April 2018 - Webhosting

What is Magento?

24 April 2018
by: webspace
in: Magento
note: no comments

Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce CMS (Content Management System). If you will create an online store, then Magento is one of the best platforms to choose. Strictly speaking, Magento provides two distinct eCommerce platforms: Magento Community and Magento Enterprise.

1) Magento Community Edition

Magento Community is an e-commerce platform which is built on an open source software. This means that Magento is developed, maintained and updated in a collaborative public manner and it can be downloaded for free, used, changed and distributed for any purpose. Developers can implement the core files and add new plug-in modules which are available for free and on sale from other developers.

2) Magento Enterprise Edition

Based on Community Edition’s core, Magento Enterprise is a tested version developed by Magento’s team. Due to the greater features and functionality, as well as the technical support offered to users, Magento Enterprise has an annual fee (starting from $18,000 for the original version and $22,000 for Magento 2.0). This is an ideal solution for large businesses and companies which want 24/7 assistance.

What are Magento’s benefits?

First of all, Magento is a scalable platform, ready to grow and to be implemented according to your business’s improvement. Easy to download and customize, Magento offers a variety of plug-ins and layouts that can be integrated along with the growth of your catalogue and in order to enhance customers’ interaction. Furthermore, its shopping cart system supports a wide range of credit card processors and shipping services. A search engine optimization, accurate inventory, catalogue and client management, a multi-lingual and currency support, a multiple reports system combined with Google Analytics: these are, last but not least, a few of Magento’s main features.

Looking for Magento extensions?

Did you already download Magento? Are you ready for an advanced functionality? All you have to do is implementing your default version with any integration you need. On https://marketplace.magento.com/ you will certainly find the extensions to do the trick.

What is the difference between a blog and a website?

24 April 2018
by: webspace
in: blog
note: no comments

Although there is sometimes a fine line between a blog and a website, it is possible to define two opposite and permanent features which show their macro differences:

1) Interaction vs Static

A blog (Web log= Blog) has a double interaction: the content refreshment and the visitors interaction. While the author offers a costant update of the chosen topic – which is very often highly defined (health & fitness after 50s, travels on a budget, quick recipies back from work, etc.) – visitors are encouraged to leave comments behind and to subscribe to the newsletter in order to keep themselves updated with their favourite subject. The articles on the blog (posts) are shown on the webpage in a reverse-chronological (latest to oldest) order. Visitors comments are listed below the related post (in a reverse-chronological order too) and they are sometimes visible for the subscribers only. A regularly updated content is example of a thriving blog.

A website is a collection of several and related web pages, usually indexed in a mainpage. The major content of a website remains generally the same and any interaction with visitors is mainly isolated to an internal page of the website (sometimes a blog, sometimes a contact page with a form to fill up) which shares the same domain name. Websites are updated from time to time due to business changes, layout improvements, general information updates, company’s terms etc.

2) Simplicity vs Complexity

As a consequence of the first point, a blog offers a simple navigation: a single page with posts in reverse-chronological order and an archive section that lists the posts in categories and sub-categories (date, author, subject, tags). On the contrary, the main aim of a website is the browsing of the different pages, which might include an online store, multimedia material or external links to sponsors. Even the language used is a reflection of this main difference: a blog is much more unformally written than a website.

As a summary, comparing these online medias with the old ones:

A blog is a modern newspaper. it writes about specific topics sharing a common point of view with interacting visitors instead of passive readers.

A website is a tv channel: it prepares you for a show and tell, making sure you will not get bored and start zapping somewhere else.

How does web hosting work?

Web hosting is a term to describe the computer networking infrastructure required to set up a website and related email accounts. This service is provided by a powerful set of computers called servers which are allocated in a special building called data center. The data center is maintened 24/7 by highly trained technicians. The server which will be allocated to your website will provide disk space and bandwidth, the necessary memory to run and maintain the backup of your data and the traffic access to your website. It will also keep all your website files (HTML files, CSS files, images, photos, etc.) in a dedicated folder in order to free your own computers from a huge amount of data.

When you are hiring a company to put your files on their web server, you’re buying an hosting service. They are “hosting” your website on their servers.

Put simply, the server provided by the web hosting company will be the hardware home for the software of your website!

What is web hosting?

Let’s say you want to build a house. Doesn’t matter if big or small, doesn’t matter if on the top of a hill or with a seaview. It is going to be your home, the place of your dreams. And you need a surveyor to make your dreams come true.

Now, let’s say you have an activity. Doesn’t matter if big or small, doesn’t matter if it is a company business or your favourite hobby. You want to be on the web, either just telling people “Hey, look at me I’m on the internet”, or starting an Ecommerce website and set sail for success. And still you will need a surveyor to make your dreams come true.

Web hosting is a service that allows you to post a website onto the Internet. It is provided by a company that has access to technologies and services needed for the website to be viewed in the Internet.

You surely might have severals degrees of competence about building your own website: how to choose a domain name, how to follow a make-yourself website builder or even how to deal with HTML and CSS markups in order to create a neat looking webpage. But still, if you could operate the server, once you will start getting massive amounts of visitors, your internet connection won’t have the bandwidth to keep up.

A web hosting company will guide you through the creation and maintenance of your own website, taking you by the hand like a good surveyor would do when building your homeplace.

How to fix wordpress auto update fail

We have seen a large number of failed wordpress autoupdates in the last weeks, there seem to have been some issues with the latest 4.9.5 update. This fix is a general one for any failed auto update and it works in 99% of the cases. Most often this issue is resulting in a white screen or server 500 error.

You will need ftp access to sort this issue out.

Step one is always to make sure you have a complete backup of your wordpress installation and database
Take a look at your main wordpress installation folder and you will find two subfolders, wp-admin and wp-includes. This two folders contains most of wordpress code it self and nothing else. Themes, plugins etc are located in wp-content, brilliant!
Download the same version of wordpress that you had installed, if you dont know have a look in your wp-admin/version.php file. All wordpress releases can be found here
Once downloaded and unzipped you should now upload the complete folders wp-admin and wp-includes onto your servers wordpress folder.
Once its done try to access the page, just to find out that its now working again. Login to wordpress backend and make an update to latest version in case your are not already running it.

Once you have the site up running again its important to make sure the issue was actually caused by a failed auto update, as we all know wordpress have had some security issues and for this reason you will need to check that your site is safe.

I recommend two security plugins Wordfence Security and Sucuri Security Install them and run a complete scan. This should find out if there is any issues within your wp-content folder ( since the others are now fresh )

Note: If the site still does not work after uploading the two folders, then try to upload the following files onto your main wordpress installation folder. But just make sure not to overwrite wp-config.php

WordPress https – How to Setup SSL for your wordpress site in 6 simple steps

What you need to do to make your wordpress site run SSL.

Its very simple to setup your wordpress to run https instead of http as long as your hosting accounts supports it!

First you will need to either purchase an SSL certificate for your domain, you can also choose to use a free option named Letsencrypt not all hosting providers supports it but it would be worth to have a look if you are on a small budget.
Install the certificate on your hosting account, this is done in your controlpanel.
Make proper testing of the certificate,ssllabs providing free tools to test your site. Do it!
Once you have confirmed your certificate to be properly installed onto the server you can now go ahead and login to wordpress. There is several ways to make your wordpress site fully run under https instead of http but the easiest way is to use a plugin on your site. One plugin we have testet and can recommend is Really Simple SSL
Now you can just visit your wordpress site and you should see all pages are now redirecting to https:// instead of http:// .
If you are using google webmaster tools ( you should ) you also need to add the https version on the site and update your sitemap with urls containing https://

Monthly ArchivesApril 2018 - Webhosting - Webspace