Monthly Archives: October 2014

10.15.14
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Online Trends you should pay attention to


Online Trends you should pay attention to in 2014-2015

If you look at the history of the online world, the one thing that strikes the most is that is changes so rapidly. It is getting updated and refreshed every minute. The software that are being used today will soon become redundant. As the scenario changes, so should the methods of your online marketing. You need to constantly update your strategy and introduce new innovations in it to grab the attention of the potential customer. To make your online business grow there are some trends of today that you just cannot ignore and use them to market your product or service effectively. Some of these are listed below:

Content Marketing

This trend of content marketing has been gaining popularity because it tends to target an audience that is actually interested in your product and not randomly anybody. It is based on the principle that when a company has a service to offer or a product then it should first educate its customers about that product and facts related to it. what companies do is that post blogs or articles on various forums and try to deliver useful information to the customer. If the customer finds the information useful, he is sure to buy the product too. When you educate your customers they pay you back with their loyalty with your business.

Social Media

there is no better way to express yourself to a targeted audience, than doing so on Social Media. Today everybody uses the social media and they generally express their requirements and interests there. You can attract the attention of the potential customers by your posts or ads over there. You can use the advertising opportunities available with Facebook, Twitter , LinkedIn and other social media websites to market your product very effectively.

Go Mobile

The number of smart phone users today is around 1.75 billion and this number is exponentially growing. You will miss the benefit that can be gained from it by using a mobile site too. Also you can have a suitable app for your company and product. All those people who use their smart phone for surfing and probably shopping will be able to get to you if you have a mobile ready site in place. People find it convenient to surf the web on the go using their mobile phones. You do not want to miss that opportunity.

Be Visual

It is a well known fact that the human brain is most affected by what it sees rather than what it hears or smells or touches. So make your marketing strategy colorful and include a lot of pictures in it. There are any number of image sharing sites today like Pinterest and Instagram and they have shown that if you throw in something interesting and appealing to the eye, you have the attention of the customer. It is essential that when you submit a write up or a blog post it is sprinkled with some nice, relevant and meaningful pictures. You are sure to fetch more customers in that way.

Video Marketing

Everybody of us has some particular video or video message stuck to our mind somehow. Some videos make us think each time we watch them, others make us laugh or cry. But a nicely made meaningful video definitely speaks volumes and affects people. Use this power of video marketing. If you can successfully create a video that conveys the essence of your product in a powerful way you will hit a home run, believe me.

You can see that by taking care of the online trends mentioned above, you can be a winner as far as effective online marketing goes!

10.14.14
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Hosting Community is Cleansing Force


Hosting-CommunityPresident Wilson in a talk before the press club in New York said “Force can sometimes hold things steady until opinion has time to form, but no force that was ever exerted, except in response to that opinion, was ever a conquering or predominant force”.

Media is a powerful source and its coverage is increasing day by day. It is playing a vital role in bringing misleads in front of the people. Role of media in hosting industry doesn’t seem to be so much prevalent. Uptil the companies have been taking their activities as granted. There was nobody who can criticize them for their deeds. But with the need the growth of groups, forums, review and rating websites started taking place, playing the role of online media.

Hosting companies enjoy their freedom of being online. Now, different countries are coming up with cyber laws to curb misleads of any of such company. In the absence of any centralized regulatory, companies in few of the counties cannot be corrected by law, as cyber law in their land is not so strong.

The activities of the online media in this regard are significant and striking. Hosing community preconceived attitude is intensified and weakened by the information, reports and news provided by the media. Radical change the online media has provides is that the visitor’s of the website is informed and cannot be ignored or fooled in a continuing manner. Online media has also forced the hosting companies to understand the growing awareness of customers and their vital opinion.

It is obvious that everybody runs its company to earn profits. In Hosting industry this profit % varies from company to company. Very few companies do share the information about their investment, cost incurred to maintain the standards, % of returns and whether it is reasonable. The keep their business information secret and sometimes becomes a reason of conflict with their customers.

In this competitive world, businesses are cutting their profit margins to gain new customers and regain old ones. They try to settle down the customer’s mind towards the low price per utility. Pretend them as transparent by providing full disclosure. Extensive use of mass communication technologies has forced hosting companies to become more responsible. The voice of customers have become more audible and there is acceleration the process of speedy and multiplication of ideas.

Rising price levels heightened economic activity, but in hosting industry prices have been decreasing with increase in resources and world has changed from traditional markets to online markets. Increase in competition has brought speediest upward economic swing, amalgamation of big business into bigger and better business. Hosting companies do recognized the need to persuade hosting community on which their business and goodwill is depended.

Hosting companies started the development of attitude, directions and even policies to build goodwill and understanding among hosting community members, integrated with each other. They have realized that with changing conditions and times public interest changes and to anticipate this business must change with change in policies and actions.

10.10.14
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Hosting Reviews and Comments


Customer-Satisfaction

Facts, thoughts and meaning are conveyed through n-number of websites developed to rate and review hosting companies. To express and mold opinion, the number of review and rating websites has outnumbered the hosting websites. These websites behave like leaders and want to control their followers through intimidation and persuasion. Initially, the websites were in the form of forum sites and gradually converted to review and rating websites.

All attempts to influence and control opinion are conditioned by the fact that visitors had not yet acquired knowledge about the latest developments and news of the company. Everybody tries to share their own opinion based on their experience, few of them seems to be logical, rest appeared to try to build reputation and importance through their own literature and promotional sales plans. The websites inviting reviews, ideas and opinion have a acute sense of public relationships.

The Hosting companies hold the authority of such websites and pay attention to the activities done by them.

Shakespeare called opinion “the mistress of success” and French Philosopher Blaise Pascal called it “the queen of the world”.

Hosting community has taken it actively to contribute their opinions on different websites. Most of these review and rating hosting websites are controlled and owned by the hosting companies, which is also a concerning issue. Using them, the hosting companies obtain free publicity and prestige. Questions can be raised, when it is being propagandized that unbiased reviews and opinion can be found on their website. Not all the websites, come under it, there are websites whose policies are influenced by their audience and public opinion. These means of communication are used with definite theme, objective and strategy, to reach public opinion.

Abraham Lincoln in his words said “public sentiment is everything; with public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed”.

Up-till Hosting Company practices were secret, very little opinion on their ethics were in existence. But as the complexities of hosting a website diminishes, there was speed up in communication and it has made public opinion as a growing concern in the industry.

Change in technology has provided the climate of constructive change. Hosting customers are more knowledgeable and are aware of their rights and share experiences and opinion on the online media. This also has lead to the brutal competition among hosting companies. To score over the competition, companies started building large units by taking over small companies. To mold the opinion in their favor they started hiring people solely for the purpose of writing positive reviews, comments and ideas on different websites. Most of the small hosting companies, which depend on any extent upon advertisements, take it as a mode of free advertisement. SiteGeek openly express its worries about the effects of such activity. It is a kind of unjust to the rest of public. Such biased reviews or comments destroys the goodwill of the reviewing site, begets distrust and reduces its value and a well founded suspicion that a site is the property of the hosting company. Although, the Hosting company employees do paint attractive pictures and present only favorable facts, it shows that companies do recognize “how vital favorable opinion is” and are compelled to put their efforts in bring it.

Conclusion: Customer interest has become a dominant force as companies are exposed to continue scrutiny, criticism and constructive actions.

10.06.14
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Content Delivery Network or CDN


What is CDN and why you should use one?

When you have a website and you want to improve the user experience by providing high availability and high performance, then you have to go ahead and start using Content Delivery Network or CDN. Your business website is meant to perform well everywhere in the world and to ensure that and to redefine its performance level, CDNs will do a great job.

First let us understand what it really is? CDNs are a system where a large number of servers which might be located at different strategic locations around the globe, are connected to each other. All these servers are capable to provide the content of your website to the potential user. So when a customer clicks on your website he is served with the contents of your website from one of the multiple servers which have your website on them. This particular server will be the one which is geographically located nearest to the visitor. When a visitor receives your website content from a server near him instead of a server located may be half way across the globe, his experience will definitely be better. In order to make maximum visitors’ experience a good one, it will be recommended to have as many servers as possible in the CDN, the more the merrier!

Advantages of using Content Delivery Networks

When you use CDN your reliability increases. Your website becomes less susceptible to hanging because of heavy traffic on a server. Also it becomes difficult for those who are there to harm your website by hacking it. It is simple, when someone needs to have a look at your website, he gets to do so by the server nearest to him. This is quick, reliable and clean. Some other inherent benefits would be:

  • Your ranking in search engine results gets a boost
  • the load on your hosting is reduced
  • Your customers are happy!
  • Minimized possibility of a downtime

Improved SEO Rankings

When search engines like Google assign a rank to a website, they take a number of criterions in consideration. One of these criterion is the speed at which the web pages of your website load. When there is a web site which has very high speed of loading its web pages, it gets a plus point and its ranking improves on the result page. If you use CDN for your web site it is sure to boost the web page loading speed and your web site will be loaded in minimum time. That gets you improved ranking in search results. Definitely when a website appears in the first few pages of the search results of any search engine, it will get more visitors and hence more business.

Customer Satisfaction

Remember that frustration that creeps in when the plate has been set in front of you on the dining table but the food is taking ages in coming. It is same feeling that a visitor gets when he clicks on the website and the content takes forever to get loaded. It simply drives them away to other faster loading websites. It is extremely essential to keep the website loading speed very high if you want to retain visitors and satisfy them. Using CDN will ensure that your visitor feels happy clicking your website name.

Less load on Hosting

There is a possibility that at a given time there are a number of visitors who want to check out your website. This leads to a high surge of traffic, which might be problematic for your hosting and it might not be able to serve your website quickly to everybody. But if you are using CDN this problem is resolved and all the content of your website reaches the visitor quickly, including audio and video files too.

These benefits clearly show that by using CDN you ensure that the visitors that come clicking, are happy and get converted into customers and do come back for more business. Also you get the benefit of publicity by word of mouth. The quality of surfing experience of the visitor on your website improves as does your SEO ranking. CDNs are definitely meant to do a lot of good!

10.06.14
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Shellshock bug – BASH


Introduction:

Shellshock-bugRight now, security professionals are jostling to fix security flaw that has come to known as Shellshock. It is also known as Bashdoor and is a security bug in the widely used Unix Bash shell which was disclosed on 24 September 2014. Bash, short for Bourne-Again Shell, is the default shell in Ubuntu and it is a free piece of software that is now built into more than 70 percent of the machines that connect to the Internet, which consists of routers, servers, computers, some mobile phones and even everyday items like refrigerators and cameras.

Why do we need it and what is Bash?

Bash is an interpreter that allows you to orchestrate commands on UNIX and Linux systems, typically by connecting over Telnet or SSH. Bash is also able to function as a parser for CGI scripts on any web server. It’s been around since the late 80s where it evolved from earlier shell implementations and is extremely accepted. There are additional shells out there for UNIX variants; the thing about Bash though is that it is the default shell for Mac OS X and Linux which are apparently well established operating systems.

What is the bug that is discovered?

Most considerably, there is no validation required when exploiting Bash via CGI scripts.

The risk centers around the ability to arbitrarily define environment variables within a Bash shell which state a function description. The problem commences when Bash continues to process shell commands after the function definition resulting in what we would classify as a “code injection attack”.

Who is vulnerable?

Macintosh, as well as a many other web servers running operating systems such as Linux.
Computers will be actually vulnerable if they invoke Bash in an unsafe way. This is true of numerous web servers and it is held, that different types of network services could also be vulnerable. But it will take a while for security experts to audit various pieces of software to check for vulnerabilities.

Many IOT (Internet of Things) devices run embedded Linux sharing with Bash. All these devices have already been shown to demonstrate serious security vulnerabilities. Bash shells are also present in many more general devices, for e.g. our home routers.

What should be done for Protection?

First and foremost thing as an end user is to keep an eye for your platform’s software latest update that they are rolling out, and to install it as soon as possible when it is available. The bigger worry is the devices with no easy patching path, for example router.

In short, the advice to consumers is this: always be alert for latest security updates, predominantly on OS X. Also be on alert for any information you may get from your ISP or other providers of devices you have that run embedded software. Be very cautious of emails instructing you to run software or requesting information. Avoid logging into untrusted wifi networks as malicious wifi router could use the bug to hack into users’ laptops and mobile devices.

Most of the heavy lifting needs to be done by security professionals, not the end user as for the majority component; servers are more vulnerable than users’ own computers.

How can attackers take advantage of this vulnerability?

Bug can be used to hack into helpless servers. Once inside the server, attackers could steal user data, deface websites and engage in other forms of harmful activity.

There is a fair chance that hackers will make use of the weakness to generate a worm that automatically swell from vulnerable machine to vulnerable machine. The consequence it will lead to will be a botnet, a network of countless numbers of machines which are compromised, that function under the control of a single hacker. These botnets — which are often produced in the wake of major vulnerabilities — can be used to steal confidential data or to propel spam, contributing in denial-of-service assault on websites.

As this is being written security professionals are racing to update their server software before the hackers have time to attack it.

How much time will it take to fix the problem and how difficult it is?

From a technical perception, the fix is not that difficult. A part of fix has already been made available, and a complete fix will be out as soon as possible.

The most complicated part is as Bash is embedded in a huge number of different devices, it will take extensive time to locate and fix them all. For example, many personal wifi routers run web servers to enable users to configure them using a web browser. A number of of these devices may be vulnerable to a Bash-related attack. And regrettably, these devices do not have a straightforward or automatic mechanism for upgrading their software.

10.04.14
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Running Hosting Business


Running-Hosting

Three of the golden words every Hosting businessmen understand and implement are: Learn, Network and Grow. With these core words in mind, research, tactics and strategy is being applied effectively to gain and retain customers. Latest technology ideas and global events and news do affect the business. To always be the leader of the market, hosting companies do update themselves with knowledge and techniques to improve their skills and competencies. With all this, companies are now becoming smarter:

  • In knowing and understanding their customers by knowing and evaluating their viewpoints
  • Modifying conditions that are affecting their business
  • Making efforts to reach their customer persuade and suggest course of action.

Hosting companies also maintain healthy relationships with various publics related to the hosting industry which includes review and rating websites, online journals, media persons, bloggers, editors, forums poster, now a day’s members of social media (Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Google+) also, as they are also actively contributing their thoughts and ideas and sharing with other members. All of them collectively play a vital role in the business growth and development and insensitivity of any of these may affect the relationship. It not only depends on what actually is done, but also depends on what the above mentioned members think has to be done or not. Networking with the bright and brilliant minds of the industry is vital for the growth of any business.

You cannot start a new business overnight is not true with hosting industry. Lot of new hosting resource seller emerges, raising the level of competition in the industry. Starting a hosting business takes less than 5 minutes. One may argue that successful in this business are only ones, who have followed the line of logical development, who have the basic understanding of present and the future.

If hosting companies are emerging so fast, the existence once has the challenge to network and to do business with them or make business partners. They recognize the necessity of planned inter-relationships. Emerging ones also are keen to get symbiotically associated with the branded existing ones, as they have power, authority and technological knowledge to control the things.

There are lot of challenges, which a hosting businessmen faces in order to take his business to next level. The major challenge faced by hosting companies is from the emergence of parallel industry of review and rating companies. Websites like Sitegeek are actively integrating the hosting community, persuading and informing them with latest development, reports and news of the industry. They have changed the means and methods of the industry. Reports are communicated by newspapers, TV and other online methods. Their role has increased the level of responsibility of hosting companies.

10.02.14
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Joomla Hosting Latest Updated Features


Unleash The New Features of Joomla Hosting

Joomla has been passed by web experts as a very powerful and yet very easy to use content management system. Joomla is open source and is user friendly and has proved to be useful in building big websites with extensive customization. It can do plenty of specific tasks that other tools could not do effectively by providing number of options to developers. Because of its popularity amongst all kinds of developers making all kinds of big and small websites, Joomla hosting is provided by almost all the webhosting companies.

Advanced Joomla Platform

With the Advanced and Updated Joomla platform available things have become even more easy and comprehensive. You can now have Joomla Hosting plans as per your requirements and smoothly get your website on track just the way you want it to. This offers a lot of advantages.

  • Increased compatibility: When Joomla 1.0 was introduced, it was good but it had some bugs which required fixing. Now that Joomla 3.0 version has come out, we need not worry about those bugs anymore as they have been fixed. Also there are no compatibility issues with Joomla. If your server has Apache, PHP and MySQL, Joomla will work just fine.
  • Superior Backend: With the latest changes that have been made in Joomla it is visibly become more commercial. Addition of templates has become easier now that the back end screen has been totally rejuvenated to give you an excellent experience and complete satisfaction. It has become more convenient to control and administer the website with the updated version of Joomla.
  • Availability of Native templates: Introduction of updated and advanced versions of Joomla does not mean that now it can be used by techies only who are familiar with technical details or have extensive technical knowledge. It can still be used by newbie who have just started with the work as there are native templates available in the latest version of Joomla too. It is not at all complex and can be used to develop simplest of the sites too. And yet there are options available within Joomla to give a very professional look to your website. That gives Joomla a huge advantage.
  • Mobile Ready: An increasing trend of smart phones has been witnessed in recent times and with ever increasing number of mobile phone users it is extremely important that any business website has an option available which is mobile ready. Everybody is looking for a CMS that has the option of providing users a website that is mobile ready and also it provides suitable tools to the administrator. Now that Joomla has adopted bootstrap framework it has joined the league of those major cms which are mobile ready. Now the user will not have any problem in browsing the website on a mobile or a tab or a simple desktop pc. Joomla is ready for it.
  • Plenty of plug ins: As compared to other CMSs Joomla way more plug ins and components. There is a lot of functionality within Joomla and thus it requires less plug ins. When building a good website there are few plug ins that are critical and one definitely needs them like url plug in. Most of these are available with Joomla and there is no need to look at a third party for extra plug in.
  • Support: When you are using Joomla you can never get stuck with a problem because the phenomenal online support available. There are hundreds of communities that supply endless useful tips and tricks. There is no dearth of suggestions when you need one . Also Joomla.org provides online tutorials to help out.

Thus we see that the new and updated Joomla has a long way to go and is a good option for all sorts of websites!