The Important Contribution of Small Business [Infographic]

Scalable Cloud Servers Free Trial

You’ve been thinking about moving away from in-house physical servers to cloud servers. It’s the amount of grief involved in making the move and the potential cost that has you spooked. You don’t really need a supercomputer to run your business. You’d just like to have the advantages of elasticity and pay as you go pricing. Is that a reasonable thing to ask?

You bet it is! Before you get into a contract with one of the larger cloud services companies, have a look at scalable cloud servers perfect for small and medium business applications, as well as larger corporations. This particular service offers per second billing, the ability to pay only for what you use, free setup, no contract commitments and... there’s a free trial available.

Talk about low risk. Here’s your opportunity to get into cloud computing without a lot of fuss and bother and without committing to something that you’re not sure will work for you. There’s no big learning curve involved, either. These Windows and Linux cloud servers work like physical servers you are already familiar with. Have you spent years running your servers using cPanel and WHM? You can still manage them using CPanel/WHM. You’ll be able to turn up cPanel/WHM-ready cloud servers in a matter of seconds. That’s a lot faster than you could install the software if you were sitting right next to a server in your facility.

What sort of features are available with these scalable cloud servers? You’ll get full root/administrative access and the ability to build, test and deploy servers instantly. Your data is backed up nightly. This is not an oversold service, like some VPS (Virtual Private Servers). You get guaranteed CPU cycles and can burst higher when more cycles are available. If you wish to control your cloud servers programmatically, you can use the RESTful API that is available to control cloud servers.

The company that offers these cloud servers, Atlantic.Net, operates state of the art SSAE 16 (SOC 1) Type II (formerly SAS 70) certified data centers. They are secure, fireproof and climate controlled with multiple direct connections to the Internet. Backup power ensures that your servers will always be running. This is no idle claim. The SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a 100% Uptime SLA that includes 100% network uptime, 100% hardware replacement and 100% infrastructure uptime, all with money back guarantees. The cloud itself is designed for high throughput and low latency, running at 40 Gigabits per second. There are multiple nationwide data centers located in New York, Chicago, Orlando, Dallas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

You are probably wondering about pricing. It starts at 1.3 cents per hour or $9.49 a month for the smallest server with 256 MB RAM, 10 GB disk, a 2.4 GHz Xeon processor and a 10 Mbps network connection. It goes up from there, of course. The largest server has 16 GB of RAM, 4 x 2.4 GHz Xeon processors 750 GB of disk storage and a 70 Mbps network connection.

Cloud servers offer the benefits of owning your own server without the commitment of buying the hardware, maintaining it, paying for power and environmental controls, upgrading software and then going out to buy more when you run out of capacity. You know that can take days or weeks instead of the seconds it takes to turn up another cloud server.

Are you at least curious if cloud services are a better approach than the legacy techniques of operating in-house physical servers? Get a free trial of scalable cloud servers and give it a try before you make a final decision. Remember, even after you order one or more cloud servers, you can shut them down at any time and pay only for what you’ve used to date. It’s like having a massive data center all to yourself without having to pay for the infrastructure.

Try Social Media Marketing Services Free

You’re aware of all the buzz surrounding social media marketing (SMM). You no doubt already have Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts for your business. Yet, you have that nagging feeling that you really should be able to make this new form of online marketing work a lot better than it does now. Perhaps all you need is a little bit of the right help.

Grosocial is a Utah based company that specializes in helping businesses create more effective social media presences. Their tools are used by thousands of companies worldwide to find new customers through social networking platforms and convert those relationships into higher revenue.

Perhaps the most interesting service that Grosocial offers is an online tool called “Customizer.” This is a drag-and-drop page editor for Facebook. Rather than settle for what Facebook provides and everyone else uses, why not stand out in the crowd with something that looks and works completely different? Let’s take a look as some of the ways you can customize your social media marketing.

Start with dynamic forms. Pick from basic form fields, checkboxes, radio buttons and drop down lists. Use these to collect names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses or whatever else would be useful in engaging a potential customer. These form widgets let help you generate more leads that you can today or schedule appointments or gather promotional entries.

Next incorporate other social media on your page with like and follow buttons or Twitter feeds, YouTube videos and more. Once again, these social tools are set up to be simple drag and drop operations. No software required.

Are you happy with the way your Facebook tabs work today? Boooorinnngggg. Put some zip in them with over 70 fonts, buttons, gradients and shapes for that professional appearance and visitor appeal. Go ahead and add slideshows, your own logos, photos and other images. Need more graphics than you have now? Us the provided image gallery for backgrounds, headers, banners, footers and other ready-to-use professional images. You may not need to engage a graphic designer at all.

Expand your promotions and make them more viral using sharing oriented features like reveal tabs, digital downloads, production listings and a promotion widget.

How do you know if any of this is really working? End results will be a sure indicator, but sometimes these promotional efforts take a while to reach fruition. No need to be stuck in the dark meanwhile. Use the Customizer analytics to see which tabs are working and which ones aren’t You can track hits, page views, who shared your tab, when they shared it and how often it was shared, plus number of “likes”, form submissions and other key data. Peruse online or export the data for further analysis.

Does all of this have you thinking that maybe your Facebook tabs could be doing a better job for your business? If so, this would be a good time to start a free 30 day trial of the GroSocial Customizer. No credit card is needed and you can get going right now. If, and only if, you really like how it works, then go ahead and sign up for the subscription service at a very reasonable cost. It’s a good way to improve your social media marketing without making a major investment.

Backup Your Gmail and Google Apps While You Can

More and more of us are using Gmail and other Google applications for business. It’s an easy entree into the cloud and the price is right. But what happens when something goes horribly, horribly wrong? Oops! You’re out of luck.

Oh, what can go wrong? I’ll tell you what can go wrong real easy. You’re cleaning up your email and just start deleting them as fast as you can. Oh, no, there was some valuable contact information in some of those. Now they’re gone for good, aren’t they?

Not necessarily. Not if you have your Gmail backed up. You do know how to backup your Gmail, don’t you? You just... Oh, wait. Google doesn’t give you that feature. You need a special service like Backupify to backup your Google Mail data.

What services are backed up? They include Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Contacts and Google Sites. What this service does is create automated daily backups with one-click restore. The account administrator can also initiate a backup at any time. What’s more, an admin can also export all the data in a user’s account. That’s handy when employees are leaving and you want to keep the data but not the Google Apps account itself. You may also just want to bring your cloud data in locally to work on it or have a “belt and suspenders” approach to maintaining backup copies.

How long is your data retained? Indefinitely, by default. You do have the option to set a retention period to match company policy.

You’re probably wondering just how secure this third-party backup system really is. All communications are over encrypted channels, typically 256 bit SSL. The data in the archives is encrypted at AES-256 or higher using a randomly generated AES256 bit key unique to each user. All the user AES keys are also encrypted with a master RSA-2048 private key.

Your data isn’t just being backed up to any old data center, either. This service uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon offers an enormous and proven set of cloud computing services. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Amazon S3 is used as a cloud to backup the cloud. Amazon S3 is ISO 27001 and PCI DSS Level 1 certified.

Do you really like the way Google applications work but are a bit uncomfortable not having an independent backup for your business needs? Now you can have just that with ample storage and a very modest monthly cost per user per month. Best of all, there’s a 15 day free trial available so you can see if this service is right for you before you make it a part of your business routine.

Customer Service Using Clouds and Social Networks

Customer service can make or break a company. You’ve heard how it is so much cheaper to keep an existing customer than get a new one. You’ve no doubt also heard how good customer experiences amount to free positive advertising for your company. On the other hand, one frustrated customer can do a lot of damage, especially these days when social networks make it easy to spread the venom.

Here’s the carrot and stick. Create an excellent customer service system for your company and you’ll be rewarded. Do a crummy job and you’ll be punished royally in the marketplace. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to take the high road in customer service. What you are seeking is a ready-to-go, easy-to-use customer support system that integrates the new social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, along with traditional contact methods like email and toll free numbers. Here it is, take a look...



Does this sound like the type of system you’ve been wishing you had someone to develop? Forget paying the big bucks for a proprietary in-house system. Assistly has already done the heavy development lifting and is ready to go to work in your organization. Not so sure? No problem. Take the Assistly free trial offer and see if works for you. There’s no commitment. You don’t even need a credit card. Give it a go for 30 days and then see if you can bear the thought of giving up the best customer service tool you’ve ever used.

Assistly is fond of saying that they aren’t just about satisfying customers, but wowing them. That’s the new paradigm is an economy stuck in the doldrums. When business is booming, there’s more than enough for everyone and customers come to accept so-so service. These days customers know that their dollars are valuable and vendors are plentiful for just about anything they want to buy. If you want to stand out and be sought out by prospects and repeat customers, you need some special magic. Where better to sprinkle the magic dust than in the one part of your company that interacts the most with potential and current customers?

Assistly has a fair number of well known and respected businesses on-board with their cloud-based customer service system. Can you really afford to blow off the potential for something that can really goose your sales when they’ll let you try it a month for free? If you sell anything to the public and aren’t already thrilled with your customer service results, take a closer look at what Assistly has to offer your business.

Cloud Hosting With a Free Trial

You’ve been keeping an eye on the cloud computing phenomena for a long time. You’re thinking that it might be something that could benefit your business. Still, you're reluctant to put forth the cost, effort and commitment to give it a try. Now there’s an opportunity that might be just what you need. It’s a free trial of cloud hosting to get you started.

One easy way to get your toe into cloud services is to start with cloud hosting. Why cloud hosting? It’s a logical upgrade for a operation that has outgrown shared hosting solutions and is looking at VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and dedicated servers. The beauty of the cloud is that it offers you a flexibility and cost advantage over competing ways to host your web sites.

VPS and dedicated web servers are popular because you don’t need to make capital purchases and provide support and connectivity they way you do with running your own data center. They are one step up from the intermediate solution of colocation hosting, where you move your equipment to a public data center. The limitation of VPS and dedicated servers is that you pay a monthly fee for a bundle of resources. If you find that you have over or underestimated your requirements, you can generally upgrade or downgrade over the course of days, weeks or months.

Getting the resources right is a tricky proposition. If you order too little in the way of disk space, processing or bandwidth, you can find yourself watching hopelessly as a huge surge of viral traffic gets stopped cold by your overloaded website. The potential loss of sales can be far in excess of your monthly hosting fees. So what do you do? Take your chances or over-provision? Having all the resources you need will protect against traffic surges, but the rest of the time you are just paying to watch the disks spin.

Worse, yet, is having the type of site with wide variations in traffic and sales. You may find that your needs follow a seasonal, weekly or even daily pattern. Or perhaps no pattern at all. That’s especially true if you are a startup with the next killer app, but you don’t really know when it is going to take off or to what extent.

These are the kind of problems that cloud hosting is designed for. The cloud is a virtual environment with massive resources hidden just out of sight. If you need another server, you don’t wait for a technician to come around with a screwdriver and mount another one in your rack. You simply go to your control panel and deploy one or more in a matter of seconds. Things getting too quiet? Cancel your excess capacity and you won’t be paying for it anymore.

Atlantic.net has been providing hosting solutions since 1994 and operates a SAS 70 Type II platform that can handle large as well as modest requirements. They are making a splash in the cloud services field by setting up a system that makes it easy for just about anyone to get into cloud hosting quickly and easily.

You have your choice of Windows or Linux servers that can be deployed in less than a minute. Scale up or down in seconds, not next month. Flexible hourly billing starts at just 1.5 cents per hour and you pay only for what you use. There’s an API to control cloud servers programmability and you can add cPanel and WHM control panels to any cloud server for easy and familiar administration.

What’s your commitment level? There are no commitments, contracts or setup fees. You can cancel your servers at any time. Your data is backed-up nightly and the self-healing redundant infrastructure with automatic failover ensures availability. In fact, this cloud service comes with a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Does this sound like the kind of hosting that would work well for your company? Well, don’t go sign any contracts or make any commitments elsewhere until you give cloud hosting a try for free. You’ll wonder why you didn’t head to the cloud sooner.

Try Toll Free Service FREE For 14 Days

Most toll free number services are structured as pay-as-you-go. In other words, you pay for each incoming call by the minute. Often there is also a small monthly fee to maintain the service. An alternate approach enjoyed by many users of i800 Toll Free Service is to simply pay one fixed monthly fee regardless of how many toll free calls come in.

The advantage of unlimited toll free number service is that you can budget for this telephone service and know what your costs will be each month. It’s $49. For that you get to select your number from a collection of 800,866, 877 and 888 toll free numbers that are already set up and ready to use. You publish this number where it makes sense. Customers and prospective clients will call at no charge to them, which makes it more likely that they’ll pick up the phone. This is especially valuable for catalog sales, customer service and recruiting efforts.

Here’s some even better news. You can try the i800 Toll Free Service from iTeleCenter for 14 days without charge. How many telephone services will let you do that? Just attempt it with a cell phone company and listen to them scream with laughter until they point at the contract and demand signature before your phone will even work. There’s no contract to sign with i800, even after the 14 day trial period. You keep the number and the service as long as you care to pay the $49 monthly fee.

That $49 is all-inclusive. There are no surcharges, hidden fees, activation fees or per minute charges. No extra fees for features, either. You’ll get an auto attendant or main greeting, voicemail to email or text, multiple extension mailboxes, online faxing, follow me call forwarding and over 30 additional features. This is a full-featured toll free service that has everything you need to make toll free service work for your small business.

I should mention that the unlimited plan does have a fair usage provision. If you exceed 1,000 minutes per month over a 30 day period, those extra minutes will be billed at 4.9 cents per minute. This shouldn’t be a problem unless you are trying to run a large call center. This service is designed for small businesses and expects to meet their inbound toll free needs well within the rules of fair usage. If you do happen to have success beyond your wildest dreams, that 4.9 cents per minute overage is still the cheapest toll free cost you’re likely to find.