If you’re like most people, you probably check your email from several different devices, including your work computer, home computer and tablet or smartphone. When you do this, you’re taking advantage of Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), which stores incoming and outgoing email messages on a server, ensuring that what you see is the same on each device.
IMAP “competes” with POP3, another email protocol that allows you to have a copy of your email and attachments residing on your computer. Depending on program configuration, these messages may be automatically deleted from the server once they are received, or at some future time. Messages sent, moved or deleted from a computer using POP can only be viewed on that individual computer’s folders.
IMAP combines the best of traditional POP3 email – which downloads into your email program for easy reading – with the best of webmail, which is a handy way to access email when you’re away from the office.
IMAP has been around for several years, but has seen a huge increase over the last few years for several reasons:
Chances are, if you have a smartphone or tablet, you already have IMAP. When you add your email account information to these devices, IMAP should be an option.
IMAP is also very easy to set up. To start, simply go to the “Settings” section on your phone or tablet where you’ll be asked a series of questions based on your email provider. Many of the standard email platforms – such as Outlook, Gmail and iCloud – are partially preconfigured for you. In the series of questions asked during account setup, you’ll also be asked to specify your incoming mail server type. Click the arrow to scroll to IMAP. In most cases, that’s all you need to do. In other cases, you may need to quickly ask your email provider for instructions. Sometimes you may need to specify any special security options.
With its ease of use and flexibility for configuring mobile devices and tablets, IMAP is perfect for multi-device users. You may even wonder how you ever lived without it.
Anyone who has ordered fast food at a drive-thru window has been exposed to upselling and cross-selling: “Would you like fries with that?” and “Would you like to make that a value meal?” It’s a slightly different process for online marketing, but the intent is the same: Get customers who are already engaged in the buying process on your website to increase the amount of money they are spending – not only during that purchase, but on future purchases as well.
One of the most effective ways to increase online sales is to encourage buyers to purchase other items that may be of interest to them based on what they’re viewing on your site. Another proven method is to encourage shoppers to consider the next higher priced item if it in fact could better meet their needs. Done correctly, upselling and cross-selling can help significantly increase online sales, maximize the ROI per customer, and reduce individual cost per acquisition.
Let’s take a look at five ways to upsell customers that can really help increase your sales:
When implementing any upsell strategy, be sure to track which items are being sold to better understand what is working best for your company. Discontinue any strategies that are not working after a few months. Remember, you can also cross-sell well after the sale via email based on what the customer purchased.
Upselling, when done well, can be a terrific tool to help you increase your average sales and the overall profitability of your company. It’s also a great way for customers to discover new product lines and the breadth of products your company offers. Following the five tips above is a great way to get started.
When talking about the cloud, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the proliferation of acronyms. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are three you'll likely see the most; according to recent analyst reports, all are growing at a rapid clip as cloud adoption rises. Gartner estimates that of the $131 billion cloud computing market, these three fundamental service models represent more than 20 percent of expenditures: PaaS comes in at about one percent, whereas SaaS sits at 14.7 percent of the market and IaaS at 5.5 percent.
In an IaaS model, businesses outsource the equipment they need to support their operations – including hardware, servers, storage and networking components – to a service provider who delivers and maintains this equipment. Businesses turn to IaaS solutions to avoid the capital expenditure outlay for equipment such as servers, and also because they can scale quickly and easily. If the scale of their operations fluctuates, or if they are looking to expand, they can tap into the cloud resource as needed rather than purchase, install and integrate hardware themselves. Meanwhile, the service provider owns the equipment and is responsible for housing, servicing and upgrading it.
SaaS (also known as hosted applications) is a hosting model in which applications use a set of common code and are owned, delivered and managed remotely by a vendor or service provider, made available to customers over the Internet. SaaS allows organizations to access business software at a monthly or annual fee that is typically less than paying for the applications outright. It does not need to be installed, set up or maintained, as the software is hosted remotely. This means that businesses don't need to invest in additional hardware.
Sitting between the two is PaaS, which draws from both concepts. In a PaaS model, businesses rent virtualized servers and associated services for running existing applications or developing and testing new ones. With PaaS, operating system features can be changed and upgraded frequently, and geographically distributed development teams can work together on software development projects. PaaS helps cut costs because programming development efforts can be unified.
If PaaS sounds a lot like IaaS, there’s a good reason: They share a lot of the same characteristics and, according to some industry pundits, PaaS will likely be consumed by IaaS in the near future as IaaS vendors include PaaS capabilities within their offerings. PaaS is today's most ill-defined area of cloud computing, these industry experts argue, with approaches, features and definitions varying widely among providers. Most PaaS offerings provide only the features and functions that build and deploy applications, lacking access other resources and tools to support specific features, such as remote and native APIs, as well as middleware and database services. Still, other surveys indicate that PaaS is growing at a rate that may sustain its independence as a model of business.
PaaS has played an important role in the cloud thus far, but the market will soon decide if it's meant to stand alone or meld quietly into the IaaS landscape. In the unpredictable realm of information technology, contradictory forecasts are nothing new. We’ll simply have to wait and see where the market goes.
The HTTPS lock icon we’re all used to trusting in our browsers hasn’t been as trustworthy as we’d like to believe.
Ever since the good folks at Codenomicon and Google have publicized the OpenSSL implementation bug known colloquially as Heartbleed, two questions have come to the forefront for each Internet user: What sites have been compromised, and what do I need to do about it?
OpenSSL, an open-source cryptographic library project which began in 1998, has been vulnerable since December 31, 2011, which means that many current versions of the most popular traffic-encryption service currently running are compromised.
Apache Tomcat users are particularly endangered, because OpenSSL comes bundled with that web server. Apache today released information on mitigating the Heartbleed vulnerability.
In total, it is believed that 17% of all SSL web servers can currently allow hackers to view purportedly secured information. These affected sites reportedly include Twitter, Yahoo, Tumblr, Steam, DropBox, and many more of the most popular URLs on the Internet. Among those, Tumblr has already reacted by advising all users to change their passwords.
On the website-operator end, Hostway has determined that 4 percent of Hostway’s total server count may have been affected by this OpenSSL issue, and has contacted each customer regarding steps to become more secure.
While affected sites are busy reissuing their security certificates to rectify the situation, Internet users are left wondering what they should or can do about the issue. Here are three tips on staying safe:
Firstly you can use this site to determine if a site is vulnerable. But it may be best to proceed as though all your accounts have been compromised. Here's a handy list of major sites, if they were vulnerable, if they've acted, and if you should do anything yet.
Secondly, it’s important to note is that changing your password before a site corrects the issue doesn’t completely address the security issue. Major websites subject to the vulnerability will likely publicize their response to it; once they confirm that their security certificates are updated, then change your password there. OpenSSL has already addressed the issue on its end.
Finally, it will be impossible to determine if attackers have intercepted user passwords in the interim unless a problem arises. So until you get the all-clear, don’t log in to affected sites at all. With the vulnerability as high-profile as ever, it seems more likely now that hackers will be aware of the opportunity to exploit the weakness.
So while you’re waiting to browse the web and figuring out how to generate new passwords, check out xkcd’s advice on the subject.
Link-building is one of the most important activities you can do to maximize search engine optimization (SEO) for your website; it's also one of the most daunting. Luckily, there are dozens of sites you're likely already familiar with that can get you started. These sites provide dofollow links – also called backlinks – which incorporate HTML markup that informs the search engines to follow the destination inside the link. With the ability to influence the target page’s PageRank, dofollow links require minimal effort and, for the most part, are under your control.
Dofollow links offer a wealth of benefits:
Many sites alternatively use nofollow links, so it’s imperative to understand the difference between the two. Every URL on a webpage is either a nofollow or dofollow link. A nofollow link means that the HTML code instructs search engines to ignore the link, meaning the link’s target page will get no benefit.
Because the vast majority of social media sites only provide nofollow links, it's important to concentrate only on those sites that allow dofollow links. Here’s a guide to getting those backlinks:
With the sites above, you will have a great start to your link-building efforts. Don't have time to post to several different sites? Social media management tools can help you manage many of them. Once you get started and begin to see results, it will become a habit that's worth continuing.
Edit: Entry was edited to reflect Google+ capabilities changes.
When measuring the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign, the true test of success is whether your recipients heed your call to action, providing a chance at revenue. So are low-single digit numbers really the best you can do? Or can you set the bar higher?
The answer is: It depends. Like email open rates, conversion rates can vary significantly between industries and companies, and even between different types of offers from the same company. Whether you're offering something for free or trying to sell it can also impact conversion rates, as can price points. Rates can also vary based on how you define a conversion, as a click-through, a download or a purchase – or something else entirely.
What's Realistic?
Most experts agree that 1 to 5 percent is a realistic conversion range, and that number has remained pretty steady over the past few years, according to recent research from the Epsilon Email Marketing Research Center. Customer benchmark data from email service provider MailChimp shows that open and click-through rates vary sharply by industry, with click-throughs ranging from 1.3 percent (gambling industry) to 5.5 percent (photo and video industry).
Based on how you define a conversion, some click-throughs have higher ROI than others. For example, if you have two email offers, with one converting at 2.5 percent and the other at one percent, you might assume that the 2.5 percent conversion is the better performer. But examining the average order value for the offers, you may see that the one converting at 2.5 percent is only $50, while the one converting at one percent is $250. In the end, ROI is the principal measure of campaign success.
Of course, it’s harder to measure the ROI for free information. For example, campaigns that offer free downloads are more about getting noticed and establishing thought leadership around your brand. To derive a measure of effectiveness from these, you may need to investigate whether there was increased interest in the product or topic of the campaign in the weeks immediately following it.
Here are three simple tips to generate strong ROI from your email marketing campaigns:
Like open rates, conversion metrics are most valuable when compared with your own data over time. If a particular type of offer does not convert well for you, either drop it or test a variation to see if you can improve conversions. If your conversion numbers for similar types of offers begin to drop, find out what has changed, either with the product or in your customers’ minds.
Although a lot of buzz surrounds the "rates," the most important metric is not the absolute numbers, but rather how those numbers translate into profitability for your business. Statistics like conversion rates just help you to evaluate the overall ROI on your email marketing efforts.
For the past two years, instead of the usual corporate holiday gift-giving, Hostway has chosen to give back to the communities that support us. Last year, we decided to ask our employees for ideas of nonprofit partners – some local to our offices, some national or international – where we could make a difference.
Eventually, we had a list of five organizations. Through social networks, chatting with our customers and employee engagement, we asked the Hostway family to decide on a winner.
Our winner, Junior Achievement of Chicago, received the top donation of $10,000.
Because every organization that participated was deserving of our help, we decided to donate $1,000 each to the foundations that fell short in our voting process. Along with our overseas friends at the Against Malaria Foundation, we made donations with the following groups:
Nancy Stewart (left), Director of Development for the Denver Metropolitan Affiliate of Susan G. Komen, accepts the donation from Hostway Partner Marketing Director Nikole Haiar.
Hostway CEO Bob Boles (second from right) and Sales and Marketing VP Aaron Hollobaugh (far right) present a donation to the National Girls Collaborative Project, represented by (from left) Nimisha Ghosh Roy, Karen Bouldin and Beverly Walker.
Scott Crews (center), Make-A-Wish® Central & South Texas Director of Development for Central Texas, accepts Hostway’s donation from Channel Account Manager Griffin Leen-Sohl and Marketing Communications Director Amanda Bayane.
Hostway Purchasing Specialist Kelly Burgman Staver (left) and Financial Planning and Analysis Manager Chris Messinides (right) present the top prize to Junior Achievement Chicago’s SVP of Development Tom Staab.
Thanks to everyone who helped us select our winner, and thanks again to all our customers.
Since the passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996, businesses that handle medical data and records have been placed under increased scrutiny, which was only enhanced by the addition of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) in 2009. The cost of non-compliance is high. Businesses found in violation of HIPAA could be forced to pay fines ranging from $100 to $50,000 per violation, with an annual maximum of $1.5 million.
With those figures in mind, forward-thinking businesses must act to ensure HIPAA compliance. But even with stringent regulations in place, many do not. While it takes dedicated effort and a financial investment to ensure HIPAA compliance, the investment is truly worthwhile.
Recently, AHMC Healthcare, a six-hospital organization based in California, reported a HIPAA breach that affected 729,000 patients. An unencrypted laptop containing sensitive patient information was stolen from a facility, the company reported, and the thieves made off with patient names, Medicare data, medical diagnoses, and insurance and payment information. It’s safe to say those patients are not too happy with their healthcare provider or its security measures, and it underscores the need for a better solution.
AHMC Healthcare is not a unique case; healthcare providers around the country have experienced similar situations, through theft, hacking or employee error (for example, erroneously sending patient information via email). While it takes dedicated effort – and a financial investment – to make sure your company is HIPAA- compliant, the cost of non-compliance can be a lot higher.
Why is HIPAA Compliance Important?
HIPAA was enacted to prevent healthcare fraud and ensure that all Protected Health Information (PHI) is only accessible to authorized individuals is shared securely between authorized professionals only.
With the use of electronic medical records (EMR) on the rise, healthcare companies need to protect their networks with security safeguards to prevent breaches that release sensitive information. But many companies may lack the technological expertise or experience needed. To address HIPAA mandates – and avoid hefty fines – companies typically require a skilled internal team to manage compliance, plus external IT resources and auditing staff.
Unfortunately, many companies lack the technological expertise or experience needed to address HIPAA mandates and avoid hefty fines. That’s typically because companies typically require a skilled internal team, plus external IT resources and auditing staff to manage HIPAA compliance. Lack of funding and resources to enact compliance protocols can put providers at risk since they are vulnerable to financial penalties if they don’t participate and subject to fines if their compliance system doesn’t pass random audits.
Why is HIPAA Important to Healthcare Organizations and Patients?
No healthcare organization wants their sensitive data to get into the wrong hands. But without HIPAA, patients and the public would have no recourse if healthcare facilities and organizations weren’t properly securing their sensitive data.
HIPAA requires healthcare organizations to manage who has access to patient health data, restricting who can view it and who it can be shared with. This helps to give more order to how data is managed in the healthcare system, and gives individual patients, and the public, more protection and more control over healthcare records and data.
Is Your Business HIPAA Compliant?
HIPAA does not provide an easy checklist of requirements that healthcare providers must meet in order to ensure HIPAA compliance. Rather, the act's vague terminology leaves many confused about whether or not they are compliant. This is where managed security providers come in, assuming control of network security and ensuring compliance with all aspects of the law. This allows healthcare companies to focus on their bread and butter while a team of experts keeps their networks—and the data that runs across it—safe.
Hostway HIPAA Essential meets all specifications of the law, as well as those relating to the HITECH Act. By implementing Hostway HIPAA Essential, business owners can rest assured that patients’ sensitive information is protected, avoiding costly fines and the ire of patients.
As one of the world’s largest software corporations, Microsoft has paved the way for companies worldwide to conduct business more efficiently. Its role in cloud computing – and in particular, in hypervisor technology used to create and run virtual machines – is becoming more prominent as companies build out private and public clouds. However, Microsoft hasn’t always been viewed as the forerunner of this particular field.
Now that things have improved for Microsoft, they have carved out a path to become a market leader as a cloud solutions provider. There’s a growing buzz as more companies are making the switch from options like VMware and Citrix to become a part of the Microsoft family.
A survey taken at Microsoft Management Summit 2013 (MMS2013) shows that while VMware peaked at about 54 percent of the market share and is at a “slow decline,” Microsoft’s Hyper-V is at about 30 percent and has been increasing every quarter. While this source may not be impartial, this data represents a notable shift occurring between companies’ first choice of virtualization software – VMware and Citrix are no longer the only kids on the block.
The Windows Hyper-V virtualization platform was released in 2012, further enabling users to easily consolidate workloads onto a single physical server to provide a spectrum of services, including Microsoft SQL and third-party applications found on Windows or Linux servers. The release of Windows Server 2012 R2 has added further enhancements that improve performance and configuration flexibility, such as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) security support, SCSI Boot, automatic activation of VMs, VM copy and paste, live migration improvements, shared VHDX, Linux guest support and Hyper-V Replica improvements.
Hyper-V supports critical components such as live migration – a backup operational mode for systems such as processers, servers, networks or databases – as well as clustering, which entails a group of servers or resources combining to work as one single system. And while cost savings is a factor, with Hyper-V coming in 1/6th less than a comparable VMware setup, characteristics such as scalability, larger virtual machines and bigger clusters are also helping drive its strong market growth.
Those in the cloud interested in consolidating their servers could find a serious competitive advantage with Hyper-V. Hostway’s new WS 2012 R2 initiative is ready to go, with early adopter signup currently live. Click here to learn more about Hostway’s partnership with Microsoft.