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Web Hosting Hub

June 30th, 2010 No comments

Web Hosting Hub Review

Visit Web Hosting Hub

Overview

Web Hosting Hub is a web hosting company that offers affordable pricing, great support and amazing uptime. It has a full list of features that puts it in the league of top web hosts, including such vital needs as top blogging platforms, e-commerce solutions and a premium web builder to get your site up and running in no time.

Getting to know Web Hosting Hub

Web Hosting Hub is an easy to use and affordable solution to get your web site online. With packages as low as $4.95 a month, you’ll be amazed that you can get all that it offers for such a competitive price.

Reliability

Since the company launched, they’ve had no downtime and no reliability issues to speak of. That’s probably because they use only the very best hardware and keep an eye on it with the best systems people out there.

Features

  • Price: Pricing for Web Hosting Hub starts as low at $4.95 per month.
  • Features: Web Hosting Hub offers, for a low monthly price, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, unlimited sites hosted per account and a free domain name or transfer with every purchased account.
  • Free Setup: Web Hosting Hub also offers free setup to get started with their web hosting services today!To make your initial costs even lower they offer a free domain name or transfer.
  • Money Back Guarantee: With every Web Hosting Hub account comes a 90-day money back guarantee.

Support:

Customer service and support is definitely Web Hosting Hub’s major strong point. Whether day, night or national holiday, you can reach Web Hosting Hub’s U.S.-based support 24/7. More than that, you can reach them via online chat, email or toll-free phone. For even more knowledge and information you can access their vast video and tutorial library online.

Bottom Line:

Web Hosting Hub has made a name for itself in the realm of personal web hosting. Affordable, feature-rich and dependable, the folks over at Web Hosting Hub have managed to bring a fresh new perspective to the personal web hosting market.

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Should You Hire a Blogger for your Company?

June 30th, 2010 No comments

As a professional blogger who scans the job boards, I have noticed a rise in the number of companies looking to recruit bloggers, some even on a full time basis. With the emergence of social media marketing as an essential tool for businesses both small and large, it seems that every company is jumping on the bandwagon to hire a blogger or two. In fact, it is not uncommon to find companies hiring a whole team of bloggers to help with their publishing and marketing efforts online.

Not convinced? Here are some areas where a professional blogger could add value to your company:

Blog Posts

Whether your company is large or small, once you have established a website, you need to keep it up to date and provide quality content to your audience. Once the first flush of excitement of having a website wears off, it can quickly become a grind to regularly produce entertaining content, especially if you are not a natural writer. There is an art to blogging over the long term, and hiring a professional who knows how to write engagingly could help boost readership of your business blog, and free up your time to concentrate on what you do well.

Email Newsletters

If you provide an regular online newsletter service to readers, you will need to constantly produce good content for your newsletter. A blogger would be well placed to help create informative and entertaining content for your readers.

Social Media

As well as writing blog posts and other web content, most bloggers are particularly adept at the use of social media as it comes with the territory. Consider getting your blogger to reply to comments posted on your company website, to spend time researching and commenting on other blogs, and to research competitor websites in your industry.

If you want to set up Facebook for your company, a Twitter account, Hub pages or Squidoo, most bloggers would be well placed to set up these social media channels for your company in a flash.

If you are interested to understand the rules of engagement on the Internet, or to learn some basic SEO, just fire away and ask your resident blogger. It’s likely that they will be able to answer your questions – for most bloggers it’s stuff that they have dealt with over and over again during the course of their career.

Creating a website is one thing and requires certain technical skills, but writing quality content to put on the site is another skillset entirely. Most business owners without computer skills wouldn’t hesitate to hire a techie to set up their website, so if you aren’t a great writer, why not hire a professional blogger to put some polish on your website?

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What should you Outsource?

June 30th, 2010 No comments

Whether you have a small or large business, at some stage of your company’s growth you would likely have thought about outsourcing some of your tasks. And you are not alone – outsourcing is on the rise as companies look for alternative solutions to employing more permanent staff due to a tightening of budgets and the need to cut costs.

The rise of the Internet has also made it much easier to communicate with someone else on the other side of the world, and to work online away from a company office, making outsourcing even more attractive to a frugal business owner.

Value of Time

What value do you place on your time? Do you rate your time at $50 an hour? $100 an hour? Are you getting the most value from your time?

Outsourcing is an excellent strategy because it allows you to best leverage the use of your time. As an example, try keeping a log of which business tasks you spend your time doing for one week. Most people are surprised at the difference between where they actually spent their time versus what they believed they were doing that week. Most of all they are surprised at the amount of time they spend doing tasks that are low priority or that produce little income – time wasted that could have been spent more productively.

And herein lies the value of outsourcing. You should place a high value on your time, and you should spend that time in producing the highest profits that you can, which leads to the conclusion that you should spend time on tasks that provide the greatest return for your business. Your time should be spent on strategic activities to manage your business and drive it in the right direction, not on performing tasks that could be better handled by somebody else.

Where are your skills?

As a owner of a growing business, you will soon come to the point where it is not physically possible to manage all the tasks associated with your company. This is the stage where it would be prudent to consider outsourcing some of the tasks.

One approach is to outsource tasks that you don’t enjoy or do not have the aptitude for. The task of bookkeeping is commonly outsourced by many businesses for this reason. Closely related to this approach is the outsourcing of many important but time consuming low-level tasks which can be taken care of by a good administrative assistant at relatively cheap rates, freeing you to make more productive use of your valuable time. As a business owner, is word processing, photocopying and answering the phone really a productive use of your time?

Another common cause for outsourcing are those areas which require specialist skills.  Seeking an expert to handle complex matters such as tax and legal issues is highly recommended, and can save you time and money in the long run.

If your business is on the rise, it may be time to reevaluate how you spend your time and outsource some business tasks, allowing you to leverage your time and focus on important business tasks for maximum benefit, while someone else looks after the small stuff.

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The Legislation behind Spam

June 30th, 2010 No comments

Inboxes around the world are consistently clogged due to the massive amount of spam sent out each day. While spam filters and blockers eliminate a good portion of unsolicited emails, there are still many that slide through. As a result, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and the European community have all enacted different types of spam legislation.

Why is Spam Legislation Necessary?

Spam is said to make up over 65 percent of all email messages sent and received. The overall cost of spam to companies, internet service providers, individuals and email marketers is in the tens of billions of dollars. This cost factors in lost productivity, high bandwidth consumption, boosted storage costs and legal liabilities amongst employees.

Internet service providers suffer from a decrease in bandwidth and storage space and a decline in retention from unsatisfied customers leading to an overall loss of reputation among subscribers. In turn, these factors result in internet service provider operating costs to proliferate, thus increasing prices for the customer.

Furthermore, email marketers that run a legitimate operation must be constantly adjusting their business methods due to ever-changing regulations. Also, their product loses significant value because customers might believe their emails are also spam.

Three Major Pieces of Spam Legislation

There are three primary pieces of spam legislation setup by three different countries. These include:

  • The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of  2003 (CAN SPAM) – United States
  • The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation 2003 (EC Directive) – United Kingdom
  • The Spam Act of 2003 – Australia

CAN SPAM

CAN SPAM was designed in 2003 to limit the number of email spam messages since more than half of spam correspondence originates in the United States. This legislation forbids companies and individuals from distributing multiple email messages containing false header information, false identities, sexually-oriented material, address harvesting or hijacking various aspects of a computer system.

The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation 2003

Otherwise known as the EC Directive, this law prohibits individuals from sending unsolicited communications related to direct marketing unless the recipient has been previously notified of by the sender of any correspondence.

The Spam Act 2003

This act was designed to control the increase in unsolicited emails. This does not target bulk emails originating in other countries. Rather, it focuses on implementing consequences for organizations that send emails for commercial purposes. Commercial messages must incorporate accurate sender information and contain a functional unsubscribe function.

While these may not eliminate spam altogether, they could deter individuals and organizations. Combining spam legislation with spam blockers and filters might decrease the amount of messages sent lowering the cost as well as improving productivity across the globe.

Dedicated Web Hosting – Plan Options

June 30th, 2010 No comments

Dedicated web hosting is widely regarded as the most comprehensive and powerful type of web hosting in the industry. Many people praise dedicated servers and their capabilities, but they fail to mention the vast selection of plans and options that one must choose from when investigating prospective hosting providers.

Every web hosting type has many plans to choose from, and each provider is different. Even after you’ve selected a plan there are still options that you have to consider in regards to optimizing your dedicated server for maximum functionality and compatibility with your sites. The following information may help you make some of these crucial decisions if you are in the process of selecting or setting up a dedicated web hosting account.

Managed or Unmanaged

The first decision you have to make is whether you need managed or unmanaged dedicated web hosting. Managed web hosting is perfect for those who have little experience with internet technology and web servers. Since dedicated servers are devoted to sole owners, they need to be maintained by their owners, unless you have managed hosting. If you’re a novice with no technical knowledge then you absolutely need fully manage hosting. If you have technical skills and you’re on a budget then you may want to choose unmanaged hosting.

Operating System

Next you’ll want to choose your operating system, whether it be Linux, Unix or even Windows. Most web hosting companies offer variations of Linux or Unix by default with no additional charge. Dedicated servers usually operate on a corporate network of publicly distributed operating systems known as the Red Hat Network. Some of the operating systems within the Red Hat Network include variations of Linux like FedoreCore, CentOS, Debian and more.

Many times Windows dedicated servers cost slightly more because of the support involved with keeping the operating system running smoothly. Many webmasters simply install virtualization software on their dedicated server that will let them run several partitions of different operating systems. For example, you could install a software like VMware within Linux and then install Windows inside of that virtualization software. You should choose your operating system based on your site’s needs. If you run server-side Microsoft applications then you will need access to Windows in some form, whether it be directly or through a virtualization software.

Server Size

Finally, you’ll need to choose the size of your web server. There are many different configurations and server types available for web hosting providers. Ideally, you should base your decision on your budget and the needs of your web sites. Most webmasters will do fine with a small dedicated server that has about 2GB memory, however, if you plan on running software with your dedicated server then you may want to consider one with 4GB of memory or more. Look for the quad core Xeon servers if you’re a fan of power and functionality. Keep in mind the price difference between a 2GB and 8GB web server is about $150 in most cases. Dedicated hosting plans start at about $120 and go up to around $400, so you definitely have a broad selection to choose from.