Cloud Computing versus Cloud-Based Infrastructure

Fundamentally, the Cloud refers to the use of software, tools, infrastructure or information that is remote-based, rather than locally. As opposed to desktop-server-based computing, Cloud computing means you don’t have to download, install or store any software on your computer, not even a JAVA Script. Everything is accessed through a browser over the Internet. Cloud-based infrastructure takes this a step further by using the Internet to control and communicate with virtual and literal machines located remotely.

Ubiquity of Cloud Computing and Cloud-Based Services

Whether you know it or not, you’re already deep in the Clouds! Your website, email, blog and shopping cart hosted with Applied Innovations are all on the Cloud. So essentially, the Cloud is just a new spin on the whole concept of the “World Wide Web.”

Some of the most ubiquitous Cloud-based services include:

• Social and business networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, MySpace and Meetup
• Video and photo sharing services like YouTube, Vimeo, Snapfish and Flickr
• Ecommerce sites such as eBay, Craigslist, Etsy
• Social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg and Stumbled Upon
• Ranking and directory sites such as Yelp, CitySearch and Trip Advisor
• Blogging and micro-blogging services like WordPress, BlogSpot and the media darling Twitter
• Wiki sites like Wikipedia
• Webmail services like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and all the rest
• Google Docs and other “SaaS” applications
• Online banking and ecommerce
• Plus a variety of e-services such as eVite, eGreetings, eBates, eTrade, Pandora and iTunes, to name just a few.

While most of these Cloud-based services are free or at least have a free basic offering, many provide a paid subscription level for additional functionality. And in fact, the advantage of this subscription-based model is one of the reasons many Cloud applications are so appealing to businesses. Instead of making a major initial out-of-pocket investment in hardware or software, a business is able to license or subscribe for only what they need, when they need it.

Advantages of Cloud-Based Infrastructure

Similar to Cloud-based services, where you “pay as you go,” Cloud-based infrastructure offers the same advantage. As such, economy is a major factor in driving the adoption of Cloud-based infrastructure, but other advantages also weigh in. Some of these advantages are why you chose Applied Innovations as your hosting provider, but you may not realize the comparative advantages of the different hosting solutions you can choose from. For example, consider these hosting scenarios:

• With a Shared hosting plan, you don’t have to know anything about System Administration, server operations or domain management. All you have to do is load your site and go! Many people get a Shared plan and never feel the need to look at other solutions. Others start with Shared and eventually graduate to a more robust platform that serves their growing needs.
• A VPS hosting plan allows you to quickly and easily scale resources up and down to accommodate business fluctuations, such as seasonal variations. Again, this means you only pay for what you need. If you purchase an in-house box or commit to a Dedicated server hosting plan with the capacity to support your highest traffic demands, you’ll be overpaying during your slow season.
• If you need the resources and flexibility of a VPS or Dedicated plan, Applied Innovations also offers a fully-managed “Server Concierge” program so you can leave all the System Administration and monitoring to us. Think of it as Shared hosting on steroids (only legal!)
• Dedicated hosting plans give you complete control over your hosting environment without any of the added overhead of maintaining a datacenter, security, networks and the like. But while you have complete control, you have less scalability and flexibility than you’d get with a VPS.

At the end of the day, the Cloud is just a metaphor for all the technology that is out there and accessible over the Internet that can offer you greater capabilities, flexibility, power, performance, and competitive advantage. And Applied Innovations is here to bring it all right to your desktop. Look for more Cloud-based opportunities, products and services from AppliedI.net soon.

Five Simple Things to Prepare Your Ecommerce Site for a Cyber Monday!

If you have a seasonal ecommerce business, here are just a handful of things to prepare your website for Cyber Monday

1. Update all your product images

Everyone knows a picture speaks a thousand words. But you are probably so familiar with your own site that you don’t even LOOK at the photos. Well, now is the time to take a careful audit of your site to ensure all the images are current, high quality, and the most effective representation of your product as possible. While you’re at it, make sure there is a keyword rich ALT tag for every image, and a caption as well.

2. Audit your purchase funnel

We talked about this in a recent newsletter, but it bears repeating. How long has it been since you made a purchase on your own website? Better yet, how long since you observed someone entirely unfamiliar with your site as they go through the purchase funnel? This is an immeasurably useful way of evaluating how user-friendly your shopping cart is. Ask yourself at every point in the process: is it clear what I’m supposed to do next? Are there any confusing or potentially misleading elements that might interfere with a purchase completion? You may also want to take a hard look at your shopping cart abandonment rates. While abandonment occurs for any number of reasons, this metric is a potential red flag for problems with the funnel.

3. Benchmark your competitors

Take a good hard look at your top 3 competitors to see what they are doing well. What keywords are they targeting? How does their brand identity and voice compare with yours? Where are they promoting themselves? How is their Social Media presence? What can you do to compete more effectively with them? Try to identify 3 things each competitor is doing well that you can improve on your site or your marketing effort.

4. Build out your Social Media Presence

Do you have a Company LinkedIn profile? How about a Facebook fan page? A YouTube Channel? A Twitter account? If you do nothing else, establish a presence on these 4 Social Media Networks and populate them with content that is timely and relevant to your business. Check out a recently published book called Inbound Marketing to get the foundation for building a very effective Social Media strategy.

5. Develop 1 or 2 special seasonal promotions

There’s nothing like a limited-time-only special deal to compel customers to buy. Create some excitement around your products and services with a seasonal promotion. Consider a gift-with-purchase, a BOGO (buy-one-get-one FREE or buy-one-get-one half off,) a purchase-with-purchase (a discount on a supplemental product or an upgrade) or even make a donation of a fixed amount for every sale.

Do you have your own “Five Simple Things…” list to share? We’d love to see it. We’ll even feature you in an upcoming newsletter and on our blog, with an SEO-friendly link back to your website! Send your submissions to sales@appliedi.net.

And may we wish a Very Merry Cyber Monday to all!

I noticed that the companies these customers of mine were working with often held their customers captive and would demand outrageous fees to help with the simplest tasks. I thought, “C’mon doesn’t anyone offer a hosting service that actually cares about the customers success?” It seemed to me that these businesses didn’t realize that if their customers succeeded and grew that the hosting company would also succeed! It’s a simple business concept, help your customers and your business will grow, but no one was making it happen.

This is the concept that Applied Innovations was founded on. Help your customers grow and succeed and you too will grow and succeed. Every day we build on that concept and today is no exception as we’re launching a Customer Advisory Panel.

What is a Customer Advisory Panel?

Today, we’re taking that caring approach our company was founded on a bit further. We’re organizing a Customer Advisory Panel. This will be a subset of our customers from our various business units helping us to understand their business and their needs and in turn helping to drive the direction our services and product offerings take.

Why Join the Customer Advisory Panel? What’s in it for me?

So let’s cut to the chase, what’s in it for you? Why should you help? It’s simple, Applied Innovations is a customer focused business and as such we listen to our customers and provide the services and products that our customers ask for. By participating in the Customer Advisory Panel, you’ll have a bigger say in the direction these products and services take. You’ll be able to voice your own business needs and that of businesses like yours and make sure the services we provide address your needs!

It’s pretty simple really, you get to tell us what you want. Then you’ll get early access to these new services and products and provide us feedback across topics like: features, functionality and price! You’ll get to make sure we’re meeting the needs of your business and the businesses like you and have a bigger say in what we do.

What’s Required of me on the Customer Advisory Panel?

If you decide to participate, you’ll be asked to take a survey from time to time and we may have you speak with one of our product managers or our executives from time to time. You’ll get early access to new products, services and betas before our other customers do and you’ll have the ability to provide direct feedback in these services ranging from features and functionality to price.

I don’t believe you’ll find it distracting and I think you’ll actually enjoy it. What kind of services? Well this is hard to say but here’s some ideas:

• We’re thinking about launching an online backup service. You’d get free access to the tools and be able to test it out for a few weeks. You’ll ultimately help us decide if this is a service our customers would benefit from and if so what would be a reasonable price for this service.
• Another service we’re talking about launching is email push services to smart phones. This is similar to the features in exchange but without the large price tag! You’ll get this service enabled for free during the beta period and then help us determine if it’s useful to you or just a novelty.

Most importantly though, you’re not required to have web hosting experience! You know your business and you know your business needs and I’m betting there’s plenty of businesses out there just like you with the same needs. That’s what we want, you to be an expert on you!

Why’s Applied Innovations doing this? What’s in it for AppliedI?

It’s this feedback that we hope to receive that will allow us to focus on services that our customers actually want and ultimately are willing to purchase. You’ll gain solutions to your business needs and help us focus exclusively on the services and products that bring value to you and your business! At the end of the day, you’ll be helping us to launch only services that help you and we won’t waste time investigating or bringing services to market that don’t help you or bring value to your business. It’s a win for everyone!

Sounds Great, how do I start?

The first thing you need to do is take our current Customer Survey. This is the type of surveys we’ll be asking you to participate in from time to time.

This current survey is meant to help us better understand our customers and why they opted for the service they’re currently on. It’s segmented based on the type of service you have and if you have more than one of these services with us (for example, if you have shared hosting accounts and a dedicated server) feel free to take each survey that relates to you.

• Shared Hosting Customers: take this survey.
• Shared Hosting Resellers: take this survey.
• VPS Hosting Customers: take this survey.
• Dedicated Hosting Customers: take this survey.

We’ll be closing this round of surveys out in the next week so hurry up before it’s too late. As a thank you for taking this survey, I’ll make sure you get a Free Travel Mug and you’ll be entered into a drawing to receive a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate! It’s a pretty good deal for taking 5 minutes of your time.

If you decide you don’t want to join the Customer Advisory Panel then I hope you’ll still take this survey. It will be a tremendous help to us.

Best Regards – Jess

Got some questions before you’re ready to spring into the Cloud?  Okay, let’s break this down.

What do we mean by “High Availability?”

The Applied Innovations’ Hyper-V VPS solutions are designed to provide clients with automatic failover, which helps ensure 100% uptime.

Uptime = Availability = GOOD
Downtime = I couldn’t find your website so I bought from your COMPETITOR = BAD

What’s this about “Scalable?”

With all our Hyper-V VPS plans, you can easily and inexpensively increase or decrease hosting resources to correspond with your changing business needs. So memory, storage space and even additional virtual machines can be added or removed from your plan quickly and painlessly. You can scale up or down seasonally, or in response to the growth of your business.  And your site can easily be transferred from a virtual to a physical machine without moving all your data. So you can just go about your business, and you don’t have to sign a long-term contract or invest in all kinds of expensive hardware.

Scalable = Flexible = EXCELLENT

Rigid = You have to pay for it NOW and you are STUCK with it whether you need it or not = SUCKS

Why should you care about “Managed Solutions?”

This means Applied Innovations takes care of everything from backups, to security patches and OS updates, to monitoring your server.  All that stuff that you could certainly do yourself, but it all takes time. Which means it takes you away from your business.

Managed = No Hassle = AWESOME

Unmanaged = It’s all on you: updates, patches, backups, monitoring = DEFINITELY NOT AWESOME

And finally: are we just blowing smoke when we say “enterprise-level?”
We don’t think so. This means you don’t have to have a whole IT staff to be able to rely on your website to support your business. It means you don’t have to hire an engineering team just to ensure you stay online.  It means that your business won’t be held back by technology and infrastructure limitations… at least not when it comes to hosting.

So if you want performance and flexibility at a price that won’t knock the wind out of you, an Applied Innovations Hyper-V VPS plan could be your invitation to hitch a ride on the Cloud. And for as little as $99.95 per month, it might be a ride you just can’t miss.

Act now and you will receive free setup on our Hyper-V plans.
The $39.95 set up fee will be waived when you enter coupon code: SpringIntoVPS

>> Click here to signup.

The Situation:
Atlanta Cutlery has one week to prepare its ecommerce website – MuseumReplicas.com – for a huge burst of traffic. How huge? Their best guess is an increase of somewhere between 300% and 3000%. But the bump is only expected to last for a few days. They need a hosting solution that can be quickly deployed, is scalable in real time, and won’t require a long term contract to implement.

The Solution:
Applied Innovations implements a creative, cutting-edge solution that saves more than 70% off the cost of deploying dedicated servers. By launching a fleet of virtual web servers and hosting them on existing nodes, additional servers required no additional hardware inventory, and could be provisioned in under an hour. The solution is scalable, economical and a complete success.

The Results:
Atlanta Cutlery’s MuseumReplicase site averaged 150,000 visitors per day over the three days of the surge, and the site was actually faster than it had ever been. Product sales increased significantly, and even remained higher than normal after the burst.

Read the whole teeth-gritting, nail-biting, white-knuckle story here. Make sure you’re sitting down.

>> Download the Museum Replicas Case Study

Visibility, support and software for professional Web Developers and Designers – at no upfront cost!

WebsiteSpark is a new program designed by Microsoft to ‘Spark’ the development and growth of independent web development and web design firms that build applications and websites for other companies.  WebsiteSpark provides eligible companies THREE YEARS of no cost software licenses. Once a company is enrolled in the program they’ll receive:

Free Software Licenses for Developers

• 3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• 1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, and Web)
• 2 licenses of Expression Web 3
• 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2
• 4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
• DotNetPanel control panel (enabling easy remote/hosted management of your servers)

Free Support, Training and Assistance

• Two technical support incidents per program membership
• Training events and activities
• Unlimited access to technical manage newsgroups on MSDN
• Unlimited program support for non-technical issues
• Access to broad community support though connections with Network Partners, Hosting Partners, and peers with complementary services and technologies

Free Marketing Assistance and Lead Generation

• They’ll also receive unique lead generation opportunities and listing in the WebsiteSpark marketplace.

Exclusive Hosting Discounts and Promotional Pricing

• As part of the WebsiteSpark program, companies will receive exclusive WebsiteSpark  discounts on Windows Web Hosting services from Applied Innovations.

Empowering innovation on Microsoft’s most powerful Web Platform to date.

Applied Innovations is pleased to be one of the first web hosting companies invited to be a member of the WebsiteSpark program and excited to be able to deliver even more value and innovation to our core customer base: web developers and web designers.

We believe combining our web hosting service with the Microsoft WebsiteSpark program will provide you the best value and most reliable, experienced and innovative hosting available today.  If you want to learn more about WebsiteSpark, please feel free to contact sales@appliedi.net. If you’re ready to signup for WebsiteSpark now, visit the WebsiteSpark portal and during signup be certain to select Applied Innovations as your hosting/network partner.

By using this web based tool (accessible via our control panel), shared hosting customers are able to generate a real-time backup from any MS SQL database server and download it instantly as a .bak file to their local environment. The solution also allows our shared hosting customers to upload real time changes to their databases – for example, developers who are working in a local environment can use this tool to upload local changes to the database instantly.

If you are making changes remotely to your live database, the tool also allows you to make a backup and have it ready to restore in case you need to roll back changes.