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signs you need SEO help
Digital Marketing, SEO

5 Signs You Need SEO Help

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We’re sure that you have received a lot of emails from companies offering services to maintain your website and get a return on investment. You can’t spend all your money on one service. You need to determine which services are essential for your business’ success. SEO may be one of the services you are offered. We can help you decide if it is worth your investment. These are the signs you should be looking for to determine if it’s time to invest in SEO help.   Your website is now up and running. Although you may have spent a lot of money to create a responsive website for your business, it is useless if no one can find it. No matter the reason you created a website it won’t be able to reach your goals without traffic. SEO is the best way to get people to visit your site. SEO can drive the traffic you need to your website, making your efforts worthwhile.   Your site has very little or no content Let’s suppose you have a website that is great for your business. It contains all the details about your past work and services. It may seem like all you need is that website. Content is the king in SEO. Regular content creation is an organic and easy way to increase your site’s visibility and gain Google’s favor. Don’t worry if you don’t consider yourself a content creator. Professional SEO services often include content writing so that your website can get original, handcrafted content.   You don’t show up on Google’s search results Open another tab in your browser to search for your business on Google. We’ll wait for you, don’t be alarmed. If your brand appeared on the first page, that’s perfect. If not, it may be inaccessible. Customers seldom look beyond the first few results. Failure to appear on the first page can lead to disaster.   Your website isn’t getting enough traffic. One positive sign is a steady increase in website traffic. If you’ve already installed Google Analytics, you can monitor how many people visited your site in a given time period. You might consider using SEO services to improve the numbers.   Long-term results are what you want. SEO can be expensive and time-consuming. You should invest in it. SEO can be beneficial for any size business, no matter how small. SEO is a long-term effort that takes time.   Conclusion SEO is crucial for any website; however, you don’t necessarily need to hire a professional to do it for you. You can do it yourself. If you don’t know where exactly to start in SEO, check out our comprehensive SEO guide. Did you know that your website speed also affects your ranking? Hostilica’s SSD hosting will never hold your website back

What is IoT
Web Development, Web Hosting

What is IoT?

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The term “Internet of Things” is currently one of the most used buzzwords. It’s often abbreviated as “IoT”. Kevin Ashton (founder of MIT’s Auto-ID Center), was part of a research group that looked at how everyday objects could be linked to the Internet in the 1990s and coined the term IOT. Many people are still not sure what IoT is, despite the fact that it is used all over the Internet. Below is a quick overview of IoT, its functions, and what we can expect in the future.   So what is IoT? The Internet is nothing more than a network made up of computers. Many of these computers are owned by web hosts, who have servers that host websites. These computers are used by billions of Internet users to access their favorite websites, watch videos, and chat with their friends on Facebook. Imagine that computers were not the only thing connected to the Internet. Everyday items could also connect to it. Let’s say you have a fridge. Your kids are home while you are at work. You are at work, but the kids have finished your last can of Coca Cola. This leaves you with no choice but to drive to 7-11 to get a new one. Imagine your fridge being connected to the Internet. You received an email letting you know that you may want to stop by 7-11 on your way home for some Coke. This is basically the idea behind IoT, which allows everything to be connected to the Internet to give feedback and provide relevant information whenever needed. Here are some examples of IoT:   Activity Trackers: These sensors can be worn throughout the day to transmit and monitor key health indicators such as appetite, fatigue, physical movement and oxygen levels. Home monitoring helps seniors and disabled live independently, while reducing the need for hospitalizations or emergency room visits.   Smart farming: Smart IoT farming applications can help farmers optimise a variety of tasks, including detecting the optimal time to harvest plants, developing fertiliser profiles based on soil chemistry, and sensing soil nutrients and moisture levels. IoT technologies can aid precise farming, resulting in increased yield. According to a BI Intelligence analysis, the market for agriculture IoT device installation would likely expand at a 20% annual pace, reaching 75 million by 2021.   Smart Supply Chain Management: Smart routing and rerouting algorithms can help supply chain managers make better predictions. Smart IoT devices connected to shipments can provide real-time after-the-fact information via GPS and RFID signals, allowing supply chain managers to make more informed decisions. IoT applications can aid in the reduction of supply chain management uncertainty concerns. Smart supply chain management systems can help supply chain managers reduce variance, save costs, and increase profitability. Inventory management, vendor relationships, fleet management, and scheduled maintenance can all benefit from the programs.   Conclusion The Internet of Things is still in its adolescence. We shall be connected in ways that are difficult to comprehend today in years to come. IoT applications will increase decision-making, efficiency, convenience, wellness, and energy saving, especially when integrated with artificial intelligence and automation. Integration of these technologies will also allow for more creative thinking and novel applications in a variety of industries.

What is AB Testing
Digital Marketing, Web Development

What is A/B testing?

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A/B Testing is when you test two or more versions of a page, plugin, or section of content to compare which performs best. In web development, A/B Testing allows you to see beforehand what the end result of your SEO Optimizations will be which in turn makes it easier for you to fine-tune your page or plugin to meet your business goals and make changes if the need arises. It is one of the most important things any web designer can do.   A/B Testing benefits and use cases There are many benefits of A/B Testing and how it can help your site. With A/B Testing, you are able to understand which version has the biggest impact on your rankings. A/B Testing saves you money by enabling you to focus your time and effort on making a great product or service and not waste money on trying to figure out which version performs best. A/B Testing is extremely flexible and allows you to run many tests simultaneously and understand how people use your product or service to optimize for usability. A/B Testing is the key to online marketing strategies that truly work. You may ask how this helps online marketing strategies? By using A/B Tests, you can determine exactly which version/content of your website performs best and make the appropriate changes. A/B Testing allows you to test many variations of one thing simultaneously. You may want to run two different versions of the same product/content/design and run A/B tests on each one. However, before you do A/B Testing, you should decide which versions you wish to test and how you wish to implement the changes once the tests are complete. A/B Testing is cost-effective because you only pay for the number of visitors who perform a certain action. Typically this means you will need to send two different versions of the page. Google’s AdWords platform can efficiently track how many visitors click on an ad and how many of these visitors go on to purchase a product. A/B Testing costs less than traditional split testing because there are fewer variables for the advertiser to control. A/B Testing is ideal for small niche products that are difficult to find traffic for conventional split testing.   A/B Testing is practical for companies that want to understand their conversion rates without spending large amounts of money to conduct market research or hire consultants. A/B Testing allows you to compare two different versions of the same page without using costly Google AdWords campaigns. A/B Testing is also useful for companies with a large variety of products or services but want to test a particular aspect of their performance.  A/B Testing is also useful for companies that want to understand their overall performance and track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.   To perform an A/B test, you should also have a copy of your website’s source code. This allows you to detect problems in the source code that may prevent you from optimizing for A/B Testing. In addition to performing A/B Testing, you should also implement a call-to-action, also known as a trigger, so that visitors will always be prompted to enter information. A call-to-action ensures that users will perform a certain action, such as entering their first name and email address, after which they will be directed to your sales page or sales letter. If you would like to know more about software development processes you can check out article on SDLC which explain all the processes involved in software development

What is SDLC
Web Development

What is SDLC

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Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a method that clearly defines the processes and tools required to create high-quality software. The SDLC methodology is focused on the following phases: Analysis of requirements Plan System Design Software development Test Implementation   What is the software development cycle? Software Development Life Cycle, also known as SDLC, is a method that creates software at the lowest possible cost and quality in the shortest amount of time. SDLC is a structured flow of phases that allows an organization to produce high-quality software quickly and be ready for production.   How the SDLC works SDLC reduces the cost of software development while improving quality and reducing production times. SDLC achieves these seemingly divergent goals through a plan that eliminates common pitfalls in software development projects. This plan begins by evaluating current systems for any deficiencies. It then defines the requirements for the new system. The software is then created through the following stages: analysis, planning design, development, testing and deployment. SLDC prevents costly errors like not asking the client or end-user for feedback. This allows them to eliminate unnecessary rework and after the deployment fixes. It is important to note that the emphasis on testing is very strong. Because the SDLC is repetitive, it is important to ensure that every cycle of code quality is met. While many organizations spend little time on testing, a strong focus on testing can help them save a lot of time, money, and rework. Make sure you are smart about writing the right types of tests. Let’s now look at the various stages of the Software Development Cycle.   Stages The stages in SDLC will ensure that the process runs smoothly, efficiently, and is productive. 1.Requirement analysis “What problems does the system need to solve?” The process of making a list of all the requirements that the system needs to meet while taking into account all stakeholders’ opinions including customers, programmers, salespeople, and industry professionals. With improvement as the goal and to learn the strengths and weaknesses of your system   2.Planning “What are we looking for?” This stage of the SDLC estimates the costs and resources needed to implement the requirements. This document also outlines the risks involved and offers sub-plans to mitigate those risks. This means that the team must determine whether the project is feasible and how they can execute it with minimal risk.   3.System Design “How can we achieve what we want?” The system design phase converts the software specifications into a design blueprint. The plan is then reviewed by all stakeholders who can offer suggestions and feedback. It is crucial that you have a plan to collect and incorporate stakeholder input into the document. Failing to do so will almost certainly lead to cost overruns and even the complete collapse of the project.   4.Development This is where the actual development begins. Every developer must follow the agreed blueprint. Make sure that you have clear guidelines regarding code style and practices.   5.Testing We test for defects and other deficiencies such as logical errors and bad performance in this stage. These issues are fixed until the product meets all specifications. We want to check if the code meets all the requirements.   6.Implementation This stage is where the goal is to move the software into the production environment. Users can then start using it. Many organizations opt to move the product through multiple environments, such as a staging or testing environment which allows all stakeholders to play with the product safely before it is released to the public and identifying last mistakes.   Additional Software Maintenance We must also update the software as the world changes. Developers now have more responsibility for the development process.

Brave & IPFS
Linux, Web Hosting

IPFS Protocol

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Imagine an internet with literal freedom of content where governments can never take any content off the internet or ban any website. Well, that’s exactly what the IPFS protocol promises. IPFS utilizes a decentralized file-sharing system that uses peer-to-peer networks instead of relying on a centralized network like the HTTP protocol. But before we explain what exactly is IPFS and how it works, we need to explain the HTTP protocol.   HTTP and HTTPS protocols Short for HyperText Transfer Protocol is the protocol that currently powers the internet and most websites that you visit and use. After you enter a website URL in your browser, your browser sends an http request which (if the server accepts) fetches the files required to build the web page you requested. HTTPS is the same as HTTP but adds a layer of security. You can learn more about both here   IPFS Short for InterPlanetary File System, which is a relatively new protocol first released in 2015. IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that utilizes multiple nodes simultaneously to download the data instead of a centralized server, making it possible to distribute high volumes of data without duplication, which will save data usage. And as we mentioned above, content censorship will be way too hard to do since the content won’t be available on a single or a range of IPs, so it’s almost impossible to block websites. As stated on their website IPFS directly challenges the HTTP protocol and is trying to be the new default protocol; however, taking the HTTP is a big challenge to take since it’s been the industry standard for decades and especially hard for IPFS because of limited browser support.   Browser support Currently, the only browser that supports IPFS protocol natively is Brave browser. Brave always supports privacy, and they firmly believe that IPFS will address a lot of the current internet issues, and they even let you host an IPFS node yourself. While Brave is a decent browser and a growing player in the market, its support isn’t enough for IPFS to achieve its goals. For IPFS to achieve their goals, they would need full native support from Chrome which has over 1 billion users. Unfortunately, IPFS isn’t natively supported in Chrome; however, IPFS already released a browser extension for it.   Conclusion The IPFS protocol is fighting for a good cause, but we don’t think that it will ever replace the HTTP and HTTPS protocols because they would literally need support from everyone in the community and the developers and they would also be fighting against industries built on the HTTP protocol head on

Web Development, Web Hosting

HTTP vs HTTPS

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HTTP and HTTPS, the literal building blocks of today’s internet. HTTP and HTTPS are responsible for powering each and every website that you visit through the internet, yet a lot of people don’t know what exactly are they, what they do and how they work, and that’s what we are going to explain through this article. HTTP After a website is created and the files are uploaded to a server, the browser uses the HTTP protocol to access those files and display the website. HTTP is short for HyperText Transfer Protocol. After your browser establishes a connection with the server that contains the website, The browser sends an HTTP request to the server to access these files; after the server accepts the HTTP request, it replies with the files needed to build the webpage. Of course, all that happens within a mere few seconds; however, HTTP has a problem, all the data is sent and received unencrypted which means an attacker can intercept the transmission and steal all the data, which is not good, especially if the website is handling sensitive data such as credit card numbers. And that’s where HTTPS comes to the rescue. HTTPS HTTPS works the same exact way as HTTP but encrypts the entire data during transmission and that’s why it’s called HyperText Transport Protocol Secure, so in case an attacker intercepts the transmission, they wouldn’t be able to read the data. HTTPS builds trust between a website and their users and makes e-commerce a lot more secure. However, HTTPS has its own limitation; HTTPS encrypts data during transmission, so if an attacker got hold of the cached pages on your browser, they would still be able to steal the data. HTTPS is enabled by adding an SSL certificate to your server, which you can learn more about here. Conclusion Understanding HTTP and HTTPS are crucial for anyone seeking a career in web development and you know what’s also crucial? Having a good web host. Hostilica provides excellent web hosting plans that are guaranteed to satisfy all your needs. All our servers are SSDs, so you can be sure that your performance will be top-notch and a free SSL to make sure your users’ data is secure

TCP IP
cPanel & WHM, Linux, VPS, Web Hosting

Common Protocols and Their Port Numbers

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Service names and port numbers are utilized to differentiate between services used over transport protocols such as TCP/IP, UDP and SCTP. The organization responsible for assigning the name and port number of the services is called Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or IANA for short who also maintains the registries where service names and port numbers are stored. Port registries used in transport protocols are divided into three ranges: 1-System Ports (0-1023) 2-User Ports (1024-49151) 3-Dynamic / Private Ports (49152-65535)   For service to operate efficiently, hosts that operate them and access them along with intermediate devices, like firewalls, must agree on which service is used on which port and many services will use the port listed on the IANA registry. However, with the growing use of windows and single-user Linux systems over the years, the initial port model isn’t strictly adhered to, which means It may no longer be presumed that a particular port number automatically refers to a specific service. For example, web hosts launch multiple instances of the same service, so we cannot use the same port for all. Nowadays there are hundreds and hundreds of programs and application-level protocols that have been delegated service names and port numbers along with this amount is set to increase later on. Additional confusion above port numbers may appear since IANA may de-assign a few more in usage and reassign it to a different service. Here’s a table of the most common services and their port numbers Service name   Port number FTP 20,21 SSH 22 TELNET 23 SMTP 25 DNS 53 DHCP 67,68 HTTP 80 HTTPS 443 POP3 110 IMAP4 143   On Linux machines, you can find information about the services that client applications might use in the /etc/services folder. On windows, services, port number and protocols are in the C:windows\system32\drivers\etc\services   Conclusion Dealing with services and port numbers can be messy, but you know what’s not messy? Hostilica shared hosting services. With Hostilica’s SSD server, 99.9% uptime guarantee, and qualified customer support, you can be sure that hosting your website will go as smoothly as possible. Check out our shared hosting offers here.

Website Cookies
Web Development

What Are Web Cookies?

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Web cookies are usually compact text files, given ID tags that are saved on your computer’s browser directory or program information subfolders. Cookies are made when you use your browser to visit a website that uses cookies to keep track of your moves within the website, enable you to restart where you left off, remember your registered login, subject choice, preferences, and other customization purposes. The Web Site stores a corresponding document (with the same ID label )to the one they set in your browser,and in this file they can monitor and store information on your moves within the site and any information You Might Have willingly given while visiting the website Cookies are often portrayed as the devil responsible for the fall of privacy, and the sole reason for their existence is to take your data, but that’s actually far from the truth. You should know that without cookies, you could kiss the internet as you know it goodbye. Cookies are responsible for a lot of the functions you need on the internet, such as keeping you logged in (so you wouldn’t have to log in each time you visit a page and it’s also responsible for the shopping cart in e-commerce websites. Let us explain why. Cookie types: The cookies that you hear about all the time are called HTTP cookies and the are two types of them: The first type is called session cookies. Session cookies are as harmless as cookies can be. As the name suggests, Session cookies work only while you’re on the website and disappear as soon as you close it and the data along with it. The second type of cookies is called persistent cookies and these are the ones that stir up all the controversy. The first type of problem with this cookie is that it can stay indefinitely on your browser (however, most of them clear after two weeks). This type of cookie is the one responsible for personally identifying you and collecting data about you such as your browsing patterns. We know this sounds bad; however, a lot of good comes from this type of cookie because, as a rule of thumb, the better a company knows about you, the better they can serve. The problem here comes with collect way too much data than they should or sell your data to other companies; of course not to forget third party cookies, which literally tracks you all over the web   Conclusion Cookies are not inherently evil or a lousy invention, but many companies abused them, but that doesn’t mean that we should blame the cookies. If you like this article, you might also want to check out our article on APIs

DDoS attack
Security, Web Hosting

What is a DDOS Attack?

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In computer networking, a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) is an attack in which the attacker seeks to render a specific system or network resource temporarily or permanently unavailable to its victims. Distributed denial of service attacks are performed by attackers that control multiple victim systems. Unlike traditional types of Internet attacks, where an IP address identifies a single system or computer, the underlying principle of DDoS is that an Internet user can bring down or damage several systems simultaneously from different computers that have different IPs. This makes it impossible for a system to relay information during such an attack accurately.   Distributed denial-of-service is one of the most formidable forms of cyberattacks, and it can wreak havoc on your business. If you have a server used for your company’s online operation, then a distributed attack against it can bring down many of its important services. With a single DDoS attack, you can get pretty much anything on the Internet to go down.  How does it work? A DDOS attack is carried out by a network of devices that can range from PCs to IoT devices that have been infected by a malware that allows the attacker to control them. The attacker then orders these devices to send many requests, causing a server to be overwhelmed by the number of requests. Of course, there are many variations of this attack, but they all share the basic concept of overwhelming a web server.   How to identify a DDOS attack? The most obvious indicator is a site or a service slowing down or shutting down completely. However, many reasons can cause these issues, such as legitimate traffic spikes, so you should do some extra investigation. Here are some of the signs you should look for while investigating: A big amount of traffic originating from a single IP or a range of IP addresses A lot of traffic from users with the same behaviour Unexplained requests for a single page Spike patterns at odd times.   How To Deal With DDOS Attacks? As we mentioned above, always try to locate the IP addresses responsible for the attack and block them; however, this won’t be possible in some situations, so here are some steps you can take to mitigate the damage. software packages in your web server such as mod_reqtimeout that ships with apache can help to defend against DDOS attacks Increase server power Use Load balancers to balance the DDOS load on multiple servers Setup a firewall application Consider hiring a DDOS mitigation service such as Cloudflare. If you want to learn more about security threats and how to protect your website against them check out these articles

What is a Brute Force Attack
Linux, Security

What is a Brute Force Attack?

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You may have heard the term “brute force” when looking for information on hacking, but you may not understand what it means. It’s a common term that is often used in the security world. Basically, the attacker submits many passwords either through a dictionary(password list) or auto-generated passphrases until the computer guesses the correct combination, like trying out all the possible combinations on a safe. This attack requires minimal effort on the attacker’s part since modern computers can crack an eight-alphanumeric complex password in less than two hours. It can even take less time if your password is found in a recycled dictionary (credentials got from another breach). The most known password dictionary is rockyou which contains 14,341,564 passwords to date. Brute Force attacks can be very problematic because once an attacker is in, it is tough to catch them, so most people try to protect their websites before the attack happens or detect and neutralize the attacker while the attack is happening. How to protect yourself? Protecting your website and credentials against Brute Force attacks isn’t hard. You just need to know the best practices:   Use Complex Passwords: Using complex passwords makes it much harder for a computer to crack your password. Always make sure to include special characters such @,_ and !. You can always use cPanel included password generator to generate strong and complex passwords for you.   Increase Password Length: Just using a complex password won’t completely protect you. As we mentioned above, a modern computer can crack eight-alphanumeric complex passwords in about two hours, so make sure to increase the length of your password.   Limit Login Attempts: Limiting login attempts on your website will make it almost impossible for your password to be cracked, so if you can enable it on your website dashboard, you should.   Use Two-Factor Authentication: Two-factor authentication adds a second security layer to your credentials by sending an OTP (one time) passcode to your phone number or email so that even if your password is compromised, the attacker won’t be able to access the app unless they get the OTP code.   Implementing Captcha: Implementing captcha on your website is a great way to make sure that whoever is trying to access your website is a human, not a bot.   Conclusion Brute force attacks can cause massive problems since they are very hard to notice if they are successful; however, preventing them is relatively easy if you follow the practices above. Never take your website or credentials security lightly, and always make sure that your website is secure as possible.

What are DNS records
Web Hosting

DNS Records and Types

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As we mentioned before in the DNS explained article, the domain name system is what makes up the internet as we know it. The domain name system translates the human-friendly URLs that we can read, write, and memorize into IP addresses that connect to websites that we use. If you plan to run your own website, you will definitely need to understand DNS records and how to use them properly. So what is a DNS record? DNS records contain that data to answer a client’s query; they are simply the database that holds the information about the servers IP addresses. Depending on their type, this will determine the data returned to the client and what they can do with it. Let’s explain the most common DNS records you will need to use.   Name server record: More commonly known as NS records. The name server record indicates which DNS server actually holds the DNS records for a domain. It basically tells the internet where to find the IP addresses to a website or an application. Most hosting providers will provide you with two NS records. A primary record and a secondary one in case the primary server fails. NS record is an essential service for every registrar or hosting provider and you will have to change them when you change your hosting provider.   A and AAAA record: An A record is short for address record and is basically used to point a domain or a subdomain to an IPv4 server’s IP address. For example, if you have a website that consists of a store and blog and wants to host them on two separate servers, you can use two separate A records by setting, for example, blog.example.com to a shop.example.com to another server’s IP address. You can also set this record in order to indicate the IP address for your mail subdomain. AAAA records are used the same as A records but are used to route IPv6 addresses. It is worth noting that both A and AAAA accept only IP addresses as values.   CNAME record: The CNAME record is short for canonical name record and is used to set a domain or a subdomain as an alias to another domain. A very common use case for this record would be setting domain names to resolve to the same IP addresses with or without WWW. CNAME records always take host names as a value not an IP address.   MX entry: Mail exchanger entry is used to direct emails to email servers. MX entries differ from A and CNAME records in that they take priority as a value so you can prioritize servers, and records will attempt to use the highest priority server first (higher priority numbers are used first). Like CNAME entries, MX entries must be to a domain or a subdomain not an IP address, so you will have to set the A records for the domain first.   TXT records: A TXT (text) record is used to store text data that was first used to store human readable text. Nowadays, they are used for verification such as Google verification to verify for Google that you own a certain domain or verify that emails are coming from trusted sources.   Conclusion Managing DNS can be tricky in the beginning, especially if you don’t know what each record is used for and for the most your hosting provider will handle it, but for more advanced use cases, you will need to do it yourself, so we hope you have a better idea of how each DNS record is used by now.

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