marketing retains the benefit creating value from the very start of the interaction with prospective customers. In short, Inbound marketing is pretty much all about creating, publishing, and sharing content (also posted in a discoverable way typically through search engines) around the internet. read_more The other way to market your website is known as Outbound Marketing. Outbound marketing is basically purchasing attention for your website/business. That can include traditional print/radio advertising, telemarketing/flyers, spam (be careful though, aggressive spamming is now considered against the law in Canada), billboards, pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising (such as Google adwords) and perhaps even tv advertisements. In the days before the internet and search engines, outbound marketing was really the only way to bring customers in; but in today's world outbound marketing is being replaced, to ever higher degrees, with inbound methods. So inbound marketing is more preferable on tighter budgets, and can also be more effective too. If excess funds are available, a company could decide to even hire a marketing agency to do all the work for them. But inbound marketing techniques actually are lasting ways to bring more business in - as the content you produce for your website can be lastingly built into/onto your website. Inbound marketing is especially effective for small businesses that offer knowledge-based products; where prospects are prone to do prior research...

May 4, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Small Smartphone screens count bigtime too! We could have entitled this article “The need for pleasing your website visitors who are using mobile device”, and perhaps that would be a better title. In any case the message of this article is to persuade you that it is basically critical to your business not only to have a website - but to also have a mobile website. So we urge you to consider the little investment in time and the little bit extra per month to develop a mobile friendly website. Would this mean that your website could require two domains? The answer to that is no. It is actually a better practice to use a single domain and then use an intelligent piece of javascript code on your website to determine if the viewing device is a smartphone or a larger device such as a laptop or a desktop PC or Mac. For example, if you go to Amazon.com on your mobile device, you will see a different layout than the larger pages you would see on a desktop monitor. If people were required to “pinch and zoom” on their small screens ( to read very small font, or to have to scroll left and right and up and down to read the site content ) - then Amazon would be losing out on many of their sales that come through iphones, and androids, windows phones, and other such devices. See for yourself if Google considers your website to be mobile friendly: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ Go ahead and try your website in the google tool above. Did your website pass the test? read_more We understand that the prospect of another website design sounds daunting to you.It is even to us. We didn’t pass this test either: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?url=http%3A%2F%2F4goodhosting.com Text too small to read; Links too close together; Mobile viewport not set ;Content wider than screen... However, despite how busy we are, and how we have often thought people searching for web hosting wouldn’t be doing so from a mobile device - the simple fact is that google is considering it important and is making it a search engine ranking...

March 31, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Canadians enjoy heading across the border for some great cross border shopping but, when choosing a web hosting company it is important to know what the differences between US and Canadian web hosting and what it can mean for your business. We are going to be looking at the differences in privacy between the two countries, the benefit of having your data near you, the benefit of being under your own nations law, the reason that you should be choosing local and of course the dangers of utilizing a US web hosting company, especially in regards to the DMCA concerns and lastly some added benefits of hosting within Canada. In the world of web hosting you have hundreds of options, and this article looks to show you why if you are a Canadian based business, having your web host based out of Canada is going to help your business succeed. Privacy We first start in the realm of privacy. Privacy is important, no matter what type of business you are running as proprietary information leaking to your competitors can mean the end to your success. However, how your information, and especially who has access to your information, is controlled is completely different between the two countries. In the United States their is practically no privacy protection for data owned by companies. There has been no comprehensive data protection legislation put through, and rather it relies on self regulation within the industry. The Patriot Act also allows federal authorities to block access to your data, as well as authorizes them to spy on you, through your site, all without a court order. On the other side of the 49th parallel personal data is regulated, and protects information for both individuals as well as businesses. This is from the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act passed through the Canadian government. In regards to your privacy, the only place to store it that is truly secure is right here in the Great White North. Data Location If you are looking for a fast loading time in San Diego, you store your websites information in San Diego, but if you are looking for...