80% of your success comes from 20% of your effort

Let’s face it, running your online business or hobby site requires a lot of time. Since time is a premium, you should focus your efforts on the tasks that bring in the most revenue for your business.

That’s why you should focus on the Pareto principle:

The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Business-management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; Pareto developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.

It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients”. Mathematically, the 80-20 rule is roughly followed by a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution) for a particular set of parameters, and many natural phenomena have been shown empirically to exhibit such a distribution.

So how can you use the Pareto Principle to make more money?

1. Stop being a server admin.

Yeah, it’s fun to install, configure, and troubleshoot applications you want for your website. However, doing this is zapping your effectiveness.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been dragged into productivity killing tasks involving troubleshooting web applications I’ve installed or my employees need help with.

Quite simply… installing, configuring, and troubleshooting should be left to the pro’s. You should be focusing on what you do best – growing your online business.

After all, if customers aren’t coming through the site, then you aren’t making money, right? Read more

Problems with your web host?

A few years ago, we hosted our main website at a big web host (we won’t mention any names)
that promised fanatical everything.

Long story short, we had to eventually move out after we didn’t receive the level of support
that we were paying for. Furthermore, we discovered that we could get quite a bit more with
other companies for what we were paying.

Maybe you are suffering from a similar situation at your existing web host?

Reasons to move your website might be:

1. Bad Support with current web host (like we suffered)
2. Lack of scalability (your web host can’t handle the Christmas rush in traffic)
3. Slow Website (packed in like sardines)
4. Over-priced for what you get

If you are thinking of moving, or have considered moving web hosts recently…

Now is the time to do it… and here’s why:

Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Quite simply, you won’t find better deals at any other time of the year. In fact, some of these
deals only come around once a year – so now is the time to take action.

Stay tuned… Read more

The Cloud Creates New Opportunities for Small Business Start-Ups

If your small business presence on the web is just starting out, you’ve jumped into the game at precisely the right time.  Cloud e-commerce services and software have exploded. The cloud has created new opportunities for small business start-ups in a truly unprecedented way.

These are just some of the accomplishments of the cloud:

• The cloud has leveled the playing field in the competition for online customers. As a small entrepreneur, you have the same access to the resources that larger enterprises heretofore supported in-house with large capital resources and staff. Read more

Cloud Creates New Opportunities with Storage

Cloud services are incredibly useful your personal files or business reports. You can save them in cyberspace and obtain whenever you want, where you want. The cloud when it comes to storage since you don’t have to use your hard drive to store files, media, programs and more. Here are a few ideas when it comes to safe storage in the cloud.

Emails

Email is safe and sound when stored in the cloud. Since it is commoditized, it is perfectly secured within a cloud service unless the email contains personal information. Another thing to keep note of is that the email should not contain any scanned files with delicate information such as tax forms. Confidential information such as this can be stored in the cloud, only if it has a high encryption level.

Media

Music, TV shows, and films that you have downloaded with a service such as iTunes can easily be uploaded to the cloud and accessed by you from any device. If you’re holed up in a hotel and all you have is your smartphone, you can easily log into the cloud and pull up your music to listen to. This is just one of many fun things to do with a virtual cloud service!

Basic Files

Files that don’t contain your personal information are securely stored within the cloud. These files can be notes for your traveling escapades or business ventures. If you work on a team, you can give a co-worker your login information to take a look at your files from any location. Again, you can also store high profile data with a secure encryption protocol.

Intranet Based Cloud Ideal for SEO Companies

When an ongoing workflow between a virtually placed workforce and customers is imperative, an intranet-based cloud is ideal for SEO companies. Since SEO companies are implementing workforces worldwide these days this is an excellent and very reliable way to keep the work flowing 24/7. In this article we point out several advantages to building an intranet for a SEO firm through the cloud.

• Project Management: Setting up a dependable portal for team members is one way to use the cloud based intranet. This keeps the projects running without any downtime and accessible from anywhere around the world.
• Sales Training: This could be very helpful for a sales force by providing them a portal for tools and resources to keep new business flowing easily. This could also be a great way to help the lead be worked from beginning to end too for conversions.
• Customer Portal: Providing the customers with a portal that has SEO reports of how things are progressing is a major saver. The cloud is beneficial because the portal is available all the time and this keeps the customer using an online tool instead of taking valuable time away from sales and project managers.
• Employee Portal: This where human resources, management, sales and so on can conduct business as if in a brick and mortar setting.

It may be hard to sell some SEO companies on moving to the cloud because they may like the control of their own servers on the premise or within an easily accessible location. However, with the risk of down-time, maintenance and other assorted expenses, the cloud may sell them on the idea of changing over because of its dependability. If you want to see how cloud based servers can meet your SEO firms needs reach out to our friends over at Atlantic.Net.  Atlantic.Net is an Approved Host who we trust and recommend.

Don’t Forget Security When Using Cloud Hosting

Your company stores its most sensitive data in the cloud. But does that mean it’s locked down tight from unauthorized access including cybercrime and hacking?

This very concern is shared by many organizations. While most organizations are more familiar with traditional onsite measures, cloud hosting policies are now just as significant. In fact, research firm, Gartner states that “10 percent of overall IT security enterprise product capabilities will be delivered in the cloud.” The report goes on to state that we should expect an increase in the availability of security measures such as data loss prevention, encryption, and authentication. With many enterprises migrating their data to the cloud, cloud-based security will eventually outnumber on-site equipment security.

With many organizations using Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) with the cloud, users can access corporate applications and data outside of the corporate network. This concept puts pressure on IT management to closely monitor user access from devices that are not completely under their own control which can cause all kinds of security headaches. Read more

The Lighter Side of Hosting

While some hosting companies offer hosting solutions that suit powerful, large physical hosting needs, these same companies tend to not cater to the lighter side of excellence in hosting. The reality is, a lot of businesses don’t need the raw strength that many hosting solutions offer. Instead, they need speed, flexibility, and a lighter cost when it comes to their hosting. Requiring better services that change and move that are fast and still reliable; many companies are left in the dark when they search for these kinds of hosting. But there’s a light- to the lighter side of great hosting.

ToggleBox is an excellent example of a company that specializes in cloud servers, virtual private servers (VPS), and content delivery networks (CDN) with their lighter hosting solutions. ToggleBox is owned by TekTonic, which has been delving and offering cloud server programs since before they became popular and mainstream. ToggleBox has become TekTonic’s dedicated cloud, VPS, and CDN provider specializing in fast, light, and easy to use hosting and networking options with true redundancy across the board and top-tier hardware. Read more

What is a Virtual Private Server?

If you’re curious about using a virtual private server, you will need to understand the basics of what it is. A virtual private server or VPS for short, is a virtual hardware that is simulated by a host operating system. This allows another operating system to run on it. What this means is that web developers can host many virtual servers at once without taking up space. A VPS can also hold the same software as other private servers, such as a file transfer protocol program, e-commerce, blogging, and a mail service.

A virtual private server is the perfect option for a small business. This is because it is much cheaper than a dedicated server and allows the same uses for a small website. One of the best pros of a VPS is that one single subscriber can uphold multiple virtual servers. One site can be used as the main point of business while another can be a test site, used to build up new designs before putting them to use on the main site.

These handy servers are excellent to use for backup files, storage, and it has root access options. These options allow you to configure programs such as running PHP instead of MySQL. Remember that if you are sharing a virtual private server, the loading times will be slower than a dedicated server, especially if your site uses a lot of graphics. Read more

How cloud hosting trumps traditional shared hosting each and every time

Once upon a time, cloud hosting technology was reserved for large companies and corporations. Only they could afford to put together complex cloud environments.

With the evolution of technology, those days are over. Cloud hosting is now affordable and available to companies large and small. Countless businesses are making the switch into the cloud, and for good reason.

Uptime that can’t be beat

One major difference between cloud hosting and shared hosting is the ability of cloud environments to offer 100% uptime. Regular shared hosting can only offer 99% uptime, at best.

How is this possible? Well, with cloud hosting your website is on hundreds of servers. If one of them happens to go down, another server will step in automatically. A server is always at the ready.

In contrast, shared hosting puts your website on one server. If it crashes, so does your site. There are no automatic backups in place to deal with potential problems or traffic surges.

Full scalability

In shared hosting, it’s common for another customer’s major traffic spike to affect the performance of your site.

With the cloud, this is not an issue. Big increases in web activity are dealt with dynamically and seamlessly. The cloud takes everything in stride. If more power is needed, the cloud automatically delivers, and then gears down when the rush is over. Read more

Using CDN To Improve Your End User Experience

If you take the time to notice the actual content being delivered to your browser when you load a page on any large site, you’ll find that many of the images – and even the text content itself in some cases – are not actually being retrieved from the site you thought you were hitting. For example, I just loaded the CNN.com home page at the time of this writing and I can see a photo of the Washington, D.C. subway. If I view the source on that photo, I can see it is actually being loaded from a content delivery network, or CDN: Read more

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