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The last post on web hosting for WordPress you will ever need

Sat, 07 Feb 2015 21:17:40 +0000

Web hosting is a hot topic among many business groups. Similar questions get asked on the daily, and the answers section instantly swells out to loads of answers of “This one is the best”, “This one is the cheapest” or “My hosting is the best. Pick me, pick me!”. With so much info out there it makes it is really hard for the non-techies (henceforth referred to as “you”) to understand what you are getting. What do all these terms like shared, managed, dedicated, VPS mean? How much should I be paying? What the hell is a web host, anyway? I’ll answer all this in a bit. A Summary (tl;dr) This next paragraph is for someone who knows a few of the industry terms and just wants to make a decision. If you are brand new, jump right over it. For most small businesses, shared hosting is plenty, even if you have a few hundred visits a day Managed WordPress hosting is also good, but costs a bit more. A truly managed WordPress host takes some burden off you Don’t use a plain VPS unless you are very techy For higher traffic sites or higher budgets use a Managed VPS or a dedicated plan on a Managed WordPress host Recommended Hosts: Shared: Site5 Aussie shared host: Site5 (Sydney datacentre) or Uber Managed WordPress: WPEngine Aussie Managed WordPress: Kinsta (Sydney datacentre) VPS: Amazon EC2 or Digital Ocean or Liquid Web What is a web host anyway? In a sentence: A web host is a computer, connected to the internet, which responds to requests from other computers. When you type in “mysite.com”, this is what happens: Your computer asks a DNS (not the topic of this post) where your site lives The DNS tells your browser the internet address of the web host Your browser asks the web host for the web site The web host spits out a bunch of code and gives it to the browser Your web browser builds the code into a web page When you see the word “server” mentioned, it essentially just means a big beefy computer that can handle lots of things happening at the same time. For the purpose of this post, a server and web host mean the same thing. A quick note on Australian Hosting It is worth nothing that everything is more expensive in Australia. Hosting companies have to pay more to house their servers in datacenters in Oz. They pay more for the data which is sent to and from the servers, and will pass this cost onto you. Should you host in Oz? Ultimately it is up to you. It doesn’t make a huge difference in the load times for your website, but it does make a little difference. This site is hosted in Dallas, USA. Also consider where you want to keep your data. If you are storing sensitive client data on your website, privacy laws may effect your decision. If it is just a few pages about your business, it really doesn’t make a difference. The Types Of Hosting Shared Hosting Price range: $4-30 / month What it is: It is essentially lots of websites living on one server. Servers generally have a lot of computing power, so a single server can handle a ton of requests. This means you can have a bunch of lower traffic websites on one server with little downside. Just don’t expect to be able to send out lots of emails from the server. They will usually end up trapped in spam. For email you should be using something like Mail Chimp Or Active Campaign. The potential downside of shared hosting is that one website on the server can be problematic and cause issues for everyone else on the same server. Most good hosts are onto this though, and shut down the offending websites. I’ve only had one issue like this in my years on the web. Pros Cheapest option (which doesn’t mean that it is bad) Server updates and issues handled for you Usually offer automatic backups Can usually install WordPress in a couple of minutes with no tech knowledge Cons Limited control of the server. You only get a control panel. (not a problem unless you are trying to do something out of the ordinary) Other websites on the same server can effect the performance of your site Won’t support high traffic Who we recommend: Site5. They offer free migrations if you have an existing website. They have a 24/7 live chat that has resolved any issues we’ve had within minutes. They are very well priced and have an Australian datacentre option. VPS Price Range: $10-100+ per month (for normal use – enterprise is different) What it is: VPS stands for Virtual Private Server and is what most people refer to when they say “Cloud Hosting”. A “virtual machine” is a computer that lives on another, bigger computer. One large server may have several VPS’s on it, but each acts just like a private computer. A VPS usually has dedicated computing power so other sites can’t impact yours. If you are reading this post, chances are you will not want a plain old VPS. These are for tech heads, or those with staff who are tech heads. A plain VPS means you have to manage EVERYTHING yourself. From core server updates, performance/uptime monitoring, to security updates and web hosting software. This is stuff you just do not want (and should not have to) to deal with as a small business owner, and likely a waste of your time. In the last few months there have been 3 MAJOR Linux security breaches that everyone with a plain VPS has to patch themselves. Granted, that is fairly rare. Pros Most power for the price Dedicated computing power Full control of the server Cons Have to manage everything yourself. If something goes wrong, you are often on your own. Who we recommend There are so many great VPS providers out there. My two favourite are Liquid Web and Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean is very very cheap. Liquid Web have great support. Who we recommend: Digital Ocean (cheap), Amazon EC2, Liquid Web Managed VPS Price Range: $60-400 per month (can range to thousands but I’m being practical here) What it is: VPS and Managed VPS are VERY different as far as you the end user are concerned. We in the IT world like to create two things that sound the same just to confuse everyone else. A managed VPS means that someone else handles all the tech stuff for you. Server updates, security patches, installing web host control panels (usually included in the price), and support are all handled. However, you pay for this service. All the Pro’s from plain VPS apply here. Pros Dedicated computing power All the techy IT stuff handled for you Still have control if you want it Generally backed up for you Cons The most expensive (excepting dedicated servers) Who we recommend: Liquid Web Dedicated Servers Price range: $250+ per month What it is: A dedicated server is similar to a VPS in that you have full control over your server. The difference is that you are renting an entire computer in a datacenter somewhere. These are pretty much reserved for really big sites, and even then most people opt for larger VPS’s in this case. If you are looking to host with someone, and they include “hosting on our dedicated servers”, generally they mean that they rent a dedicated server, and host lots of small sites on them. This is effectively the same as shared hosting, except the company maintains control of the websites on that server. Pros Same as VPS, but usually more computing power Cons More difficult to put backup plans in place. VPS providers usually have systems in place to easily backup a VPS, where dedicated servers usually don’t. What is Caching? Every time someone visits your site, your server runs a bunch of code to generate the web site, which gets sent to the user and displayed on their internet browser.This code takes time and computing power to run. If 100 people visit your site, the server runs that code 100 times. Caching means that after the server runs all that code, it stores the result into a little file somewhere. The next time someone visits that same page, it just sends them the information in that file, so all that code doesn’t have to run. “Cache expiry” defines how long the server will use that file before it decides to build a new one in case anything has changed. What does this mean in practice? Your site speed should improve and the server can handle more volume without more power. Managed WordPress Hosting Price range: $30-150 per month What it is: This is essentially shared or managed VPS hosting with a bunch of extra features and benefits. These may include caching (see the description in the box on the right), automatic backups, easy restores, WordPress updates, guarantees to fix your site if it is hacked, options of CDN (hosting media files on computers around the world to make them load faster) and staging area (ability to make changes to your site in a testing area so only you can see it). Managed WordPress Hosting is often the most worry-free hosting, as so much is taken care of. Thankfully, there are still low priced entry points. The term “Managed Hosting” is thrown around a lot by different companies. Not all of them offer “true” managed WordPress hosting. Be careful with this one. Feel free to drop us a line if you are unsure on a company. Pros Not much to worry/think about, except WordPress plugin updates Some companies will let you scale up your plan really easily as your traffic gets larger Cons Little to no control on the server. Generally the way the host says it goes, goes Who we recommend: The biggest player in this space is WPEngine. This is who we use. So far the best player I have found to host in Australia is Kinsta. As yet, no others come close to the likes of WP Engine.

4 Months Free – Our Favourite Managed WordPress Hosting

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 06:17:33 +0000

Over here in Australia we don’t seem to care a whole lot about Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But, the American’s go nuts for it. One company is even asking people to show up to their sale semi-naked. Loads of American companies throw huge sales which we Aussies can still take advantage of. This is one of our favourites. For our important websites, we exclusively use WP Engine. They are currently offering 4 months free hosting when you sign up for a year. That’s a minimum of $116 saving, which is pretty awesome. We like WP Engine because you can basically install WordPress, and never have to worry about setting up caching, backups or any of those annoying things – it’s just done for you right out of the box. Hit the image below to check it out and sign up.

Why do you need to backup your WordPress site?

Sun, 12 Oct 2014 01:38:58 +0000

There’s a client of ours who host their WordPress based website on their own server which we do not have access to. On Monday, their site was hacked and the home page was replaced with some Israeli propaganda. We advised them how to clean it up (since we had no access) and they got it sorted out. Then they were hacked again on Wednesday with a Russian front page. And again on Friday. They only found out they were hacked when they had clients calling them up asking them what the deal was. To make things worse they were paying for Adwords. We stopped the campaign as soon as we found out, but can you imagine if they were paying to send potential new customers to a hacked site? It’s one of the worst feelings when this happens. There’s a lot of things that can make your site vulnerable to being hacked. Sometimes, there are exploits discovered which hackers can take advantage of before the rest of the world is able to create patches and fix those holes. They are called 0-day exploits, and are completely unavoidable. Recently, there were security problems discovered in OpenSSL and Bash. These are two packages installed on a huge majority of servers worldwide, so the exploits were huge news. The IT world scrambled to patch their servers, but many were vulnerable for days, and many probably still are. So can you protect yourself against these things? Absolutely. By regularly backing up your site and having a recovery plan in place, you can be back up and running in minutes after your site gets hacked. Backups are in my opinion, completely necessary, yet not many sites are regularly backed up. That’s why we’ve tried to make it really affordable for small businesses to get their site backed up, and get the peace of mind that comes along with it. Unfortunately, no one really worries about backups until everything comes crashing down overnight. It happens more regularly than you’d think… If you would like to protect yourself against your site being hacked, as well as other disasters like web hosting failures, check out our WordPress backups and maintenance packages starting at $29 / month.

How To: Sign up for and use Stripe (for normal people)

Mon, 22 Sep 2014 04:19:27 +0000

I’m a pretty massive advocate for Stripe. It’s one of the most simple credit card payment systems to set up that I have ever seen. With lower fees than most, to me it is a complete no-brainer. The problem is when I tell people to go and sign up, and are immediately put off by all the tech head references. If you click to Learn More, you get: Way to scare off everyone who is NOT a developer. Words like “developers”, “APIs”, “infrastructure”, “stack” and an actual code snippet? Wow. So I thought I would knock together a short post on how and why to get set up with Stripe. It’s going to be short because the signup process is insanely easy. Just try to ignore the scary looking website, and ready on. First, Why Stripe? In succinct, dot point form: Did I mention it was simple? Getting set up takes less than 5 minutes opposed by all kinds of lengthy setup and verification procedures with other payment processors Fees are great. 1.75% + 30c domestic transactions, 2.9% + 30c offshore You can type in a card number that you get over the phone and store it Then charge that card whenever you want Set up subscriptions Auto bill for services at the end of every month Charge in any currency in pretty much any country And more As an added bonus, loads of services and products build Stripe in as a payment processor. Later on, you probably end up using your account in other ways. For example, lets say you had some software that lets people sign up to web hosting (like we do). Just throw in your Stripe account info and you’re ready to take payments automatically. Second, How Stripe? Here’s what you’ll need to get going: Your email Your mind, to make a nice password The name of the country you live in Your bank details (so in Australia – BSB and account number) That’s seriously it. Click the Sign Up Button in the middle of the page. Type in your email, password and confirm your password. Close the window that shows up. This is what the dashboard looks like. Uncluttered and super simple (click to enlarge). Up the top right, click “Your Account” and choose “Account Settings”. In General Settings, change country to Australia (or wherever else) and timezone Click Transfers, then Add Bank Account Type in your BSB and Account number Click Done. If you don’t want to play around in the system, flick it over to Live Mode (top left) And you’re done. How to charge a credit card There’s a couple of ways. If this is a once off charge and you don’t need to set them up as a customer, click on “Payment” on the left hand menu, then click the “Create your first payment” button. That’s it…. If you want to create a person and store their card, go to Customers -> Create your first customer. Click on Bob in the list. In the “Cards” section, on the right there is an “Add Card” button. Add their card (just the usual info). Now, you have their card stored on file permanently. To charge it, go to the Payments section on the same page, and click “Create Payment”. Enter the amount, currency, description (for you), statement description (for them) and the card you want to charge. Again, you’re done. Other cool stuff The point of this post was to show you how simple and cool Stripe is. There’s a whole bunch of other cool stuff, but we won’t go into too much detail here. You’ll be able to work it out for yourself, because you’re a smart cookie. Below is a quick run down of some of the things you can do: Subscriptions -> Plans – Set up plans e.g. $299 per month. Then in the customer screen you can add a Subscription to a customer to automatically bill them each month. Subscriptions -> Coupons – Apply coupons to customers (% off or fixed amount) to be automatically deducted from their account before the next subscription charge Invoices and Invoice Items – Add extra items that are automatically added to the subscription cycle and billed on the next occurrence Update Customer Details – Account Balance – enter a negative number to put credit onto a customers account – it is automatically deducted from the next charge Email receipts – found in Account Settings – Email

Free Gift: Brand New Landing Page Software

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 12:54:31 +0000

A good friend of mine sent me an awesome deal today. Landing page software has become all the rage recently. This is because they make it crazy easy to create sites and landing pages that capture names and email addresses. This software goes one further and gives you the ability to build those lists and email your contacts without any extra software. This is the kind of thing they create with little to no effort… Ben from FusionHQ has sent me a code which gives you access to their awesome new landing page builder for an entire year, for free. It’s normally $47 per month. No credit card or commitments of any kind. That’s pretty cool. Why? Because it is just being released for the first time and they want people to try it out. This isn’t normally the type of thing I’d post on here, but recently I’ve heard lots of people asking about this kind of thing… and when it’s free there’s nothing to lose Try it for yourself and get your first professional looking, mobile responsive squeeze page up in minutes. You don’t even need an existing autoresponder. Just follow the link below and put in the coupon code, to gain instant free access (usually $564): Click here to claim the deal! Coupon code: CHIMP2014 Remember you MUST enter the coupon code CHIMP2014 into the coupon code box below the “Buy Now” button to apply the freebie. And it is only valid until September 18! Hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think.

How To: Manage your own Adwords

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 06:07:35 +0000

We’re a business that deals in Adwords… why on earth would we want to tell you how to manage it yourself!? Simply put, many businesses just can’t afford to have someone else manage Adwords for them. Managing an Adwords account properly can be a very time consuming process to properly track, monitor, modify and report. This is why Adwords management can (sometimes) be an expensive venture. This is especially true in the very early stages of business when there just isn’t any cash flow yet. Now, we’ve taken over a lot of Adwords accounts that were previously self-managed. These accounts are almost always getting very low click through rates, have poor quality scores and are paying WAY too much per click. Paying too much for ad clicks is very easy to do, so the Do-It-Yourself route is NOT for everybody. You must understand that if you don’t pay attention to what you are doing, you can slip up and waste money very quickly. If you go down this self managed route, please make sure that in the beginning you use a prepaid Adwords account, where you have to manually add balance using your credit card. At least this way, the risk is minimised. Ok, with that out of the way, I want to share one of the best ways I have found to learn the basics of Adwords and apply it to your business. It is a book by Perry Marshall, aptly named: “Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords“. It’s available as a digital Kindle download, or on paper. You’ll want to have a highlighter or pen ready, so you can note down various numbers and bits of information which you can directly apply to your ads. This is why I love Kindle – as you are reading you can select pieces of text to highlight, and then access them all later online at kindle.amazon.com. This is seriously awesome. If you apply the things you learn in this book, you’ll be ahead of most of the self managed AdWords guys out there. It goes through everything from how to select keywords, how to bid, how many ads to make, and how to interpret the results. Even the best way to build an ad is covered – there are a lot of ways to write a 4 line ad which can make huge differences to your click through rate. What I love about it is that it is so specific about everything, from processes down to exact numbers to aim for. For $12.99 and a couple of reading hours, you don’t have much to lose. Grab it here.

What exactly is a WordPress database anyway?

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 01:44:39 +0000

It can be a little confusing when techies start talking in languages you just don’t understand. With all these parts that make up your website – domains, web hosting, WordPress, databases, PHP – it’s really easy to get overwhelmed and just give up. Recently I had a chat with a very avid blogger friend of mine – Jennie Gorman. After explaining WordPress backups and how databases work, she told me that she believes this is something that more business owners need to understand. Hopefully you get a little something out of this as well. This post is a series of posts to help you better understand the workings of your website so you can make sense of all that tech talk. Today’s topic is databases. If this is still too techie for you, let me know and I’ll update the post. A Content Management System If you are able to log in and change parts of your website easily, chances are that you also have a database. WordPress gives you this ability, and falls under a category of software called a “Content Management System”. That means it gives you the ability to make changes to your website without having to change any actual files. When someone visits your website, they are connecting to a computer (web server) somewhere which holds at least two things – a bunch of files and a database. There are two types of files. There are “static” files, like pictures, PDF’s, documents and other normal files that you would find on your own computer. The rest are just lines of code. Lots of them. They contain instructions for the web server on what to do when it needs to display your website to your visitor. Together, these files contain the information for: The layout of the website e.g. show your logo first, followed by a menu, followed by picture, etc The style of the website e.g. colours, text sizes, borders, etc Pictures, documents, downloads Instructions on where to find the current page in the database All these files together are what you would call your Content Management System, or in this case, WordPress. This is also where your theme and plugin files live. Right now you have visited a specific web address to read this post. Based on that address, WordPress knew that it needed to go into the database to dig out these actual words you are reading. So what is a database? The easiest way to think of a database is a bunch of tables, just like Microsoft Excel. All your WordPress posts are stored in a table. If you were to view it, it might look a little something like this: Looking at the above table, WordPress would have seen that you are looking for post with an id of 3. It grabs that row out of the database, displays the title at the top of the page, and all the words from the post column right here. Each row is just a new post. Pretty simple when you look at it like that, huh? The point of the id column is so that there is a unique way to identify each post. If you change the title, it won’t break anything because it will still be post number 3. There will also be other columns that have other information. Things like: The date it was posted The user who created it If it is public or private That is about as simple explanation of a database that you can get. Basically everything you see in your WordPress dashboard lives in tables like this. Some other examples are comments, settings, users etc. They all just get their own table. In reality, all this information is stored in special data structures that would look like a giant mess to most people. Databases are full of enormous complexity that would require an entire blog to explain everything that goes on inside. Obviously, way beyond the scope of this post. What you need to know is that at a simple level a database is a bunch of tables managed by some software on the web server, and that your database sits completely separate from the files that make up WordPress. How it relates to WordPress backups As we have seen, there are two parts to a WordPress site. The files that make up WordPress (including your themes and plugins) and the database that sits behind it. It’s also worth nothing that themes and plugins may create their own tables inside the database to store information. If you were to back up your website, it is not as simple as copying the WordPress files somewhere. You now know that you need the database as well. Unfortunately, you cannot backup a database just by copying some files. However, you can take the current state of the database and turn that into a normal file. If you have ever backed up your WordPress site (if you haven’t, remind me to smack you later), you’ll notice options to do a “complete backup” or a “database backup”. If you request a complete backup, this is what happens: A command is run to take a snapshot of the database and turn that into a file Gather up all the WordPress files Squash it all down into a compressed file (like a “.zip” file, but on most web servers they will be a “tar.gz” file) If everything is set up correctly, once you download that single file, you have a copy of your entire website which you can restore on another web host. You can also use it to restore your site to a previous state in the event you get hacked or completely break your site. Backing up regularly can be a massive pain. Some people have the backups stored on their web host. This is fine when you need to recover from a broken site, but what if your whole web host went down? Another option is to regularly log in, create and download the backup. But who has time for this? These days, one of the best solutions is to set up automatic cloud backup of your website. This means that WordPress will regularly backup your site, and ship the files off to a server on the cloud somewhere which you can download when you need them. You can also restore your site directly from that cloud server, without having to download the backup and upload it to your site. And finally, the easiest method of all is to have someone else handle it all for you. Recently, I became aware of how many business owners rely on WordPress for their day to day business, yet are not backing up their site. Before I mentioned the blogger friend of mine. Last week, she told me about how she lost FOUR entire websites sue to a web host crash. Completely gone, overnight. How awful is that? It doesn’t need to be like this, as having your backups and maintenance managed is such a simple and inexpensive process. We now offer WordPress backups and maintenance as a service to our clients, to give them peace of mind, knowing their entire site is safe at all times. If you’re interested in not only ensuring that you won’t lose your entire website overnight, but having someone regularly service and maintain your website for speed, security and more, check out the plans at the WordPress Backups and Maintenance page.

How To Listen Better

Sun, 24 Aug 2014 00:08:19 +0000

I just watched an awesome TED Talk by Julian Treasure on listening (video below), and why it is super important for our society. Take a few minutes out and watch it as well. Listening is so important in almost every aspect of our lives, yet we’re really freakin bad at it. It doesn’t just apply to listening to your partner so that you don’t get in trouble. One of the major reasons so many businesses fail is that they fail to listen to their customer or audience. Sometimes that means they just piss them off. Sometimes that means they build the entirely wrong product or service, and no one ends up wanting it. The end result in both cases is the same – a rubbish business. Here’s a quick summary of the 5 ways Julian gives to improve your listening. Take 3 minutes every day to just sit in silence (or quiet if you can’t find silence) When you are in a noisy place, try to identify how many “channels” you are listening to, like a sound mixer In your mind, try to turn mundane sounds (e.g. train going past) into something way cooler than what it is. Pick out the various details in it. Move your listening position e.g. critical to empathetic, active to passive RASA – Recieve, Appreciate, Summarise, Ask. When listening to someone, receive the information, show appreciation for what they are saying, summarise it and ask questions.  

Chimp Rewriter 3.2.5720 Released

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 11:13:53 +0000

A new version of Chimp Rewriter has been released. The update can be downloaded from http://chimprewriter.com/download.

This release includes an updated version of the OpenNLP and IKVM libraries and also implements several stability improvements. This version specifically addresses the “English POS not loaded” issue reported by several users.

To avoid possible loss of work, it is highly recommended that you upgrade Chimp to this version at your earliest convenience.

The post Chimp Rewriter 3.2.5720 Released appeared first on AkturaTech News.

Chimp Rewriter 3.2.5699 Released

Sun, 09 Aug 2015 08:05:39 +0000

A new version of Chimp Rewriter has been released. The update as always can be downloaded from http://chimprewriter.com/download.

This update includes some minor functionality fixes as follows:

Fixed article scraper for several sites.
Fixed small bug causing user synonyms to not add to capitalized words.
Changed ALT-LEFT and ALT-RIGHT functionality to automatically select the synonym selector list after selecting the next/previous phrase.
News tab can now be disabled from opening on startup.
Hold CTRL+SHIFT when loading and Chimp will automatically reset your settings file. This can be used if Chimp is no longer functioning correctly.
Hold SHIFT when loading Chimp and all browser tabs (Welcome and News) will be automatically disabled. This can be used if the Internet is currently offline or if the Browser component is causing issues.
Added enhanced startup logging to assist in diagnosing startup, POS, Thes and language loading issues.
Added recovery code to automatically download lost or corrupted language files.

This update can be downloaded from http://chimprewriter.com/download.

The post Chimp Rewriter 3.2.5699 Released appeared first on AkturaTech News.