When people of similar interests meet, they often trade suggestions. For example, when two book lovers engage in conversation, one would almost immediately ask the other if he/she has read a certain title from a genre they both enjoy. If not, then a suggestion might be given to check it out.

That’s very similar to how backlinks work – they are simply recommendations given by other websites. To put that into better perspective, let’s just say you published an article on your book blog about your experience reading the first Harry Potter book. Let’s say that another book blog or book-centric site picked up on it and wrote a post that mentioned your piece and included a link. That’s what we call a backlink. And if that backlink comes from a reputable source, it could be very valuable to your site.

A few months ago, we first introduced you to VPS (virtual private servers) on our blog. Today, we’ll be discussing whether it’s time to consider moving from a shared hosting plan to VPS.

Back in April, we first wrote about using Category pages in WordPress. We did not, however, explain the difference between the Category and Tag features. On the surface, the function of “categories” and “tags” may seem very similar. And for the most part they actually are. After all, both features are used to organize blogs by grouping posts of a certain theme together. But where do the similarities end? Is there ever a time to use one without the other?

Your website can help your business grow. That’s why it’s important to make sure you’re getting your website in front of the right viewers – as many of them as possible. Search engine optimization (SEO) has become a huge topic of discussion online because it does just that.

While SEO is a very proactive, forward-thinking effort, it can still be applied to existing (and even outdated!) web content to help get your site garner more positive attention in search engine results pages. For example, think about your company blog. Even if you or your team isn’t updating as frequently as you should, what you already have can still be used to your benefit. You may be sitting on a gold mine! Today, we’re going to show you 8 ways you can use your existing blog posts (or any page, really) to improve your site’s SEO.

Back in March, we first brought up the topic of server monitoring on our blog. In our initial post we explained how server monitoring works, identified some common monitoring metrics and explained who can benefit from it. To build off of that initial introduction to server monitoring, today we will discuss 5 server monitoring best practices to help you protect your website, email, data, application, or whatever else you may be housing on your server.

Have you ever tried to send an email but had it rejected or returned? This is called “bounce.” Email bounce is when you try to send a message but the recipient’s server rejects your mail. This can be especially frustrating for businesses, as email marketing can be an incredibly effective (and cost-effective!) way to attract new customers. There are several reasons your emails may bounce, which we will get into later. Let’s start by explaining the 2 primary types of bounce.

Last November, we created a post showing you how to optimize your images for the web. One of the steps was to compress all JPEG image files to smaller sizes – that way they wouldn’t have such a drain on your website’s load time. Today we’re going to discuss a couple of easy ways anyone can easily do just that.

Email Account Security Update

Several of our customers have reported experiencing issues with one of our Webmail platforms – more specifically Horde – over the last few days.

These issues have ranged from not being able to log in at all, not being able to access your address book, and/or not being able to delete items from your inbox.

If you’re looking for ways to get more out of your website, you should try applying search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. It’s a great way to help new visitors discover your site by improving your rank in search engine queries. Imagine being found by people looking for content that you already have on your site. They’re going to love it! Consequently, there’s a good chance they’re going to love you. Today, we’re going to discuss 7 Browser Tools for SEO and how they can help you improve your site’s rank.

At HostandStore, we’re huge fans of WordPress. In fact, we strongly advocate moving your site to WordPress. Today we will help you get started using this fantastic CMS yourself. We created this post to serve as a beginner’s guide to getting started with the WordPress dashboard. We hope you will use this guide as a resource to familiarize yourself with the platform so that you can become comfortable enough to start using it for your own site!