As WordPress grows, theme makers are specialising and diversifying their creations.
One theme, Swift Basic, claims to be the “fastest loading” WordPress theme on the block.
A test by WP Addict [no longer online] suggested that themes may influence site loading time.
But what makes one theme perform better than the rest? Read the rest of this entry »
If you live in Canada, bandwidth for your home connection is about to get a lot more expensive.
Recent changes from the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) means that Usage Based Billing (UBB) is coming to Canada. This means that Canadians, previously accustomed to unlimited or nearly-unlimited bandwidth caps on their Internet connections, may be facing caps as low as 25 GB per month.
In the age of online gaming, Steam, Netflix and YouTube it’s clear that Internet users are going to have to either adapt or expect to pay more. However, there are going to be changes for regular webmasters as well. Though Canada isn’t the only country in the world with tightly metered bandwidth, it is one of the first major Internet nations to go this route and others will probably follow if this approach meets its goals.
Webmasters need to start thinking about what they will need to change once visitors start thinking more about bandwidth costs. In other words, how can they improve their sites to ensure they don’t wind up costing customers money and causing them to not come back?
On that note, here are five ways that the Web is likely to change as metered billing, especially low bandwidth caps, becomes more common across the world. Read the rest of this entry »
Finding a good hosting account isn’t just about finding the cheapest account that you can survive on, it’s about finding the best one for both you and your site, meeting your needs at the best possible price.
But while no one likes to overspend on hosting, there are plenty of situations where you should be prepared to open up your wallet and spend a bit more money. There are situations where the extra money is more than worthwhile, making it more of an investment than an expense.
With that in mind, here are five such situations where there’s no shame in paying more than your peers; in fact, you may be the wiser one for it. Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this week, Amazon announced the launch of its new Simple Email Service (SES).
SES is part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) division. That’s the division that also provides Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon S3 and Cloudfront.
Amazon SES is not an email service like Exchange or Gmail. It’s designed for people who want to send email marketing and other similar types of bulk email. The Amazon newsletter is a good example.
SES is therefore Amazon’s equivalent of services such as AWeber and Mailchimp. But SES doesn’t provide newsletter management as such: it is strictly an outgoing mail server for sending legitimate bulk email.
As a customer, you’d have to create the list, develop the mailing and send it.
Bearing this in mind, SES is for clients with very large bulk mailing needs that have the expertise to do most of the work themselves. The majority of hosting customers won’t use it. But SES could be incredibly useful to corporate customers.
That impact could, in turn, trickle down to small businesses over time.
With a bulk email service, users can download software to turn their ordinary home computer into a bulk mail sender. Amazon says SES is different because of its price and its performance.
Amazon SES costs 10 cents per 1,000 messages sent out; customers sending messages through Amazon EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk can send up to 2,000 messages per day free. Bandwidth charges apply to both tiers, the same as with all Amazon’s services, but the first GB of outward traffic is free.
It’s tough to compare SES with Aweber and Mailchimp, because the service both offer is slightly different. For the sake of perspective, Aweber charges $19 per month to send unlimited email to 500 people. MailChimp is free for up to 1,000 subscribers and 6,000 emails per month, but its bulk pricing plans are several times more expensive than Amazon’s, averaging about 50 cents per 1,000 messages.
‘Deliverability’ is hard to measure, but Amazon sends many newsletters and has honed its metrics around deliverability and success rates. This means it’s going to have to work hard to prevent spam.
It’s therefore pretty cautious about taking on new customers, acccording to reports.
Initially, new clients must use the SES Sandbox, a stripped-down version of the SES service with limitations:
Once a customer has a proven track record, they may request an upgrade to the full version of SES. They can send send 1,000 email messages per day, though the mail is still throttled to one per second.
Those caps are lifted to 90 messages per second and 1,000,000 per day in a few weeks, if the user needs greater capacity.
Amazon SES isn’t meant to be a replacement for Gmail or Exchange. It’s not a replacement for MailChimp and AWeber either. It’s targeted solely at corporate customers; the companies that send out tens or even hundreds of thousands of messages per month.
As such, clients will need to have the tools for building lists and developing emails already.
Other AWS products have proven that companies can be inspired to build new services when the technology is there, and SES could be the same. Amazon’s products are cheap, reliable and developer-friendly, so SES could sit behind services we all use, even if we don’t sign up directly.
For most of us, some downtime is pretty much inevitable. Servers fail, networks go offline, sites go down and problems arise. All of these can be minimized, but not outright avoided.
Although a lot of downtime is unplanned (meaning something went wrong), there is also intentional or ‘planned’ downtime. Downtime can be required for anything from updating a theme, installing updates on our site to doing some kind of cleanup.
Dealing with downtime can be very difficult. All downtime, planned or unplanned, can have a negative impact on how Google ranks a site. While we can’t do much to mitigate the affects of unplanned downtime, we can often take steps to prevent damage caused by planned outages.
On that front, Google recently released its suggestions on how to deal with planned downtime and the answer is surprisingly simple. Best of all, they can be fairly easily implemented on your site, ensuring that you don’t accidentally thumb your nose at Google while trying to work on your site offline. Read the rest of this entry »
No website could exist without ISPs and network providers all over the globe.
Every time someone visits your site, the data passes through dozens of servers spanning dozens of networks.
Normally, everything runs smoothly. But local outages can cause the system to fall over.
The internet is critical to many businesses and domestic users, yet it isn’t being treated as a utility. Outages are tolerated, and there are risks that companies may attempt to “tier” the Web, making it less accessible.
Should we be taking internet access more seriously? Is it now less of a luxury and more of a necessity? Read the rest of this entry »
If your site is feeling a bit sluggish, it might well be time to take some action. Though site-slowness might be your host’s fault or your local Internet provider having an off day, it might also be because you’ve become a bit lax in your site’s maintenance.
Webmasters aren’t often guilty of making changes to their homepages that make them run slower. Though the actions we take might not seem like much at first, they can snowball over time and, when coupled with lack of routine maintenance, can bring a site to its knees.
Fortunately, there is help. You can usually fix a site’s sluggishness by taking a few simple steps and, without the hassle of switching to a new host, can bring it back to life. In fact, even if your site isn’t moving slow, it may benefit from some or all of these steps, making it even snappier than before.
So what can you do to improve your site’s loading time? Here are just a few quick and easy suggestions that anyone can follow. Read the rest of this entry »
We talked recently about some of the common misconceptions newcomers have about hosting.
One of the biggest misconceptions made is that they, as the customer, don’t need any knowledge about building or maintaining a website and that the host will handle it all for them. Hosts are dedicated to providing a service, namely keeping the servers online and the network operating. Setting up a WordPress blog might be a feature, but a customer who doesn’t understand the basics of running a site may find their host is not very useful.
That being said, there is a whole class of hosts that target this exact audience- people who either have very limited knowledge or those who simply don’t wish to fiddle with building a site. These services offer and support point and click systems for building a site, integrating hosting, design and content management into one service.
Though these tools have been around for some time, historically they have not been taken seriously. Services such as Homestead might have made it easy to set up a site, but the results were usually mediocre at best. But with services such as Squarespace and WordPress hosts such as Blogetery, these services are becoming much more mainstream, even for businesses.
So is a point and click host right for you? It really depends on your needs. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s a tendency to think of those with a domain and hosting account as ‘tech-savvy’. That, while they may not be computer geniuses, they are at least reasonably proficient with technology and capable of handling themselves on the Web.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case.
Because nearly every type of business needs a website and more and more individuals want their own domain, web hosting customers are, more and more, a cross section of the general populace rather than the “geek” populace.
This can be frustrating at times, because many of this new brand of users have misconceptions about what the role of a host is, what it is capable of and what their sites can do. This can lead to problems not just for hosts, but for other customers that happen to be on the same physical machine or network.
With that in mind, here are five of the more common misconceptions found among less experienced host account holders. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s important to search for savings when you’re looking at hosting accounts – depending on the deal and the account, finding a good hosting sale can literally save hundreds of dollars over the course of a year. For small businesses, this can be an especially important action because a deal on hosting can save a large percentage of tech budget without sacrificing service.
So, is there a particular time of year to find the best hosting deals and save money on new accounts?
Unfortunately, hosting isn’t like other consumer goods or services and there isn’t a singular best time to look for deals. However, if you know where to look for them, there are still some times that are better than others.
The obvious answer is that there is no time like the present to start looking for a good hosting deal. At any given point, dozens, if not hundreds, of relevant hosts are running deals and special offers.
The reason is that, even if there is no holiday in sight, hosts run specials for their anniversaries, for nearly every season and, often times, for no reason at all (Christmas in July specials are common, for example). Also, there are coupon codes and referral codes that can save you money 365 days a year.
So, if you have a new project in mind or need a new hosting account for any reason, there’s no point putting off the search in hopes of finding a better deal. You may succeed, but the amount you save likely won’t be worth the wait.
Still, if you’re desperate to lock in the absolute best deal possible, there are a few things you can look for and a few times of the year that are best to start that hunt.
If you’re looking for an hosting account for a business, whether small or large, you’re probably going to find that they simply aren’t as sale-oriented as you would expect. Most business-to-business hosting providers don’t have large, flashy sales with big discounts.
This is especially true of higher-end VPS and dedicated server accounts. The competition is less fierce and there’s a lower expectation of sales, so these hosts don’t need to run specials as much as their counterparts further down the line.
But don’t despair, you can often find coupon and referral codes to help you save at least a modest percentage and, in extreme cases, you may actually be able to negotiate your way to a better rate.
If you’re determined to find a business hosting sale, your best time is probably summer. With clients’ IT departments on vacation, business at hosting companies slows down and there are often sales to be found as companies look to keep their numbers up and their employees busy.
Another good time is right before the end of the year, often before the holidays, or between Christmas and New Year, as hosting companies look to catch businesses eager to put the expense on the previous year’s taxes.
Don’t expect insane deals at these times, just moderately better ones – but remember they can still save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars over the course of a few years.
If you’re looking for a personal hosting account, such as a shared host, a cloud host or even a lower-end VPS, you’ll likely find your best deals at much the same times you would look for deals on other consumer goods.
First off, any holidays are going to be an excuse to put hosting on sale. If it’s a holiday where people are typically off from work, you’ll likely find that many hosts discount their wares around it.
Christmas is also a natural time for hosting discounts, (though not as much as for other products as it isn’t often given as a gift), but you’ll also find a lot of good hosting deals in March and April as hosting companies try to coax buyers into spending their tax refunds on a new hosting account. However, those will likely be more geared toward longer-term hosting accounts, such as those with year-long contracts.
Still, the best time to seriously hunt for deals is either going to be the holidays or, as with business accounts, the summer. Not only does business slow down during those months naturally, but many hosts also target students who are home from school, often times taking up new hosting-related projects.
All in all, hosting accounts aren’t nearly as seasonal as other products. You can easily find good deals at just about any time of the year if you’re willing to look.
On that front, sites like WhoIsHostingThis can greatly help speed up your search by helping you find not only reviews, but also coupon codes and discounts that can save you a lot of money when buying a new hosting account.
Still, if you absolutely have to have the best hosting deal possible, there are times that are at least slightly better for launching such a hunt and now you should know, roughly, when they are.