All posts in Tips

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a natural next step up for many websites which have out-grown a Shared Hosting solution. As we’ve recently helped a number of clients make the transition up to a VPS we thought we’d share some of the pros and cons to weigh up when considering such a move for your own website.

When a website is starting out Shared Hosting makes a lot of sense. It’s cheap, easy to setup and maintain and really pretty fully-featured. For a lot of small businesses a good Shared Hosting package from a reliable host can serve them well indefinitely. But as a site grows in popularity and/or complexity you might start to bump up against some of the limits of a typical Shared Hosting either in terms of bandwidth allowances, web space or the applications you can install and run. There aren’t any hard and fast rules but if you site attracts more then a couple of thousand visitors a month then the VPS option is probably worth exploring.

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The New Year is a great excuse to look at things afresh, draw a line in the sand and say “From this day forth I shall…” So we’ve compiled a quick list of five simple New Year’s resolutions for all you website owners and manager out there:

1) Test Regularly

We’d encourage anyone running a website to make testing part of their monthly routine. Setting aside even an hour a month dedicated to reviewing a site for broken functionality or bad copy can help you quickly identify problems affecting the user experience. As well as carrying-out simple walk-through reviews yourself, it can be useful to get external input too, preferably by doing some usability testing with your target audience.

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Every now and then a tool comes along that’s so simple and useful that you wonder how you ever did without it. TinyPNG from Voormedia is just such a tool and in this post we’ll look at how it can help you optimise the performance of your website, delivering pages that load faster for your visitors and are less demanding on your server.

We know that page speed can have a big impact on user experience and as a result it’s also generally accepted that Google et al. take it into account when determining how your site ranks. Site Speed has long been a part of Google’s Webmaster Tools and there are many established tools out there for testing a site’s performance. One of our favourites comes from the folks at Pingdom. (more…)