One of the most common questions we get from new business owners is whether it is best to host their blog on their own site or on a blog hosting site like WordPress. We typically recommend that business owners host their own blogs, since the cost is low and control is entirely in the hands of the author. However, there are some instances when hosting on a free blogging site makes sense.

When Free is Right

If your budget is tight and you are worried about the learning curve, utilizing a free blogging service may be the right choice for you. WordPress and Blogger are two free hosting services you may consider. Of course, the downside of free hosting is the lack of control. Not only are you stuck with the non-customizable URL, you don’t have complete control of your own content. For a business, having control and security are essential. More on this below.

What’s the Deal with WordPress

As a platform, wordpress has many advantages. It’s customizable, easy to navigate, and has a large community of people sharing tips, troubleshooting tricks and free templates. The problem with hosting a WordPress site on their free service is that they can enforce their “non-commercial-use” policy at a moment’s notice. This means if you use your blog to advertise your own products or include affiliate links, you run the risk of losing your content. The good news is that WordPress is available for free to host on your own site. This means you can take advantage of all the perks of a WordPress site without worrying about the WordPress police. You’ll need your own hosting account for this, but you can often include a WordPress blog on your existing hosting plan. We offer this here at TurnKey.

What is Your Existing Web Presence?

Do you already have a business website? Do you have a presence on the social networks? If your business is already somewhat established online, it’s probably best to host your blog on your own website. The main reason for this is your URL. When you host on your own site, your blog shares the same URL as the rest of your website. This is good for branding and it keeps customers from getting confused. It also means that your blog’s content will help your entire site’s SEO profile. The search engines will index your blog posts as new content, and this will make your site pop up higher in search results.

Do You Already Have Hosting?

If you already have hosting for your website, chances are good you’ll be able to add a blogging platform at no extra charge. If you have a bare-bones hosting plan, you may need to upgrade, but the cost will only increase by a few dollars a month.

Worried About the Learning Curve?

Don’t be. Not only are these platforms designed to be user-friendly, many hosts offer one-click installation. This means you don’t have to know anything at all about how the technology works to start using it.

Learn More

We offer hosting plans specifically tailored to the blogger. If you’re feeling nervous about setting up your first blog, this is a great place to start.

http://www.turnkeyinternet.net/blog-hosting/

The Cloud Brings Ease of Use to both IT managers and business owners. The complexities of setting up and maintaining office servers and desktop applications can be replaced with a click of a button for scallable IT On Demand with TurnKeyCloud’s Virtual Desktops and Cloud Servers.

TurnKeyCloud simplifies compliance requirements for your business with our Cloud Applications which provide instant compliance such as HIPAA and SOX compliant email and PCI / PA-DSS eCommerce Compliance.

TurnKeyCloud Saves You Money

TurnKeyCloud takes IT on Demand further by helping you greatly reduce your IT costs – no more expensive servers in your office to replace every few years and no need for expensive IT consultants. For example, TurnKeyMail our Enterprise Email Solution can provide you with a robust feature rich email and collaborative solution for your entire office for $19.95/mo. Compare that to the cost of placing a microsoft exchange mail server in your office ($20,000 and up for the server, software and installation by a traditional IT Company).

TurnKeyCloud is Reliable

TurnKeyCloud solutions are housed in our Enterprise Grade Datacenter providing redundant network, power and data systems to ensure continous access at all times. Our Cloud Servers offer self healing redundant systems – should a server go down (for maintenace, or mechanical failure) it self heals and replicates to a new server within minutes. Data backups are automated and stored off site – providing you not only the best in reliabilty but the peace of mind of data security as well. Compare a Cloud Server to running a server in your office, if the disk drive fails, or power goes out – what would you do? With TurnKeyCloud, your cloud server is back online automatically with our self-healing technology.

TurnKeyCloud Protects Your Data

TurnKeyCloud solutions are all protected by internal backup systems, offering daily, weekly and monthly backups of all your servers, virtual desktops, and applications. We remotely backup these systems, provide you with easy access to snapshots in time for restoring data should you need access to the data. Our Cloud Servers and Virtual Desktops utilize advanced encrypted connection protocols to protect your data, and ensure your business and staff always are protected.

TurnKeyCloud is Green Friendly

Cloud sourcing IT is not only reliable, cost effective and instant – but it also helps save the environment. That server in the office running your business email, or company CRM, or other applications will be drawing power 24 hours a day to keep it connected to the Internet. Even when there are no emails to deliver, – the disk drive, the fans, the power supply all are drawing electricity.

With a Cloud Server – our cloud infrastructure is up to 30 times more energy efficient versus leaving that office server online all day. Cloud Servers are more efficient because of the core design model of virtualization and how resources are allocated on demand. For example, TurnKeyCloud through its datacenters provides services to clients from around the world. A client in Asia typically will have highest usage when clients in the United States are at their lowest – so over a 24 hour period the TurnKeyCloud system dynamically and efficiently can allocated resources on demand to ensure you have the maximum performance while greatly reducing your typical energy foot print.

The cloud is IT on demand. The cloud is a scalable, reliable and cost effective way of accessing information technology at any time from any where.

The technology of the cloud revolves around the benefits of moving expensive and complicated IT out of your office into an efficient, scalable, and secure data center. This data center is where your IT equipment, office servers, desktop applications, web applications, business software and data can all be accessed easily, at a much lower cost, and securely via the Internet.

TurnkeyCloud is IT On Demand

TurnKeyCloud offers ready to go Cloud Applications that help any business be more efficient, communicate and collaborate with ease. Our instant on technology can have these Cloud Applications running for your business within seconds, and save you both money and time versus trying to deploy similar solutions in your office. Our Cloud enabled Virtual Desktops let you connect your computer work environments together with employees across the room, town, or globe with a shared desktop, suite of Microsoft Office applications, and access to files and folders in a secure environment. Cloud Servers offer instant replacements and instant capacity for your office servers. At the push of a button you can deploy additional services, cloud servers, increase speed, increase storage capacity, increase the number of users all without having to call your IT company and schedule an expensive site visit.

How Does the Cloud Help My Business?

Cloud Sourcing your IT (Information Technology) provides significant Cost Savings, increased reliability for your business, instant access to computer resources or applications when you need them, green friendly benefits to both you and your community, and access to powerful software tools to help your business grow and be more efficient.

How is Cloud Hosting Different?

Traditional hosting servers run applications in a linear design without extensive redundancy or scalability. The traditional method until now when hosting a server, web site or application is to place it in your office on a single computer. Although the hardware on this computer may have some limited redundancy such as a spare disk drive- it is inevitable to have some form of business disruption from loss of power, exceeding the capacity of the computer or network, hardware failure, human error, or simply having a software crash. This disruption could cost a business significantly in lost data, lost time, and for the IT company you have to hire to come in and fix everything.

With the TurnKeyCloud Hosting model, the single point of failure is replaced by a scalable on demand network of computing resources that are hosted in our data center with multiple redundant ultra-high capacity network connections, on-site generators, precision cooling systems, and leveraging green-friendly practices. The single server design model of yesterday is now replaced by sophisticated SAN (Storage Area Network) file servers, multiple clustered HyperVisor virtualization based systems, and control module nodes that ensure a reliable always available experience for your servers and software applications.

Today I am excited to announce the release of our newest product: Windows 2008 hosting with ColdFusion 9 (with full ASP/ASP.net support). Our dedicated Microsoft SQL Windows 2008 servers come packed with the latest IIS 7, optimized with the latest security and performance settings. The Plesk 10 control panel allows for easy set up and management of websites, databases, email and web applications.

ColdFusion 9 is the development platform of choice for many, and for good reason. ColdFusion has a shallow learning curve, it’s easy to troubleshoot and it’s widely supported. It also integrates with many applications and allows developers to condense complex business logic into fewer lines of code. It is a dynamic platform with an incredible range of functionality.

These packages also include Enterprise e-mail with an integrated SmarterMail system; SiteBuilder website building software to quickly and easily create fully-functional websites on the fly; a free SSL certificate ($69 value); R1Soft Continuous Data Protection; free Voxwire web conferencing, webinar and training rooms; and many more bonus software freebies.

Our Windows 2008 packages with ColdFusion 9 start at just $19/month.

Learn more!

Anyone with a blog faces this conundrum at one time or another. Some people start out with a free blogging service like typepad or blogger, and, as they grow their audience, decide they need their own property. Others start out managing their own blog and get mired in the wordpress updates or spam and bail for a free, fully managed option. Before leaping right in, there are several items to consider when deciding which arrangement is right for you.

What are your Goals?

Are you planning on world domination or is your blog primarily for your friends and family? If you’re aspirations are modest, there is no reason to invest your time and money into a privately hosted blog. On the other hand, if you have loftier goals and think  you might, one day, want to become a pundit or amass a million followers, hosting your own property could pay dividends.

Design

Are you a designer? Does it matter to you to have your blog look just so? With free blogs, you have severely limited options design-wise. You can pick colors and templates, but you can’t go much beyond that. If you want to design your blog from the ground up, a privately hosted blog is right for you.

Maintenance

How good are you at computers? Do you understand how to configure a database? Do you understand PHP, blog software installation stuff or server-side configurations? None of this is particularly difficult, and it is very possible to learn it all with a little elbow grease. But, if you haven’t got the time, or don’t want to be bothered, a free blog is the best choice.

Branding

Generally, a blog with its own memorable domain name is much more brandable than a free blog domain (that includes .typepad or .wordpress within the URL). A private domain projects a professional image and sticks in people’s minds. Name your blog something clever to really capitalize on the memory factor. If you have big dreams, think about the promotional materials and business cards you may use in the future. Your own domain will look smashing on both.

Making Money

If your blog is popular, you can sell ads and make money, regardless of what format your blog happens to be in. Arguably, advertisers may be more inclined to take you seriously with your own domain name, but numbers talk. If you have the traffic, they’ll be interested.

Ready to Get Started?

If you’ve decided on hosting your own blog with your own domain name, look no further than TurnKey Website.

These days blogging is a ubiquitous tool for businesses, but it isn’t always easy to get started. Many free platforms don’t offer the ability to use your own domain name, leaving you to give out amateurish addresses to business clients, while do-it-yourself programs present a steep learning curve without much in the way of style. With TurnKey Blog Hosting, we are fulfilling this obvious need by providing a ready-made blogging solution that is adaptable, robust and professional. As a blogger myself, I know how frustrating it can be to find a platform that meets my two most basic and important needs: good looks, works.

Functionality

TurnKey Blog Hosting offers incredible functionality with quick, customizable templates that are sleek and easy to use. You can use your own domain name so your clients will see your blog as an integral part of your company’s identity and brand. Set up takes about 90 seconds, and you can fully customize your blog to match your existing website. Choose from hundreds of templates and themes, migrate content easily from other blogging platforms like Blogger, Typepad and Livejournal and enjoy complete administrative control for managing access and permissions. TurnKey Blog Hosting also offers state-of-the-art SPAM filters to prevent junk from clogging up your comments. On top of all that, you can monitor your site’s statistics with our webstats program, and take advantage of email via your blog hosting account.

SEO

The other critical element of a successful blog is search engine optimization (SEO). With the constantly changing SEO rules (thanks, Google), optimizing your blog can be a full-time job. Thankfully for all of us, WordPress offers many wonderful plugins and add-ons for automating the optimization process. If you were managing your own blog hosting, you would need to configure your wordpress to integrate these tools, keeping up with security updates, patches and alerts. With TurnKey Blog Hosting we do all of this for you. We have researched the best plugins for SEO to drive the maximum amount of traffic possible to your blog. With our optimized configuration, your blog will be poised to ensnare each and every spidery Google tendril.

What TurnKey Does for You

Our goal is always to provide easy, ready-made “turnkey” solutions that don’t require any technical expertise on the part of our clients. At the same time, all of our products are enterprise-class, professional, sleek, and top-of-the-line. We always try to put ourselves in the position of our business clients. We ask ourselves: “if I were a small business owner looking for an affordable, easy, professional solution, what would work best for me?” When it comes to blogging, TurnKey Blog Hosting is our answer to that question, and we couldn’t be happier with the result. We hope you will try it out for yourself and explore the many ways a TurnKey Blog can enhance the image of your business while driving traffic to your website.

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While you might think longer domain names are never the way to go, you might be surprised by some of the benefits. A more descriptive domain better represents your site content, and can be a great boost to SEO. It can also be more memorable, more readily available and less of a risk of copyright infringement. Before I go too much further, I should mention that it is always a good idea for your domain name to be the same as the name of your site. This is true both because it will be more memorable and because it won’t dilute your brand with multiple titles.


SEO Benefits

In a longer domain name you have the opportunity to pick two or three keywords that represent your company, your products or your services. Short might be nice for ease of typing, but it’s nearly impossible to find a short domain name today that will have anything to do with your company content-wise. If you’re willing to brand yourself with something nonsensical for the sake of brevity, great; but if you want your brand to reflect your company, longer just makes sense. In a world where search terms define traffic, naming your company with industry-related search terms is smart business. However, there are a couple of points to look out for.

• Make sure the domain name you choose is easy to spell. If it isn’t, then buy up all the misspellings of your domain and point them to your page. But really, it’s best to avoid hard-to-spell domains for the sake of clarity. Also, your site ranking is associated with your domain name so if you have multiple spelling variants, it could be lowering your numbers.
• Make sure your domain name is easy to pronounce. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: word of mouth is just as important today as it was 50 years ago. If your customers can’t pronounce the name of your website, they’re less likely to talk about it. I don’t have any scientific studies to support this claim, but I think it’s pretty solid common sense.

Easy to Remember

Sometimes a phrase can be easier to remember than a short made up word. It’s all about context and description. If your site name and domain are specific, descriptive and relevant they will also be memorable. Why not go all the way and make your domain name a complete sentence? As language-based creatures, sentences that mean something, stick. Think about how easy it is to remember song lyrics. Associate your title sentence with your site content and you will have the advantage of contextual memory coupled with all of the other advantages discussed above. Slam dunk.

Backlinks inevitably come up in every discussion of SEO. They are a critical part of building solid traffic and play a large role in getting your website ranked by search engines. Building good backlinks can take a lot of time. Unique IP addresses are very important, so you can’t just set up a bunch of domains and link to yourself and get results. The ranking of the sites linking in is also important. The more authoritative the site linking to you, the better your site looks to Google. In a perfect world, content really would be king. Unfortunately, with billions of websites out there, learning how to use the system is an important element for success.

Buying Backlinks

Buying backlinks from an SEO company can be very effective very quickly but the ground you gain usually doesn’t last long. Since many backlink packages include software you run on your server, you risk damaging your site’s reputation and getting your IP blocked for spamming. Buying backlinks one-by-one can be very effective if you have a decent budget and are willing to spend time researching each site before you invest. It’s rather like advertising but with the search engine as the consumer.

Building Backlinks Yourself

The organic backlink is the most powerful of all. Good content, well distributed WILL grow your traffic though, of course, it takes both work and time. Trading links is a great way to grow traffic while supporting other businesses and growing your network. Great methods for building backlinks on your own include: posting on blogs, posting on forums, posting on article directories, utilizing social bookmarking sites and newsletters.

I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again, the secret to success is hard work. As much as we all might not want to admit it, the quick fix or the magic bullet are just as pretend on the Internet as they are in the real world. The great thing about investing time and energy into building up backlinks is that, in the process, you’re also improving your brand and building your networks. The more good content you put out there, the more attention you get. And I just can’t ever say enough for good old fashioned reputation. Behind every computer (kind of) there is a person, with a real live brain, forming opinions about every single thing he sees. If your company keeps popping up with compelling content he wants to read, you’ll get his clicks, and his links, and his network.

A colocated server is a privately owned server hosted at a datacenter, rather than in a home or business. Datacenters offer security, regulated power (with backup generators), fire protection, dedicated Internet connections, and climate control.

Customization

While the customer provides his own hardware, the facility offers choices of storage, connectivity, backup solutions, and security to suit the customer’s needs. The customer also has freedom to upgrade at any time.

Connectivity

Many datacenters offer fully-redundant network connections. At TurnKey Internet, we offer a 100% up-time guarantee on all colocated servers.

Financial Benefits

For small and medium-sized businesses housing servers in their offices, costs can be extremely high. Employing technicians, energy costs and maintaining infrastructure is extremely costly. By housing hardware in a datacenter, all of that is taken care of with support staff available to troubleshoot 24×7. Colocating is also a much greener option. A datacenter is considerably more energy efficient than an office.

Storage

Getting those servers out of the office opens up space and keeps things quiet so employees can work. Server fans are loud!

Disaster Recovery

Datacenters offer remote backup sites in case of disaster. If the unthinkable happens, your data is safe.

Security

Firewalls, security cameras, guards and other precautionary measures insure the safety of your physical hardware and virtual network.

Most office copiers these days contain hard drives that store data from every copy, print-out and scan you and your colleagues have ever made. The security risk is huge but many companies neglect to wipe their copier’s hard drives when they replace the equipment. Recently, a piece on CBS news exposed the dangers of this kind of security leak by searching through four used copiers purchased from a New Jersey warehouse. They mined the hard drives from the copiers with free software, available to anyone on the Internet.

What the investigators found was shocking. One of the copiers had belonged to the Buffalo, NY police department and it contained everything from a list of wanted sex offenders to detailed domestic violence complaints. A machine from the Buffalo police narcotics unit included information about targets in a major drug raid. Data culled from a construction company’s copier yielded the architectural floor-plan of a building near ground zero, and pay stubs with the names, addresses and social security numbers of employees. The fourth machine, from an insurance company, contained 300 complete medical records, including the results of blood tests, family medical histories, and cancer diagnoses.

As more and more of our sensitive data is digitized, we need to keep up with security protocols apace. Companies should be keeping careful track of every device where information is stored: computers, printers, copiers, voice mail and more. Every storage location is a potential security hazard and should be monitored, maintained and wiped clean before disposal.