In April, several members of the HostandStore.com team traveled to Austin to take part in a digital marketing conference called Pubcon. It’s important to us to attend conferences where we can learn from experts because we ultimately hope to share that knowledge with you. We are far more than a hosting company, so it’s important that we stay up to date on what’s going on in digital marketing.

After all, that is a key part of learning SEO or any other aspect of digital marketing. Pubcon was an opportunity for us to hear from many of the industry’s leading experts. So what did we learn? It’s hard to sum up such a useful event in a single blog post, but we’ve narrowed down six key takeaways that we believe can help each and every person that reads this post.

File storage is something everyone needs. Being able to keep up with data, media, documents, etc. is a critical part of daily life – especially at work. Using servers for file storage has become increasingly popular. We’ve written before about the many ways servers can be used. In this post, we’ll explain why these file servers are becoming more and more the norm.

If you’ve paid much attention to what’s been going on in the hosting world, you’ve probably heard about virtual private servers, or VPS for short. VPS are a popular type of server that many advanced webmasters and network administrators use to power their sites and applications.

There are many ways businesses and individuals use servers. In most of these cases, this involves storing a tremendous amount of data – some of which is probably not intended for public knowledge. Many servers also power business websites, email platforms and even applications. Regardless of how a server is being used, unauthorized access to that server is no laughing matter. That’s why we’ve put together this list of 10 ways to help keep your server safe.

Everyone knows the old cliché, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” For centuries, people have used illustrations to tell stories visually. In more recent history, cameras have enabled us to capture still images in photographs. Now, images are having a tremendous impact on the web as well. Images are used to gain readers’ attention, to help narrate a story, to reinforce a point and to provide additional information. They create strong impressions and can be used to supplement content at any level. They can even be added to emails to improve engagement.

When servers work as expected, no one notices that they’re there. The minute a server stops fulfilling its duty, it can seem like the sky is falling. Many businesses – especially small businesses – live and die by the performance of their servers. That’s why choosing the right server and the appropriate configuration is so important.

Servers should be reliable, obviously. Business owners should also expect their servers to be secure, efficient and scalable. Secure servers protect company data and can regulate many business functions. Efficient server utilization helps keep costs where they should be. Scalable servers enable businesses to grow into themselves and can also help with daily operation. They’re there to help the business, not disrupt it.

The term domain name has been around since the beginning of the internet.

A domain name is the unique identifier given to a website or a server. The domain name points to the exact location that a website’s files are located. Without domain names, we would be typing addresses like “99.99.99.99” rather than “www.HostandStore.com” or “Google.com” every time we needed to navigate to a particular website.

A server is technically a piece of software that is capable of accepting requests and responding accordingly. Many people know a server to be the computer that the server software is actually running on. Throughout this article, we’ll be referring to the software – not the computer itself.

The “cloud” is amazing. Its very existence makes many new technologies possible. It also helps older technology operate more efficiently. Whether you realize it or not, the cloud is already making your life easier.

We recently published an article explaining the “Cloud.” While we explained what the “Cloud” is, we did not go into much detail about how it is actually used. This post will explain some common ways you’re probably already using the cloud, as promised in our previous article.

This is what you see when you Google “what is open-source?”

What Do We Think Open-Source Means?

This is a perfectly fine definition for explaining open-source software, but it is fairly vague. There is more to open-source than many people realize.

To be able to call your software open source, there are several requirements. Here is a list of some of the most important ones.