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Tag Archives: hostgator
Reseller Hosting Migration from HostGator – Suggestion Needed
Hello everyone, I’m looking to switch my current provider (HostGator) we are facing lot of problem with them. – I need 24/7 Phone/chat… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1735435&goto=newpost Continue reading
Posted in HostGator, Hosting, php, VodaHost
Tagged current, current-provider, hostgator, hosting, php, read-the-rest, reseller-hosting, rest
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Anyone know of VPS hosting service with fast download speeds ?
I just spend hours getting setup on HostGator to learn they have a 20 mb/s “traffic shaping” limit per VPS. They only told me that when I c… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1735306&goto=newpost Continue reading
Posted in HostGator, Hosting, php, VodaHost, vps
Tagged hostgator, hosting, only-told, read-the-rest, rest, setup-on-hostgator, the-rest, traffic-shaping, vodahost, vps, vps-hosting
Comments Off on Anyone know of VPS hosting service with fast download speeds ?
The 10-Step Holiday Sale Launch Checklist for Online Stores
The post The 10-Step Holiday Sale Launch Checklist for Online Stores appeared first on HostGator Blog . The holiday season is coming! For eCommerce businesses, it’s not so much the most wonderful time of the year as it is the most important. For the next couple of months, people will be in spending mode as they collect gifts for loved ones and prepare for various holiday celebrations. For retail businesses, holiday sales account for 20-30% of all sales for the entire year. A lot of your online store’s success for the year could depend on these next few weeks — you don’t want to do anything wrong. And yet, even big sites like Target and Paypal have taken a hit in the past on the biggest shopping days of the year for not being adequately prepared. If your website isn’t doing its job right during the holiday season, you’ll lose sales. Your Holiday Sale Launch Checklist Do everything in your power in the weeks leading up to the holidays to make sure your online store won’t have any issues when it counts most. To make that easier for you, here’s a handy checklist of steps to take. 1. Review last year’s analytics so you know what to expect. You can learn a lot about what to expect this year by looking to last year. Pull up your Google Analytics data from last year’s holiday months to see: How your traffic volume changed during the holiday season Which pages got the most traffic Which products were the most popular What keywords brought the most people to your website (and are they different during the holiday season than the rest of the year?) Which channels drove the most traffic (search, social, email, links from other sites, etc.) The demographic break down of your visitors during the holiday season (and whether it’s different than the rest of the year) What devices your visitors are coming from All of this information will be useful in forming a more effective strategy for your holiday marketing, If your primary audience is usually 15-year old boys, but during the holiday season you notice their moms are usually the ones visiting your site, then you’ll know it pays to shift your marketing strategy to the audience making the purchases. If your past data shows that paid search ads work especially well the week of Black Friday, then you know to increase your PPC ad spend during that time. Turning to your site analytics during the holidays can provide a wealth of insights that enable you to truly make the most of the season this year. 2. Create a plan for discounts and specials and how you’ll promote them. People are ready to spend money, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still want to save anywhere they can. Your competitors will definitely be offering deals and promotions during the holidays so if you want a chance at winning business, you need to promote attractive offers as well. Decide on the discounts you can offer on popular products this season to get people to buy. Consider other specials that may push potential customers to buy, such as free gift wrapping or shipping. And create a plan for promoting your offers to your target audience(s) on all your main marketing channels (especially those that your analytics showed worked best last year). 3. Make sure your website’s organized for holiday shoppers. For some online stores, the way your website is organized the rest of the year may work just fine for the holiday season. For others, you can benefit from trying to see your store and products with fresh eyes: what pages and categories would someone looking for holiday gifts or items find useful? If you have a lot of small, affordable items, creating a category for Stocking Stuffers or White Elephant Gifts might help your visitors find something specific they need this time of year, and help you optimize for some holiday keywords. Make sure any changes you make to your store’s organization are intuitive — keep your target audience top of mind in this step. 4. Confirm all new holiday pages are optimized for SEO. Every new page you add to your website for the holidays should follow the same SEO best practices you use for the rest of your website. Namely: Do keyword research to determine the best primary and secondary keywords to target on the page. Customize the page URL so that it’s both intuitive and includes your primary keyword. Update the page’s title tag to include the primary keyword. Update all the heading tags on the page to include keywords, where relevant. Optimize all your images by including keywords in the file name and alt tags. Add a meta description with a strong CTA to encourage click-throughs from Google. But as always, make sure all the elements of your page combine to provide a positive experience for your visitors first, and search engines second. Don’t sacrifice clarity to get your keyword in there a few more times. 5. Review (and possibly update) your return policy. There are a lot of wonderful things about gift giving (and receiving), but the one big catch is that you usually don’t know for sure what the other person wants. During this time of year more than any other, having a good return policy is important for ensuring your customers choose to buy from you and have a good experience when they do. If your customer excitedly hands your product over to their loved one only to learn it’s the wrong size or something they already own — how will they feel if returning it is a difficult process, or worse, you don’t allow returns at all? If your return policy is at all strict throughout the rest of the year, consider updating it at least through the holiday season. A generous return policy will make people more likely to do their holiday shopping with you and return to your brand for future purchases. 6. Test out the checkout process on your website. If there’s anything about the checkout process on your website that’s difficult or inconvenient, you want to know about it before you lose customers over it. Use a company credit card to make a few test purchases on the site. Don’t just do this once on your usual computer and browser. Try it out on various computers, in different browsers, and on as many mobile devices as you can access. If possible, ask a friend to make some test purchases too so you can get an outsider’s perspective on the process. If you notice anything that slows the checkout process down or makes it even slightly more difficult, change it before the holiday season is in full swing. 7. Test out all important links and forms. If any of your links point to the wrong place, your visitors won’t be able to find what they’re looking for and are more likely to leave the site. And if your forms don’t work properly, you could miss out on important contact attempts and lose sales because of it. Have an employee spend a day going through the website to try out all the links and confirm that they take the user where they should. Test out all the forms on the site, too. As you did with the checkout process, make sure to do so on various devices and in different browsers to be comprehensive. 8. Calculate shipping speeds so you can advertise “delivery by” dates. While people care about how long they have to wait on an order year-round, it becomes especially important once you get into late November and December. Anyone browsing your website close to the main gift-giving dates will want to know they’ll get their items in time. You can increase conversions during that time by providing clear information on when your customers can expect to receive an order based on the shipping option they choose. Here’s an example from Nordstrom: Keep in mind that the winter months bring weather patterns to many areas that can slow packages down, so be prepared with a plan to make amends if a customer doesn’t get a package when they expect to because of a storm or icy roads. Even if the delay isn’t your fault, it’s your job to turn a disappointing experience into a good one. 9. Check that your hosting can handle higher traffic. It’s every online store’s nightmare: your website crashing on one of the biggest shopping days of the year. It even happened to Amazon on Prime Day this year, proving that it can happen to anyone. But you can reduce the risk of it happening to you by upgrading your hosting if you’re expecting a big increase in traffic. If you’re not sure if your website hosting plan can cover the amount of traffic you expect this year, get in touch with them and ask. If they can’t give you the answer you want, consider switching to a new web hosting provider or a more advanced plan. 10. Make sure you have plenty of stock. This one requires moving off your website to check that what’s on the website is accurate. Check your inventory to make sure that every product listed, and especially those you plan to promote heavily, are in stock. Use last year’s analytics to determine if you should buy more of a particular item so you don’t risk leaving money on the table if it runs out too early. Just as importantly, make sure you have all the packaging materials you need to handle the orders that will come in. You don’t want orders held up because you ran out of boxes or tape. Be Prepared With Our Holiday Sale Launch Checklist Your website has a big job to do, but you have to make sure you’re ready to fulfill everything the website promises to your visitors. Go through our Holiday Sale Launch Checklist to make sure you’re ready for the season this year. A profitable holiday season will put your online store on strong footing as you move into the New Year. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading
How to Secure a Website from Hackers
The post How to Secure a Website from Hackers appeared first on HostGator Blog . As a website owner, is there anything more terrifying than the thought of seeing all of your work altered or entirely wiped out by a nefarious hacker? You’ve worked hard on your website (and your brand) – so it’s important to take the time to protect it with these basic hacker protection tips! This article will also teach you how to check if a website is safe and what you can do to ensure your website is completely from hackers. In addition to regularly backing up your files (which you should already be doing, for various reasons), taking the following these seven easy steps will help protect your website from hackers: Step #1: Install security plugins, when possible Once you’ve updated everything, further enhance your website security with plugins that actively prevent website hacking attempts. Again, using WordPress as an example, you’ll want to look into free security plugins like iThemes Security and Bulletproof Security (or similar tools that are available for websites built on other content management systems). These products address the security vulnerabilities that are inherent in each platform, foiling additional types of hacking attempts that could threaten your website. Alternatively – whether you’re running a CMS-managed site or HTML pages – take a look at SiteLock . SiteLock goes above and beyond simply closing site security loopholes by providing daily monitoring for everything from malware detection to vulnerability identification to active virus scanning and more. If your business relies on its website, SiteLock is definitely an investment worth considering. Note: Our Managed WordPress hosting plan has SiteLock built in, along with other features to help secure your site. Step #2: Use HTTPS As a consumer, you may already know to always look for the green https in your browser bar any time you’ll be providing sensitive information to a website. Most consumers know to recognize those five little letters as an important shorthand for hacker security: they signal that it’s safe to provide financial information on that particular webpage. In July 2018, Google Chrome released an security update that alerts website visitors if your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate installed. An SSL certificate is important because it secures the transfer of information – such as credit cards, personal data, and contact information – between your website and the server. Search engines are taking website security more seriously than ever because they want users to have a positive and safe experience browsing the web. Taking the commitment to security further, a search engine may rank your website lower in search results if you don’t have an SSL certificate. What does that mean for you? If you have an online store, or if any part of your website will require visitors to hand over sensitive information like a credit card number, you need to invest in an SSL certificate . The cost of an SSL certificate is minimal, but the extra level of encryption it offers to your customers goes a long way to making your website more secure and trustworthy. At HostGator, we also take website security seriously, but most importantly, we want to make it easy for you to be secure. All HostGator web hosting packages come with a free SSL certificate. The SSL certificate will be automatically applied to your account, but do need to take a few steps to install the free SSL certificate on your website. Step #3: Keep your website platform and software up-to-date One of the best things you can do to protect your website from being hacked is to make sure your content management system, plugins and apps, or scripts you’ve installed are up-to-date. Because many of these tools are created as open-source software programs, their code is easily accessible – to both good-intentioned developers as well as malicious hackers. Hackers can pore over this code, looking for security vulnerabilities that allow them to take control of your website by exploiting any platform or script weaknesses. As an example, if you’re running a website built on WordPress, both your base WordPress installation and any third-party plugins you’ve installed are potentially vulnerable to these types of cyber attacks. Making sure you always have the newest versions of your platform and scripts installed minimizes the risk that you’ll be hacked in this way and usually takes very little time to do. WordPress users can check this quickly when they log in to their WordPress dashboard. Look for the update icon in the top left corner next to your site name. Click the number to access your WordPress Updates. Step #4: Make sure your passwords are secure This one seems simple, but it’s so important. It’s tempting to go with a password you know will always be easy for you to remember. That’s why the #1 most common password is still 123456. You have to do better than that – a lot better than that to prevent login attempts from hackers and other outsiders. Make the effort to figure out a truly secure password (or use HostGator’s password generator). Make it long. Use a mix of special characters, numbers, and letters. And steer clear of potentially easy-to-guess keywords like your birthday or kid’s name. If a hacker somehow gains access to other information about you, they’ll know to guess those first. You also want to make sure everyone who has access to your website has similarly strong passwords. Institute requirements in terms of length and the type of characters that people are required to use so they have to get more creative than going with the standard, easy passwords they turn to for less secure accounts. Creating strong passwords can prevent a hacker from being able to gain access to your accounts. One weak password within your team can make your website susceptible to a data breach , so set expectations with everyone who has access and hold yourself to the same high standard. Step #5: Use parameterized queries One of the most common website hacks many sites fall victim to are SQL injections. SQL injections can come into play if you have a web form or URL parameter that allows outside users to supply information. If you leave the parameters of the field too open, someone could insert code into them that allows access your database. It’s important to protect your site from this because of the amount of sensitive customer information that can be held in your database. There are a number of steps you can take to protect your website from SQL injection hacks; one of the most important and easiest to implement is the use of parameterized queries. Using parameterized queries ensures your code has specific enough parameters so that there’s no room for a hacker to mess with them. Step #6: Use CSP Similar to SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks are another common threat site owners have to be on the lookout for. They occur when hackers find a way to slip malicious JavaScript code onto your pages which can then infect the pages of any visitors to your website that are exposed to the code. Part of the fight to protect your site from XSS attacks is similar to the parameterized queries you use for SQL injections. You should make sure any code you use on your website for functions or fields that allow input are as explicit as possible in what’s allowed, so you’re not leaving room for anything to slip in. Another handy tool that can help protect your site from XSS is Content Security Policy (CSP). CSP allows you to specify the domains a browser should consider valid sources of executable scripts when on your page, so the browser knows not to pay attention to any malicious script or malware that might infect your site visitor’s computer. Using CSP is simply a matter of adding the proper HTTP header to your webpage that provides a string of directives that tells the browser which domains are ok and any exceptions to the rule. You can find details on how to craft CSP headers for your website provided by Mozilla here . Step #7: Lock down your directory and file permissions Now, for this final technique, we’re going to get a little technical – but stick with us. All websites can be boiled down to a series of files and folders that are stored on your web hosting account. Besides containing all of the scripts and data needed to make your website work, each of these files and folders is assigned a set of permissions that controls who can read, write, and execute any given file or folder, relative to the user they are or the group to which they belong. On the Linux operating system, permissions are viewable as a three-digit code where each digit is an integer between 0-7. The first digit represents permissions for the owner of the file, the second digit represents permissions for anyone assigned to the group that owns the file, and the third digit represents permissions for everyone else. The assignations work as follows: 4 equals Read 2 equals Write 1 equals Execute 0 equals no permissions for that user As an example, take the permission code “644.” In this case, a “6” (or “4+2”) in the first position gives the file’s owner the ability to read and write the file. The “4” in the second and third positions means that both group users and internet users at large can read the file only – protecting the file from unexpected manipulations. So, a file with “777” (or 4+2+1 / 4+2+1 / 4+2+1) permissions would then readable, write-able, and executable by the user, the group and everyone else in the world. As you might expect, a file that is assigned a permission code that gives anyone on the web the ability to write and execute it is much less secure than one which has been locked down in order to reserve all rights for the owner alone. Of course, there are valid reasons to open up access to other groups of users (anonymous FTP upload, as one example), but these instances must be carefully considered in order to avoid creating a website security risk. For this reason, a good rule of thumb is to set your permissions as follows: Folders and directories = 755 Individual files = 644 To set your file permissions, log in to your cPanel’s File Manager or connect to your server via FTP. Once inside, you’ll see a list of your existing file permissions (as in the following example generated using the Filezilla FTP program): The final column in this example displays the folder and file permissions currently assigned to the website’s content. To change these permissions in Filezilla, simply right click the folder or file in question and select the “File permissions” option. Doing so will launch a screen that allows you to assign different permissions using a series of checkboxes: Although your web host’s or FTP program’s backend might look slightly different, the basic process for changing permissions remains the same. Our support portal has solutions for how to modify your folder and file permissions . In conclusion… Don’t put off taking this important step. Securing your site and learning how to protect against hackers is a big part of keeping your site healthy and safe in the long run! At HostGator, we have created a set of custom mod security rules to aid in the protection of your website. If you’re looking for a new hosting provider, you can click here to sign up for a great deal. For new accounts, we’ll even transfer you for free! After you’ve created an account, you just need to fill out the form here . Don’t worry about getting tripped up in the process. HostGator has world-class support available around the clock! Our customer support specialists are available 34/7/365 via email ticket, chat, or phone. We can help you get secure! Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading