According to AMR Research Inc, disaster recovery is a low priority in many companies, owing partly to the fact that it is a very unpleasant task, and partly to the companies’ overconfidence on their IT security. Of course, mistakes are bound to happen and no security measure is completely foolproof. This is exacerbated by the lack of resources devoted to disaster recovery, leaving many companies being more reactive than preventive and vulnerable to downtime  or unrecoverable losses as a result of being unprepared once disaster strikes.

According to AMR’s study, there are a number of things overlooked by many IT managers and experts when it comes to disaster recovery planning, such as:

Doing the Proverbial Homework

A large number of IT groups tend to disregard end users and frontline executives when it comes to deciding which enterprise applications should be restored first after a disaster, leading to faulty assumptions that the heavy-duty enterprise applications need to be brought back first.

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If these groups kept their ears close to the ground and asked for feedback from the users, they would know that the most needed applications are much more basic – from email to scheduling tools, the kind of small, minor things that the IT department tend to deprioritize but are actually very disruptive to operations if made unavailable. The main culprit here is the reliance on silos in an organization, where the term “mission critical” would have a different meaning depending on the department. (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.

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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…)

Being a webmaster isn’t all about web design and content creation. While both design and content creation are very important and easily make up majority of the duties of a webmaster, there is one other responsibility that is usually neglected yet important enough to a website that its neglect could ruin everything: Web Hosting Security.

Hackers these days have more tools at their disposal and more unpatched exploits and soon to be discovered vulnerabilities at their disposal, and now that the Internet has become an important aspect of businesses, the profit-oriented motivation has also solidified, which means your website getting hacked is no longer a matter of IF, but WHEN.

Granted that the web hosting companies are already doing their able best in order to ensure the security of their servers, and that security is technically their responsibility, but it’s still important to remember that webmasters themselves need to take precautions on their end. After all, it is their personal info and precious data that’s at risk.

All Web Hosting plans of Prestige Technologies provides redundant security measures. Click here and check out the different plans. (more…)

Most people think that the process of improving a site in order to make it more SEO friendly requires big changes and major overhauls of the structure and content, but the truth is that there are simple design changes you can implement to make your site more SEO Friendly, and none of them will require additional purchases or weeks’ worth of coding to do. Such as:

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1. Less is More

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Less text is better. Less images is better. Less messages is better.

Remember that the brain is capable of processing only one piece of information at a time. The more you crowd your site with information and images, the greater the chances of the visitor turning away. Make it clean and make it direct.

Say what you want to say in one sentence and yes, you have to say only one thing.

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Matt Cutts stated that that your choice of a web hosting company actually affects website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google takes into consideration the location of the server. If the server is in the US, the search engine is inclined to believe that the websites hosted on that country is more relevant to users within US.

However, he was also clear that the location of the servers is not the only consideration. Below are some of the ways on how your web hosting company affects your SEO.

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Speed

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One of the most important things a site should have is speed. Website visitors, especially the first time visitors, will only give your site 7 seconds. If within 7 seconds your site does not load or they understand what you are offering or how they will get what they will need from you, they will leave.

In order to provide searchers with the best experience possible, search engines give a lot of weight to the speed of your site. If your web host gives you slow speed, your site will get pulled down lower regardless of how relevant your content is.

Prestige Technologies is one of the fastest web hosting companies in the US. You can try it out for FREE for six months. No credit card required.

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Uptime/Downtime

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Your site needs to build a good reputation. When your site keeps on bogging down, your rank will be affected. There is no web hosting company that will guarantee 100% uptime. Most of them will go for a 99.9% uptime. That 1% is just to cover their @ss because a power outage happens. When it does,

However, you need to find a web hosting company that has a redundant security feature. With a redundant security system, even when there is power outages or something goes wrong with their servers, transactions and queries will be automatically rerouted to their back up. Their back up should be able to a mirror. In other words, whatever their main servers can do, their back up system should be able to do too.

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IP Reputation

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Search engines give IPs a reputation. When too many compromised contents come from a certain IP, search engines will mark that IP. It is not true that all sites with that IP will be given a bad reputation BUT you will be kept on close watch.

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Conclusion

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Remember that no one thing will ever pull your site down. It is when you have a combination of these bad things that will make search engines pull your score down.

If you want your website to be successful and to be around for the long term, you need to know how to find the right web hosting service. While you can change to a different web hosting service somewhere down the line, it is important that you get everything right from the start, in order to avoid the hassle and the loss of readership you will incur if you just migrate later. Here are a few things you need to do in order to find the right web hosting service:

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Decide on What You Want Out of Your Website

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This should come first, as it will be the deciding factor on whether you can go with a free web host or must invest in a paid hosting provider. To wit, if you just plan on having a website for your friends and family members, you can make do with a free web host. But if you have plans of attracting massive traffic and monetizing your website, you really need to invest in a paid hosting plan, as free hosts cannot accommodate your needs (and sometimes will actively prevent you from any attempt to earn a profit).

You can get FREE 6 months hosting with Prestige Technologies. You get all the privileges, features and freedom of a paid hosting service without the cost. Check it out here. (more…)

These days, getting good search engine rankings for websites on free hosting is almost impossible and the poor webmasters have to contend with a system that is naturally rigged against their favor. Of course, the option is to just get paid hosting and most webmasters do just that, but what are the alternatives? Is there a way to optimize a website that’s on free hosting and get it to rank well on search engines?

First, you have to understand why free hosting sites are at a disadvantage. It has to do with credibility. A lot of people these days have a belief that webmasters who don’t invest in paid hosting are not committed to their site. Add the fact that just about anybody can build a site on a free host and you have a recipe for general distrust as far as authority is concerned.

You can get free hosting for 6 months with Prestige Technologies. You can build a site and get it going before you spend any money on hosting. You get the credibility that comes with a paid hosting site without spending in the first six months.

However, it’s not all gloom and doom as sites on free hosting can and do come off as credible, even those that don’t have top level domains (Neil Gaiman used to host his blog on a free WordPress account before moving to his own domain, and one of the most successful marketers online, Seth Godin, started out his blog on a free Typepad account.)

With enough hard work and foreknowledge, you can get your site to rank well on search engines even if it’s hosted on a free provider, and yes – Search Engine Optimization is still worth it in your case. (more…)

Business Website Hosting is one of the most important factors to consider if you want to build an online presence and another communication channel for your business, but equally important is SEO, because even the best business website hosting won’t do much if you have poor or no visibility on search engines.

Does Website Hosting Affect SEO?

Contrary to common belief, the web host you choose does play into your SEO strategy. Technically, choosing the right hosting company is not a 100% guarantee that you’ll be getting a boost in search engine rankings, but at the very least it means you can avoid the consequences of being saddled with a poor host. Make no mistake about it, a bad web hosting company will do a lot of damage to your search rankings, due to the following reasons:

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Site Loading Speeds

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Google has already publicly admitted that the loading speed of a website factors in when their search engine ranks websites, on the basis that users will most likely not appreciate being sent to sites that take a long time to load. Remember that a search engine’s job is to point users to websites that they want, and an unresponsive website doesn’t exactly meet the criteria, relevant content or not. (more…)

Major universities usually provide free student web hosting for individuals enrolled in their institutions. Technically, there is nothing wrong with this, as it’s free. But students will eventually find out that the hosting is so limited that there’s really nothing useful to do with it.

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Limitations for Student Hosting

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Limited Bandwidth

For starters, it’s usually hosted on school servers alongside other students’ sites, so bandwidth is definitely not in abundance.

Limited Content

Additionally, the universities have very strict policies on what you can put in them, so you can’t have full control over your content. If you want true free student web hosting, you have to strike out on your own and build your site using third party services.

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Disadvantages

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Losing Your Contents

Once you graduate, your free account goes away. Your content goes away. Yes, you may always save it in the cloud but that would mean uploading everything again. (more…)

It’s understandable that budget web hosting can be appealing to webmasters who want to make a profit online, especially because web hosting is a recurring expense for their business. But there is a caveat – budget web hosting can actually affect a website’s search engine rankings.

There’s nothing really alarming as the effects are nowhere near as bad as being outright flagged and “Google-slapped,” but people who want to make the most out of their websites when it comes to exposure should keep in mind that budget web hosting will affect your SEO efforts through the following things:

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Page Speed

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One of the things that cheap web hosts usually skimp on is bandwidth. They either throttle or shape the bandwidth of their servers, resulting in slow page loading, especially now that the size of files on the web has gone up. Unfortunately, speed has become an even more important factor for people especially as more and more of them have gotten high bandwidth Internet accounts. According to studies, 40% of people will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Sign up with Prestige Technologies and your first 6 months is free.

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