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Saief Mahmud

Saief is the co-founder of VernalWeb. He is a digital marketing enthusiast. He's on a valiant quest to discover effective marketing strategies then share those secrets with VernalWeb users.

types of web hosting

What Kind of Hosting Should I Choose for My Website?

Posted on Posted by Saief Mahmud Categories Dedicated Hosting, Web Hosting

If you are making your website for the first time, choosing the right hosting service can be one of the challenging jobs. Different types of web hosting services have different types of features and a variety of impacts on your website. So, choosing the best option is a crucial part of creating your first website.

If you have a clear idea about your requirements and various types of web hosting, this will be easier for you to go for the right one. Choosing the right hosting plan and provider will make your business ahead of your competitors.

Today we will talk about different types of hosting services (mainly 3 types) and try to help you find the right one for your website:

  1. Shared Hosting
  2. VPS Hosting
  3. Dedicated Hosting
  4. Managed WordPress Hosting

Web Hosting Explained

Each website you see on the web uses a server (like your computer) to store the data that is shown to the users as content. Web hosting is basically the service of storing the website and its content. So the website data is hosted on the server and the server delivers the data as content to the users.

The hosting provider or hosting company owns and maintains the server where your website is hosted. The company provides information, technical support, and other necessary assistance to help you build a better website. You need to buy a hosting service from these types of companies. Purchasing hosting doesn’t mean you are the final owner of the server. You’re actually renting a portion of the server or a full server for your website and you are paying the rent on a monthly basis, yearly basis, or even more.

A hosting company may offer different plans on a specific type of hosting where different plans have different features and prices. The more you pay the more features you will get and this policy applies to almost every company.

Finding the perfect hosting and right provider for a website is very much crucial. Your hosting server will affect your website performance, appearance, and security. Choosing the wrong hosting or company may ruin your website and even business completely. Similarly, a good hosting company plays a vital role in moving your website and business ahead. They push your business ahead by providing real-time support, helpful resources, and making sure your site is up & running smoothly.

Different Types of Web Hosting Based on Your Needs

When it comes to web hosting types, we can typically define hosting categories according to the server space and other specifications like bandwidth, RAM, etc provided by the hosting provider. Here we will discuss the major categories of web hosting and which category you should choose for your website.

Shared Hosting – For Personal & Small Websites

You will get a clear idea about shared hosting with its name. A server is shared with different websites. The most significant advantage of this type of hosting is the least cost due to low resource and shared specifications such as storage, bandwidth, etc. Another advantage is you will get your hosting fully ready and managed. You don’t need to do any technical job. As your provider manages everything, you don’t have to worry about any technical aspects.

shared hosting

But keep in mind that, your server is also shared with other users that mean server resources are also consumed by other websites. So, there is a great scope of security vulnerability. Heavy traffic of another website hosted on the same server may cause server crash experience for your website. Your website can be infected by malware attacks if any other website on your server is infected. Your website or server IP can be blacklisted if other websites are involved in spamming or any other illegal activity. There are many negative sides like the above. But that doesn’t mean shared hosting isn’t a good option or you should avoid it. It is really good and popular for starting a new or small website especially when you want to invest less money for hosting your website.

If you are new in creating a website, shared hosting is recommended for you. You will get managed service at less cost. You don’t need to worry about your hosting rather you can focus on building your website as well as business. Our shared hosting starts from just $2.95 per month.

VPS Hosting – For Medium Websites That Are Growing

If you don’t think shared hosting is not suitable for your website, but you don’t need the full server, Virtual Private Server is the perfect solution for you. With a VPS, you still shared your server resources but you will get your own resource allocation and no other site will bother your website. Your website will use its very own resources and virtually-partitioned amount of space. In the same way, other websites will use their resources.

vps hosting

Although for VPS plans server shares its resources, your website is protected from eating up your server resources by other websites. This prevents other websites from overloading your server. So you will get a healthy performance for your website. There is no traffic limit for VPS Hosting. You will get an almost dedicated environment on a Virtual Private Server. However, due to being a shared server, it’s still much cheaper than dedicated hosting.

With our Fully Managed Cloud VPS Hosting, you will get ready deployment and we will manage everything on behalf of you. So you don’t need to worry about performance, security, and availability. Our VPS Hosting plans start from $59.96 per month.

Dedicated Hosting – For High-Traffic & Large Websites

Dedicated Hosting is actually a complete server. Unlike Shared or VPS Hosting, Dedicated Hosting contains a dedicated environment for a website. Previously in the shared hosting section, we told that a dedicated server is shared within different websites. Now dedicated hosting is just the opposite of shared hosting. It doesn’t share anything with our users. The whole server and specifications are allocated only for your website. So you don’t need to worry about storage, bandwidth, RAM, security, or performance.

dedicated hosting

The more you pay for, the more you get. Obviously, a dedicated server will cost you higher money like a hundred dollars to one thousand dollars or even more for a month. If your website is new, you don’t need to kill that much money.

Another important factor is, you need to manage your server by yourself. So you need expertise on server administration. Good news is there many hosting providers like us who provide managed service for dedicated hosting. That means they will manage your server on behalf of you. This will keep you worry-free about your hosting environment, performance, and security aspects.

As dedicated server hosting costs a higher price, you don’t need to go for this until your website has grown enough and you or your team has good expertise on maintaining your server. This hosting is suitable for large or high-traffic websites.

At VernalWeb, we offer Fully Managed Dedicated Hosting for heavy traffic and professional websites, where you can handle any kind of website you have. Our SSD-only dedicated server plans start from just $134.96 per month.

Managed WordPress Hosting – For WordPress Websites

WordPress Hosting is specially built for WordPress websites. If you have a WordPress website, maintaining the server security, speed and uptime can be challenging. Moreover, WordPress security, core updates, additional features management is a day-to-day task that can be annoying for a WP user. Managed WordPress Hosting has made all of these tasks easier.

managed wordpress hosting

WordPress now powers almost 37.5% of websites and as this platform is highly popular, some web hosting providers are now offering specialized optimized hosting for WordPress websites. Besides server management, you will get additional security, core updates, and an automatic backup system without extra cost for your website. Even some providers install WordPress for your website.

If you are aware of this type of hosting, you will see a variety of pricing from various providers’ websites depending on server config and features. We offer Managed WordPress Hosting just for $2.95 per month. We have 3 plans just like our shared hosting. But the main difference is with managed WordPress hosting, you will get lots of features just for WordPress optimization. 

How Can I Select the Right Hosting for My Website?

Choosing the right hosting plan is not always easy even if you know all the options you need. But you may follow some criteria for choosing a good hosting and provider. Here is the checklist you can follow:

  1. Features: Check all the features you will get with your hosting plan. Check what features are available in the smallest package and the largest plan. Crossmatch your requirements and plan features.
  2. Customer Support: Customer support is one of the most important factors for a hosting company. Before purchasing a web hosting plan, try to contact their support channels and judge their feedback. Make sure they are capable of solving any kind of hosting issue and they are also responsive to their customers.
  3. Server Performance: You should check the server performance, where you will host your website. You can do some performance tests or check for others’ test results, and check if the provider includes performance-related features such as additional caching system and Content Delivery Network (CDN) in the hosting plan.  
  4. Ease of Use: Ease of use is another important factor in the case of making a purchase decision. Check how easily you can use the control panel and manage your hosting. We recommend cPanel as hosting control panel as this is the most widely used panel around the world.
  5. Price: The final criterion is pricing. Keep in mind that you will get what you pay for. So don’t jump to the cheapest one. That may ruin your website and even your business. We recommend you to start with a small shared hosting plan and upgrade gradually when your website grows up. You can also compare the pricing of other hosting companies with similar features.

The Right Web Hosting For Serious Websites

You have read the full article and now you know how you can choose the right hosting that you need for your website. We have discussed 4 major types of web hosting:

  1. Shared hosting for new and small websites
  2. VPS hosting for medium websites that are growing
  3. Dedicated hosting for high-traffic and large websites
  4. Managed WordPress hosting for easy and hassle-free WordPress websites.

Do you want to have a high-performance website? VernalWeb Hosting plans are a perfect solution with the fast loading speed, performance, and extraordinary security features for your website. Check out our web hosting plans and we believe VernalWeb is the right hosting company for you!

Drive traffic to new website

16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your New Website

Posted on Posted by Saief Mahmud Categories Marketing & SEO, Open Source

Just because you have a website doesn’t mean anyone is ever going to see it unless you drive traffic there.  When you create a website, your first and most challenging job is “How to get visitors to the website?” You need to analyze your business type and choose a marketing plan based on that type.

16 Effective Ways to Drive Traffic To Your Website

If you have a website or planning to create a new one, you will need to find the sources of traffic to your website. There are thousands of tactics to bring visitors to your blog or website, but choosing the best options isn’t that simple. No marketing strategy is universal but there are some common strategies that work for most of the websites. Let’s learn how to drive traffic to a website.

1. Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast is an amazing WordPress plugin that will optimize your website. It is the most multi-dimensional plugin that I have ever seen. It helps you adding meta tags, Facebook OpenGraph, Twitter Cards, XML Sitemap and many more.

2. Blog Posts Optimization

Optimize your blog posts as much as possible. In the case of optimizing, Yoast is the best tool for you. It helps you check the SEO score of your post on the basis of focus keywords, title perfection and so on. Follow the guideline “how to optimize your WordPress images” to improve each post’s SEO score to the level best.

3. Create Internal  Linking

Link to your old posts and pages in all your blog posts. Have you ever thought that why the large blog sites link to their older posts in the new article? Internal linking helps search engines understand the importance of your content, context, and how it relates to your other content. It helps you boosting your website to the great extent.

4. Create Targeted Email List

In most cases, 75% of users visiting your website will never see it again. This is why you have to build a useful email list and it will give you access to the users directly. As well as you can let them know any other information regarding your all other articles.

5. Utilize SEO Tools

There are hundreds of SEO tools for finding a way of getting traffic. But as a new user, you can get them in a bit difficult. Check out the list of the best SEO tools that you should use for your new WordPress site.

6. Using Rich Snippets

Rich snippets add metadata to your blog posts. Search Engines use this metadata to display your site differently in search results. It helps your site get boosted.

7. Make Sharing Easy

Sharing makes things better. Make your article sharing easy. Social media is an important source of traffic for any website. That’s why most popular websites focus on making sharing easier for their users. There are many plugins that will let you add social media sites.

8. Engage Users on Social Media

Social media is the best platform where tons of users stay and hangout. You just need to reach out to those targeted users and join the conversation. Engage with users sharing your links and take part in discussions around topics of your blog.

9. Share Your Old Posts

You can easily set up your WordPress site to automatically share your old posts at regular intervals. Or you can share your older post manually.

10. Engage Users Commenting on Your Site

Commenting is the easiest way for interaction between the site authority and visitors. You need to respond to  the most comments. It will create a great relationship with the author and visitor.

11. Use High-Quality Images

Images talk more than text. All your images are the most important part of your articles. Infographics are the best part of an article. Always try to use images with high quality. It will make your content more interactive.

12. Use More Videos

Visualization is the most powerful technique for engaging people. YouTube is the second-largest visited website. It is just because of videos. People are very much fond of videos. Use videos on your website to provide engaging, entertaining, and useful content to your audiences.

13. Optimize Your Website Speed

No one likes a slower website. Both visitors and Search Engines prefer faster website. However, you will notice that your WordPress site would feel slower after installing a few plugins and adding a few images. Use some speed test tools to check your website’s current performance. Check out our guideline on how to speed up your website. Keep in mind that you must use a high-quality hosting to get fast website loading speed. A bad hosting provider may ruin your money and effort.

14. Use SSL Certificates

Lots of websites have started using SSL Certificates just after the announcement of Google that they will prefer a website having SSL. It will secure your website data and help get ranked. You can buy an SSL Certificate or you can add Free SSL with Let’s encrypt.

15. Google Analytics Integration

To take a decision about your website you must have enough data about how your visitors use your website, where you can focus to get more visitors and all about your visitors. Google Analytics is the best tool to get analytical data.

16. Create Useful Content

Many of you know “Content is the king”. Only useful content can convert your visitor to a regular visitor. Always try to create user-friendly content. It’s the best way to get visitors and get ranked in search engines.

Keep in mind, driving quality traffic depends on effective marketing strategies. A strategy may not be suitable for all the time. You should work on A/B testing to get the best result. Always try to engage with your users and ensure they are getting benefits from your website whether you sell products/services or it’s just a blog. Take feedback from the users and provide resources as per their demands.

hosting impact on seo performance

How Web Hosting Plan Affects SEO Performance of Your Website

Posted on Posted by Saief Mahmud Categories Marketing & SEO

In this modern world, business owners are expanding their business virtually. Especially during this Covid-19 pandemic, moving online is becoming the topmost priority of all types of businesses. So, marketing challenges are rising day by day. Modern marketing is all about SEO. If you want to get customer attention, SEO is the #1 option for moving globally. Today we will discuss how web hosting plan affects the SEO performance of your website.

If you are the owner or decision-maker of your company, you must know where you have hosted your company website. It may seem very light factor but it varies. Let’s move on to the topic.

How Hosting plan Affects SEO

Search engines recommend sites that perform better and provide value. Your hosting selection is a key factor for better performance and reliable hosting is vital for making your website fast, secure, and trust-worthy. Selecting a bad web host may ruin your all SEO efforts without giving back a single penny. Again, a good hosting service will make your website rise and develop SEO rankings. If you are new in online business, you may mistake in choosing the right hosting service which may lead your business with zero profit.

Page Load Time

As a user, which one will you prefer to visit?

  1. A slow website
  2. A fast website

Definitely the second one. Actually all of us will choose the same. And also search engine such as Google loves to work with faster websites. Fast loading speed is one of the top-ranking factors in Google SERPs.

Google’s Matt Cutts also highlighted the importance of website loading time in Google ranking.

This is very true that, if a website takes more time (more than 2 seconds) to load, the visitor is more likely to move to the next possible website. That’s why the page load time of your website can make a significant difference in you and your competitors.

Another factor is high loading time will bring a high bounce rate for your website but search engines prefer lower bounce rates.

Down Time

Getting a website down is the worst thing for a user. This not only creates a bad impression but also ruins your business reputation, reduces user trust flow and moves your website back from the ranking competition. It brings down your website’s SERP and SEO performance.

Imagine your website is down. Google crawler (Bot) has visited your website to crawl a specific content and get your website down. So how Google will treat your website? It will directly impact your SEO performance and site authority. Moreover, the bounce rate will go higher.

To avoid downtime, you must go for a web host where you will get 99.9% uptime guarantee. Choosing the right hosting company is very important to get a better ranking in search engines.

Security Features

If you are operating an online business, you must be concerned about your website securities. Keeping your website safe from potentials threats like hacking is vital. Malware attacks are rising day by day. You must ensure that your website is well protected from these types of threats to get a good SEO performance. Because Google won’t recommend a website to its users which is not secure enough. With poor security, your website can be down or even removed from the search engine.

The most common security feature is using an SSL Certificate. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) helps your website transmit data over secure HTTPS connections. Google has flagged any website that is not using SSL as ‘Not Secure’ and discourages its users from visiting these websites.

Your web hosting plan plays a vital role in the case of security features. Here at VernalWeb, we are using CloudLinux which is very important for making our servers highly secure. All our hosting plans include a free SSL certificate, free daily backups, and automatic security monitor. So you can secure your website without any extra cost.

Conclusion

If you really care about your business success, your website must have a good ranking in search engines. Without ranking, your website won’t be reached by most of the users. So you must do everything you can to make a better search engine ranking of your website which includes choosing the right hosting company and hosting plan for your website.

If you really care about ranking your website on search engines, you must choose a good hosting company.

Digital Marketing Strategy

How to Build a Digital Marketing Strategy from Scratch to Finish

Posted on Posted by Saief Mahmud Categories Marketing & SEO

Marketing is a core element of a business. Business is evolving faster with modern technology. To keep up the pace with this evolution, marketing has also gone digital. Digital marketing has become more powerful & effective than traditional marketing in this modern era. If you want to create a better online presence for your business, you need a solid digital marketing strategy.

So what is a digital marketing strategy and why do you need a digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is an actionable plan that works towards focusing and achieving the digital marketing goals of your company. The digital marketing goal is accomplished using various digital marketing channels such as digital publishing, social media, organic, online advertisement, referrals, etc.

A digital marketing strategy will give you a complete guideline towards your marketing and business goal. It will help you optimize your work plan and avoid duplication. With a limited resource, you can tie up your team and stay focused. A single written copy will make an enormous difference to your online performance.

Creating a strategy does not need to be complicated. That’s why we have created an effective guideline to help you build a solid digital marketing strategy in simple 8 steps.

8 simple steps to building a solid digital marketing strategy

Let’s discuss the steps for building a digital marketing strategy for making your business successful.

1. Set up your goal:

To build an actionable strategy, you must ask yourself what kind of goals you want to achieve. Although it sounds too simple to set it up. But you must be visionary and this step needs you to come up with a very detailed and specific set of goals. Define your ultimate business goal and your marketing strategy should fit into your mega plan.

Your digital marketing plan should be SMART. SMART is an excellent tool for measuring any goal or strategy. To be SMART, a goal should have five characteristics:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant
  • Timely

So your digital marketing mission should have those characteristics. Increasing sales of your eCommerce store is not a SMART goal. Generating a 5% sales increment per month with paid search within four months is a SMART goal.

2. Evaluate your accomplishment:

You need to measure your accomplishment even if you are just starting a new venture. This will help you understand your progress and what should be focused on the digital marketing goal. If you have an existing business, try to find out your previous mistakes and make sure you are not doing the same one. Make a list of your target marketing channels where you want to move forward. Some mostly used marketing channels are:

  • Website
  • Email marketing
  • Content marketing/SEO
  • Social media
  • PPC(Pay per click) advertising

Keep in mind that all available channels are not equally suitable for all types of digital marketing campaigns. You can rank all channels from most effective to least effective and focus on them according to the ranking.

3. Understand digital sales funnel:

A digital sales funnel is a comprehensive process where a stranger comes to buy your products or services and becomes your long term loyal customer. There are some steps in the digital marketing sales funnel and by following these steps with proper marketing channels and tools; you can achieve your digital marketing goal.

The buyer’s journey can be divided into 5 stages:

  • Awareness: Make your target customers aware of your existence.
  • Interest: Create customer interest in your business. Let them know how your business can benefit them.
  • Engage: Solidify your relationships. Sponsored posts on social media that address concerns the client could have or encourages them to ask questions are a great tool for this stage.
  • Action: Do business with the customers. Inspire your potential customers to buy your products or services. Call-to-action is a great tool for your business website to encourage the client to make a purchase. Offering discounts is another good way to make them purchase from you.
  • Advocacy: Customer service is now very much essential for building a successful business. Your customer may need your suggestions before or after purchasing. You must help your customer solve any kind of issue regarding your business.

Funnels are extremely important for turning your anonymous traffic into customers on automation. You need to understand each stage and implement all of them as a process.

4. Build Your Buyer Persona:

You need to know who your target customer is. Buyer personas will help you know your potential customers better. The better you understand your customer behavior, the better you can serve. You can tailor your products & content easily according to your customer needs. Put yourself in the place of a buyer. Now think about what kind of features & facilities make you convinced to purchase the products or services. Now you can make some assumptions about what would appeal to a customer.

  • Create a narrative: Learn about your customer interest. From where they shop? Which social media do they use? What kind of marketing channel can be used to reach your audience?
  • Be Specific: What kind of product the person is interested in? What are their preferences? How can you meet their expectations?
  • What are the motivations that drive people to choose your company, products, and services?

These are the very important questions you need to answer. You can use Google Analytics to learn about the demography of your target audience.

5. Locate your customers:

This is another important step that is used for determining your marketing channels. For example, you are selling web hosting Your prospective customer may:

  • Search web hosting service on Google and find your website on the top pages.
  • Read a blog where you are featured.
  • Find you on a sponsored advertisement on social media such as Facebook.
  • Opt-in your email campaign featuring an option to buy your web hosting service at a discounted price.
  • If you have enough information about customer location, it will be easy to run your digital marketing campaign.

6. Set your digital marketing budget:

Before starting your digital marketing campaign, you need to set your digital marketing budget. When you determine your budget, you can distribute it into your marketing channels based on your focus. If you are trying to get organic traffic, you need to invest in content marketing and SEO.

7. Make your content marketing plan:

You need to create a specific content plan for each marketing channel. Determine your content to attract your audience. You should have a comprehensive strategy that is made up of a series of steps to deliver a complete message to your potential customers. You need to maintain a specific schedule so that all actions taken by you can be measured properly.

Content Strategy Checklist:

  • Keyword Strategy: determine the keywords you want to cover up in your content.
  • Set up the content calendar: You need to create your schedule for publishing your content. Your content calendar should be specific. The calendar should include the topic, meta keyword, publishing date, author, tags, etc.
  • Breakdown your schedule into the year, month, week, and daily basis.
  • Specify social media content: You need to determine what kind of content you want to publish on which social media channels. And also think about the frequency of publishing content.
  • Marketing automation tools: There are various automation tools out there that can save your time and effort. Once your content strategy is ready, you can use these tools.

8. Track your results: 

Monitor customer feedback and measure the digital marketing performance of your strategies by tracking their performance. You can use different tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and so on to measure your performance.

Building a digital marketing strategy that includes all eight of these steps will allow you to understand the whole process and the impact of digital marketing on your business. Keep in mind that this is a step-by-step process and don’t skip any step. You can locate your customers without building buyer personas. You can’t think about content types until you’ve crafted your marketing channels. If you are focusing on marketing your business digitally, you need some experts for execution.

Datacenters

How to Choose the Best Hosting Location for Your Website

Posted on Posted by Saief Mahmud Categories Web Hosting

Does the website hosting location have an impact on website speed?

Yes. Your website hosting location has an impact on the website speed. If you have 60% visitors from USA, your website should be hosted in the USA rather than Singapore or Europe. In the same way, if the most visitors are from UK, you should choose UK or European location hosting. This is because of the network latency and TTFB.

What is Network Latency & TTFB?

Network Latency means the time to complete the data transmission from your browser to the server over a network. The longer the distance the data transmission take. The longer the distance the data must go, the longer it will take to reach its user. Network latency is typically measured in milliseconds; however, it could go up to seconds depending on the network.

network latency

On the other hand, the TTFB (time to the first byte) measures the amount of time it takes when a web browser sends a request to a server and when it receives its first byte of data. The longer the distance the data must go, the longer it will take to serve your website’s page.

We won’t get into all the technical aspects in this post; all you need to have in mind is that the network latency and TTFB should be as low as possible.

An effective way to achieve low latency & TTFB is to choose a server location closest to your visitors.

We will share some effective suggestions you can follow to select the most perfect hosting location for your website.

 

Check the geolocation of your visitors

First of all, you need to check the geolocation of your visitors. One of the easiest ways to check visitor’s location is to on your Google Analytics account.

To do that, log in to your Analytics account, and go to Audience → Geo → Location

You will find countries from where you are getting traffic. You can also choose your target country. Even if you are running a local business, you can choose the city where you are operating your business.

Google Analytics Geolocation

At the starting of this post, we mentioned that 60% visitors are coming from USA, so you should host your website in the US location server.

If you are targeting global audience, you can use CDN (Content Delivery Network) for your website. We will discuss about CDN later in this article.

Do a quick latency test

There are some fantastic tools to check latency from your current location to your hosting provider, like Ping, Traceroute or MTR ( a combination of Ping and Traceroute). This will evaluate which location can be best for your website. Keep in mind that, the lower the ping result, the better.

Do a quick TTFB test

You can check TTBF & web performance using KeyCDN Performance Test tool. With this amazing tool you can test from 14 locations around the world.

  1. Go to https://tools.keycdn.com/performance
  2. Insert your domain in the search bar
  3. Hit the Test button

Keep in mind that, the lower the TTFB result, the better.

performance test

There are some other free tools you can use to check TTFB such as GTmetrix or Pingdome. Here you will find TTFB as the wait time.

As per Google’s recommendation, any TTFB result less than 200 ms is ideal. 200-500 ms is considered as good.

Choose a server location closest to your visitors

If your target audience and maximum traffic is from Singapore and your website is hosted in Canada, You website data need to travel one-third of the globe to reach the end-user. That’s why you are always recommended to host your website to the closer location of your visitor. If you already did that and your website speed is still now slow, probably you should consider changing your web hosting provider.

At VernalWeb, we have 3 different data centers across the world from where you can choose your hosting location.

  • USA
  • Canada
  • Singapore

This allows you to host your website close to your target visitors. This will help you create a fast website.

Is there any way to reduce latency?

If you are targeting global visitors for your website, CDN (Content Delivery Network) is very effective way to get low latency. A CDN stores your website static content in different data center location around the globe and delivers the content to the user from its closest data center. No matter where your visitor comes from, your website will load very quickly to that user.

VernalWeb has partnered with CloudFlare, a global CDN company and all our hosting plans include free CDN service. Using Cloudflare CDN, your website loading time will reduce significantly and you will get excellent performance.

Summery

Website loading speed matters a lot in case of web performance and customer satisfaction. No one loves a slow website, right? Choosing a good hosting service close to your target audience will ensure fast loading speed & increase your web presence.

If you are thinking of moving your website to server location closest to your visitors now is the moment. We are offering free website migration with our all hosting plans.

We are offering 50% OFF on any of our web hosting plans.

website speed optimization

Top 12 Techniques to Website Speed Optimization

Posted on Posted by Saief Mahmud Categories Marketing & SEO

How much important is your website speed? Suppose you have visited a website to find a solution or information. While visiting, the website is loading & loading. How do you feel? You will be annoyed and leave the website and move to another one, right? The same thing happens to another user if your website is slow. You will loss traffic as well as conversion. User will have a negative impression about your website. Slow website is one of the most frustrating things that will make your awesome content useless. Website speed optimization has become the key factor for good conversion.

High speed websites bring higher traffic, greater conversion, low bounce rate, higher ranks in search engines & better impressions. Low website speed will ruin your cost & business and you will get nothing in return. By optimizing your website speed, you will get high traffic and good traffic means good leads that can be converted to your customers. So, you can understand how speed optimization is important for your website. In this article, we will discuss about website optimization process and give some effective recommendations.

How Website Speed Influences Success

Website speed is actually your web page loading speed. Reducing page load time of your website will bring greater user-experience and you will gain higher conversion rate. A good quality user-experience is directly related to visibility. Visibility means how a user can find your website. Website speed is one of the important factors that Google takes into consideration while ranking a website for organic search. Poor performance leads a website to bad user-experience and as a result search engines mark that website as unimportant & less useful. So search engines are not interested to promote this type of website. Another factor is poor website performance losses usability & customer loyalty. The better a website performs, the more positive impression it will get.

12 Most Effective Ways to Optimize Website Speed

Before starting your website speed optimization, you need to determine current loading time so that you can track the optimization & development level.  Then you should set your website performance goal. The recommended page loading time is under 3 seconds. So if you can optimize your website speed to an acceptable level, you will get a significant ranking boost in the search engines.

There are several free website speed & performance checkers you can try:

  • GTmetrix is a great tool where you can check current website performance & speed. Also you will get recommendations for optimizing your website. Following their suggestions, you will be able to increase the performance as well as speed.
  • Google Pagespeed Insights is another great tool operated by Google that will show separate website performance score for both Mobile & Desktop. It also shows Opportunities & Diagnostics of your website and gives optimization scope.
  • Pingdom allows you to test the website speed with a number of great features. You can check the speed from several locations like USA, Japan, and Germany and many more. Pingdom checks your website, tracks the performance, makes data-driven optimization recommendations, and provides simple yet effective reports.

1. Choose The Right Hosting

There are different types of hosting services based on performance & cost:

Depending on your website features & traffic, you need to select the right hosting. Suppose you have a new website or blog with zero or very little traffic. You can host your website on basic shared hosting plan. If your website grows in a right way, you can scale up with a larger plan or a VPS. Again, if you have an ecommerce website with a good traffic, you can use VPS hosting or dedicated one to get a good performance. You have to use resources depending on your requirements.

2. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Content delivery networks, also called Content distribution networks are networks of servers that are used to distribute your content across the geographical areas based on the user location. With CDN, user requests are responded from nearest server. That’s why website content is delivered to a user quicker and the website works faster. All our hosting services include free CDN

3. Optimize Images

Images play a vital role in website engagement & performance. You have to use eye-catching & perfect pixel images in your website to get optimized performance. In case of eCommerce website, images are highly used. The negative side of the image is it is usually large file and it slows down a website.

So using a compressed version of image is the best solution. There are various tools out there for image compression like TinyPNG, ImageOptim, JPEGmini, or Kraken. Another way to optimize the image size without losing quality is to use the HTML responsive images attributes that adjust image size based on visitor display properties. Another effective way is to create a template for images using CSS sprites. CSS sprites combine your images into one large image file that loads all at once and then display only the sections that you want to show. It makes fewer HTTP requests and website loads faster.

4. Enable Gzip Compression

Gzip Compression is a great way to reduce total size of files. It not only minimizes the HTTP requests but also reduces the server response time. Gzip compresses all files and sends them to the browser. The browser unzips the files and shows to the destination user. This is an effective way to reduce website loading time significantly.

5. Improve Server Response Time

Your server response time is determined by your total traffic, resources used by pages, software used by server and few other things. If you want to improve your server response time, check all those factors and fix them. Slow database queries, slow routing or lower memory may slow down your website. So check all these factors and make sure nothing is making obstacle on your website. For more details, you can follow KeyCDN Guidelines.

6. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML Files

Your website shows all content by using its codes. By optimizing your code, you can make your website light-weight & super-fast. Make sure your codes are not formatted and have no extra spaces or gaps, unnecessary characters and unused codes. Google recommends Resource Minification.

7. Leverage Browser Caching

Browsers cache static resources like images, CSS, JavaScript files to make browsing faster when a user comes back to a website. The browser serves the stored files to the user and it doesn’t need to load the full web page. You can set Expiration date for how long your website resources will be cached. Google recommends to set cache time for minimum 1 week and up to 1 year for static assets.

8. Optimize Database

Database is a key player for dynamic website. If you are using content management system (CMS) like WordPress with heavy plugins for your website, your database can be over-sized. It decreases your website speed. Optimizing database (removing unused tables, drafts, trashed or temporary information) can dramatically increase your site speed.

9. Use Latest PHP Version

Older PHP version may slow down your website. Always try to use the latest PHP version for your website. It makes your website performance better and enhances website security.

10. Reduce external scripts

External scripts are not in your control. So if your website loads a script from another website that has poor load time, your website performance will fall down.

11. Reduce Redirects

Website redirection creates extra HTTP requests which are bad for a website. It increases the load time and makes the website slower. You are recommended to keep the redirects minimum and if possible completely remove them.

12. Use Custom 404 Page

All websites should have custom 404 error page. It increases the user engagement and Google recommends creating 404 page for any website so that users aren’t lost away.

In the end, this is always recommended that you should keep your website light & simple. Don’t exaggerate with unnecessary resources. Keep in mind that simplicity is the best thing you will ever have.

Reseller Hosting business

7 Ways To Market Your Reseller Hosting Business

Posted on Posted by Saief Mahmud Categories Marketing & SEO, Web Hosting

In comparison to other businesses, the web hosting business is very easy to start. You can purchase a reseller hosting plan and start providing shared hosting to your customers. However, like with any business getting customers in the door is usually the hard part. Here are 7 easy to implement tips that can help drive customers through your door and hopefully to more sales.

1. Google Adwords

If you’re not ranking well in Google you can opt to use Google Adwords to get your business in front of potential buyers. If you’re new to Hosting however this could be a little expensive so f you’re going to enter the world of Google Adwords try targeting a specific product or search term that’s less competitive and you should see a better return in your investment.

2. Referral Program

Most billing systems such as WHMCS and Clientexec have an inbuilt referral or affiliate system. Put together a competitive referral program and let your customers drive business for you, it’s cheaper than Adwords and your reach will be a lot greater.

3. Get a Blog and write

Content is still king. Start a blog and put up useful content that people will want to read about and hopefully pass on through social platforms. Don’t be afraid of telling all and sharing some insights about your Reseller Hosting Business and more importantly giving answers to problems that took you days to work, I bet you someone else out there is probably on Google looking for an article on how they can fix the same problem you just worked out.

4. Participate in Forums

Forums are still great, one for Australians is Web Hosting Talk Australia, we’re active on there along with a number of other providers. Forums are a great place to share ideas, solve problems, talk to potential customers and share some of your special offers.

5. Customer Testimonials

If you don’t have any get some, if you already have some get more! We refresh our testimonials every 3 months after we conduct our quarterly surveys, this list should be growing year on year and make sure that the testimonials are easily accessible for your visitors.

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You want your website to rank well so make sure that you at least do basic SEO on your website isn’t hard, update your meta tags, fix broken links, add a robot.txt file, etc. And when you have the funds available hire an SEO consultant.

7. Develop Relationships

There is always more business to be found and one great way to get more leads without much leg work is through opportunities with local web designers. Build partnerships where you provide hosting in exchange for web design leads.

These are some really easy ways to increase your market share and if you’re not doing any just go out there and tackle one at a time until you’re nailing every one of them. No matter what size your business if you regularly revisit this list and measure how you are performing you will be able to drive more growth to your web hosting business.  If you have any other tips or experiences that you can share I’d love to hear them!

domain name system

What Is the DNS (And How Does It Work)?

Posted on Posted by Saief Mahmud Categories Web Hosting

When you want to start your own website, you need to find a domain name for you. There are different sites where you can search for domains by your brand name. Once the name match with your brand or your necessity, you can go for the domain registration work. However, after registering your domain name, when someone inputs the domain name in the browser, the domain name server redirect you to the website. If you want to know what is DNS and how it works, just read till the end.

What is DNS?

DNS is the short form of Domain Name Servers or Domain Name System. This is the system that controls your domain name website. When visitors input your domain name, they input it as “domainname.com.” But the domain name server fix in which company’s server it will reach. The system translates the name into the IP address. Though people can read domain names with words, but machines identify a website based on the IP address. Your hosting company and the Internet service provider interact with the central system with the DNS. When you type a domain name in the browser, the internet service provider view this as the DNS which is associated with the domain name. So, your domain needs to be as machine friendly name. The machine friendly name may like 236.128.224.70 or something else. And the DNS system works with this name.

How Does the DNS Work?

DNS process

The DNS work in different steps. Here I am going to explain each step with necessary data.

Step 1: This is the beginning step of the whole procedure. In this step, when a visitor types the name of the domain, at first your computer or any other device that you are using looks its local DNS cache which stores your previous information that the device recently saved. If the device doesn’t get the answer, it goes in the second step.

Step 2: In this step, the device asks the recursive DNS servers through your ISP. Usually, the recursive servers have their own cache, and if the device gets the answer, the process ends here, and it returns to the user. Otherwise, it will query for the next step.

Step 3: In this step, your device or the machine query to the root nameservers. A nameserver is a machine that answers about different information include domain names and IP addresses. The nameserver is like a telephone switchboard, though it doesn’t know the answer, but it can navigate the way to someone else who knows the answer.

Step 4: The nameserver starts to read from right to left to query your search. The nameserver directs your query to TLD or top level domain nameservers. Different extensions like .com, .org, .net etc. has their own nameservers. Though these servers don’t have the answer but it can refer the user directly to the servers where the user will get the information.

Step 5: In this step, the query goes to the authoritative nameservers, and they are responsible for knowing all related information. They contain different type of data. When you are asking for a specific IP address, it asks to the authoritative nameserver for the address record.

Step 6: Now, the recursive server repossesses the record from the authoritative nameservers and then store the record to the local cache. So, whenever another person has the same query, it answers directly from the cache. Though this data remains for a particular time duration like the expire date. The recursive server asks for a new copy after the period to ensure the information is not going to out of date.

Step 7: This is the last step, and the recursive server returns the record to the device that the user using the query. That is the way the device stores the record in its cache and reads the IP address of the record. Then it sends the information to the browser and the browser connect to the webserver and receives the website.

Though this is a critical process, but for the whole process, it only takes milliseconds.

EzzyTech provides WordPress Hosting, Joomla Hosting, Drupal Hosting, PHP Hosting, Magento Hosting, OpenCart Hosting, Prestashop Hosting and they are the best, reliable & affordable web hosting service provider.

Thank you for reading the article and hope it can help you a lot.

joomla security

Introduction to Most Common Joomla Security Issues

Posted on Posted by Saief Mahmud Categories Security

Joomla is a free open-source content management system(CMS) built with MVC Framework. Being 2nd most widely used CMS, Joomla is empowering millions of businesses and blogs. As a major issue, security has become one of the most common tech-talks of the online systems. Today we will have some discussion on Joomla security issues and try to find out some technical solutions. Follow our complete guideline to harden your Joomla security and help prevent yourself from getting hacked.

Weak Admin Password:

Most of the CMS get hacked with just poor/common administrator user & password. This is very common weakness in all content management systems. Hackers apply scripts on CMS with common username such as admin or administrator or something like this. Using common username can facilitate hackers up to 50% to access your website admin panel. The most common way of getting access for an unwanted or hacker to a joomla website is using weak user & password combination by the end user.  The following user and password combinations  that hackers try:

  • admin – admin
  • nimda – admin
  • admin – password
  • nimda – drowssap

Software enables hackers to run millions of guesses a second.

So if you are serious about being, try to use uncommon username which can’t be guessed and longer passwords with a combination of small & capital letters, numbers and a few special characters. You can configure your server to block ‘brute force password attempts’, for the main just setting a strong password is enough.

 

Outdated Joomla Core Files:

Joomla is built with a large amount of PHP files behind a MySQL (or MS-SQL) database. These files are constantly being updated on the Joomla’s Github page with new updates, features and security patches to the Joomla CMS.

All things considered the Joomla Core engineers discharge one refresh at regular intervals, discharging new updates and security patches to the Joomla people group.

 

Keeping core files up to date is one of the best way to avoid hackers, there are presently additional items that educate you of a refresh in the manager range and can refresh your Joomla site with only several ticks.

 

Poorly Coded Extensions:

I’ve seen some that query the database with parameters passed straight from the URL. This implies somebody could sort a bit of code into a URL bar on a program and get to your database. These poorly coded additional items get answered to the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) and expelled, tragically individuals will have just downloaded them and began utilizing them.

Many websites list extentions with common problems. If you are serious enough about your website security as well as your user credentials, you should check on all, of your third party extensions.

And old and obsolate extentions are more dangerous and serious issue of getting caught by hackers. Stay update & be safe.

 

Legacy Directories/Code:

For any website that has been on the web for more than two or three years, it’s presumable that it has collected some inheritance code. In the event that this code isn’t cleaned up, it fundamentally builds the odds that the site will be traded off. This is on the grounds that after some time an ever increasing number of vulnerabilities are found by programmers. Time to clean up your filesystem.

The 3 most common scenarios:

  • The webmaster or site builder installs an extension, doesn’t end up using it, and forgets about it.
  • A Joomla developer working on the site creates a staging or backup directory to test some updates in. Once the updates are incorporated in the live site forgets to remove the staging directory from the server.
  • The website uses multiple applications and while one is actively updated the others are neglected. For example, a Joomla site with a WordPress blog that is not updated.

 

No Joomla Backup Routine:

Importance of keeping regular backup of your website whether it is Joomla or any other CMS can’t be expressed in words. Suppose, your website has somehow got hacked. If you have backup file, you can easily replace with this clean files. But without backup, it’s so much tough to ensure your hacked site is completely clean & inacessible by hakers.

Besides this, Regular backup will ensure your safety from any type of sudden disaster.

 

Common Database Name & Credentials:

Common DB name & credentials may make you victim of hacking. Working with uncommon database & user will make your website more secure and prevent you from SQL Injection vulnerability.

 

Cheap Joomla Hosting:

Just one question for you. Why do you go for cheapest or free hosting? The answer may be to save money.

But your website data is more valuable than the amount of money you are saving with purchasing cheap or free hosting.

Cheap hosting with poor security can make a huge loss for your website that you can’t see in the white eyes. Not all the cheap providers are bad. But you have to find out the perfect one for you. A good hosting service can ensure your  optimum security and look after your data properly.

 

That finishes up our rundown of the main ten Joomla security issues. In the event that these influence you and you require proficient Joomla security specialists to help you with an irregular bundle or long haul continuous help, you can get in touch with us.