Three Consumer Tech Innovations of 2018

Any online business owner can relate to the challenge of keeping up with technology. Even in businesses that don’t seemingly have any major link to emerging technologies, there are still benefits that can come from keeping up with consumer and industrial electronics. Many of the latest tech innovations are based on technologies that can scale to different industries, so there’s always some insight to be gained from the latest trends.

The Consumer Electronics Show is arguably the most important tech show of the year, as it reveals innovations that can be game-changing for both businesses and consumers. These are five of the most exciting technologies that have been revealed over the last month at CES and private industry events.

Innovations:

Alexa Voice Commands in-car with Muse

Muse is a new device developed by Speak Music. It’s a simple accessory no larger than an Oreo cookie, which will integrate with a car audio system and provide Amazon Alexa voice functionality. Users can change the music that they’re playing, interact with their schedule, and perform other functions that are available on the Alexa platform.

While an interesting device for consumers, it’s also noteworthy for business owners. It shows how natural language search and voice search will become more important in the coming years, as more consumers gain access to voice control devices. This will change the way that business owners and webmasters approach to search engine optimization and content marketing. Continue reading Three Consumer Tech Innovations of 2018

The Differences Between Shared, VPS, and Dedicated Hosting

Any modern business will benefit from having a professional website. A website provides a gateway to a larger market, and most businesses recognize that a website is essential for growth. For small and medium-sized businesses, making the online transition can sometimes be intimidating, especially when it comes to the different hosting solutions that are available.

One area that often leads to confusion; is the difference between shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting. The three options have some similarities but can provide different benefits at an additional cost. Choosing the right hosting solution for your website is your responsibility, however, our engineers are assisting our customers to choose the right hosting plan and provide the advice for the best results and peace of mind.

The following is a breakdown of each solution, with simple explanations aimed towards online business owners.

Shared Webhosting for Online Business

Hosting is essentially the parking garage for a business website. A hosting solution combines storage, bandwidth, and the hardware and software that is needed to start and maintain an online presence.

Entry level packages are predominantly shared solutions, which offers a good compromise between performance and affordability.

Hosting providers use servers to store website data and service their customers. With a shared solution, an online business website will be stored on a server that is also used by other websites. This makes hosting more affordable and accessible.

The server needs to share all resources between websites (including storage, RAM, network connectivity, and processing power), which in old days can mean degraded performance when compared to VPS or dedicated hosting. While Continue reading The Differences Between Shared, VPS, and Dedicated Hosting

Storage and Bandwidth Explained for Business Web Hosting

An online business needs an efficient and stable website, which is why choosing a hosting provider is so important. With the right host, a business will benefit from stable up-time, plenty of storage and bandwidth, and fast servers that allow for speedy page loading. With the wrong package, an online business could quickly run into issues that could reduce income and growth.

Any small or medium-sized business owner will need to understand all of the basic terms and features of a professional web hosting package. The following information will help to clarify the difference between bandwidth and storage when related to business web hosting.

Hosted Storage for a Website

A number of hosting providers have moved to models where an unlimited amount of storage is offered. This effectively allows businesses to create websites without restriction on how much content is being hosted. Whether the site is a few hundred megabytes or more than a gigabyte, an unlimited storage plan won’t place any restrictions in terms of storage size. For some lower tiered plans for startup websites, storage is often capped, sometimes as low as one or two gigabytes and if it’s unlimited storage, it should be limited by the number of files that can be hosted on your hosting account. Here at HostRound we provide resources as promoted, for shared hosting plans, we start from 7GB of SSD storage and up to unlimited gigabytes for the higher plans.

The average website will not contain more than a few hundred megabytes of information, especially with the existence of CDN which help increase website speed and cache the static files and serve them from many servers across the globe which decrease the number of requests and traffic consumed on your hosting account and improve the user experience. However, storage doesn’t just relate to the site itself, but also the content management system, any backups that are stored, and any other resources that are saved but not specifically used on the publicly facing website (additional downloadable resources etc.).

For any business today, an unmetered hosting solution is recommended. While most hosting providers are generous in what they offer on limited plans, it makes more sense and will assist in futureproofing when an unmetered storage solution is chosen.

Bandwidth for Business Websites

Bandwidth and storage are sometimes confused, but they are actually two very different things. Storage, as we’ve covered, relates to all data that is stored on a website through a hosting provider. Continue reading Storage and Bandwidth Explained for Business Web Hosting

3 Online Business Tech Trends in 2018

In the past 25 years, we’ve seen more advancements in business technology than at any other point in history. Businesses that recognize the tech trends early will be better prepared to take advantage of the latest tools and market conditions.

To succeed in business, adaptability is key. Not only do business owners need to adapt to changing consumer demands and spending patterns; it’s also essential to adapt to the natural progression of technology.

These are the three tech trends that online businesses will not be able to ignore in 2018.

Big Data, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence Will Continue to Grow in Importance

Machine learning can provide significant advantages to businesses that collect any kind of data about their market and consumers. Big data has been a buzzword for a number of years, but now it’s becoming clearer as to how businesses should use all of the data that is collected.

Artificial intelligence and automated machine learning can now make it simpler for businesses to analyze the data that they collect, enabling them to build better customer profiles, predict tech trends in the market, and develop better approaches to customer service and product/service design.

Even the smallest companies can take advantage of big data, thanks to a number of modern CRM services that can provide custom analytics to gain consumer and market insights.

Businesses will need to learn that efficient collection of customer data is essential to evolve and stay ahead of the competition. Continue reading 3 Online Business Tech Trends in 2018

HostRound Launches Managed SSD VPS Hosting Service in 2018

VPS hosting is the latest addition to our product lineup, offering an excellent alternative for anyone that needs a light, moderate or even intensive traffic solution.

Reliable hosting solutions should be affordable for businesses that want to establish an online presence and remain competitive. At HostRound, we’ve invested heavily in new technologies and infrastructure that allow us to offer affordable hosting packages that free you from storage, speed, and feature constraints.

Why Choose a VPS Hosting Solution?

VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting allows for a virtually isolated machine that can be accessed and configured as if it were a standalone resource. HostRound makes the VPS even more attractive by using Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) infrastructure. The benefit of this technology is that KVM provides real virtualization where allocated resources are not shared between different virtual servers on the same hardware (Server). The result is faster and more reliable performance, without slowdowns that can be caused by overprovisioning. VPS provides full control over your hosting environment with root access and much more power than shared hosting, so you can install any software you want and host projects of any size.

Intel Xeon Processing Power with Kernel-Based Virtualization

Processing power matters with any server hosting solution, and at HostRound we use some of the most powerful Intel Xeon server processors to provide you with maximum speed and efficiency.

Intel’s E5 server CPU’s are utilized, with the E5-1650 v4 being the most commonly found in HostRound’s servers. These CPU’s are built on 14nm technology which improves efficiency without sacrificing performance. 6 cores / 12 threads, 15MB of SmartCache and a maximum turbo frequency of 4.0GHz per core makes these CPU’s perfect for a virtual private server environment. Continue reading HostRound Launches Managed SSD VPS Hosting Service in 2018