Our servers have been upgraded to cPanel version 64. Within this upgrade there are several new functions available (read about them in this article). Another new function available is iOS push notifications for email on devices from Apple. This has been tested and can be found on all our cPanel servers at PRO ISP.
This technology will improve the battery time for your iOS device and receive email quicker.
This technology is only available if email is set up using IMAP. If you are using POP3 this will not work. This is also only available for Apple’s email application.
Receive notifications
New emails will not automatically show on the screen when the unit is locked. You can adjust the settings to receive warnings when specific people send you email. Follow these steps:
1. Open Mail application.
2. Choose “Mailboxes” on the top left corner.
3. Choose “I” symbol to the right of the VIP menu.
4. In the VIP list choose “Add VIP”.
5. Choose which of your contacts to be shown on the locked screen when you receive email from them.
During the next few weeks cPanel will be updated to cPanel version 64 on all of our servers. These updates are done a few times each year after they are tested and available. Since updates contains several different things we have written about the most important ones for our customers.
Fast Email Searching (IMAP Full Text Search)
This technology (Solr) will be activated on all our servers and will work for everyone using email with IMAP at PRO ISP. The technology works on all iOS units, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and all the webmail clients we have available.
How does it work?
When searching for an email with text or other the server will index the entire email account. The first time the search will be somewhat slow, but all future searches will be much faster compared to before as the account was indexed earlier.
This technology will require more resources from the server (CPU and disk space). This will not affect the disk space for our clients, but directly on the server.
Tidy Mailboxes
A new icon will be available in the control panel to give an overview of the number of emails and disk space for the different email accounts. It will also be possible to tidy up the email accounts using these options:
– Remove all emails older than 1 year in a folder
– Remove all emails in a folder over 30MB
– Remove all emails in a folder
Look for the icon “Email Disk Usage” under the category “Email”.
Optimizing
Improvements will be made on a server level for the email servers as well. Mainly sending/receiving email will be faster as well as reducing the battery usage of iOS units.
New styles (white/black)
Several of our customers have changed to Paper Lantern theme in the control panel. Now white and black is available for anyone wanting to use this.
Software
The most important and highly requested updated this time is phpMyAdmin which will be updated from version 4.0.10 to 4.6.6. The current version (4.0.10) was released in 2013 and the new in 2017. In the future new versions will be released more often.
SSL proxy subdomains
It will now be possible to use your own SSL on proxy subdomains (for example webmail.yourdomain.net/cpanel.yourdomain.net). If you have a wildcard SSL certificate you can install this on the subdomains in cPanel.
DMARC
Within the zone editor it is now possible to add DMARC records within the interface instead of manually.
From 27.-31. of march PRO ISP attended World Hosting Days (WHD) in Rust, Germany.
What is World Hosting Days (WHD)?
The fair is held at Europa-Park, Europes largest amusement park. Every year WHD grows in number of participants, seminars and companies attending. This years over 6500 people attended WHD and over 120 seminars was held. As many as 2500 companies from 84 different nations attended.
Our providers
Most of the time PRO ISP spend at WHD is spent on meeting our providers and their contacts. We discuss current solutions and products as well as the future and what challenges lies ahead. This gives us information of future plans for our providers services and products.
The speed and page load time of your website is extremely important and will affect the traffic to your website. Google distinguishes between fast and slow websites when ranking them and in cases where two websites has the same content, Google will prefer the faster one. Your websites page load time will also have a large impact on your visitors and potential customers as the bounce rate is much higher for slow than for fast websites. At PRO ISP we care about the speed and page load time for our clients websites. We therefore wish to give you some simple and easy ways to speed up your website.
Before performing any change, we recommend you test your website to see the differences before and after. Below you will find some simple tools to measure how fast your website is today: Pingdom Tools (choose Stockholm before preforming the test). GTMetrix (you cannot choose location without being registered).
1. PHP version
New versions of PHP are released continuously. They have improvements that will reduce the use of resources required to run a website build in PHP.
There are several benefits when switching to a newer and higher PHP version:
– They require less resources and are more efficient.
– The website will have more capacity for more traffic and load faster.
– Active support for security. On PHP 5.6 support for security support expires 31th of December 2018. (We are running «HardenedPHP» on all our servers so older PHP versions are secure).
You can change versions as much as you please to see which one works the best for your website. It is important the code/script you are running on the website is not outdated as this can cause problems with newer PHP version.
As long as everything is updated (whether it be WordPress, Joomla or other scripts) it will be able to run on PHP 5.6, but if the websites works well in PHP 7.0 that is the best option. PHP version can easily be changed in cPanel (control panel).
2. Compressing content
Most content can be compressed before being sent from the server to visitor. By compressing the content, it will reduce the amount to be transferred to the visitors and therefore reduce the load time for the website. This is available on all our severs and can easily be set up in the .htaccess file or by activating it in cPanel as shown in this guide.
3. Cache
There are several types of caching. This tip is for caching the website on the server. By having caching activated on a website, data will be stored, so that new requests of the same website and content will be retrieved from the cache and not the webserver itself. This reduces load time and makes the website considerably faster.
A large number of our clients use WordPress for their websites, but this tip also applies for other scripts (such as Joomla!, Drupal og Magento).
When using WordPress you can download and install plugins. There are several different cache plugins and if your web hosting is located on a LiteSpeed server you can use the LiteSpeed cache plugin which is the fastest one when we tested.
When you have installed and activated one of these you can adjust the settings, but for most websites no adjustments will be necessary. If you have a website with low traffic you should change TTL for caching from standard to higher (432000 for example, which is 12 hours).
4. Keep everything updated and remove what you dont use
Often people install scripts on their web hosting and plugins within the scripts to test stuff. These are often forgotten or not being when the testing is completed. Even you have plans to maybe use them later you should remove them and rather install them when you need to use them.
Installations such as plugins, theme, extensions and modules not being used is a safety risk. The also use resources and disc space. By keeping everything updated you are better protected against hackers and other attacks. Should an update fail you can always restore from our external backup.
5. Optimize images
Images is one of the larger elements on a website. It is therefore important that they are optimized as much as possible. Use Google PageSpeed to analyze what can be improved including having all your images optimized in a zip-file for downloading and replacing existing images.
For WordPress, there are plugins to remove excess information from images which will reduce their size and optimizes the images. By using one of the plugins mentioned below you can optimize several images already posted on your website: WP Smush ShortPixel Image Optimizer Imagify Image Optimizer TinyPNG
6. SSL and HTTP/2
HTTP/2 is the latest version of the HTTP protocol and will improve the load time for websites considerably compared to the 1.1 version. The most popular web browsers have chosen to only support HTTP/2 over SSL (HTTPS), which means you will need to use an SSL certificate on your website to be able to use HTTP/2.
All our web hosting solutions include a free SSL certificate which covers the minimum demands for encryption and HTTP/2. You can easily install this as shown in the guide for configuration of Basis SSL. Even though this is free to install, we recommend all professional websites to purchase an SSL certificate with additional functions to increase your customers trust in your website and this way also increase conversions.
For the moment, our web hosting’s on Apache webservers do not support HTTP/2 even if you install an SSL certificate. This is because cPanel do not support it. It is expected cPanel will do something regarding this, but there is not set date for any solution. In order to use HTTP/2 you will need to have your web hosting on a LiteSpeed webserver which you can for free if you have Pro Medium or larger web hosting solution with PRO ISP. Check if your web hosting is located on a LiteSpeed server via the client portal. Here you can also request transfer to a LiteSpeed webserver by following this guide on how to change server.
7. Use LiteSpeed webserver
In addition to the previous section on why you should use LiteSpeed webserver, you should also know these advantages of using LiteSpeed instead of Apache:
Static content is delivered up to 5 times faster than Apache
Dynamic content is delivered up to 40 times faster than Apache
HTTPS 3 times faster than Apache
Uses less of the server’s resources which causes it requires more before CloudLinux limits are reached = it takes more before the resource usage of your website is limited
LiteSpeed was the first commercial webserver on the market and our experience is that new functionality and improvements are constantly being developed.
Our Apache servers uses a module based on LiteSpeed (mod_lsapi). This means the differences mentioned are not as dramatical on our web hosting solutions, but they are still considerably large enough to recommend LiteSpeed instead of Apache.
Digital marketing is all around us in our everyday life. Take a look around you. People are either looking down on their mobile phones or tablets. Be it on the streets, restaurants, cafes or in their homes, everyone is connected to the internet. Information is literally at everyone’s fingertips and with it, the birth of digital marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
Connecting with your customers in the right place and the right time is what marketing is all about. Simply put, digital marketing is a collective term for all online marketing done by a business. There are a lot of channels open for companies to connect with their target audience. These include social media, Google search, email and their own websites.
Tips and Tricks
There are many ways a company can enhance their branding online. These include the following methods that will help their brands reach their goals:
• Emails
• Blog articles
• Company websites
• Interactive tools
• Infographics
• Ebooks
• Lookbooks
• Whitepapers
• Online brochures
• Social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
• Branding using fonts and logos, among others
• Online coverage such as reviews, social media or PR
Most companies employ the following tactics to improve sales conversion:
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – the method of optimizing content so that the website will rank higher in search engines.
• Social Media Marketing – a kind of marketing that utilizes social media to promote brand awareness, increase traffic to the site and generate sales leads.
• Affiliate Marketing – advertising based on performance where site owners promote products of other sites to get a commission.
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – one common example of this is Google Adwords where companies pay a publisher every time their ads are clicked.
• Marketing Automation – these are software were the goal is to automate everyday marketing actions such as emails and other social media functions.
• Native Advertising – these are advertisements that are content-led and mostly featured side-by-side non-paid content.
• Online PR – much like traditional PR but in the digital scene; companies employ online coverage with blogs, other digital publications and content-based websites.
• Email Marketing – companies use email marketing campaigns to communicate with their customers to promote events, contents and discounts among others
Whatever your company desires to use, make sure it fits the needs of your customers. It will save time, money and effort in the long run.
Important differences between B2B and B2C
While digital marketing works well for any kind of company, there are different ways it can be used and implemented. Depending if your company is B2B (buisness to buisness) or B2C (buisness to customer) different strategies are needed.
B2B is marketing products (or services) to other companys or organizations. For B2B the digital marketing strategy will need to focus on creating “leads” online via the companys website and other channels such as LinkedIn. The “leads” will again create conversions (sales).
The focus for a B2C company is to attract visitors and turn them into customers. This often requires a strong “call to action”and marketing through several channels are often a well used strategy.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
There are a lot of benefits for marketers, among them:
• Seeing your results in real time regardless of whether you are a big or small company.
• Using website content to connect with online visitors 24/7.
• Track consumer reaction the moment they visit your site and thus, optimize the page on an ongoing basis.
• Realize higher ROI compared with traditional marketing strategies.
• Stay competitive in today’s high tech business climate.
• With real time data on hand, a company can adapt and take action.
• Able to connect with mobile customers when they use their smartphones or other mobile devices.
• It generates higher conversion rates.
• Big and small companies save money in terms of lead generation.
• Enables real-time response to customers.
Content Creation
Depending on the needs of your audience, your content must answer the needs at different stages in the buyer’s journey. Knowing and creating different buyer personas are necessary for content creation. It will aptly identify your customer’s goals and preferences in relation to your business.
To create awareness, your company may use short videos, blog posts and infographics. All are powerful means to connect with your customers. Using testimonials and case studies are also ways to help clinch a sale. Companies often use photos of their customers with hashtags to get their brands across.
Seeing Results
Depending on how effective your website content in driving customers to your site, results vary. So, it is important to understand and create your buyer persona to answer their needs. It is also crucial to have quality online content for sales conversion.
Paid advertising results may be seen quicker, but it is more important to build your organic reach. This can be done using SEO, content and social media for the long haul. Usually, results can be seen within the first half of the year.
Budget
You don’t need a huge budget especially when you already have your own website. When you use SEO, content creation or social media, you won’t need much at all. Yet, if you decide to hire other SEO specialist later on, it will come with a reasonable fee.
Online advertising, while giving you the needed visibility will cost more. Using Google AdWords to implement PPC can be expensive. Rather, it’s a good idea to improve your organic reach and focus on creating top-notch content.
Mobile Marketing
Do you know that almost 60% of your market uses mobile content? Those who uses desktop make up the remaining 40%. Therefore, it is important that web pages, images, digital ads and other digital assets are optimized for mobile devices.
A responsive website design that will make browsing seamless must be your goal. It is important for mobile users to have the same pleasing experience as they would on desktop. This means that images and texts must not be cut-off. Remember that some smartphone’s screen may be tiny.
What Now?
There’s no time to lose – digital marketing is the lifeblood of today’s businesses. It is not a fad or a trend. In today’s highly technological world, staying on top of the competition is not the same as decades before.
You need an effective strategy to build your brand and get your customer’s loyalty. Whether you are a novice or a pro, digital marketing is your ally to take your business to the next level.
