Why Cloud Hosting Alone is not Enough for Large Enterprises

Cloud hosting has taken off in a big way in the last few years and has helped to make many businesses both more innovative and more efficient. But is hosting your files in the cloud enough or should businesses be going one step further? Well, many experts believe companies and especially large organisations need to think more about the basic concept of cloud computing and how they can use it to improve.

Many businesses have looked at using Cloud Hosting options for their company websites to offer the maximum levels of performance and flexibility; many are still not making full use of the Cloud.In other areas of their business to improve efficiency and working practices and to adapt to their changing needs.

The notion of companies being run from an office on a nine to five basis has long gone. Businesses need to be more dynamic and more responsive to the needs of their customers and – in turn – so do their staff. Working patterns have changed dramatically in recent years, and staff are no longer working set hours or are even just based in the office.

Being able to work away from the office is essential but accessing systems, files and software is vital. The days of staff using laptops and transferring files onto USB sticks are no longer practical – there will be times when staff may be home based, working at other locations or even need to work on the move – so something more efficient needs to be available.

The Cloud can offer options for most business needs and with no greater financial impact than traditional solutions. Keeping in touch with your office can be managed quickly and easily with any of the Cloud based email services available. Either linked in with your website hosting package or using a separate email service, you will be able to access your email anywhere using a standard web browser, even with a tablet or smartphone as long as you have an internet connection.

If your company has need of a CRM System then you should start to look towards Cloud alternatives for this as well. While there are a large range of packages on the market, Cloud alternatives are quick to set up while still offering the same level of power and flexibility as self-hosted systems.

If your mobile business needs go beyond having to access a CRM System, there are Cloud based options for most packages at your disposal should you need them, with free and enhanced paid-for alternatives. Microsoft have two versions of Office available – Office 365 which is a full cloud version of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office Web Apps. While the latter features cut-down applications, it still provides full Office compatibility.

Google, through the use of their free Google Apps service, also provides Microsoft Office compatibility and both providers also offer free cloud storage where you will be able to store documents you are working on, so you can access this on the move or share work with colleagues (Google Drive and Sky Drive respectively.).

If you do need larger amounts of storage or need to share larger files between work groups, then dedicated Cloud storage would be a better solution. One of the leading providers for this is DropBox and you can store 2Gb of data of any type, setting up an initial group of up to 5 users. These groups and storage space can be increased, with a premium to be paid, to any size dependent on your business need. Critically, it ensures that any of your staff with access to this shared storage will be able to use the latest version of any document stored online no matter who has worked on it.

The use of the Cloud and its potential is far greater than businesses give it credit for, and given enough planning and consideration you will find that you can move most of your essential IT needs to the Cloud and your company will be all the better for it.

How to Backup Your cPanel Files & Database to Cloud Storage Easily

It is absolutely paramount for your website to be visually attractive and user friendly. If your website is complicated or difficult to use, it won’t get used. If you are concerned by your rankings, your traffic quality, your conversion rates and anything else that determines the quality of your online presence, then you should be concerned by your website availability—that is, site speed and loading time.

Fast loading pages are an essential part of a user’s experience of your site and brand, the same way that customers who have to wait in line in a physical shop or institution will be discouraged to return. It’s a valuable investment because a fast site will mean happy users, and happy users almost always make us more money. Here are a couple of advantages of a fast site.

• Users use the site more
• They view more pages
• Conversions increase
• Less down time
• Lower abandonment rates

These factors are simply results of the usability of the website. Here are some pretty persuasive statistics.

• 73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load.
• 51% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that crashed, froze, or received an error.
• 38% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that wasn’t available.
• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
• If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.

Crucially, Google knows how long your site is taking to load. Loading time is taken into account by search engines because it is taken into account by web users. Site speed has been a ranking signal since 2010. That means that ‘page speed’ is used in the ranking algorithm, and if it’s a ranking signal then you need to be able to optimise it, even though it’s a difficult thing to do. You can now track your loading time in Google analytics. Google’s priority is a seamless, user friendly experience delivering quality results. If you don’t fit in with what Google wants to deliver to search engine users, they won’t deliver you. All your work on your website is aimed at getting traffic there, and then at converting traffic once it’s arrived. The loading speed of your site does both of these things, which is why it’s a beautifully simple and effective thing to aim for. There are basic tips to follow to increase page load speed and drastically reduce bounce rate.

For more information on increasing your site load speed visit www.optimising.com.au

How to Display RSS Feeds from a Website in PHP

I didn’t need this particular piece of code till I started customizing my SMF mobile version and had to show recent topics on the homepage using PHP. Now this doesn’t apply to SMF alone, its just a PHP code you can use in any script so far you know just how to do it. You can grab the RSS of any website and display it on another site and this is dead simple even if you have no idea about PHP coding.

This is quite useful if you’ve got more than one site and wish to show updates on one of your sites to visitors on another site. Depending on how you want it, you can customize the display by altering this code or just using it as-is:

<?php
$rss = new DOMDocument();
$rss->load('http://www.9jaclub.com/index.php?action=.xml;type=rss;sa=news;limit=20;boards=3,10,11,14,15,16,47,50,55,2,4,6,7,23,33,24,26,21,32,36,29,27,31,28,25,30,57,51,38,39,40');
$feed = array();
foreach ($rss->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
$item = array (
'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
'desc' => $node->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->nodeValue,
'link' => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
'date' => $node->getElementsByTagName('pubDate')->item(0)->nodeValue,
);
array_push($feed, $item);
}
echo '<p><strong><div class="titlebg">Latest 10 Topics</div></strong><br />';
$limit = 10;
for($x=0;$x<$limit;$x++) {
$title = str_replace(' & ', ' &amp; ', $feed[$x]['title']);
$link = $feed[$x]['link'];
$description = $feed[$x]['desc'];
$date = date('l F d, Y', strtotime($feed[$x]['date']));
echo '<div class="rssdisplay"><strong><li> <a href="'.$link.'" title="'.$title.'">'.$title.'</a></li></strong>'.$date.'</div>';
}
?>

You should change http://www.9jaclub.com/index.php?action=.xml;type=rss;sa=news;limit=20;boards=3,10,11,14,15,16,47,50,55,2,4,6,7,23,33,24,26,21,32,36,29,27,31,28,25,30,57,51,38,39,40to your own RSS feed.

Of course, if you’re inserting this into an existing PHP file, you should remove the first and last line. Alternatively, you can copy the code to a text file, rename as rss.php and upload to your domain root. You can include anywhere it in your PHP document with include('rss.php');.

Customizing the elements and layout

The code above only displays the RSS title and the date but you can as well add the description. To include the description, you may add '.$description.' just before the closing div tag where the date is shown or simply replace '.$date.' with '.$ddescription.' before that same closing div tag.

You can also style it with CSS by defining rssdisplay CSS class in your style sheet

Optimizing Website for Windows 8 Will Take Your Business to a New Level

Undeniably, Windows 8 has been the most controversial operating system. Did you know that optimizing your website for Windows 8 can fetch you better business? Probably, users are not well accustomed to this operating system currently, but it is predicted that it will become one of the most popular operating systems among the users.

If you’re a Windows 8 user, then you may aware of the fact that certain features of Windows 8 make it easier for a user to access a website—it could be pinning of the website, accessing content via shortcuts or sharing of the website.

Let us plunge little deeper, to find it in detail!

Windows 8′s Website Tile:

If a user uses an Internet Explorer app in Windows 8 system, then he can pin a particular website to the Start Screen, which will appear as a live tile icon.

To make it better for the visitor, why don’t you keep a ‘favorite’ or a ‘bookmark’ icon on your website! This icon would be the one appearing on the Window’s tile, and the name of the tile would be the HTML title tag of your website.

If you’re thinking about notifying your users about any update of your website, such as content, you can make use of pinned site notifications that will appear on the tile.

Flip ahead browsing:

Luckily, you need to add a simple set of code in your website to make this feature enable. ‘Flip ahead browsing’ is available in the app version of IE 10 for Windows 8. This feature is useful, when the content is of many pages or photo slides. A visitor can flip through the pages of your website as in a magazine. Clicking the next button should take you to the obvious content.

Customize the Sharing Content:

Users can share your website with other users, by making use of the Charms bar of Windows 8, Mail and People app. It will use the HTML title tag as the site’s name, Meta description and any image from your website.

However, if you want to display particular content when users are sharing your website content among one another, then you should place a customized code in your website to make this happen.

Perhaps, the reason behind the suggestion of optimizing website for Windows 8 is clear now. Features of Windows 8 make it easier for a user to find a website and website owner can enjoy the benefits of it.