Adobe Flash's demise has long been heralded, but concrete signs are starting to appear – none more significant than Google's new announcement on its AdWords blog that Google display ads will go entirely to HTML5 within a year.
Google announced Tuesday that AdWords and related services will no longer accept new Flash-based ads after June 30; existing Flash ads will stop working on January 2 of next year.
As recently as last June, it was estimated that 84% of Internet banner ads were Flash-based. But Chrome and Firefox had already banned Flash ads due to security concerns, while iPhone has never supported Flash. Ad0be has responded to the shift toward HTML5 by scrapping the Flash Professional name for its animation platform, now calling the HTML5-friendly program Adobe Animate CC.
If your company produces animated advertisements, it's past time to say goodbye to Flash and embrace HTML5.
Hostway is proud to announce our membership in the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition), a group that ensures the continued growth of the Internet infrastructure industry.
Founded in 2012, the Internet Infrastructure Coalition is the leading voice for hosting companies, data centers, registrars and registries, and software services providers. i2C has made great strides on initiatives like open access, mass surveillance, cybersecurity, patent reform, customer privacy, and more. The organization continually adds resources, expanding its priorities based on member-driven initiatives.
i2Coalition supports the continued growth of the Internet, fostering innovation in the infrastructure industry. i2C’s Working Groups drive its activities, and all members are invited to join. Member Working Groups include the Public Policy, Internet Governance, Best Practices, and Gender Diversity in Internet Infrastructure.
Hostway Web & Apps General Manager John Enright emphasized the importance of the role played by the i2Coalition in ensuring the Internet can continue to grow unimpeded.
“The Internet’s growth is fueled by competition and innovation by companies that depend on an open and level playing field,” Enright said. “That balance can be undermined or even destroyed at any time by legislation or regulations – net neutrality, for example – written by from well-intentioned, under-informed lawmakers that may have been swayed by large, well-funded interest groups.”
“This is where i2C comes in – they work to educate legislators on the need for an open Internet – and aggressively work to block any legislation that would be detrimental to that open architecture,” Enright continued. “Hostway is proud to be an active corporate sponsor – and we look forward to working together to keep the Internet a level playing field.”
Employees of i2C member organizations have opportunities to meet with Congressional members and staff to discuss our legislative priorities and to educate Capitol Hill on our industry. i2C represents our industry at global meetings such as ICANN, IGF and ITU to champion our industry’s role and position in the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance. It also has a member-to-member benefits program where members provide exclusive services and special offers.
If you are a small business owner, you know the types of struggles you must face in order to achieve success. In many ways, small businesses have their work cut out for them, especially when it comes to communication and collaboration. Sure, there are numerous solutions out there, but many of these are specifically designed for larger enterprises.
For a small- or mid-size business owner, one compelling answer for alleviating these communications challenges is OX Mail – and its companion OX Collaborate. These two solutions can change the way small business users connect with one another.
"Fear not: Hostway has come to the rescue with a new suite of solutions."
While large organizations often serve as the pacesetters for any new technology, the more than 28 million small businesses operating today in the United States – according to recent research from the Office of Advocacy for the U.S. Small Business Association – cannot be overlooked. These organizations employ over 56 million people, even with the 22 million or so single-owner ventures. Inc. Magazine found that almost half of all U.S. private sector workers are currently employed by small businesses.
"With those numbers, it's no wonder that small businesses have been called the 'backbone' of the U.S. economy," IT Business Edge contributor Kim Mays wrote.
Just like their enterprise counterparts, small- and mid-size businesses have particular needs when it comes to their communication and collaboration – needs specifically addressed by OX Mail and OX Collaborate, powered by the OX App Suite software stack from Open-Xchange. These systems offer a range of professional features and capabilities to help businesses cost-effectively address their unique requirements.
The OX App Suite enables users to unify their email accounts, address books, calendars, files and other elements into a single, easy-to-use dashboard. This significantly streamlines organization, and ensures that appointments, documents and other important information never fall through the cracks.
OX also makes collaboration a cinch, enabling users to easily share their contacts, calendars, attachments and other files with co-workers and business partners. Best of all, each individual action is tracked, and others can review and edit these so that every project stakeholder is on the same page.
In the small business community, cost savings are always a top priority. OX App Suite enables decision-makers to only select the specific services their organization needs. This keeps you connected while driving down the price.
But this only scratches the surface when it comes to OX Mail and OX Collaborate. To find out more about Hostway and the OX App Suite and how it can benefit your business, be sure to contact Hostway today.
We’ve blogged recently about the characteristics of a strong online store that best represents your business. A huge piece of that puzzle is selecting the right platform for your site. For three out of every ten merchants worldwide, that solution is Magento.
Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform that puts merchants in a straightforward path to developing the website they’ve envisioned for their product. Between the free to download Community Edition, and the advanced Enterprise Edition Magento’s market share is 29.8%, according to research from AheadWorks.
Don’t let the fact that it is free to download and use fool you into believing you are getting shorted the features you want for your online store. The Community Edition includes everything you need to get your eCommerce website up and running. Magento themes and templates include a shopping cart, payment and order processing, easy set up for implementing the basic SEO elements, and marketing tools that assist with tracking, analytics, and reporting.
For many business owners getting their online store set up, and offering 100, 500 or even 1,000 items, and accepting payment through their PayPal is all that they need. For other merchants, who upgrade to Magento’s Enterprise Edition, will receive the added benefits of PCI compliance, purchaser data storage, encryption options and more.
Customization Potential: Extensions and plug-ins are available by the thousands, and scalability is at the center of Magento’s value. The smallest of shops can get a sharp online presence that matches its larger competitors concerning practical needs and aesthetic standards.
Community Support: On a related note: While Magento is always evolving with updates from its creators, the true strength of Magento comes from its vibrant community of developers. With this open-source solution, your specific pain point in customizing your site, or feature that you desire, has probably already been handled by many other users. Those utilities are accessible via Magento’s large ecosystem of developers.
Simplicity: The most popular utilities are simple to use, and Magento is no exception – flexible, scalable and user-friendly. Its intuitive control panel gives you immediate access to multiple websites and stores and related reports. Custom dashboards are easily created. The built-in content management system makes content and catalog editing and importing a snap.
Built for SEO: A gorgeous, user-friendly website is still useless if it’s not designed to attract traffic Magento eliminates much of the time-consuming work involved in making your site – and its countless product pages – as SEO-friendly as possible. Magento automates SEO optimization of URLs, metatags, navigation, site structure and more. It generates a Google Sitemap for crawlers to explore.
Quality Core Elements: When it comes down to it, Magento will be measured by the excellence of its core features. Regarding transaction processing, page and catalog management, analytics, marketing tools and mobile compatibility, Magento is simply a top-notch tool with a track record of satisfied, successful customers.
And, of course, it helps if you have an elite hosting provider with top-notch hardware and networking, and 100% availability guarantees. Learn more about what Hostway can do for your e-commerce site.
Year after year, CIOs and IT leaders name security as a top priority, both in focus within the business and financial resources allocated. Enterprises are storing more and more sensitive information, creating a pressing need for protection – these details must remain under the business's control, and unauthorized viewers must be kept out.
As the volume of security requirements continues to increase, IT and network administrators struggle to keep up. This is where security-as-a-service can become valuable.
IT research firm Gartner has predicted that security spending will likely reach approximately $75.4 billion by the end of 2015. Driving this rise is the large number of recent high-profile data breaches, as well as government initiatives and new legislation. Overall, this spending benchmark represented an increase of 4.7 percent over 2014.
" IT security spending will likely exceed $36 billion this year."
As we kick off 2016, security is still a priority for enterprises. According to findings from market research firm Ovum, IT security spending will likely exceed $37 billion this year. Ovum's report noted that many of the threats seen in 2015, including cybercriminal activity, state-supported attacks and advanced persistent threats, are here to stay. For this reason, a large portion of this spending will be devoted to managed solutions, including security-as-a-service.
With new vulnerabilities and attack vectors being discovered nearly every day, it's increasingly difficult for enterprise IT staff to ensure total protection. This is an uphill battle that every organization faces. Security-as-a-service solutions are ideally suited to help bridge the gaps in a company's protection capabilities.
TechTarget contributor Joseph Granneman noted that security can be an incredibly labor-intensive process, often coming down to a judgment call. At the same time, labor is a scarce resource among nearly every enterprise. Having a security-as-a-service solution in place can make a huge difference when it comes to under-resourced companies.
"This is where Security as a Service can shine," Granneman wrote. "Security as a Service solutions can dedicate teams to a specific activity, such as monitoring logs, and spread the cost across many different customers, lowering the unit cost for everyone. Security programs can now afford a dedicated log monitoring team where they could not have previously without the cloud-based model. This raises the effectiveness of the security program and frees in-house staff to focus on higher level risk management activities."
In addition to labor, enterprise security increasingly requires the use of advanced tools and knowledge unavailable to many IT administrators. Particularly with the ever-changing nature of the threat environment, it can be incredibly difficult if not impossible to stay on top of emerging vulnerabilities that could impact the business. Without access to the right tools, the company could be completely missing exploitable entry points in its network.
This is another area where security-as-a-service solutions are invaluable. In addition to providing access to the latest and greatest security tools, companies can also gain contextual expertise that they may not be able to obtain elsewhere.
"Information security is a broad subject; there is no practical way for anyone to know every detail on each aspect," Granneman noted. "This knowledge gap can cause serious blind spots where risk is not easily observed nor mitigated. Security as a Service offers organizations the benefit of access to these contextual experts and resources they otherwise could not afford to maintain in-house. This allows the internal security staff to focus less on technical details and more on strategically managing the organization's information security risks."
Overall, security-as-a-service solutions can make a considerable difference for today's enterprises, particularly when it comes to bridging knowledge gaps and ensuring access to the best tools and information. To find out more about how security solutions can benefit your business, contact Hostway, an industry-leading provider of managed security solutions, today.
Businesses that rely heavily on e-commerce – as most do these days – know that there are three principal issues which can reduce the effectiveness of their site. This blog is the third in Josh Hatfield‘s three-part series, “3 Problems that Plague E-Commerce Sites.” Find earlier entries in this series at our blog.
An e-commerce website earns or loses business in part based on how quickly it responds. Kissmetrics’ thorough studies on this subject tell us that 40% of online shoppers abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. As the Aberdeen Group puts it, customers are won or lost in a single second – it was true 10 years ago, and it’s true today.
But an e-commerce site's load times are difficult to accelerate. Product images are the lifeblood of an online store, and they can only be optimized so much. Third-party data for these sites is being loaded from a variety of addresses (where ads reside, CDNs, tracking programs, and so on), and it only takes one to stall your page.
Meanwhile, e-commerce sites are getting larger and slower all the time – according to Web Performance Today, the median e-commerce page grew 67% between Summer 2013 and Summer 2014, and loaded more than a second lower across the same survey period. According to Yottaa, the average image size on an e-commerce site is nearly four times that of a non-commerce website.
So how do you ensure that your e-commerce site runs at optimal speed while still delivering the graphics-intensive experience that sells your product? Here are five elements to consider to get the most speed out of your e-commerce site.
Content Delivery Networks: It’s important to remember that every picture on a site represents another resource the browser must pull for the page to completely load. The response time of the image source is crucial, so businesses with a huge list of products will often use a content delivery network, or CDN, to provide multiple sources for these images, ensuring each user pulls the items from the nearest server.
Caching: The most frequently accessed product pages and page elements should be cached so that they don’t have to be repeatedly retrieved on each visit. How many of your pages use the same header and footer, or ubernav and menu? Set those items to be cached, and they are removed from each reload.
Gzip: Load times are greatly affected by image size, so image compression becomes a key element of achieving the desired speed. Gzipping generally delivers a webpage at between one-half and one-third its original size. A server simply has to be configured to offer gzipped content if the browser can interpret it – and all modern browsers do. As long as you’re not catering to Netscape Navigator users, gzipping is a good idea.
Load Distribution: If you’re product catalog is very large, it may need its own server to thrive. Allocating resources separately to pulling this information can make a big difference for a high-traffic, big-catalog site.
Third-party resources: While a few social media widgets and analytics scripts may be required, always remember that you’re balancing external content against your site’s load time. For the items that are crucial, consider caching scripts if they aren’t update-sensitive or hosting the scripts yourself, or employ asynchronous loading – essentially telling that item to load after everything else so that more crucial items aren’t impaired.
And, of course, it helps if you have an elite hosting provider with top-notch hardware and networking, and 100% availability guarantees. Learn more about what Hostway can do for your e-commerce site.
Today, Magento released new versions and patches related to vulnerabilities that could be exploited to access customer information or take over administrator sessions. The root of the vulnerability stems from the improper validation of email addresses that are entered into the customer registration form. Unfortunately, such a flaw would allow an attacker to add JavaScript to the email field of the form. What does all this mean? Simply put, whenever a new form is filled out, the malicious Java Script code is triggered when the user account is listed in the back end panel of the website. All versions of Magento are affected, but there are no confirmed attacks related to these issues.
If you haven’t undated your Magento to the latest version, or installed patches to keep you current, you may want to ensure that you haven’t been effected by the vulnerability by checking a few things
Full articles about the Magento 1.x and Magento 2.x issues are posted in the Magento Security Center. Additionally, all new releases and a separate USPS patch support recent USPS changes.
The Magento Community Edition 2.0.1 release also contains several important functional updates, including official support for PHP7.0.2.
To download your update, please visit the Community Edition Download Page. These two patches (SUPEE-7405 and SUPEE-7616) are available to address security and USPS issues for Community Editions 1.5.0.0-1.9.2.2. Both sets of improvements are included in Community Edition 1.9.2.3 and Community Edition 2.0.1. Be sure to install all previous patches, if you haven’t done so already. All previous USPS patches must be installed for the new patch (SUPEE-7616) to work. We advise installing patches in a development environment before putting them into production.
Hostway now provides Managed Magento Support.
Hostway’s new Managed Magento Support includes but not limited to the following:
Need help keeping your Magento deployment running? Contact us today and let Hostway help you patch your Magento application.
Businesses that rely heavily on e-commerce – as most do these days – know that there are three principal issues which can reduce the effectiveness of their site. This blog is the second in Josh Hatfield‘s three-part series, “3 Problems that Plague E-Commerce Sites.” Check back in for the final entry next week.
According to a 2015 Business Insider report, about $4 trillion of purchases are abandoned annually in online shopping carts, and that number is only increasing. Many e-commerce sites experience abandonment rates between 60 and 75 percent, according to the Baymard Institute – in addition to a website bounce rate in the vicinity of 30 percent – but why are 3 out of every 4 or 5 customers failing to complete their transactions?
As you might suspect, there’s more to it than uncertainty about a purchase. Customers are turned off late notifications of additional fees, expenses related to delivery and shipping, and long delivery times. Many of these issues are not under your control. But addressing what you can affect will help keep some customers from escaping your grasp.
Here are 12 ideas for reducing cart abandonment on your e-commerce site.
Prominent Security Indicator: Any PCI-compliant site should display the padlock symbol and use an https address. These reassure the customer that they can trust you to encrypt their financial information.
Sign Up? No? OK: First-time buyers may not want to create an account at your site. Registration shouldn’t extend beyond what’s needed to complete the transaction, and should occur simultaneously with the purchase. Even if it’s the same amount of data entry, a customer doesn’t want to be told to sign up before buying something.
Multiple Payment Options: In an expanding world of transaction types, it’s important for a site to accept as many forms of payment as possible. If a prospect doesn’t see PayPal, Google Wallet, or another preferred option, it’s an immediate invitation to exit.
Free Shipping If Viable: Especially for smaller, more expensive items, free shipping can be a simple, affordable incentive for a retailer to provide. Otherwise, be sure to provide an estimated shipping cost as soon as a mailing address has been entered.
Shipping Address as Billing Address by Default: Save customers time by ensuring that they don’t have to type in the same exact address information twice. A simple checkbox will suffice, indicating that mailing address and billing address are identical.
Progress Meter: “Man, how many steps does it take to get these people to take my money?” Make sure they know with a simple linear phase indicator, letting them see how many more pages are left before they reach a purchase confirmation.
Time-Limited Offers: Some abandoned carts result from consumers simply wanting to see what the total cost would be. Incentivize purchasing now with promotional rates.
Real-Time Support: If a customer is having difficulties, or simply has questions that the website doesn’t answer, live chat via phone or web interface reinforces the idea that you care about the customer and want to earn his business.
Backlinks: Give the customer the opportunity to backtrack and revisit the catalog without using the browser’s back button. If nothing else, it’s a visual reminder that you’re not trying to trap them.
Save Cart Functionality: If a customer is interrupted during the purchasing process, or simply wants to use the shopping cart as a wish list, let them return to their selections at another time. A wish list option could also serve the second purpose.
Cross-Selling Where Appropriate: If you’re going to suggest other products a customer may be interested in during their checkout process, make sure these suggestions make sense, both in terms of expense and what the items are. A bad algorithm for picking related products can convince consumers that you don’t know what you’re doing.
Email Remarketing: If you’ve collected a consumer’s email address before they abandon their cart, contact them to remind them of their purchase in progress. Sometimes, they need an extra nudge to finish the transaction.
Embracing these characteristics will put you well on your way to offering a customer-friendly experience, and making more sales along the way.
Businesses have plenty of options when it comes to migrating large portions of their infrastructure to off-site hosts. According to Research and Markets, the colocation and managed hosting market is projected to reach a value of $47.2 billion by 2018. It's important that these companies not only know what's available, but also what will work best for their unique needs.
Recently, dedicated server hosting has been under scrutiny, surrounded by a considerable amount of hype and negativity. To determine dedicated hosting's true value, we'll examine the top three misconceptions about it:
One misconception about dedicated server hosting is that it usurps control from the client, that having an expert service provider looking after their hardware limits their accessibility and control.
"[A] potential disadvantage to dedicated hosting is that you do not have physical access to the server," The Web Hosting Directory noted. "Your Web-hosting provider will be responsible for maintaining the actual server. They will provide security measures to protect your server and data."
The second portion of this statement doesn't sound so bad – what's so terrible about having an experienced, knowledgeable team taking care of maintenance and security? As for the first – it's more of a half-truth than anything.
"The provider's support helps free up time for the internal IT team."
Access and control will largely depend on the provider and type of service chosen. For instance, a managed dedicated server comes with a full range of vendor support. Even still, the client has complete control of resource usage as well as the platforms, applications or solutions hosted there.
In many cases, clients have more accessibility and management capabilities than they thought, and the provider's support helps free up time for the internal IT team.
This misconception goes hand-in-hand with the prior. Not only are today's dedicated hosting plans customizable and fully accessible to the client, but this approach often provides a higher level of quality support than any other environment.
Because resources are dedicated to a single user, as opposed to being divvied up between organizations in a shared environment, clients always have access to the support they need. This is crucial for organizations that host critical real-time applications or customer-facing platforms. Without it, employees may be left without access to the platforms they need to be productive; consumers may lose access to the resources they need to connect with the business.
Additionally, some consumers view dedicated servers as inherently less redundant than cloud servers. However, when built the right way, with failover destinations available, dedicated infrastructure can be just as highly available, if not moreso, than cloud deployments.
With dedicated resources in place, businesses can expect top-notch reliability and can rest easy knowing their solutions will always be available.
This option is definitely an investment – there's no mistake there. However, the benefits outweigh the costs – depending on the hosting provider. Thankfully, today's providers typically offer a range of different plans and prices that can suit any need.
Hostway has a number of options when it comes to dedicated server hosting – from starter packs to general purpose and high utilization. And if these don't fit the bill, our team of Dedicated Server Specialists can create a custom solution aligned with your business's unique needs.
To find out more about dedicated server hosting, contact Hostway today.
Businesses that rely heavily on e-commerce – as most do these days – know that there are three principal issues which can reduce the effectiveness of their site. This blog is the first in Josh Hatfield's three-part series, “3 Problems that Plague E-Commerce Sites.” Check back in for subsequent entries the next two weeks.
Every year, a series of predictable, avoidable failures occurs. Big-name brands are punished for their lack of preparedness as the peak season arrives. It reduces their profits, knocks their brand down a peg, and serves as a reminder that anyone can suffer the consequences.
Call it Spike Overflow Syndrome – the S.O.S. sent out by a company’s IT staff when the walls come crashing down. In 2015, Target was a victim of Black Friday failures. Neiman Marcus struggled for consecutive days during peak gift-buying season, while PayPal went down on Cyber Monday and the day before.
For smaller retailers, it’s a stark reminder: Traffic can surge without warning, and websites generally go down when the most money is coming in. So how can you prevent your e-commerce site from buckling under pressure? Here are three suggestions.
Lighten Your Landing Page Load
Which pages on your site get visited the most? Probably your home page, any Google ads landing pages you have, destinations of links in emails, and so on. Ensure those load fast: two out of every five users will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. Maximize this speed by making your landing pages as light as possible. It’s a delicate balancing act to lighten the load while keeping the site compelling. But to keep your site up and running during spikes, it’s a crucial one.
Use a Content Delivery Network
A high-quality CDN, and offsite source for images, will enable faster page load times, better video streaming and smoother shopping cart processing. Web-hosting providers and telecommunications providers offer CDNs, as well as third-party specialists. Many employ geographically diverse servers to ensure faster load times for visitors around the world.
Move to the Cloud
To increase bandwidth during peak seasons without paying for maximum volume year-round, embrace a cloud hosting model. This way, you can quickly add computing power for those occasional spikes, then reduce capacity when they end.
Prepare now for Cyber Monday 2016 – or for any other traffic spike.