For a long time now, offsite backups are considered as very secure and safe from infiltrators, as they only ever target the main servers and on-site backups because that’s where the payoffs are. However, URL shortening service Bitly has recently revealed that an unauthorized individual may have compromised an offsite database backup service that hosts their user details.

Bitly was made aware of the breach on May 8, when the security team of another technology company informed them of the breach. Bitly CTO Rob Platzer reveals in a blog post that they are confident that no external connections were made to their own production user database, and that their network has not been breached by any unauthorized individuals.

Click here and learn about the redundant security and back up system of Prestige Technologies. Sign up and automatically get your first 6 months free. No credit card required.

However, the third party security team saw that they have an unusually large amount of traffic from their offsite database backup storage, with the access not being initiated by anyone from Bitly. (more…)

One of the odd things about enterprises these days is that they recognize the need to digitize, but they go about it in such a roughshod and disorganized way that it creates a lot of wasteful spending, wreaking havoc on their IT budget. With different departments usually implementing digitization on their own, resulting in islands of digitized departments for engineering, production and operations, R & D, knowledge work, and even customer interaction. In order to avoid these largely inefficient moves to being digital, companies usually take one of these approaches:

Convergence

This approach is used by enterprises in order to make the move centralized upon one focal point, consolidating key assets such as people, data, infrastructure, skills and management processes. This is done by bringing all digitization investments together under one key executive.

Coordination

This approach is done when the organization doesn’t want to disrupt the structure too much, instead adding mechanisms that will help increase coordination of the big digital investments, usually through engineering, operations, product owners and other enterprise groups. Aside from minimizing disruption, it also helps units work together in the delivery of enterprise goals.

Click here and learn about the tools and services that Prestige Technologies extends to help your business digitize faster. You can get 6 months free. No credit card required. (more…)

The recent Google Panda refresh not only brings the infamous algorithm to 4.0, it also heralds a new direction in which updates to the algorithm will happen on a regular and unannounced basis. This means your SERPs could change any time without any warning, so it has become important to stay on top and get alerted to major SERP changes. Thankfully, Rank Ranger’s Risk Index can do the job for you.

How it Works

The Rank Ranger Risk Index is able to measure fluctuations in the SERPs for more than 10 thousand domains and keywords, which are monitored daily. The rankings can be brought up on any particular date, with higher risk indexes showing more movements in the SERPs. If you see any alarming fluctuations, then you can go ahead and check your rankings just to see if any specific action is required on your end.

Rank Ranger monitors sites that are more likely to be using SEO strategies that run the gamut, from white hat to black hat and everything in between. This makes it more likely to catch major algorithm changes from Google, particularly ones that hit one camp over the other.

Another use to Rank Ranger is it lets you spot trends in SEO, if there’s a new strategy that’s been showing a good increase in webmasters’ traffic. From there, you can decide whether it’s something that you should adopt or something that’s going to be on Google’s chopping blocks soon (and should therefore be avoided.)

Prestige Technologies goes beyond web hosting. We provide you tools and assistance to help you boost your business via your website. Click here and sign up for our free 6 months hosting. No credit card required. (more…)

Content Delivery Networks (or CDNs) are very useful and can solve many problems for websites who value availability and user experience. However, they’re not exactly a requirement and whether or not you need one for your site depends on various factors.

But First, What is CDN?

CDNs are essentially designed to address problems with global availability, bandwidth constraints, and latency. If the server that hosts your website’s files are located in the US while the user browsing them is in France, the request for the data and the data itself will have to travel from the US to France. Data travels fast, especially now that we have fiber optic cables serving as the pathways, but the time it takes to make a roundtrip is still affected by distance and the number of data that must travel (it’s not uncommon for a single page from a website to contain at least 100 objects that need to be sent to and fro.)

Click here sign up for 6 months free hosting. You will have access to all utilities available to a paid account including 24/7 free technical support.

A CDN addresses the problem of latency by caching static resources in edge caches (or points of presence – basically distributed servers) located in various parts of the world, ensuring that the resources can be accessed in places that are nearer to the user, thereby reducing round trip time. (more…)

Webmasters should always be ready for the day when they have to migrate their site to a new host. Even if the current host is perfect, there’s no guarantee that they will stay the same forever. Or maybe a better host will come along, or maybe the current one suddenly goes out of business.

Regardless of the reason, you should be ready to move your site without undergoing too much of a hassle. If you want your migration to a new host be efficient and with minimal downtime, you should take the following into consideration:

Make Regular (and Full) Backups Of Your Site

You don’t want to be that guy who only makes a backup of his entire site at the moment he has to migrate to a new host. The really big migrations can occur as a result of a host suddenly disappearing or a host being so unreliable that their servers frequently corrupt your databases.

Click here and test the efficiency of Prestige Technologies with 6 months free hosting.

If you don’t have any backups yet by the time you’re forced by circumstances to change hosts, you’ll find yourself with just bits and pieces of your old site available, which can be so difficult to restore that you’d find it easier to just start a new site from scratch. Additionally, really big, established sites take a lot of time to back up, so you don’t want to be rushing everything at the last minute. (more…)

When it comes to choosing a hosting solution, most people find it easy to choose between a dedicated host and a shared host because of the price difference between the two (the former costs more than the latter,) with people either choosing shared because they want to save money or going with dedicated hosting because they subscribe to the “you get what you pay for” mentality. However, the truth is that there are other factors to consider besides the price when deciding if dedicated hosting is the best option.

You can get 6 MONTHS FREE HOSTING and discover what makes our clients stick with us. No credit card required.

Difference Between Shared and Dedicated Hosting

As the name implies, the main difference between dedicated and shared hosting is the resources they use. A shared hosting shares server resources with other accounts, while dedicated usually get its own server. Dedicated hosting is essentially akin to a web host leasing server hardware to the client, with some hosts also including software as part of the package. The client then has full control of the server, where he can have as much traffic to his website (at least, as much as the server can handle) without worrying about other websites. He can also install applications that he wants and doesn’t have to worry about security concerns normally associated with sharing space with other websites.

Benefits of Dedicated Hosting

Of course, you’re not paying more for dedicated hosting just for the sake of status. There are practical and justifiable reasons why a dedicated host costs more than shared, such as:

1. Flexibility – a dedicated host will allow you to use as many or as little of your server’s resources – be it bandwidth, memory, or hard drive space – provided that it remains within the limits allotted by your plan.

2. Greater Control Over the Server – since you’re not sharing the server with other users, you’ll be given much greater control and access. One great example of this is root access, which is usually not allowed on shared services.

3. Stability – this is easily the most important benefit of a dedicated host. The fact that you’re not sharing the server’s resources means that you don’t have to worry about your site’s performance being affected by other websites. You can also rest assured that you won’t be outgrowing your server anytime soon.

So Is Dedicated Hosting Really The Best Option?

Technically, dedicated hosting is the best hosting that your money can buy, but that doesn’t exactly mean that it’s the best solution for you. A Porsche may be the best car that your money can buy, but is it the car you should buy if you’re just going to drive it a few blocks to work every day?

Basically, if you have a personal site that won’t generate much traffic, a dedicated hosting might be considered as overkill. There’s no need to spend too much money on a dedicated hosting plan if you won’t need the kind of benefits it gives. However, if your site generates tons of traffic and requires utmost stability and security, dedicated hosting is the best solution for you.

Many developers these days tend to neglect the importance of writing production-aware code, which could come back to bite them somewhere down the road. After all, programs are always written to run somewhere into production. We don’t want to delve too much into advanced topics such as aspect-oriented programming or aspect weaving, so we’re going to tackle four of the basic dimensions of code instrumentation, which also serve as examples of the best practices that should be followed by all software developers:

1. Tracing

Tracing is the first important element of code instrumentation. Adding traces to your code might be frowned upon by some developers because it could impact performance in some scenarios, but this is easily solved by adding different tracing levels that can be configured at runtime. Additionally, the benefit will outweigh the minimal performance hit.

Many developers favor debugging over tracing, but the problem with debugging is that the effort is rendered for naught once they close their development tool. Tracing, on the other hand, will allow developers to leverage the trace information and understand as well as address issues even well into production. Additionally, tracing’s benefits can be leveraged even by different developers who wish to contribute into a project somewhere down the line.

Click here and get FREE 6 MONTHS HOSTING. No credit card required. (more…)

One of the most frequently asked questions about start-ups is “how do you make a startup succeed?” The answer to the question is easy, but completely useless: you make something that users want. Answering exactly what users want is the hard part because it changes over time and is affected by many factors. Besides, if it were easy, no startup would ever fail and everybody will be a startup millionaire.

The better question is “how do you make a startup fail?” because the answers are based on examples of past failed startups. Additionally, the answers can be used to eliminate things that wouldn’t work, making it easier to get a startup to succeed. Here are 10 of the most common (and easily avoided) start up screw ups:

1. Having Only One Founder – quick, think of a successful startup that was founded by a single person. Can’t think of one? Even companies that look like they were only founded by a single person, like Oracle, actually have more. This is not a coincidence. The thing is that having no other founder is a sign that the person can’t talk any of his friends to start the company with him, which shows that nobody except him is confident in the idea. Next, running a startup is hard work that no single person can do alone. The amount of work required and the pressures involved in getting the business up and running requires multiple founders that can help and support each other even in the lowest points.

Click here and see how Prestige Technologies transcends traditional services that other web hosting companies provide in order to help you create websites that convert. (more…)

We all believe in the adage “nobody is perfect,” and it’s true even for web developers. Even the most experienced ones still commit mistakes that make you scratch your head. Here are some of the most common ones:

Lack of Search Box

Many websites, even ones designed by seasoned web developers still don’t have a search box. All websites need a search box. Even if you have the most user-friendly layout and navigational tools, it is still easier for visitors to just search for the content he wants using a search box. In fact, visitors tend to stay longer by randomly typing search strings at the search box than manually navigating the menus and site links.

Try Prestige Technologies with the first 6 months of your hosting free. Click here.

Additionally, adding a search box to your website isn’t even that difficult even if you have no coding skills. Google provides a search box that you can add to your own layout simply by copy and pasting a snippet of HTML code. (more…)

These days, the possibility of a cyber attack affecting your files – whether they are on a remote network or a local workstation – is no longer a matter of IF, but WHEN. You can keep your OS and softwares perfectly up to date and install the best anti-malware available, but you’re still not safe from hardware crashes and physical media corruption. If you really value your data, you need to have a regularly updated backup of your sensitive and mission-critical data.

However, regular backups can be time consuming especially if you have gigabytes of data to back up, which is especially made worse by the fact that large organizations will have accumulated terabytes of data throughout the years. With conventional methods of backing up files, the backup you have created will already be obsolete by the time you have finished, as new sets of data has probably already appeared. In order to solve this conundrum, there are so-called “smart” backups that save both time and disk space by only backing up modified and new files. There are currently two types of smart backups – Differential and Incremental.

The fundamental difference between differential and incremental backup strategies lie not in their overall efficiencies, as they are both viable strategies, but in their respective strengths and weaknesses. Choosing one over the other will depend on your needs and requirements as an organization, as well as your capabilities. But first, let us define the two backup strategies.

Click here to learn more about Prestige Technologies’ redundant security system. (more…)