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It wasn't me...

Imagine this scenario. You wake up; do your morning routine which you stick to religiously. With the flick of the switch you graze over the internet. As you stroll down and type in your regular email password, anticipating what may be in your inbox, the page opens up… it’s empty. There’s NOTHING. No emails, no contacts, no sent messages.

You shut down the page and re-enter your password, double-clicking anxiously as you work up a cold sweat. You shake off your tiredness, only to realise to your horror- something is wrong. Desperately wrong.

Earlier this week, this is what thousands of Google e-mail users experienced. All their e-mails and contacts had disappeared into thin air.

Questions race though your mind…

Was it me? Was it Google? How and why? It soon becomes a swirling confusion. You see your reflection in the screen swaying from side-to-side.

Let’s start with the first question. No it was not you, and yes it was Google’s fault.

Google basically lost the emails because of a glitch in its software. The event happened when Google was updating its services. The company also stores multiple copies of everything in its data centres – so it was quickly able to restore all the emails to normal working routines.

But if you were one of the users who lost their account information, how to you feel? Have you lost faith in Google’s Gmail? Let us know your opinion matters.

Social media, we’ve all come across it in one way or another. But for some individuals this encounter has been rather traumatic. Have you experienced the cold sweat, heart palpitations and detest when your eyes meet a vulgar profanity on a social networking site? For many of us it’s a sad, sad situation…

Since 2008, the watchdog received more than 4,500 complaints about the text written on websites that they could do nothing about.

Many online companies aim to promote themselves through social networking or advertising campaigns. However, more than often the good will be surpassed by the bad and the downright ugly.

However, on 1 March changes are going to be enforced. Dun, dun, dun, duh!

The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) will be given the power to tackle the growing number of complaints about the way companies sell themselves on the web. You better believe it. They will be cracking the whip!

The seductress siren, Twitter and the legendary Facebook will be paraded by police, monitoring the websites advertisement words. Any misleading, harmful or offending paid-for-adverts will be named and shamed. This however, will not include user comments. Firms will be encouraged to comply, to prevent their reputation being stained. Further sanctions will be issued for offenders who fail to comply.

The ASA has been recruiting extra staff to meet the investigation and complaints unit by 10%.

The ASA may see an end to adverts like these:

A long, long time ago, in a land far, far away (the USA, to be exact) a group of people were pioneering together with a vision- a vision where individuals, groups and companies from all over the world could view and exchange goods.

In 1973 a draft of the internet was produced. But it was not until 10-years later this unique form of technology began to take hold, shining through with its potential and offering a new form of communication that would change the world.

Oh the mighty internet, a whole new world of cyber space. Offering one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind and boldly taking us to where no man had gone before.

It was not long before online business saw the potential of this niche tool, where they could advertise and promote themselves.

However, the internet is made up of content and without this content we would have nothing to browse, read, picture, buy or sell. That’s why each day online businesses from around the world pump out heaps of data.

This is where Google Analytics comes in, to study the impact of a website and its pages on visitors. It’s a powerful tool, not to be underestimated. You can use web analytics to measure how many times your website page is clicked, viewed, browsed etc. There’s gold there.

Understanding the traffic patterns and data on Google Analytics will enable you to improve your website. How? Well you can see from this what brought the visitors to the site and the navigational path they took while on your site. Thus you can spot any potential problems and areas in your site that may need attention. This will save you time and money.

Hijacking you into Online Marketing Tools

“It’s business.” How many times have you heard those cold-hearted words? The face of business is often formal, stiff, upper-lipped and goby. You get the picture. It’s not a walk in the park, a sun-bathe on a beach, or a good old banter with friends. This is the stereotypical view of “business.”

Nowadays this image is changing. You better believe it. Social media marketing is a popular tool for business these days. It takes away the cold-front, stripping it bare, until you’re left with nothing but an informal two-way communication tool.

Social media has web-based platforms, applications and technology that enable the formal to meet the informal. It’s a great way for online business to promote market and hone on to their audience. The most popular social media sites include: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. How many of you use these sites, or have at least visited them?

According to a study by RJMetrics, “Facebook has more than 500 million active users, while Twitter [is peaking with] 75 million.” Not bad considering the micro blogging service began only in March 2006. Multiple communications is clearly the way forward, in our ever advancing technology driven world.

Ecommerce: What is it?

Ecommerce is an intelligent way for online business to follow up with website visitors who have abandoned a shopping cart. You can follow the process of customers, what they did, what they tried to purchase and when they abandoned the products. It sounds like being a stalker but it’s simply a way of monitoring a site to help improve it.

From the information you gather you can implement campaigns to bring the customers back, such as discounts, promotional incentives etc. Have you ever experienced this?

Watch the YouTube video below to learn more about the facts and benefits about the different social media sits over the World Wide Web.

Be popular with SEO

Link building is an integral part of any effective search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. Link popularity contributes to search engine results pages and the rankings.

However the way your website ranks in Search Engine Results Pages will depend on several variables. It can be argued that the most important links are the external ones that point back to your page.

What does Google like?

According to the Official Google blog: “Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem… Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”

Links and Spam

The more links you have pointing to your website, the better. However too many links can be considered by Google as spam and can have a negative effect on your ranking. Poor content and hallow, or cheap blogs can also be classified as spam by search engines.

Who’s viewing your personal data?

Cybercrime is nothing new. The battle between good and evil has been going on for years. Law enforcement and security officials know it, and so do insurance companies. Varying degrees of anti-virus software has been created, up-dated and reinforced, but still, hackers find a way to break through the mould.

Disaster recovery planning is a crucial part to keep business continuity. It is a key arrangement that can be agreed in advance to protect a business from any type of disaster. Whether this disaster be caused by fire, flood, or human error. There are all kinds of risk these days.

Having protection is important. “Malware writers target vulnerable web servers, with often unaware of the attack” says Ram Herkanaidu, senior security of research at Kaspersky Lab.

“They will put a piece of Java code, for example, onto a website and scramble it so it is hard to notice.

“The Java code runs when you visit the site and redirects the user to malware,” he said.

Government officials are taking the threat of cybercrime very seriously because it is costing the economy £27 billion a year, while almost a third of computer users are being affected.

Having up-dated virus protection can save you time and money in the long-term. It is very important if you have a business to be virus protected. Plus being PCI Compliant can protect you and your customers from card fraud.

So if you want your online business to laugh in the face of danger, knowing that you are fully armoured for battle, then go safe with Layer 7 fully load balanced web hosting. Life will never be the same again. Feel the difference, experience the passion of highly-effective web hosts.

Cloud Computing- Got your head up in the Clouds?

Do you have your head in the clouds? Are you thinking out loud and dreaming? Well, dream, dream, dream, because cloud computing can turn your dreams into reality. Cloud computing is a term thrown out in the air for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet.

These services can be broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-service, Platform-as-a-service and Software-as-a-service.

Benefits of Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is a great service that can save you money. It is easy to maintain and re-provision of sources. There’s gold there.  Cloud computing is also environmentally friendly, freeing up internal resources.  See the list below for its great advantages:

• Pay-as-you-go service
• Gets rid of the burden placed on IT teams
• You can access your data from any location with an internet connection
• No extra costs for hardware or software licenses
• No on-going costs for maintenance or upgrading

This internet service is a fast evolving futuristic technology. It was once the exclusive domain of government agencies, universities and research facilities. It is now making its way into the mainstream. Gartner Inc. predicts that by 2012, “80% of Fortune 1000 enterprises will pay for some cloud-computing service, while 30% of them will pay for cloud-computing infrastructure.”

The 16^th annual Global Mobile Awards were announced earlier this week, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. However Wi-Fi didn’t seem to do so well…

Areas marked “free Wi-Fi here” often had painfully slow connections. Demonstrations from Google, Intel, Yahoo, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Research in Motion, among other were comical when they couldn’t connect to their networks.

According to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt: “That’s the problem with networking conventions…Everyone is on the network.”

Meanwhile all the guests were entertained and romanced off their feet with Brit-Award singer and songwriter Duffy, and Indi rock band, Metric.

Cisco, which operated the free Wi-Fi network at Mobile World Congress plastered around the convention – it estimated 40,000 unique devices were trying to connect to its network alone. Average peak usage reached about 3,200 devices managing to connect simultaneously to Cisco’s 110 access points.

“The service wasn’t that bad for free,” said Cisco’s Smets. “We’re the good guys. We’re the knights in shining armour. We knew it was a risk to put our name on it, and we ran into challenges, but that will make us better for the next time.”

A frightening amount of money is being spent on preventing viruses and hackers from stealing and destroying important information over the internet. Cybercrime is costing the UK economy £27 billion a year, according to the government reports.

The figures are made up from £21 billion of costs to businesses, £2.2 billion to government and another £3.1 billion to citizens.

Efforts to prevent the problem have been tampered because many firms do not want to admit to being a target of cybercrime, in order to keep their reputation.

According to Baroness Neville-Jones “it is a bit like terrorism – the more you know the more frightening it looks.”

The hardest hit sectors have included pharmaceuticals, biotech, electronics, IT and chemicals.

The juggernaut malware, Stuxnet which first came to light in 2010 was known to specifically target real-world infrastructure such as industrial software and equipment.

The security firm, Symantec revealed how waves of new variants of the virus were launched at Iranian industrial facilities.

Orla Cox from Symantec said: “we are trying to understand how and why it spread.”

It’s not the first time hackers have targeted industrial systems, but it was the first malware discovered that spied on the subject’s industrial systems and the first to include a programmable logic controller rootkit.

Speculation surrounded the virus attack arguing the sophisticated piece of malware had likely been written by a “nation state” to target Iran’s nuclear programme, including the uranium enrichment centrifuges at the Natanz facility.

The Nato ambassador in Russia said the virus “could lead to a new Chernobly,” referring to the 1986 nuclear accident.

Hmm...All I want for Valentine's Day is a Layer 7 website host.

Spread the love this Valentine’s Day and get a fantastic fully load-balanced website hosting service, only with Layer 7.

Layer 7 web hosting has a proposal for you…

Three words come into mind…can you guess what they are?

If you guessed “Unlimited web hosting” then lucky you! Because at Layer 7 we fully understand that our clients highly value their websites and require reliable and affordable web hosting services to ensure that they are at their best.

With so many online companies and competition, you need a professional web hosting company to get you to the top.

Here at Layer 7, we want you to climb the ladder with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and be at the top of search engine results pages such as Google, Yahoo or Bing.

Even angels fall when they hear of Layer 7 website hosting

We are here to secure your online business and are confident we can provide you with the highest level of support. Feel the love. Our highly trained staff, located at Brash New Media will guarantee that we can make your site a success with our 100% uptime and fully load-balanced web hosting service.

Plus, we will also go the extra mile and give you a FREE domain name for life. You better believe it.

You can’t go wrong when you get Layer 7 web hosting. We got it down to a T.  Let us know what you think of our web hosting service? And spread the love this Valentine’s Day.