A2 Hosting recognized Earth Day for the entire month of April. We planted two trees for each hosting package we sold during the month. CarbonFund.org also pitched in by planting a tree for each package sold, for a total of three trees. Thanks to our customers, we were able to plant a ton of trees. Take a look at the environmental impact of our Three Tree Initiative below. We planted enough trees to: Absorb 55,380 pounds of carbon dioxide each year Produce over 600,000 pounds of oxygen each year Provide a days supply of oxygen for 4,620 people Absorb the carbon dioxide generated from over 25 million miles of driving a car

I've read a lot of studies saying that if you add some sort of 3rd party trust seal to your site, your website visitors are going to be 80%, 90% or even 200% more likely to purchase from you. While these seals probably do help to a certain extent, developing trust with your audience goes a lot deeper than merely putting a seal on your site. Let's explore some ways you can develop trust with your audience.   Site Design You could have the most innovative product and exactly what your site visitors are looking for, but if your site looks like it was put together haphazardly or like it is from the 90's, it's difficult to build trust. We've all seen a site like this and it is only natural to wonder who are the people behind the site. Not everyone has a huge budget for designing a site, but there are plenty of affordable and even free template sites you can use. If your site is outdated, it may be time to refresh it with a new look!   Write An About Page Like I said, it's important for your visitors to see who is behind the company. That's what an About page is perfect for. Tell your visitors about you, your employees and your company's story. Knowing that there are actual people behind the company is a huge trust builder.   Have A Blog & Keep It Updated A blog is the perfect way to put your own creative voice behind your company and products. Your visitors will appreciate it! You're going to want to keep it updated though. If you haven't posted since 2009, your visitors are going to wonder if you're still around and available, especially if you have any questions!   Testimonials Ask the customers who you have your closest or most high profile relationships with for a review of your product or service. As we know, peer reviews are invaluable. Let your site visitors know about your existing successful customer relationships to help increase their own comfort level.   Proofread Your Content   This rule makes me paranoid because I'm scared I'm going to have a grammatical error in thi

Last year when we were sending out our happy hour invitation, we made a minor, last second edit to it. Since we didn't quite know how well the event would turn out, we changed the invitation from the First "Annual" A2 Hosting Happy Hour to just The First A2 Hosting Happy Hour. The good news is that the event was such a good time that we in fact decided to do it again.   Come on out and join us on June 6th from 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM EST at the Corner Brewery (720 Norris Street Ypsilanti, MI). Mingle with the A2 Hosting staff and some of our other customers! If that's not a good enough reason to join us, we're going to have free food, free drinks and even giveaways (including an IPAD mini)!   So we can best plan for the event, please let us know by May 31st that you will be attending. We can't wait to meet you and to see you there!  

PHP is the language of the web. Whatever your personal thoughts on it, its popularity cannot be denied. Many of the web's most popular applications are written in PHP and even with the growth of Ruby and Node.js, PHP is not going away any time soon. Beyond the massive entrenchment in existing applications, one of the main reasons PHP continues to hold the top spot is that the team behind it continues to add new features. A2 Hosting now offers PHP 5.5 Hosting! Just select PHP 5.5 in your cPanel control panel with our our exclusive PHP Switcher.   PHP 5.5 brings a nice assortment which should make developer's lives easier. I'll highlight a few of them here.   Finally, it's finally!   Those who follow PHP's development may remember a bit of a kerfuffle about the finally keyword a while ago. It was a highly requested feature that the developers behind PHP insisted wasn't necessary because its functionality could be duplicated (very clumsily) via other means. Simply put, finally lets you attach code to a try catch block which should be run whether or not an exception is thrown. You might think that means finally is useless since code after the try catch block would run next even without finally, right? In many cases that might be true, but if your have code within your try catch that alters the flow (e.g. throwing another exception which is caught elsewhere) that code after the block may never run or may be run much later. The finally block lets you ensure the code within it always runs before normal execution resumes, which can be quite handy.   Generators via yield keyword   A feature that is coming in ECMAScript 6 as well, Generators are a great design pattern. In PHP (and ES6) they are accomplished via the yield keyword. Yield lets you return a value to the calling code without actually ending execution of the generator function. This means you can iterate over an array of values or objects without actually building up that array. That obviously saves a lot of memory. In asyncronous languages

I spend a bit of time on online marketing forums and one of the common questions I see asked is how to drive traffic to a new website. My first suggestion is always to write unique, relevant content and make sure that the site is optimized with the keywords that are being targeted. I like starting with SEO because it's a long term strategy. The content on your site does not go away. The second suggestion I generally make is PPC because it's targeted and if done correctly, it can be affordable. Obviously there are tons of other ways to market your site besides SEO and PPC (like guest blogging, forums and social media) there comes a time though that you'll probably want to try display advertising. This can be an effective strategy especially since the average person needs to see new information at least 3 times before it registers for immediate recollection. As with any marketing tactic, there needs to be a bit of a strategy behind it. Here are a few things to keep in mind before you get started. 1.) Who Are You Targeting? You don't want to just start buying ad space without first considering where your target market is spending their time online. The first place I would look is at your Analytics sources to see where your traffic is actually coming from. If you look past PPC, direct traffic and organic traffic, I would look to see which sites are referring traffic to you and find similar ones to potentially advertise on. You can also get creative based on your product. If you sell treadmills, you probably will want to advertise on running sites, fitness sites and weight loss sites. 2.) What's Your Unique Message? If you're just starting display advertising, you probably don't have a huge budget. This can make it difficult to compete in industries where you have mammoth competitors because you can't just plaster your logo or company name on a banner. That's OK. You just have to be unique in your messaging. If you haven't identified what sets you apart from your competitors, this is a great time t

April 22nd may officially be Earth Day, but A2 Hosting is celebrating all month. In collaboration with CarbonFund.org, when you purchase any new hosting package during the month of April, A2 Hosting will plant 3-trees on your behalf! We do offer FutureServe Green Hosting after all and are 100% carbon neutral! We're also based in Ann Arbor, MI (AKA Tree Town), the home of over 50,000 trees and over 150 parks! Maybe you're concerned with the performance of your site. Choose our SSD Hosting service, with page loads up to 300% faster than standard hard drives. An added benefit is SSDs consume roughly one-third the amount of energy as traditional hard disks. We'll plant three trees! Maybe you're going to purchase a Web Hosting package from us because our partners like Sandvox, Drupal, Mantis, Elgg and PrestaShop recommended us. We'll plant three trees! Maybe your website visitors are located in Europe and you are interested in our Iceland Hosting. Did you know our Reykjavik, Iceland data center uses geothermal cooling technology and is 100% green? We'll plant three trees. The more packages we sell, the more trees we'll be planting! Let's do some tree planting!

As our list of supported platforms continues to grow, we’d like to take a moment and look at one of the platforms we support that can make a big difference for PHP developers - Zend Server.   Zend Technologies has been around since the late 90’s, developing server technology that increases scalability, security, reliability and optimization. They’ve developed several products targeted towards the PHP developer community, namely the well-known Zend Guard and Zend Optimizer packages, which help developers secure and optimize their code.   Their most advanced and robust offering is the Zend Server platform, which comes in many flavors. The free Community Edition version is great for developers who want to become familiar with the platform and develop projects that utilize its functionality. The Community Edition includes powerful debugging tools, bytecode and data object caching, application metrics, and monitoring. Upgrading to any of their paid versions adds features such as application rollback, multi-server support, and fault tolerance.   The developers behind the Zend products are not only hosting partners to A2 Hosting, they are also customers! We’re proud to host misfitgeek.com, the personal blog of Joe Stagner, Zend Developer, for several years.   Joe recently wrote and published a very detailed article in their Dev Zone explaining how to set up Zend Server on an A2 Hosting VPS. You can view that tutorial here: http://devzone.zend.com/2957/zend-server-6-a2hosting/   If you want to learn more about how Zend Server can help you get the most out of your PHP applications, check out the Zend Server page at http://www.zend.com/en/products/server/.

It seems like everything I write about or talk to our customers about these days is our SSD Hosting and how pages load up to 300% faster on our solid state drives compared to standard hard drives. Many of our Web Hosting customers have already made the switch to our SSDs. If you're one of the customers who have switched or you're still considering, we're now offering a free, site speed boosting tool called Railgun for our Prime+SSD customers that you're going to love! Railgun was released by CloudFlare, the same company who we've partnered with to bring you a free content delivery network (CDN). As you may know, CloudFlare's CDN automatically serves content from servers closest to a website's visitors. Cloudflare optimized sites can see pages load up to 200% faster. If you haven't turned on CloudFlare yet, you can do so in right in your cPanel control panel. While CloudFlare automatically caches 65% of the resources needed to make up a web page, the other 35% of resources are unable to be cached. They are either dynamically generated or marked "do not cache". The remaining 35% is often the initial HTML of the page that has to be downloaded first. This is where Railgun comes in handy, by speeding up the remaining 35%. Railgun users will experience up to 143% faster HTML load times. How does it work? The markup of websites doesn't change often from one request to the next. Instead of transferring the entire request between CloudFlare and your server, Railgun only transfers changes in markup from one request to the next. This cuts down on transfer time and your overall page load time. Railgun caches these differences in memory so page processing is as fast as possible. As a CloudFlare Optimized partner, we're able to offer you Railgun for free at A2 Hosting! You only need our Prime+SSD package. Once you've purchased a Prime+SSD package or after you request your upgrade in a Sales ticket, just ask our team to turn on Railgun for your site. If you're not already a CloudFlare user, you will need to turn i

You had a great idea for an online business. You built your website, but it didn't take off like you had imagined. You need to get the word out! This can be stressful and scary, especially if you're not working with much of an ad budget. I understand! If you're a small fish in a big pond, you might even wonder how you can break through all the noise of your competition. You can! 1. Define Your Brand Before you do anything, you need to differentiate yourself from the competition. What sets you apart? You may think your product is simple, but your one defining factor could be the difference between a sale and non-sale. A fun exercise is looking around a grocery store and trying to figure out how seemingly homogeneous products differentiate themselves from competitors. Go to the deodorant aisle and determine the brand identity for each brand. Are they selling on performance? Are they selling on attraction to the opposite sex? Are they selling based on the way you apply it? 2. Define Your Audience Now that you know who you are, you need to determine who you are selling to. If you closed your eyes and envisioned your average customer, what are the characteristics of that person. Before you determine where to spend your time and money, you need to determine who you're targeting. This should be fairly easy to determine if you've spoken to any customers or potential customers. 3. Define Your Keywords I speak to a lot of people who say that they do not rank well in the search engines for the keywords they're targeting. I ask them which keywords they're targeting, and 9 out of 10 times they aren't even using those keywords on their site or they're using very broad ones that their huge competitors dominate on. Don't try to compete for "travel agency". You've defined your audience, where are they? They're probably looking for a local travel agency so focus on ranking well for "Michigan travel agency" or even more niche terms like "Orange County Travel Agency". 4. Define Your Ad Plan If you only have

Our solid state drive (SSD) Hosting has attracted a lot of attention since we launched it last month. Our SSDs do load pages up to 300% faster compared to standard hard drives after all. Would you like to try out our SSD Hosting? It's your lucky month then! During March we're raffling off two, annual Prime+SSD accounts! That's a $131.88 value! To enter: Visit our SSD Contest page. Click the "Like" button if you aren't already a fan of our Facebook page and enter your email address into the email field. You may be asked to automatically add the Sweepstakes app if you're not already using it. That's it! You're entered. You can add a new entry each day during March! After each entry, you'll be given the option to share the contest on Facebook and Twitter. For each person you get to sign up, you'll get an additional entry into the contest! If you already have a Web Hosting account, we'll quickly migrate your account to an SSD for free and credit your account for a full year of hosting. Already have a Prime+SSD account? We'll credit your account for a full year.

Has it already been a year since we won the fight against PIPA and SOPA? Another similar bill called CISPA has recently re-appeared. If this bill is passed, Internet companies and websites would be required to collect private information of their users and pass them onto the government upon request. It would also allow the government to use that information for matters that have nothing to do with cyber security. We won't mince words; we are wholeheartedly against CISPA! We highly recommend that you contact your U.S. Senators and U.S. Representative to let them now how you feel about CISPA.

If you've followed the world of JavaScript development at all over the past few years, chances are you've heard the term closure thrown around a lot. You may have some idea of what it means; chances are you associate it with anonymous functions treated as first class citizens, but you may not feel you have the definition nailed down. The good news is, you're on the right track.   The one sentence explanation is this; closures are functions which have access to the environment in which they are created. That means, when a function is created inside of another function, then returned outside of it, it still knows about the values of the variables within the function that created it. Clear as mud right?   Let's illustrate it with some JavaScript:   var foo = function spawn_a_closure () {   var enclosed_variable = 'something';   var my_closure = function () {     if(enclosed_variable === 'something') { return true; }     return false;   }   setTimeout(function () { enclosed_variable = 'something else'; }, 5000);   return my_closure; } So what does that code do? Well as the function names indicate, it creates a closure and returns it. Because of the special nature of closures, it will return true for 5 seconds until our setTimeout function runs, and the closure will return false thereafter. The closure is special because it has access to the value of enclosed_variable even though we've left the scope of that function. The closure still has reference to it because of the special nature of closures. So it not only remembers the value of that variable at the time the closure was created, it has access to it and knows when that variable is later changed by our setTimeout function.  If you'd like to test that code you can copy and paste it into the your browser's JavaScript console and then invoke foo repeatedly (by entering foo(); on the console) and you will see it return true for 5 seconds then switch over to false.   This is just the simplest illustration of a closure. There are amazing, p

We always strive to provide the most up-to-date information to our customers when we experience a server issue, maintenance, or any other event that may cause a disruption to services. To help make it easier to stay on top of our service notification, A2 Hosting has launched @a2hosting_alert - a Twitter account specifically used to notify you of service-related events. The account will automatically tweet any notifications issued by our support staff, as well as any subsequent updates to the event. You can receive these messages in your Twitter feed by following @a2hosting_alert. Our main Twitter account @a2hosting is still active and will remain our primary point of communication for messages that are not service related. We will also continue to post all of our service notifications on our website at https://my.a2hosting.com/serverstatus.php.

According to recent estimates, over 570 new websites are created every minute. Even the most unique sites have competitors. That's why your website's performance is more important than ever. Remember, your website visitors are not patient. You can have an enormous advertising budget to drive traffic to your site, but if your site is slow, your visitors are just going to hit their back button to find a competing site. There are a ton of articles about what you can do to speed up your site. I've read a lot of these articles. Unfortunately they can get pretty complicated and I just don't have the skill set to do what they suggest. This is not one of those articles. One of the reasons we launched our SSD Hosting service in January was because it provided an easy way for everyone to boost your site's performance. After all, our performance tests have shown that pages load up to 300% faster on our solid state drives compared to standard hard drives. Even fully optimized sites will see a significant speed boost by hosting on an SSD. Aside from the obvious decision to switch to hosting on a solid state drive (submit a ticket if you're ready to switch), here are 5 tips anyone can use to speed up a site. 1.) Resize Your Images Resizing your images is one of the easiest ways to optimize the speed of your site. Yes, most website software will let you scale down a larger version of an image into a smaller one when you upload it. The problem is that it's the large image, not the small one you see on your site, getting downloaded every time your page is loaded. Make sure to scale down your images to the size you want them to appear on your site before uploading them. 2.) Fix Your Broken Links Don't you hate it when you go to a website, click on a link and instead of getting the information you want, you get one of those annoying 404 error pages? Yes it's annoying. So don't put your visitors through it! Fixing your broken links won't necessarily speed up your site, but it will get your visitors from point A to p

Are you one of those people who hit the snooze button 10 times before getting up in the morning because you dread going into work? If so, we're truly sorry to hear that, but we have wonderful news; we're looking for new Guru Crew members! Over the years we have consistently posted on job boards and classifieds, but surprisingly we've never really tried to recruit members of the A2 Hosting Community. Why? Honestly, I have no clue. Our community is amazing so we're bound to find some amazing candidates. We have a number of open positions that you may be interested in. Also, if you know someone looking for a career, we would greatly appreciate you letting them know about our openings. Most of our positions allow you to telecommute so you don't have to be located near Ann Arbor, MI (though we do request our Systems Engineers be located in Southeast, Michigan). So are you ready for a career, not just a job? Fill out our application! Our staff could reach out to you about working at A2 Hosting.

At A2 Hosting, we've always said we want to provide hosting to our customers that we would want to use ourselves. Our solid state drive (SSD) Hosting falls right in line with this initiative. This is especially true since we use SSDs ourselves. What's the big deal about SSDs? Our performance tests show page-load speeds are up to 300% faster on SSDs compared to normal hard drives. It’s no secret that your site’s speed has a direct impact on everything from your sales and page views to overall visitor happiness. In fact, market research company the Aberdeen Group ran some tests to see how a 1-second page delay will impact a website. Their findings found that this delay caused a: 7% decrease in your conversion rate 16% decrease in visitor satisfaction 11% fewer page views These stats are very telling, and they don't even get into another important benefit of boosting your site's speed, SEO. So the question really isn't why you should care about SSD hosting. The question is how could you not? If you've worked hard on your site and are going to spend your time and money to drive traffic to it, give it a speed boost with our new solid state drives. Ready to move your site to a brand new SSD drive? SSD Hosting is available on our Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, VPS Hosting and Managed VPS Hosting. Contact our sales staff for more information on moving to an SSD server. Do you know someone who has slow hosting? Tell them about our SSDs! Make sure to send them your A2 Hosting Refer-A-Friend link. When they sign up for a new account, you'll earn a $50 hosting credit. We've also added buttons in My A2 Hosting that make it easier than ever to post your Refer-A-Friend link to Twitter and Facebook.

You likely already use Solid State or Flash memory every day in your smart phone and/or tablet. Today's smart TVs or Blu-Ray players also tend to have a bit of Flash memory. It's faster and more reliable than traditional Hard Drives because there's no moving parts. More and more laptops are coming with a Solid State Drive in addition to or in lieu of a traditional Hard Disk Drive.   When we built the server for our new website last year, we decided to try an experiment and use SSDs instead of HDDs. We expected it to be faster, but were blown away by just how great it was to work on that server. Any kind of file operations, tar, cp, find, etc. were amazingly fast. Even simple operations like ls which we are used to being responsive on a HDD based system were noticeably faster.   The difference is not limited to when you're working on the server, it's appreciable for your users too. A website on running on SSDs is extremely fast and responsive. Sure the most popular pages and resources are kept cached in memory, but it's not realistic or necessary to keep the entire site in memory. But with SSDs, no matter what data the server needs it's instantly available. This is compounded on a shared server where memory is the main limited resource. Increased storage speed means everyone's sites load incredibly quickly, even if yours is one with lower traffic that doesn't stay in cache for long.   Once we made the move to SSD based servers, I don't think we can go back. Try it out for yourself and I bet you'll agree.

2011 was the year of the Panda; Google penalizing sites with thin content and ultimately encouraging all website owners to publish high-quality content. 2012 was the year of the Penguin; Google penalized sites who were violating their Quality Guidelines with link schemes and other fishy link building activities. Will Google unleash a major update named after another one of my favorite animals in 2013? Stay tuned! What I have done is read through a number of predictions from SEO experts to compile a list of 10 of the most popular SEO predictions (and few of my own) for 2013.   A potential sneak peak of what to expect in 2013:   Content, content content. Quality content is already king and its importance will only continue to grow in 2013. Thanks primarily to the organic exposureGoogle Authorship can provide to a content site, more and more online content writers will begin to use Google+. Google will develop ways to delay their organic search ranking updates, making it more difficult for search engine spammers to correlate which of their black hat activities are having the greatest impact on their rankings. As inbound linking becomes more difficult and we all need to be more careful about our SEO activities, we'll start to see a lot more SEO auditing services to make sure we won't get bitten by the Penguin. Google will address the increase in "not provided" keywords reported by Analytics and provide a way to obtain this valuable data once again. This is more of a wish of mine, but seems like a reasonable request especially for AdWords users. If this prediction doesn't come true, I can foresee web analytics solutions becoming more and more inaccurate. Guest posting will become more and more popular. Likewise, search engines will become more vigilant in cracking down on spammy guest posting sites. Link baiting and earning links with useful content will become the norm, as we start to see link building begin to fade away. More and more link farms will begin to finally disappea

Password strength requirements are increasing. Please inform all email users on your account. As part of our Perpetual Security program, we have increased password strength requirements. When you change your password, a minimum password strength of 50 is required. Starting Monday, we will also check all logins against a dictionary. Passwords that are too simple such as ‘password’ or ‘123456’ will be changed to a random string during the login and the email administrator for the account must set a new password to regain access. An email will be sent whenever an email password is changed by this program. Follow the instructions in our KB article to change passwords in advance of the new requirements. https://my.a2hosting.com/knowledgebase.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=886 During testing, we found these simple passwords to be used primarily on addresses like info@yourdomain.com and other addresses that are not typically assigned to individuals, so this change is likely to cause little disruption for most email users. This change does not prevent any account from receiving mail. It only safeguards email accounts from sending by unauthorized users. By increasing password security there will be less abuse of easily accessed accounts by spammers and reduced chance of your server getting on a block list. We are sure you will agree that is a result worth the effort. Thank you for your cooperation in making your server more secure and ensuring reliable email delivery. Best Regards, A2 Hosting Support

Since A2 Hosting's launch in 2003, we have offered hosting in a single data center location (Southfield Michigan). We're excited to announce the launch of our European server location in our new Reykjavik, Iceland data center. Our Iceland data center puts websites and content closer to users with primarily European website visitors. In addition to providing enhanced site performance, A2 Hosting's Iceland data center is one of the most eco-friendly data-centers in the world. This 100% green data center uses a natural free cooling technology that pulls in outside air into its cooling unit so no carbon footprint is made! Our Web Hosting, VPS Hosting and Managed VPS Hosting products are each available in the European data center. Just select Reykjavik Iceland as your server location from our order form. If you're a current A2 Hosting customer interested in moving your site to our European data center, just submit a Sales Ticket. We can provide more details on how to move your account to our new European data center.