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January 2021

Linux

CentOS reign is over! A new era for web servers

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What is CentOS? CentOS is a Linux distribution targeted towards Web servers. Centos was founded by Gregory Kurtzer and Lance Davis in 2004. CentOS is basically a one to one copy of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) but without RHEL branding and commercial support and is built from the same source code. CentOS appealed to a broad market since it was free and as reliable as Red Hat this contributed to gaining a large market share for a couple of years, making it the most used Web server in 2010 by a whopping 30% market share in web servers.   Red Hat acquiring CentOS in 2014 and IBM acquiring Red Hat in 2019 In 2014, the CentOS team had a market share bigger than their resources can support. So the team accepted a deal with Red Hat. This was a win-win deal for both sides. Red Hat took control of an entity that complemented their brand and CentOS developers got the resources they needed to continue working on the centOS project. However, a part of the deal involved electing a new governance board for CentOS with a mandatory and permanent Red Hat majority; this made it more acquisition than a deal since CentOS is now funded and controlled by Red Hat. In 2019 IBM officially acquired Red Hat, which led to the decision of discontinuing CentOS.   Death of CentOS and hail CentOS Stream In December 2020, Redhat officially announced the death of the CentOS project. This meant that the current version CentOS 8 will be the last version and adding salt to injury, it will not enjoy the 10-year update it should have, sending it to the grave much earlier by the end of 2021 instead of 2029. Red Hat also announced users will need to migrate to RHEL or CentOS, which was originally announced back in September 2019. For those who don’t know what CentOS stream Linux is, As CentOS community Manager Rich Bowen “ the upstream (development) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux” meaning it’s an update preview of RHEL. Many people consider Stream Linux as a beta version of RHEL; however, the distribution FAQ clearly states that CentOS Stream will not be “the RHEL beta test platform”.   Alternatives: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL): The ultimate goal of discontinuing CentOS is to move users to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Yes, it is a sly move but will save you a lot of time if you have the money for it. Red Hat already released a script for a smooth migration. Stream CentOS: Moving to Stream is an option if you want to stay within the Red Hat ecosystem and don’t want to pay for RHEL. We wouldn’t recommend this option because it can’t have the same reliability as either CentOS or RHEL since, by nature, Stream is a work in progress and always will be, even if the distribution FAQ says that it will not be used as a beta testing platform. ROCKY LINUX: Right after Red Hat announced that CentOS was finished, one of the original founders of CentOS, Gregory Kurtzer announced another clone of RedHat named ROCKY LINUX after the late co-founder of CentOS Rocky McGaugh. However, we are not sure that it will have the same stability and continuity as CentOS. Rocky Linux will be released in Q2 2021. ORACLE LINUX: ORACLE Linux has been around for some time and is another one to one copy from Red Hat offering the same reliability and continuity of Red Hat since ORACLE backs it. Migrating to ORACLE Linux will be very easy as ORACLE provided a script for it. However, the issue with ORACLE Linux isn’t a technical one but more of an ethical problem. Since every scrap of Red Hat Linux is open-source, anyone can make a clone of Red Hat, but the community has long criticized oracle for offering a paid version for technical support for a product that isn’t technically theirs.

WordPress SEO
Digital Marketing, SEO, Web Design, WordPress

Why WordPress is the Best CMS for SEO?

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Are you having trouble with your website SEO? Suffering from low traffic? Are you looking for the best SEO-Optimized CMS? Then you must put WordPress into your considerations. Since WordPress was released in 2003, it has never stopped growing. In fact, according to W3Techs WordPress now powers more than 39% of all the websites on the internet, and it powers more than 63.7% of all websites whose content management systems. If you are wondering why WordPress is so popular? There are many reasons behind its popularity such as high performance, ease-of-use, redundant themes and plugins, and many more. But when it comes to online marketing and search engine optimization WordPress is the best. Here are the reasons why WordPress shines in the SEO part:   WordPress Cares About User Experience Most of WordPress’s themes and plugins are well-crafted to work together to make websites more user-friendly and professional. which makes visitors enjoy and have a smooth experience on a WordPress website and stay longer on it. If you don’t know, Google search engine algorithms care about user experience and reward websites that provide a good user experience. So, WordPress helps you create a great user experience on your website that all search engines would love.   WordPress Support SEO-Friendly Permalinks (URLs) WordPress makes it easy for you to make your website’s URLs SEO-Friendly, for example instead of a URL like this “https://www.websiteName.com/blog/p=39883948PuU320/” you can make your website’s URL like “https://www.websiteName.com/blog/post/marketing-tips” this permalink is more human-readable that makes your user understand what your website is about just by looking at the URL. In addition to that, you can put your keywords in the URL which also helps search engines to understand what your website is about more easily which means your SEO-Friendly permalink doesn’t only look good and human-readable. It will also help you with your website search ranking.   WordPress Makes it Easy for You To Manage Metadata SEO metadata and titles help search engines understand your website content. They tell search engine crawlers what your web pages are all about. When you plug relevant keywords into your metadata and titles, your website becomes more likely to rank well for those keywords in the SERPs Search Engine Results Pages. You can easily install an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO; this plugin helps you to manage all of your post’s metadata in just a few minutes.   WordPress makes it simple to optimize Your website’s images for SEO We all know that images are essential for blog posts. They help you make your posts more interesting and readable for visitors and improve visitors’ engagement on your website. But you need to optimize your images to help you with your website search engine optimization. For example, you need to add alt text (alternative text) to every image and resize them so they don’t slow down your page loading. Here are some examples of how you can optimize your website’s images with WordPress: WordPress allows you to create alt text (alternative text) for your images to add keywords as images description, and search engine crawlers will notice that and help you rank better. You can use a WordPress plugin that automatically creates alt text for each of your images. You can resize your images to improve your WordPress website performance and page loading.  And much more, with WordPress you can make your website’s images well-optimized and rank better on search engine results pages.   WordPress Cares about Performance Website performance and Page Speed is an important Google ranking factor in mobile search, so if you have a slow website, your website will be pushed down on Google SERPs. WordPress has many amazing plugins that help you improve your website performance and page speed from many angles such as optimizing images for fast load, compressing your documents and past images to boost your website speed, and much more. You can read further about WordPress optimization and the Best WordPress optimization plugins to really understand all of the ins and outs of this topic.   WordPress is Mobile-Optimized Mobile usage has grown by 222% in the past seven years versus desktop usage. You can take a look at the statistics of mobile usage to realize how big it is. This means your website must be mobile-optimized otherwise, you’ll lose huge traffic. The great news here is if you’re using WordPress for your website, you don’t need to do anything because most WordPress themes are mobile-optimized already.   WordPress is easy to Integrate with Most Popular Software WordPress after all of this popularity and usage has become easy to integrate with the most popular software, which means you can easily integrate your WordPress website with social media campaigns, email marketing software, SEO tools, analytic tools, and more.  You will find that most good, popular software applications are easy to integrate with WordPress websites.   WordPress Has the Best SEO Plugins With WordPress, search engine optimization is made simple. All you need is to install the right plugins to simplify the process of making your website SEO better. Among all of CMS, WordPress has the best plugins for SEO, such as: Yoast SEO: This will help you optimize your website content and make better keyword-focused content, optimize your website metadata, titles and meta description, and much more. Google XML Sitemaps: Sitemaps are essential for helping search engine crawlers easily understand your website. With this plugin creating complex XML sitemaps is made easy, and every time you post a new article or create a new page, this plugin notifies search engine crawlers of your website’s new content. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights: With this plugin, you literally don’t need to leave your WordPress dashboard to see your Google Analytics reports, you can study your website pages in great detail and well-crafted statistics so you can optimize your content more and more, plus you can track your banner ads, affiliate links’ clicks from it, and many more powerful tools with this awesome plugin.   Are You Still Asking, What is the Best CMS for

5 tips to optimize website speed
Web Design, WordPress

5 Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Website Performance

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After you understand the importance of page speed, let’s start on how to boost your website speed.  How to speed up your WordPress website and increase its performance surely is a very hot topic nowadays. Fortunately, there are easy ways to help you increase your WordPress website performance significantly. But why do you even need to care about your WordPress website performance and page load time? Your website performance and page load time are actively affecting the bounce rate of your website. Studies said that if your website page took more than 2 seconds, you would have about 47% bounce rate; besides that Google and other search engines consider the page load time as one of the most important ranking factors in their result pages. So, you need to take your WordPress website’s performance as a serious matter for your website’s success. In this article, we’ll tell you how to speed up your WordPress website speed and performance in the best ways possible, so let’s get started.   1. Choose a Good Hosting Provider: The very first reason that affects your website speed is your web hosting quality. So, if you are just starting your website, it’s fine to choose a shared hosting plan, but we recommend you to make sure that your hosting server storage type SSD; if you already have launched your WordPress website for a while and your traffic volume is increasing, you probably will need to upgrade your hosting plan either to a higher shared hosting package or to a VPS hosting.   2. Use an Optimized Lightweight WordPress Theme: A WordPress theme with too many elements, widgets, sliders, etc. could look very shiny, but if the theme has too many components with a higher page size, it will affect your page load time. Another important factor is theme optimization. You need to make sure that the theme is well-coded and don’t forget to look at its reviews and buy it from a trustworthy place.   3. Use a WordPress Caching Plugin: WordPress pages are “dynamic”, which means that they’re built on the fly when anyone visits a page or a post on your website to build a page, WordPress behind the scenes has to run a process to find the requested information, then display it to the visitor. This process has multiple steps to be done, so sometimes it could slow down your website when multiple users visit it at once. Here the caching plugin comes into play, it can make your WordPress website more than twice faster. The caching plugin role is that instead of going through the whole page generation process every time a user visits the page, it (caches) makes a copy of the page after the first time the page loads and then serves that cached version to every upcoming user.  There are many good WordPress caching plugins, but we recommend using WP Super Cache, it’s free!   4. Optimize Image Size: Images help you boost engagement on your WordPress website content, but they will negatively affect your website if you don’t optimize them. In fact, non-optimized images are one of the most common performance issues seen on beginner websites. So, you need to optimize your images to speed up your WordPress website. So, either manually optimizes the images using Photoshop, Chrome Pagespeed Insights extension, or any other tools, or you could use image optimization WordPress plugins such as Optimole or WP Smush. This way you’ll reduce your website images and improve your website performance and speed.   5. Regularly Update your WordPress Website: WordPress is frequently updated; each update offers new features and may contain security fixes. As a WordPress website owner/manager, you are responsible for keeping your WordPress website, themes, and plugins up to date with their latest versions. If you don’t update everything regularly, you may cause performance issues to your WordPress website or you may end up vulnerable to security threats.   To conclude Always put your WordPress website performance and page load time as one of the most important factors that affect your website/business success.

Web Hosting

What is FTP And How Does FTP Work?

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First of all, FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and it’s a protocol used to communicate and transfer files between computers on a TCP/IP network (The Internet). In other words, FTP is a way to transfer files online. It’s also one of the oldest protocols that we still use today to move files around.   How does FTP Works? FTP connection needs two parties to be established on the network; to do that, you need to have permission by providing credentials to the FTP server. Some public FTP servers may not require credentials to access their files by the way. There are two communication channels while starting an FTP connection, which are the command channel and the data channel. The command channel initiates the instructions and responses. The data channel distributes the data. To transfer or get a file, you as an authorized user will use the protocol to request creating changes in the server, and then the server will grant you that access; this session is called Active Connection Mode.   How to use FTP? There are three ways to establish an FTP connection: command line, web browser, and FTP client. The oldest and simplest method is the command line, such as the terminal in Mac/Linux or the command prompt in windows. Many developers still use the command line to establish an FTP connection to transfer files as they develop a website for example. You can also use a web browser to establish an FTP connection with a server; usually, users use a web browser when they want to access large directories in the server, but it’s less reliable and slower than using an FTP client. The most popular way to establish an FTP connection today is to use an FTP client. It provides more freedom when comparing it to the command line and way faster than the web browser. So, the FTP client overall is a lot easier to manage and has more features such as it allows users to transfer large files and use the synchronizing utility, and more. In the end, you can now send and receive files from an FTP server. We wish you understood the FTP now and the different methods you can use to establish an FTP connection as we learned. 

Web Hosting

What is WHMCS Usage and Benefits?

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If you’re starting your own hosting business, or you are a web developer/designer who is bundling additional web hosting services to your customers then, you might have heard about WHMCS. In the article, we’ll learn more about WHMCS and why you should use it, so let’s start.   What is WHMCS? WHMCS stands for Web Hosting Manager Complete Solution; It provides you with a full web hosting management solution with a cart system that can integrate with your own business website so that customers can purchase web hosting services with a fully automated hosting business website. WHMCS is one of the cPanel products    Why use WHMCS?  If you would like to make your reseller hosting business fully automated and professional, WHMCS is one of your best options.   What Can WHMCS Do for You?  WHMCS unlike traditional cart systems, is specially made and designed for web hosting businesses, so it can be integrated with a wide variety of web hosting servers and related applications so when a customer purchases a service from your hosting website, it will do the full process, from collecting the payment, creating a user account for the customer to manage his service/s, to automatically provision the web hosting account on the hosting server.  The processes that we mentioned above can take hours of manual work from you as a web hosting provider, but WHMCS saves you this time and effort by automating the whole process.  In Addition to that, WHMCS have all of the tools you need to automate customer onboarding, service delivery, and management happen smoothly, here’re some of these great tools: Customer Support System Billing Management System Reporting System Fraud Management System Order Management System Domain Registration System  Also, WHMCS can be integrated with various other web hosting-related products. You can use it to automate provisioning services like VPN Accounts, VPS Hosting, Domains, Email Accounts, and much more.  to master reseller business, you should know the Difference between WHMCS and WHM 

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