Are you losing business to your competitors because your site isn’t meeting your customers’ needs? Are you on a hosting platform that is HELPING or HINDERING the growth of your business? A Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting plan is a great, affordable solution for many businesses that are ready for serious growth. It can offer unique benefits over both Shared and Dedicated Hosting that you may not be aware of.

Here are 10 things to ask yourself about your business and your website to determine if you’re a candidate for a scalable, flexible, powerful VPS solution.

1) Does your business rely on your website?

In the past 10 years, a profound percentage of commerce has shifted online. If your website absolutely, positively MUST be live and operating at top efficiency 100% of the time, you can’t afford to have a hosting plan that may not deliver. A Virtual Private Server provides a number of benefits that SMBs (small-to-medium-sized businesses) require.

2) Is your site sometimes too slow to handle the traffic volume?

That’s what we call a “High Class Problem.” And it’s easily remedied. Medium-to-high traffic sites benefit from VPS because a virtual machine is not affected by the traffic demands of other sites, as can be the case on a Shared server.

3) Do you host particularly sensitive data or have specific security concerns?

With a VPS plan, your source and data files remain behind a secure partition, completely inaccessible to other customers. This means all your data and anything you collect from customers is ensured complete privacy. You can get the same thing with a physical dedicated server, but a VPS is more cost effective and scalable.

4) Is your business growing rapidly?

You may not be able to accurately predict your website’s needs over the next 3, 6 or 12 months, but you DO know you are growing. A Dedicated server may be unnecessary right now – and even prove to be constraining if your growth continues. A VPS plan can offer you all the flexibility you need for growth, without committing to some major monthly overhead.

5) Is your business seasonal, with a high variability of demand?

Seasonal businesses often experience major increases in traffic during their busy seasons. For example, ecommerce, financial services, tourism, holiday and wedding-related industries each have their own unique business cycles with corresponding bumps of traffic expected on their sites. VPS is a particularly effective solution in this case, since you can easily and quickly add and subtract additional virtual machines to support “bursting” traffic needs. So you only have the overhead when you have the revenue to justify it.

6) Is more than 20% of your business revenue generated online?

If so, that makes you an ecommerce business. And that means that you can’t afford for your site to be offline or so slow that customers lose interest before they complete a sale. With a VPS plan, you can expect 100% Uptime and high performance, ultimately enabling a higher conversion/sales rate.

7) Have you ever had an immediate, short term need for more hosting resources?

Maybe your biggest customer decides to run a promotion that could increase your website traffic by 1000%… in 10 days. Or what if you get the opportunity to sponsor an event attended by 50,000 of your ideal customers… and it’s 5 weeks away? What’s more, you don’t want or need to commit to a more expensive Dedicated solution for the long term; it’s just a short term situation you’re trying to solve. VPS plans have the unique quality of utter scalability in memory, CPU and Disk Space. This means you have the benefit of On-Demand Resources to meet changing needs.

8 ) Can you afford downtime or slow page load time?

How much do you think 10 minutes of consecutive site downtime costs your business? How much business do you lose if your site is sluggish? Can you afford to lose any amount of business revenue? Most businesses these days can’t. A high-performing, fully-managed VPS plan may cost $5 per day but can easily save you 10x or 100x in revenues.

9) Is your time better spent building your business instead of managing server loads and configuring your hosting environment?

Management options are always available, even if not included in a specific VPS plan. Applied Innovations offers two standard levels of management, as well as a whole menu of a la carte management services. So if you are upgrading from Shared to VPS, you can eliminate the learning curve. And compared to hiring a Systems Administrator or Developer, a Server Concierge VPS plan is a fraction of the cost.

10) Concerned that you might need a Dedicated plan in the future, but aren’t ready for it today?

This is another way VPS offers a notable advantage: VPS plans are 100% Portable. This means your virtual machine can easily and transparently be moved to a Dedicated box if necessary. With High Availability and Live Migration, the migration process is utterly painless and completely unnoticeable to your customers.

Keep these questions in mind as your business grows and changes. You might want to even schedule a periodic audit of your business to determine if it’s time to upgrade or build a new site on a VPS plan. If you have specific questions, feel free to contact us to discuss VPS options or managed solutions that will best suit your needs.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Applied Innovations customer survey results confirm the basic tenets of our value proposition: SMBs want a worry-free hosting solution. You value superior customer support, and demand reliability and security.

Here are some of the interesting data points we gathered:

What’s important to you?

• 91% of customers chose Applied Innovations because we are known for our commitment to Total Customer Satisfaction and Superior Support.
• 94% of respondents identified AppliedI as providing exceptional Reliability, Security and Uptime.
• 84% of customers selected AppliedI for our exclusive Windows-based Hosting offering.
• Not surprisingly, 71% of respondents rated our reputation for seamless deployment of ASP.Net applications as significant. By the same token, 39% also rated our reputation for deployment of PHP apps as important.

Good to know that what’s important to YOU is just as important to us.

How can Applied Innovations improve?

• 29% suggested expanding our KnowledgeBase.
• 26% requested more Help Tools: Tutorials, Webinars, White Papers and FAQs
• 39% had specific feedback which we were very interested to receive. Lots of great information here, including many substantive and constructive suggestions. Comments ranged from “You offer fantastic service!” to requesting more “flexibility for resellers” to “improving the control panel.”

This information will be invaluable in shaping our ongoing training, support, communications and customer relations management efforts. Take a look at the profile of new team member Lane Vance, customer service manager, to get an idea how he’s approaching this.

How does Applied I measure up?

• 86% rated Technical Support at least a 4 out of 5 (51% Exceptional.)
• 82% rated Overall Hosting Performance at least 4 out of 5.

Our goal is to be 100% across the board, so we’ll keep looking for ways to improve.

What types of businesses are you in?

• 27% of respondents identify themselves as Developers
• 14% consider themselves in Technology or Software industries
• 49% of customers conduct some Ecommerce on their sites
• 23% use their sites to maintain Blogs

Size and nature of companies?

• 89% of customers have 25 or fewer employees
• 8% are Non Profits

How do you use your sites?

• 49% conduct Ecommerce
• 23% use their sites to maintain Blogs
• 21% sell some sort of advertising
• 11% provide Directories

The final question was designed to give us some insight into our customers’ tech savvy. The gist of what we gleaned from this is that you are highly intelligent and technologically-inclined, but you’d prefer not to waste your time with Systems Administration tasks or load balancing. Fair enough.

Thanks again to all of you who took the time to share your opinions.

We really do listen, so please reach out to us if you have something to say!

You can always post on our facebook fan page or Twitter.

Popularity: 9% [?]

AppliedI Labs  is a unique hosting environment allowing users to gain advanced access to beta test programs and new technologies prior to their formal release. AppliedI Labs launched in conjunction with the Microsoft WebMatrix Beta program, but will be rolling out several other initiatives this summer.

 AppliedI Labs extends an open invitation — to both Applied Innovations’ customers and the development community at large — to experience and participate in shaping new technologies, platforms and applications.

 “AppliedI Labs is an embodiment of our commitment to deliver the most innovative tools and technologies for customers seeking to stay ahead of the curve,” stated Jess Coburn, president and CEO of Applied Innovations. “The AppliedI Labs servers are independent and isolated, so it’s a secure environment to explore and test freely.”

As one of the exclusive hosting partners for the WebMatrix Beta Program, Applied Innovations is offering free hosting to all Beta participants from now until the formal launch of WebMatrix in early 2011. Space is limited, so sign up right away if you’re interested in participating.

More About WebMatrix

Seamless, small and free, WebMatrix features a complete web dev stack that installs in minutes and elegantly presents a web server, database and programming frameworks in an integrated experience. WebMatrix will streamline the coding, testing and deployment of any ASP.net or PHP website. It also dovetails with all of the most popular open source apps such as DotNetNuke, Umbraco, WordPress and Joomla. Running right on the desktop, WebMatrix makes the transition from development to production smooth and seamless by utilizing the same powerful web server and programming environment that runs websites on the Internet.

“WebMatrix is a task-focused tool that is designed to make it really easy to get started with web development,” reported Scott Guthrie in his July 6, 2010 blog entry. “It minimizes the number of concepts someone needs to learn in order to get simple things done, and includes and integrates all of the pieces necessary to quickly build Web sites.”

More About WebMatrix Beta Program

The WebMatrix Beta Program allows early adopters a unique opportunity to experience WebMatrix months in advance of the market release. Totally free and open to anyone, the program gives users a chance to see for themselves how easily WebMatrix integrates workflow for seamless development using free open source community apps.

We’ll keep you updated about AppliedI Labs as more interesting programs are rolled out.

Popularity: 40% [?]

When Applied Innovations offered Lane Vance the position of Customer Support Manager, he jumped at the chance. He had already decided it was the job he wanted.

Originally from Arvada, CO, located just outside of Denver, Lane came to South Florida in 1996 to take a job as a studio engineer in radio. He met his wife here, and realized that he’d have to get out of radio if he wanted to be able to support a family. So he ended up in technical support at Verio, where he spent almost 10 years managing support teams where the customer experience was the #1 priority.

“I was lucky to join Verio at a time when there was a lot of customer focus,” Lane said. “I sort of grew up [professionally] in that environment, where we put the customer first and the priority was to make a difference.”

Lane and his wife have four kids; needless to say, they don’t have a lot of free time. In fact, he reluctantly admitted the last movie he saw was Despicable Me with the whole family at the drive-in. [Who knew there were drive-ins anymore?] And though he loves to scuba dive, he thinks it’s been at least 12 years since last strapping on a tank.

He says he sometimes misses the “chilly” Colorado winters, but all his in-laws are here in Florida, so he’s accepted his fate. When asked what he likes most about Florida, he simply replied: “December.”

Hmmm. Good thing Lane has a great job in an air-conditioned office.

LL: What appealed to you about Applied Innovations?

LV: The big thing that drew me to AI was the culture of the organization. It’s a company that truly wants to do the best thing for the customer. To provide a superior experience. And what has impressed me from the start is simply the knowledge of the team overall. There are a lot of really bright people here.

LL: What are the most interesting opportunities in this new position?

LV: Basically, I’m looking deeply into improving or implementing various back end systems that will enable us to provide a better support experience for our customers. I have a pretty aggressive 90 day plan, perhaps more ambitious than is realistic. I’m focused on defining policies and procedures that will elevate our service and support standards to exceed customer expectations. I’m looking at all the systems we use, from ticketing to the phone system, to how to make the most useful, most comprehensive information available to customers.

LL: Jess Coburn, founder and CEO of Applied Innovations, refers to you as his “Top Dog Customer Advocate.” Can you talk a little bit about that?

LV: Absolutely! It means my #1 priority is to look at everything Applied Innovations does from the perspective of the customer. My job is to make things run smoothly for the customer at all times, and to build on our past success in customer retention, problem resolution and overall satisfaction. So everything I do is designed to support our goal of Total Customer Satisfaction.

LL: What were some of your personal takeaways from the recent Applied Innovations Customer Survey?

LV: I think the overall response was amazing, and I was particularly interested in reading the individual comments that so many customers took the time to articulate. 86% of respondents rated our Tech Support a 4 or 5 out of 5, which is pretty astonishing. 74% are “totally satisfied” with their plan and with Applied Innovations and 75% say they’d recommend AppliedI to others. But while I think most hosting companies would be satisfied with those numbers, we know that means we have room to improve. My job is to increase those numbers across the board, and I know we can do it.

LL: Do you have a saying you’re known for? A slogan or Mantra, if you will?

LV: I think the team is already familiar with something I say whenever we run into a problem: “It is what it is.” I guess it’s an updated version of “No use in crying over spilled milk.” I mean don’t dwell on the problem; just look at what you can do to fix it. To make a difference. To make things better.

LL: What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?

LV: Once in a while I actually have a couple of hours to kick back and catch up on some of my favorite prime time TV. Things like Burn Notice, Psych, Warehouse 13, True Blood. But I’m a little disappointed with True Blood this season so far. I was a huge Lost fan.

LL: How do you rank your “Geek Factor”?

LV: Aw, I guess I’m a geek at heart. I really enjoy programming. I’m fascinated by electrical engineering and have studied electronics for years. But funny thing, when a previous employer got everyone in the department an iPhone, I really resisted. I had a nice Windows-based smart phone at the time that was great and just didn’t buy into the whole Apple thing. But after about 3 weeks, I was hooked. I even bought an iPad right away when it came out. I don’t really surf the web on it much, but I have it loaded with all kinds of books and techy geek stuff. And when the iPhone 4G was released, I picked up an older 3G model for my wife. She was totally against it, but after 3 days she’s a convert. Now my two older kids want iPhones, too.

LL: So let me wrap with a truly inspired question to reveal the essence of Lane Vance: What did you want to be when you grew up?

LV: [laughs] What else? An astronaut.

Sounds like big thinking, confidence and optimism come to Lane naturally. And the consensus among customers and staff is that he’s a natural fit and a terrific addition to the Applied Innovations team.

Customers are invited to reach out to Lane anytime via Twitter @AppliedILane or Facebook.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Today Microsoft is announcing a new beta product that’s geared towards developers looking for an easy way to build, test and deploy web applications. The new product is called WebMatrix and is only a 15MB download!

Applied Innovations, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, has been working closely with Microsoft on supporting this new application and is pleased to announce we’ll be providing FREE hosting for WebMatrix beta users through the end of 2010!

What is WebMatrix?

WebMatrix is just 15MB of download and will install for you everything you need to develop and deploy web applications. It includes three new web development technologies:

• IIS Developer Express – a lightweight web server that’s fully IIS7.5 compatible and supports all the latest extensions.
• SQL Server Compact Edition – A lightweight file-based database engine that couples the power of SQL Server with the ease of use that made web developers fall in love with Microsoft Access databases.
• and ASP.NET Razor – Best described as ASP.NET meets PHP. A new easy to use, easy to learn and easy to write scripting engine.

So you get a new scripting language, easy to deploy databases and extremely powerful, yet lightweight, web server.  But it gets better than that.  WebMatrix integrates tightly with the Web Platform Installer and the Microsoft Web Application Gallery making it even easier to build, test and deploy all your favorite applications like:  WordPress, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Umbraco, Joomla, NopCommerce, Kentico, Gallery  and a couple dozen other very popular applications.

What does this mean for me?

This means you’ll have one tool that can do it all. It’s completely free and if you hurry, you’ll get free hosting for your WebMatrix projects through the end of the year!

So hurry up and signup for your WebMatrix Hosting and get started today!

Popularity: 28% [?]

 Tracking visitors is not only vital for your website but also for your business. This article explains what analytics are all about and how you can leverage this powerful feature to enhance your site experience for all users. 

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.  When a user comes to your site they bring a ton of information along with them such as geolocation, browser type, referring website, and best of all what search engine and search term they used to get to you. All of this information is collected by our advanced analytics tool named SmarterStats.  This application is also responsible for collecting data like time spent on the site, entry pages, exit pages, visitor history and lots more.  This data can then be interpreted by a web or marketing professional to allow this person to make clever changes to your site based on the hard data.

For example, a marketing or sales professional looking to sell advertising space on your site would show a potential buyer the amount of unique visits to the site and even the unique visits to specific pages. You could even vary the advertising price depending on the days of the week or time of the day, based upon the unique visit stats.

Additionally, webmasters can get reports on what pages within the site are causing problems such as those troublesome broken links.

The following video offers an overview of the application and demonstrates how you may enable advanced analytics for your site using our control panel:

All of this data is then parsed by the SmarterStats application in order to give the site owner  a comprehensible format.

In conclusion, if you are not looking at your web metrics take action and start now. This feature is free on shared hosting plans. For those of you that use virtual or dedicated environments we have some great ways for you to get this functionality at little or even no cost. For more details contact sales@appliedi.net.

Popularity: 14% [?]

The first official Community Server Developers Conference (CSDC) was held on the weekend of October 20th and 21st and Appliedi.net was there to be part of it.

Over the past few years Community Server has played a lead role in web based community sites by being the platform of choice by developers from around the world.

For those of you that don’t know, Community Server is an all round ready to go system based on blogs, photo galleries, forums, and file sharing.  The application is developed by Telligent Systems and built with ASP.net (C#).  The most recent version available for download is Community Server 2007 2.1.  The application can be hosted on our Value Plus plan and can easily scale to any of our advanced or enterprise dedicated asp.net  hosting solutions.

[Left to Right: Jess Coburn, President and CEO of Appliedi.net; Rob Howard, CEO of Telligent.]

The conference itself was based on theming community server, reporting, and a look ahead into Community Server 2008.  We also got a sneak peak at the companies’ latest project named Graffiti. This newly created CMS will allow a small to mid sized business full control over their web presence without the need for a designer.

[Left to Right: Dan Bartels, Development Architect with the Community Server project; Carlos Caneja, CTO of Appliedi.net]

One of the greatest things about this event was the variety of people that were present from all over the world.  Attendees from Central and South America as well as all parts of Europe were all there to be a part of this.  We spoke with the IT folks from FOX, HP, and Texas instruments on how Community Server 2007 plays a lead role as their web content delivery method.

The Applied Innovations Team gave away 2 Zune media players after its presentation on the Windows web platform and ASP.net hosting.

If you want to learn more about Community Server Hosting be sure to visit our Windows ASP.net hosting solutions on the shared and dedicated platforms.

-Carlos Caneja

Popularity: 1% [?]

With 3 previous builds under their belt, the folks from Smarter Tools have hit the bulls eye in more than one dartboard with SmarterMail 4.  For starters, today’s Internet users face a huge problem while digging for HAM and spending unaccountable number of hours macheting away SPAM. 

However, SmarterMail 4 ranks a higher IQ than spammers by combining Greylisting and Spamassasin support.

The greylisting method will temporarily block email from any sender it does not recognize.  If the email is coming from a  legit mail server then it will attempt to redeliver the message. Most spammer tools will not attempt redelivery and this is what the spam fighting method relies on to achieve it’s effectiveness.

On the other hand, Spamassassin checks every inbound (as well as outbound) email and filters out spam based on content-matching rules.

“Staying one step ahead of the spammers takes constant effort. We work closely with customers such as Appliedi.net to make sure that SmarterMail is providing the stable and robust protection that hosting companies need.  SmarterMail 4.x was built from the start to help users reclaim their inboxes from the spammers with 99% efficiency.” said Tim Uzzanti, CEO of SmarterTools.

Here are some other key categories Smartermail scores a 5/5 on.

1. Smarterphone syncing support (or what we like to call geniuses @ work):
    Smartermail’s Enterprise Edition offers interoperability with the windows mobile 5 operating system allowing you to sync calendaring and contacts (not just mail).
   
2.  Anti-Virus Cost Effectiveness (ATTN: Customers running dedicated servers):
   Thanks to CLAM AV support this open source anti viral project can be implemented into your Smartermail 4 instance without the need to open up your wallet.
   
3. Real-time performance dashboard:
   Is this an admin’s dream come true or what?  With this feature you will be able to view the performance and health of your mail server in real time to ease the troubleshooting those culprits that creep up from time to time.
   
4. SSL/TLS Support:
   Support for these protocols has become a standard feature in the  V 4 enterprise flavor. Both features allow communication encryption between the client and the Smartermail server.

 Smartermail 4 hosting is available in all of appliedi.net’s shared hosting plans.  Additionally, thanks to our key partnership with the SmarterTools folks we are able to provide you with a free copy of the software if you are a new dedicated server sign up.  If you would like to purchase a discounted upgrade please visit our smartermail 4 upgrade page.

See Also:
Previous smartermail releases.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Appliedi.net has teamed up with templatemonster.com to bring you top quality ready-made web designs.  If you are looking for a template to kick-start  your web site or better the looks of your current design then templatemonster.com is the place. 

Templatemonster.com is the number 1 website template provider on the web.

In order to take advantage of this offer log into your control panel and select the website templates icon that you see displayed upon login.

Once you click and are redirected to the next page you will able to browse and choose from thousands of templates in a caterogized manner with the discounted price already in place.

Popularity: 1% [?]