1. The first option is that you can use the hosting provided by WordPress.com, and choose to either use a subdomain or your own domain.
2. The second option you’re presented with is self-hosting your WordPress site.

Unfortunately, many consumers and businesses are unable to distinguish between the differences these two options present. Today, we’re going to be looking at some of the advantages of self hosting your own WordPress site, as opposed to hosting it through using the service at WordPress.com.

The first benefit of self hosting your WordPress site is that you’ll be able to take complete advantage of the plugin functionality that WordPress presents. Unfortunately, when you use WordPress’ hosting solution, you are unable to install any and all plugins into your installation. Only those plugins WordPress.com let you.  As such, you aren’t able to take full advantage of the software. WordPress is powerful because of the third-party plugins that have been built. Not to mention, you’ll be able to take complete control of the themes which you use and the reliability of your businesses website.

Here is a simple infographic kindly provided by WPMU.org to further explain the difference between the two options.

In short, when you choose to use the standard, WordPress.com hosting provided by WordPress themselves, you cannot take full control of your own website. You’re limited by their own restrictions. As such, self-hosting your WordPress site is always preferred in all cases, as you’ll be able to completely optimize your site for you and your visitors/customers.

Lastly, hosting your WordPress site with an experienced, friendly web host ensures you get the support you need, wehn you need it.  As always, you get what you pay for and free hosting services won;t provide the dedicated support a serious web site owner demands or expects.

Host your WordPress site with a host that can do all of this and more.

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Blogging is not just for individuals to share their daily lives either, far from it. Now it’s for businesses to interact and engage with their customers and clients. Customers of a business are always looking for ways to interact and engage, so it’s wise for you as a business owner (or employee!) to give them the chance to. Whether that means sharing a picture every Friday, or blogging weekly about the new products you’re selling – there’s no doubt that blogging is great for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation / Rankings) and customer retention.

Developing customer relations is of paramount importance for your business, and that’s why you should start the process of blogging early. Blogging is a slow process, and it will take a while to develop a readerbase. Potential customers can sometimes be more comfortbale making subtle contact by commenting on your blog than firing a contact form to your sales team. Don’t be in a hurry to force sales, they’ll come in time and the sales team will get their moment. Be helpful, informative, expert on your subject and honest. Readers will return to keep learning and enjoy the interaction.

Business Blogs ignite conversation and interest, questions about your products/services often follow in blog comments and it can be a great opportunity to develop trust or gain a sale. Don’t be over ambitious, start slow and be consistent! One post a week, every week, is far better than 4 posts in one week and then nothing for 4 months.

It’s now easier than ever to feed your blog posts to third party social media sites and draw in more and more followers/readers/customers! Before you know it, you’ll have thousands of readers who are subscribed to your blog eagerly awaiting your next blog post. It’s times like these that you truly become engaged with your audience, because you have developed a strong relationship with your most loyal fans and followers. You’ll then have your own platform and finely targetted audience to launch and promote products and services to.

Start your blog today

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We’re happy to report a smooth transition for all.

As many of you will have noticed from the indication at the top of your WordPress admin panel, version 3.5 is available. As WordPress fanatics, we’re very excited about this new release.

This release is focused on media and it has a rebuilt media upload and management section. Making it simpler and more streamlined to handle your media within WordPress.

Watch the official video below for a 90 second view of the key features.

View the official press release here: http://wordpress.org/news/2012/12/elvin/

Learn how to update from your dashboard here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Dashboard_Updates_SubPanel

Please, ALWAYS BACKUP ! before carrying out any upgrade or major change to your site.

If you would like us to carry out the upgrade (Managed WordPress customers get this service automatically and included as part of their package), you can order via a support ticket

The post WordPress 3.5 – Get the latest appeared first on VARiHOST (UK).

The truth is no-one can guarantee this. With an ever changing list of do’s and don’ts and potentially thousands of other like-minded business owners vying for the same Google top 10 in search results, it’s a tough challenge.

One area of contention is the expiry date of your sites domain name. It’s been thought for some time that Google (and other relevant search engines) place ‘some’ weight on how long the sites domain name is registered. This is based on the simple premise that if the domain is registered for 3/4+ years, then the site owner is serious about their business and likely to be more committed to the site – giving more relevance to it. Domains registered for a year at a time present a less committed presence. This makes sense.

Although Google denies the use of the domains expiry date in the search results algorithm, it has in fact filed a patent (in 2003) for the use of a domains expiry for this purpose!

Make your own conclusions from this. But one thing we can tell you is if you’re a serious online business and plan to be around for years to come, it makes sense to register your domain for an extended period of time. It might just contribute to your SEO, which is always a welcome benefit!

Aside from search engines, savvy potential clients who use due diligence might pick up on this and it could contribute to clinching your next contract. It doesn’t hurt to have that covered. After all, who would you choose between a temporary looking market stall and an established high street store? I know my answer.

How to easily extend your domains expiry date

If you want to extend your domains expiry date, (and your domain doesn’t need to be due for renewal now, expiry can be exended anytime) you can do this easily in your Customer Control Panel:

• Login here: https://www.varihost.net/CustomerControlLogin/
• Once logged in, near the bottom of the left menu, click ‘Manage Domain Names’
• Now you’ll see a list of your registered domains with the current expiry date and a ‘Renew’ link next to each.
• To extend a domains expiry, click ‘Renew’ next to the domain.  In the box that appears, select how many years to extend the expiry date from the drop down and click the ‘Renew’ button.
• You’ll then be taken to checkout to make payment.

Any questions or problems with extending your domains expiry, please contact support for friendly help.

The post Extending your domains expiry – maybe improve SEO? appeared first on VARiHOST (UK).

Today, I’m pleased to tell you that the one and only Joost De Valk has now included video tutorials teaching you how to use the incredibly popular WordPress SEO by Yoast.

If you’re not already using this plugin, you’re missing out. It provides everything you need to maximise the SEO of your WordPress site and give you the best chance of moving up the Google results.

If you’d like these new videos enabled within your WordPress site, just submit a support ticket with the request.

Oh, don’t forget to tell your friends about this great feature of our WordPress hosting

The post WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin Video Guides – FREE appeared first on VARiHOST (UK).

We thought it would be a good idea to go over the details of what our Managed WordPress Hosting service actually provides, in a little more detail and in plain English.

Backups

We take a daily backups of both site files and database.  Which is an essential part of every websites scheduled maintenance. This allows us to easily roll-back a site to a previous version, should you (or we) require this.
In addition to a daily backup we also carry out a full backup prior to any WordPress core, plugin or theme updates that we carry out. This is good practice whenever an update is made, however trivial. This is also part of the Managed WordPress service.

Updates

Keeping WordPress core, plugin and themes up to date (within 24 hrs of release) is a key aspect of your sites security. One which is often overlooked. Hackers will run searches for specific WordPress versions they know to carry known vulnerabilities. They then attempt to exploit these, whether it’s WordPress itself or via a plugin or theme used on the site.

Security & Performance Best Practices

Over the years we’ve developed our own Best Practice procedures for securing and optimising the performance of WordPress. This comes from in-depth research, testing and real world experience.  It does include a number of proven plugins, however – fully comprehensive enhancements can’t all be found in a plugin. So we apply a variety of tweaks and settings of the installation and server environment settings.  This hardens the site, making it as robust as possible.  At the same time we improve the performance using compression, minification and a number of other methods.

All in all, the result of applying our Security & Performance best practices, is a secure, fast site.  Which is resilient to all the threats a web site faces and is fast and responsive to visitors and search engines. Both very important factors of a successful web site, whatever you’re site is working to achieve.

Conclusion

WordPress is a fantastic platform for building your web site.  The tens of millions of web site (large and small) owners using it, are testimony to that.  But some find themselves spending more and more time taking care of WordPress, than actually selling their service/product. Or worse still, not taking care of WordPress…until it’s too late.

So, if you either don’t have the know-how or time to keep on top of your WordPress site, this could be the service for you. Check out our Managed WordPress plan and start focusing on what’s important…your business.

We really value your thoughts and feedback, please leave a comment below.

The post Managed WordPress Hosting – What is it? appeared first on VARiHOST (UK).

When search engines look at your website, they are looking for specific telltale signs, in order to rank you relevantly in the results. They are looking for information which is going to tell them who your clients are, who your potential customers are and who should see your website. If your business is located in the UK, and you only ship/service within the UK, then visitors from the United States are not going to benefit you at all. You need to specifically cater for the UK market. One of the best ways of telling the search engines which country you’re targeting is to purchase hosting in this region. Once your site is hosted in UK data centers, you will begin ranking higher in google.co.uk – which specifically targets the UK audience – helping you to get more visitors, more sales and more profits.

Additionally, servers hosted in the UK boast high performance speeds which is going to have your website loading faster. Because your web site is available that much closer, you can rest assured that your website is going to load quickly every single time. Once again, Google uses website speed as a determining factor in ranking websites.

All in all, hosting your website in UK data centres is one of the most important things for any business within the UK.

All of our servers are located in the UK. Find your perfect hosting plan here: http://www.varihost.net/web-hosting/

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With Google controlling such a large portion of all search engine traffic, this only leaves Bing, Yahoo, Ask and other search engines with an extremely low market share. Recently, Google removed the functionality required to automatically submit websites. As such, all websites now need to be manually submitted to Google for inclusion into their search results via their webmaster tools service. Because Google controls such a large portion of the market, we felt that it would be misleading and almost ‘pointless’ to offer search engine submission. While we would still be able to offer inclusion into Yahoo, Bing, Ask and other search engines, there is not enough relevance.

We value our customers and we want to help you to build an online web presence, and for that reason we have removed our automatic search engine submission process.

If you are looking for information on how you can manually submit your website to Google for inclusion, this can be achieved by signing up for an account with Google Webmaster Tools. Additionally, you can register with Bing Webmaster Tools for inclusion into Bing, Yahoo and Ask. Once you have signed up, you will be able to enter your website’s details and request a crawl of your website. Once crawled, your website will usually be indexed within Google and other search engines within one to thirty days.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

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We expect a very low impact for our customers and their websites; fewer than 0.1% of websites hosted by us will be affected. Any possible problems are existing issues that will now cause an error to occur where previously the error was dropped silently.

For more in-depth information please visit the official MySQL page here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/upgrading-from-previous-series.html

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