By MyHostNews.com
August 30th, 2010 | Posted under
Articles
The short answer is absolutely, but the more important question is “Are you running an ecommerce business which requires you to be on a PA-DSS certified application?”
A quick explanation: PA-DSS is a standard set by the PCI Security Council designed to increase the security of your storefront. The council set a deadline of July 1, 2010 for all merchants to be on a PA-DSS complaint system. Merchants not meeting the deadline could face additional fees from their merchant services provider or loss of their merchant services account entirely.
So, still, do you need to be on a complaint system? For the most part yes, though there are some exceptions the council have outlined. First, if your cart never transmits or stores credit card information, a compliant cart isn’t required. For example, if you’re only using PayPal Traditional and the customer is transferred over to PayPal to complete the order, you are fine. However, if you’re using any other PayPal method, or a method where the credit card is accepted on your site (authorize.net or intuit for example) and the payment information is posted to your payment provider for authorization, you need a compliant cart. Another exception is in-house applications which are not sold or distributed.
The rules are very specific, if your storefront STORES or TRANSFERS customer sensitive information, you are required to be compliant. Of course, the easy solution is simply move to a payment system (like PayPal Traditional) that moves your customer over to their site to complete the transaction. Anyone in the ecommerce world for even a short period of time knows this action can have a significantly negative impact on sales. Moving a customer from one site to another to complete a transaction increases cart abandonments, sometimes as much as 30% or more.
This standard isn’t designed to make a merchant’s life more difficult, but to increase the security of internet transactions. In the end, secure transactions and increased customer confidence result in more business for all merchants conducting business on the internet – and that’s a good thing.
If you’re in the market for ecommerce software, you must determine if the company’s offerings are PA-DSS complaint. If the software is not PA-DSS compliant, weigh potential risks – both personal and financial. Even if you don’t accept credit cards on your site today, understand you will need to eventually if you expect to grow your business. If you’re using an existing ecommerce platform, be sure they are compliant or inquire as to when they expect to achieve compliance. The deadline has passed, and merchant account providers will certainly start assessing fees soon if they haven’t already.
Article written for MyHostNews.com by Craig Fox, Founder and VP of Marketing for Pinnacle Cart, the leading eCommerce / Store Builder application for small to mid size businesses. For more information, please visit www.pinnaclecart.com
By MyHostNews.com
August 25th, 2010 | Posted under
Articles
You may have heard rumors that virtualization, cloud hosting, VPS services, and other “virtual” solutions are more expensive, unreliable, slower, have a complex migration, and are difficult to manage. However, all of these could be far from the truth. What is certain is that with virtualization you will be spending more time and energy on your business and improving your offerings than on worrying about datacenter issues and downtime.
Virtualization is a loosely used term for too many offerings and solutions that today’s web hosting companies are trying to sell you. What is virtualization? At the most fundamental level, virtualization is the ability to run one environment, such as an operating system, inside of another environment (such as an operating system). Imagine running Windows Vista inside of Windows 7 or running multiple instances of Linux inside of Windows (or any other operating system). Virtualization simply lets you allocate different amounts of resources and privileges to other parts of the physical server.
You may be asking yourself how this is any different from the classic shared hosting environments you are used to renting from GoDaddy, 1and1, and others. All of these services are “shared” in nature, but you aren’t actually renting a piece of the entire server that your website is on, only some web space to upload your files over FTP and to run your website through their web server.
Which sort of virtualization is right for your needs? If you have a small website with a few hits, then you should continue paying your webhost $10/month or less for your FTP space and web server access. But what if you have something more complex such an open-source forum, a small MySQL database, some custom PHP content, and your website? Again, it depends on how much traffic you get. If you receive very little traffic, shared hosting may still be your solution. By now you must be wondering why you’d ever need anything besides shared hosting for $10/month.
The answer is you probably don’t and the salesman on the other end of the phone is trying to sell you services that are too powerful for your needs. What if you really have a need for serious web hosting services? It’s clear that there are plenty of companies that have a requirement for better computing resources, so what sorts of requirements do you need to justify higher costs and a more sophisticated hosting environment?
Part 1 – Ownership:
When you own your own servers, much like you own your car, your sense of ownership may provide you with a false feeling of security. It’s true that by owning your servers you feel like no one can access or tamper with them, but what about the downsides? Hard drive failures, motherboard failures, network card failures, power supply failures, etc. In addition to your responsibility of maintaining the hardware, you will probably also need to purchase remote IP KVM’s or computers with remote access integrated into the motherboard which carry a higher price tag, remote power rebooters so you don’t have to painfully wait for datacenter technicians to restart your servers, and shipping spare parts when they are needed. With a virtual solution all of these problems do not exist. In a virtual environment, you can experiment and customize your server as much as you want, break it, and just start a new virtual instance at any time without worrying about anything.
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By MyHostNews.com
August 18th, 2010 | Posted under
Articles
Web Hosting News - Herndon, VA - Small businesses can now improve their productivity and speed up the flow of critical information with a mobile app designed to make popular business forms available on the go. Deluxe Corporation (NYSE:DLX) and Canvas announced today a pilot program that will deliver Deluxe’s most popular paper forms to its small business customers with a smartphone application designed to run on Android™, Windows Mobile® and Blackberry®, as well as laptops, netbooks and tablet-based computing devices. During the pilot, the apps are available at the Deluxe Mobile App Store and will be free for a limited time.
‘At Deluxe, our goal is to provide small business with innovative solutions that make it easier to manage and grow their businesses,’ said Ed Wolfe, strategic alliances manager for Deluxe Corporation. ‘Our new mobile apps offer small businesses a whole new way to fill-out and manage their paperwork – from service estimates to work orders – quickly and easily.’ Read the rest of this entry »
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By MyHostNews.com
June 27th, 2010 | Posted under
Articles
Web Hosting News – BOSTON - Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Cisco, the worldwide leader in networking, today announced the expansion of their virtualization collaboration with the integration of Cisco Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) technology with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. With this integration, Red Hat and Cisco customers will have an opportunity to achieve higher performance, greater network visibility and control and a reduced total cost of ownership for their datacenter virtualization deployments.
Bringing the network and virtualization domains closer to simplify datacenter deployments, Red Hat and Cisco are integrating the Cisco Unified Computing System Virtual Interface Card with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor included in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. This combination creates a logical network infrastructure that will help to provide full visibility, control and consistency of the network for virtualization without sacrificing performance. VN-Link automates the movement of network and storage services so they can follow virtual machines as they are moved around the datacenter, helping to ensure consistent policy-driven network capabilities across all servers, physical or virtual, in a customer’s datacenter. With this combination: Read the rest of this entry »
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By Richard Guzzo
Web Hosting Reviews – Oklahoma City, OK - Web Hosting Directory and Review site www.FindMyHost.com released its March 2010 Editor’s Choice Awards today. Web Hosting companies strive to provide their customers with the very best service and support. We want to take the opportunity to acknowledge the hosts per category who have excelled in their field. The FindMyHost Editors’ Choice Awards are chosen based on Editor and Consumer Reviews.
Customers who wish to submit positive reviews for the current or past Web Host are free to do so by visiting the customer review section of FindMyHost.com Click here to submit a review for your Web Host and nominate them for next months Editors’ Choice awards. We would like to congratulate all web hosts and The following list of web hosting providers excelled in their field of service, congratulations to all and keep up the great work!
About FindMyHost
FindMyHost, Inc. is an online magazine that provides editor reviews, consumer hosting news, interviews discussion forums and more. FindMyHost.com was established in January 2001 to protect web host consumers and web developers from making the wrong choice when choosing a web host. FindMyHost.com showcases a selection of web hosting companies who have undergone their approved host program testing and provides reviews from customers. FindMyHost’s extensive website can be found at www.FindMyHost.com.
By INetU Managed Hosting
November 5th, 2009 | Posted under
Articles,
Featured
The PCI Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), established by the Payment Card Industry (Visa, Mastercard, and other payment cards), combats online fraud and identity theft. It stipulates many security practices that any vendor who stores or transmits credit card data must follow. Any company found noncompliant faces steep penalties.
To facilitate compliance, Visa established a list of certified vendors, found here: http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/cisp-list-of-pcidss-compliant-service-providers.pdf. Working with a certified vendor guarantees a level of compliance with the PCI DSS spec. A certified vendor must supply you with a responsibilities sheet detailing exactly what they are covering.
To companies that handle credit card data (financial services, eCommerce, etc.), choosing a certified hosting provider has obvious benefits; however, all businesses can benefit from the third-party certification. Here’s how:
Access Control
The PCI-DSS places restrictions on who has physical access to servers in a datacenter, as well as terminal access to the operating system. As such, a certified PCI compliant hosting provider has safeguards that may or may not be present with other hosts:
- Photo security badge, fob, PIN, and biometric access to the datacenter.
- Access privilege granted to fewest necessary personnel.
- Login and change monitoring/logging for each server or device.
- Secure client authentication required for any changes to the environment.
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By MyHostNews.com
October 5th, 2009 | Posted under
Articles
The Microsoft WebsiteSpark hosting program knocks down the barriers to entry for new design and development companies, giving them the technology they need to compete for SMB opportunities in the Windows Hosting platform arena without paying a dime in upfront costs.
It’s a great time to be a young and growing design and/or software development firm. Our highly connected world means an endless stream of opportunities for companies trying to meet the demands of SMBs and hungry eyeballs churning through websites, print media, and mobile delivered content at exponential rates. Ironically, at the same time it’s never been as tough for young designers and developers, who must fund a variety of disciplines in order to be competitive. It’s not enough to know your way around Photoshop; the successful design companies are the ones that stay abreast of the current and breaking technologies needed to deliver the highly interactive Web 2.0 experience users expect. That means costly training and license fees. Fortunately it just got a lot easier, thanks to Microsoft’s new WebsiteSpark prog ram.
The Microsoft WebsiteSpark hosting program knocks down the barriers to entry for new design and development companies, giving them the technology they need to compete for SMB opportunities in the Windows Hosting platform arena without paying a dime in upfront costs. Offering free licenses for Visual Studio 2008, Expression Studio and Expression Web, and user and processor licenses for Windows Server and SQL Server, the WebsiteSpark program clears a path for young design companies by giving them free access to industry leading software and letting them avoid costs that could otherwise bleed away at revenues during the critical first few years of operation.
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By MyHostNews.com
September 8th, 2009 | Posted under
Articles,
Press Releases,
Web Host News
Web Hosting News – HERNDON, Va. – On Wednesday, September 9, 2009 from 12 a.m. EST to 11:59 p.m. EST, the GrowSmartBiz Conference – hosted by Network Solutions® – will offer a one-day special registration fee allowing two people to attend for just $99 total.
The GrowSmartBiz Conference will gather more than 500 small business owners and entrepreneurs together with industry experts, including Wired magazine Editor-in-Chief and author of The Long Tail and Free, Chris Anderson, who will serve as keynote speaker. Attendees will participate in group learning discussions and networking opportunities that will provide actionable, cost-effective strategies for growing their businesses. The first-ever GrowSmartBiz Conference will be held Tuesday, September 29, 2009, at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, D.C.
The small business sector is responsible for more than 40 million jobs and a reported $6 trillion in revenues1. The GrowSmartBiz Conference was created as a result of the Small Business Success Index (SBSI) – an ongoing measurement of the overall health of small businesses commissioned by the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and Network Solutions.
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By MyHostNews.com
August 10th, 2009 | Posted under
Articles
Web Hosting News – San Jose, Calif. – Fortune Data Centers, which provides premium wholesale data center space for corporate customers, announced today that the energy efficiency measures which Fortune has implemented as part of the company’s participation in PG&E’s High Tech Energy Efficiency program will save 10,448,592 Kilowatts per year—equivalent to powering 1,500 homes annually or the reduction of 4,200 tons of CO2, as calculated by PG&E.
PG&E’s High Tech Energy Efficiency program provides technical services and analysis of energy efficiency measures to companies like Fortune Data Centers. The California utility offers incentives for a broad portfolio of technologies, including virtualization/consolidation, massive array of idle disks (MAID) data storage systems, high efficiency power conditioning and delivery equipment, PC network management software, and strategies for lowering air conditioning energy use and costs.
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By MyHostNews.com
July 19th, 2009 | Posted under
Articles
Web Hosting News – Dallas, TX - Drupal fever is hitting Dallas. Over the weekend of August 1st-2nd, Drupalers from all over the state of Texas will congregate at Improving Enterprises in Dallas to learn, share, and discuss all things Drupal. Organized by a group of Dallas area Drupal enthusiasts, the camp will feature two full days of sessions. Sessions will cover everything from structured presentations from local and national Drupal experts, to unstructured “Birds of a Feather” sessions, where people with similar interests form small groups to learn and collaborate.
This year, for the first ever Dallas DrupalCamp, the event will feature presentations from local Drupal experts like Ben Finklea, CEO of the Austin area Drupal search engine optimization company, Volacci, and Tom McCracken President of Dallas area Drupal agency, LevelTen Interactive. Sessions plan to cover a wide range of Drupal oriented subjects from setting up a Drupal website for the first time to advanced optimization techniques and how to master niche subjects within the Drupal framework.
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