What is Dedicated Hosting?

Unlike other commonly used hosting services such as shared, dedicated hosting (also known as dedicated servers) are powerful, high spec, standalone computers that allow the account user or hosting customer to use the platform without being effected by other customers. This is unlike shared hosting whereby other customer’s websites and files are placed on the same cluster of servers and all end up using the same set of server resources.

A shared environment is heavily restricted by the available bandwidth, memory, and storage space due to the nature of the set-up, whereas the dedicated hosting platform allows the customer to actually lease a part of the server for their own use, giving them the advantage of unaffected space, bandwidth and resource.

The dedicated server can come managed or un-managed, either way it remains in the actual data centre, however managed gives the customer all of the benefits of a dedicated platform but without the need to manage and support the machine at a granular day to day level. The unmanaged however, allows the customer to actually get right down to the software layer to configure and support the server exactly how they would like to.

Dedicated hosting is ideal for websites that are expecting particularly large volumes of traffic or are very resource hungry in terms of usage or throughput. Medium, large or complicated database driven websites would benefit from the dedicated hosting due to the increased security, speed, flexibility and scalability.

Just some of the pros and cons of using dedicated hosting are listed below:

Dedicated Hosting Benefits	Dedicated Hosting Drawbacks
Gives you Full Control of the Hosting	Most Expensive Server option
Supreme Performance and Speed	Requires you to maintain the platform
Complete Flexibility of the Management	Possible additional support costs

If you would like to find out more about dedicated hosting or are thinking about purchasing this service, then please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.

What Makes a Good Website Great?

 

Website design has come on leaps and bounds in the last 5 - 10 years, websites have become a vital tool for any business looking to reach out and engage with either their target market or avenues they never thought they could reach before.

Also with the improvement of internet connection and bandwidth speeds over the past decade, websites have been able to become more vibrant, image rich, functionality driven and accessible.

So we all have great access to great websites right? Well not quite. Even though accessibility is no longer an issue (or though some would argue this, depending on who your provider is), the difference between a good and a great website is still a chasm that is there for the closing.


Optimise Every Page to Convert

Now there is online, but off-site optimisation which includes paid search, social media advertising, organic SEO, link building and all of the other elements that create a great marketing campaign. Then there is the online, on-site optimisation, which is pivotal for any website looking to not only gain traction but to achieve key goals such as conversions, enquiries, click to calls, downloads, sign-ups or form submissions.

Optimisation of the web pages to convert does not mean inserting the right keywords or making sure the meta tags are optimised, it means, is the page optimised so that when the ideal visitor lands on your site are they seeing everything they need from the second they land on the page in order to:

1) Be immediately engaged.
2) Know they are in the right place.
3) Understand at a glance what you are about.
4) Help bring the reason for visiting to a conclusion as easily as possible.

All pages should be optimised to an extent, as visitors may happen to land on a page that you had not intended them to enter the site through, for example about page, or terms & conditions page, so you need to give them an easy route out of that page to the location they do want to be, without making it difficult.


Understand Your User Journey, No, Really understand it.

When we say understand your user journey, we really mean understand your user journey. From who will be actually landing on your website and the different personas you will need to appeal to, right through to getting the visitors to do exactly what you need them to as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

It’s one thing to have good navigation and an easy way to actually move around the website, however it’s another thing entirely to think like your ideal visitor would, in order to both appeal to them as well as giving them a proverbial ‘pathway of breadcrumbs’ to follow to achieve what they are after whilst they are there.

Write Content with a Passion!

Content is not everybody’s bag. Most find it monotonous and a task they would rather not have to carry out. However this is probably the most important part of any website. It’s the part that engages potential clients and can excite existing customers.

Most treat content writing as an afterthought or as huge chore that someone has to pick up at the back end of a large website design project in order to replace the masses of ‘Lorem Ipsum’ scattered all over the site.

There is a slightly different way to think about this however, and that is that it does not have to be a lengthy and painful task at all. Write with a passion about your business or your product and only write information you feel is relevant to that page. It doesn’t need to be a ten thousand word essay, just short, succinct, descriptive and meaningful portions of well written text.

If you write with this in mind you’ll provide compelling, relevant and unique content in no time at all!

Remove All Barriers for potential Online Customers

The single most important thing you should have in the back of your mind when building, re-vamping, rebranding or refreshing a website is to pull down all barriers in the way of potential customers doing business with you. You may not initially think of barriers in the same way as a potential client will do when they reach the site however you will need to ensure you emulate standing in their shoes in order to understand and tackle these barriers.

These barriers are able to come in many forms, from poor navigation and user experience, to illegible text, bad image or colour choices, not having any Call to Actions or not having them in the correct position on the pages, the list really does go on and on.  The best way to eliminate these barriers is to test your site on new friendly ‘guinea pigs’ or visitors with little or no idea what you are about, in order to see if they can navigate with a pair of fresh eyes as they will see far more barriers than you can ever imagine..

You will never be able to remove all barriers from the outset as potential customers have a great way of finding holes you never thought were there, however with continual, timely and meaningful tracking and measuring in place, you should iron out any remaining barriers in no time.

Keep things fresh and different

Once the website has been completed don’t sit back and relax quite yet. You should always have a plan in place to ensure that there are large parts of your site dedicated to fresh, exciting and changing content. These sections of the site can come in the way of many things, just to give you an idea:

1) Integrated & regularly updated Social Media.
2) Engaging news & updates.
3) Engaging Blog articles and interesting information.
4) Exciting competitions, weekly events, giveaways and offers.
5) Guest writing or articles from other well-known industry names.
6) RSS Feeds from useful resources.
7) Regularly updated & informative case studies.
8) Integrated videos and rich media.
9) Giveaways and reasons to make visitors travel to your site.

Please people not machines

For the best part of a decade now, the term Search Engine Optimisatim (SEO) has had people crawling over themselves to try and outwit the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing in order to gain an advantage in the search engine listings and push their website up the rankings when someone searches for a certain keyword.

There have been many underhanded (or black hat) techniques used in order to achieve higher rankings and it has always been an issue the search engines have always been keen to stamp out.

It’s for these ‘black hat’ reasons that the likes of Google have constantly updated their algorithms to combat this form of practice. Search methodologies combined with algorithms provide what’s called ‘semantic search’ which are ways that search engines seek to improve result accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they are typed.

All of these improvements in the way the search engines are being developed help, although developers, designers and SEO consultants still think that you can fool a search engine, well don’t. It simply will not benefit you or your website if you approach the design, content, look and feel or any of the customer experience side of things from a search engines perspective.

If you want search engines to respect your website then write and design the site for you ideal user, not for the robots that trawl your site.

We would love to hear from you and your experiences when it comes to web design. Please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.

Social Medias ‘BIG 5’ (soon to be 7)

Over the past decade Social Media has become prevalent online. Marketers will spend £5.3 billion in 2015 on Social Media Marketing and that figure is growing fast! The Social Media trend is continually on the rise and shows no sign of slowing down.

Of the thousands of Social Media channels available, there are only a handful that are pushing the boundaries in terms of sheer quantities of active users, continued growth and potential to help reach out to large target markets and give you the most return for your efforts.

Those so called ‘BIG 5’ Social Media platforms are becoming a standard term now, due to the fact they have become so widespread and such a staple part of everyone’s day to day life.

We have listed the ‘BIG 5’, although we believe 5 are to become 7 soon due to the fact that there are 2 channel racing up on the outside at a rapid rate..

1) Facebook - Facebook is a very personal network, it’s where people like showcasing their day to day life in the form of photos, videos, personal achievements and calendar events. It has slowly caught on with businesses but users of Facebook do not take likely to ‘hard-sell’ tactics. This is more about building relationships through engagement and trust.

2) Twitter - Twitter is all about real time engagement. It works very well for support, immediate feedback, networking and real time monitoring. Again business are starting to use this channel much more now although few know how to harness its power.

3) LinkedIn - LinkedIn is all about business networking. It’s an online CV, a place for you to show off your academic skills and start to build meaningful business networks and relationships that earn money.

4) Youtube - Youtube is probably one of the most recognisable and used Social Media channels and it’s all about video streaming. Great for engaging with people through rich media, businesses have been made purely on YouTube and popular Youtubers have made millions just from gaining ridiculous amounts of views on their uploaded videos.

5) Google + - Google+ has the weight of one of the largest technology companies in the world behind it, so that’s a good start. It’s also a great reason to use it as what every Google owns it takes notice of.

6) Pintrest - the first of the two additional Social Media channels (on top of the ‘BIG 5’) that are growing at an alarming rate is Pintrest. Pintrest is an image based Social Media channel that attracts a large percentage of women, in fact approximately 70% of Pintrest users are women. Pintrest is a lifestyle driven channel that acts a platform for images with short descriptions based on retail, recipes, fashion and other various hobbies and interests. Businesses can use it to great effect if they use the channel correctly.

7) Instagram - Instagram is the second of the two additional Social Media channels (on top of the ‘BIG 5’) that are also growing at a ridiculously alarming rate. Instagram, like Pintrest, is an image based Social Media channel and is a predominantly mobile based app used to capture and add cool effects to a photos. This channel is a great tool for building a community on a social basis with likeminded users.

We would love to hear from you and your experiences with Social Media, which is your favourite channel and which have you had the most success with?

Please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.