After this CORONA pandemic, online businesses have taken a significant stake. Almost every company has come online with substantial investment and started an e-commerce website to facilitate sales, ordering, and other online transactions. Businesses have started relying on online sales much compared to their physical stores. The factory outlets started their online e-commerce portals to provide products or services at lower prices, eliminating intermediaries. Thus, online business has become highly competitive; hence, it requires quality websites and the best web hosting services. No company would like to risk its online presence to host its website on a notorious web hosting provider who has server downtime, provides no security and backups, and have frequent technical gaffes.
Online e-commerce businesses need fast servers, security, backups, and the best look-n-feel to attract potential customers.
The hosting providers set up high-performance criteria with cloud hosting living consistently with their claims. Ananova.com reviews all such web hosting providers to ensure they continuously meet standards and then list them on its top Web hosting providers list.
The web hosting providers ranking in the list depends on the customer/visitors reviews and ratings, professional hosting ethics, customers support and services, and brand acknowledgement in the web hosting market. Most website visitors rate hosting providers and consider these criteria necessary to meet website requirements, including a money-back guarantee, 24×7 technical support, payment options, hosting prices, hosting resources, usage, and access logs. Business Hosting Journal (BHJ) considers Ananova criteria can strengthen the web hosting industry as s whole.
Chatwoo Live Chat services emerged after SCPL acquired CraftySyntax. The development team headed by Mr. Rajesh developed the online chat services application in JAVA. In 2015, live help services were top-rated, and customers or visitors chatted with the available support or technical personnel with their queries or issues. Companies were trying to develop chat systems where customers or visitors could speak directly to the representative using live support. Every online business wants to remain in 2-way communication with their customers and visitors and adopt the live help services to provide support faster response, get immediate feedback, and know about the consumer’s perception and views. The companies look to keep live help always manned 24×7 to keep their customers or prospects in touch and be firmly behind them. Live Chat services start booming with the introduction of AI and video conferencing software. During Corona time, the company allowed their team to handle customer support services through live help support services from their home.
The face-to-face online live services result in better customer satisfaction are support experience. No matter how big or small your business is, chatwoo live help, and chat thousands of websites use support to deliver quality customer services. The companies understand that providing the best quality customer services improves business productivity and boost sales. The websites offer FAQs, Knowledgebase, articles, and web pages to give the solution for almost every query or issue. However, customers still like to confirm them by chatting with a live help representative. Communication helps to build trust, and customer gains overall satisfaction.
Initially, SCPL offered live chat support solutions for free to websites with less traffic and resource consumption. But later, it introduced premium plans for high traffic and resource-consuming websites. The webmaster was delighted to have the live help software embedded into their websites, as it required just a line of code in the section. Chatwoo provided an online admin panel where they could view many reports and mentioned benefits and provide support to their website visitors. The ease of creating an account on Chatwoo, configuring live support help, customizing it according to business, and finally logging and handling incoming chats makes website owners fascinated with the SaaS application.
The customer wants immediate resolutions of their queries or issues; they don’t want to wait, which drives them to start communication with the live help representative in real-time back-and-forth. Although with that, they prefer to create trouble-ticket or send emails to the support team. The customer expects the available representative to be well trained, equipped, and knowledgeable to understand the issue and provide a solution. The customers don’t appreciate the businesses with delayed live help support services. Sometimes, during the peak time, when specific services go down, and many customers want to know the reason, the live help with limited personnel doesn’t get available in real-time, and a long wait query gets generated. The demand for live help representatives increases during that time. Attending everybody immediately sometimes becomes not possible for representatives; thus, in the offline mode, the customers can leave their name, email, and query through the form. Later, technical personnel takes care of all those queries.
Nowadays, artificial intelligence has enhanced live help support services by bringing chatbot services. For most queries, it provides a helpful guide, and if the customer remains unsatisfied, then the actual representative comes into play. The chatbots save the representative time by collecting information from customers and helping representatives with appropriate answers.
The Chatwoo was the fastest live chat help support system.
Microsoft’s (MSFT) stock is 18% up this year on Wall Street and hit a new 52-week high on Tuesday. It’s now 10% below the all-time high it hit way back in December 1999 during the Bill Gates era. The company is ahead of the broader market and doing better than its rivals, Apple (AAPL), Oracle (ORCL), IBM, and SAP. Its cloud sales boomed up in the latest quarter.
Since Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer in February 2014 as CEO, shares go nearly 60% up, almost more than double the gain of the Nasdaq during the same time frame. Could Satya Nadella be compared to Bill Gates? All Indians say it proudly as he is delivering on that count.
Satya Nadella emphasized cloud products like Office 365, cloud-centric Windows 10 operating system, and Azure. That brings Microsoft to compete in the web hosting services with Google and Amazon’s lucrative AWS division. Microsoft is emerging as a cloud provider from its old model of selling software. Even though its overall revenue has gone down, its profits rose. Microsoft is emerging as the most user-friendly and transparent, allowing free Windows 10 downloads and listening to developers and customers. Windows 10 has pushed consumers and businesses to upgrade from older PC machines and benefitted Intel (INTC).
The company shareholders are pretty enthusiastic about the company’s prospects. It’s an old story now when in 2013, Microsoft bought the smartphone business of Nokia (NOK). In 2014, the company cut 7,800 jobs on top of the 18,000 announced.
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation that produces computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. It is also emerging as a leading provider of Microsoft 365, Xbox, Windows, and Azure.
No hosting company allows hate sites, and the latest example is Godaddy cancelling the website registration for the white supremacist and neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. The website posted an extremely misogynistic post mocking Heather Heyer, the young 32-year woman murdered at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, by a neo-Nazi. It certainly appears that he deliberately drove his car into her and numerous other counter-demonstrators.
In this case, a GoDaddy spokeswoman said The Daily Stormer crossed the line and “encouraged and promoted violence. In instances where a site goes beyond the mere exercise of these freedoms, however, and crosses over to promoting, encouraging, or otherwise engaging in violence against any person, we will take action.”
Under the GoDaddy ToS, GoDaddy had the power to terminate a domain registration based on the user’s “morally objectionable activities,” including “[a]ctivities designed to encourage unlawful behaviour by others, such as hate crimes.”
After that, the website didn’t get any hosting platform, and they tried on Google and then Russian servers but quickly withdrew the registration. The hate content violates the web hosting company’s contractual Terms of Service (ToS), and now the website has a hard time finding a place on the web. No primary web hosting provider is willing to register the Daily Stermer domain and provide hosting.
The Daily Stormer is an American far-right, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, misogynist, Islamophobic, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website that advocates for the second genocide of Jews. It is part of the alt-right movement. Wikipedia
The First Amendment protects freedom of speech and expression from government censorship and government punishment. Also, Internet neutrality claims to transmit any content, but the land laws of all the countries ban and restrict such objectionable hate content. Legally drew a line and held web hosting companies responsible for not allowing any such website. Furthermore, even the website hosting companies have the policy not to host such websites. It’s within the web hosting company’s rights to decide whom they conduct business with, and they don’t allow the expression of hate, racism, and bigotry on their platforms.
Every parent wants decency in every media, whether movies or the Internet. But, on Internet, you may find everything. During the Corona pandemic, even small kids were given access to the mobiles and Internet. Keeping an eye on children every time is not possible. Although firewalls block specific websites and routers also come with parenting guards. There has been a sharp decline in adult hosting websites in recent years, and even now, the hosting providers are very stringent on this. But, online adult websites still exist on the Dark Web, and land laws are not sufficient or powerless to some extent to stop them. It creates a sense of urgency to stop abuse and adultery. Negative things gain more popularity, such as adultery websites, images, gallery rack up a substantial number of views.
A single collection of images, labeled “Melinda – my daughter,” was viewed more than 467,000 times. The most challenging part is that viewers or members of such sites are not punished, or significantly fewer numbers get punishment. The agencies find investigations of such websites costly, slow and difficult.
Recently FBI hackers resorted to hacking to hunt down pedophiles hiding anonymously on the Internet. They took down a child porn ring on TOR by hacking, spying, and conducting home raids. The details came into focus when the FBI played the hacker spies role going beyond legal boundaries with court authorization.
In Operation Torpedo started in 2011, Netherlands police found a large child porn site and gained administrative access. The web server was located inside a data center at Power DNN, a Web hosting service located in Bellevue, Nebraska. Prosecutors said police rescued over half a dozen children. According to court records, Dutch cops then tipped off the FBI.
The judge approved FBI spying on Omaha, Nebraska, home of one Power DNN employee, Aaron McGrath. In late 2012, The federal agents burst into his house and caught McGrath signed in as the administrator of PedoBook, a social media site where people shared photos of child pornography. His laptop data was encrypted and locked, but investigators could determine the password and unlock the computer, as per court records. FBI agents could not identify the website’s visitors, as the website on the Dark Web was accessible through the TOR browser, which hides visitors’ location by bouncing Internet traffic signals around the globe. Then FBI was granted a search warrant for a “network investigative technique,” allowing agents to slip computer code into photos on the child porn website.
Every time a website visitor clicked on an image of a naked child, their computer also downloaded extra data that reported its actual IP address and operating system and identified users. The FBI agents exploited notoriously vulnerable Flash to establish a direct connection to reveal IP addresses. Those using an outdated version of TOR and didn’t set computers block Flash, their IP got revealed. They catch the slowest, dumbest of the bunch without breaking TOR’s anonymity.
One more challenge is that few, in the name of free speech, criticize the government’s actions and question the legality of bringing down such websites; they say the Internet is free and such websites can also run, and people can freely watch them. Challenging the FBI hacking methods in the Operation Torpedo case, the defense attorney claimed the mass hack was “overreaching of law enforcement.” “FBI unfairly sneaked upon his client.” The defense argued that the search warrant required notifying the suspect of the electronic search within 30 days.
These criminals’ acts were beyond one’s imagination. A 22-year-old from Ashford, Alabama, promised to produce images of his yet unborn daughter while still in her mother’s womb, and the FBI stopped him, and now he is in prison for 15 years. A 42-year-old boasted about the many girls he raped in the Philippines. He’s now serving 20 years. (source: https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/25/technology/fbi-child-porn/index.html)
Ananova.com lists the power hosting providers to help businesses running e-commerce websites that do heavy business transactions pick the best web host. Ananova selected the hosting providers by considering security, SSL/TLS to enable “HTTPS” pages, handling payments, guaranteed 100% uptime SLA, cloud resources, snapshot backup facility, and other features, thus helping Webhosting customers to reap the benefits.
The world is moving fast toward online markets, and every business considers it must have an online presence to sell goods to consumers worldwide. The businesses create online marketing plans and strategies to reach, catch & communicate to customers, thus fostering a community around their company.
The Ananova listed hosting provider offers professional e-commerce templates to enable businesses to build a website with all available capabilities. It’s good to have a business e-mail address, blog, and social media presence for a business.
Ananova recommends WordPress.com eCommerce & Business plan for e-commerce sites and shopping carts. The programs offer Premium themes and more than 50,000 WordPress plugins to provide businesses with the best look-n-feel and functionality with the best security and backups. The provider takes care of security, making the website 100% secure to minimize hacking or malicious activity. For an e-commerce website, this feature is a must as customers do share sensitive credit card information while making purchases. SSL/TLS – Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security ensures information encryption.
Furthermore, WordPress allows customization, accepts payments in 60+ countries, and integrates with Top Shipping Carriers.
Share your Web hosting tips and experiences in Business Hosting Journal (BHJ.org)
WordPress has been the most widely used CMS platform throughout history and continues to be so today.
Do you wish to create your website on the WordPress platform and look for the best plan. The Ananova would guide you to choose the best hosting plan for your online business presence. CPWebHosting is an affiliate to WordPress.com and earns commission whenever anybody purchases hosting plans using the partner links. The Ananova editorial team’s opinions and evaluations are unbiased, honest, impartial, comprehensive, and current despite the above. The team highly recommends WordPress.com to build a business, e-commerce, stores, blogging, & individual websites because of its competitive pricing, features, security, and the best customer support.
Although one can ask why only WordPress.com website builder, when WordPress offered is same through WordPress.org?
Further, is it necessary to have a premium domain? Why not use the freely available sub-domain with WordPress.com like Ananova.wordpress.com.
A website looks professional with a premium domain, and it should not be a staging domain. You can get a domain from Godaddy, Enom, Dynadot, Google domains, or other registrars. The premium domain costs from $8 to $14 if the domain code is .org or .com annually.
WordPress.com offers:
‘WordPress Free‘ with limited functionality, storage, and traffic. It is free and does not include a custom domain name, premium themes, WordPress plugins, premium support, WooCommerce, SEO Tools, advanced social media tools, professional email, WordAds, SFTP, database access, automated backups, and jetpack essentials. This free plan comes with 1GB storage, does not allow uploading videos, displays ads, and allows only one administrator.
‘WordPress Pro‘ plan includes a custom domain name free for one year, premium themes, Unlimited WordPress plugins, premium support, Sell Products with WooCommerce, Collect payments, SEO Tools, advanced social media tools, professional email free for 3 months, WordAds, upload, videos, SFTP, database access, automated backups, and jetpack essentials. This free plan comes with 50GB storage, without ads, and allows unlimited administrators. The plans enable the installation of 3-rd party premium themes and plugins.
For those who want to try other hosting providers, Ananova provides a list of trusted web hosting providers
where they can install WordPress through cPanel Control Panel.
Since early April 2022, WordPress.com has offered two plans as listed above with differences. The Pro plan includes everything a business website needs.
The flexible, powerful, and stunning template is suitable for news agencies, article writers, individual journalists, magazines, e-commerce websites, stores, reviewers & bloggers. It’s GDPR compliant and supports YouTube videos, RTL, Google Ads, AdSense, & multilanguage support. The template easily integrates with Instagram, bbPress Forum, BuddyPress, and WooCommerce.
The mobile-ready theme comes with gorgeous and effective prebuilt elements, custom colors selectable for each category & built-in tools for search and load-time optimizations to attract more traffic. The theme is fast, simple, and easy for fashion, food, lifestyle, modern, personal, travel, luxury, viral, minimal, minimalist projects, web development, and professional websites. Overall, the theme’s popularity is bolstered by the professional designs it delivers.
The Responsive Newspaper theme helps establish authority in the industry by creating an overall enjoyable experience for site visitors. The built-in performance analyzer helps make critical adjustments to improve your site’s search engine optimization and load times. The tool analyzes page structure and helps to move CSS code to better areas, cutting down the number of requests and the size of crucial files required to load your site. Thus, making the site blazing fast.
The theme includes tools for:
Composing beautiful blog posts and WordPress pages
HTML5 Prebuilt elements and layouts to deploy on your site
Header and footer builders
Simple to use customizable sections
Opt-in forms and gated content for subscribers
WooCommerce shop builder
Instagram, bbPress, and BuddyPress integrations
There are no incompatibility issues while adding JavaScript; the theme itself uses a minimal number of external libraries.
The users use the template for better reach and easier creation and adjustment to every element.
Elementor is the leading website builder platform for professionals on WordPress, with over five million active installations. It serves web professionals, including developers, designers, and marketers. Furthermore, it boasts a new website created every 10 seconds on its platform. Recently in the latest plugin version, vulnerability to an authenticated remote code execution flaw (RCE) was detected that enables abusers to take over the affected website. The abuser can upload an arbitrary file, potentially leading to code execution.
Plugin Vulnerabilities disclosed a bug introduced in version 3.6.0, released on March 22, 2022, and roughly 37% of users of the plugin were on that version. The bug allows any authenticated user, regardless of their authorization, to change the site title and site logo, change the theme to Elementor’s theme, and upload arbitrary files to the site. The provider advised users to update the plugin as soon as possible to mitigate further risks.
Elementor helps web designers to turn design visions into professional websites, accelerate and innovate website development and make an online business shine and grow its audience. With the live drag & drop editor, 90+ widgets with total customization freedom, zero coding is required to create a flawless website with custom positions, padding, margins, and global settings for colors & typographies. The platform helps create unlimited web creations like anding pages and eCommerce stores to full-blown websites. Designers use it to create unique & consistent website designs using advanced animations, custom templates library, global design settings, custom CSS, responsive layouts, and more for Business & Services, Portfolio & CV, Creative, eCommerce, Events & Entertainment, Landing Pages, Media & Blogs, Health & Wellness.
Business Hosting Journal is one more review and rating website in the web hosting industry, run by SCPL as a statistics and analytical company. The website is updated daily with the latest reviews, web hosting trends, industry news, technology updates, tutorials, forums, press releases, and resolutions to most web hosting issues. BHJ collaborates with SiteGeek to rank web hosting providers in various categories like Shared Hosting, Cloud Hosting, VPS, Dedicated Servers, Local Hosting, and SSD hosting. Daily the website publishes numerous articles related to the web hosting industry. The website is affiliated with a few web hosting companies. It receives affiliate income whenever hosting consumers purchase the hosting plan by clicking the banner links—the affiliate income help to defray the site’s operating cost. The website claims to provide honest hosting editorially independent reviews by website visitors.
BHJ discusses hosting experiences and ranks legitimate hosting providers on a scale of their hosting processes, resources, security, support, and customer services. Thus, it helps the hosting consumer evaluate the most vital features for its business or individual website or application. The hosting industry is completely consumer-centric, and good customer support is crucial for success. No business or personnel continuously pays the hosting provider who doesn’t offer the best value and customer services. Every customer wants a hosting company to resolve the issues before it comes to them.
Before Damage, preventive mesaure must be taken. A hosting provider must ensure 24×7 technical support via experienced experts who can resolve customer issues asap.
Rohit Kumar (BHJ)
An issue may arise anytime in a hosting business, but if somebody is available to address it and get the best solution on time, it makes the best customer experience. Hence, the hosting provider must ensure the technical staff is available via phone, trouble ticket, email to answer questions and concerns. Everybody understands that most hosting consumers don’t want to wait, but they need immediate responses or resolutions to their technical issues.
Every business knows how much downtime can cause headaches, financial setbacks, and setbacks to Google ranking. They always want 100% website content available to their customers or visitors, and they are right in that. A hosting provider must always provide explanations or reasons for the issues or downtime. And if it is due to server maintenance, then intimate the customer well in advance. If the hosting provider fails to do so, then the knee-jerk reaction from hosting customers is obvious. A hosting consumer looks towards the provider and blames them for downtime for every issue. Thus, a hosting provider must always be responsive and provide timely notifications.
Most hosting consumers trust web hosting reviews and rating websites like Ananova, SiteGeek, Chatwoo, and BHJ to get a sense of web hosting reliability. The hosting consumers look for various hosting features in the hosting providers listing, like effective data backups process to prevent data loss, upgrades, updates, maintenance notification, customer support, uptime guarantee, etc.
Rohit Kumar, BHJ, says, “I’m sure, most of the hosting consumers never go through host’s service level agreement, they just take few moments to skim and then took buying decision, which they already thought in their mind.” However, it is always recommended to go through the service agreement, mentioning the uptime guarantee and the host’s redundancy arrangements.
BHJ suggests that consumers go for public cloud hosting providers like ‘Google Cloud’ or ‘AWS’ to host a business website, providing the best backup and disaster recovery plan. They have the best support on cloud computing, and the hosting specs meet the consumer needs and are fully scalable. A customer does not have to worry about disk space and bandwidth on cloud computing. Most websites have quality full-size images, downloads, extensive audio and video, and content. The customer gets as much as required and can scale later as needs arise.
Ananova 