Moving to the cloud is a no-brainer, but deciding what to move there is complicated, and deciding who to partner with is even more intricate.

Come talk to us at the Cloud Partner Conference, Sept. 11-13 in Chicago at booth #325, and learn a bit more about cloud, cloud partners, and how we can work better together.

Here’s something to have in mind entering the event: To have the best shot at success, Hostway recommends forming partnerships with organizations that make cloud services their expertise.

Our whitepaper, “How to Successfully Add Cloud Services as a Revenue Stream Using a Partnership Model,” outlines the reasons that successful cloud strategies rely on collaboration across multiple organizations.

You also have to answer the question, “What am I going to move first to the cloud?” Another Hostway whitepaper, “To Cloud or Not to Cloud: 8 Apps that Make the Grade” discusses the functionalities that are ripe for cloud deployment, as well as how to safely migrate.

With our guidance, you can start enjoying the cost savings, scalability, and virtualization benefits of the cloud. It’s a much larger conversation, but this gets the wheels moving. Our gears will be spinning full-speed at the Cloud Partner Conference. Come by, and we can brainstorm on how to make this work for you.

“Big Data” – The term might conjure an image of downward-scrolling characters from the Matrix movies, or of room-sized computers from 40 years ago. But what Big Data means in its modern context could have a significant impact on your business.

Fueled by algorithmic advances that have yielded affordable software alternatives, Big Data analytics are becoming more accessible to smaller businesses. Since expert researchers are no longer required to generate recommendations from the analysis, more companies are leveraging the technology.

The most common use of Big Data is trying to determine customer behavior through predictive analytics. The “Big Data” in this usage in mined in the fashion you’re most familiar with – many popular websites try to target customer subgroups by monitoring buying and browsing behavior.

Again, this ability used to be the domain of only large, well-funded corporations, because the necessary data analysis for characterizing consumers requires extreme hardware resources. But as CPUs and processors become capable of handling greater volumes of data, and new algorithms improve the efficiency of the process, the list of Big Data’s potential users grows.

Different companies find different ways to put predictive analytics to work. An e-commerce firm might use the data to identify up-selling or cross-selling opportunities. Pigeonholing a consumer into a group displaying similar activities allows a website to make a good guess at what ads or offers are best to present to that consumer.

Is Facebook getting better at presenting you relevant advertisements? This is the application of Big Data at work – a much less hit-or-miss method of luring in consumers. More research yields more knowledge.

Predictive models using Big Data are also being used in companies’ decision processes. As explained by Target Data’s EVP Scott Bailey in a late July piece in Forbes Magazine, a business may try to simulate a tactic change to determine its potential success or failure. An article at IT Pro Portal discusses risk mitigation using Big Data, where real-time transaction analysis quickly red-flags suspicious items – Big Data provides more indicators to decide if any transaction should be suspected of being fraudulent.

So how can Big Data be put to work for you? Here are a few ideas:

• Evaluate not just your own performance, but also your competitors’. What do they do differently? Why are some customers going to them instead of to you?
• Trends change quickly, but Big Data counteracts that by compiling a huge volume of information as things change. Adapt faster if the data suggests acting.
• Predict the outcome of applying new strategies instead of learning the hard way. Make strategic decisions more on modeling than on instinct.

Now cost-effective and simpler to attain, Big Data is producing more and more refined metrics and insights. See what Big Data’s all about – do yourself and your business a favor.

Business decision-makers always have one eye on the bottom line. Are the company’s technological expenditures well spent? Not if they’re paying for more server capacity than they need only to see that excess capacity remain unused.

That’s why the flexibility offered by a cloud hosting provider is essential: Businesses can easily scale their server capacities in order to accommodate fluctuations in web traffic. Growth, whether organic, seasonal, or temporary, is supported seamlessly without breaking the bank for expensive upgrades to existing IT infrastructure. For example, if Oprah Winfrey mentioned a specific product on her show, due to “the Oprah effect,” the company that manufactures that product would likely see a substantial influx of web traffic immediately. Scalability allows that company to handle the traffic.
In today’s business world, web downtime could mean the loss of substantial revenue. A recent survey of 200 companies across North America and Europe revealed that $26.5 billion in revenue was lost because of IT downtime, which works out to an average of $132,500 per company. Breaking those numbers down further, small businesses on average lost $55,000, medium businesses lost $91,000 and large enterprises lost more than $1,000,000 in revenue. The survey defines small businesses as employing between 50 and 499 people, medium businesses as employing 500-999 people and large enterprises as having 1,000 or more employees.

By teaming up with a reliable cloud hosting provider, businesses can protect themselves from the costs associated with downtime. If a website gets overloaded with traffic, scalability allows providers to quickly increase capacity, reducing downtime to a minimum and avoiding the tremendous costs associated with it.

The utility billing model tied directly into scalability is becoming a more integral part of the cloud hosting model. Businesses only pay for what they consume, and add resources when they need them. This allows companies to easily adapt to a changing business climate. It’s the most cost-effective web-hosting solution model available for certain workloads. Not every application is a good fit for a cloud model, but there are many applications that will benefit from scalability.

When looking for a potential cloud hosting provider, it is important to keep in mind that each one offers different features. For example, Hostway customers can provision new virtual machines (VMs) within a matter of minutes, and those using our application program interface (API) can set up auto provisioning rules that enable them to scale up when certain capacity thresholds are met.

Scalability is just one of the reasons that 91 percent of IT decision-makers hold a positive view of the cloud. To learn about other reasons, click here. Tell us about your cloud experiences in the comments below. Has your business benefited from the scalability of the cloud?

There are three phases of football – offense, defense and special teams. All three are important, and a lack of focus on any one phase will hurt a team's ability to win. With football season right around the corner, NFL franchises are working hard to build winning teams by taking a balanced approach and giving appropriate attention and investment to all three phases.

There are also three phases of IT security – prevention, detection, and response. Just as NFL teams need to be strong in all three phases of football to win games, IT departments need to be strong in all three phases of IT security to effectively protect their organization from evolving security threats.

Unfortunately, many companies focus too much attention on prevention and underinvest in detection and response capabilities. In fact, we estimate that roughly 85% of security dollars are spent on prevention capabilities. Very little goes to detection capabilities and an even smaller amount is spent on response capabilities. As a result, companies often find themselves unprepared when an attack bypasses traditional prevention technologies such as firewall and antivirus.

A Managed UTM solution like those offered by Hostway ensures that you have all three phases of IT security covered.

Prevention – Managed Firewall, IDS/IPS, VPN Remote User Access, Web Content Filtering, and Web Application Firewall come packaged together. This multi-layered approach provides comprehensive protection and ensures that you have the prevention phase covered.

Detection – Security experts monitor your network 24x7 for suspicious activity. By utilizing Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) technology and conducting advanced traffic analysis, sophisticated attacks that bypass traditional prevention solutions can be detected.

Response – When suspicious activity is detected, the security experts respond immediately to handle the issue. Quick and thorough response to security incidents minimizes damages and reduces business disruptions.

This solution would ensure you have all three phases of IT security covered. Best of all, with all three phases working together and security experts watching your back, your IT team can focus on core business activities without worrying about security.

Learn more about Hostway’s Managed UTM solutions at this site.

We all enjoy feeling valued. A personalized note of gratitude, a special offer just for you… such simple acts go a long way toward customer satisfaction and retention. And no one markets as effectively as a loyal customer who can explain why she or he clings to your brand.

Though loyalty programs run much deeper than rewards cards, some tactics are always in style. But the details of your program have to be just right: Is your incentive worthwhile? Is achieving the objective simple, or is there too much jumping through hoops?

Your goals will shape your loyalty program from its inception. Are you simply courting business? Collecting email addresses for a mailing list? Driving website traffic? Trying to keep established customers? Each of these objectives corresponds to a different loyalty tactic.

The success of loyalty programs based around amassing points to reach a goal rides on several components of the promotion:

• The reward should be something valuable to most customers, not a niche product.
• The reward item should come from your own inventory, to ensure expenses are controlled.
• Higher numbers of inexpensive steps often work better than few iterations of expensive steps.
• Work in a secondary reward component for bringing others into the program.
• A tiered reward program –silver, gold, platinum, for example – plays on customers’ vanity, and can offer different levels of rewards for people with varied incomes.

Trying to carry customers to your online home, or to that new mobile app you’ve invested heavily in creating?

• Online-only and mobile only discounts and offers are a great way to get people to check out your various platforms, and their use is alienating fewer and fewer customers as technology continues to take hold.
• However, any such program must still be easily accessible, easy to complete without major technological hurdles. No real computer expertise should be necessary to jump through the hoops to reach your deal.

Building a database of customer contacts?

• Create a series of email-only promotions to send to customers whose emails you’ve already acquired, however small that list may be.
• The emails themselves should have links to special deals at the bottom, so customers have to at least scan through the rest of the document to get to the link.
• Track the emails for analytics value: What messages are working? What deals are valued? Who is opening what emails?

Hoping to fend off challenges from other brands?

• Set a time limit to your rewards plan, to ensure that any product purchased on a regular basis must continually be purchased from you for most buyers to earn the incentive.
• Consider reward concepts that offer a free item after purchasing that same item repeatedly within the time frame. This in essence offers the incentive of a percentage discount, but only to those who follow through on the entire sequence of purchases in a timely manner.
• Use an email campaign and receipt notifications to present the loyalty program to existing customers. The email campaign should stress the value you see in return customers as well as the value of the product in the promotion.

Remember, however you try to build loyalty, these programs are only supplemental to the basics of building business relationships: good products, great service, and personal attention.

For further reading on optimizing loyalty programs, check out “The Lowdown on Customer Loyalty Programs: Which Are the Most Effective and Why,” which covers several studies with interesting results.

Are you overwhelmed by the massive amount of data that arrives at your business’s virtual doorstep every day? Is your company handcuffed by the inability to interpret it? Or are you already using database, but interested in learning ways to modernize your applications?

Hostway is here to help. We like to think of ourselves as an extension of your IT department, here to provide educational resources to make your business more successful. We want to help you determine the best way to handle the information that drives your business. That’s why we’re offering a free webinar, “Am I Ready? Using a Database to Enhance Your Business Performance,” on Sept. 12, 2013.

We aim to help companies determine what level of database solution is the right move. We’ll be discussing how such options can provide a competitive advantage, in particular focusing on the features offered by Microsoft SQL Server 2012:

• See how SQL Server 2012 can modernize your applications relative to similar offerings in the market.
• Learn which SQL Server edition – Standard or Enterprise – meets your unique needs.
• Hear tips on choosing the right environment for your database – public cloud, private cloud, managed, or hybrid.

Storage, management and analysis of your data can be straightforward with the assistance of a high-performance database system. Get useful insights to inform your business decisions. Click here to register for this free webinar.

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There is perhaps nothing more important when it comes to branding your company then settling on the right domain name. Your domain is the name your online business will be known by and how people will find your business website. Therefore, domain registration is the pivotal first step in developing a foundation for your online presence. So where do you start? And how do you ensure your domain name provides a strong, visitor-friendly corporate identity?

Because your website address will be displayed on everything you print – from invoices to business cards to labeling on delivery trucks or other vehicles – the importance of an effective domain name cannot be overlooked. Prudent decision-makers will be sure to choose a name that’s easy to relay verbally and easy to spell, while making sure it’s versatile enough to serve multiple purposes.

You want a domain that’s easy for your stakeholders to remember. For example, if someone sees your website address on a delivery truck, you want them to be able to recall your address immediately – without even having to do a quick search.

Here are some tips to consider when choosing a domain name:

• Size: Try to avoid choosing names longer than 15 characters. Shorter means easier to remember.
• Spelling: Try to use only alphanumerics. For example, the URL baseball.com is much stronger than base-ball.com.
• Uniqueness: Your name should stand out among the millions of competing websites. Your address should also be intrinsically linked to your core competencies.

Doing business? Make sure your domain ends with a .com extension – customers generally assume a .com ending. According to TechCrunch, about 42.5 percent of the more than 250 million registered domain names have .com extensions, while about six percent of them have .net extensions.

The shrinking price of acquiring domain names means companies without their own domain name may be perceived as cheap. It also means that your competitors are more apt to buy multiple, coveted domain names to “take them off the market” in the event that they want to use them down the line. To remain ahead of your competition, take precautions now to safeguard your online presence by purchasing a domain name as quickly as possible. A business owner on the other side of the country – or the world – could be vying for the very same domain name when you finally figure out the one that best suits your company.

Even if your website’s launch date is well down the road, it’s in your best interest to acquire the name now. Recent research shows that 15 percent of registered .com and .net domain names don’t lead to live sites, while 21 percent of them are just one-page websites. People acquire domain names either with plans for the future, or to prevent someone else from acquiring that address.

Once you’re ready to acquire a domain for your website, contact a web hosting provider or domain name registrar and purchase it. Then it’s time to move onto the process of creating your online web presence. If you need help, then click here to read a whitepaper by Hostway on how to get your business online in six simple steps.

Have you learned any other helpful domain tips? If so, please share in the comments. Are there any other small business web hosting topics you’d like us to create blog posts on?

We’re glad to announce that Judith Davis is the iPad winner from our Brand Ambassador drawing. Congratulations Judith!

Judith Davis became a Hostway Brand Ambassador in January 2013 because she appreciated our services and wanted to recommend us to others. In January, she reviewed us over at Serchen with the following testimonial to let others know about her experience with Hostway:

“My website has been hosted on Hostway for over 10 years and it has been relatively easy for me. When I upgraded to a smartphone a few years ago and wanted to add my Hostway email, I had to call them and I dealt with a very nice customer service representative on the phone who was very helpful to me. He was able to fix the issue and everything is working well. This is important since I use this email quite often for my business. If you are thinking about a hosting site, give Hostway a try.”

As a long-standing customer via writerjudy.com, Davis exemplifies the Hostway experience. Her services seamlessly integrate into her business, but when she needs a little help, she can rely on our outstanding customer service. We’re honored to be a partner in Judith’s business; our decade-long relationship with her serves as an example of the importance of customer loyalty.

Davis will receive her iPad in early August. We hope it serves her and her business well.

If you aren’t familiar with the program, the Brand Ambassadors are an elite group of Hostway customers who stand behind Hostway products and services and share their experiences through social media, blogs, and review sites. As an Ambassador, Hostway will feature your business on our website. You'll also be eligible to receive special product and beta announcements reserved just for our ambassador group.

Once we reach our next landmark number of registered Brand Ambassadors, we’ll conduct a new drawing for another iPad. Don’t miss out – become a Brand Ambassador today!

Several months ago, Amy’s Baking Company of Scottsdale, Ariz., gave the world a free lesson in small business social media technique.

Their extreme counterexample went viral as a result of their negative appearance on Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares” television program. Their subsequent all-caps ranting on their own social media sites was cited as “The Most Epic Brand Meltdown On Facebook Ever” by Buzzfeed. (Yes, that link includes screenshots of some objectionable statements.)

It can be difficult to show restraint when your hard work is criticized in a no-holds-barred forum by an anonymous writer. Yet it remains important to not embarrass yourself to any degree in your own Internet space, much less to the degree demonstrated by the above restaurant owners.

Here are eight tips on how to handle a negative review or comment via Hostway Senior Online Manager Alison Brehme, which she discussed on her blog at B2Bmediamavens.com:

1. Understand that you cannot be all things to all people, so it’s okay for someone to be upset every now and then. No business has a 100% satisfaction record. If constructive criticism is offered, respond thankfully and indicate the advice will be considered (even if it won’t).
2. Always respond professionally. Yes, it should be obvious. But sometimes, turning the other cheek can be difficult. Unprofessional remarks are not acceptable, and do not go away.
3. Leave emotion at the door. Do not antagonize or belittle the person commenting; that will only add fuel to the fire. Bad situations gather more onlookers.
4. Take the conversation off of the social sphere and into real life. Ask them to email you or call you so you can discuss a solution. This takes any further anger-spewing away from prying eyes.
5. Don’t be defensive. There are ways to explain your perspective without passing blame or discounting the opinions of others.
6. Wrap it up online. Once you have settled on a resolution, follow-up with an online comment to suggest a satisfactory resolution has occurred on the original thread. Do not be specific in your statement to avoid the “me too” syndrome, but acknowledge the agreement.
7. Not every complaint has a solution. If there is no resolution and the customer leaves, it’s not a disaster. Tell them you are sorry for their troubles and that you will take their feedback to heart.
8. Every interaction is a chance to improve. Learn from these instances and apply your knowledge to better your product and business model.

Here are a few extra tips that relate directly to the Amy’s case:

1. Be honest. After finally figuring out how awfully they’d handled the situation, the people behind Amy’s Baking Company posted that their “Facebook, YELP, Twitter and Website have been hacked” and that “We did not post those horrible things.” You want to put yourself in situations where you can stand by everything you say. But even if you manage to slip, don’t pretend you didn’t.
2. Sometimes, you have to concede. Some online statements simply don’t merit responses. Often, you can’t get out of someone what their complaint is, only a torrent of insults. If you’ve demonstrated an effort to help, and that is all you can do, accept that.

With these thoughts in mind, you can tread more safely into the minefield of social engagement.

When it comes to business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) solutions, there’s no such thing as playing it too safe. Guaranteeing uptime, continued service delivery and data protection is critical to any business – from the largest of enterprises to the smallest of SMBs.

Efficient BC/DR plans are the pillars of many businesses’ success in facing obstacles, as they provide a tactical road map for responding to disasters. With detailed planning in place, companies ensure that they can operate smoothly after such a setback, avoiding the monetary losses, OPEX headaches, or damaged reputations that can result from disrupted uptime.

While nearly 75 percent of all companies – from large enterprises to SMBs – have a business continuity plan in place, the numbers drop when looking only at SMBs. Specifically, 57 percent of SMBs have no disaster recovery plan laid out. This means that in the event of a network outage, data loss or other IT disaster, these companies may be left improvising how to handle the fallout.

And the cost of fallout is exorbitant. Specifically, when it comes to small-sized businesses, the average cost of downtime is considerable, at about $12,500 a day, according to a 2011 Symantec SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey. Moreover, medium-sized businesses can lose an average of $3,000 a day due to downtime. Factor in the potential reputation damage, and the threat of downtime becomes even more imposing.

SMBs that implement disaster recovery plans stay one step ahead at all times. With cost-efficiency remaining essential, the first step to being prepared is to enlist the services of a cloud-based hosting company. Cloud computing places the company’s data on remotely located servers that are connected to the company’s network. There are multiple benefits afforded as a result: cost-effective resource use, scalability and rapid provisioning.

Some of the principal benefits afforded by cloud computing providers include the following:

• On-demand scalability: Allow your business to scale instantly by turning services on and off exactly when your business needs it. Buy only what you need to get started, and worry about expanding your computing power later.
• Cost savings: The consumption-based pricing model often found in cloud computing helps those dealing with tight purse strings.
• Fully customizable: Whether you are looking for load balancing, images or snapshots, your cloud computing provider can provide you with a customized solution, designed to address your specific needs.

While the benefits of cloud hosting seem obvious, SMB decision-makers still often exhibit a degree of trepidation about making the jump to the cloud. Many SMBs are concerned about expenses; specifically, eWeek states that 85 percent of SMBs are worried about the cost associated with ensuring uptime. Eighty percent also grapple with perceived complexity issues.

But cloud hosting, by design, offers a more affordable business continuity and disaster recovery solution than traditional BC/DR methods.

Last year at Hostway, we introduced our virtual machine (VM) replication service into beta. This service allows companies, as well as large enterprises, to leverage our affordable public or private cloud infrastructures to establish a real-time, compliance-quality, reliable recovery solution. Enabled by the Hyper-V Replica included in the newly released Windows Server 2012 operating system, the replication service allows for seamless and affordable cross-site and site-to-site VM replication to support both planned and unplanned failover resolution. This product will move to full production near the end of 2013.

To learn more about affordable disaster recovery solutions or to join the beta test group, click here.