It’s been a year since American computer professional Edward Joseph Snowden, who is a former systems administrator for the Central Intelligence Agency and counterintelligence trainer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, disclosed to several media outlets thousands of classified documents that he had access to while working as a contractor for the National Security Agency. The act turned the once obscure NSA contractor into the face of a nationwide movement that calls on the US government to be more transparent when it comes to their surveillance of its citizens.

As expected, Snowden’s leak and the wave of outrage that followed affected not just the government but also service providers that handle and host data on the World Wide Web. People were already skeptical of the privacy that are afforded to them on the Internet, but are at least relying on the assurance that companies that collect their private information will keep it to themselves.

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The straw that finally broke the proverbial camel’s back was the realization that their personal info is not safe even if these big name, multinational corporations had no intention of sharing their data, as they can be forced to hand over customer data to government agencies via orders issued by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court orders without any notice before or after the fact. What’s worse, Snowden’s leak revealed that the NSA has secretly intercepted unencrypted data from Google’s private data centers.

One of the biggest changes that has come out of the Snowden leaks is that US web hosts’ reputation has suffered a great deal, as users now know that no matter which host they use, they tend to be at risk of getting their privacy stepped on by the government. This in turn led to many businesses moving to hosts that don’t have servers located within U.S. jurisdiction.

The main problem that people have with the revelation brought by the Snowden leaks goes beyond the vulnerability of their data on servers hosted on US soil, as that is easily solved by not hosting something that would mean trouble for them from a legal standpoint. The bigger problem is that it gives the government raw, unchecked authority to access private files, which could then be used to build cases for targets of legal prosecution, regardless of the validity or relevance to the current charges.

In order to avoid further losses, many large tech companies such as Google, Yahoo, Dropbox, Microsoft, Apple, and others, have started a group called the Reform Government Surveillance, which calls on the government’s help to restore the confidence of people on the Internet and many IT services, with the first agenda being pushed essentially calling for US surveillance efforts to be reigned in by transparent and clearly defined laws.

As mentioned above, until the U.S. government manages to fix the can of worms that the Snowden leaks have opened, Cloud and Web Hosting Companies with servers in the U.S. will have to contend with losing customers to foreign service providers outside of U.S. jurisdiction.

With over 550 million (and growing) Chinese residents regularly accessing the Internet, it is a fresh new market that any foreign company or business would love to tap into. However, actually getting your website viewed in China is way more difficult than simply getting a .CN TLD and translating your website contents into Mandarin.

The thing is that internet users based in China have to go through what most people refer to as The Great Firewall of China, which is basically the Chinese government’s national firewall, which is very restrictive and will block majority of outside traffic. Thankfully, there are processes that you can go through in order to make your website viewable in China, and Prestige can help you along the way.

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First Things First: Getting a .CN Domain

Prestige allows you to use any of your own domain for their hosting service, and also lets you buy one through their partnerships with various online registrars. Make sure you get a .CN domain. While China doesn’t block most domain names, you stand a better chance of being visible on the country if you are using a .cn domain.

Prestige’s Servers Are Fast

The thing about the great firewall of china is that they lead to all sorts of slowdown on the user’s end. Add the fact that many of the Chinese surfers that want to access foreign sites use VPNs, and you’ve got enough slowdown to turn off most impatient users. Benchmarks have pointed to anywhere from 6 to 10 seconds of additional loadtime for U.S.-based servers.

With Prestige, we don’t oversell our servers’ capacities so it will not be bogged down on our end, ensuring that lag from your end is minimized. It’s not going to make your site load instantly in China, but every little bit helps.

Our Company is based in a Country that is On Good Terms with China

It’s not a secret that the Chinese government has a less than sterling relationship with the U.S., and there is some hostility between the two when it comes to IT (all you need to do is do a research on the allegedly federally-subsidised hacking groups from both sides), so the great wall of china is naturally sensitive towards companies that are based on the U.S. While Prestige does have servers in the U.S., the company is a legitimate U.K. business, so most of our servers aren’t on China’s list of IPs to watch out for.

Last But Not the Least: Controversial Content

The Chinese government is extremely strict when it comes to two kinds of controversial content: adult and political. So if you’re planning to build an online presence in China, make sure your site doesn’t have either of the two. What passes for political content can be a little bit hard to pinpoint if you’re outside of China, so try to browse around Chinese news sites – if a news item is being reported in there, you can consider it as something that’s allowed by their firewall.

If your site is hosting controversial content, you can still get through by applying for an ICP license (Internet Content Provider), which is a permit issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information technology (MIIT). However, that is something that you have to personally do as the owner of the website. More details on how to apply can be found at the MIIT website (miit.gov.cn)

One of the hurdles that any decent IT department has to hurdle is getting the higher ups to understand the importance of maintaining a stable technical environment, as the higher ups rarely have any idea as to what a system downtime means with regard to the company’s bottom line.

The bosses know downtime costs money, but they rarely understand exactly how much money. This means they rarely understand how devastating a downtime can be. It’s not just executives, sometimes the IT heads themselves choose to bring down a server for maintenance during business hours, not realizing exactly how much they are costing the company. So how do you calculate the exact cost of your downtime?

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First, we need to define system downtime; basically, it is when the system is unavailable to the user. So even if an application and the hardware it runs on are both up and running, if the application can’t be used for any reason, then the system is technically “down.” (more…)

Administrators – at least the ones who actually know how to do their job – already know that no network is completely safe from crashes and outages regardless of how good the administrators are and how robust their systems are, but the August 2003 widespread power outage in the U.S. Northeast hammered the point home, with many firms at that time suffering their first lengthy downtime in many years.

There are a few things that weren’t part of people’s crash plans in the past and were considered overkill, that are now shown to be needed after the August 2003 blackout took out many big name sites. If you want to set up your site’s crash plan and be ready for unexpected outages, you should add the following things to your list:

Click here and try out our service for six months for FREE. No credit card required. (more…)

Designing a really good text-heavy website can be a bit of a balancing act. It’s common knowledge that text content is still the best vehicle for delivering information and helps make it easier to get indexed by search engines, but being too text heavy can turn away visitors – especially now that surfers have started developing a taste for images and multimedia content.

These days, it is much easier to throw together an image-heavy website with just the right amount of text for search engines to index and call it a day but some websites have proven that there is still room for heavy text content that delivers a great amount of information without detracting from the aesthetics. Some of the best include:

Polygon.com

Polygon is a video game review site, so heavy text content is expected along with heavy use of images, mainly because there is a need to present screen captures of the games, on account of video games being a visual medium.

In Polygon’s case, they make full use of long-scrolling unconventional layouts that help break the heavy text content into digestible chunks, which are then supported by visually appealing images. This gives the Polygon website a magazine-like look. Additionally, their site search is both functional and readily available instead of being obscured by other website elements.

Condenast.com

Conde Nast if the parent company of various heavily-circulated print magazines, so it’s not surprising that their website takes on a magazine-like feel and makes effective use of both heavy text content and images. The site makes good use of a big, visually appealing content slider on the header in order to make it easier for readers to see the most important things on the site when it first loads. Additionally, it also has customizable filters so there’s no risk of information overload – users can freely filter the presentation down to just the content that are relevant to their interests.

USAtoday.com

Prestige Technologies can develop and host websites that capture visitors, convert visitors to leads and leads to customers. Click here. (more…)

Overall, the global economy is not conducive to running small businesses. Large companies are either big enough to weather the downturn or are actually growing stronger due to their ability to gobble up small businesses that are losing revenue. Thankfully, it’s not all doom-and-gloom for small businesses. There is one key area where small businesses are actually getting the upper hand: online.

Web hosts have leveraged the playing field, allowing small businesses to keep up (and sometimes even best) large multinational corporations when it comes to reaching new potential customers and clients. Here are a few ways how web hosts can boost small businesses:

1. Cost-Efficient Marketing and Advertising – with traditional tri-media marketing campaigns and advertising, companies need to spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars just to reach people across the country for a short amount of time. Whereas for the fraction of its cost, a small business can get a web host, build a decent web site for their brand, and gain exposure to people all over the globe.

2. Allows Efficient and Personalized Communication with Customers – customer support is one of the areas where small businesses are disadvantaged compared to large corporations, as they simply don’t have the budget to hire an army of customer support staff and their tools. A web host will provide the infrastructure upon which a small business can reach out to customers from any location and give support on a more efficient and personal level, without the need to hire a ton of people.

Click here and sign up for Prestige Technologies’ 6 months free plan. You will get all the benefits of a paid plan for FREE. NO credit card required. (more…)