Web Hosting Reviews |
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Parallels Plesk 9.x is leaps and bounds ahead of Plesk 8.x in terms of features, ease of use, and stability. Parallels is continuing this trend in Plesk 9.5 by improving stability and security in Plesk 9.5 which releases on March 11.
According to Craig Bartholomew, Vice President of Panel Products, the main goals of Plesk 9.5 were to improve security by introducing PCI compliance and improve overall reliability. Read the rest of this entry »
Many small business owners struggle with planning their online presence.
The key to remember when going online with your business is that you want to give customers information about what your business does and is about. If you have a physical location, you want to show potential customers how to find you. You may also want to post information about your services, or a menu if you are a restaurant.
Most businesses do not require an expensive web site design if they are not doing online commerce. Sure, it would be great to have a beautiful web site that pleases the eye, but a custom design is not really required. Customers only care about finding your business or learning more about you. If you can set up an online brochure of sorts with contact details, maps, and product or service information that is current, you are helping those customers learn more about you.
Many of the following questions are asked when the decision has been made to go online:
The PA-DSS Protects E-Commerce Users
Over the past several years, Internet security has become quite a powerful discussion topic for online businesses as well as their customers. With the advent of online banking, shopping and bill payment, the amount of confidential data shared on the Internet is constantly increasing exponentially. As these online services multiply, it is becoming more and more imperative to confirm that sites engaging in e-commerce activities (including businesses utilizing online shopping carts such as Miva Merchant) are compliant with the PA-DSS.
PA-DSS, or the Payment Application Data Security Standard, is based on the Payment Application Best Practices (PABP) of Visa. The PABP was first introduced in 2005 in order to aid in the creation of secure online payment applications by software vendors. The PA-DSS was released in 2008 with the purpose of establishing all requirements that e-commerce merchants who utilize business web hosting services must follow in order to process credit card payments. Miva Merchant 5.5’s online shopping cart software is completely up to date with all PA-DSS compliancy conditions. These days, any online merchant must be able to prove that they are compliant with all PCI and PA-DSS prerequisites.
The Importance of PCI Compliance
The PCI in PCI compliance stands for Payment Card Industry. The PCI was formed when each of the five major credit card companies (Discover, Visa, MasterCard, American Express and JCB) banded together to establish the guidelines online businesses must follow to accept credit card payments. The PCI then composed the PA-DSS as the primary means to combat fraud and establish a sense of trust and security on the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »
Most small-to-medium sized businesses are using CMS (customer management systems), E-Mail (who isn’t? 5 year olds have email accounts now), to manage a web site, and occasionally share files between employee’s. Traditionally SMB’s (Small-to-medium sized Businesses) have had to either create their own internal hosting and communication systems or piece together many disjointed software programs and hardware devices to create their intranet. Time and expense add up and often times SMB’s go without all or some of the components they require. As such, there has been a need for an all-in-one solution that can tie all of these systems together for ease of use.
Web Hosts have also had a difficult time putting together an all-in-one solution for their customers. Hosters have created some crude control panels and options for customers, but nothing that creates a seamless integrated approach for a company to manage email, hosting, CMS, file sharing, and even an online store. There are literally thousands of options out there for Email, Hosting Platforms, CMS, File Sharing, and Operating Systems. Web hosts have traditionally focused on managing the hosting experience and simply offer an assortment of software they think their customers want. These platforms are offered and supported to an extent, but most of the grunt work is left to the SMB’s IT department. Read the rest of this entry »
How can a small service provider compete against Google, Amazon, and the other giants entering the cloud/hosting market? The cloud is now a reality. However, your company can start your own affordable cloud offering and even compete against the big boys and win. It may seem like a no win situation to try and compete against the big boys. However, smaller providers can compete and win provided they do the things the big guys are not willing or capable of doing. Larger companies are slow to evolve, are generally worse at customer service, unwilling to help the customer resolve technical issues beyond the core basics, and have strict guidelines for what customers can and can not do.
1. Improve your customers experience. Personalize.
A good example to showcase is Wal Mart. While Wal Mart tries to be everything to everyone, they are missing a few key components that are important to the customer experience. While Wal Mart does offer an exceptional product offering and good pricing, their customer service is horrible. Employees barely say hi to you in the check out lane. You can also expect to stand in a Soviet-Era bread line while you wait to pay for your savings on the products. Contrast to Target which charges a bit more, offers higher quality products, and you can expect to wait less in the check out lane. Both are still large companies and offer a breadth of products and offer a relatively dull customer experience.
SOLUTION(S): Let your customer get to know you better. Start a company blog that contains more than simple marketing messages. Let the customer know you are a hard working company full of energetic people willing to go the extra mile. Add additional bundled support options the larger companies simply can not compete with. Spend additional time early in the process to ensure your new customers are setup properly. Perhaps give them an email asking them if everything is fine and if they need anything. Generally in web hosting, if you can get the customer setup properly and familiar with your systems within 72 hours you will rarely hear from that customer. Yes, I know… you’re afraid of getting a lot of high maintenance customers. Fear not, your good customers will far exceed the high maintenance customers.
Showcase your companies personality and willingness to help the customer get up and running. Perhaps your site could use a re-design bringing these aspects in. Focus more on service and customer experience than pricing. Don’t copy the big providers boring and bland white paper looking web sites. Add twitter to your home page, maybe a link to a company FaceBook profile.
2. Offer niche products. Specialized plans. Read the rest of this entry »
In today’s economy running your own internal data center is an expensive undertaking. Hosting web servers, application servers, and collaboration servers within your own office building is a reality for most small businesses. IT managers prefer close proximity to equipment so they can manage any hardware failures or software issues quickly. If your company does not have an IT manager, you most likely have an outsourced IT department. A “Nerd Herd” type solution who you call when things go wrong or you need something configured or set up.
I often wonder at the amount of money that goes into this old school way of handling small business infrastructure. Power, human resources, payroll taxes, equipment, generators, routers, switches, software licensing costs, and the list goes on and on.
HOSTING INTERNALLY IS A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY
Many companies fail to realize the implications of hosting their equipment internally. Power costs continue to rise, brown outs are increasingly common, and power grid is sure to be stretched as people ween themselves off of fossil fuels. If your systems are mission critical then you also need to have backup batteries and diesel generators at the ready.
Hosting your own equipment also brings other unnecessary costs to the table in regards to networking equipment. Routers, switches, and experts who configure this equipment are all added expenses. Factor in hardware firewalls, DDOS protection, high availability and your costs have soared.
Dedicated server shopping can be overwhelming, since there are lots of things to consider- platform, plan features, and pricing, just to name a few. There are also less obvious considerations that can have a major impact on how successful your choice will be, and one of the biggest is also one of the easiest to answer i.e. is the company privately held or publically traded?
Looking beyond buying shares in a hosting company, (although a successful dedicated server host might look good in your portfolio), it should be a factor in your decision making process. Knowing that a company is public means that a lot of your due diligence has already been done, and done well. Public companies are audited from top to bottom. Not only must the company be financially sound, but everything from personnel to equipment to the overall business plan must undergo a complete evaluation. Public companies have business practices that are fully documented, which might not seem like a big thing, but anyone who has worked in an environment where people make things up as they go along can attest to the benefit of quality documentation.
Public scrutiny is a good thing – that many secretive hosting providers do not understand. Where a privately held company may be accountable to the customers and the business owner, a publically held dedicated server hosting company has another level of accountability to deal with- shareholders and a board of directors. As a customer, your visibility is into what goes on at your managed dedicated hosting provider ends at the website and customer support number. Shareholders and the board of directors on the other hand have much greater visibility into the operations of the company, questionable decisions, performance issues, and anything else that impacts the bottom line is subject to scrutiny by the stockholders. Read the rest of this entry »
When Watts Humphrey designed the framework underlying the Capability Maturity Model, his purpose was for the CMM to have positive aspects in organizations. His intent was that the CMM should help organizations improve the ability of their workforce and develop, motivate, organize and retain talent. Even though the Capability Maturity Model has constructive parts in organizations, it also has destructive parts when it is applied to organizations.
In this article by Kerime Ataker, Superb Internet Corporation Product Marketing Specialist will focus on the negative and positive aspects of the Capability Maturity Model. Kerime intends to provide both sides of the CMM and the reasons why this model may or may not function well in a particular organization.
How disappointing it is to read that, according to research, seven out of eight information technology projects fail to meet the original time, cost, and requirements criteria (McManus & Wood-Harper, 2008). According to McManus and Wood-Harper, the key finding from studies of successful and unsuccessful projects is that no single factor is the overriding cause of project failure; however, instead, a number of factors contribute to failure, and some of them interact with each other. The most important reasons why projects fail are poor communication, lack of user or customer involvement, ineffective project managers, insufficiently managed requirements, undisciplined project definitions or baselines, and uncontrolled scope (McManus & Wood-Harper, 2008). A project that has senior-level sponsorship has a higher chance to be supportive of the strategy and goals of the business. Also, it has a higher chance to have an experienced and disciplined control team that will be actively involved in confirming the project’s objectives against those goals. Of course, this kind of involvement requires good communication within the project team as well as good management requirements. Thus, the Capability Maturity Model was established to avoid all of these failure factors and help projects succeed. Even though the Capability Maturity Model is designed to help organizations not overrun schedule and budget constraints to complete a project, the model has negative and positive aspects when applied to organizations.
The Capability Maturity Model has a well organized structure for managing the software process. When Watts Humphrey designed the CMM, he made sure that the model consisted of five levels. Kashif Manzoor, software engineer, on his website, has explained these five levels of the CMM. Initial is the first level. At this level, processes are disorganized and chaotic. Also, success is expected to depend on individual efforts and is not considered to be repeatable since processes would not be sufficiently clear and documented to allow them to be replicated. Repeatable is the second level, and at this level, basic project management techniques are established. Also, success could be repeated since the essential processes would have been established, defined, and documented. Read the rest of this entry »
In the early days of the Internet a business site was a simple brochure of products and services. More likely than not, it included a contact form and a phone number if the site visitor wanted to request more information. As time went by, Web sites evolved to include online ordering and full e-commerce capabilities.
While most Web sites evolved to include a lot of information for the visitor as well as easy e-commerce ordering they were impersonal. There was a certain anonimity to all Web sites. For all you knew, you could be buying your widget from a guy in his underwear living in his moms basement or from a huge multi-million dollar corporation.
Say Hello To The Blog.
I don’t remember the first time I heard the word ‘Blog’, but I am guessing it was around 2004. Regular people used the blog as a personal diary of sorts and shared knowledge and memories with friends and family. As blogging caught on, the SEO value began to resonate in marketing minds.
High search engine rankings fueled by a new style of web design often drive the masses towards adoption of concepts the average business owner would not ordinarily consider. The blog is a prime example of adopting a concept one would not necessarily pair with a business Web site.
How Can A Blog Help Make Me Money?
Most business owners will ask how can a blog help increase our sales? The answer is simple – transparency. Letting potential customers get to know you and your staff personally creates a special bond that’s very hard to create on the anonymous Internet.
Imagine creating an open and friendly environment. Imagine telling customers what your plans are. Imagine asking customers for feedback on new idea’s and engaging them to participate. Most business owners cringe at the idea of exposing company secrets or how they maintain a competitive advantage. In reality, it seems that Web sites who feature an open and informational Blog see increased sales. Some Blogs like Google’s Apps even have a following and new feature requests from readers.
Most Blogging software also offer the ability for readers to obtain RSS feeds through their email clients such as Outlook. This is very important for one simple reason: People read email every day, all day. Customers who subscribe to RSS feeds from your blog don’t even have to visit your site to be informed of a new product launch or service upgrade. Read the rest of this entry »
