Monat: August 2020

July 31st is System Administrator Appreciation Day!

The world of information technology relies on the expertise of an often-unsung group of people—system administrators, or sysadmins.

These skilled technicians are the backbone of any business that runs on tech, ensuring that users have support when they need it, and that all IT systems run optimally.

Today, we want to express our profound appreciation to sysadmins on this, the 21st annual SysAdmin Day.

Tending to servers around the clock, caring for and solving problems with physicals hardware and cables, keeping networks secure and safe, resetting passwords and rebooting computers, sysadmins are always working hard behind the scenes so that all tech-related endeavors run smoothly.

This is an incredible depth and breadth of work for which there is often little to no recognition. When everything is working as it should, we often forget that this is thanks to a huge amount of unseen work that keeps IT systems functioning.

If these highly specialized tech experts seem to do it all, it’s because they do.

Sysadmins often have a vast range of responsibilities, from managing networks and servers, to installing and upgrading software, to onboarding new technology, to troubleshooting any technical problems that may arise.

They play an essential role in an IT company’s growth and success.

At all hours of the day and night, sysadmins can be relied upon to bring patience, know-how, and problem-solving to their work, dealing with issues quickly and calmly. Though one day a year isn’t sufficient to express our gratitude to sysadmins, we are happy to take the time to sing their praises.

Do you have a sysadmin in your life?

Take time to celebrate the contributions and successes of these professionals who work behind the scenes.

In so many ways, they make growth and innovation possible. In our increasingly digital world, we all rely on sysadmins to keep our online business and lives moving forward.

Send a note of gratitude to your sysadmins today, an email thanking them directly for all that they do.

Your appreciation of sysadmins doesn’t need to be contained in one day.

Check in on your sysadmins throughout the year.

Thank them.

Buy them an occasional coffee to help see them through long nights of work.

Today, we want to express our sincere thanks for the sysadmins of Liquid Web.

You are the foundation upon which this company runs, and we are genuinely appreciative of your dedication and expertise. You keep us secure and are quick to rectify all issues that arise, and you do it day in and day out.

We could not be The Most Helpful Humans in Hosting without you.

And to all sysadmins out there, you make the tech world go round. Happy SysAdmin Day!

The post Happy SysAdmin Day! appeared first on Liquid Web.

The time is here!

We are so excited to share that your new customer portal is live.

At Liquid Web, we are always committed to ensuring that every one of our customers has a great interaction with our customer portal.

We thank all of the customers that were part of our Beta Program and provided an insightful amount of feedback. With that feedback, we were able to make some additional changes based on recommendations.

We have fully rebuilt the portal to feature a new, sleek design. This redesign is not only easy on the eye but reworks the navigation for easier use. The new customer portal has the same functions that exist in the old portal as well as new additional function capabilities; all reimagined for the best usability in the portal.

Some updates you will find:

• Mobile-First Design – Same great experience on tablet or mobile phone!
• Active Incidents and the latest news on your login page.
• Help is front and center for you. View your open support tickets from the home page.
• Intuitive navigation options such as tailored recommendations, tracking, and favorites so you can get to the place you need fast.
• Enhanced interactive invoice and PDF generation – simpler and much easier to read and understand.
• Easy to manage server add-on services such as cPanel licenses and Acronis backups.
• Simplified user management and permissions.
• Reimagined interfaces for lots of existing features such as bandwidth, backups and images, domains, DNS, firewalls, load balancers, IPs, and many more.

Plus, a few hundred small changes and bug fixes.

We are also introducing a new Projects Dashboard feature. The Project Dashboard feature is a fully customizable way customers can include different types of servers and services on a single pane. For example, if you have a single server with a few domains to manage, you can access all your resources from the main section of your Liquid Web account portal in my.liquidweb.com.

And if you have a dozen servers, hundreds of domains, and many other related services that you need to manage, the new Projects Dashboard can help. The Projects Dashboard allows you to group any assets in your account together into a single project dashboard, making it easy to organize and find any related servers and services.

The new Projects Dashboard at my.liquidweb.com.

Starting July 29th, 2020, customers will be automatically sent to my.liquidweb.com when they log in for support. Normal support procedures will not change, only a new look and feel. Customers that prefer the old look have the ability to toggle back to the old view as needed.

As always, the Most Helpful Humans in Hosting are standing by for any questions you may have. Reach out to us by phone, chat, or ticket. We are here to help!

The post Introducing Your New and Improved Customer Portal appeared first on Liquid Web.

Are you wondering how important a brand name is to the success of your new business idea? Consider:

According to Forbes, it takes about seven seconds for a customer to have a first impression of your brand name. A report from FSB concluded that 5.8 million businesses were started in 2019, a 3.5% increase from the previous year. So technically there’s an entire ocean of companies out there, making it a lot more challenging to attract your target customer’s attention.

And this is the primary reason you need a brand identity that stands you out from the crowd. Just the same way a person meeting you for the first time takes a first impression about you based on your looks, so also does your brand name makes a first and lasting impression in your customers’ minds, helping you stand out from the 5.8 million businesses out there.

Imagine your brand name’s a flower in serious need of pollination, calling out to several bees. Be honest with yourself: do you think those bees would love the sound of your brand name? Because how customers perceive the mere sound of your name can make or break your brand.

One look at Uber, Lyft, and Zoom would tell you why it’s important for customers to love your brand and have the correct first impression of it. Great business names go a long way in supporting the survival of start-ups.

A Great Brand Name Will Help Customers Easily Identify You

Take a moment to imagine what the future of Google would’ve been if Larry Page and Sergei Brin hadn’t renamed their start-up back in 1998. The name ‘BackRub’ doesn’t capture the unique empire Google’s become today. Google, an off-shoot from ‘googol,’ reflected their brand mission, philosophy, and promise to every customer that patronized them.  

Consider every successful brand that comes to your mind, such as Apple, Facebook, or Google. They entrench their core business mandates and promise to their customers in their brand names. When going through options for your business brand name, understand that your choice should reflect your business in the fullest.

And just in case you get stuck in naming your brand, don’t assume you’re the only one capable of generating the best name for your business. Reach out to a brand naming agency that can help set up a brand identity that’ll boost your prestige and reach your target customers.

Great Names Easily Connects To A Customer’s Emotion

It’s true that “People buy out of emotion and justify with logic.” And according to Professor Gerald Zaltman, of Harvard Business School, 95% of our purchase decisions happen subconsciously.

As a business, a major part of your success depends on how your brand name, business goals, and missions resonate with your customer’s feelings. By appealing to a customer’s emotion, a Magnificent brand name can transform one-time customers into dedicated customers who are forever loyal to your brand’s services.

As long as multiple companies exist, customers will continue to depend on the feeling they’ve associated with a brand and word of mouth to navigate the overwhelming choices they have to make.

It Elevates Your Business’s Standing Within Your Industry

With 5.8 million new businesses in 2019 alone, we know competition is steep. Other already-existing businesses aren’t asleep either. So, besides having a great product, one way to stand out is to have an exciting brand name.

People naturally gravitate towards the most exciting brand they encounter.”

Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors has gathered a cult-like following because the brand’s name tapped on the fame and legacy of Nikola Tesla, the need to protect the earth from greenhouse gases, and electric cars, the revolutionary auto-advancement of the time.

Today, Tesla, a relatively new company, can compete with other luxury brands, all thanks to its intriguing name and aggressive brand mission.

A Great Brand Name Is Easy To Use

One other way a great business name can offer long-term value to your business’ survival is that it guarantees your business an online presence that makes it really easy for your customers to find your products or services in a quick online search.

You don’t need to bite off your tongue to pronounce a great brand name, and thanks to the Crowded bar test, you’ll know you’ve got a wonderful name when you don’t need to repeat or explain yourself in a crowded bar after saying your brand name.

Making the Next Unique Name Brand

Branding is much more than just making a logo or slapping a strapline on a product. It’s more about the experience you create for your customers, the promise your brand gives, the philosophy your company preaches, and the culture you’ve instilled in your customer. All these things make your brand unique; it makes your brand human.

The post How a Great Brand Name Will Boost Your Business Success appeared first on Liquid Web.

Considering Liquid Web vs 1&1 IONOS?

Choosing the right hosting partner shouldn’t be limited to what you need today. Rather, the right hosting partner is one that can grow with you and offer different solutions as your needs change. 1&1 IONOS is one such provider, offering not just web and application hosting but also domain registration, email and website builders. Additionally, 1&1 offers marketing services and enterprise cloud solutions for customers all around the world.

However, it can be easy for a hosting company to be spread too thin when offering so many different services. And while some of the offerings at 1&1 do stack up against the competition, others like core hosting services and cloud deployments suffer in areas that matter a great deal. For example, 1&1 refers customers to its partner network for site migrations, server management, and system administration.

At Liquid Web, our primary focus is managed hosting. That means that your server environment isn’t just optimized for performance and fine-tuned for your needs. It also means that our support team can help with a wide range of issues to keep your infrastructure running properly and in good health. What’s more, we promise to answer your phone call or chat inquiry in under a minute instead of referring you to a third-party to lend a hand.

Domain registration, website builders, and marketing services can all play a role in your digital strategy. But at Liquid Web, we choose to be the industry-leader for managed hosting, leaning on more than twenty years of expertise in doing just that. If you’re looking for a little bit of everything, a company like 1&1 might be an acceptable choice. But if you’re looking for the best managed hosting provider in the world, you’ve come to the right place.

Nobody Includes More Than Liquid Web

Every solution at Liquid Web is engineered for peace of mind, with a full suite of performance, reliability, and security solutions included at no extra charge.

Backed By The Most Helpful Humans in Hosting
and the Best Guarantees in the Industry

We aren’t kidding when we say the Most Helpful Humans in Hosting work at Liquid Web. With over 300 engineers, system administrators, and support technicians at the ready, your next big idea is in good hands with our team. Powered by an unrivaled support SLA and over two decades of experience, Liquid Web is the premiere infrastructure provider for your most-important websites and applications. Our team is standing by, waiting to help power your digital strategy into the future.

24/7 Support from The Most Helpful Humans in Hosting 
It’s easy to say you have the best support, but we have the numbers to back it up. Our Support ranks No. 1 in customer satisfaction.

The post Liquid Web Vs. 1&1 IONOS appeared first on Liquid Web.

Partnering with an infrastructure provider can be one of the best ways to grow your own business.

Why?

Because the right partner can open doors for your organization.

New markets, new services, new segments of clients…the possibilities for expanding your business are vast if you have the right partner at your side.

But as with any relationship, there are “good” partners and “bad” partners, and it is imperative that you have a framework for partner evaluation if you are to ensure success.

Below, we will lay the groundwork for that evaluation so that your choice in infrastructure partners will help, not harm, your business.

Here are five questions to ask when evaluating infrastructure partners, not just for your clients, but also for your own business.

1. Are All of the Services that Your Clients Need Offered by the Infrastructure Provider?

There is no point in considering a provider that doesn’t offer the services that you and your clients require.

For example, many providers offer shared hosting and email but don’t offer dedicated servers.

Others offer Managed WordPress but don’t offer VPNs.

Finding a provider that checks all the boxes of the services you need will keep you from having too many relationships with too many disparate vendors.

Most providers will have a well-documented website that gives you all the details you need to evaluate their suite of services and products.

2. Does the Infrastructure Provider Guarantee Uptime?

Perhaps the most important metric by which to judge a hosting provider, at least when it comes to technology, is their uptime guarantee.

In the infrastructure world, this is often referenced as “five nines,” “four nines,” or “three nines.”

That is a reference to the percentage of time that the service is guaranteed to be working correctly. Five nines is equivalent to 99.999% of the time. Four nines correspond to 99.99% uptime, and so on.

Infrastructure is bound to have a problem every now and again.

After all, servers, switches, power supplies, and cabling do occasionally break in the course of regular use.

What is important is how responsive and organized your hosting partner is in addressing these issues.”

For example, Liquid Web guarantees network uptime to be 100%.

This guarantee assures you that all major routing devices within the network are reachable from the global internet 100% of the time.

By using redundant systems and quality components, Liquid Web can offer an industry-leading uptime guarantee. Contrast that with an infrastructure provider offering only “three nines” as their guarantee; that means almost nine hours of allowable downtime per year!

Pro Tip: Use a website monitoring tool to track your website uptime. Many of these tools are free to use and can even notify you in the event of downtime. This will give you an extra layer of confidence that your website is always online.

3. Does the Infrastructure Provider Have a Positive Reputation?

Most infrastructure and hosting providers have beautiful websites that promise wonderful services devoid of any problems. They will boast of peak performance, high-availability, and the best customer service. Of course, the reality is often very different.

It is essential to check the reputation of each provider before signing up or choosing to partner. Customers who have already used the provider over a long enough period can attest to its reliability. Online reviews and forums are excellent sources of information about the provider’s service offerings and support levels. You can also find their comments on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Professional review websites like HostAdvice also maintain a selection of the best infrastructure providers. For example, take a look at their evaluation of Liquid Web.

Pro Tip: Focus on recent reviews and articles. A provider can see its reliability vary over the years, depending on the renewal of its infrastructure and the life of the company.

4. Is the Infrastructure Provider Active Online?

A provider must be able to communicate quickly with its customers if an issue arises. It is a reasonably reliable indicator of its professionalism and it is quite easy to verify.

Start by checking that the provider has at least a Twitter account. Is this account active? Does the provider use it only to relay its new offers, and does it interact with its clients? Does the provider maintain a blog or news section on its site? Is there a network status page that allows you to know the current incidents and maintenance schedule in real-time?

Aside from helping you learn more about potential partners, this digital footprint can be a good indicator that you won’t have trouble getting in touch with them should an issue arise.

Pro Tip: Follow the social media accounts of infrastructure providers you are considering before you finalize a partnership. The information shared about the company, products, services, and customers will provide information useful to your evaluation.

5. Can You Communicate With the Infrastructure Provider?

Perhaps the most critical component of a quality partnership is excellent communication.

1. Can you get in touch with support easily?
2. Is your Account Manager constructive and helpful, or hard to track down?
3. Do the business hours align with your business hours or, even better, is your potential partner available 24/7/365?

Liquid Web’s industry-leading SLA, for example, guarantees that the phone will be answered and live chat responded to in less than one minute. Contrast that with some providers that don’t even provide phone or chat support.

Pro Tip: Give your prospective partner some support scenarios that you’ve experienced in the past and evaluate their response. You’re likely to glean valuable insight into their responsiveness and technical skill by actually discussing potential use cases.

Set For Success With Your Infrastructure Partner

Partnering with an infrastructure provider is a critical decision for your business’s long-term success and the businesses of your clients and customers. The right partnership can and should help your business grow.

The right hosting or infrastructure partner should offer all the features and services that you and your clients need and the support you require. Although it should rarely happen, you may have some issues at some point, and you want a provider that will assist you quickly and efficiently.

Take the time to make the right choice. Otherwise, you may lose a lot of time trying to change to a new partner or provider later on. If you are interested in learning how Liquid Web can serve as an infrastructure partner for your company and clients, contact us now. The Most Helpful Humans in Hosting have been partnering with small and mid-sized businesses for almost twenty years to provide industry-leading infrastructure solutions.

The post Questions You Should Ask Before Partnering With an Infrastructure Provider appeared first on Liquid Web.

We’re the employees you would hire if you could. Responsive, helpful, and dedicated in ways automation simply can’t be. We’re your team.

Each month we recognize one of our Most Helpful Humans in Hosting.

Christopher has worked as a web developer, designer, and manager for 24 years, starting his career pre-Internet building websites on California State University servers. He’s worked with over 20+ companies and contracts, hundreds of clients, and thousands of websites, working with DotNetNuke, ASP, ASP.NET, C#.NET, Telerik Sitefinity, SharePoint (MOSS and WSS), and has been focused on WordPress since 2007. He had been hosting a collocated server at a Liquid Web data center since 2016, and realized how much more support he received from Liquid Web than any other web host he had hosted with. He began to refer clients to Liquid Web, counting on their legendary support to help him and his clients in their times of need. When an opportunity arose in 2019 to join the Most Helpful Humans in Hosting, he jumped at the opportunity due to his belief in our mission and values.

We sat down with him to learn more about him and his journey.

Why did you join Liquid Web?

I joined Liquid Web because I was in a support chat for a client’s website late one night a few years ago, and I realized that in the three years of hosting hundreds of clients at Liquid Web, their Support had always been there to help in less than a minute, without fail, 24/7/365. After years of being on hold for as much as an hour for clients with web hosts other than Liquid Web, I realized I really wanted to be part of the team that did this incredible one minute support thing, so I searched their Careers Page until I found a position where I could make a contribution.

Today, I’m an Affiliate Program Manager and work with a superb, fun, and dedicated group of people on our Affiliate Team.

Is there something specific at Liquid Web that you just love?

I love the Helpful Human culture that flows through everyone, especially internally. At my first All-Hands meeting (our annual Q&A with Leadership), I discovered that from top to bottom, Liquid Web is an open and caring organization. People care about you inside of Liquid Web as much as they care about the company and the customer, which is truly rare. In most organizations, it’s all about profit and the customers: that’s not how it is at Liquid Web. They have built a culture unlike any other.

It’s legit, amazing, and refreshing.

In your eyes, what’s the difference between Liquid Web and other employers?

Liquid Web invests in their employees both personally and professionally. Besides the intangible benefits of working with wonderful people across many departments, the tangible benefits are far superior to benefits I’ve experienced with other companies. We receive amazing health benefits, which are absolutely essential for my family, and it provides much better coverage at a lower cost for us than I have had with other employers. That’s truly something I am grateful for.

Tell us about a truly rewarding experience you’ve had with a customer.

I received a Slack message from a Liquid Web Support team member that I had worked with when I was a client for Liquid Web stating that he was chatting with a former WordPress client of mine who had nothing but great things to say about me. And my former client wanted the Support team member to relay a hello from him to me. I also found out that the client now hosts all of his clients with Liquid Web.

Building relationships that last beyond company and career transitions is both rare and rewarding.

What is one thing you wish our customers knew about their hosting?

I’m constantly sharing comments, posts, and emails with notes about our 59-Second Initial Response Guarantee. But it’s not just the speed at which Liquid Web responds to issues for customers that is impressive. Many other web hosting companies offer triage support, meaning that the initial person you speak with will not have the authority or knowledge to solve your request or issue. At Liquid Web, the first technician you work with almost always has the ability and knowledge to resolve your request, or be able to dive with you into the issue and solve it alongside you. Only the worst issues roll into tickets.

Even more importantly, Liquid Web Support handles requests that fall outside the normal scope of work; we call this “Beyond Scope Support.” These are the issues that other web hosting companies won’t touch, and Liquid Web Support techs are happy to dive in and help as best as they possibly can, even though it isn’t necessarily their responsibility to do so. They are that helpful.

I have never encountered this level of support anywhere else in the Hosting Industry.

Work aside, what are some of your hobbies?

I love hanging out with my wife and kids, landscaping, gardening, and cooking. But my favorite pastime is writing and studying fiction literature and screenplays. I have a book of short stories published on Amazon. One of my favorite quotes about writing is by one of my favorite authors Robert Heinlein, “Yes, I write but I only do it in private and I always wash my hands afterwards.”

What is your nickname at Liquid Web and why?

My Affiliate teammates call me “The King of Dad Jokes.” Here’s a few classics that are sure to get your audience staring at you:

“What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?”

“Can you drop an egg on a concrete floor without cracking it? Yes, it is very hard to crack a concrete floor with an egg.”

“Why do you never see elephants hiding in trees? Because they’re so good at it.”

What is your favorite TV show?

I wait until the end of the season and binge watch everything at once so I can enjoy the entire story continuity of the whole season at once. Some of my top shows are Breaking Bad, House of Cards, The Americans, Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, and Man in The High Castle.

If you could have dinner with one famous person [dead or alive] who would it be?

If I could have dinner with any famous person, I’d love to enjoy an evening of dinner, wine, and cigars with Mark Twain. Many don’t know this, but Mark Twain had a dry sense of humor which effortlessly pops out of his work in The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm (and look up his quote on smoking cigars in moderation). His work, and life, is an inspiration to me for my writing on fiction.

You can follow Christopher Eller on LinkedIn.

The post Meet a Helpful Human – Christopher Eller appeared first on Liquid Web.

As we see more and more companies establish or grow their online presence, there has been a proliferation of hosting providers vying to capture this growing demand. With so many providers advertising themselves as the “best,” it is important to know how to choose and recommend the right hosting provider to your clients.

While the temptation may be strong to recommend the same host in every scenario, the truth is that one size truly does not fit all when it comes to web infrastructure. A good hosting provider for one client may not be a fit for another. 

Furthermore, hosting providers may improve or degrade over time, so regular evaluation of your hosting partners and how you decide which to recommend is essential.

Establish Your Clients’ Needs

A hosting provider can have a strong offering for one product but a weak offering for another. Find out what products your client will need, and evaluate the hosting providers on these specific products.

Here are some popular or commonly used products that your clients may be looking for in a hosting provider:

Basic Hosting

Depending on your clients’ size, you can choose between Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, and Cloud Hosting. Make sure to select a cost-effective solution that performs well enough for your clients. Each of these offerings includes features and benefits that may fit your client’s needs. 

For example, many shared hosting plans offer a reasonable price to go with features like email and the ability to host many websites. The downside is that the memory, storage allowances, and security inherent to shared hosting are not as strong as it is with VPS or dedicated hosting. On the other hand, VPS and dedicated hosting offer more horsepower for complex and high traffic sites at a higher cost to the client.

Managed WordPress Hosting

WordPress is a great turnkey solution if your clients want to build a corporate website or a blog. WordPress, the most popular CMS in the world, provides lots of powerful core functionality, can be extended via thousands of plugins, and supports full theming. WordPress is also very easy for beginners to learn and operate.

In this case, the right hosting provider should likely cover all the administrative and maintenance tasks that WordPress requires to run well. You should never have to think about updating the platform or its plugins. Your WordPress hosting provider should have in-depth knowledge about WordPress and be ready to assist you with any issues (bugs, performance issues, and security events).

Liquid Web offers all these features and more in our Managed WordPress offering. We automatically create daily backups, secure your clients’ websites with SSL, and optimize our data centers to improve WordPress speed and performance.

Managed eCommerce Online Store

Your clients may need to sell their own products or services. This means setting up an online store with secure payments, configurable shipping options, and a dashboard with key metrics. 

Managed WooCommerce from Liquid Web provides many of the same features and benefits as Managed WordPress but with a greater focus on WooCommerce itself. Partnerships with complementary providers and infrastructure fine-tuned for WooCommerce itself mean that your clients are in good hands with Managed WooCommerce from Liquid Web.

When selling online, every millisecond counts. Make sure that the hosting providers you are considering offer high-performance and scalable infrastructure to handle traffic spikes during flash sales or events like Black Friday. Your hosting provider should also guarantee high uptime; your clients would hate to lose sales because their website went down at the worst possible moment.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS)

In more advanced scenarios, you may need to build and deploy complex applications on your client’s infrastructure. IaaS is a computing infrastructure that is provisioned and managed automatically. This includes virtual machines, storage, and networking hardware. On top of this raw infrastructure, you may benefit from utilizing a PaaS that will provide ready-to-use, fully managed business intelligence (BI) services, database management systems, and more.

Liquid Web also offers cloud dedicated servers and can provision a private cloud for your clients if their infrastructure needs require the resources most commonly found in cloud environments.

Email, Storage, and More

On top of the hosting solutions that we have already covered, your clients will likely need a business email solution. It can be a simple webmail account or a more complex Microsoft Exchange setup. They may also have a lot of files to store or backup. Or, they may need some security features like a VPN. Your clients may also be in specific industries that require regulatory compliance like HIPAA Compliant Hosting.

As more and more businesses move to email options provided by companies like Microsoft and Google, it is important to remember that other options are available that might indeed be a better fit for their needs. Liquid Web offers two types of business-class email to help businesses the world over communicate reliably and securely. Additionally, Liquid Web offers VPNs and other specific services for even the most niche requirements.

The Hosting Provider Should be Right for You as Well

Whether you are a freelancer, a digital agency, or IT service provider, you want a hosting provider that will handle the infrastructure and let you focus on helping your clients grow.

Many hosting providers offer a referral program that rewards you for each recommendation. It is as simple as putting affiliate links on your website or contacting their sales team when you have a client that needs web hosting.

Additionally, many hosting providers offer a reseller program if you prefer to maintain the infrastructure billing relationship with your clients. This is an easy way to start and grow your own web hosting business without investing heavily in building your own datacenter.

Non-Functional Requirements

Once you have ensured that your potential hosting partners offer all the services that your client needs, you should evaluate the quality of these services. A hosting provider can promise a lot of features, but you need to make sure that they work well. Make sure to test these services according to your clients’ needs, including peak performance to load web pages as quickly as possible, scalability to handle traffic spikes, and reliability so that client websites are always online.

You should also evaluate their customer support and online presence. Ideally, your hosting partner should be available 24/7 to handle any potential issues that may arise. Don’t hesitate to contact them with your questions and see how well and how quickly they answer.

Note that there is only so much time that you can take to evaluate each hosting provider, so take advantage of online reviews written by professionals. You can also search social media platforms to read the comments from their past and current clients. This is a great way to get an idea of their online reputation and how they will ultimately serve and support your clients.

Get Started on the Right Foot

Choosing the right hosting provider for your clients is the first step towards a successful and fulfilling business relationship. You want to focus on adding value to your clients, not worry about infrastructure. Take the time to validate each client’s needs, then take into account how you would work with the hosting provider to serve this client.

If you’re looking for a new hosting partner to serve your clients, Liquid Web would enjoy the chance to work with you. The Most Helpful Humans in Hosting have been serving web and IT professionals worldwide for almost 20 years. Contact us now to learn more about our available options for partnership and the services we offer.

The post Recommending the Right Hosting Provider to your Clients appeared first on Liquid Web.

Designing small business websites can be fun and challenging, all in the same breath. Taking these 7 steps into consideration when designing a new website will take your project a long way and make your clients love their finished product.

Understanding your client’s current, past, and future goals, can help you deliver a product that your clients will love and will bring in more referrals over time with your quality of work and attention to detail! You may be able to offer recommendations that they would never have considered, but you can just easily miss these great opportunities if you aren’t careful.

Let’s look at these 7 steps to design the perfect small business website for your client, and preventing headaches later on.

7 Steps to Design a Small Business Website

1. What Does Your Client Do and What Do They Already Know They Need? Make a List

Look through your client’s existing website and promotional material to see what your client offers, and get an idea of their demographic. Understand what type of work they do the most, or which work brings the most revenue, so you can maximize these features in your small business website design.

As a design company, it’s important to understand what your client will benefit the most from:

• Are they utilizing email lists and newsletters? Incorporate an email subscribe into their landing pages.
• Are they selling products online, but not as efficiently as possible? Ask them about a web store and how they currently manage orders and services. If individual users need the ability to edit pages or products, it’s necessary to know this before you get started.
• Do they have planned future projects that will impact their web presence significantly, such as adding a new type of product lineup, digital products, courses, or other services? If so, this needs to be taken into account during design.

All of these questions will help you provide your client with the best possible custom website that perfectly matches their needs and business model. Even if they only accept walk-in or call-in orders, you can maximize their new website to deliver the most possible customers, and the most needed information, where it makes the most sense.

Taking the time to learn their business needs and offer suggestions is vital to starting any client project, and the stakes are higher for a small business that might not be able to update their site any time they need a new feature.

2. What Kind of Hosting Will You Need? What is the Projected Growth?

When you need to host your small business website, it’s important to find the right hosting for the current website, as well as a host that can grow with their needs. Whether you need Dedicated Hosting or VPS Hosting, it’s important to understand the size of the current site as well as a few months, or years from now.

If a website, for example, takes in a lot of data and stores this information permanently, the site will continue to increase in size and resource usage as more data is added over time. For a site with continued growth, a VPS can grow with your small business and be upgraded to add more memory, processing power, or hard drive space with relative ease.

If your client is working with sensitive Personal Health Information, like medical records, you must have HIPAA compliant hosting, which will require dedicated hosting. This is necessary to keep sensitive data away from other hosting clients.

Managed hosting for VPS and dedicated servers can help take away some of the stress of day-to-day hosting maintenance like OS updates, tracking resource usage, and monitoring traffic against attacks. With Managed Hosting from Liquid Web, your server stays secure, up-to-date, and if something happens, you have technicians available to start working right away.

3. Do You Need an Online Store? Consider It Early Because It Could Be Difficult to Add Later

If your client is currently, or planning on, selling products and services through their website, you’ll want to incorporate the store into your new website design. Adding an online store after the website is built can be costly and time-consuming for both you and your customer. Even if you aren’t building an eCommerce site for them now, making sure it’s something that you or another designer can incorporate into the new website later on, if possible.

If you do need to incorporate an online store, it may help to design the website around these features in order to streamline orders for potential customers. Adding on an online store to an already functional website, will generally not convert as many sales as a website designed around the order process.

Understand their target demographic and top products, so you can design a website that focuses on these details to convert users at astronomical rates!

4. Think About SEO and Marketing Strategies In Advance

When designing a website’s content, architecture, and navigation, keep Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind, as these design elements will impact traffic and ranking in search. Pages and URLs should be user friendly, and the site’s design should reflect standard SEO practices like header tags, alt tags, and user-friendly content like images and videos.

If your client is providing you content, offer suggestions for improving organic traffic, if appropriate. Making sure titles and content deliver the best possible reach for target keywords and business names is vital to providing a great website for small businesses. They can even gain new traffic without incorporating additional marketing, if your site is designed with organic search traffic in mind.

SEO may not be a main focus of your design team, but incorporating best practices into your site layout and initial content can improve client traffic and customers, with just a little forethought!

5. Incorporate Social Media Buttons and Feeds for Increased Interaction

Does your client have a presence on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube? Try incorporating Like buttons and social feeds into your design to increase social media interaction!

Small businesses use social media to reach new customers, existing customers, and offer new deals and products. Something as simple as a Facebook feed in the right spot, can increase your client’s revenue and user retention.

While adding social media feeds and buttons can be incorporated later on in the design process, if you are able to plan parts of the design around their most popular, or least popular, social media service to increase user engagement, you can have a happy customer for life. Many businesses do their best work on social media, or have a lot to gain by incorporating it into their new online presence, and it’s up to you to help them with this process!

Think forward with social media and include it into your design process in order to maximize user engagement and retention for clients.

6. Focus On Landing Pages to Increase Sales, ROI, and Future Business

Your client wants to make more money utilizing their new website, or else they wouldn’t have a need for one! Whether that’s to keep a professional presence online or to have a web sales powerhouse, they look to you to make the best suggestions on increasing leads and sales. By focusing your design efforts on intake forms, email sign ups, or product sales, you can give your client an edge over their competitors with higher conversions ratios.

When you give extra attention to landing pages and sign up forms, your client will appreciate increased revenue from new and existing traffic, and they’ll come to you for suggestions on future marketing.

Building the entire look and feel of the website around sales pages and long-form landing pages will help bring in revenue for clients and solidify your place as a design firm that knows what they’re doing.

7. Hosting Should Be Fast, Reliable, and Affordable

Remember, you’ll need a place to host their website, too. Web hosting should be fast, reliable, have reachable customer service, and be reasonably priced.

Providing the right hosting environment for your client helps keep costs low and gives room to grow when they start receiving more traffic and business. The website you designed needs to run fast and load quickly for customers everywhere, as well as run on all modern browsers, at least. The importance of proper hosting cannot be underestimated, and will give your clients headaches if they can’t find the right hosting solution for your product.

If you are working with many clients, consider becoming a reseller host and get special lower prices and separate control panels for each client to manage their own hosting if they choose. This will let you give better deals to clients and let you provide tech support or give control to the hosting company to take over.

Take Small Business Web Design into Your Own Hands and “Wow!” Your Clients

Now that you know some of the important items to check off your list when designing a website for your small business client, you can go above and beyond to make sure every client is satisfied. Speaking with your client about their current business, their plans to go online, and their social media presence are all important pieces to delivering a great product or service. Understanding your client’s business and strategizing their future online will help you provide a great website that they will love!

Get Started Designing the Perfect Site

To summarize, there are a few important steps you can take to give your clients the best website possible. Think about the following points before you even get started.

1. What do they need? Understand what they do and where they are going.
2. Ensure the web host and infrastructure matches your needs.
3. Are you incorporating eCommerce functions like an online store?
4. Integrate best SEO practices directly into the design.
5. Add social media feeds and Like buttons to increase engagement!
6. Build great landing pages, and everyone will profit.
7. Ensure the web hosting for each client is fast, reliable, and affordable.

If you are working with multiple clients, consider becoming a Reseller at Liquid Web to make more money and save big on hosting!

The post 7 Simple Steps to Designing the Perfect Small Business Website appeared first on Liquid Web.

Liquid Web’s Vice President of Marketing for Nexcess on her career journey, self-reliance, and carving your own path.

A born and bred Brooklynite, Rachel Martin loves a challenge. As a teenager, she spent a lot of time in Greenwich Village, watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Friday nights, and followed fashion trends. “Growing up in Brooklyn made sure I was going to be ready for just about anything,” she says.

No longer in New York, Martin has spent the past 16 years working in technology. She now serves as Vice President of Marketing for Nexcess, one of several brands within the Liquid Web family, where she is focused on branding, messaging, content development, Nexcess’ web and digital presence, and events. It’s a role Martin loves. “Technology is a really exciting place to be. It’s always evolving,” she says. “It’s fascinating to watch how both tech companies and consumers adapt to what’s new.” In her work, she values the opportunity to learn about different kinds of technology. And she’s happily surprised that, at the center of all that technology, it’s still our humanity that takes precedence. “Even though technology benefits us in so many ways, it has yet to override the importance of people and how we engage with each other,” she says.

In her career journey, Martin says that she feels fortunate to have had senior leaders provide her with mentorship. “A few amazing people have taken me under their wing,” she says. “They’ve helped me learn how to navigate what can sometimes be tricky waters.” Her husband has also been a source of support in her career in technology. “He’s a great sounding board. It’s not always easy to hear feedback, but I work hard on being open and accepting of how I can continue to grow and evolve as a business leader.”

Her work style is collaborative and engaging, followed by placing trust in her team. “I enjoy planning and strategizing with everyone, ensuring we’re all on the same page. I’m in the weeds when I’m needed, but I spend a lot of time cultivating people and giving them the freedom to run. I describe myself as being a net. I’m there when you need me, but I want to see you fly. You’ve got this. There’s not just one right way to do Marketing – I learn from my team as much as they learn from me,” she says.

This emphasis on self-reliance and compassion have been cornerstones for Martin in her life and her work after becoming independent from her family as a teenager. “While it wasn’t always easy, I am grateful for the lessons I learned—perseverance, a solid sense of self, figuring out how to get back up after a fall, and always being willing to learn something new,” she says. Her greatest motivation now comes in the form of her two teenage daughters. “I feel most proud when I put my best work forward,” says Martin. “And I’ve always wanted to show my daughters that having a strong work ethic and trusting in yourself are key attributes that lead to success.”

While the field of technology has made great strides, Martin notes that there are still inequities for women in tech. “I’ve been fortunate enough to see women in leadership positions, but they are usually just one out of many men with a seat at the table,” she says. Thankfully, she notes, companies continue to create initiatives that give women the opportunity and interest to enter tech. “Large companies often have programs to help young professionals explore cross-functional opportunities and receive mentorship. But we still face the challenge of breaking down stereotypes during our journeys, and figuring out how to speak up for ourselves.”

An important thing for women considering a career in technology is balancing passion and practicality, to set yourself up for a career that’s long-lasting. “When you think about what you want from your job, and you connect that with what you love to do and what you’re good at doing, it’s a recipe for success. Don’t get stymied by all the uncertainty. And accept that you don’t have all the answers. Technology will only continue to grow and expand in our personal and professional lives.” Making yourself invaluable, she says, is a great way to pave a long career path.

The post Women in Technology: Rachel Martin appeared first on Liquid Web.