The internet has become a vital tool for research, communications and even marketing. Almost every company out there probably has an official website and there’s a continuous increase of businesses setting up a virtual office by launching online stores. It has transformed the way people shop and provided the public with a number of benefits. But along with these pros are a set of disadvantages as well and one of them is being exposed to a possible identity theft or online fraud due to poor internet security.
The rising number of cases arising from the lack of proper website security has forced companies to enforce stronger measures in order to ensure that the information provided by their customers are safe and protected. Establishing a strong website security gives the internet users the peace of mind but hiring the services of the professionals can be quite expensive. Most small scaled businesses and home owners often don’t have the budget to utilize the services of companies that specialize in web security.
The idea that only the websites of multinational companies and large scaled businesses are prone to hacking and other forms of security attack is entirely wrong. Your home computer might also be at risk and if you don’t take the necessary precautions, there’s a possibility of encountering a bigger problem in the future. Hackers do not discriminate and they can attack any website where information is unsecured. There are simple measures that home owners and small businesses can use in order to make sure that their wireless security network is safe and secured, the best part is that you won’t need to spend money to do this.
1. Change the default name and password. Routers come with a default username which is normally the brand name. It is very important to change such information once you have set up your wireless network. Having a password or a security key also keeps unauthorized computers from accessing your wireless connection.
2. Keep your MAC address filtering option enabled. This will prevent hackers from getting access to your internet connection as it only allows known users or devices to gain internet access.
3. Secure your network by turning on the WPA/WEP Encryption. Encryption transforms information shared over the internet into codes that cannot be easily decoded or understood by humans. This ensures that any data transferred online are secured and protected.
These are just some of the basic measures that home and business owners can take as an initial step towards having a secured wireless network. In situations where you feel that your connection might have been compromised, it will be best to seek the help of computer and network security experts.
But what if your website changes over the next month or over the next year? If you create an interesting website people love to visit, your traffic will grow. When that happens, make sure you are prepared with the hosting services you need.
Virtual private servers (VPS hosting) are available at a price close to that of a shared hosting plan. For a few more dollars per month, you can be confident that your hosting service can handle your traffic today, and also as it increases.
What type of web hosting does your website need today?
Even outside of business, we all prioritize our most immediate needs. The future is uncertain and can sometimes be intimidating, but our current problems seem much more intense. As a result, many webmasters choose web hosting services with only their immediate needs in mind.
The reality is that an online business changes quickly. If you are launching a new sales channel for your existing organization, or even starting a brand new business online, it is possible for your website to get very popular, very fast.
Of course, you should always start with what your website needs today. But even if your website does not attract large volumes of traffic or use lots of bandwidth, VPS hosting could still be the best choice for your current needs.
VPS web hosting uses a process known as virtualization to give each user their own fully isolated compartment of a hardware server, with its own operating system. For companies that need to meet data compliance regulations,VPS hosting is the most affordable way to implement robust and reliable security. A virtual server is also a great way to ensure that any sensitive or confidential data on your hosting account is suitably protected against theft.
For security you can depend on, choose VPS web hosting. Then, as you begin to attract more visitors to your website, you will also be ready to give them the most responsive service, all of the time.
VPS hosting can support a growing website with high traffic
When somebody connects to your website, the hardware that powers your hosting service needs to complete a range of different tasks. Every task requires a combination of different system resources, such as CPU, RAM, and disk space. The more visitors you have at any given moment, the more of these resources you will need to use. If you run complex web applications that include a lot of server-side processing, you need more resources still.
If you do not have the resources you need, the performance of your website will suffer. Suddenly, exploring your products slows to a crawl, with pages taking a long time to load or – worse – timing out and not loading at all.
The theory of affordable shared hosting is that you can access an entire hardware server’s resources if they are required by your account. However, this would only be possible if there were no other websites on the same server. In practice, your neighbors could be using large amounts of hardware power, leaving your visitors to suffer the consequences of underpowered hosting.
With a VPS hosting plan, you are allocated a fixed amount of hardware power for your account. The RAM and CPUincluded in your package is exclusively yours, always available to give your visitors the experience they demand. In many ways, VPS web hosting offers the consistent performance of a dedicated server, but in a more affordable shared environment.
Start with VPS web hosting to avoid a complex migration
Ask any webmaster: The process of moving from one web hosting service to another is incredibly stressful. Although most hosting companies will support you and even offer hands-on assistance during this time, moving large quantities of data and changing domain settings can cause unexpected problems.
One of these problems is downtime. Your visitors will be frustrated if your website starts to respond slowly as the result of increased traffic. However, making your website unavailable, even for just a few hours, is sure to result in lost business.
As you explore the different web hosting services available, compare the price of an entry-level VPS hosting service to that of shared hosting. Estimate the price difference realistically over the course of 12 months.
You will probably find that you can get VPS hosting at a price that still works for your budget. Those few extra dollars give you more control, better security, and an isolated operating system. Most importantly, those few dollars can give you peace of mind and confidence to grow your business online.
Get a reliable VPS hosting plan from Coast Internet Publishing (CIP)
As a professional VPS hosting provider with years of experience, CIP offers reliable and responsive VPSweb hosting plans with generous resource allowances. Even as the scale and popularity of your website grows, you can depend on a CIP VPS hosting service to support your business.
Customers can choose from a range of tiered VPS hosting plans, from entry-level solutions priced for small budgets, to more powerful VPS web hosting solutions that rival a basic dedicated server plan.
Every CIP VPS hosting service is deployed on leading hardware with an unrivaled 100% network uptime guarantee. CIP VPS hosting is also covered by a 45-day money-back guarantee, and comes with 24/7/365 expert support.
For more information on VPS hosting plans from Coast Internet Publishing, call 1-604-866-5800
Spammers thrive on being able to harvest emails from unwitting participants in Web 2.0’s dialogue. One of the biggest and best sources for this is blogs where both bloggers and those commenting on their entries make the mistake of posting email addresses without taking precautions, and it’s important that bloggers know how to keep spammers from harvesting emails from their sites – both for their protection, and that of the readers who are leaving comments on your pages.
One simple way of preventing spammers from getting your website is by posting your email graphically, rather than by using text. You can also try to use a spam filter, or scripts that prevent spammer’s email-harvesting bots from noticing your page, although these have varying degrees of success depending on the sophistication of the spammer in question.
If your blog is located on a site like wordpress, livejournal, or blogger, you have the option of protecting your updates so they can be seen only by those you allow, or by those who are also members of the site. This can have the unintended result of limiting your readership, although new sites such as Dreamwidth are supposedly offering aggregations of other sites in an attempt to allow cross-posting to scale new heights.
When commenting on blogs and forums, one technique a number of web surfers have used to try and protect their email addresses from being harvested by spammers is by inserting random punctuation into their email addresses, breaking the address up with spaces, or spelling out certain punctuation marks which are included in their email; for example, instead of writing spamhater@spamhater.com, someone might write their email address as “ess pee eh em aytch eh why tee eee are at” …and so on, or spamhater/at/spamhater/dot/com. This method can work, if your readers and the others commenting on your blog or forum have the patience to decipher those characters then retype them, but it can be a killer for communications if they a) miss the point or pronunciation you’ve used or b) can’t be bothered to retype the address. Plus, using uniform punctuation as in the “/” example above isn’t all that tough for spammers to program their bots around, and so its effectiveness is limited.
No method for protecting your blog from spammers is going to be a hundred percent foolproof, but by even attempting to make it harder for spammers to read addresses off your site, you help make it harder for crime syndicates who run spam rings to find more unwitting victims for their next ploy. That, more than anything else, makes the attempt to safeguard your blog from email harvesting spammers worth the extra effort.
Cisco Security Intelligence Operations has detected significant activity related to spam e-mail messages that claim to contain a package delivery notification.
The text in the e-mail message attempts to convince the recipient to open the attachment and view the details. However, the .zip attachment contains a malicious .exe file that, when executed, attempts to infect the user’s system with malicious code.
Many businesses are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. They are excited by the prospect of this free marketing tool, and all the success stories they have seen in the media. They eagerly anticipate the traffic spikes and hoards of followers that will help them promote their businesses. But it doesn’t happen. The traffic doesn’t come. The visitors that do come don’t stay. The number of followers doesn’t budge.
One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make in the Twitter world can explain what is going on. Instead of engaging and interacting, businesses are strictly self-promoting. Only sharing their own news and information. Creating what is essentially an advertising stream on Twitter. And the majority of people on Twitter are not interested in that. That’s not what they are there for.
How to break out of this cycle of constant self-promotion? Here are some ideas for what you can tweet about to help boost engagement and visibility for your company on Twitter.
By keeping the above tips in mind when managing your Twitter account and avoiding only self-promotion, you’re sure to see more activity and interaction. When tweets come to your Twitter stream, they’ll see a company that is interested in engaging and building relationships. And that will make them that more likely to click that follow button.
Hartland Ross on September 06, 2011
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