We’ve Partnered with McAfee!

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We have been working behind the scenes with McAfee to start a new partnership. With this partnership we are able to offer our customers something that has never been offered by McAfee before. All of our customers can now get McAfee Secure for their websites absolutely free. This is a completely free lite version of McAfee Secure which will give you access to their website security seal, website scanner, and more.

Next time you log in to your cPanel you’ll see an icon for McAfee Secure located under the “Software & Services” section. Simply click on the icon, choose which website you’d like to add McAfee Secure to, and McAfee will test the security of your site. Once they’ve tested the security of your site and your site is certified, the certification trustmark will automatically display on your website for up to 500 visitors per month.

mcafee secure

mcafee secureSo, what does McAfee secure actually do for your website? It lets your visitors know that your website is safe by displaying a trustmark in the bottom right corner of your website. When the visitor hovers over this trustmark it will show them that your website is McAfee Secure certified and has no malware, phishing, or any other malicious content.

Adding McAfee Secure to your website will benefit both you and your visitors. It gives you the peace of mind in knowing that there is a product working behind the scenes to make sure that your website has no malicious content on it. If, by chance, something does happen to your website you will be notified so that it can be fixed immediately.

Not only that, but McAfee Secure will also allow you to:

  • Become Secure: Get weekly security screenings from the world’s largest dedicated security company, and then tell your visitors about it.
  • Drive Your Engagement: Easing security concerns will mean a reduced bounce rate and increased visitor usage of your site.
  • Increase Conversions: With McAfee SECURE Lite, visitors spend more time doing more things on your site—and that ultimately means more sales.

The best part of all? McAfee Secure Lite is absolutely free! This can be added to your website at no cost to you, and will display the trustmark to up to 500 visitors each month. Next time you log in to your cPanel go ahead and add McAfee Secure Lite and see how it can benefit your website.

Today is World Backup Day

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Today, March 31st, is world backup day. While most people tend not to back up their data as much as they should (myself included), today is an important reminder that at any time disaster can strike, and having a backup could mean the difference between an easy restore and hours, perhaps days of rebuilding a website.

Allow me to share a quick personal story. Last week, I was working on one of my personal websites. I was doing some account maintenance, which included deleting some old FTP accounts that I had created through cPanel. The problem was that I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what I was doing, and during the deleting process I selected the option for deleting the account AND all of the files in the folder for that account.

Oops. A whole website gone in the blink of an eye. The worst part is that I had no backup. Thankfully for me it’s a WordPress website and all of the posts and pages are stored in the database which remained on the account, but all of my template customization, images, plugin data, everything else was gone. It’s taken me over a week to recover and I’m still not there yet.

The moral of the story is if you value your website at all, I urge you to reconsider how often you take your backups. It’s also important to keep these backups off of your hosting account. Say, for example, multiple hard drives fail on a server. We have safe measures and redundancies in place on our servers to try and mitigate data loss, but sometimes there is no revering from hard drive failure. When this is the case, if you kept your backup on the same storage that failed, that backup is also gone.

To encourage everyone to partake in taking backups more regularly we are offering our backup on demand service for 50% off it’s regular price. If you order using the promo code backup50 you can get it for $9.97 for a year. Just Click Here to log in and order it on your account.

Introducing MetroMail Secure Email

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secure emailAs the internet becomes a bigger part of our lives so does the need to secure our online worlds. One of the things that people neglect most is the security of their email accounts. With that in mind we have launched a new secure email service called MetroMail Secure Email, which will help protect you in several ways.

MetroMail Secure Email is designed to protect you from hackers, spammers, identity thieves, and more. It also protects your email from being scanned by free email providers like Google and Yahoo who sell the information to companies so they can advertise based on your email contents.

Over the next few days we will release posts with more details on how each of these features work, but the short of it is that MetroMail Secure Email protects you from:

  • Email Spoofing
  • Spam Emails
  • Identity Theft
  • Viruses, Trojans, etc
  • Phishing Attempts
  • And More

Not only does MetroMail secure email protect you from threats, it is also a great way to stand out from the Gmail and Yahoo crowd. You can have personalized email addresses for you, your family, your friends, coworkers, and anyone else you can think of. It’s also a great way to enhance your business by showing your customers that you take yourself seriously as a brand.

Stay tuned for most posts as we cover just how much MetroMail secure email can protect and enhance your online world.

How new TLDs can enhance your brand

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new tldsI hope you all had a happy and healthy holidays and are gearing up for a great 2015. For today’s post I want to discuss the new TLDs that are being offered by every registrar (including us) and how they can help you strengthen your brand.

TLDs (short for Top Level Domains) are what you see at the end of your domain name. You’ll recognize the most popular ones like .com, .net, .org, and so on. These generic TLDs have been around forever and are a great starting point for any online business. With the introduction and release of new, vanity TLDs, you can take your business to the next level.

There are over 300 new TLDs available right now, and a total of over 2,000 are in the works down the road. With these new TLDs becoming available it means that you can secure a domain name that you couldn’t have done with the more popular ones. Say, for example, your name is Joe and you run a pizza shop. Obviously JoesPizza.com isn’t available, but joes.pizza would be a great alternative.

It can also help you protect your brand as well as make you stand out from your competition. Let’s say you’re an attorney living in Chicago where your competition is really high. You could grab chicago.attorney and really set yourself apart from the other attorneys in the area.

It can also have a positive impact on your SEO (search engine optimization) and SERPs (search engine results pages). When a visitor does a search on Google the words of the search get highlighted on the website’s title, description, and domain. That means if you have the domain chicago.attorney and someone searches for “Chicago Attorney” both Chicago and attorney will be bold in your domain. That won’t be the case for any other result on the page.

Nowadays competition is high for almost every business, and you have to use every tool at your disposal to set yourself apart. New TLDs are a great, inexpensive way of doing this. It will give you a leg up and allow you to market your website in ways that others can’t.

Click Here for a list of all the domain names that are available for registration.

How CloudFlare can supercharge, and secure, your website.

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cloudflareCloudFlare is a content delivery network (CDN for short) that uses data centers around the world to deliver your content to your visitors faster, and more securely. Their intelligent system also protects your website from possible threats by blocking out bad traffic. Best of all? It’s free for every HostMetro customer.

So, how does CloudFlare work, you ask? The the basics of it are rather simple. CloudFlare has a network of 30 data centers around the world. These data centers automatically store cached versions of your website in every single one of their data centers. When someone visits your website, CloudFlare analyzes where in the world the visitor is located and routes them to the nearest data center.

This means that visitors of yours who might not live close to our data center (located in Chicago, IL, USA) don’t have to make as many connections to get to your data stored on our servers. The result of this means, on average, websites using CloudFlare load 50% faster.

cloudflare

CloudFlare also adds an extra layer of security to your website. Since so many websites use CloudFlare’s CDN, it has the ability to quickly and accurately sniff out new attacks and stop them before they harm your website. Not only does it block an attack going after your website, it also shuts it down for the rest of the CloudFlare community.

This means that if any website on CloudFlare is attacked, that attack will be recognized and learned, which will make it never be able to target your website, so long as you use CloudFlare. You also have access to reports that show any attempted attacks on your website as well as a breakdown of where they came from, type of attack, and how severe it would have been.

Truth be told, there is no such thing as a 100% secure system. The HostMetro servers are as secure as can be and we take every preventative measure to protect your website from attacks. With that being said, the more security you have for your website, the better. CloudFlare offers a simple way of adding security to your website as well as speeding it up for your visitors.

You can sign up for and enable CloudFlare quickly and easily directly from your cPanel control panel. Just log in, navigate to “Software & Services” and you will see an icon for CloudFlare.

As always, if you have any questions you can call us toll free at 800-485-9730, open a live chat by clicking here or sending an email to Support@HostMetro.com.