Guides | RFE Hosting

What is the difference between Shared hosting, VPS Hosting and Dedicated Hosting?

April 24, 2017 by Daniel Leave a Comment

Here is a guide we we have created about our hosting plans and how they compare to each other.

Shared Hosting Comparison

Shared Hosting is very similar to living in an Apartment Complex. All residents are in the same location and must share the available resources with everyone. These may include such things as the pool, parking lot, and playground. In shared hosting, all accounts must share the available resources with all the other accounts on the server. These include CPU, memory, and disk space.

VPS Hosting Comparison

VPS Hosting is similar to owning a Condo. While you still share things on the property, you are ultimately responsible for maintaining your own property and repairs inside the condo. There is also significantly fewer residents per building and assigned parking. On a Virtual Private Server, you are assigned resources that are not shared by everyone. The overall CPU and memory are shared across all accounts on the machine, but at the same time, portions of those resources are always dedicated to each account. This allows for more power and flexibility than being on a shared account.

Dedicated Hosting Comparison

Dedicated hosting provides set resource limits not shared resources. More control and access.
Dedicated Hosting can be compared to owning a house. You are allowed and have access to all resources available on the machine. No one Else’s account resides on the machine (your house) and would not be capable of tapping into your resources.

Filed Under: Blog Guides, Web Hosting

WordPress Speed and Performance Suggestions

April 6, 2017 by Daniel Leave a Comment

While we are constantly working to improve our systems and speed things up on our end, there is always something that can be done on your end too.

WordPress out of the box is not optimized for speed, so we suggest a few different options to help speed things up.

Here are some tools of the trade that we love and use often….
Pingdom Speed test – https://tools.pingdom.com/ (Test the load time of that page, analyze it and find bottlenecks.)
GTmetrix – https://gtmetrix.com/ (GTmetrix gives you insight on how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it.)

To get started, the first recommendation is to use a cache plugin like WP Super cache (Free – https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/), or WP Rocket (Paid – https://wp-rocket.me/).

What is caching? Cache is an area in the computer’s memory that stores recently used information. When a site is cached, it means the site’s pages, images, files and Web objects are stored on the user’s local hard drive. This in turn means that when a user opens a frequently accessed file, the browser will have most (if not all) of its files cached.

When a browser doesn’t have to retrieve new information every time a site is accessed it results in faster page load times. Caching plugins work the same way. They save dynamically generated HTML files in the cache and serve them next time a request is made instead of re-loading all of the PHP scripts from WordPress.

Next, we suggest the use of a CDN. Some options are Cloudflare (Free – http://www.cloudflare.com), MaxCDN (Paid – http://www.maxcdn.com)

If you are just getting started and do not have the budget for a premium CDN system, we suggest you start off with cloudflare. They offer a great system at no cost to you.

All of our hosting plans have this pre-installed in the cPanel system, you just have to activate it.

And Lastly, the use of image smashing plugins is also very helpful. Some that come to mind are WP Smushit (FREE – https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/), And EWWW (FREE – https://wordpress.org/plugins/ewww-image-optimizer/)

These systems will take all the images on your site and will compress and optimize them while keeping their quality intact.

We would be happy to go through your site and help you come up with ideas on how to improve your sites speed and performance. This also goes for any other questions you may have about your website or our services. Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in doing so. http://www.rfehosting.com/support

Filed Under: WordPress

Guest Post – Couponing4you.net

January 17, 2017 by Daniel Leave a Comment

We are starting a new campaign of guest posts from current clients. Here is our first one from Jennifer & Samantha @ Couponing4you.net

We are Jennifer & Samantha from Couponing4you.net
We help our readers save money with printable and digital coupons, daily deals, sales, promo codes and tips on how to maximize your shopping dollar.

We started out with WordPress and RFE but, not knowing much about hosting, we strayed when a good friend of mine offered his services to us at a discount. What he neglected to tell us was, that unlike RFE, his service was only available when he was – and he was often out of town or away on holiday.

When our site went down at 2AM and I learned that he was on a cruise with his family, I went back to RFE who was fast to get us up and running, even though we had left them before! How is that for excellent customer service!

Any time we have a problem, which is always on my end, Aaron is fast to help us. Whether it’s a plug-in issue or just my ignorance of something so simple, I can always rely on Aaron to help me out, no matter what time of day it is!

If you’re looking for service that is reliable, dependable and there for YOU; THIS is it!

Filed Under: Guest Posts, Web Hosting

Why is WordPress so Popular?

September 22, 2016 by Angela Leave a Comment

WordPress is the most popular web hosting option available, powering roughly one in every four sites on the internet. Most web hosting companies (RFE Hosting included) offer free one-click installation of WordPress, and that is just one item in a long list of reasons why most experts believe that WordPress is only going to get bigger with time. So if you’re preparing to create or redesign a website for your company, the question you are probably asking yourself is, “Why is WordPress so popular?” In this article, we will cover a few of the most important answers.

WordPress is a free, open source program. Never underestimate the power of free things. In part, WordPress obtained its tremendous popularity by simply offering the best free and free-to-use software out there: not only did this create an instant user base, it also created an instant base of base of people eager to work on and improve the existing program (but more on that later.)

WordPress is impressively versatile. Whether you are designing a website for Ecommerce, classified advertisements, video hosting, blogging, selling memberships, booking events, or what have you, WordPress has the capability to do a good job.

WordPress offers incredible SEO potential. WordPress also offers fantastic SEO capabilities: Google recently gave the site a 99% positive ranking in terms of enabling its users to rank well. Here’s a few of the SEO prerequisites that WordPress meets.

Fast Loading Speed.
Great Coding Standard.
XML Sitemap.
Robust Navigation.
Image Optimization.
Seamless Social Media Integration.
User Experience and Cross-Platform Functionality.

The Power of Popularity. Finally, the last factor to which we can attribute WordPress’s popularity is the positive feedback loop that followed the company from the start. Thousands of WordPress users have developed their own WordPress modifications and plugins, thus cementing the sites position as the highest quality option out there.

Build your own WordPress Website with RFE Hosting. Visit us online to learn more.

Filed Under: SEO, Web Hosting, WordPress Tagged With: SEO, web hosting, wordpress

5 Tips for Managing an Ecommerce Website

September 16, 2016 by Angela Leave a Comment

E-Commerce is the wave of the future. It offers tremendous potential for the savvy business owners who manage to wield its power. Here are 5 tips that can help you be successful in the industry.

Use (and hone) conversion-based landing pages. Sure, a lot of organic traffic may end up on your homepage: but, with smart SEO and advertising campaigns (which will both be discussed in greater detail later in this article) you can ensure that a good portion of customers end up directly on a landing page that is specially designed to start them further along the conversion funnel. Extra points if you can include payment on that very screen. Whatever your strategy, however, you should set up A/B testing in order to perfect your page: new software has made the process exceptionally easy, and the ROI potential is through the roof.
Advertise. Sure, it represents an investment–but once again, the ROI potential that this investment offers is well worth it. Of course, your online advertising campaign will only be as valuable as you make it: be sure to do your research, manage your campaign carefully, and (once again) always be improving your landing pages.
Invest in SEO. Improving your search engine rankings can help bolster traffic as well: you could start a blog, redesign your site for functionality, or begin running a comprehensive social media campaign: it all depends on how much you are willing and able to do.
Narrow your horizons. E-commerce can feel like a much lower liability business model–which leads some business owners to get overly excited and sell too wide a range of products, effectively destroying their niche.
Choose the right hosting services. Finding a host that offers great service, optimal uptime, and SSL credentials is a must. Visit RFE Hosting online today to learn more.