I would like to welcome all HostPC customers to TurnKey Internet! Welcome!

If you are not yet aware, as of the beginning of this month, TurnKey Internet is now the proud owner of HostPC, a web hosting provider with a 12-year track record of providing hosting to small and medium-sized businesses. If you are a TurnKey customer, all this acquisition means for you is that we will be expanding the TurnKey brand, growing our company to better serve you with the best possible products and service. If you are a HostPC customer, this acquisition means improved performance across the board along with access to a wide range of new products including VPS servers, dedicated servers, cPanel, 24 x 7 support, R1soft continuous data protection backups, Softaculous auto installer and all of our software-as-a-service solutions for growing your business.

A word from Joseph Mack, former CEO of HostPC:
“HostPC has been a leader in the web hosting industry, and remains the largest hosting provider offering DirectAdmin web hosting control panel. HostPC has trusted its network and server infrastructure to TurnKey Internet for years. TurnKey Internet presented a perfect fit to take HostPC to the next level.”

A word from Adam Wills, President and CEO of TurnKey Internet and HostPC:
“Mr. Mack has done a great job over the years, and we’re thrilled to be able to bring HostPC into the TurnKey Internet family. HostPC web servers are already housed in our New York Datacenter, so clients will not need to make any changes going forward and will enjoy the new performance and features at no additional cost.”

It has been about a week since we started serving HostPC clients, and things have gone quite smoothly. Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions, suggestions or comments.

If you would like to learn more about HostPC, visit the website: http://hostpc.com.

You can also read our press release about the acquisition here: http://www.turnkeyinternet.net/company/HOSTPCPR.pdf

This holiday season, the airwaves are full of hardship stories. So many good companies that help people are going under because they just can’t afford to keep themselves going. Many of these companies are experiencing the vicious cycle:

- Money problems lead them to cut back on marketing efforts
- Cutting back on marketing efforts stalls growth
- Stalled growth limits opportunities for funding and expansion
- Money problems get worse

This cycle happens again and again because the last thing a company wants to do when money is tight, is spend money on expanding the business. Unless these companies get help, this cycle brings them down, and fast. This happens in all types of business, but it is especially prevalent for non-profits and educational institutions that rely on donations, grants and other sources of funding for operation costs. Those funding sources are driven by outreach. Without the outreach, the organization loses visibility and with it goes legitimacy. When your funding depends on your presence, losing that presence ruins your business.

We realized that our business solutions do the one thing these organizations need: grow businesses. But we were seeing a lot of our non-profit clients fall by the wayside because of budgetary hardship. We are in a unique position to provide lifeblood services to stagnating businesses, and we’re doing just that.

This holiday season, TurnKey Internet launched the TurnKey Technology Grant to address this problem by providing these companies with the tools they need to bolster their image, communicate with members and market new projects. With the TurnKey Technology Grant, TurnKey Internet hopes to help organizations that help people–to further their missions while keeping their companies strong and vibrant in their communities.

The TurnKey Technology Grant is worth over $5000 and provides the recipient with 10 premium business solutions including: TurnKeyWebsite, TurnKey Newsletter, Voxwire web conferencing, TurnKeyVault, TurnKeyMail, TurnKey Monitoring, TurnKey Blog Hosting, TurnKeyDesk, TurnKeyVPN and TurnKey Virtual Office.

All of these solutions are easy-to-use and include detailed instructions and support. Combined, they cover all the business visibility basics—from inter-office organization and efficiency (platforms for collaboration, storage, backups, mail, and networking) to marketing outreach (newsletters, webinars and blogs). These solutions can transform a business, literally, overnight, from one with little to no presence, to a savvy front-and-center contender in the online marketplace.

TurnKey Technology Grants are available to non-profit organizations, accredited public and private educational institutions and individual classroom teachers. To learn more and apply, visit: http://turnkeyinternet.net/grant.

E-commerce is a ubiquitous tool in the online marketplace, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find a platform that works well, let alone one that is easy to use and has good back-end support. If you think about it, your e-commerce platform is just as important as the rest of your website. It may even be more important!

Once a customer reaches your store, chances are good they’ve decided to make a purchase. Your website has done its job, and you are about to make a sale, but you’re not home free. If your store is confusing, unattractive or makes your customer feel unsafe, all your hard work may go right out the window. Consumers are used to a certain standard for online stores, and anything less won’t fly. Would you risk your credit card information in an online store you didn’t trust? I sure wouldn’t.

It’s clear that professional, clean, secure e-commerce solutions are critically important for online success—so which one do you choose? Surely there are many options out there, but you probably don’t want to just try one and hope for the best. Unless you have the luxury of lost clientele, you’ll likely want a solution you can stick with. You’ll likely want a solution you can set up easily, without a steep learning curve. I can’t help but suggest TurnKey Commerce.

TurnKey Commerce offers a free 14-day trial, so I signed up to try it so I could write an informed post for our customers. I’d never seen the interface before and was interested to see how long it would take to start actually doing business. I can honestly say the process was fast, easy and fun—that’s right: setting up an online store was fun. The thing I enjoyed the most was playing with the templates, and configuring my store items. Even though I work for a company that specializes in easy online solutions, this particular solution seemed too good to be true and it was a shock that I was actually able to create a functioning, professional-looking store so quickly.

Really though, whether you choose TurnKey Commerce or another e-commerce solution, make sure you have back-end support, and that the solution works securely before you open it to the public. Your business depends on it. Learn more: http://turnkeycommerce.com

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.

Learn more!

Today I am very excited to be able to announce our newest software-as-a-service solution: TurnKey Website! TurnKey Website is an easy-to-use website builder that will save businesses thousands of dollars in web design costs. It includes over 1,000 different design templates you can completely customize in minutes. It also comes with tons of web applications (like blog, SitePal, image gallery, guestbook, forum, feedback, RSS reader and more), traffic reports, a free domain name AND ecommerce shop pages! Of course, all of this is backed by our world-class 24×7 support.

But I’ve Never Made a Website Before!
For those of you who may feel a little bit timid about leaping into designing your own company website, I completely understand where you’re coming from. As a former small business owner myself, I remember feeling completely overwhelmed by both the cost of hiring a designer, and the steep learning curve of figuring out how to do it myself. I ended up spending many hours that I didn’t really have to design my site. In the end it was functional, but it wasn’t pretty, and my company’s reputation suffered. If I had had TurnKey Website back then, who knows how my business would have done!

Video Tutorials
If you have never used a website builder before, you will probably benefit from watching our short tutorials that demonstrate the software and illustrate, quickly and easily, how you can use it to build your own business website. Everything in TurnKey Website is customizable. You pick colors, include your logo and edit all the text. If you watch the tutorials and follow the easy step-by-step instructions, you will be amazed how much functionality you suddenly find at your fingertips.

The Highest Quality: Professional Results Every Time
The first time I tried TurnKey Website, I was shocked by the quality of the templates. They look extremely professional—in fact, many “professional” designers use similar templates for their projects—projects that bring in thousands of dollars for the designers. The only difference between those designers and you is that they know how to use the software! To be fair, a lot of the web design software out there is extremely convoluded and confusing, and it’s worth it to hire an expert—figuring it out yourself would be worth the money, and more! But TurnKey Website isn’t hard to figure out. It makes sense! In fact, you could learn it in 30 minutes and then turn around and sell your design services to the next guy! Seriously. It’s that easy and that good.

And There’s More
Beyond just the design of your website, TurnKey Website includes tons of added programs to build your online presence—from ecommerce tools to images, from blogging to flash intro pages. Once you understand the basics, you can set up an online store in minutes, and start taking credit card payments right away.

Give it a Shot
Try TurnKey Website today and we know you will be amazed with what you can do, and super pleased by the price tag (only $7.95/month). And with our free 30-day money back guarantee, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. How often does that happen?

If you own a hosting company, chances are good you have a large number of customers paying a very low price for shared hosting services. But, for all you know, those customers are doing good business—despite the low price tag on their hosting. So, how can you make the most of this potential source of income without investing a ton of money in infrastructure and software development? By reselling online business solutions from TurnKey Internet, of course!

What Services?
Every business needs an ecommerce solution, right? Every business needs robust office email with collaboration tools. Every business needs web conferencing, monitoring and secure backup services. If you don’t provide these things to your clients, they will get them elsewhere. If they’re getting their other services elsewhere, it may not be long before they switch their hosting over too, consolidating their business with one company that has it all. You need to make your company the company that has it all. The more services you have to offer, the more clients you will keep, and the more money you will make.

What they Don’t Know they Need
As advanced as business has become, still many small business owners are behind the times. Part of the reason for this is simple fear of the technology—but another reason for this is ignorance of the simple solutions that could be increasing their sales ten-fold (and yours too, as a reseller of the services they need). The first step in making a successful resell, is education. Let your clients know about the tools you have to offer, and then sell them those tools. It may just be as easy as it sounds.

Your Monthly Percentage
The beauty of reselling is the consistent income that perpetuates itself with no additional work from you. You don’t have to worry about tech support or phone troubleshooting. Once you’ve made the sale you don’t have to raise a finger while you watch your profits go up and up.

TurnKey has it All!
As we move into the fall months, we will be releasing our full suite of online/cloud business solutions. We have already released TurnKeyMail, TurnKey NAS Vault and TurnKey Newsletter. These are three robust, action-packed SaaS solutions that you can start reselling to your clients today. Follow the links to learn how you can increase your monthly income with the clients you already have. You have nothing to lose!

Cloud computing has become increasingly popular, even while many people (industry leaders included) continue to waffle about exactly how it should be defined. The basic consensus is that cloud computing is ubiquitous, offering resources to many users at a time, over the Internet. It doesn’t matter where, geographically the programs or applications themselves reside because they are all plugged into the cloud. Everything is available remotely, from anywhere. While the cloud is often confused with the grid (think the SETI@home project) the cloud is differentiated by its infinite scalability: it can grow as big as you need it to be, quickly, without any interruption of service. Of course, grid computing and cloud computing are not mutually exclusive, but cloud always allows for multiple users while grid does not (though grids can be used for cloud computing if they are multi-use enabled—confused yet?)

Cloud computing has grown in popularity with the rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS). Numbered are the days of downloaded software. SaaS lives in the cloud, making it remotely accessible to multiple users with scalable juice. It allows you to run complex programs and processes without having the firepower of a super high RAM computer. SaaS is easy to implement and requires no big up-front investment. It is also perfectly suited to today’s business professionals who use multiple computers and portable devices to work on collaborative projects.

One of the many benefits of the SaaS cloud is that software licenses are issued to individuals instead of to computers. This means an individual can access a program from any device. This removes the tethers—it gives every person the freedom to work from anywhere on any project. It enables small businesses to maintain completely remote offices, resulting in huge savings and increased productivity.

The SaaS cloud also reduces costs and hassles associated with software problems, maintenance and support. SaaS is the responsibility of the company providing the licenses, not the individual. How many software problems are caused by conflicting programs, insufficient hardware or simple employee error? SaaS eliminates these risks.

As businesses have enjoyed the many benefits of SaaS, many companies have focused their efforts on developing new SaaS business products for more efficiency and ease of use. Since we are in the business of making businesses more efficient (and easier to run and manage) the last few months have seen us roll out our own line of SaaS products. We pay very close attention to the needs of our business clients. Through feedback, reviews and our own business experience we have developed tools that combine the best of all possible worlds: features, efficiency, ease of use, attractiveness and speed. So far we have launched TurnKey Newsletter and TurnKeyMail, two SaaS solutions that provide necessary cloud infrastructure tools to businesses. As the fall gets underway, we will be launching more TurnKey SaaS solutions that will grow our clients’ businesses over the coming months. Bring your business up to speed quickly, easily and for less than you’re paying now. [Learn more].

As you may know, cloud computing is remote computing—housing your data on many different servers, worldwide, with remote access to files and software and an infinitely scalable (grow-able) infrastructure. What you may not know is that cloud computing has been around for a very long time. While it has only recently become the go-to hot potato, for years many businesses have been utilizing cloud services to run things behind the scenes. There is no foreseeable end to the cloud—it is growing every day as more people realize how powerful, cost effective and useful it really is—and for many small and medium-sized businesses, the sooner they implement cloud services, the better for their bottom line.

Emerging Technologies

As the cloud goes mainstream, businesses everywhere are capitalizing on the new technology—both internally and as a potential area for expansion. The faster you move your business to the cloud, the faster you will be able to incorporate new technological advances into your business model. The longer you wait, the more difficult getting a handle on the new services will become. Start now, start small, and soon enough your business will be launching ahead of your competition. It is not every day that an opportunity presents itself to take a giant business leap forward without any risk to the business’ foundation or to day-to-day operations. You can get cloud services up and running while everything else stays in place then, when you are ready to switch over, do it seamlessly and without any glitches.

SaaS

As I have discussed in a previous post, software-as-a-service is a key component to what makes the cloud so beneficial for businesses. Accessing software from anywhere, paying licensing fees for individuals instead of computer work-stations and eliminating the cost of downtime and maintenance are just some of the reasons the SaaS cloud makes sense. Paying for exorbitantly expensive software and IT support is one of the main factors holding many small businesses back from challenging their larger competition. Check out TurnKey Internet’s cloud SaaS solutions.

Cloud and the Environment

IT infrastructure is extremely costly, from a monetary and environmental perspective. Housing, cooling and powering your business servers requires a large amount of energy. From an individual business’ perspective, this matters, but it also matters on a macro level: providing a networked server cloud for all your clients is far more efficient than providing a dedicated server for each one. As more and more businesses move to the cloud, we will reduce carbon emissions exponentially. That alone is a good enough reason to switch.

We could not be more excited to announce the arrival of our new email marketing software, TurnKey Newsletter! TurnKey Newsletter is going to change the way our clients do business. There are about a million incredible features (which I will get into below) but most important of all is the ability this software provides to learn about your customers—from how they read your emails to their shoe size—seriously. The better you know your customers, the better you can target your products and services to their needs, and the more successful your business will become.

TurnKey Newlsetter and Your Bottom Line: A One-to-One Ratio

Sometimes you can hear something a million times and you still need to hear it again. For example, you know you’re supposed to drink eight glasses of water every day. You hear it on T.V. You read it in the paper. But do you do it? I sure don’t. It’s the same thing for email marketing. Everyone talks about how important it is—how dramatically it can improve profit, how much it affects customer retention and customer trust—yet so many companies still haven’t started doing it. Part of the reason is that it’s intimidating. What solution do you choose? Will you be able to figure out how to use it? I think many businesses are reluctant to try something new that they don’t fully grasp, especially when they are worried about alienating customers or being called spammers. That is why TurnKey Newsletter is so incredibly exciting. It could not be easier to use!

TurnKey Newsletter: Overflowing with Top-of-the-Line Features

TurnKey Newsletter includes beautiful, professional design templates, an easy what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor, CAN-spam compliant automation (so you don’t get flagged, and your emails get through), email feedback and surveys (so you know what your customers are thinking), and personalization options (so every email is addressed personally—as if you sent each one individually). You can read more about all of the features here: http://turnkeynewsletter.com.

TurnKey Newsletter’s Emails: Always Look the Way You Designed Them

One of the things we are most proud of with TurnKey Newsletter is its compatibility with every major email client out there. Many email marketing products look great at first glance—you can edit templates, add images, and personalize just fine—but when your customers actually open your email, it looks nothing like the email you designed. Text is too big, images get resized, code is visible—it’s a complete mess. Your customers aren’t going to think, “hmm, wow, their email marketing software sucks,” they’re going to think, “hmm, wow, this company is incredibly unprofessional and I don’t think I should be trusting them with my business.” It’s sad, and it’s true. Don’t stake your reputation on a shoddy email marketing tool.

Trust TurnKey Newsletter. Really. It rules.