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.

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.

It has become the old story now; cybercriminals steal users’ information, and customers or members are notified by hosting or social media websites. The customer’s situation is a complete mess; they shared the details with complete trust, and how such big websites get compromised. Wasn’t their security enough to stop hackers? The situation becomes salacious when they know that the hacker’s group is anonymous.

The companies claim the complete security of their user’s data and promise that they won’t be sharing or selling with 3-party companies without the user’s consent. But what if hackers breach the data? Why don’t companies take security as the topmost priority to stop such breaches? After the data gets compromised, news often comes out from such companies that the cyber security team has taken remedial action and then starts assuring customers with high priority security and privacy. The worst is when companies don’t know about such leaks for even months.

The mysterious online hacker community Anonymous always remains in news headlines. In February, a Twitter account with 7.9 million followers named “Anonymous” declared a “cyberwar” against Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. The group claimed responsibility for cyberattacks that disabled websites and leaked Russian government agencies, state-run news outlets, and corporations’ data.

The Anonymous hacktivists employ coordinated cyberattacks against various world governments, corporations, or other groups, often in the name of social or political causes. On March 6, 2022, Anonymous claims to have hacked into the Russian streaming services Wink and Ivi (like Netflix) and live TV channels Russia 24, Channel One, and Moscow 24 to broadcast war footage from Ukraine. But that doesn’t make them heroes. Let’s have a look at their past deeds.

On November 17, 2021, Godaddy, an Internet domain and web hosting company based in New York, revealed a hack on September 6, 2021, which exposed its 1.2 million customers’ emails and numbers, putting them at risk of phishing attacks. An attacker sends a fraudulent message designed to trick the victim into giving them sensitive information. The company filed an incident report with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) stating that it had identified ‘suspicious activity in its Managed WordPress hosting environment by an unauthorized third party. They immediately began an investigation with the help of an IT forensics firm and contacted law enforcement. SSH File Transfer Protocol, a network protocol that provides file access, transfer, and management over a data stream, and database usernames and passwords got exposed for active customers. The company immediately blocked the unauthorized third party and reset both passwords.

The company spokesperson said: ‘We, GoDaddy leadership and employees, take our responsibility to protect our customers’ data very seriously and never want to let them down. We will learn from this incident and are already taking steps to strengthen our provisioning system with additional layers of protection.’

Why are hackers so high? Can they impact thousands of websites and bring down businesses? Even with so many protections, firewalls, anti-malware, anti-viruses, and best security, how the hosting accounts get compromised still is beyond one’s thinking.

It’s not only Godaddy; almost every big company is the target of hackers. Amazon’s Twitch, a video streaming service, suffered a data leak after an anonymous hacker posted a computer file containing a vast amount of data for the public to access. Users Called ‘Disgusting Toxic Cesspool’ in a post on 4chan by a hacker. CNBC reported that the data leak included details on payments to content creators and an unreleased product from Amazon Game Studios.

Most companies use two-factor authentication (2FA), but not all their customers or members use the same. The companies always recommend changing passwords periodically. It’s time for users to know the difference between public and private information, ‘what to be shared and what not to be.’ Undoubtedly, the threats of cybercriminals will remain in the future also, but it’s the company’s and user alertness that can minimize hacking possibilities.

Security researchers claim that hackers and cybercriminals attack big web hosting companies and domain registrars. There is an increase in backdoor payload attacks against the big hosting providers. Wordfence, a popular security service, analyzes that the WordPress hosting providers and resellers gets the most affected.

The hackers exploit the vulnerabilities, gain access to configuration wp-config.php, and modify parameters to have complete control. They get a template that refers users to pharmaceutical sector spam links and injects malicious pages into search engines results. The spam templates intend to incite victims to purchase fake products, exposing money and payment details to the threat actors. The hackers with complete control alter or modify website content like links, titles, menus, or images; thus, the site appears compromised instead of the original one.

Cybercriminals steal data, passwords, and users’ personal information. The hosting customers prioritize protection and want absolute and higher standards of security measures for their websites, emails, and other resources they host on servers. Thus, the website’s reputation is maintained. The user experiences get impacted, leading to a negative experience and losing trust with website downtime or affected vulnerabilities. The website security threat leads to potential financial losses; thus, hosting consumers want to strengthen digital presence security and take a longer-term view on protecting the investment.

Over 90% of GoDaddy APAC customers participating in its 2021 Global Website Security Survey consider cyber security important for small businesses. Nearly 80% of respondents agreed that small businesses are at risk of cyberattacks. At the same time, half said they had already experienced a security breach, and a third described themselves as unsure of how to deal with a cyberattack.

The hosting providers always advise their customers to keep everything updated and upgraded. Wordfence strongly recommends that users scan the wp-config.php file immediately to detect potential backdoor injections.

Last year in November 2021, up to 1.2 million users of Godaddy’s WordPress websites got affected by an unauthorized attack. GoDaddy In. empowers millions of entrepreneurs worldwide looking to expand their online presence. The hosting provider offers tools for domains, website creation, e-commerce, content creation, and online security capabilities like Firewall and malware protections, site cleanups, and secure backups to help safeguard your customers’ and business information.

A web hosting service started in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and it was the third most visited website on the world wide web. Earlier named Beverly Hills Internet (BHI), a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California, later renamed GeoCities. It allowed registered users called ‘Homesteaders’ to create and publish home pages and e-mail addresses, chat, bulletin boards, and community elements with neighborhoods they wanted to belong to with 2 M.B. of space provided. The neighborhood was part of the member’s Web address along with a sequentially assigned “street address” number to make the URL unique (for example, “www.geocities.com/RodeoDrive/number”). 

According to their content, the users select cities or regions to list hyperlinks to their web pages like computer-related were placed in ‘SiliconValley, and entertainment placed with ‘Hollywood.’ GeoCities included GeoCities Marketplace, a commercial website, which sold GeoCities-branded merchandise.

The users need to provide personally-identifying and demographic information when they register for the website. In the privacy statement on its New Member Application Form, the website promises not to give anyone personally-identifying information without the user’s permission. The visitors can browse user-created websites by their theme or interest. They enjoyed the user-created websites and built a profound community.

In 1999, FTC received a complaint against GeoCities that it violated provisions of (the Federal Trade Commission Act, precisely 15 USC & 45. The act states, “Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful.” The agency found GeoCities engaged in deceptive acts and practices in contravention of their stated privacy act. The website sold personal information to third parties who used the information for purposes other than those for which members gave permission. The website illegally permitted third-party advertisers to promote products targeted to GeoCities’ 1.8 million users by using personally identifiable information obtained in the registration process. Subsequently, a consent order was entered into, which prohibits GeoCities from misrepresenting the purpose for which it collects uses personal identifying information from consumers. 

On January 28, 1999. Yahoo Inc. acquired the GeoCities hosting service for $3.57 billion in stock and abandoned this practice to favor Yahoo member names in the URLs.

In July 1999, Yahoo! switched from the neighborhood and street addresses Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) for homesteaders to “vanity” URLs through members’ registration names Yahoo! (“www.geocities.com/membername”). This service was offered previously only as a premium.

 Later in October 2009, the United States GeoCities services came to an end. Yahoo terminated the most user-written website with at least 38 million pages – The vintage personal web hosting site got farewell on October 26, 2009. Yahoo asked and encouraged users to download content to computers if they want to rebuild them on another site, as they won’t be archiving user pages. Yahoo urged users to try the company’s pay Web-hosting service. The company introduced a for-fee premium hosting service at GeoCities. It reduced the accessibility of free and low-price hosting accounts by limiting their data transfer rate for Web page visitors.

By 2008, the domain geocities.com attracted at least 177 million visitors annually and had 18.9 million unique visitors from the U.S. during March 2006. Later in March 2008, it decreased to 15.1 million unique U.S visitors and in March 2009 had 11.5 million unique visitors.

GeoCities Joined a long list of other services, including Yahoo! 360, My Web, Yahoo! Briefcase Farechase, LAUNCHcast, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Photos, Live, Kickstart, etc. Web messenger and teachers prioritize their products and services to deliver the best products to consumers. The visitors looking for GeoCities won’t find flashing banner ads, questionable color schemes, guest books, streaming HTML marquee tags, and omnipresent “Under Construction” signs. The site touched the hearts of millions of users that “RIP GeoCities” was a trending topic on Twitter. The website where millions first tried their hands at coding and designing before Yahoo scrubbed it.

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.