Monat: Oktober 2020

Nexcess’ Product Manager for Managed WooCommerce on maintaining hope, diversifying tech, and owning what you bring to the table.

Christie Chirinos spent the early 2000s as a teenage girl obsessed with rock music and the Internet. From The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, to 90s grunge bands like Soundgarden and Britpop revival bands like Oasis, Chirinos loved it all. “I loved electronic music too,” she says, “and had access to everything I could possibly want to know about it, thanks to the Internet. I recorded a three-song demo of my original work and built a website for it. I was intrigued by creating things, then putting them online. I guess you could say I’ve been consistent in my interests since early on.”

She began making websites for fun at 14. “The first full-on website I ever made was a simple page advertising piano lessons, which I offered to kids to make extra spending money. I later had a blog where I reviewed pop music and an online store where I sold Peruvian jewelry.” And so began an intersection of art and technology in Christie Chirinos, interests that would carry her into adulthood.

Born in Lima, Peru, Chirinos’ family immigrated to the United States when she was 9 years old. They lived in the Miami metro area until she was 18. Hers was not an upbringing she would describe as easy, but it taught her a great deal about resilience and resourcefulness, and for that she is grateful.

“I wake up every morning astounded at how radically different my life is today from my parents’ lives at my age, or even my grandparents,” she says. “Being a Latin American immigrant informs so much of my gratitude and wonder. The difference is so astounding. One of my grandmothers didn’t even finish middle school. I get to exist every day at the forefront of technological innovation that’s revolutionizing everything we know about the world, and still have fun, surround myself with people I love, and make music every day.”

Today, Chirinos lives in Austin, Texas, where she enjoys drinking copious amounts of coffee, swimming at the pool or in a spring, spending time with friends, and playing the piano.

After completing college as an economics major, working for a few years, and getting an MBA, she moved to New York City knowing she wanted to work at the intersection of art, technology, and activism. It was in New York that she landed her first full-time, salaried tech job. “I remember that during my interview, they asked me to fix a post-migration website bug, and I flushed the permalinks on the WordPress website. Anyone who makes WordPress websites today would probably find that anecdote funny, but that goes to show how much what you know can be exactly what someone else needs!” That moment got her the job. She spent time working for a nonprofit incubator, an organization that trained women to run for office, and a WordPress product company before joining Nexcess, a Liquid Web brand, last year.

Now, Chirinos works as the Product Manager for WooCommerce for Nexcess, a role in which she can happily exercise her creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. “Essentially, my job is to be the voice of the customer,” she says. “So, it’s a combination of sales, marketing, development, support, and other roles, all from the lens of what the customer might want. I’m the glue between different departments, making sure that we’re all working in the same direction to make an amazing product that helps our customers.”

In her work at Nexcess, Chirinos is motivated to leave things better than she found them. “Something that drives me is that we’re truly leveling the barriers to getting started with business ownership, and that can change lives.”

This is just the beginning for Chirinos. It takes fortitude to grow and sell a software company before the age of 30, a feat she can claim. Chirinos attributes much of her success to her mother. “My mom was and continues to be a woman who was independent and made it as a single mom and an immigrant in America. Watching her taught me that if I roll up my sleeves and get to work, I can do anything.”

Chirinos is excited about the possibilities in tech for herself and for other women. She hopes that seeing women better represented in leadership roles will help to combat unconscious bias against women in STEM fields. “I hope more women join us here,” she says. “I would tell women starting out to be unafraid to take up space. It can be uncomfortable to be the only one in the room who is saying what you might be saying. Still, it’s important to remember that the facts are in your favor: companies that have greater diversity are more profitable and have higher degrees of employee satisfaction.”

In her creative life and her work, Chirinos is focused on depth and care. Guided by the words of Margaret Mead (“Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have”) Chirinos lives a life filled with determination and hope. She has always seen the world with an idealistic lens, and that’s something she strives to maintain. “I think that if there is a childlike wonder within that is easy to access, finding motivation in hope can be very powerful and long-lasting.”

The post Women in Technology: Christie Chirinos appeared first on Liquid Web.

History

Once upon a time before public cloud, each Internet service was hosted on the servers of its provider. For example, a University would have a room full of servers dedicated to providing computing power and data storage to its lecturers and students. Over time, some of this hosting model was outsourced to third-party companies (ISPs) which could focus on managing the servers (hardware) while the service provider (you) would rent that hardware and deploy their Internet services (software) there.

In recent years, cloud computing emerged as the next evolution of this paradigm: the hardware was paired with managed software that made it a lot easier to develop powerful Internet services.

The public cloud was born.

What Is A Public Cloud?

The public cloud is composed of pay-per-usage cloud computing services offered publicly over the Internet.

Cloud computing started off as public-only: all its services were available for public use. Any organization could sign up to use it. Then, “private” cloud was introduced with the goal of operating a set of cloud infrastructure exclusively for one organization.

It is also possible to compose a public cloud with a private environment to obtain a hybrid cloud. Although this approach is more complex, it can be necessary in order to take advantage of the benefits of both environments. Typically, they are connected through a dedicated VPN.

Services Offered

The Public Cloud is typically composed of services that can be divided into three layers:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Instead of buying a server yourself, you can rent server space or other hardware services such as virtual machines, data storage, networking hardware, and bandwidth with IaaS. Typically, you can just use your web browser to order and manage the servers that you need.

In addition, the infrastructure is scalable. This means you can increase or lower the number of servers that you use based on your needs. This is a very powerful benefit, because you don’t have to commit a lot of money on hardware that might end up being too big (which is wasteful), or too small (which is not enough to handle your peak loads).

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

When you are developing your software, you can increase your productivity by taking advantage of ready-to-use, fully managed business intelligence (BI) services, database management systems, and other PaaS services.

These PaaS services are easy to use and powerful. This means instead of spending a lot of time installing and configuring a local database system, you can use a cloud database system that is managed, scalable, and secure. And since they are built for other users, they typically come with very detailed documentation.

You also get access to services that are simply not available anywhere else. For example, some public cloud providers offer advanced services that can handle petabytes of data in real-time.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Just as music and movies are increasingly available through streaming services, so are commercial software. Instead of manually installing software on their own computer, users access it via the Internet. The software provider usually hosts the software, making it a public cloud service. Typically, payment is done by subscription. With this model, you will always have the latest version along with ongoing IT support.

How Does Public Cloud Compare With Cloud VPS and Dedicated Cloud Hosting?

It is important to recognize that not all public cloud options look (and act) the same for each use case. Many businesses and organizations choose to not utilize a large public cloud provider like AWS or Microsoft Azure. Whether for compliance, legal reasons, or technological preference, there are myriad reasons for choosing a different option.

As such, it is critical to understand that your business and specific use case can be filled by other cloud configurations and solutions including Cloud VPS and Cloud Dedicated Servers.

These solutions provide the power, versatility, and scalability of traditional public cloud. However, unlike a public cloud option that can be cumbersome or complicated to deploy, administer, and support, VPS and dedicated cloud hosting offer more traditional and familiar functionality without sacrificing the benefits that make the cloud so appealing.

What are the Top Features of Public Cloud?

The Public Cloud comes with five main features:

1. Scalability

You can start building and deploying your software with little to no upfront cost. There is no need to buy hardware or expensive software licenses. Public cloud offers a pay-as-you-go model that enables you to choose the services you need at the scale that you require to start.

Then, you can adjust these choices as your needs change. As your traffic grows or shrinks, you can dynamically increase or reduce the amount of IaaS services that you use. PaaS and SaaS services will scale automatically.

Similarly, shutting down your software immediately stops all ongoing costs. Although you can choose to sign a long-term contract (which typically lowers your costs), that is optional.

2. Maintenance

You don’t need to worry about maintaining public cloud services, as they will automatically be updated and improved over time. Although a public cloud can have some outages, they are usually far less common and isolated thanks to geo-redundancies and backups.

If you rely on PaaS or SaaS, the amount of software that you will need to develop yourself will be significantly lower. This will make your own operational costs much smaller. That way, you can focus on running your business instead of spending time on technical issues.

Finally, you can have access to IT support that will help you troubleshoot any issues that you may have.

3. Security

All the underlying public cloud services that you use are designed and monitored to stay as secure as possible by a team of security experts.

This means you can focus on securing your software. Just make sure to follow the best practices on how to use the public cloud services. For example, they are often accessible programmatically with an API key. So, you must ensure that you keep that API key private.

4. Worldwide Access

The public cloud is accessible from anywhere. Not only can you deploy and manage your software using just a web browser, you can also make that software available to your customers around the world.

For example, your customers in Europe can be connected to your software running on a server that is also located in Europe. This makes connectivity faster and more reliable.

5. Innovation

Public cloud providers have teams dedicated to working on their services. This is core to their business model. This means they will spend a lot of resources building and improving these services. This is a level of investment that leads to highly sophisticated and powerful services.

Then, thanks to the economy of scale, you can use these services at a very affordable price.

Using the Public Cloud

Businesses and individuals are increasingly turning to cloud computing for their IT services. The public cloud allows a wide audience to access data and services anytime, anywhere, however, they want. This reduces your own hardware and software acquisition and maintenance costs. It also provides services that you could not develop yourself, all at a flexible pay-as-you-go cost.

Try Cloud Servers

Cloud Servers are a turnkey, scalable public cloud solution with rapid deployment, predictable monthly billing, and 24/7/365 fully managed support.

The post What is a Public Cloud? appeared first on Liquid Web.

This past decade affiliate marketing has grown in popularity as a way to earn passive income. As a result, most companies have come to offer an affiliate program for their products.

The reason for this trend is that affiliate marketing creates a win-win situation for all involved in the business exchange. This article will include a few insights from successful affiliate marketers about strategies they use, along with the top six affiliate marketing strategies you need to employ today.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting other company’s products and earning a commission of the revenue. A three way transaction takes place within affiliate marketing.

An affiliate recommends a product and refers a customer to purchase the product from a company. This is accomplished through URL tracking links. The prospective customer can then click the link and then make a purchase at the website. The company gains a customer and shares the revenue with the affiliate whose link was used for the purchase. That’s all there is to it.

Most companies have a dedicated page for their affiliate program that specifies their commission rates and specific terms.

If you are not familiar with this topic, you can learn the basics in this separate guide about getting started with affiliate marketing.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Joining an affiliate program is relatively easy. The work in affiliate marketing is done in creating your own funnel that leads your audience to your affiliate links.

Think of affiliate marketing as another weapon in your digital marketing arsenal. And successful affiliates treat affiliate marketing as their business, meaning that they invest the time to build it.

Affiliate Marketing Mediums

Engage and educate audiences with the following types of affiliate marketing content:

• Blog articles
• Podcasting
• Email Newsletters
• YouTube videos
• Online courses

The key is to interweave all of these channels to increase the opportunities of the audience finding value and clicking through the affiliate links.

In brainstorming your own funnels, think about your strengths. Perhaps being on camera comes naturally, or you are a good writer, or you have a tendency towards photography for social media.

Consider the following:

• Who your target audience is
• What needs or problems exist in your niche
• What you can do to help

This will help narrow down what kind of content to create and where to focus your efforts.

Many think of using platforms like Twitter and sending out generic tweets with affiliate links as affiliate marketing.

A Tweet with an affiliate link is not likely to generate any sales. A video course that is truly informative and mentions X product as a helpful tool is highly likely to yield better results. The Internet as a whole has become more savvy in avoiding links that exist for the sole purpose of making a quick buck.

The theory of affiliate marketing is simple. Yet many people attempt it and do not see immediate results. Context is everything, and affiliates should be advocates for the products they recommend if they want to perform well.

An affiliate is essentially a salesperson for the product they are recommending. In one way or another, affiliates are helping prospective customers learn about products and make buying decisions. The commission is earned in bringing customers to the company that they would not have gained without the affiliate.

A great example of educational content in action is popular affiliate marketer, Pat Flynn. Smart Passive Income examines how he leads readers to his affiliate content. As you read, you’ll realize this is not his primary objective.

Pat’s goal is to educate people.

I asked Ryan Robinson what made a difference for him:

“The best long-term decision I’ve made as an affiliate blogger over the years, was to choose a very well-defined niche to be the focus of the majority of my blog content. When I first got started with affiliate marketing on my blog, I was trying to publish (and rank) content on a very wide range of topics. While I was able to attract a steadily growing audience, my affiliate earnings remained pretty low compared to the amount of readers I was seeing.

6 Successful Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Acquiring readers and subscribers can seem like an uphill battle, although there are numerous ways to attract web traffic to your content. The more of these strategies you can utilize, the more your funnel will grow.

There are no easy recipes for gaining traffic. These strategies all require time and effort to learn and execute well.

1. SEO-Ranked Content

People these days use search engines to look for solutions, advice, and do research. Having your content be among the top listed search results for certain topics or keywords means that your content gains more exposure.

This is called Search Engine Optimization, and a vast topic on its own. The process requires time, keyword research, and planning to position your content favorably for relevant search terms.

2. Video Content

Video content is useful for visual tutorials and reaching audiences who prefer listening over reading. Spoken dialogue can be more powerful than text for influencing viewers. This is because videos allow you to convey genuineness to which the audience will feel a connection. In turn, your videos can lead viewers to subscribe and visit your other content on your website.

3. Social Media

This is not always the ideal primary method of promoting products, but daily doses can build your following and gain their trust. It provides another, less formal way of engaging with your audience. It should also lead the audience to find your other content and affiliate links.

4. Email Newsletters

Email newsletters are fantastic for distributing new information. For this reason, affiliate managers usually announce major sales and updates to affiliates with some advance notice. Building up your email subscribers only adds to our reach of potential referrals you can continue to sell to. It is easier to get someone to return to your content than it is to find a new visitor.

5. Paid Ads

This is the process of paying for ads on search engines and social media that lead to your main content. These are Facebook ads displayed in your feed or Google ads shown in search results. Because of the initial investment to place ads, this strategy is less used. But those who can fine tune their advertising budget and ad placements can see positive returns as commissions are earned.

The effort needed for this is in researching and testing ads and audiences that yield the most conversions. Affiliate managers can help with program guidelines and direction to help you get started.

6. Consulting or Word-of-Mouth

Affiliate marketing does not necessarily mean being an online influencer. Working with clients are great opportunities to recommend solutions. If a client has asked for your help and hired you, they must value your expertise. Most likely, there are affiliate programs relevant to your work.

Sometimes these types of referrals are higher revenue customers, so affiliate managers are more than willing to work with these types of affiliates.

3 Affiliate Marketing Strategies That Are Not Effective

Successful affiliate marketers are regularly refining the way they promote their products. They keep updated on market trends and opportunities to improve their performance. These are some tactics that may seem easy, but should be avoided if you expect to grow your affiliate business.

1. “Set it and Forget it” Approach

The set-it-and-forget-it approach is placing an affiliate link somewhere, and never giving it another thought. Imagine going fishing and casting your hook into the water, and then leaving your fishing rod there for good. That would not be the smartest approach if the goal is to catch a fish. It is not enough to place affiliate links and hope for the best. The next step is generating traffic to those locations.

2. Spamming

This one might seem like a ‘no brainer’, and yet it continues to be done. This can take many forms, but generally-speaking, it is overloading your audience with your affiliate links. To them, it comes across as desperation to make a sale, and it will have the opposite effect. Too much selling is a good way to lose subscribers, and in the end will harm your reputation. Good affiliate marketers are able to find a good balance between adding value and selling.

3. False Promises

Like clockwork, you can search for affiliate marketing videos and soon after begin to see ads promising exotic cars and overnight income. Usually they are long video ads showing stacks of cash and selling a course for making money online.

No matter the affiliate product you are promoting, it is never right to purposely promote misleading information. The expectations of potential buyers should match what the product actually is. Otherwise, the sale won’t take place, or it will be cancelled.

Affiliates with high cancellation trends will attract the attention of affiliate managers and risk the possibility of being removed from the program. Some amount of cancellation is to be expected, and the data can be used to identify areas of improvement.

When sales are canceled, the commission is also reversed. Affiliate programs have this mechanism in place to prevent affiliates from cheating the system.

Note: It is important to disclose your affiliate links to comply with FTC regulations.

Optimizing for Conversion Rate

Driving visitors to your content is only half of the battle. Once the web traffic has found your content, what will they do?

Hopefully, they do not choose to click out and leave. You should always present some form of “call to action.” It may be to subscribe to your newsletters or buy a product. In this case, it is clicking and buying via affiliate links. Your goal in affiliate marketing is to increase your conversion rate, or increase the amount of those who visit your content and take the next action.

Conversion rate is calculated as clicks divided by conversions.

50 clicks ÷ 10 sales = 20% conversion rate

Many variables can affect conversion rate. Landing page design, product pricing, and the quality of your content should be considered to achieve the highest conversion rate possible. Any pieces that dissuade customers from completing the purchase should be changed. This is called Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

Your individual affiliate performance can be found in your affiliate dashboard. Most companies provide a login where you can track your earnings and find additional resources.

Uncovering what hurts your conversion rates can be done by A/B testing variants of price, design, and copy. That data is then used to determine what changes need to be made and create the optimal experience for potential customers. In the long run, this process results in more commissions paid to the affiliate and revenue for the company.

Neil Patel shared with me his thoughts on affiliate marketing:

“Persistence is what makes affiliate marketers successful. Most affiliate marketers run some ads or write a few blog posts, and quit when they can’t make ‘easy money’.

Sign Up to Become an Liquid Web affiliate Today

Creativity and patience are your allies. Affiliate marketing is interwoven into all other aspects of digital marketing. Understanding how all of the pieces work to generate a sale will help you know how to build a multi-pronged strategy.

If you believe your audience is a fit for Liquid Web’s Managed Hosting, sign up to become an affiliate. Our affiliate program also holds contests for opportunities to win extra cash and other bonuses. Subscribe to our affiliate newsletter to learn more.

The post Affiliate Marketing Strategies That Work appeared first on Liquid Web.

Choosing between a cloud server vs dedicated server hosting solution is an important decision for your company.

In the past, it was common for businesses to start off on a shared Linux server when first learning about web hosting and then upgrade to a dedicated server to support increased web traffic as the website scaled in growth.

Today, the new paradigm of cloud hosting means that businesses don’t necessarily need to follow this traditional path and can start building a website on a managed cloud plan with pre-integrated platform support for Varnish Cache, Memcached, Nginx, CDNs, etc. that previously would have taken many hours in developer time to build on a custom dedicated server independently.

Cloud hosting plans offer scalable server resource allocation based on hardware virtualization, whereas dedicated server plans include a fixed allocation of isolated RAM, CPU, and SSD/HDD storage that can provide better performance and increased security for online business applications. There is even hybrid dedicated cloud hosting which utilizes a single parent server’s resources based on dedicated hardware.

Elastic cloud solutions can scale to provide higher levels of web traffic support than a single dedicated server can provide and are increasingly becoming an essential aspect of keeping the most popular websites and mobile apps hosted online.

What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting is a way of hosting websites by spreading data over several machines rather than a single server. Users manage their data by using a “virtual machine” that access the various servers in the cloud. When comparing a cloud server vs dedicated server, a notable difference is that cloud hosting accesses the computing power and services of multiple machines.

Many of the new retail dedicated cloud hosting plans available for small business website publishing support are based in webserver network management software improvements derived from “big data” in enterprise corporations where the scalability requirements of the largest websites in the world are the responsibility of DevOps teams in IT companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM, as well as hosting companies like Liquid Web, Rackspace, and Amazon.

How Does Cloud Hosting Work?

When comparing a cloud server vs dedicated server, it is first necessary to understand how cloud servers work. Cloud hosting utilizes a virtual server that uses cloud computing technology to distribute data among connected servers located in different areas.

It is important to understand the difference between public, private, hybrid, and managed cloud hosting frameworks, as well as how these services relate to the specific web hosting needs of small businesses, SMEs, start-up software companies, and enterprise corporations (such as multi-nationals or Fortune 500 brands) uniquely, with particular cost-saving solutions targeted to each market sector.

Business website owners also need to understand the differences between Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) plans.

The main advantage of a cloud hosting product is for a small business to take advantage of an enterprise-grade SaaS/PaaS solution at a fraction of the cost of developing the software independently.”

Cloud hosting plans include managed platform security which, along with elastic scalability, mainly distinguishes them from dedicated server solutions with isolated hardware and customized webserver software stack environments.

Many cloud VPS plans use a “pay as you go” approach rather than fixed rates for billing which allows them to scale to provide more CPU cores, RAM, or I/O processes on demand for web traffic spikes that can overwhelm shared hosting plans. Elastic cloud platforms manage multiple virtual servers and databases simultaneously, synchronizing changes across versions and caching web pages for anonymous browsers.

Whether you’re developing in PHP or .NET, Linux or Windows, or hosting WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla, Cloud hosting lets you quickly launch and manage your sites effortlessly.

Main Differences between Dedicated Server Hosting and Cloud Hosting

Comparing dedicated server vs cloud hosting is an important part of the process of a business establishing its web presence. Ultimately, the decision comes down to how each server addresses the needs of an individual business.

For most small business web hosting requirements, cloud hosting solutions offer webserver resource scalability options that compete at the same price levels as dedicated server hardware for high traffic websites.

Many cloud platforms use a single webserver stack software that will not support the custom software requirements of legacy web applications or databases, making dedicated server plans a necessity. In most cases, cloud hosting plans offer a “plug and play” PaaS option that small business owners can transfer existing websites to for better webserver performance at scale with integrated page caching.

Dedicated servers provide base hardware resources that developers can custom install with the programming language extensions, tools, utilities, and third-party frameworks required to program complex, database-driven web and mobile applications. Over-provisioning dedicated server hardware for web and mobile applications can lead to better performance vs. shared hosting platforms, based on virtualization with thousands of domain names active on a single server instance.

Advantages of Cloud Hosting

Although there are a wide variety of cloud hosting plans, platforms, and services, each unique to the company and programming team developing them for market, the main advantages of cloud hosting plans is that they provide pre-installed elastic webserver support with custom stack software optimized for CMS websites running on LAMP.

CMS site owners receive better overall performance on cloud hosting through a combination of premium hardware configurations, SSD storage options, load balancing on network traffic, and multi-layered database, PHP process, and web file caching services, including CDN integration.”

Cloud hosting allocates more RAM, CPU cores, and I/O processes to CMS websites than shared hosting plans while allowing each site to scale to consume more resources on-demand, according to the web traffic requirements in live production. This ensures that websites remain “always on” under any web traffic conditions and that web pages will load faster under normal conditions of community use.

Disadvantages of Cloud Hosting

The disadvantages of retail cloud hosting under the PaaS model compared to a dedicated server plan is that systems administrators or web developers may not have the full flexibility required to modify the webserver stack software installation in order to build custom solutions.

For example, there is no ability to change the operating system or install alternative webserver platform software like Nginx, Tomcat, Hadoop, Lightspeed, or Lighttpd on retail PaaS cloud hosting plans.

However, cloud hosting plans available under “pay as you go” approaches AWS, Google Cloud, and other companies do allow easy webserver stack customization using snapshot services. Small business owners normally find managed WordPress hosting and retail cloud plans offered with LAMP PaaS options easier to use when transitioning from shared hosting for better performance, while the cloud computing plans offered with more stack flexibility require experience in systems administration and function similarly to VPS plans.

How Does Dedicated Server Hosting Work?

A proper discussion of cloud server vs dedicated server would not be complete without looking at how dedicated servers work. Businesses lease dedicated servers from hosting service providers and are able to then have the server customized and configured to their specific needs.

The traditional advantages of dedicated servers are that systems administrators can configure them for the exact level of web traffic that is required to support online operations.

Where this is variable, website owners need to provision dedicated servers with over-capacity that will also provide better performance during periods of less than peak traffic activity.

Advantages of Dedicated Servers

Customization is a key advantage of dedicated servers. Companies that need to handle a lot of traffic or run complicated applications often find that differences in cloud vs dedicated server cost are not as important as having a server configured to their unique needs.

Web developers and programmers require dedicated server hardware to create custom webserver environments for complex application support. This can include installing alternative operating systems for the webserver, custom developer extensions for programming languages, performance-enhancing utilities like advanced page caching systems, or alternative database frameworks to MySQL.

Java, ASP.NET, Node.js, PHP, and Python developers all require dedicated server hardware that can be fully customized to build new applications or support legacy software online with specific runtime requirements. Dedicated servers can be optimized to support high levels of web traffic for eCommerce, media, publishing, promotions, and more.

Disadvantages of Dedicated Servers

The main disadvantage of dedicated servers is that, under an unmanaged approach, systems administrators must be responsible for all aspects of web security, which includes the operating system (OS) and all installed extension frameworks.

Dedicated servers with a managed stack software environment are continually updated by remote technicians in the data center with security patches, but this can create data access issues with unregistered employees that are unacceptable to some business operations.

The cost of leasing remote dedicated servers can even be higher than buying and provisioning the hardware locally, although it is difficult to replicate the speed of fiber optic network resources in a world-class data center or international colocation facility.

Trust in the web hosting company includes reliance on a third-party team for support, technical assistance, and debugging in operations that can be mission-critical for business website support, but not every hosting company is guaranteed to be consistent in this at a level to be reliable, leading to a potential loss of business or occasional webserver downtime that cannot be predicted.

Liquid Web Cloud Sites Service

Liquid Web’s Cloud Sites service is an excellent example of how managed cloud hosting platforms with elastic scalability are providing enterprise-grade solutions for small businesses and SMEs that are both cheaper and more powerful than dedicated servers. Liquid Web’s Cloud Sites platform is designed to work to optimize the performance of websites built with WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, PHP, and .NET through pre-installation of optimized stack software on the webserver.

Elastic scalability is automated with Cloud Sites so that new server instances launch on-demand or as scheduled to meet the user requirements of web traffic spikes. Liquid Web’s Cloud Sites plans are more cost-effective than many dedicated server plans and also scales to support more web traffic under peak activity than dedicated hardware or VPS plans can manage.

This can be vitally important for eCommerce websites that can lose business during peak sales periods like holidays, weekends, and special promotions unless a scalable webserver framework is deployed.

Liquid Web’s Cloud Sites plans can scale to support over 500 billion page requests per year on a fixed price monthly framework to illustrate how managed cloud hosting platforms are replacing dedicated servers for preferred use in support of web publishing, eCommerce, social media, and mobile applications.

Choosing the Right Server for Your Business

Instead of moving from a shared hosting account to a dedicated server with more hardware resource allocations, business owners can now choose cloud hosting plans which scale to provide more CPU cores, RAM, or database instances automatically as required by web traffic (“elastic scaling”).

When combined with a “pay as you go” approach or cheap fixed-rate billing, this can be more efficient than estimating required server overcapacity manually to match peak hours with downtime levels of website traffic.

The most important aspect of web hosting for many business websites is the ability to install a custom webserver software stack platform to support needed third-party programming language and database extensions for complex web and mobile applications with custom code.

Dedicated servers were traditionally the way to go, but cloud computing options are becoming increasingly more competitive alternatives for building small business software solutions at an affordable price. This makes the cloud server vs dedicated server debate even more interesting.

It is now possible for small businesses and SMEs to host their websites with elastic server capabilities on retail PaaS cloud hosting plans at a fraction of the cost of comparable dedicated hardware and with the same enterprise quality services the largest companies in the world use to maintain their daily internet operations at scale.

Find Out Your Cloud Hosting Options

See how Liquid Web’s Cloud Hosting options can provide scalability and performance at an affordable cost.

The post Which is Better For My Business, Dedicated Server Hosting or Cloud Hosting? appeared first on Liquid Web.

As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.

Zoho launched Workplace last month – it is a suite of 9 applications to compete against Office365 and Google tools. The positioning is Workplace allows you to “seamlessly collaborate with your teams, no matter where you are, and get more done in less time.”

I got an hour long briefing – I have extracted 20 minutes below

Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer kicks it off with some background on what he calls Zoho’s “hidden gem”. The suite has been evolving for 15 years and has adapted to the changing nature of work as it has become more remote with WFH, has become mobile-first etc.

At 11.25 Aarthi Elizabeth, Product Marketing Manager provides an overview of the 9 components that make up the suite.

Finally, my favorite part – at 13:36 Aarthi shows how the suite is not just horizontal. She does a nice walkthrough of use cases for the suite in the construction industry.

The Analyst Cam: Zoho Workplace is copyrighted by Vinnie Mirchandani. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.

Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce and Zoho.

A few weeks ago I woke up to see a mail that said I was given a “Thought leader” badge by IBM – which is our highest level of competence in consulting . We have switched a few different HR frameworks in my time here and this badge was a retrospective of the level I had achieved more than a decade ago as a senior manager .

It just reminded me of my shift in career direction and I posted it on LinkedIn . That led to a lot of people reaching out asking me about how they should think about a career transition between Engineering and Sales .

I am a mechanical engineer by training and a software engineer by profession . I chose engineering as my line of work strictly because I saw how much my father enjoyed being one . This is also why I chose a career in IT after my business school instead of Finance which was what I largely focused on while doing my MBA.

I am an introvert by nature . It takes a lot of effort for me to not let that hold me back and occasionally it still exhausts me trying to do that . This probably was the root cause of me hating sales with a passion when I started working . When I looked at sales as an engineer – I felt it is all about telling half truths and lies , wining and dining clients , speaking a lot of jargon and using fancy vocabulary , having a good golf game , taking credit for engineer’s work and so on . Net net – I couldn’t think of sales as an honorable way of making a living . The reality – which I know now but didn’t know at the time – was that I didn’t have the confidence to do any of the things sellers did every day .

I was a reasonably good developer , mostly thanks to an early start . I learned BASIC when I was in seventh grade and C when I was in ninth grade . My favorite uncle gave me his old PC when he left for his masters in US . Other than training dogs, and playing cricket – the only other thing that I had real interest in was in creating silly video games .

A big attraction for me to work in IBM was that this company had an iconic status in tech . I felt I can thrive in that environment . So when I joined and learned about career options , the most attractive option was to become a distinguished engineer – which is the executive rank for our technologists , much like a partner in consulting . I started getting all the certifications and other credentials needed and was generally progressing fine towards becoming a DE . The stretch goal – more like winning the lottery really – would be to make IBM fellow .

That is when my boss and I had an interesting discussion . He said something like this – “You will probably make DE in a few years and it doesn’t look like there is any big risk that will stop it . So why don’t you take a year trying to carry a sales and revenue target and see how you like it. If it doesn’t pan out – go back to your tech career” . A few discussions with my mentors made me realize there is no risk in trying this and I took on a sales target as an associate partner .

To my shock and surprise, I realized that pretty much everything I thought of sales – all the negative stuff – was purely my own ignorance and fear . I needed some training – and my boss signed me up for training in negotiations , executive presentations etc when I made those requests . I cannot emphasize how much that training helped me .

Here is what I figured out . There is a big similarity between good sellers and good engineers – they are good problem solvers . Engineering gave me two skills that proved very useful in sales

1. The ability to analyze problems systematically and finding solutions to the components

2. The ability to then combine the components to a cohesive solution for my client

All problem solving needs assumptions . And that exposed a weakness I had . As a programmer, I rarely needed a lot of help from my team to analyze problems . When I needed that help – I knew how best to ask that question and who is best positioned to give me a good answer . That was not how it worked in sales .

The unknowns are many in sales and often no one person knows all the answers . What’s worse – you often can’t even ask the right questions . That was the hardest challenge for me personally to overcome . Learning to ask for help early and often , and trusting others to build a solution with me . Doing trade offs on tech with people who think like me and doing it on a solution where everyone thinks differently – it is an acquired taste . Interestingly, once I acquired the taste – I think it made me a much better engineer too !

Then there is the idea of how you move from good to great . In engineering – tech changes from time to time , but if you are used to solving problems from first principles – you will thrive despite the massive changes around you . Sales can make use of the same idea – except that it is about people . Moving from being good to being great (or in my case aspiring to be great ) is all about your ability to understand people and their motivations – which is quite a bit harder than reading legacy code and figuring out a modernization strategy .

People do business with people – not with companies . We talk more about what is good for the company – but the truth is that sales is about what is good for people in that company . That needs relationships , that needs the ability to understand what makes people successful and motivated to work with you and so on . And when I say people – it’s not just people at your client . It’s people in your own company too ! The more deep our understanding of people – the better the sales process all around , even if no transaction happens in short term .

And that brings me to story telling . No one really likes to change – including and especially me . And yet – sales is all about making change happen . Of all the tools in sales – the ability to tell a story is what I find the most powerful . Stories are magical when told well – they get people to focus , helps them switch contexts and feel inspired . Numbers and facts don’t have the same effect on people . That was a hard switch for me as my basic DNA is mostly quantitative in nature . It took me a lot of effort to blend facts and figures into stories to make it work . But post facto – I can assure you that the juice is worth the squeeze .

Now that I have covered a lot on being effective , I will make a couple of points about efficient selling .

As programmers , we learn about code hygiene and why that is useful . That concept readily extends to sales too . Keeping pipeline updated , having people QA our pitch stories etc are all great things . Also just like with coding – your ability to say No is what eventually makes you most successful . Qualifying every step of the way – ruthlessly – is your key to being successful in sales . When I look at my old code , I have often wondered why I typed up thousands of lines of code that never executed . Similarly when I look at my old deals – I have often wondered why I bothered to do all the things that don’t matter to the client very much . Learn from my mistake and ask yourself frequently if your opportunity is more or leas qualified today than yesterday . And don’t keep the info with you – share it with your team and your boss . There is always someone with a fresh perspective on what can be done to make it better . Share it with your client too and ask if you are still headed in the right direction.

And then there is the time dimension . As engineers, we write code to ship and that usually comes with firm dates that look unreasonable . Sales is that way too . It’s not a deal unless there is a predictable date to go with it . Learning to estimate the time it takes to close a deal is just as much an art as it is to estimate a finish date to coding . Eventually you will have to pick a date and make it work on both fronts – with the associated cursing , coffee and late nights . There are always dependencies that we only learn about late in the process . Good engineers figure out a model to thrive in that stressful environment and it’s something you can figure out just as well in sales too .

I will conclude with this . For me – engineering and sales are co-mingled parts of my job . I switch from largely sales oriented to largely tech oriented roles every few years to keep it interesting . But there is never a case where I ignore one in favor of the other . It is a model that works for me and it probably will work fine for all of you engineers too who want to expand into sales roles .

I still need to learn to play golf better , improve my vocabulary, develop a fancy accent and develop a taste for fine wine

From Engineering To Sales is copyrighted by Vijay Vijayasankar. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.

Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce and Zoho.

Today I’m excited to share something I’ve be working on since I joined Zoom to lead Product integrations. At our annual conference Zoomtopia, we launched Zapps — which enables 3rd party developers to create and distribute apps that enrich the Zoom experience and enhance the meeting workflow to increase productivity before, during and after a meeting.

Over 35 launch partners are building Zapps, including Asana, Atlassian, Box, Cameo, Coda, Coursera, Chorus, Docket, Dot Collector, Dropbox, Exer, Gong, Hubspot, Kahoot, Kaltura, LoomieLive, LucidSpark, Miro, Mural, PagerDuty, Pitch, Remix Labs, Rev, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Slido, Superhuman, SurveyMonkey, Thrive Global, Unsplash, Woven, Wrike, WW and Zendesk.

I wanted to take a moment and mark this occasion by sharing why I believe this is important. As avid readers know (all three of you), I’m a long time startup founder. These days consumer and SaaS startups need to ride platforms to win. And there’s some important details in how we designed Zapps that provide exactly what I’d look for in a platform as an entrepreneur.

A Flexible Canvas for the Full Meeting Workflow

Zapps are web views that run in the Zoom experience. This provides a flexible expressive canvas, with the ability to iterate faster. And we made it so they don’t just run in a Zoom Meeting or Webinar (which is in and of itself a feat), but in the Client Home. That means people can use it independently from meetings, and is critical for supporting the full meeting workflow — before, during and after.

App Store, Word of Mouth and Viral Distribution

Distribution is everything for app developers, and what makes for a great platform opportunity. We literally stuck an App Store where 300M people are paying attention each day — in Zoom meetings. Discovering Zapps can happen before, during or after a meeting. And especially during.

One of the key platform features is one click to Share a Zapp as a screen share in a meeting. This is perfect for using something like Pitch.com for a presentation. But it’s also word-of-mouth distribution where you show-and-tell.

You can also Send a Zapp. This actually sends a deep link to a page within the Zapp, so you can get your team on the same editable page in a meeting. And if they haven’t Added the Zapp yet, they do so on the fly, and then join everyone on that page. Sending works outside the meeting through chat notifications, so you can spread a Zapp across your network of contacts.

What’s Next

Our next step is to build and ship the first Zapps this year, and then open it up. Enabling developer to create new meeting experiences and enhance the meeting workflow will product apps the likes before we’ve never seen. And I believe this not just a platform opportunity, but a new model for SaaS distribution. Where apps are social objects — for discovery, adoption and engagement.

Today the world works on Zoom. And tomorrow it will be a platform that makes the world work better.

Disclaimer: opinions expressed here are my own.

Introducing Zapps, The Platform for Apps on Zoom is copyrighted by Ross Mayfield. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.

Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce and Zoho.

German version here. We talk a lot about making HR processes more engaging and improving the employee experience. Software for employee engagement has grown, in the space of a few years, to more than a billion euro market.  Making HR processes easier and simpler is a big business.

Also in the last few years we have seen HR leaders take a public role in promoting the employer brand.  We hear a lot about purpose these days. Awards for best employer, best employee brand etc have become a booming industry in their own right. HR is trying hard to shed its image as a bureaucracy, and in many cases it has succeeded in simplifying and speeding up processes, whether in recruitment, learning, performance management or even payroll. My linkedin feed is well populated with HR leaders extolling their digital transformation projects, D&I initiatives and how well they have helped their organizations transition to work from home. This is laudable. HR needs to market what it does more effectively, so having HR leaders communicating with a broader, external audience is a good thing. HR famous is okay, but business famous is better.

But until this weekend, I‘d never seen an HR leader look to fundamentally transform the employment contract. They were always complex serious legal documents, filled with mighty words and long sentences with many commas, even in english. Getting the contract assembled and signed has always been the weak link in the onboarding process. It is when the slick recruiting process meets the legal 10 point font. Ordnung muss sein means lots of paperwork.
I was totally thrilled to see this contract from the Dutch Chocolate maker, Tony‘s Chocolonely. Yes this is the actual employment contract-

Kristel Moedt, the Head of People and Culture posted it on LinkedIn with these words.

“Did you ever think to join a cool, informal company until you got your new employment contract under your nose? At least 8 pages with some very useful things in it and a lot of formal clauses you had to stick to? We did pretty well at Tony’s Chocolonely  but thought we could raise the bar
Together with Bruggink & Van der Velden  and employment lawyer Daniël Maats we created our 1-page contract. We laid down the most important things and for the rest, we rely on mutual trust and common sense. And okay, there is a 2nd page with our values and promises we make to the new Tony.
Proud of this ‘ticket of trust’. Thank you Daniël Maats  for your help and of course Tony’s Arno Bleeker for the cool design.

The comments are also worth a read. She notes they are working on a German version too.
This is the most impressive example of HR process re.design I‘ve seen ages. It is quite remarkable on several levels.

1.  Profound simplicity and attention to detail
2. It amplifies the company brand. Check out their website and marketing. This aligns perfectly.
3. It shows that almost anything can be improved through thoughtful design
4. It will make Tony‘s a very popular chocolate with HR departments.
5. if you can do this to the employment contract, you can do it to pretty much any process.

I really like the “Ticket of Trust“ term. It encapsulates the employment brand promise of the company and the employee obligation to the company brilliantly.  The company brand focuses strongly on slave-free chocolate and social justice, so this reflects and amplifies that.

Well done to the HR team, the designer and the employment lawyer. This is genius. Time to buy some Tonychocolonely chocolate I think.

Melting HR bureaucracy is copyrighted by Thomas Otter. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.

Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce and Zoho.

Warning: long, rambling metaphor. Readers of my blog and twitter feed will have seen that I have an interest in music. One of my favourite albums is the first Stone Roses Album, The Stone Roses. I play this record a lot. Here is the song, Waterfall, from the album.

The wikipedia entry is worth a scan, But have a listen to the album ,or, better, buy it from your local record stone. There is an interesting back-story about album cover. The band’s second album was not nearly so successful, it failed for a number of reasons. It was way late, the market had shifted with Oasis and other britpop bands , massive expectations, band stress, maybe arrogance, record company pressure and so on. It probably didn’t deserve the level of criticism it received, and the band didn’t survive the fall out.

As the Guardian noted,

This is the acme of Difficult Second Albums. Over five years after their epochal debut, the Stone Roses emerged from tortuous recording sessions, sounding like a baggy Led Zeppelin, to find that fellow Mancunians Oasis had stolen their thunder. There was no second chance either; they hated each other so much that they split up before they could record another note. In retrospect, the title’s inferred comparison to the resurrection of Jesus, however ironically meant, was perhaps unwise. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/sep/19/3

The first album’s influence remains massive, nevertheless.

The difficult second album syndrome is well known in the music industry, but there are many exceptions to the rule. Some bands have a second album that is better than their first, some lurk in obscurity for ages, and then have breakthrough. Radiohead’s first album, Pablo Honey , had one massive hit, Creep. With the second album, Bends, they changed style dramatically, becoming far less grudge like, and pioneering more complex electronic music. They have since become one of the most successful bands of the last 25 years, commercially and critically. Some second albums build on the success of the first, driving new sales of the first album too, and establishing and expanding a loyal fan base, who then buy the third/ fourth album. With Elbow, I heard one of their later albums, and then bought the back catalogue. Tears for Fears was that band I liked before most my friends had heard of them, and then when Songs from the Big Chair came out, I kept telling people how great the first album was. This was probably quite irritating.

But the second album is a challenging endeavor.

When you have a successful niche product, you eventually need to make decisions about what to do next. Perhaps the niche product alone isn’t enough to sustain the expectations of the investors or the market, so you think about additional products. Sometimes the innovation of the first product begins to be duplicated by larger vendors, and is eventually subsumed into a suite offering. Increasingly, there is the option/temptation of being acquired by a larger vendor too, or perhaps to make your own acquisitions. You and your team may also be brimming with ideas of new products you could be building. Maybe you have vision and ambition to grow from being a niche vendor into some sort of suite.

There are a couple of good videos on SaaStr about this challenge.

I’d urge you to watch them.

Before you charge off and build an additional product, I suggest you ponder the following.

1. Why are you doing it? Have you identified a real market gap, or are you just copying what others are doing?
2. Is the new product derivative or is a radical departure from what you have done before? (McKinsey Horizon 2 v Horizon 3).
3. Do you need to build or should you acquire?
4. Can your product and engineering cope with the prioritization of two products, what changes will you need to make to the organization?
5. You aren’t an unknown start up anymore, so customers will have different expectations of MVP.
6. Are you prepared to disrupt your existing product and its positioning?
7. Will your salesforce and marketing function be able to position two or more products?
8. Are you building additional features on top of your existing product and commercializing them, or are you really building a new product?
9. Are there obvious cross-sell opportunities?
10. Will the new product expand the addressable market for the current product?
11. In 2 years time do you expect the new product to have a bigger ARR than the current product?
12. Will this be the first of several new products?
13. How will this disrupt existing partnerships, alliances and integrations?

You have a bunch of advantages building a second product

1. You have existing customers you can ask. This is especially effective if you plan to build a product that sells to the same, or an adjacent buying centre.
2. You have funding, or easier access to it. If you don’t then you have a different set of problems.
3. You can find early adopters easily.
4. You have engineers and product managers that have HRTECH competence (security, data model etc)
5. You have platform features you can leverage.
6. You have a marketing function with established HRTECH channels, analyst relations, mailing lists, influencers etc. You have brand.
7. You have partners, for instance SIs, that can help drive sales and adoption.

You have some risks.

1. You take your eye off the product that has made you successful so far, and alienate those customers.
2. You over-assume the team that built the first product is capable of building the next. In musical parlance, do you need a new producer?
3. You replace the original team with too many “enterprise” hires, losing your original spark.
4. Your first success makes you arrogant, and you underestimate the competition and customer expectations.
5. You spend too long in analysis paralysis, and over think the MVP, arriving too late, and distant from genuine customer need.
6. You build on the older, familiar stack, but you add to your technical debt.
7. You don’t figure out how to communicate that the combination of your first and second product together makes a more compelling offering. Your marketing can’t navigate the niche to portfolio transition.
8. Your sales folks are less comfortable leading with the new product, and lurk in nostalgia mode.
9. Selling to a new buying centre is not always easy.
10. You damage existing partnerships with other vendors

I’d also urge you to read Anshu’s stack fallacy post. I see this playing out in HRTECH too. ATS vendors think it is easy to build candidate engagement. Learning vendors think performance management is theirs for the taking, and payroll vendors think that building HR is really simple because they know payroll and payroll is complicated. Core HR vendors tack on a survey tool, and they reckon they have employee engagement nailed. Talent management vendors think core HR is straight-forward. Everyone seems to think they can do internal mobility solutions.

So building additional products requires you to develop a new set of skills, and your ability to prioritize will need to step up dramatically, and it will change your company far more than you imagine. Don’t do it just because your VC reckons you should. For many niche vendors, the best option is to remain a niche vendor. Do that one process better than anyone else does, and ignore the clarion call to expand. One awesome album is a pretty fine thing.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite examples of a band that coped with massive adversity and metaphorized into something new and equally special. The story of how Joy Division became New Order, in the wake of Ian Curtis’ death is quite remarkable. Here is the New Order song, Blue Monday. It is the best selling 12″ single of all time, and an immense influence even today.

The difficult second album. Advice for HRTECH vendors. is copyrighted by Thomas Otter. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.

Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce and Zoho.