by Aurelien Parment | Feb 26, 2015 | Small Business, Tips
The McKinsey Global Institute has revealed an alarming statistic: The average employee spends 474 hours per year sorting through and reading unnecessary emails! Yikes! Not only is that extremely unproductive (and somewhat annoying), but it can also result in many overlooked communications due to accidental use of the delete key. Please take the short quiz below to determine whether this post could prevent you from wasting nearly 20 days of your life each year.
Have you ever found yourself in these situations before?
- Realized that you just CC’d your entire team unintentionally.
- Found an important email in trash days later.
- Wondered, “Why am I included in this email?”
- Felt that the idea of cleaning up your inbox is about as easy as catching a greased pig.
If you answered yes to any part of the quiz, then the below guidelines can assist you in perfecting your email etiquette:
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by Aurelien Parment | Jan 14, 2015 | Tips, Web Hosting
Question: What happens if you have a great e-commerce website, and a great product or service but no SSL?
Answer: Not very much.
Here’s why: SSL is all about trust. Without trust people are shy about giving you their business – or their credit card information. SSL enables e-commerce websites to safely and secure conduct business without all the unnecessary drama associated with online shopping.
Some people assume that SSL is mainly about SEO, but those people are wrong. The main reason to use SSL is to establish security and trust with your customers. Period.
But wait, you may say. My website doesn’t collect sensitive personal information, or even any user information. Do I still need an SSL certificate? Yes, Virginia, you do. Because even if you don’t collect that sort of user info, you can still benefit from the ranking boost that SSL encryption provides.
Don’t believe me? Ask Google:
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by Aurelien Parment | Jan 7, 2015 | Tips, Web Hosting
We’ve heard the excuses before: “I don’t have time”, “What could go wrong?” and “I’ll get to it later”, but you know you need to back up your website, don’t you?
Well, if you don’t, here are 5 really good reasons you should do so:
The “Oops” Factor: Truth be told, anyone with FTP access to your site can unintentionally delete important files in a single keystroke. Oops! There goes your website.
Hackers and Viruses: Yes, they really do exist and just because they haven’t found your website yet doesn’t mean you’re not on their list. Besides, a full restore is much faster – and less painful – than cleaning hundreds of files corrupted with malicious code. Trust us.
Data Loss: Every time you do an upgrade to your CMS or add a new plugin or other component you’re at risk for data loss. No one is immune.
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by Aurelien Parment | Dec 30, 2014 | Web Hosting
Imagine this: You have 5 to 6 windows servers. Each of them is running at different workloads. Suddenly something fails on the hardware and you lose critical up time.
What do you do? Well, if you’re like most you’ll cut bait and start moving your windows servers to the cloud.
But, before you do that you might want to consider this first: Consolidate your software solutions alongside your hardware consolidation.
Start by planning your compute requirements, including storage, CPU, Ram and network needs. Hint: You can capture all of this data from within your Windows administrator tools.
Next, create a list of all the apps and check how they can be moved to the same host. This way you may end up only managing 3 VM’s instead of the 6 dedicated servers that you currently have. (You’re welcome.)
Ok. Now that you have all the data ready, take it to your IaaS provider. They should be able to recommend what products in their portfolio map to your specific requirements. See? You just saved yourself a lot of time and money.
One more thing: Don’t forget to add your backup resources and bandwidth requirements, because you are moving to a platform where you are more dependent on network/internet connectivity. This new dependence upon the internet isn’t really a big deal since all businesses need 24/7 web connectivity anyway. This is the 21st century, after all.
While moving to a new environment is never easy, it can be a blessing in disguise. Especially if you count the fact that the process will leave you with lower TCO, consolidated infrastructure and less management headaches.
So, what are you waiting for? Get moving!
