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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Reading Time: 2 minutes HaLow There! “Halow” (pronounced "halo") is a new wifi-frequency that offers double range, and uses half as much power; or succinctly “low-power, long-range wifi”. ( 802.11ah standard ) The WiFi alliance has finally approved the frantically-anticipated 802.11ah wifi standard and nicknamed it ‘HaLow’; which uses less power and has better wall penetration. It can be thought of much like a long-range Bluetooth signal. Basically HaLow is all about connecting low-power & long-range wifi; which is critical to the production of small, affordable smart devices. “Halow” enabled devices will operate at a lower and much less dangerous “less-microwaving” frequency, in the unlicensed 900MHz band (incorporating IEEE 802.11ah protocol standards). Coincidentally this also extends the range of a typical router or device of the current 2.4GHz standard, uses less power and provides better wall penetration. The new wifi standard is seen as essential for the Internet of Things (IoT) and various futuristic connected home devices. The biggest obstacle has been gadgets like home-security sensors, smartbulbs, cameras, smart-watches, connected cars, digital healthcare products, and wearables; as well as industrial and retail sectors. These devices have had to supply enough power to send data long distances, constantly, to remote hubs or routers. However, today most prevalent wifi-standard in the 2.4Ghz spectrum doesn't allow for long battery usage and transmission distances. read_more The WiFi Alliance states that HaLow will "broadly adopt existing WiFi protocols," incuding IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity, meaning devices will have regular WiFi-grade interoperability security. This announcement portends to a new array of 900Mhz-enabled devices in the near future. Apart from the IoT, Internet of Things, how about simply a more solid WiFi connection from the distant spare room, or simply less microwave-cooking-band radio frequencies saturating your house?
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Reading Time: 2 minutes A representative from Google tweeted out something many Webmasters and SEO-minded people have usually presumed there was no issue with. However, in the case of having your page content indexed by the Google search engine, for best results your content should be plainly visible on the page as it loads, instead of being hidden in on-screen widgets that are typically programmed in Javascript. The representative, Gary Illyes, said in his tweet that Google doesn’t consider (or ‘index’ in search engine lingo) content that is programmed into Javascript. So, basically if important parts of your content are embedded in Javascript code, then you may want to reconsider the design of your website. This doesn’t imply that Javascript functionality isn’t ‘worth it’. It most likely is. Only if say 20% of your content is hidden by it until the viewer clicks “see more” or “expand”, then it might be worth trying another design technique. Google “won’t see the content behind tabs if the content under the tab is dynamically generated.” What did Google precisely admit in their most recent statement? Gary Illyes of Google said on Twitter: “ If you put content in a Javascript array and only expand them when you click e.g. ‘…’, those contents won’t be indexed by Google.” Here is a snapshot of his November 4th tweet: How can you check if Google is indexing your web pages? If Google cannot index your web pages fully or correctly, your web pages probably won’t rank as high as they probably would rank otherwise. It is a good idea to check if Google, and other search engines, are indexing your pages in full - and that your pages contain everything that the various search engine robots expect or require when spidering over your website. If you’d like help with your SEO efforts, please write us at support (at) 4goodhosting.com and we’d gladly consult and provide a quote to you for SEO optimization for your website.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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