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Web Design, WordPress

How to Check Your WordPress Performance?

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The Importance of WordPress Performance After we explained the WordPress plugins, we will move to the performance stage. WordPress performance is a big and important topic for any WordPress user because as you may already know, page loading speed is an important factor for SEO and user experience on your website, so this is one of the topics you always need to check and optimize. Are you just starting with WordPress or using it for a while?, but you need to check your WordPress site performance, then you’re in the right place.   Why is Page Speed Important? Studies say that the average human attention range has decreased from 12 seconds to only 7 seconds, so that means that you have very little time to show your visitors your content and give them a reason to stay on your website. You may have heard about the term ‘bounce rate’, which means how many users leave your website after visiting it. The main reason most times for users leaving your website is the slow loading of pages. Another important study from StrangeLoop that involved large sites including Google and Amazon said that a 1 second delay in your page loading time may lead to 11% fewer page views, a 7% loss in conversions, and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. Google search engine algorithm has already started to push slow websites down in the search result page, which results in less traffic volume for slow websites. To wrap this point up, by now you know how much the importance of WordPress website speed and performance, so if you want to attract more traffic volume, more subscribers, and more profit from your website, you need to make your WordPress website fast.   You Must Check Your WordPress Website Speed As a beginner, you may think that your website speed is ok, just because you don’t feel it slow on your computer, but this is a big mistake because since you always visit your website, modern browsers like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox store your website in something called browser cash, which automatically prefetch your website data, so as soon as you visit it, it will load fast because it’s cashed already in the browser; However, when a normal user visit your website for the first time, he may not have the same experience as you in terms of website loading speed. Also, users in different geographical locations and different internet speeds will have a different experience. This is why you must check and test your website speed using a good tool like for example isitWP’s WordPress Speed Test tool; it’s free and allows you to test your website’s real speed. After you have tested your website speed, you need to know that the good page loading time is under 2 seconds but put in your mind that the faster your website is, the better.   What could slow down your website? After you knew the importance of your website speed and how big its role in either search engines ranking or in your users’ experience, and after you checked your website load time speed, let’s talk about what could make your WordPress website slow, and try to fix or avoid them to make your website better day after day. The main reasons for a slow WordPress website are: Web Hosting: If you have a bad hosting service or your server is not properly configured, both could end up slowing down your WordPress website. WordPress Configuration: Sometimes when WordPress is misconfigured and isn’t serving cached pages, it will overload your server, so this will end up either slowing your website or crash your entire website. Page Size: Your website’s page size is a big factor for slowing down your website, and in most cases, the reason is unoptimized images for the web. Bad Plugins: Poorly coded plugins will slow your WordPress website, so before installing a plugin into your WordPress website, make sure to search about it and read some reviews. External Scripts: External scripts like font loaders, ads, analytics, etc. could also have a big impact on your website performance and page load time. Now that you know what could slow your WordPress website down, try to avoid making any of the causes that we mentioned above to keep your website performance as good as you can.   Good Web Hosting is Important for Your WordPress Website Always remember that the number one reason for your WordPress website slow could be bad web hosting. A good web hosting provider always takes the extra measures to optimize your hosting environment, resulting in a high-performance web hosting service that will help you optimize your WordPress website performance and page load time speed.

When-you-should-upgrade-to-VPS-Hosting
VPS, Web Hosting

6 Reasons Why You Should Upgrade To VPS Hosting

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  Are you facing a problem with your shared hosting now? You can upgrade to VPS hosting, but when and why should you upgrade to VPS hosting? Let’s answer the “When” part first. But, let’s highlight that Shared Hosting is a perfect starting point for most small businesses and websites. But, as your business and website grow and require more resources to handle it successfully, you need to think about upgrading to VPS Hosting. So, if your website has grown to a level that your website goes down a lot, you have a high page load time, you need to create a separate development environment, or install custom software, then this is the right time to upgrade to VPS Hosting. Now it’s time to answer the “Why” part of the question. Here are the reasons why you should upgrade to a VPS Hosting plan:   Support Bigger Traffic Volume at The Same Time As your traffic grows, operations like synchronizing users accessing your website, purchasing products, sending and receiving emails, using webchat, downloading and uploading files, forum or blog posts, and so on. When all of these operations happen from a high number of users at the same time, this will make your website slower.   Reduce Page Loading and Wait Time In shared hosting, many websites are using and competing for limited resources such as a limited amount of memory. And if your website can’t access the amount of memory it needs, then page load time and the other operations surely will get slower. Most VPS hosting packages are supported by a high and dedicated amount of ram, which will reduce the waiting time and ensure that your website is running properly. So, your users will benefit from rapid page load, faster processing, quicker downloads, uploads, and so on.   Keep your Traffic Flowing Smoothly Your server’s CPU is the brain of operations, which handles your user’s (Inputs/Outputs), and actions on your website, so your server’s CPU is responsible for handling user requests and making sure that your website is running smoothly.   More Scalability VPS environment allows you as a system administrator to expand and upgrade your server’s CPU cores to enable the server to handle busy times and scaling (Input/Output) resources to handle the increased traffic volume.   Build More Complex Web Apps As we know, a simple website can run smoothly on Shared Hosting. But you should know that your server performance can be reduced when handling many requests simultaneously. So, as your web app grows and becomes more complex, it will require more processing power to give us better performance. VPS Hosting packages with the higher resources’ capabilities will ensure that your web app runs as fast as possible even when handling many requests at the same time and continuously runs smoothly.   You Need More Security The VPS environments are isolated and separated from each other, which gives you more security and more security control than shared hosting. With shared hosting, many websites share the same hosting environment, so they can affect each other when it comes to security. So, as your website grows and has more data to protect or if your website handles sensitive data, you’ll probably need to upgrade to a VPS Hosting plan and be more secure.   Do you feel like you have one or more reasons to upgrade to a VPS? If you feel like you need to support bigger traffic volumes, want to scale your online business and presence, optimize your website performance and work on your page loading time, or you feel like you need more security, so don’t hesitate to upgrade to a VPS for a second!  You’ll feel the difference as soon as you start moving from shared hosting to VPS hosting; it will be like you were a startup and became a mid-level company! You can pick a VPS server that suits your business needs from here! 

shared-hosting-vs-vps-hosting
Shared hosting, VPS, Web Hosting

VPS vs Shared hosting – Top Key Differences

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If you decided to start a website, and you need to find the best hosting option which suits your needs, don’t worry we’ll talk about the two most popular hosting options, Shared hosting vs VPS hosting.   What is shared hosting? Shared hosting is a type of web hosting where a server hosts multiple websites. Many users use the resources of a single server, which lowers the cost. Each user gets a part of the server where they can host their websites’ files. Imagine shared hosting like sharing an apartment with other people, so you’ll share the same server resources, like CPU, disk space, and memory with other users who are on the same server. Shared hosting is the most affordable way to host your website online. But, Unfortunately, your website might get slow with a high traffic load, and this happens because of the limited resources. [themify_layout_part slug=”web-hosting-discount”] What is VPS? VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. VPS also is one of the popular hosting types. VPS is about providing you with private resources on a single server with multiple users. With VPS you’ll still be sharing a single server, but it’s more secure and stable than shared hosting where you don’t get private or dedicated resources; all of that ensures that these resources are always available to you.   When to choose shared Hosting? – You’re starting a blog or personal website. – You’re starting a small or average company website. – You don’t know much about dealing with servers. – You have a small budget.   When to choose VPS hosting? – You want to expand your business. – You expect a high traffic load for your website. – You have a bigger budget and planning to invest in your website.   Shared Hosting Pros and Cons : Pros: – More friendly hosting solution for beginners. – Have a standardized setup. – The most affordable hosting solution Cons: – It has limited resources. – Gets slow when handling high traffic load by your website or any other website on the same server. – You have limited access to the server back-end.   VPS hosting Pros and Cons: Pros: – VPS hosting has more bandwidth, memory and easily scalable. – Not affected by other websites’ traffic. – Faster and stable than the shared hosting. Cons: – Have a slightly higher price. – Need more technical experience to manage it well.   Shared hosting vs VPS hosting To conclude, shared hosting is the most affordable solution when it comes to hosting because you’re sharing a single server with other websites. You will have limited resources, but you’re able to host a small website without spending too much money. VPS Hosting, on the other hand, gives you more control, more freedom, and more performance. You don’t have to worry about high traffic or limited resources. However, it’s a bit more expensive.   Finally, When to upgrade your hosting plan? You might be wondering about when is the best time to upgrade to VPS hosting if you already have a shared hosting plan. You can answer this question by asking your self these questions: – Do I want more control over managing my server?– Will I get a high traffic load in the future?– Will I host more than one website in the future? At the end of the day, all of the hosting solutions are good, but the purpose of this article is to explain how to choose the best hosting plan for you, which of them suits your needs more than the other. We hope that this article was useful to you.

does-shared-hosting-affect-your-website-seo
Digital Marketing, SEO, Shared hosting, Web Hosting

Does Shared Hosting Affect Your Website SEO?

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As we know, the SEO strategy is an essential key to the success of your website; however, SEO is not just about making your site mobile friendly, using the right keywords in the right place, and posting useful strong content for your audience; it also, there is a technical aspect to consider for your SEO strategy to succeed.   Will Shared Hosting harm your SEO? To understand this topic, we’ll put together the key points that you need to know about the relationship between shared hosting and SEO.   First of all, Shared hosting is not a ranking factor According to Matt Cutts, former head of search quality at Google, your hosting type/option is not a ranking factor in Google’s Algorithm because they understand that you can’t control who else is on your IP address: However, many factors have an indirect affection on your site ranking. For example, your hosting performance can affect your ranking.   Let’s dive into our list of the key points that you need to know about SEO and Shared hosting: Website Speed: The loading speed is an essential key to rank your website. If you have a slow-loading website, it will negatively affect your UX, plus it will affect your website ranking. Google said Page speed is a ranking factor. All of that because simply people don’t have the patience for slow websites. According to Google Research, most mobile users leave any page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load: So, if you’re on a host that ends up slowing down your website page loading, then that will affect your rankings.   Datacenter / Server location: Another critical point that could affect your website’s speed is the host server location or where your files are stored. Having a server that is very far from your users’ location may negatively affect your website speed.   But, you will be wasting your time trying to find a host near people living in different locations in the world. So, if your site attracts global traffic, then your server location will not be a big problem, or you can get around this by using a CDN. Just consider this factor if your target audience is mostly living in one country.   Learn more about Hostilica’s servers’ location.   Uptime and Downtime: Without surprises, you should already know that your website downtime and uptime both affect your Google rankings positively or negatively. If your website goes down for extended periods, it will affect visitors’ attraction because you will not reach the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) if this is your case. As with slow loading websites, users aren’t likely to revisit your site. For a better understanding of this topic, you can also take a look at these two articles: Downtime for the World’s Top-50 E-Commerce Websites Performance of the World’s Top 50 E-Commerce Websites   To understand how important your website’s uptime and downtime, you may need to take a look at the charts linked above of the Downtime of the world’s top-50 eCommerce websites. You need to know that Google continuously tries to shift its rankings algorithm to these sites that value their users and give them a better user experience. By the way, you should know that Hostilica’s servers guarantee 99.99% uptime.  [themify_layout_part slug=”web-hosting-discount”] Website Security: You must know that security breaches always cause SEO problems. Google research proved that security breaches can lead to technical difficulties that may prevent Google from correctly ranking your website pages. These are the top two security points that affect your website SEO:   HTTPS is an important ranking signal Blacklisting is also a significant key to your rankings.     If you want to go deeper into this topic, you may want to look at this article about the relation between SEO and your Website security.   So, that’s why it’s essential to choose a web hosting option that’s known to be secure because you don’t want your website SEO to go wrong because you chose a hosting option that leaves your site open and vulnerable to attacks.   Quick Note:  HOSTILICA not only guarantees you 100% secure shared hosting servers but also offers many security tools to help you achieve a high level of security on your website.   Final Thoughts   I guess it’s clear that choosing shared hosting as a hosting option will not ruin your SEO rankings. You can also see that on many websites that are on shared hosting servers but have a good SEO ranking result.   You just have to understand what are the factors that could affect your SEO rankings as we mentioned above. So as long as you keep these factors in mind, you will be good to go.   Rely on shared hosting from HOSTILICA [themify_layout_part slug=”web-hosting-discount”] Hostilica offers a variety of hosting options that are meant to suit your needs and are designed to support you in many directions, for example, Servers with 99.99% uptime, More secure with their security tools, and much more.  

WordPress SEO plugins
Digital Marketing, SEO, Web Hosting, WordPress

Best WordPress SEO Plugins

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In this article, we will introduce to you the Best WordPress SEO plugins. If you have built a great website and spent a lot of time creating amazing content for it, but didn’t care about search engine optimization – SEO, then don’t expect to get a lot of traffic from search engines! Organic search traffic is considered as the key metric for defining content success in 2020, also SEO is regarded as the best way of enhancing the content performance based on SEMruch survey. When it comes to WordPress search engine optimization, you must get some help from WordPress plugins (Find out what are WordPress Plugins) to optimize your WordPress website for the search engines. Since you’ll find hundreds of WordPress plugins for SEO, today we’ll highlight some of the best WordPress plugins for search engine optimization. Let’s get started with our list.   Yoast SEO Plugin: Yoast SEO plugin is the most used SEO plugin by WordPress users. It offers a wide range of features to optimize your WordPress website for search engines, including: Optimizing title tags and meta descriptions for every page and post. Analyzing your website pages and posts. Creating an automatic XML sitemap. Connecting your website to the Google search console. Plus, tons of other great features.   SEMrush SEO Plugin: One of the best when it comes to on-page SEO plugins for WordPress. It provides you with instant SEO recommendations for optimizing your website content based on your given keywords, some of its other features: Suggestions for content enhancing and readability score. Suggestions for keywords for better targeting. Plagiarism checking for your website content. Linking recommendations and checks for any link errors.   Rank Math Plugin: Rank Math plugin helps you optimize your WordPress website not only for search engines but also for social media. It’s a widely used plugin and considered one of the best SEO plugins, some of its features: Integration of Google schema and search console. Providing real-time insights for your posts. Making redirections and 404 monitoring. SEO for WooCommerce, and a lot more features…   Google XML Sitemap Plugin: This plugin generates a sitemap for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. This sitemap will help search engines crawl and index all of your website parts. Its features: Automatically update your website sitemap whenever you create a new page or post. It’s easy to use and work with.   All in One SEO Pack Plugin: With more than 2 million websites using this plugin, it’s a popular choice for optimizing on-page SEO. It has a lot of features to help you boost your website SEO including: Helps you with title tags, meta descriptions, and graph tags. Generates image and XML sitemaps Has an easy integration with WooCommerce.   Google Analytics MonsterInsights Plugin: This plugin enables you to check your Google analytics without leaving the WordPress dashboard, some of its features: Provides many reports, such as audience, content, behavior, e-commerce, and search console report. Helps you track your website traffic and user engagement. Has link tracking features.   All in One Schema Rich Snippets Plugin: It’s the most popular plugin when it comes to schema markup for WordPress. Rich snippets are very important for your website SEO and increasing your organic clicks. Some of its features: Has a wide range of schema types such as articles, reviews, products, and recipes. Useful for eCommerce websites.   Broken Link Checker Plugin: This plugin is super helpful for managing your website broken links and missing images because if you have any broken links or missing images, it will affect your search engine’s ranking. Some of its features: Notifies you about any broken links and missing images on your website. Prevents search engines from following broken links.   SEOPress Plugin: SEOPress is a simple SEO WordPress plugin for both beginners and advanced users with many features including: It’s an all-in-one SEO plugin for optimizing your WordPress website. Content analysis with unlimited keywords suggestions. Helps you optimize meta descriptions, sitemaps, etc.   All in One WP Security & Firewall Plugin: This plugin is one of the best WordPress security plugins. It provides advanced security measures for your website. As you know that security matters for better ranking. Some of its features: Scans your website for any security vulnerabilities. Shows how secure your website is. Enhances your overall website security.   W3 Total Cache Plugin: This plugin works on your WordPress website speed and is considered one of the best WordPress cache plugins. Since your website speed matters for SEO, this plugin will help you speed up your website, thanks to its features: Improves your overall site performance. Enhances and reduces page load time. Saves a considerable percentage of bandwidth.   Lazy Load Plugin: Lazy Load plugin is another plugin by WP Rocket, and it’s one of the best WordPress performance plugins. It helps you optimize your website performance by displaying the images only when they’re visible to the visitor, which reduces the HTTP requests and increases your website speed. Works with images, thumbnails, widgets, avatars, and iframes. Boosts up your website speed.   EWWW Image Optimizer Plugin: Another factor for optimizing your website is to optimize your website images by reducing their sizes. This plugin is very powerful when it comes to image optimization, some of its features: Automatically optimizes your images when you upload them to your website. Optimizes previously uploaded images. Unlimited file size.   Final Advice: When it comes to WordPress search engine optimization, there are many factors you should work on, as we mentioned, some of the best WordPress SEO plugins will help you achieve your goals. but as a final advice, you should consider working on your SEO on and off-page plus working on your website security and performance optimization because it’s never about keywords and meta tags only, it’s an overall optimization work on your website to reach a good ranking level on the Google SERPs – Search Engine Result Pages and start getting more organic traffic.  You can also read about: Why

WordPress design tips
Web Design, WordPress

WordPress Design Tips Everyone Should Know

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If you are planning to create a WordPress website, but you are confused about how you should design it to follow the latest and the essential best practices for web design, then you’re in the right place. Designing a website is not a piece of cake if you need to make a website that stands out, but there are a few things that represent about 90% of creating a well designed and optimized website. Let’s explore these tips:   Use a Premium Theme Instead of A Free One To be honest: We all love free things! When it comes to WordPress themes, you’ll find hundreds of free themes. But if you plan to create a professional WordPress website, you’ll probably need to go with the premium options, Why? Because premium themes have a more flexible structure, better code quality, more performance-optimized, and more functionality that will help you produce a great design.   Use the Right Font Fonts play a crucial role when it comes to a good user-experience design. You should go with a font that is available and supported with most browsers, you’ll probably stick with Google Fonts. And be aware that, when you choose your fonts carefully, it will reflect the personality of your brand and make your website look more professional, trustworthy, and stand out in the competition.   Choose an Accent Color for Your Website All of us want to make our websites look “WOW”. So, it’s important to take your website’s colour selection seriously. Your website colours reflect your business message and your brand identity. As a beginner, you’ll probably go with your favourite colour, but you shouldn’t do that, instead, you should know what’s your business message that you want your colours to reflect, then based on the answer choose the right colours.   Performance Optimization is Important According to Google, 53% of users leave a mobile page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So, if you don’t care about your website speed, your visitors won’t care for you, too! Also, your website optimization plays a vital role in search engine optimization. If you want to invest some time and effort to boost your WordPress website optimization, you can take a look at our article that will show you 5 ways to speed up your WordPress website performance.   A Good Logo Matters! Your logo reflects your business identity for sure. It shows the values and ideas behind your brand. You should consider some main factors when it comes to logo design which are readability, simplicity, and uniqueness. Your logo is one of the most important cornerstones of your business, so pick a good designer and don’t go with the cheapest options, because it really matters!   Final Notes After going through the main design concepts to follow the web design’s best practices, the best advice we could give you is to keep learning about the design and user experience because it really matters to make your WordPress website stand out from the competition. From choosing a high-quality theme, good fonts, setting accent colours and making a good logo, all of these are key points to help you create an exceptional website design.

portfolio WordPress website
Web Design, WordPress

How to Create Website with WordPress

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Having a professional portfolio is a must, especially if you’re a freelancer. You need a professional portfolio to showcase your work, leave a good professional-looking impression to your target audience – employers, companies – who are looking for you, to better market yourself and to stand out among all of your competitors! The surprise here is creating a professional-looking portfolio with WordPress is super easy. Note – WordPress is the best solution for freelancers who are looking to make a professional online presence because it has everything you’ll need from the ease of use, great themes, and plenty of additional functionality through hundreds of plugins, by the way, if you are still asking yourself why you should use WordPress you can read our detailed answer for this question to really understand this point. By following up with this article, we’ll take you from the very first step such as web hosting to creating a simple but elegant portfolio WordPress website. when you finish this article you will know how to create a portfolio website in WordPress.   Choose a reliable WordPress Host: we’ve discussed the performance of WordPress topic to death in the past, but here are the most important three things you’ll need to keep in mind when choosing a WordPress host: [themify_layout_part slug=”web-hosting-discount”] 1. Scalability: Your host should have many plans with scalability in mind to handle demanding websites, in case you want to make new projects in the future. 2. Security: A reliable, good host should take web security as a serious matter, and offer features to help you keep your website safe such as SSL certificates, backup options, etc., you can learn WordPress security best practices from here. 3. Support:  This is so important, in case anything went wrong with your website, you’ll want to have access to a reliable support team with a rapid response. After you chose a reliable hosting provider and purchased a shared hosting plan, let’s now move onto installing WordPress.   Install WordPress: This step might look a bit different from a web host to another, but the basic steps remain the same. After purchasing a hosting plan, you’ll have access to a private cPanel which is a control panel to manage your hosting environment. It will have a one-click app installing section – also called “Softaculous Apps Installer” – for installing WordPress and many other CMSs. Find the WordPress option in this section, then install it.   Install the right theme and plugins: This step is a bit more open than the rest of this guide because everyone has his own needs, but there are some factors on how to choose a perfect theme for your WordPress website: Choose a clean, creative, professional-looking theme. Your theme shouldn’t be overwhelming and have tons of colors and animations, just choose a clean but creative one that reflects your nature, personality to help attract your visitors’ looks without exaggeration. Choose an SEO-Optimized theme to help you make your website search engine friendly. Choose a performance-optimized theme, built carefully to give your website a short loading time and a great user experience. If you want to learn more about WordPress plugins, you can read our guide to WordPress plugins from here.   Start Building Your Website: Now you have WordPress installed with a good, professional-looking theme. Now it’s time to create your portfolio page/s and content. Let’s get started. [themify_layout_part slug=”web-hosting-discount”] Your Portfolio Basic Structure: Header: A good header should have a clean/creative background that reflects your desired needs, and an attractive carefully-crafted title that tells your visitors more about you! Main Content: You can split your portfolio main content into three parts which are: Project Gallery:  This part is the heart and soul of your portfolio website, with a link attached to each project. About Me Section:  By now you have made a lot of progress with your portfolio, but you still need to tell your visitors more about yourself and provide them with some insights about who you are and what’s your abilities and skills. Contact Form: After you perfectly showcased yourself and work to your visitors, it’s time to get them to contact you. The basic contact form should have three main entries which are Name, Email, and Message. Footer: Here you have many options such as you could put your social media links, or if you have a blog or additional pages on your website you could put them in your website footer.   Final Notes A good, professional-looking portfolio on WordPress can open a lot of doors to gain more potential employers, because it provides them with a good idea of your abilities and skills, and enables you to stand out from your competitors. And the process of creating your portfolio with WordPress is fairly easy as you saw, even if it will take some time, but it’s definitely worth it.

Web Hosting

The History of Web Hosting

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 Web hosting is considered a new industry. In the past, there was no need for web hosting until the birth of the internet and still, no great need for web hosting until individuals and companies started to launch their own websites, that’s when the web hosting industry boomed!  In this article, we’ll briefly talk about web hosting history to let you know more about this interesting industry.   NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network) and WWW  The decision that started the web hosting industry was the National Science Foundation decision to lift commercial restrictions on the web and allowed commercial traffic to use its (NSFNET) internet network in 1991 resulting in compliance with (NSFNET)’s use policy for profit-companies to have access to the network, which was previously only used for education and research.  That change also coincided with the launch of the WWW – World Wide Web in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues. Also, in 1995 Berners-Lee’s WWW model was adopted as the preferred method to access the Internet.  All of that resulted in an increase in the number of Internet users which increased the commercial usage of the Internet, which in return created the web hosting industry because any company or individual that needs to launch a website needs a server or host to host his website.  In 1995, there were 16 million internet users around the world with a percentage of 0.4% of the total population of the world, and by 2015, this figure reached 3.18 billion with a percentage of 43.4% of the total population of the world.   The First Shape of Web Hosting – Geo-Cities  The first shape of web hosting was something called Geo-Cities which started in 1994 and was bought by Yahoo in 1999. Geo-Cities allowed users to upload and host web pages with simple content sorted by virtual ‘cities’ that had relevance to the page’s content.   Shared Hosting from the Beginning  According to research by Pingdom, in 1998, the average cost of a shared hosting package which includes 150MB of storage was around $16.30 per month and dropped to $12.95 by 2008. At this time, shared hosting was the dominant hosting type in the market.   The “.Com” Bubble Burst … and The Start of the Cloud  The burst of the “.com” bubble at the start of the 20th century allowed the web hosting industry and the technology industry, in general, to reshape as we see it today, so the companies who stood out had to modernize and find out more efficient IT architectures to keep up that reshaping of the industry and market needs. This is considered as the Start of The Cloud as we know it today…  From 2007 and beyond, the cloud shined and had big popularity among small businesses and enterprises in 2009, because of its low prices and huge scalability. Some organizations were having concerns about cloud security, but all of these concerns disappeared by the birth of the Private Cloud, which allowed users to achieve the same level of scalability but with full control of their own hardware.  By 2011, we started to see the benefits of the public cloud such as the ease of access and sharing which led to the integration between the components of the private cloud and the public cloud to finally create the hybrid cloud.   Looking at the Future  The web hosting industry will continue to grow and develop over the coming years, it’s first 25 years have taught us that there is a consistency in the foundation of core services, but the methods and technologies that deliver the services of web hosting are what change regularly by inventing new technologies.

DNS Propagation
Domains, Web Hosting

DNS Propagation – Explained!

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Nowadays users’ expect to perform complex online transactions in a fraction of a second, but one of the obstacles to performance is the DNS System. Even the smallest change to the DNS system could take between a few hours and a few days to be propagated across the Internet. When you change a DNS record, you can’t be sure when the change will happen. In this article, we’ll explain what DNS Propagation is and the causes of the propagation problem.   What is the DNS system? The (Domain Name Server) DNS System is an infrastructure that enables translating a human-readable domain name such as “www.yourDomainName.com” into an IP Address such as “289.93.112.22”. The DNS system is a distributed system that relies on multiple layers of DNS servers. When a web browser needs to know the IP for a host-name, it begins with a process called “DNS Lookup”, it asks a DNS server and might be referred to many other DNS servers until it reaches the name server that holds the IP address for the required host-name. At each stage in the DNS lookup process, systems might store DNS information in their local cache.   What is DNS Propagation? When you change an IP address or any other information about a host-name in a DNS record, this change needs to propagate to all systems around the world which are involved in the DNS process. If you made a change in a DNS record, then a client performs a DNS query and reaches a system that has not propagated yet, that client will receive the old information/address because that change hasn’t yet propagated to reach that user. DNS propagation is the time a “DNS Change” takes to be updated in all DNS servers across the Internet. A change to a DNS record might be, for example, changing the IP address for a specific host-name – and this could take up to 72 hours to propagate worldwide, but it typically takes a few hours in many use cases.   Why DNS Propagation Takes So Long?  There are 2 main factors that case DNS propagation, which are: TTL (Time To Live) Settings:  Every DNS record has a TTL value, which is the time DNS servers should store that record in their cache, even if a DNS record is changed, DNS servers will continue working with its old value from the cache until this time has passed. ISP (Internet Service Provider):  Internet service providers (ISPs) around the world cache DNS records to make users access websites more quickly. For each website, they perform a DNS lookup once and then use the result for as many users as possible to access the website more quickly. Some ISPs ignore TTL settings and use DNS records in cache even if the TTL period has expired, and this can make the DNS propagation take longer.   How to Speed up DNS Propagation?  Most elements in the DNS system are not under your control, ISPs and DNS servers around the world have their own policies, but there are still simple ways to speed up DNS propagation which are: Define an A record that points your host-name to the new destination IP address. Set a minimal TTL for DNS records – recommended 5 minutes – because many ISPs might ignore the TTL when it’s below 5 minutes and retain the old record in their cache.  In most cases, these simple steps will speed up DNS propagation. However, there is no way to predict or know how long DNS propagation will take.   Is there a Solution For the Delay of DNS Propagation…?  Yes, there is the next generation of DNS technology. It’s a DNS platform that offers nearly instant-propagation. Any DNS change is propagated in just a few seconds worldwide.  This new technology uses a global network of fast DNS servers that could respond to DNS requests more quickly and allows users to set low TTL

What is a domain name
Domains, Web Hosting

What is a Domain Name and How it Works?

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  Are you thinking of starting your own website but feeling a bit confused about what is a domain name, what is the difference between a domain name and a website, how does it work? There is a lot to learn and think about for those new to web development and web hosting, but don’t worry! In this article, we’ll cover what exactly a domain name is and how it works. We’ll also explain many technical terms like IP addresses and DNS so, let’s start!   What is a Domain Name? Simply put, it is the address of your website. It’s what people type into the browser’s bar to visit your website. The internet is a huge network of computers connected to each other by a global network of cables so that each computer can communicate with others. But how do they identify each other? Each computer has an IP address, which is a series of numbers that identify a particular computer. An IP address looks like this: 77.294.66.1 An IP address is difficult to remember; imagine if you had to remember each website’s IP to visit it! So, domain names were invented to solve this problem, instead of typing a long string of numbers to visit a website, you just type a domain name in your browser to visit the website.  By the way, you can purchase/register a domain through a domain registrar or a hosting provider.   How Do Domain Names work? Let’s take a look at what happens when you type a domain name in your browser to understand how it work: When you enter a domain name in your browser, it sends a request to a global network of servers that form the DNS . These servers lookup for something called “ the name servers” associated with the domain you entered and forward the request to those name servers.   What are these Name Servers? For example, if your website host is HOSTILICA, then its name servers will be like this: ns1.hostilica.net ns2.hostilica.net These name servers are computers managed by your hosting company, they will forward your request to the computer where your website files/data is stored. This computer is called a web server, and it has special software installed (Apache is a popular web server software). At this moment, the server fetches the web page that you requested and sends it back to the browser.   Final Thoughts As you can see, a domain name is simply an address of a computer that stores a particular website. By now, you know how they work and why they were invented. If you want to go further on this topic, you can read our guide on how to choose the right domain for your business, and you can also explore more about the most popular extension “ the .COM “. Enjoy reading!

What is WordPress
Web Design, WordPress

What is WordPress? – Complete Guide

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What is WordPress? WordPress is an open-source (CMS) content management system that enables you to easily create and manage a website without being a web developer. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, used by millions of people including business owners, bloggers, publishers, individuals, and more to maintain their online presence every day. WordPress is simply a piece of software built to make it easy for individuals without technical knowledge to create their websites easily from a simple dashboard. You can create new website pages, blog posts, edit your website appearance, and more with a few clicks. WordPress is free to use. There are no setup fees to have WordPress information, with thousands of themes available to create amazing-looking websites. It’s one of the best ways for businesses and individuals to create fully customized websites. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world. It’s powering 63% of the worlds’ websites whose content management system – CMS.   What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?   When you search the word ‘WordPress’, you will find two different websites, WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Let’s find out what is the difference between them: WordPress.org also called self-hosted WordPress among the people, is the free, open-source WordPress software that you can install on your web hosting server to create a website on your domain with it, 100% free. WordPress.com is a paid service made for profit, powered by the WordPress organization, It is also simple to use, but you may lose some of the flexibility of the open-source self-hosted version of WordPress. If you want to truly own your website, the open-source self-hosted WordPress version is the best option for you. In most times, when people say “WordPress” they mean the self-hosted version that’s available on WordPress.org or that you’ll find on your cPanel for example. All you need to get started with the free open-source self-hosted most used WordPress version is to purchase a web hosting plan and a domain name, after that you will be a few clicks and a few seconds to put your WordPress website online.   A Brief History of WordPress WordPress is open-source software,  WordPress was first created back in 2003 as a previous project called b2/cafe log, as WordPress is open-source software which means it’s made by a large community of contributors. But if we want to know the first start of WordPress from its roots, it was originally created due to a collaboration between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Since that, Matt Mullenweg has become the face of the WordPress organization, and he is the founder of Automattic which is the company behind the for-profit WordPress.com service as we mentioned.   What Kind of Websites can you create with WordPress? Years ago, WordPress was primarily created as a tool for creating a blog, not traditional websites, but all of that changed due to the changes in its core code. Thanks to the WordPress’s massive ecosystem of themes, plugins, widgets, and more, you can now build any type of website with WordPress with that great ecosystem. For example, you can create with WordPress: Business Websites Portfolio Websites Blogs eCommerce Websites Forums eLearning Websites Galleries Q&A Websites Social Networks Membership Websites Resumes Websites Presentational Websites Almost any type of website you can dream up with…   Who Uses WordPress? WordPress powers 35% of all websites on the internet as we mentioned, and all business types from small companies to corporations, individuals, and everyone else in between. Also, as a note, we use WordPress! So, all of our blog that you’re looking at right now is powered by WordPress. A lot of other well-known organizations use WordPress. Here are some of them: Whitehouse.gov Microsoft Blog BBC America cPanel Blog The New York Times Mercedes-Benz And More…   Why Should You Use WordPress? There are many reasons to use WordPress, but here are the biggest: WordPress is Open Source and Free One of the most important benefits of WordPress is that it’s open-source, free software, even if you need to pair it with a little amount of money for web hosting. Still, you will never have to pay for using WordPress, and as it’s open-source software, so you’ll find a lot of open-source plugins and themes to change how your website looks and functions. WordPress is Easy to Install If you think you need to be a tech genius or to be an experienced web developer to create your own website! Well, then think again! As you can with a couple of clicks install WordPress on your site. WordPress is Customizable Even if you are not a web developer or don’t have a web developer in your team, you will be able to easily edit and create a 100% customized website thanks to WordPress’s massive ecosystem of themes and plugins. Themes are the primary look of your website. Plugins are how your website functions, for example, a contact form, SEO helper plugin, and more. There are thousands of WordPress themes and plugins, so you have thousands of choices to make a fully customized functioning website on your own with a few clicks thanks to the great massive WordPress ecosystem! Easy to Find Help with WordPress Because of WordPress’s popularity, it’s very easy to find help with it if you ever got stuck in anything. There are many types of help blogs, tutorials, forums, groups, developers, videos, and more. So, what will you build with WordPress? We can’t wait to find out!  Congratulations you have passed the first step to be a WordPress expert. 

What is a CMS
Web Design

What is CMS and What are the Benefits of Using it?

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What is CMS? CMS stands for Content Management System. A software application helps you build and manage a website without having to code it. A CMS helps you manage, create, modify, and publish different content types with a user-friendly dashboard. You can also create a custom design for your website or purchase a pre-designed template, so you can easily build a customized website design as you prefer. A CMS is made up of two main parts, which are a content management application (CMA) and a content delivery application (CDA) combined together. The CMA is the part that allows you to manage your website content; on the other hand, the CDA is the backend that takes the content you input in the CMS, stores it in the database, then shows it to your visitors.   What are the benefits of Using a CMS system? We’ve already mentioned some of the benefits of using a CMS, and by now you know the meaning of CMS, but let’s continue. No Coding Required A CMS enables non-developers to build websites easily without needing coding knowledge. So, you can manage, create content, customize your website design, and install plugins and extensions that help you add more functionality to your website, all of that without having to write one line of code. Pre-designed Templates  Most CMS software comes with some pre-designed templates so you can quickly choose the appearance of your website. In addition to that, you’ll find tons of pre-designed templates online, or even you can hire someone to develop a custom template for your website. Productive Workspace A CMS system enables multiple users to work in the backend simultaneously. For example, your marketers can be writing content, your customer support replying to your customer comments, at the same time, even on the same website page. So, a CMS offers you a productive and collaborative workspace. SEO Friendly Most CMS platforms offer you pre-built features and plugins to help you optimize your website for search engines, so you can customize your website’s page titles and meta tags and descriptions, choose SEO-friendly URL structures, add image alt tags, create redirects, create sitemaps, and so on. So, it helps you implement the search engine optimization best practices easily. CMS system Platforms Examples There are many CMSs software out there for many types of websites; for example, you’ll find CMS for static websites, blogs, e-commerce stores, forums, social networks, portfolios, and much more. Here are some examples of CMS platforms: WordPress Joomla Drupal Magento PrestaShop In the end, CMS is a very useful software; you should try to use a CMS to build and manage your website. CMS has the features that will help you grow over time; besides it stores all of your web content in one place, also, offers you a productive workflow, and offers templates to customize your website. We hope you enjoyed the article and learned more about the CMS software applications.

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