5 Trends in Web Hosting That You Should Know About

alt="5 Trends in Web Hosting That You Should Know About" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/siteground-customer-survey-1-500x314_c.jpg" />

Here at Web Hosting Secrets Revealed, we spend a lot of time thinking about web hosting.

Generally speaking, we look at how href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/compare-best-five-hosting/">individual web hosts stand up in terms of cost, service, and reliability.  These are real and important factors when you’re considering a host for your site. But there’s a whole industry here, with dynamics and factors at play that effect the kinds of services you can access as consumers and how those services are delivered.

Downtime means lost money, unhappy visitors, and potential damage to your search rank.  When issues arise, the ability to reach a competent human being can be the difference between speedy resolution and hours of frustration. And cost is straightforward: when you’re working on a limited budget or just trying to maximize profit, you want the most bandwidth, storage space, and loading speed that your dollars can buy. Understanding the changing hosting landscape can help you make informed choices about providers that will meet your technological needs over the long haul.

Like every other space, hosting is continually evolving. Technologies are changing and improving, and as a result the technological boundaries of hosting are being pushed as well to meet the changing demand. This creates opportunities for consumers: not just to search for the href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/ultimate-cheap-web-hosting-guide/">cheapest hosting deal or the most flexible hosting model, but to think about what kinds of business models they want to support and whether or not they need specific features in their packages.

But where is the hosting industry headed in 2012 and beyond.  At the recent href="http://www.hostingcon.com/blog/hostingcon-2012-attendance-information-guide/" rel="nofollow">HostingCon 2012, a number of the industry’s key players gathered to talk about the latest concerns and areas of innovation for the industry. Here are 5 big trends that are worth paying attention to as we move into the next twelve months.

1. Improving Security In The Cloud

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From Amazon’s href="https://read.amazon.com/about" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Kindle Cloud Reader to Apple’s href="http://www.apple.com/icloud/setup/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">integrated cloud allowing extensive Mac device communication, even the most casual user is aware of the power of the cloud. Small and medium sized businesses are slowly adopting cloud hosting in even the most staid markets. Major enterprise cloud solutions have been in development for years and are being deployed at a high rate. But the href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.com/featured-articles/what-might-go-wrong-with-cloud-hosting/">security aspects of the cloud are still being worked on.  Many suggest that hackers are focused on big potential breaches in cloud security. Therefore, it’s increasingly important for hosting companies offering cloud products to anticipate weaknesses in cloud security and address those aggressively.

Customers are also becoming savvier with respect to potential security issues connected with the cloud. As a result, hosting companies are developing stronger communications around this issue in the form of copy, collateral, and training for their sales teams. The need to fight malware and abuse is a major theme affecting all kinds of hosting companies, not just the cloud hosts. Continuing investments and upgrades in this area remains a major theme for hosting companies.

2. Increased Differentiation Among Cloud Providers

The last few years have seen hosts focused in on providing infrastructure needed to support cloud hosting* and rolling out basic services.

In the coming year, prices are likely to increase as providers layer differentiation and additional services on top of existing hosting plans. An important trend is the degree to which individual providers are able to do so in an automated way that minimizes the need for human intervention. The more automated this process is, the higher margins will be on individual accounts. As a consumer, it’s helpful to understand how efficient your potential host’s processes are in this respect – it will save you tremendous amounts of aggravation when an issue does occur.

In addition, cloud providers seeking differentiation will need to find other avenues for communicating their advantages to customers.  Quality customer service is important, but it’s not enough. Instead, cloud hosting providers need to find real points of differentiation and market those effectively. 2012 so far has proved a big year for marketing spending in the hosting industry, and this is likely to continue as hosting companies work to educate the public. Differentiation is especially key as cloud hosting companies compete against Amazon, which has to a certain degree commoditized cloud services.

Example: Atlantic.net is offering ‘VPS Cloud’ service to less-techie hosting users

href="http://www.atlantic.net/vps/vps-vs-cloud.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">class="border" src="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/images/2012/1031-6.jpg" alt="" width="750" />

* Note: Cloud and VPS are two very different things; href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/vps-hosting-guide/">read our VPS hosting guide to learn more.

3. Increased Reseller Activity And Partnerships

As more big players like Amazon and others move in to the hosting field, it’s growing increasingly important for smaller players to have strong partnerships. Affiliate and reseller relationships are becoming a mainstay of how these businesses profit, as a number of small to medium sized hosting companies become bundlers for the specific services packages needed by small business users and online companies.

Competitive pricing, niche specific approaches, and stellar service will all play a key role in how this growing class of middlemen continues to evolve. Some speculate about whether hosting companies will actually phase out their own infrastructure altogether in favor of acting as straight resellers with lower infrastructure costs and therefore higher margins for Amazon and other larger players.

4. Companies Like Yola And Weebly Are Changing Mass Market Hosting

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Major hosting and domain registration companies like href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/go/godaddy" target="_blank">GoDaddy have been offering website building tools for ages. But new players on the scene such as href="https://www.yola.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Yola and href="http://www.weebly.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Weebly are changing the order of things. Instead, the company is positioned around solving a specific need: companies that need a cheap, easy, simple to manage website. They then advertise their easy to use website builder, which is free, and bundle in hosting, domain registration, and other services. But angling their marketing in a specific way, these companies are smartly repackaging hosting for the small business market in a way that’s not overly technical and therefore is accessible. While this is largely a marketing spin, it has directly impacted the way in which consumers purchase hosting and is a trend that bears watching.

5. Changes To Domains Offer Opportunities

Finally, recent changes to the domains available have created additional profit centers for hosts. From registration to hosting, many companies are taking a specific position on hosting non-US extension sites. Gone are the days when every site was either a .com, .net, or .org. Today, users can choose from href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">more than 100 different extensions and experts say hundreds more are on the way. As a consumer, understanding whether a host charges more or offers a specific advantage when hosting less common but popular extensions such as .co and .me is an important step.

Major trends in hosting are continuing to push infrastructure development, the companies that are offering services and how those services are presented to consumers. As consumers, it’s beneficial to understand the dynamics of the industry in order to help you make your best decisions.  We encourage you to check back as we continue to cover major trends and technologies in the space, as well as take a look at our detailed href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/hosting-reviews/">hosting reviews to help you make the best choice for hosting your site today.

Page 22 – Web Hosting Secret Revealed

How To Pick the Right Tools and Trends for Your Blog

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Every blogger has only so many hours in a day to select great content, write, network, promote and market. Whether growing a new blog or leveraging an old one for more business, you’ll need tools that support you and make you more efficient, but how do you know which ones are right for you?

Understanding your goals is the first step. Next, matching your particular personality with the right product can increase your productivity and help your blog boom. Then you’ll need to figure out what matches your audience.

Step 1: What Are Your Goals?

First, consider your goals for your blog. Are you trying to href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/blogging-tips/9-strategies-to-get-your-first-1000-page-views/" target="_blank">capture your first 1000 page views? Are you trying to eliminate blog spam? Are you launching a newsletter, or aiming to grow one of your social media accounts? Don’t generalize your blog goals here.

List S.M.A.R.T. goals: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (that is give them a time frame, such as one month.) Then prioritize them in order. Each goal may require a specific tool or a group of them – an email subscriber system, a new theme, plugins, testing, analytic, content tools, etc.

class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-8706" alt="storify" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/storify.jpg" width="750" height="447" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/storify.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/storify-300x178.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />

One thing every blog needs is great content. A tool like href="http://www.google.com/alerts" target="_blank">Google Alerts comes in handy for regularly emailing you content in your niche. However, there are tools that pull it all together for you. One great one is href="http://storify.com/" target="_blank">Storify allows you gather stories from any online service and share them, and even posts directly to your blog. href="http://feedly.com/" target="_blank">Feedly aggregates all the sites you regularly visit for content. href="http://getpocket.com/" target="_blank">Pocket is a great tool that let you store and organize content to view or read later; href="https://kippt.com/" target="_blank">Kippt is a similar tool that runs a interface which resembles Outlook and allows you to share it publicly or with a group.

Timers and billing software are necessary tools for professional bloggers, procrastinators and those with deadlines. Annika Helendi at Toggl – which has a free timer tool – has an article on how to determine href="http://blog.toggl.com/2013/11/top-3-best-free-online-timers-improve-efficiency-work/" target="_blank">the best timer for your needs.

For professional billing, I use href="http://www.myintervals.com/" target="_blank">Intervals, which is a month for 15 maximum concurrent projects. You can also bill clients through Paypal services if you don’t need a project management tool.

Step 2: What Fits You?

You can have dozens of tools but if you don’t use them, they are simply wasting space. Find tools that fit your personality and work habits. Are you Type A – prone to great detail and a need to be engaged all the time? Then you’ll need productivity tools that make your work time more efficient, leaving ample time to network and build your brand. For example, href="https://bufferapp.com/" target="_blank">Buffer and href="https://hootsuite.com/" target="_blank">HootSuite are tools that let you schedule most of your social media in one place, allowing you to organize all your shares in one sitting.

class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-5739" alt="My Web Reference On Evernote" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/0110-3-750x536.jpg" width="750" height="536" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/0110-3-750x536.jpg 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/0110-3-300x214.jpg 300w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/0110-3.jpg 835w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />

You’ll also want tools to keep you organized. I’m a big fan of href="http://evernote.com/" target="_blank">Evernote, which lets you organize note, files, links, PDFs and more. It also comes with a nice line up of href="http://evernote.com/products/" target="_blank">additional products. One of my favorites is Evernote Clearly for browsers, which eliminates visual distractions in your browser so you can read just the article.

Foodie bloggers will want to use Evernote Food that allows you to organize your outside dining experiences. If you work with others,  href="https://www.dropbox.com/" target="_blank">DropBox and href="https://drive.google.com/" target="_blank">Google Docs are specifically for sharing files across the web. You can also use an app like href="https://trello.com/" target="_blank">Trello, which is extremely flexible for organization and sharing across a group.

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But if you’re Type B, like me, and prefer kicking back and approaching things with a more relaxed attitude, scheduling tools won’t appeal to you but you do need to space out your shares. That means you’ll need reminders – an electronic calendar system is a must-have for someone like me, so I can schedule shares at my leisure. And while it’s great having the ability to schedule things, using too many tools is a drag for me. I don’t like the layout for HootSuite , nor do I like seeing Buffer or HootSuite come up whenever I want to share anything in Facebook. I prefer to manually schedule my Facebook or Google+ posts and I use href="https://tweetdeck.com" target="_blank">TweetDeck for scheduling tweets when I’m already engaged on Twitter.

class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-7213 border" alt="ifttt channels" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ifttt-channels.png" width="750" height="378" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ifttt-channels.png 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ifttt-channels-300x151.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />

For those that only want to be notified when something is critical, a tool like href="https://ifttt.com/" target="_blank">IFTTT can be a life saver. You simply an “If” and a “Then” to automate actions in social media or through other online channels. For example, one that is currently preprogrammed on the site is: “If I star an email in Gmail, create a reminder to take care of it.” Or you can automate to share an item to DropBox, for example.

Finally, know your budget. There are great free tools and even better tools for a fee. Paid tools for bloggers run from $.99 apps to pricey software and monthly services. If a paid tool, app or service looks like a good fit, use the trial or free version to get an idea if it will work for you. Before spending the big bucks, find other users among the people you trust to get an opinion of whether it’s worth the price for your purposes. You should also look for deals. href="https://deals.cultofmac.com/" target="_blank">Cult of Mac Deals and href="http://www.mightydeals.com/" target="_blank">Mighty Deals are two that I subscribe to that offer lots of great apps, discounted software, freebies and resources that work great for bloggers. In addition, iTunes and Amazon regularly post free app deals as well. Lifehacker has a great article on “href="http://lifehacker.com/5934747/how-to-make-limited+time-app-deals-last-forever" target="_blank">How to Make Limited-Time App Deals Last Forever,” using IFTTT.

Step 3: What Fits Your Audience?

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Tools are also a matter of what is going to work well for your audience. Returning to your blog goals, run them individually – or at least give each goal a running head start before you dive into the next one. For that, you’ll need Google Analytics (GA) – it’s simply a must for every blogger. You should be keenly aware of your audience’s habits, devices, locations and more. GA can help you figure out which social media outlets are gaining you the most traffic, where your audience is located, and how they are getting to your site (mobile? PC? Mac?). Once you’re aware of this, you can make sure that your apps fit their needs or can store the data you need to know about your niche to make you more relevant to your audience.

For example, your blog design might look awful or too large on a mobile device. If you’ve noticed your mobile visitor stats dropping, it’s time to either look into a theme that is responsive or use a tool to create a mobile site that won’t look like your browser site but will function better for your audience. href="http://www.dudamobile.com/" target="_blank">DudaMobile and href="http://www.mobify.com/" target="_blank">Mobify are two very easy tools to accomplish this.

Plugins for your blog are helpful, but as always, keep your readers top of mind. While plugins can make things easy for them, those that perform complex or consuming action can drain your site’s resources and slow down or crash your blog. Always load plugins one at a time and test your site afterward to make sure they are not harming it. In addition, plugins can get hacked, so do your best to ensure they are working properly and up to date. Check out my basic primer on plugins, href="http://mom-blog.com/2012/08/optimize-your-blog-wordpress-plugins-101/" target="_blank">WordPress Plugins 101.

What Are the Best Tools?

Here is a recap of those top apps.

class="row-fluid">class="span6">

Online Productivity

• href="https://bufferapp.com/" target="_blank">Buffer
• href="https://hootsuite.com/" target="_blank">Hootsuite
• href="https://tweetdeck.com" target="_blank">TweetDeck

Content

• href="http://storify.com/" target="_blank">Storify
• href="http://feedly.com/" target="_blank">Feedly
• href="https://kippt.com/" target="_blank">Kippt
• href="http://getpocket.com/" target="_blank">Pocket
• href="http://www.google.com/alerts" target="_blank">Google Alerts

Billing/Timers

• href="http://www.myintervals.com/" target="_blank">Intervals
• href="https://www.paypal.com/" target="_blank">Paypal
• href="https://www.toggl.com/" target="_blank">Toggl

10 Web and Marketing Trends that Dominated Jan’14 (and are Likely to Stay Around)

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style="line-height: 1.5em;">As a new year begins, everyone in the web verse was anticipating what 2014 will bring for the online marketing realm. For those who didn’t have their ears and eyes pointed to the ground, there haven’t been many surprises. The trends, though have remained same, but have noticed bit more urgency, and a slight shift in the dependence on certain aspects of social media – swinging upwards.

Let’s take a look at what January 2014 was about, and what it brought for the digital marketing aficionados.

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1. Social Media Continues to March Ahead at a Ballistic Speed

What did you expect anyways! For the souls who found themselves lost in the world of digital marketing, and who had little or no knowledge of SEO, social media has come as a savior. Rather, it does more than just saving the day. Social media has let even the novices of digital marketing perch their websites on the top of their potential reader’s mind through some simplest of techniques to promote their content. That is not say that social media marketing can be mastered by anyone and everyone, but even the lack of experience can deliver incredible results. The Facebook groups have opened new avenues where you can post a link and can be assured that it will be seen by a multiple number of visitors – relevant visitors on top of that.

2. Quality Content Isn’t making an Exit, Not Yet

And why would it! It is not just your visitors who love to stumble upon a piece of content that in full of insight and intrigues them, href="http://searchengineland.com/google-changes-ranking-advice-says-build-quality-sites-not-links-163931">Google has its own biases (for good). The fresh and unique content has been the buzzword for quite a while and I wager the focus is only going to get deeper. More and more business owners are understanding how content can totally transfigure their marketing stratagem and bring more results to it.

3. Guest Posting Continues to Breed (despite the unsettling buzz)

An amazing way to attain authority juice for your website content is through posting articles on established third parties. You manage to grab more eyeballs when a piece of content, accompanied by the URLs that link back to your website, gets published on websites that receive heavy traffic.

4. Guest Posting Will Get More Fraught with Risks

That said, the practice of href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/blogging-tips/how-to-run-a-better-guest-blogging-campaign-5-things-to-do-5-things-not-to-do/">guest posting may very well turn out to be a nasty burn for you if you don’t play to the rules Google has set. Writing a guest post for an arbitrary website that is full of spam, has zero page rank and accepts anything and everything can really make you crawl into a mud pit. Google punishes websites that have their links posted on low ranked and spammy websites.

5. Sponsored Posts Will be Given More Attention

While guest posting in its more elementary sense (and in the context of the way they are referred to ), means writing a post on some topic that relates to your business and including a link or two at the bottom in the author bio. Sponsored post is however direct marketing, where you contact a high PR website and ask them if they can accept a post that talks specifically about your company and its line of products. This is an entirely promotional post which needs you to pay a considerable amount.

6. Mobile apps are Even More Welcomed

It’s not an age anymore where fancy gadgets and phones were meant for teenagers. Today, you would find those in the hands of anyone between 10 and 60, and beyond that. And that’s where the need to market your products through mobile app emanates, and flourishes – as we are seeing of-late.

7. Content Seeding Remains Haywire

Not every business that has concentrated its resources on content seeding has benefitted from content seeding. While you may post comments with links on popular blogs and forums, one is never sure if they will remain there. Even if the forum and blog admins don’t delete them, the conversion rate is under a serious clout of doubt.

8. Video Marketing Keeps Getting Bigger

We had a Doordarshan age where a handful of advertisements made their way to television. Then we had the cable TV and the Digital TV era where there is a plethora of brands creating far more interesting advertisements for their TV audience. And then, there is Youtube and the likes of it where brand ads play before specific videos. As and when the concept is great, the videos turn viral and spring times are in store for the brands.

9. More Investment in Paid Online Advertisement

This is a derivative of video and social media marketing. Marketers will keep investing more and more on pad advertisement son platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, (through those banner ads). Posting banner ads on websites that sync with their brand will also continue to head north, despite the high charges associated with it.

10. Responsiveness of Websites Will Be Sought-After

For the fact that a large chunk of your audience accesses your website on their mobile devices, you need to href="http://dannybrown.me/2013/11/11/5-reasons-why-you-need-to-be-mobile-ready-for-2014/">make your sites mobile ready. When the website you have been constructing and pushing upwards for months does not harmonize well with the tiny devices that are getting popular by the day, you are doing a great disservice to your business. Slow loading times because of fancy features or a layout that isn’t designed to play out well on diversified operating systems will only increase the bounce rate on the site.

Web marketing is a concoction of far too many ingredients. It hardly serves a purpose for the tunnel-visioned folks, but those with a clever acumen, know how to use it to give their business a velvet touch.

Page 15 – Web Hosting Secret Revealed