Tag: hosting

May 10, 2017

Hosting Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

A good many of you who web designers out there may in fact be correct in your assumptions regarding what your defined audience wants, but there’s likely an equally large percentage of you who have made design, layout, and content choices with your site that have missed the mark. You might have hunches, and more than a few folks will have opinions for you. But how do you really take the pulse of how intelligently your site is laid out for and experienced by visitors. Here at 4GoodHosting, our expertise is naturally with quality web hosting in Canada, but our enthusiasm for trends in Internet marketing leads us to discover a number of topics that would likely interest our customers. This week, we’re inclined to discuss these 6 good PHP scripts for Canadian websites that are very practical for letting your site visitors leave you with quantifiable feedback on specific elements or components of your site, via ratings. Here are 6 that we’ve come to be familiar with, and in order of the ones we think most highly of. Thumbs Up The ThumbsUp rating script gets high marks for its modern, stylish design and how it makes it easy to implement an engaging ratings system for any of your websites. The ThumbsUp script works with a MySQL database, and incorporates an easy-to-understand configuration file, plus includes six custom templates. It looks sharp, and performs well too. The admin area offers plenty of control and customization options along with several selectable features. Users report finding it very easy to customize scripts to suit website styles and needs. Rating System The Rating System script provides a very plain way for allowing visitors to engage with your content by leaving a rating score. Choose one of the 3 different user interface styles, and the proceed to documentation which explains how to implement and configure the script to suit the specifics of your website. Another big plus is that it allows visitors to leave feedback on your content, products, and media releases, and more. Skinnable Rating System The Skinnable Rating System is not only a modern, comprehensive rating script that’s easily implemented, but it...

April 19, 2017

Hosting Related

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re a premier Canadian web hosting provider, and as such you can be certain we love anything related to the mobile communications world. You’d be hard pressed to find any newer-model smartphone and computer on the market today that doesn’t have a smart assistant preloaded and waiting on your every inquiry, Apple has Siri, Windows has Cortana, and then there’s the lesser known but equally useful Google Now. So how do they stack up against one another in our opinion? To the more casual observer or passive participant it may seem like Siri, Cortana, and the nameless Google Now assistant are all pretty much the same — and, to a great extent, they are. But they also have several tangible differences and in each case they’ve got at least one quirk, flaw or strength between them. So which one would be best for you? Of course, you’re not going to make a purchasing decision for your next smartphone based exclusively on the type of assistant it comes with, but it may be a prominent consideration. It’s not an easy question to answer, with the fact they’re so similar making it hard to compare them without digging deep into their capabilities. Let’s give it a try. Siri Siri has been one of the flagship features of iOS since the 2011 launch of iOS 5. It’s somewhat humble beginnings were with the basics, like weather forecasts and messaging, but it’s expanded in leaps and bounds since, and most notably it now supports third-party integration with MacOS Sierra and iOS 10. Indeed, Siri’s jokes and witty comebacks continue to be a hit, but the virtual assistant is becoming more and more capable as the years go by. These days you can ask it to call people, send messages, schedule meetings, play games, launch apps and games, answer questions, set reminders, and still provide those weather forecasts. Siri’s also very capable with understanding contextual queries, and with the MacOS Sierra and iOS 10 versions it relies a lot less on web results in choosing the response. Siri can also integrate with third-party apps and understand follow-up queries. This was a significant...

April 13, 2017

Hosting Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

If you live in the heart of a major metropolitan city, having a sports car that can do zero to 60 in less than 3 seconds would is great - but it’s certainly far from being a necessity (or even practical for that matter) because of the fact that you’ll almost never be able to actually put that performance capability to use. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re city dwellers and some of the best Canadian web hosting providers around, but we certainly don’t drive Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Maseratis, or anything of the sort. What we do have for you though is genuine speed for your WordPress-built website, and that IS a necessity these days. Users’ expectations have expanded these days, and they expected a website to Load quickly, and Be responsive when scrolling through pages or enjoying multimedia content If a website doesn’t respond with sufficient speed, these users will move on. It’s that simple. It may not be ‘fair’ but that’s the way that it is. You may be left wondering about ways to increase your website speed, and you should do that for a pair of reasons. Not only does a lagging website risk losing visitors (and in some cases prospective customers) but more importantly… Google has stated unequivocally that the speed of a website will reflect that site’s rankings in SERPs (search engine results pages) Now that is a big deal, and no matter whether your website is e-commerce, personal, or whatever it may be. Right then, here’s 5 nearly-guaranteed ways to improve the speed of your website. Choose a Reliable and Reputable Web Hosting Provider Your proven web hosting provider in Canada must have solid and reliable hardware, and most particularly their servers. Researching your prospective host in line will almost certainly lead to at least one customer review that talks about their servers. But while we have the same powerful dedicated servers that nearly any good Canadian web hosting provider will have, but we also boast our ‘fast fiber’ network designed to deliver optimal operation time and high throughput and packet per second capability. Long story short, you should be demanding, and when you ask questions about...