IT Support

It’s all very well investing in the latest technologies, and having an impressive new IT system to enjoy in the workplace; but what happens when you hit a bump in the road and see no viable path around it?

Even tech-savvy users of advanced IT systems will inevitably find themselves in too deep when it comes to particularly stubborn problems. Of course, the likelihood of a new system failing is minimal to say the least; but there is still a slim possibility that an unforeseen and entirely unpredictable chain of events could lead to a system failure – be that partial or full. It is this slim possibility that must protected against.

This is where IT Support comes in. There are many different types of IT Support package out there, but the method receiving most attention in the modern realm of fast-paced business is ‘Pay-As-You-Go Support’. In the past, third party IT Support vendors would sign organisations up to contractual support packages, with set billing periods allowing the business in question to call upon the agreed services whenever the requirement arises. This works well, provided your system is encountering major faults on a frequent basis. Otherwise, your business is simply haemorrhaging money on a service that is far too elaborate and expensive to justify the cost. After all, any respected system manufacturer today will be producing technology with incredibly low failure rates.

Modern business needs a modern solution, and that solution is Pay-As-You-Go IT Support. Your business only pays for the support it requires, when it is required. A support team will be on hand to help whenever needed, at an agreed hourly rate to ensure all costs are well understood before work even begins.

Netwise Hosting – as leaders in the field of online IT services (dedicated servers, online backup and colocation) – are able to offer businesses a highly cost-effective Pay-As-You-Go IT Support service in the South London area, from professionals with a long serving history in all aspects of IT and IT Support. Remote Support is also available to those in need of quality long-distance IT Support.

This is not a service we are prepared to roll out on a large scale at this time, so we ask any businesses interested in such a service to please contact us directly and begin discussions.

SEO Tips, Straight from Google

I have already spent some time in previous posts explaining the importance of SEO, paying particular attention to the importance of speed (as provided by a dedicated server platform) and the quality of your content. However I have yet to explore the bigger picture.

Rather than attempting to write out a length and detailed run-down off all things ‘SEO’, I thought it would in fact be far more useful to point readers in the direction of a fantastic presentation as put together by Matt Cutts (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/) of Google. The presentation focuses on WordPress SEO optimisation, although the advice can be more broadly applied to any type of website. Also, seeing as a large number of users on our system employ the use of their dedicated servers for the distribution of blogs, I felt this guide would be of direct relevance to them.

Enjoy the presentation.

Direct links to the content providers are here at Viddler.com and here on Matt Cutts’ blog. The team here at Netwise Hosting hope that you find these resources useful.

The my.NetwiseHosting Customer Portal and You

Whenever we speak with our clients, one thing that comes up very frequently is the need to consolidate. That is the need to consolidate all aspects of their service into one easy to manage location. Naturally, our wide array of products allow for all base-level online services to be entirely consolidated with us, such as our dedicated server range and our online backup facilities.

However we are now interested in taking this idea of total consolidation to the next level. This will greatly improve customer satisfaction as well as entirely streamlining the processes surrounding the ownership of a Netwise Hosting contract. Every aspect of a customer’s account can now be controlled from a central online location, ensuring clients have all the information they require in an instant. Couple this with our Single Point of Contact Account Management, and it becomes apparent just how rewarding a contract with Netwise Hosting can be.

So lets explore the new my.NetwiseHosting Customer Portal, and see what it can offer you as an end-user.
Firstly you will notice that the my.NetwiseHosting section of the website differs in appearance when compared directly with the main site. This is intentional, and ensures users understand the transition they have made from the main web pages to their own personalised portal. In this sense, users are taken into their own personal space, away from the public site and can enjoy the beginnings of a truly personal online experience.

The portal also handles all billing and payment methods, which makes any required alterations and recurring payments incredibly easy to handle. Invoicing, quotes and other such related documentation can all be handled digitally through the portal, meaning a singular point of contact for every single aspect of your account is maintained at all times. Handling such documentation online also aids in ensuring Netwise Hosting’s carbon footprint remains in check; ultimately allowing us to pass our savings in consumption onto you.

my.NetwiseHosting Customer Portal

Hosting such a complete method of managing your account with us online not only makes the management of your services easier as an end-user, but also translates into the more efficient inter-personal management of clients from our end. This in turn gives greater flexibility in all areas of service deployment and support; so vastly improving relationships between clients and Netwise Hosting. And as anyone will tell you, a business based on a solid working relationship is far healthier and endlessly more rewarding than the blank faceless provision of user services.

In summary, the primary aim of this new customer environment is to make life easier for our clients through complete and total consolidation of all contact and service related processes. It also helps Netwise Hosting to better deal with our growing customer base, which again benefits clients in the more efficient management of their needs and wants. Moving on from this, we would like to invite readers to register online with our new system and give it a try. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, as the portal should reflect everything our users want.

You can register by visiting the portal here and clicking the Register link at the top of the page.

We sincerely hope that you enjoy using the my.NetwiseHosting Customer Portal, and find it a useful and rewarding tool in the handling of all areas of your services with us.

Google Make Speed a Priority

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past decade, you will be very familiar with Google and their dominant position on the web. So powerful are Google within the search engine market, that it is more widely said that one is to ‘Google’ something rather than search for information online. Therefore it is no surprise that in order to remain at the top of a keyword related search online, you had best be keeping the Google indexing system happy with your site.

In August 2009 Google announced the launch of a new search and indexing architecture under the codename ‘Caffeine’. This is expected to hit the full public domain sometime within the next few months, although it is already active in a number of Google’s key datacentres. Caffine’s primary roll is to refresh Google’s overall indexing and search-return capabilities, switching focus more directly to speed. This means that search results are returned to users more quickly (some tests have shown results to be returned twice as quickly), and the Google index is better able to cope with rapidly changing information sources such as Facebook and Twitter. Of course this bodes well for businesses who consistently update and roll out new information, as there is no longer a need to wait for your site to be reindexed over a lengthy period of time. It also means that Facebook fan pages and Twitter updates (amongst other social media strategies) can now become a more active part of your sites overall page ranking.
Google will now be rewarding faster websites with higher page ranks, making speed not online a new priority for Google at their end of operations, but also for those businesses seeking to better their SEO and improve page rankings. This will have a direct positive impact on total site traffic, another key factor rewarded by Google’s new system architecture.

So how is this related to your dedicated servers and overall online services? Well for a start, with the new shift in focus towards site speed, the response times from your online location had better be very good. Unlimited bandwidth is also a must; as well as fast and reliable hardware to ensure internal data is processed quickly. This should then be coupled to a high-speed backbone directly onto the web, ensuring site visitors have the lowest possible latency times when interacting with your online location. Current research suggests that users are able to subconsciously discern speed differences from as little as one tenth of a second in loading times. This illustrates just how important speed has become to the modern world of web hosting.

The location of your dedicated server(s) is also highly important in gaining a respectable position within Google’s index. For a UK company, it is now more important than ever to keep your dedicated servers within the UK as well. In recent years many organisations have pushed their IT services abroad hoping for more solid financial returns without considering the quality and speed of the services received. Forgetting any SEO perks, it should be remembered that better site speed will also improve customer relations and the likely hood of customer visits to customer order conversions.

Netwise Hosting understand the needs of businesses in relation to Google’s new Caffeine architecture, and have been following the overall progress and all related details of the new functionality to ensure our services match the updated index. UK businesses can rest easy in the knowledge that the dedicated server packages from Netwise Hosting meet Google search guidelines, ensuring your hosted online presence is entirely optimised and ready for the best possible results on Google’s new architecture roll-out this year.

Growth and Retention

Modern business has seen a direct shift in focus in recent years. According to the transitional models of academics Dwyer, Payne and Kotler, traditional marketing and business model operation strategies are now long dead. The pivotal change came with the introduction of relationship marketing strategies in the late 90’s. Essentially, it is no longer acceptable to focus on growth from a business-centric position – the focus has been shifted to operating within a customer-centric model of operation, thus placing customers at the heart of all decisions made within the organisation. This reaps benefits on both ends of the table, with customers enjoying a better rounded personal level of service, and businesses better able to retain existing clients. With the state of the economy, it is the retention of existing business which is keeping many businesses afloat.

As I am sure most will expect, Netwise Hosting plan to innovate new strategies and so lead the internet services industry into this exciting area of operation. It takes a special group of dynamic thinkers to come up with ground-breaking new strategies in an otherwise clockwork marketplace, making Netwise Hosting the only real choice for taking control of such changes.

The well established mobile telecommunications industry is and ideal case study in identifying the key advantages behind implementing a customer-centric retention orientated business model. Relationship focus has played a major role in how the big players inside the mobile telecomm’s industry have found such dizzying heights of success. Looking at the contrasting successes of O2 and Vodafone illustrate this point very effectively, as well as taking into consideration the smaller companies such as Orange and T-Mobile.
Although Vodafone are the worlds largest mobile telecommunications provider, with 333 million customers worldwide, their focus on retaining UK customers has slipped considerably. This is due to a continuing focus on general growth, particularly focusing efforts on the emerging economies such as China and India. Vodafone hold this to be of key importance, and in terms of growing the value of their business they would be entirely correct. India alone have 52 million new mobile phone contracts taken out every month, making the market highly valuable. But of course this has a trade off, in the loss of UK business.
This means that the UK’s mobile contracts market has been taken over by O2, who are undoubtably the leaders in relationship marketing strategies. O2’s extensive customer service portfolio has secured their place as the UK’s favorite provider of mobile phone services, with the O2 Priority events and venues a key success in their overall strategy.

The What Mobile Awards show the progression of the smaller providers across the years, with Orange winning the top award in 2009, ahead of both O2 and Vodafone. This is thanks to their impressive customer-centric marketing deployment activities, such as Orange Wednesdays and other 2-4-1 offers –  a very good indication of how much the public appreciate being valued as a paying customer.

Bringing this over to the dedicated server market will not be an easy task, primarily because of our target market. However, Netwise Hosting are currently in the process of planning out a series of additional offers that we feel our customers will value. We hope this will aid in customer retention, and in boosting customer satisfaction as a whole.