SSL Certificate – Give Your Customers Peace of Mind

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Chris Chase

SSL certificates give online shoppers peace of mind…and since online shopping is an important part of modern commerce, and your business should make sure to take full advantage.

Online shoppers love convenience but hate risk. No one wants to be unsure about placing a purchase because they might be giving their financial information to an insecure site. Don’t let that happen to your business: give your customer a guarantee.

This guarantee is a digital certificate. Also known as an “SSL Certificate,”it encrypts your site’s online shopping cart, making it incredibly tough for a third party to snatch the credit card/mailing info your customers provide you.

And how will your customers know you’ve encrypted your website? Firstly, you can display a graphic (showing a seal of the certificate, or a lock, etc) on your site, but…more importantly…if your cart is properly encrypted, the “http://” in your store’s web address will display as “https://” (the “s” literally stands for “secure”, and there is no way to get it without encryption).

With a secure website, your customers can buy without worry. So include an SSL Certificate as a part of your ecommerce web hosting plan!

Good Domain Names – How Valuable Are They?

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

Forbes.com recently published an interesting article by venture capitalist David Teten about domain names.

Though the focus was specifically on whether startups should spend venture capital funding on a domain name, the article was a good reminder of domain name basics (as we’ve previously posted about; see Best Website Domain Names) and provided valuable insight and domain strategies to use when the domain you want is unavailable.

The article asserts that while domain names are currently a little less important (because of mobile and apps), they are still your email identity (as we also wrote about a couple of weeks ago in Domain Email…What Are You Waiting for?) and an important part of your marketing.

A domain name can even be the difference between winning and losing companies, one of the factors that tips the competitive balance from one startup to another; for example, the stronger Mint.com domain winning out over Wesabe.com.

Why? Because a good domain name catches attention, is easy to remember, and easy to find online. It represents your company often before you have any other way to influence potential customers, investors, or even future employees.

Three main domain name factors proposed in the article are:

Fit. This is perhaps obvious, so Teten doesn’t explain any more than to say the domain should match the business. There are, of course, different ways to “match” or “fit.” As we’ve previously written, a domain name that is an exact match or close match to your company name (assuming you’re not a startup with no previous company name) is often the number-one recommendation. Next would be a strong, popular keyword that’s associated with your business, like one of your core products or services. I would say that the domain doesn’t have to be immediately obvious but it should makes sense when you think about it. Like the Facebook domain. While “facebook” wasn’t a popular keyword and people first hearing the domain may have wondered what it was, a social network like this is kind of like a contact “book” with the “faces” (and other personal detail) of friends. So it fits.
SEO. Here’s another push for keyword-rich domain names. If your domain name exactly matches keywords people are using to find the products or services you sell, your website will get a real boost towards the first page of search results (assuming you have a non-hyphenated .COM site). If you are lucky enough to have such a domain (or can get one), make sure you optimize the homepage for your domain name keywords. In other words, the content of the homepage should support the URL/domain.
Linguistic Characteristics. Though we have written about certain aspects of these good domain name characteristics before (notably that you want a short domain, without hyphens or numerals, that’s easy to spell and therefore remember), some of Teten’s other recommendations about the internal sounds of domain names were new and intriguing.

No matter what your domain name means, data suggests that the best ones generally have these linguistic characteristics:

are short
use dictionary words
do no include hyphens or numerals
have initial sounds that are easy to articulate
avoid internal sounds phonemes associated with disgust (like the uh sound in yuck and the ew sound in puke)

The bad news: If you’re going to be bidding on domain names that are already owned, you’ll probably need fairly deep pockets. Average domains are said to go from $5,000 – $20,000, with the very top of the market going in the millions.

The good news: Teten advises most new businesses to start with a free or very low-cost dot-com domain name. If your ideal domain name isn’t available but there is no website yet active at that domain, you may want to purchase a similar domain to launch your business with the goal to transition to the other domain when you can purchase it. These EarthLink Web Hosting services offer a free domain name for one year.

To get more domain name advice for startups, read the full article on Forbes.com.

When you’re ready to get started, here’s a step by step guide to choosing a new domain name with EarthLink.

Managing Your EarthLink Web Hosting Account

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

One of the great benefits that all EarthLink Web Hosting and professional website design customers can take advantage of is the EarthLink Web Hosting Control Center.

We’ve previously posted about several of the sections of the Control Center, including how to build your website, how to manage your domain email, how to manage your website, and how to manage your domain.

Today we’ll focus on the Manage Account section of the Control Center. It offers you one centralized place to access essential settings information, account statistics, alerts, available services, important account-related dates, disk usage, and more.

So let’s take a look.

Log in to Web Hosting Control Center

As always, you should start by going to control.earthlink.net and logging in with your Web Hosting domain name, username, and password. (If you have multiple domain names, you can access them all by using your primary domain information.)

Then, simply click the Account tab at the top of your screen to go to the Manage Account section of your Control Center.

Manage Account Tab

If you have more than one domain name, the first thing you’ll want to do is use the Show & Manage menu to select the domain you want to manage.

Client Settings

Click the plus sign (+) next to FTP Settings, Mail Settings or FTP Dropbox Settings to verify these account-related settings. You’ll need the FTP setting if you are going to FTP files to your website (rather than only using our built-in Site Builder to control your website). Use the Mail Settings if you want to set up an email client to access your domain name email or use our Web Mail for Web Hosting.

Account Statistics

This section gives you a quick look at a few of your most important stats:

Disk Usage: see how much webspace you are currently using and what the limit of your web hosting plan is.
FTP Users: Just a reminder of how many people have FTP access to your domain.
Bandwidth: Similar to Disk Usage, it’s a snapshot of how much bandwidth (also called web transfer) you’ve used this month and your monthly Web Hosting account limit.

Assistants Manager

Click the Assistants Manager icon if you want to add users to your web hosting account and assign them specific privileges. See our previous post on adding web hosting assistants.

Alerts

It’s a good idea to click into the Alerts page of your Control Center every now and then to see if there are any issues that require your attention. Alerts listed here may be billing issues, system updates, announcements of planned downtime and other important information. Click to open and read any alert you have and then click the X to close the alert. Then choose to Mark as unread, Mark as read or Delete.

My Services

Click the My Services icon to view all available services as well as upcoming billing dates for all your web hosting services. This section gives you a quick look at this information only; if you need to modify any account information or make a payment, click the My EarthLink Account icon instead.

My EarthLink Account

Clicking My EarthLink Account opens a new browser window with our My Account portal, the place to go when you want to make any changes or updates to your Web Hosting account. See our previous post about My Account for more information.

Disk Usage

The Account Statistics section we mentioned above already gave you a quick look at your primary account statistics. Click into Disk Usage if you want a bit more. You’ll get a more detailed look at your available disk space, used disk space, free disk space, available bandwidth, current bandwidth, and email boxes. All stats are in megabytes (MB) except mailboxes, which show current number of boxes and the total allowed for your web hosting plan.

The statistics listed on top of the Disk Usage page are for the current month only. If you want to see how this information compares to other months, use the drop-down menu to select previous months.

Domain Email … What are You Waiting For?

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Tom Sullivan

We know that our web hosting services are super-easy to use – whether you build your own website with our site builder tool or take advantage of our professional web design service options.

We know that web hosting provides a great return on investment.

But we also know that you still may not be ready for web hosting.

So, what about domain email hosting?

For some, getting a domain name to use for email is a smart first step before moving on to creating a website.

A domain email address can be a valuable extension of your personal or business brand, providing a more consistent and professional way to communicate with customers, prospects, partners and vendors.

Wouldn’t it be nicer to be You@YourBusiness.com or CEO@YourCompany.com than something like tcs7114@yahoo.com when you are communicating about your business?

As a potential customer, I know I’d feel better about doing business with someone using a branded domain than a free email service.

Not having a company email domain suggests you don’t really take your business seriously. And if you don’t, why should others?

After all, getting started with domain email is simple and inexpensive. For just $4.95 a month, our Domain with Email service includes:

50 email addresses @ your domain name
Email mailing lists, forwarders and auto-responders
1GB of storage per email address
Easy Web Mail access from any online computer or device
Built-in spam and virus protection

To learn more, these previous domain-related blog posts may be helpful:

One final word of advice: get your domain name as soon as you can.

There’s a lot of competition for good names. And it would be a shame if you waited too long and then couldn’t get one that works well for your business.

Good luck!