Some customers need a hosting solution that’s more powerful and secure than shared hosting, but less complex and costly than Cloud Hosting or Dedicated Servers. They are generally looking for a reliable offering to resell to end customers – something they can use to manage multiple hosting accounts from a single interface.
For these users, we offer Virtual Private Servers (VPS), a core service from Hostway. Our VPS plans include the Plesk control panel from Parallels, from which resellers can easily configure and manage hundreds of websites within a single plan. Individuals who don’t want the burden of managing their own server also find VPS useful for projects too complex for shared hosting.
VPS service from Hostway provides the following advantages:
Visit our website now to learn more about our VPS offerings.
The cloud reseller market is a hot place to be right now, and it’s no wonder: Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are gradually moving to cloud-based environments, and a finite number of providers are reaping the benefits.
As partners consider moving into the cloud reseller space, they must work to understand SMBs’ needs, mindsets, and challenges, which include the following:
From there, it’s about taking these answers into account to position solutions and messaging to address the apparent prioritized needs and challenges.
It’s increasingly important to incorporate these priorities as SMB spending shifts towards cloud and mobility-related expenditures. Cloud share of wallet of total SMB ICT spending will increase from 16% in 2014 to over 22% by 2019 – triggered largely by rapid growth in SMB deployment of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, hosted infrastructure, remotely managed IT services and unified communications services.
The top 30 percent of SMBs in terms of cloud progress, termed “cloud integrators” and “cloud innovators,” are most likely to use SaaS for payroll, accounting and CRM applications. They find infrastructure as a service (IaaS) useful for security and storage needs. Instant messaging usage in the cloud is widespread among all cloud-enabled SMBs.
Keeping this in mind, only 13 percent of resellers surveyed by AMI are fully “cloud transformed” – that is, they’ve taken all the steps necessary to successfully sell cloud, and are meeting or exceeding their cloud sales goals. As a result of these actions, these cloud transformed resellers see stronger customer demand for cloud and realize stronger profit margins when selling cloud to SMBs.
AMI has identified the following five key actions and investments made by cloud transformed resellers to ensure success and profitability in the cloud:
To learn more from AMI-Partners on how resellers are capturing the cloud opportunity, check out the recording of our “AMI-Partners Share Secrets of Profitable Cloud Resellers” webinar or the slide deck from that presentation.
On Oct. 17, Google launched its new algorithm, Penguin 3.0, and completed the full rollout on Oct. 20. The new filter was specifically created to prevent spam and provide more actionable, valuable search results for users. According to Search Engine Land, this updated version of Penguin includes changes in the way Google treats websites that violate its linking guidelines. This means companies might need to consider changing their search engine optimization strategies to ensure that their websites remain high-ranking search results.
Inc. contributor Drew Hendricks noted that, similar to last year's release of Penguin 2.1, this new algorithm may only impact an estimated 1 percent of search queries. However, in the grand scheme of overall Internet traffic, that query count remains astronaumical. For this reason, it is critical that business leaders – particularly those in the e-commerce sector – understand the changes brought by Penguin 3.0 and how to optimize their SEO techniques for the new filter to their advantage.
Penguin refresh: Treatment of spam links
While many are referring to the release as a complete update, Google's Pierre Far noted that this version was more of a refresh of last year's Penguin 2.1. Much of this revolves around Google's treatment of spammy links. Last year, many companies put considerable work to remove spammy inbound links, only to see minimal improvements in search result rankings.
"[T]his means that the site merely updated its algorithms to release those sites that had repaired their issues after the last update and pinpoint any issues that might have been missed by previous updates," Hendricks explained. "As a result, sites that didn't repair issues but remained high in search results may notice a sudden drop."
Moreover, QuickSprout contributor Neil Patel pointed out that Penguin 3.0 also looks for optimized or exact-match keyword anchors, low-quality backlinks and links leading back to guest blogging networks.
Optimize your site for Penguin 3.0
Keeping these points in mind, there are several best practices website administrators and marketing strategists can leverage to prevent being weeded out of search results. Power Retail contributor and digital strategist John Vlasakakis suggested utilizing the following strategies:
Although some companies may think Penguin 3.0 may not impact them, Patel pointed out that there is no harm in optimizing your website for improved search results.
"Even if you don't think you're at risk, performing these actions will help your link profile," Patel wrote. "There's never any harm in taking action to clean up your website. It won't hurt, and it definitely might help."
Google Analytics is a powerful, free tool that can give business leaders an in-depth view of the effectiveness of their company's online presence. In the first part of this series, we examined an array of available features as well as the benefits for enterprises that leverage those capabilities. In this entry, we'll go beyond the surface of the program to get a better idea of the various uses of Google Analytics.
Getting started: Google Analytics homepage
Let's begin with the homepage. Social Media Examiner contributor Kristi Hines noted that this page immediately offers some basic information, including the list of websites connected with your Google Analytics account, the total number and average duration of sessions, and the bounce and goal conversion rates for all the sites listed.
The homepage is searchable and customizable – the page includes a search box for easy navigation of the websites included in your account, as well as the ability to mark the most important sites with a star.
This page also includes a date range feature, enabling you to see historical information about a certain website over a specified time period, or compare these statistics to the platform's current data.
More information: Google Analytics reporting
The homepage provides an overarching view of the basic metrics for each website. However, for a more in-depth picture, users can navigate to the Google Analytics Reporting page, accessible through a menu bar at the top of the screen. This menu also provides options for the homepage, Customization and Admin sections.
Once on the Reporting page, the left sidebar offers the ability to locate and view certain reports and resources:
Customize the view of your audience
One of the biggest advantages of Google Analytics is its insight into your customers' behavior. The program makes it easy for you to take an in-depth look at your website visitors, customizing how information about these consumers is presented.
WordStream contributor Dan Shewan drew attention to the Interests Overview section under Audience reporting, where you can access a broad view of Interests reports, including different subsets of information based on the type of users visiting the site. The Interests and Demographics reports – both accessible within the Audience reporting menu – provide an in-depth view of the type of individuals visiting your site based on their specific interests, age and gender. In the case of Shewan's reports, he was able to glean that the majority of his website visitors are males between 25 and 34 years old, working in financial or investment services who have an interest in technology.
With this information, website owners can create custom segments to separate users depending on the available categories through the Audience reporting menu under the All Sessions drop-down menu. Shewan noted that certain segments can now be viewed and compared.
"This segment can now be measured against other visitor traffic to gain insight into how certain types of visitors behave in comparison to one another," Shewan wrote.
By leveraging these in-depth Google Analytics capabilities, website owners are able to see just how their overall audience is interacting with the platform, how certain subsets are behaving and historical comparisons. Armed with this information, page administrators are able to craft a more focused, effective website that will not only benefit their business, but will provide the solutions their customers are seeking.
Stay tuned for the final chapter of our Google Analytics series, where we'll examine the latest Google search algorithms and what these mean for your site's search engine optimization.
Fifteen years ago, when Google was launched, it included very basic capabilities, boasting that its search index included 25 million pages. That simple search engine evolved into one of the most powerful resources available, expanding to include a whole host of tools beneficial not only for individuals, but for the enterprise community as well.
Google now provides a range of capabilities for users, including Google Analytics. This series will examine the tools available with Google Analytics and how they benefit businesses.
Top Google Analytics Tools
Today, a considerable number of companies within the e-commerce and other sectors utilize Google Analytics. According to Venture Beat contributor John Boitnott, these are some of the platform's most widely utilized capabilities:
• Acquisitions: Track clicks, conversions and other metrics.
• Content drilldown: View website content in terms of which pages visitors are viewing, how often, and their traffic path throughout the site.
• Bounce rates: See how long visitors remain on a page and if a poor bounce rate impacts revenues.
• Keywords: Check the specific words and phrases that drive visitors to the site.
While these are the most well-known features, Google Analytics offers a number of other beneficial tools:
• E-commerce tracking: This tool is specifically geared toward companies that do the bulk of their business online, and allows for real-time revenue measurement. Company leaders can track all purchases made through the website from its launch through that second. Boitnott noted that this can help businesses gain insight into how their online sales compare to those taking place within physical locations.
• Goal flow: This feature allows website administrators to see the path users are taking to navigate the site, where purchases are made, and where customers are leaving the site.
"This flow feature allows marketing analysts to take snapshots of the progression customers are actually taking, including where they loop back, get redirected, or exit midway," Boitnott wrote. "This explains customer behaviors and shows areas of your website where customers are getting confused or losing interest or where steps in the process are becoming entangled."
Using this, decision-makers can see exactly where their website needs improvement to shape consumers behavior.
• Attribution modeling: This tracking capability provides a view of all the touchpoints – places of customer contact – consumers are using to navigate the website. These can include leads from social media, blog links, search results or other sources. In addition, attribution modeling also allows the business to see just how many of these touchpoints resulted in purchases. This offers an in-depth picture of how customers are finding the website and what leads them to buy.
Benefits of Google Analytics
Now that we have a better idea of Google Analytics' capabilities, let's examine the ways in which these tools are beneficial.
One of the most valuable advantages is the ability to adjust and optimize the website for better exposure and increased web traffic, noted Full Traffic contributor Shobha Atre. Through the insights gathered via Google Analytics, website administrators can see which sections or pages of the platform need improvements and can use these findings as a guide when revamping the site.
Another benefit is the ability to track and measure the results of a marketing campaign. Today's businesses put a considerable amount of time and resources into improving their brand visibility. Google Analytics enables these groups to see how their initiatives are paying off.
"There are different functionalities using which you can determine whether your marketing campaign will be successful or not," Atre wrote. "As a result, you can get lots of opportunities for growing and diversifying your online business."
Google Analytics also provides the best view of website traffic, including where users initially land, what pages they visit most and what drives them to make purchases. These insights can be immensely helpful in ensuring the platform's usability and value.
It is worth any administrators' time to examine and utilize the features of Google Analytics to improve their business.
The next part of this series will take a look at the technical side of using Analytics, as well as how Google Algorithms impact search engine optimization.
Depending on your business’s needs, Remote Desktop Services (RDS) can help your employees work more effectively and productively than the system or strategy you currently have in place. If you’re considering investing in RDS to enhance your workforce, spend a little time learning the ins and outs of RDS usage by perusing our brief primer below:
What Is Remote Desktop Services?
RDS is a capability within Windows Server 2008 R2 and, recently, Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2. Installed on a Remote Desktop (RD) Session Host Server, the technology hosts Windows-based programs, applications or full desktops to enable remote access for users. To gain access, users can use the RD Connection Broker, which provides access to virtual desktops hosted on the RD Session Host Server.
All files, applications and desktops within RDS can be accessed from a number of client devices (smartphones and tablets), operating systems, and HTML5 browsers with Web access and a Remote Desktop Gateway, which allows users to connect to virtual desktops and/or remote application programs over the Internet. As such, the quality of the user experience is dependent on the amount of network bandwidth available. If the user does lose a connection, however, the RD Connection Broker can restore it and preserve the remote desktop’s current state.
Who Needs Remote Desktop Services?
Employees across the board can benefit from RDS:
Why Use Remote Desktop Services?
There are plenty of benefits to deploying a program on an RD Session Host Server. Here are just three:
And there are even more benefits of RDS with the newest version of Microsoft Windows 2012. A member of Microsoft’s RD team took to the company’s Remote Desktop Services blog in early October to elaborate: “RDS in Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 brought significant enhancements to the user experience, simplified RDS management and lowered the total cost of ownership. RDS in the next version of Windows Server builds on this strong foundation.”
According to the blog, enhancements to RDS in Windows Server 2012 include better support for OpenGL (1-4.4) and OpenCL (1.1), which will enable customers to centralize commonly used engineering and design applications such as Adobe Photoshop; simplify single server deployment for education and retail scenarios by integrating Windows Multipoint Server within Windows Server; and improve user productivity from personal devices.
Hostway is proud to offer the latest version of RDS client access license (CAL), Windows Server 2012 RDS CAL, which offers a number of benefits beyond what previous versions offered. Click here to learn more about how Hostway can help support your RDS endeavor.
Users of Apple's iCloud may want to enable two-step verification – or temporarily store any sensitive material elsewhere – in response to a new threat to the security of the system.
The public release of the iDict tool, and subsequent test usage worldwide, suggests that all iCloud accounts are vulnerable to brute-force hacking.
The designer of the iDict tool claims that it can access any iCloud account given the email address associated with that account.
While its designer claims to have made the tool in order to alert Apple to a security flaw, directly informing Apple seems like the less dangerous way to accomplish that, rather than publicizing the flaw and publishing a tool to exploit it.
Either way, this represents the second major iCloud security story in six months, following the massive leak of celebrity photos last year. As a result, iCloud users may be left wondering if their files are safer elsewhere.
UPDATE:
According to the publisher of the iDict tool, Apple has patched the issue.
Best wishes to all our readers and customers for a prosperous 2015!
Many companies utilize a shared Web hosting plan to better offset costs and balance server capacity, especially if they don’t need a full server or lack the technological prowess to operate or maintain one independently.
What is shared hosting?
Shared hosting simply means that your website is being housed on one large server along with many other websites; each site is separated from one another but draws on the same system resources. A good example of this is WordPress, a blogging and publishing tool in which users can create their own websites and house them on the central WordPress server. In this way, even the least tech-savvy person can create as many different domains as he or she likes and get to blogging in a matter of minutes using a shared Web hosting plan.
While we’ve mentioned some of the benefits of using a shared Web hosting plan, there can also be challenges—specifically, central processing unit (CPU) usage.
So, what is the CPU?
The CPU essentially represents the brains of the computer that is the host server; it handles all of your pertinent information and executes your programs. So, in a shared Web hosting environment, multiple servers are usually housed on multiple CPUs, which can complicate things compared to housing on a single CPU.
When multiple requests are made of the CPU simultaneously, the hardware can get overloaded. The requests will be queued and handled in turn, and each request will receive a fraction of a second processing time before the next request is handled. By queuing them in this manner, each request can be handled more quickly; however, depending on certain things such as the size of the request or how much Web traffic is occurring, processing time can slow down, which can degrade performance.
Four Ways to Improve Your CPU
No matter the cause, when you’re sharing your Web server with a number of other sites, if one user’s request is especially heavy it can cause a domino effect. This forces the entire group of users under that shared plan to suffer a loss in performance.
Your managed hosting provider may tackle this issue in one of four ways:
Not sure where to start seeking a reliable Web host? Click here to read the six things to look for when shopping for one.
During the holiday season, e-commerce companies need to be at the top of their game when it comes to attracting customers and encouraging purchases. Several different approaches are leveraged to achieve this. Organizational leaders often look to the recent trends in the industry to give their company a certain edge.
With this in mind, here are today's top e-commerce trends:
Mobile isn't just a gimmick anymore
One of the biggest trends to take note of, if your business hasn't already, is the large-scale shift toward the mobile platform. Today, many consumers do much – if not all – of their shopping via their smartphone or tablet. In fact, according to Business 2 Community contributor Nilesh Rohra, more than half of all e-commerce traffic originates from mobile devices. What's more, 32 percent of all purchases made are conducted over a wireless gadget. As a result, e-commerce companies are focusing more on their mobile presence – and rightfully so. Firms can take considerable steps toward success in this arena with a mobile-optimized application or website. And as mobile payment applications – including Google Wallet and Apple Pay – become more popular, enterprises should ensure that they are compatible with all the ways their customers want to make purchases.
High-quality, engaging website content
When it comes to mobile e-commerce websites and applications, consumers simply aren't satisfied with the run-of-the-mill content anymore. James Hardy, e-commerce expert and head of Alibaba.com's European branch, told Start Your Business that companies whose websites include dull product descriptions and uninteresting graphics might as well be pushing their customers right toward their competitors. Content that is of a higher quality will not only better engage customers, but can considerably boost traffic levels as well.
Reduced shipping timelines
Today's consumers aren't used to waiting. Let's face it – they can quickly purchase nearly any item they might want within seconds, with the simple click (or tap) of a button. So why should they have to wait days – or weeks even – to receive their items? This is often the only obstacle that prevents shoppers from choosing an e-commerce firm for their purchases over a brick-and-mortar retailer. However, firms like Amazon and eBay have begun leading the way with faster shipping. In some cases, customers can receive their items on the same day. While this might not be possible in every instance, reduced shipping times are taking hold in the e-commerce industry, and are something that companies should strive for.
A personal, positive experience
Rohra pointed out that nearly 90 percent of customers said they began doing business with one company after having a bad experience with a competitor. This is completely understandable, as nearly everyone can relate to switching brands after not being fully satisfied. However, one trend that is emerging is the use of consumer information to create a more personalized experience for shoppers. In fact, 73 percent of customers said they'd rather make purchases with a company that leverages such a strategy.
"By tracking users' behaviors, companies can provide personalized recommendations of products, services and related offers, resulting in increase of engagement with the likelihood of making a purchase," Rohra wrote.
A customized shopping experience can also help brands retain their customers, not to mention attract new ones.
What to consider when implementing a new strategy
These trends all represent relatively new ways of doing things. Whenever companies look to implement a new strategy of this kind, there are a few things they need to consider to ensure its success. According to Jim Sisson of Vantage Associates, a leading strategic planning firm, these factors are summarized thusly: