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06 Sep 2016

How Important is Web Hosting for your Business

What Makes Great Web Hosting Services

Many small businesses often make the mistake of choosing bad web hosts. Perhaps one reason for this is that most of them think that it doesn’t matter and it won’t affect their income. Actually, it is quite the opposite. Here are some reasons to consider great website hosting services:

Prevent potential loss of revenue.

One advantage to having having good hosting is that you can avoid frequent downtimes. When your site is down and unavailable, your potential customers wont be able to find your site and learn about your products and services. If you’re running an e-commerce site or an online store, the effects could be more detrimental as the downtime is preventing customers from buying anything from you.

By selecting a great web host, you can help minimise the risk of experiencing technical issues that will cause your site to go offline. Redback offer a 100% uptime guarantee for our Premium WordPress Hosting Service.

Protect your search ranking.

The main objective of SEO (search engine optimisation), is to ensure that your site will rank high in search results so potential customers can find you. If your website is often experiencing technical issues, or is down frequently, Google’s search spiders won’t be able to access and crawl your site. As a result, your search ranking will suffer. Even if your website doesn’t experience frequent downtimes, but loading times are slow, it’s very likely that your search rankings will also be affected negatively.

Web hosting from a great supplier helps you rank higher. Search engines, particularly Google, use site loading times and availability as a ranking signal, having an excellent hosting service that can help you with these issues is an advantage.

Better protection and security

There is no magic pill that will make your site invincible against viruses, hackers, and malware attacks. In fact, even the biggest and most popular websites get attacked from time to time. However, choosing a reliable hosting company can go a long way towards protecting your site from potential attacks. Your hosting provider should be able to provide you with technical support, protection and help you solve security issues in case your site gets hacked. And more importantly, they will be able to create a backup of your data, thus, making it easier for you to restore your site after an attack.

website hostingAvoid Off Shore Hosting Companies

These days, there are many companies offering a wide range of hosting services that meet the different needs of a business. But if you are going to get a hosting service, make sure you avoid a hosting company that is based abroad. Sure, their services might seem cheaper, but  they come with a myriad of problems, some of which are discussed below:

Support Issues

If your web hosting and domain service provider is based on the other side of the world, it can present a problem if your site is having technical issues. There is nothing like an Australian Technical Support Desk. Our team understand your needs far better than someone from another country, and if you ever have issues, we’ll fix it straight away. Don’t wait for your ticket to pop up in the queue. Time is money in Australia so you need to demand the best service.

Slow Server

The physical location of a server can affect how fast it can load a particular webpage or website for you. If you go for an offshore hosting company, it is very likely that your web visitors will experience slower loading times, which will affect not only your search ranking (as discussed earlier), but user experience, as well. Therefore, if you are an Australian business and you’re targeting locally based customers, then it makes perfect sense to choose an Australian web host to ensure reliability and fast loading times.

Bad Business Image

If your website is suffering from downtimes and it takes a while before your offshore web host can fix it, not only will it affect your profit potential, it can also affect the image of your business. This spells bad news for the future of your company as it can impede with the growth and development of your business.

Shared Server Resources

Most of the off shore hosting companies offer discounted rates simply because your website will be stored on a server that has maybe 200,000 other sites on it. All for these sites utilise the servers resources at the same time, effecting the speed and deliverability of your website.

While it may seem that offshore web hosting services are a cheaper alternative, when you consider the exchange rate, bank fees and foreign currency exchange charges it may not be the case. Therefore, the best website hosting for small business is still the one offered by a local company. With the proximity of their servers and their business hours similar to yours, you can avoid hosting problems and issues that can affect the image and profit potential of your company.

Contact Us today and we will help you evaluate your current hosting requirements and give you free expert advice on how to improve your current situation.

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14 Feb 2016

Gold Coast Web Agency Graphics Online in Liquidation

disaster-recovery-150x150One of the most important rules of establishing an excellent online presence is to get secure and reliable web hosting services. To make sure that your little corner of the Internet will survive no matter what, it’s important that you take caution when choosing your web hosting service provider. Gold Coast Agency Graphics Online recently dished up some challenges for their customers.

Worrells Move In on Web Agency Graphics Online

Recently, it has come to our attention that Graphics Online, one of the better known digital agencies and web hosting service providers on the Gold Coast, has gone into liquidation (see ASIC Notice). This unfortunate event was so sudden it sent the local industry buzzing, leaving many of their customers stranded. Nobody had expected that one of the well-established web agencies in the city would suddenly disappear just like that overnight.

Clients of Graphics Online received notifications from the company’s liquidator Worrells, that the content of their websites and/or other services hosted with the now defunct digital agency should now being moved to other web hosting service providers. If you’re a customer of Graphics Online and you have been affected by the company’s sudden demise, this indeed can be a very traumatic time for you. What if something goes wrong with your online assets in all this confusion? Who will be responsible for the potential loss of your valuable online data?

Digital Agency LiquidationsRecovering Your Website Site From Graphics Online

Nobody knows exactly what happened to Graphics Online that led to its liquidation. However, there have been reports that the company claims that it had been a victim of cyber attacks.

Cyber attacks are a known threat for everyone who has a website or any form of online presence, unless you have a serious security and backup plan in place. If you were a customer of Graphics Online, here’s how to recover from potential loss, and the team at Redback Web Solutions will help you all the way.

Step 1:

Firstly, it’s important to gain access to your hosting account, and your domain name. We know that Graphics Online outsourced their website hosting, so we will seek out the supplier and assist in accessing the data that is stored on the server.

Step 2:

We will contact the domain registrar and assist you in transferring the domain name to our registry so once again you will take control of your online assets.

Step 3:

Getting you site migrated is a tougher challenge. Graphics Online used a proprietary CMS (Content Management System) Called GoCMS. You can’t simply move the website to another server, as part of the data stays on the main server that’s required to run the site. This is one of the reasons we have always advised businesses never to use a Proprietary CMS system (see our blog article about Why You Should Avoid Bulk Hosting and Automated Websites). We recommend and build sites using WordPress, the world’s largest and most popular CMS which you can freely move at any time. Best of all it is open source – which means its free to the public. So step 3 is to open a new hosting account. We suggest a Premium WordPress Hosting account to make sure your security and backups are always maintained correctly.

Step 4:

Have your site or contents migrated to the new server. This may mean re-building the site or having new framework made available by way of a template. It may also be a good opportunity now (taking advantage of the disruption) to make sure that your site is mobile responsive (works perfectly on all devices) and is optimised for the Search Engines. This can certainly increase your presence on Google, in turn gaining you more customers from your site.

Why Redback Web Solutions – and how can we help you?

We have migrated a number of customers in the past from the Graphics Online GoCMS system, and we will make the process as stress free as we can for you. Our dedicated in-house team of experts are always here to help, and our first class data centre will never let you down.

Safe and Secure

Redback Web Solutions understand that not all cyber attacks can be avoided, so the best course of action is to stay vigilant and be prepared at all times. This is why we always make sure to use the latest server technology and firewalls to ensure the safety and security of our customers’ data. We also have powerful contingency measures in place, such as solid backups and data recovery systems, so we’ll know how to solve a problem instantly in case disaster strikes. This is one of the reasons why so many of Australia’s business trust us, and we’re the preferred supplier of the Small Business Association of Australia.

Australian Servers

Our client’s web sites are all hosted on our high speed Australian servers, and we provide 24/7 Australian support. Best of all we guarantee that your valuable data never leaves the shores of Australia and offer a 100% uptime guarantee.

Stable Company

Redback Web Solutions is a 100% Australian Owned Company, and has been servicing the industry for over 15 years. As one of the premier digital agencies in Australia, with offices in Melbourne, Brisbane, on the Gold Coast, Sydney, and Perth, we serve up a complete range of digital solutions that include not only hosting and website maintenance services, but web design, SEO and marketing as well. We are the one stop digital shop.

If you need web hosting services or to recover your site following the Liquidation of Graphics Online, you can trust and rely on us. Contact Us 24/7 on 1300 768 100 and we will get you back online and give you the peace of mind that you need.

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16 Dec 2015

Update Your Joomla Site Now!

If you’re using an old version of Joomla, make sure that you update your site now.

Upgrade JoomlaJoomla’s security team has just released a new version to update a critical remote command execution vulnerability that affects CMS versions 1.5 to 3.4. If you don’t patch your CMS immediately, this vulnerability can be easily exploited by hackers.

According to Joomla’s latest press release, the latest patch also fixes four low-level security vulnerabilities and hardens the user password reset system.

In case you are using the old and unsupported versions 1.5.x and 2.5.x, you have to update your system from here: https://docs.joomla.org/Security_hotfixes_for_Joomla_EOL_versions.

As for those who are not using the unsupported versions, you can get the latest patch here:

Joomla 1.5 https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/releases/download/3.4.6/SessionFix15v2.zip
Joomla 2.5 https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/releases/download/3.4.6/SessionFix25v1.zip

If you need help patching your CMS, Redback Web Solutions can provide you with the assistance you require. We can update your site for $50 including GST. It will take us about only 30 minutes to install and test your updated site. Contact us today to order the upgrade service.

We have already blocked some known networks that are being used by a bot network to infect other sites at our core routers. However, please take note that this won’t stop your outdated Joomla site from being attacked. As such, we encourage you to download and install the latest patch as soon as possible to ensure your website’s safety and security.

If you aren’t sure if your website is running Joomla or not please get in touch with our Tech Support Department urgently so that you can address this important security issue now.

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