September 3, 2024

Domain Related

Reading Time: 14 minutes

We are all right in the midst of the early days of having artificial intelligence start to revolutionize some many aspects of our lives. We’re already seeing it in so many different facets of our digital lives, and the most visible of them for most people will be with the way their search query results are offering them more than just a list of search engine results pages. There is a growing need for websites to be maximum oriented to these AI-facilitated search results, and now you have the option to build an AI-powered WordPress website. Not surprising at all that WordPress is taking the lead with staying ahead of the curve on this, as they’ve been arguably the gold standard for DIY website design and that grew out of their beginnings as an easy-to-use online publishing platform for blogs and the like. Our specialty here at 4GoodHosting has always been reliable Canadian web hosting, but for the folks at WordPress it’s a much wider umbrella and it’s been all about making it easy for people to be taking themselves online. Many of the folks we’ve kept as customers for years upon years have WordPress business websites, and most will want the advantages of managed WordPress hosting for themselves. Faster website performance and better web security are just two of the many advantages of having this type of hosting for a WordPress site, and it’s not like it’s considerably more expensive too. If you’re one of the folks who’s all ears when you hear of an AI-powered WordPress website you might want to look into moving over to Managed WordPress hosting if you haven’t already done so. We’ve talked a lot about the entirety of the advantages of doing that, but with this blog entry we’re going to lay out everything we know about the new WordPress AI websites and why you might want to be evenly doubly excited about them. Apparently these types of sites are set to change everything, and considering nothing stays the same for long in the online world we say bring it on. We imagine you feel similarly, so let’s get right into it. Building...

August 27, 2024

Hosting Related, SEO Related, WordPress Hosting

Reading Time: 11 minutes

For a good long time after the Internet got its start the only type of domain extension that was available for websites was a .com extension. It’s still the most ubiquitous and popular among them, but nowadays there are all sorts of domain extensions and the most notable ones are all the ones that are country specific. While the .org and .biz types have 3 letters to them just like the .com extension, all of the country ones will just be two letters after the dot. A .ca extension is advisable for businesses in Canada, and we encourage you to discover the benefits of a .ca domain today. This is part of the broader topic we’re going to look at with this week’s blog entry here, and it will be more about Canadian business marketing tips online. No one is going to need to be made aware of how essential it is to have a strong online presence for a business nowadays, and here at 4GoodHosting that’s the reason we have many of the Canadian web hosting clients that we do. You need to have quality website for your business, and it needs to have reliable web hosting behind it so that it is available to prospective customers 24 hours a day. This is because what would be considered local businesses are only local in the physical sense of the term – they’re often taking orders or however else it is they do business from all across the country and possibly even outside of it. Local business growth strategies are going to be built on the idea that not much is explicitly local anymore when it comes to all of this. One of the things that the nature of our business provides for us is a lot of insight into what works well and what doesn’t with local SEO strategies in Canada. We say that fully aware of the fact that what defines ‘good’ SEO is changing all the time, and in fairness that’s the way it should be. If you’re looking for a provider you want the ones you see on page 1 of SERPS to be legitimately good...

August 13, 2024

Domain Related

Reading Time: 11 minutes

So much to be said for simplicity nearly all the time, and then with websites there’s the way that DIY is the way to go if you’re not at all keen to pay a web developer to put together a website for you. Obviously you won’t choose that if you’re making the decisions for a big and well-established business of any sort. But if you’re in business on a significantly smaller scale and it’s not so much about branding as it is providing a quality product or service at a good price then a DIY website is often a good choice. WordPress gives you that option, and what we’ll look at here is Divi vs Elementor as the best WordPress page builder. It’s not even a choice you need to make if all you’re after is the simplest of websites, and good examples of these are ones for recreational sports teams or maybe one where a person is showcasing their music or arts or crafts. You can use WordPress as it comes out of the box to put together the entirety of the site, but for some they’ll want more functionality with how certain pages are assembled. Divi and Elementor features both line up with being able to do this, and what we’ll aim to do is determine if one is better than the other for doing that. As you’d expect there are Elementor vs Divi pros and cons and taking all of them into account and weighing them against each other is how we’ll come to our conclusion. There’s more than a few people who will be looking for the best drag and drop page builder, and you can be sure that at any given time there’s at least a handful of people out there who are getting set to use WordPress to build a website for the first time. That means that a topic like this can always be relevant, so without going on any further let’s start our Divi vs Elementor comparison. CMS Considerations A content management system (CMS) is usually a must for the creation of websites, and WordPress has been the leader of the pack...

August 5, 2024

Domain Related

Reading Time: 13 minutes

A relatively captive audience may have been a possibility in the early days of the Internet. Nowadays, however, there is very likely no shortage of others with the same to say as what you’ve got to add to any conversation on any subject. That doesn’t mean you’re any less of the expert on it if you genuinely are the expert, but if you have a WordPress blog or a WordPress website then there’s plenty to do to ensure your quality content is best positioned in the sea of content that exists out there. WordPress updates are needed. The enduring popularity of this online publishing platform has endured for decades now, and it reflects the fact that WordPress is perennially usable for people who need a very basic means of publishing a blog online or having a DIY website that is good enough for their simpler aims with it. Some of you may have a blog or site that hasn’t had any changes to the web infrastructure of it since its inception, and if so and you are wondering why you are not getting the same traffic as before then we need to start looking at the benefits of updating WordPress. The reason being that simply improving website SEO for WordPress isn’t the all-encompassing solution for increasing your blog or website’s visibility with the audience you’re aiming to have it be more visible to. There is plenty more that goes into the equation and with newest update there are so many new WordPress features that are going to appeal even if your aims are simpler and you just want to make your pages look better and promote greater interactivity with a – hopefully – growing audience. So what we’re going to do with this blog entry is go over 6 reasons why WordPress updates are something you should be considering if what you’ve got on the web is in need of a makeover. We’ll also look briefly at ways to improve website speed for WordPress and what’s the best approach for WordPress bug fixes if you need them. Mandatory Move The fast-paced world of website management makes keeping your WordPress site...

July 30, 2024

SEO Related, WordPress Hosting

Reading Time: 13 minutes

Long gone are the days when a storefront had to be at least a 3-walled location and with a shopkeeper behind a counter in front of one of them. That was the only means you have of selling products up until nearly 30 years ago, but since then the advent of the Internet has given us eCommerce. You can do all of that selling online now if that’s what you choose to do. For many people it’s exactly what they choose to do, because it’s a more cost-efficient means of doing business and it means expanding your customer base in a way that is simply unmatchable by any other means. What we’re going to do here with this entry is compare WordPress vs Shopify for anyone who is set to take their store online, and is trying to decide on the best platform for an online store. We’ll be right up front and say for us it is WordPress, and there’s plenty of reasons why that’s the way we feel. The aim here will be to have you thinking similarly once you’ve read through the entirety of this blog, because there are Shopify alternatives. If you are willing to put in just a bit of work to optimize your WordPress site you’ll be amazed at how it can be just a conducive to selling a lot of whatever it is you’re bringing to the online market. One thing is not debatable is that you will be taking on much less monthly operating costs when you do business online with a WordPress site rather than getting Shopify’s services. But cost savings are just the smallest part of the advantage here with WordPress for eCommerce. The newest version of WordPress is even more user-friendly and intuitive for users as well as putting much more capability in their hands. That applies to WordPress sites for online stores too, and the value in going this route is even more pronounced for smaller businesses and especially ones for people who are running a small business entirely on their own and selling what they make online. You can optimize your store with WordPress, and if you’re...

July 22, 2024

WordPress Hosting

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Anyone who simply browses the Internet and / or peruses what it has to offer and doesn’t have a website on the Information superhighway is going to have a different prerogative with using the web. At least compared to those who do have a website and especially if that site is giving online visibility to their business as well as a means for customers to make purchases without visiting a brick & mortar storefront of any sort. If that’s the scenario for you and you website you’re not going to need to have the acronym SERPs explained to you, or why there is an ongoing need to improve website SEO. But maybe you’re not familiar with that grouping of characters, and if so we’ll explain; SERP stands for search engine results page. Let’s make an example. Someone who has a business selling custom sports team jerseys is going to know it’s important that their website is on the first page of SERP pages every time someone searches custom sports team jerseys *city name*. And preferably high up on that page, and ideally in the first spot. SEO optimization for a website is the determinant for whether or not that happens. You either have it, or you don’t. And if you don’t then your site isn’t going to be on that all-important first pages of SERPs, and definitely not at the top of it. For our example business owner that means it is VERY unlikely anyone is going to be ordering their custom sports team jerseys from the owner’s business. Being maximum visible online is of paramount importance for any business these days, because 9-plus times out of 10 that is where customers find their provider. This is how it is in the 21st century, and it’s going to be this way from now on. This is why WordPress SEO optimization is so important if you have a WordPress website for your business, and if so we highly recommend looking through a Yoast SEO guide. Yoast is definitely the best plugin for improving search engine rankings for a WordPress website, and that’s what we’re going to look at here with this...

July 15, 2024

WordPress Hosting

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Twenty plus years and counting since WordPress made its arrival and quickly became the platform of choice for anyone who felt that what they had to say was worth sharing on the World Wide Web. The reason it caught on so thoroughly was because of the simplicity it offered for publishing content in a form that was doable for the Internet, and since then WordPress expanded its horizons to become a website creation and launching platform too. Here we are in the middle of 2024 and it’s now possible to upgrade to WordPress 6.5. This new WordPress update is getting a good bit of fanfare, and for legitimate reasons as it has expanded those horizons yet again and is set to enable users to do even more with creating websites and publishing content online. For the first decade and then some of its existence the predominant value for WordPress was in its vast array of plugins that made customizing pages a cinch and really allowed you to add design flair to the site with no need for web design capability or savvy at all. That part of the appeal of WordPress is still there, but the new slate of WordPress 6.5 features takes this appeal to a whole new level. And does so based on so much more in the way of accessible functionality for people who choose to build a website with WordPress. That’s a good number of people, and more all the time considering the way that it’s not just businesses or bloggers that need to have a website these days. There are all sorts of creative ventures out there that need a website for promotion and visibility, and that’s just one of example of many where the growth and vitality of society and culture have so many people deciding they need a simple yet attractive – and inexpensive – website for themselves. We imagine they’ll be keen to get started with WordPress 6.5, and we’ll lay out why that is here with this blog entry where we go into dtail about the newest iteration of WordPress and what makes it so great. Super Enhancements The WordPress 6.5...

July 9, 2024

Domain Related

Reading Time: 12 minutes

There are all sorts of references in life to knowing what goes on when you’re not around, and of course there’s an entire industry built around remedying the problem and providing that insight for you. Remote cameras do work especially well for that, but when it comes to hosting a website there’s no camera or anything else of the sort that is going to make you aware of someone being unable to visit your website when you’re not monitoring it. Which is going to be upwards of 98% of the time, provided you’re a normal business owner. And we mention the business owners rather than the hobbyist website owner or any other type here because it is people with a WordPress website serving business interests that have most to lose when WordPress web accessibility is an issue. Most big corporations are going to have websites built on platforms that are much more mammoth – and expensive – than the relative simplicity that you get with WordPress. But there are plenty of websites serving businesses built on WordPress, and no matter what size of business you’re running it’s likely you don’t want to miss even one sale or order because you didn’t have any accessible WordPress site for whatever reason. The consensus is going to be that can’t happen, or at least everything that can be done to prevent it from happening should be done. The first thing to that end is to make sure you have reliable web hosting, and the best Managed WordPress Hosting in Canada is recommended. But from there it becomes a matter of taking advantage of the ability to have command of your website’s performance through the control panel and elsewhere, and doing what’s needed to improve WordPress web accessibility. That’s what we’ll look at here with this week’s blog entry, and it’s a topic that people with WordPress websites for business will definitely be interested in. All In, All the Time It’s fair to say that few if any people have checked on their website's accessibility level lately. But perhaps they should, as today it is very necessary for the web to be accessible to...

July 2, 2024

Hosting Related, Security

Reading Time: 9 minutes

People draw curtains or close blinds because they want privacy, and in other instances it’s because they’re looking to be kept out of the light of the sun. But when they lock doors they are taking it to a different level and no part of their interest is in shade from anything. They’re wanting to have an uncrossable barrier between themselves and the outside world, and one of the principal appeal points of being indoors is being able to have that. It can keep you safe, and it can also make sure your belongings stay in your possession. Both aspects of that can be related to when we frame that from the perspective of cyber security. The reason that website security protocols and the like are necessary is because there are more cyber security threats than ever before and without these protocols there will be unauthorized access to your website. And once the threat actors are in there is no telling what they might get up to. One of the more serious risks is data theft from a website, and assuring people you have the means of defending against that is going to be expected with VPS hosting Canada with 24/7 support. Web hosting providers need to have web security protocols built into their hosting servers and these days it’s necessary to offer this to prospective customers. We’re able to provide that assurance with out VPS web hosting here at 4GoodHosting, and we put a real emphasis on staying at the forefront with secure web hosting in Canada. So what we’re going to do with this week’s blog entry here is talk about the best data security practices for VPS servers. It is a topic that will be of interest for anyone who has a website for a growing business that is moving to VPS hosting because their current shared hosting arrangement isn’t a fit because of traffic spikes to the website – a good problem to have to be sure if you have an ecommerce website and you’re online to promote the growth of your business. More high-performance web hosting is where they need to be looking. Look To...