It’s time for the holiday rush, and increasingly each year, consumers are avoiding the hustle and bustle of brick-and-mortar gift-buying for the relative ease of e-commerce. Who wants to brave the conditions and the crowds when you can buy online by the fire (and never change out of your pajamas).
Hostway has a great deal of experience with helping businesses prepare their web presences for the holiday rush, as retailer Christmas Treasures can testify. With Cyber Thursday, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday on the horizon, we know you’ll have high expectations for sales.
We’ve also got several special deals to encourage you to spend your holidays with us! Because we know you've been good, here are a few things we can arrange for your stocking:
Holiday E-Commerce Bundle: 15% off customizable Magento configurations
Is your infrastructure ready to handle the heat of holiday sales? Check out our high-quality e-commerce solutions. Community and Enterprise options available.
Holiday Security Bundle: 20% off SilverSky security services with any new server
Don't let your guard down this holiday season. Protect yourself and your customers from any would-be Grinches who'd try to steal your stash with Hostway security and PCI bundles.
Interested in trying Microsoft Exchange? ’Tis the season! Our customers are invited to a 30-day free trial of this powerful communication tool. Access email from any device, any time; share contacts and calendars to keep your team in sync, and improve productivity with collaboration features. It’s a great way to get through the hustle and bustle of the season.
Just starting your web presence? Get online in time for holiday shoppers to find you! Attract holiday shoppers with a business website produced and maintained by an intuitive website builder with professionally designed templates, drag-and-drop editing, and more. For a limited time you can also get unlimited pages, mobile site optimization, and social media integration with Website Extender. Our special Website Unlimited plan includes Website Starter ($6.95) AND Website Extender ($9.95/mo) for just $12.95/mo – Over 20% savings! Order online or call today! Promo code: holiday13
Need more holiday season help? Check out our 9 Tips to Improve Online Sales This Holiday Season at Small Biz Technology, or check out our newsletters for advice on Sprucing Up Your Site Before the Holiday Rush or Preparing for the Potential Traffic Spikes.
Give our elfin' sales team a call: 1-855-265-1013. And keep an eye out for our holiday video.
With today’s growing e-commerce market, it’s essential to have an e-commerce website that is both user-friendly and visually appealing. However, when your Magento front-end is the main focus of work, you have to make sure the other parts of your business are being neglected.
On December 11, at 1 p.m., join Hostway Demand Generation Manager Javier Cano, Logicbroker Sales Director George Heudorfer, and Logicbroker Marketing Coordinator Rebecca Kaelin as we discuss how expert partners can handle hosting and back-end integrations.
Free up your resources and allocate them towards nurturing your business and maintaining a competitive edge in today’s upbound e-commerce environment. See how to:
Register now for this informative webinar.
On November 6 and 7, Hostway will join thousands of Digital Marketers at ad:tech in New York. Out of the hundreds of exhibitors attending, we encourage you to stop by booth #211. In addition to our charm and entertaining banter, we have some great products launching at the show. Here are three reasons to say, “Hi”:
1. We’ll be giving away FREE stuff.
Ok, so every booth will be giving away FREE stuff, and we are no different. Current customers who stop by will receive a $5 Starbucks gift card and an opportunity to catch up – in person!
Also, anyone who gets their badge scanned – current customers and people new to Hostway alike – will be entered to win a $100 AmEx gift card. Get $100 bucks in your pocket before the holidays start.
2. Our cloud is getting a facelift.
As a digital marketer, your users’ experience must be optimal. Websites that host dynamic media must have the ability to handle growing volumes of rich media, and ever-changing traffic patterns. Fast page load times, rapid content downloads, and website uptime are crucial. Our FlexCloud Server is a great option for you. Our scalable, on-demand cloud computing solution combines the flexibility of a public cloud with the reliability and performance of an enterprise-grade virtual environment. Plus, we will be launching Windows Server 2012 R2. The scalability, performance and resiliency of our cloud will be enhanced.
3. Our startup program launches.
We are excited to see the eight startups present at The Startup Spotlight during the show, and celebrate with the ad:tech Innovation Award winner. We also want to help with their hosting needs. Hostway’s Emergence Startup Program will premiere at ad:tech. We will give selected startups up to $1,500 hosting credit for cloud and managed servers for six months. Learn more at the show.
This will be Hostway’s first year at ad:tech. Stop by booth #211 to learn more about our basic infrastructure offerings, our new and improved FlexCloud servers, and our startup program, Emergence.
Last year, Hostway donated $10,000 to the Red Cross’ Hurricane Sandy Relief fund in lieu of our traditional corporate gift-giving. We made two videos to explain our rationale, and we talked about it on the news.
This year, we’re skipping the corporate gifting again – and we need your input to choose a charity. Tell us where out $10,000 donation should go. Learn about each charity below.
Junior Achievement is the world's largest organization dedicated to educating students about workforce readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy through experiential, hands-on programs.
The vision of the NGCP is to bring together organizations throughout the United States that are committed to informing and encouraging girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
Make-A-Wish® grants the wish of a child diagnosed with a life-threatening medical condition in the United States and its territories, on average, every 38 minutes. We believe that a wish experience can be a game-changer. This one belief guides us. It inspires us to grant wishes that change the lives of the kids we serve.
We help protect people from malaria. We fund anti-malaria nets, specifically long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs), and work with distribution partners to ensure they are used. We track and report malaria case data.
Susan G. Komen – Denver Metropolitan Chapter
Komen is the global leader of the breast cancer movement, investing hundreds of millions of dollars each year for research, education, screening and treatment and encouraging governments everywhere to make cancer a top priority.
Contributing to the world around us is part of Hostway's ethos. Guide us in our efforts to make our global society a better place.
From September 30 to October 4, Hostway will join thousands of IT professionals at New York's largest IT Event, Interop. If you’re going to be visiting the show, stop by booth #700 to discuss the daily keynote, chat on the latest industry trends, or learn about our new offerings, like Parallels APS for FlexCloud Servers or the soon-to-launch Windows Server 2012 public cloud.
Chances are you’re familiar with our basic offerings since you’re on our blog. But if you’re not, more than 600,000 customers use our scalable, customizable IaaS solutions, including:
FlexCloud Servers: A scalable, on-demand cloud computing solution that combines the flexibility of a public cloud with the reliability and performance of an enterprise-grade virtual environment.
FlexCloud Private: Built to provide multiple virtual servers dedicated and configured to your needs with the freedom to run your software of choice and control the virtual machines running within your cloud.
Managed Hosting: Best-of-breed physical servers optimized to perform at maximum efficiency to manage the applications that drive your business and ensure that your critical data is never compromised.
Hybrid Hosting: Leverage the best of managed servers, cloud environments, private clouds and your internal IT architecture by combining them into a single optimized IT infrastructure.
If you’re coming to Interop to find IaaS partner opportunities, check out our Partner Program. It provides aggressive incentives and generous volume discounts on our award-winning products to enable all types of businesses to incorporate hosting services into their current product offerings.
Hostway's also part of the Interop Passport Program: While at the show, collect stamps from all passport participants on the expo floor. Once your passport is complete, turn it in to the Interop passport booth for prizes. Hostway is part of the stop - Come see us at booth #700.
Hybrid clouds are one of the fastest growing types of Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings in the market. They can provide a number of special benefits to companies with a specific set of characteristics. NFL blogging site, FanSided is a good example of the type of business for whom hybrid was a perfect match.
As FanSided.com grew to a national blogging network, their sites were strained during the traffic-heavy NFL season. If this sounds familiar to you, then you’ll recognize the importance of choosing infrastructure that is responsive to and allows for easy management of traffic fluctuations.
FanSided’s prior infrastructure comprised of two web servers and a dedicated database server. This sufficed during spring and summer, but NFL-season surges would cause crashes. This was turning off FanSided visitors and hindering the network’s array of bloggers. The combination of a public-facing website or application as well as a private database is a strong indicator for a potential hybrid use case.
In summer 2012, FanSided searched for a more reliable solution to handle the changing load while remaining cost-effective. They were used to dealing with a turnaround time of three full days for additional temporary servers. A hybrid setup would drop that to a matter of minutes by placing their website in a public cloud so they could easily adjust for traffic fluctuations. In addition, they would save costs because they could turn off resources they were not using as needed to avoid expenses on unused resources.
For this particular set-up, Hostway recommended a platform which linked a managed server through a private VLAN connection to the cloud servers. Since the database played a critical role, a dedicated database server became part of the equation. This offered both the stability and security they needed for their database-intensive backend as well as the ability to increase and decrease resources in the cloud on the fly throughout the year for their website.
After FanSided’s trial, they officially signed on citing Hostway’s reliability, flexibility, ease of use and customer support as their reasons for making the move.
FanSided is just one example of the type of business that benefits from hybrid cloud. If you business experiences any of the following, talk with your IT department or Hostway about whether a hybrid cloud is right for you.
Follow this link for the rest of the FanSided story.
Hostway marketing copywriter Stephen Fontenot serves as Assistant Director and Central Texas Coordinator for the Texas Quiz Bowl Alliance (TQBA), an organization that facilitates high school, college and middle school academic competition across the Lone Star State.
In this role, Stephen started San Antonio's first quiz bowl circuit from scratch in Fall 2011. TQBA held its fifth San Antonio-area event in April 2013, and has 23 local high schools participating in the four-on-four buzzer-based competition.
During an average school year, Stephen works at about eight tournaments, including traveling to the Middle School and High School National Championship Tournaments as a volunteer. 2013's national events were held in Chicago and Atlanta.
"At the most basic level, quiz bowl is about broadening horizons, about learning things you may not encounter in the classroom, from Salk to Saint-Saëns to Saramago," Stephen said. "It rewards academic achievement in a way that isn't necessarily found elsewhere. It's fun, and it fosters teamwork skills among those who might be used to being self-reliant."
Stephen has been involved in quiz bowl since his freshman year of high school -- sadly, 21 years ago, he notes -- and has been volunteering as a moderator and coordinator at these events for 15 years.
"Seeing the standard of knowledge grow year over year is really fulfilling," Stephen said. "What students need to know today is well beyond what we were asked decades ago."
In May, Stephen received an Alumni Community Award from Alpha Phi Omega’s Alpha Gamma Kappa chapter at his alma mater, Southwestern University, for his work with TQBA. APO is a national co-ed service fraternity.
To learn more about TQBA's efforts, visit http://www.texasquizbowl.org.
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.
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.
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:
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.