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Server vs. Cloud: Choosing the Right Email Hosting Service

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dedicated_serversWhether it’s an enterprise-level company or a brand-new startup, email is an essential tool for any business. Consumers use email to ask questions and provide feedback, and professionals use email to communicate with employees, colleagues and other organizations. Being able to efficiently and reliably send and receive messages is crucial to a business’s day-to-day functions, so it’s important to choose a reliable email hosting solution that fits your company’s needs.

The types of email hosting

Two main types of email hosting exist: server based and cloud based. A server-based systems involves an in-house server your company launches and maintains on its own. This server stores all your email accounts and their contents, and your IT team is responsible for repairing server problems and keeping your accounts safe from external attacks. This kind of hosting requires a great deal of involvement from your IT team, so be sure your department is well staffed and knowledgeable before choosing this option.

Cloud-based email hosting, on the other hand, involves sharing space with other companies on a server provided by the hosting provider. Here the host is responsible for maintaining the server and ensuring that your email is accessible and secure. This kind of service requires little to no involvement from your staff, but when you trust a third-party with sensitive data, inherent risks are involved, so choose your hosting provider and plan carefully.

Finding a provider

Not all email hosting providers are created equal, and the cheapest provider isn’t always the best choice. When selecting an provider, consider the following characteristics:

  • Security: Emails often contain confidential information, so be sure to choose a provider that offers a high level of security. Otherwise, your customer’s sensitive data may be vulnerable to hackers, identity thieves and other such criminals.
  • Customer support: When you have problems accessing or utilizing your email account, your hosting provider will be the one to resolve them. For this reason, you’ll need a hosting provider that offers continuous customer support.
  • Reliability: Take some time to research each candidate’s reputation. Choose a provider known for reliable service with few incidences of server failure or other malfunctions.
  • Price: After narrowing your choices down to a few providers using these criteria, consider each provider’s price and choose one that will be affordable for your company.

Choosing a package

After selecting a hosting provider, the next step is choosing the best service the provider offers that will match your email needs. Packages may offer varying levels of storage, bandwidth, customer support options and security measures. Expensive packages may even offer you your own private server. If your company receives thousands of emails on a daily basis, you’ll probably need a large plan, but if you use email infrequently, paying for the biggest available service is a waste of money.

Every organization has different requirements when it comes to email hosting. While a small server-based hosting system may be sufficient for some, others will need a large plan on a dedicated server in the cloud. To choose the best option, simply consider your preferences, usage history and ultimate goals. With so many options available, you can easily find an affordable package that works for you.

How Color Psychology Affects Conversions

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crayola-mp3-playerWhen it comes to your website, there’s more to color choice than personal preference. The colors you choose can actually play a subtle, psychological role in how users feel about your brand and how likely they are to convert. Whether you’re building your first company webpage or looking for a way to refresh your digital marketing strategy, don’t underestimate the importance of your color choice when it comes to how users perceive your message and choose to convert.

Colors to communicate tone

Every color can display one or more emotions, and a wrong choice of website color may have an unintended message. In general, fiery colors like red, orange and yellow convey happiness, joy, excitement and pep. These might work for a real estate, marketing or travel website. Cool colors like green and blue communicate a tone of peace and harmony. Blue and green hues may work best for spa, personal care and home design website.

White tends to symbolize cleanliness and purity. This clean palette would work for architects, clothing companies and cleaners. Black can communicate a tone of dignity, elegance, depth and modernism. The color may work well for luxury branding, such as hotels, vacation rentals, real estate and cars.

Think about what traits or characteristics your user base is likely to favor based upon the color’s tone. Also think about what message will most convey your brand. Is there a match between these colors? If your brand is a calm blue but your users are young and energetic, you may want to combine a fiery color with your soothing blue to connect these tones.

Colors to draw attention

To draw attention to an advertisement, color works over 40 percent better than black and white. Even just a splash of color can draw a user’s attention toward a certain area of the page. Two companies — Performable and Ript Apparel — decided to change the color of their call-to-action. Performable went from green to red; Ript changed their button from green to yellow. The companies realized a 21 percent increase and 6.3 percent increase in conversions, respectively.

This illustrates an interesting lesson: If you feel you aren’t getting the conversion rate you want, you might need a small tweak to realize a higher rate. And time spent investigating how users perceive website elements may reward you with a higher ROI.

Once you have a prototype of your website, perform user testing to see how well your colors are working on your target demographic. Are users’ eyes drawn to your call to action? Are they getting stuck at some point during the conversion process? Is something else on the website actually competing with the call to action for user attention? By evaluating the user experience of your website before a launch, you can see what’s pworking for your target demographic as well as what isn’t working. You can make changes to improve the user experience and usability of your web design before the launch.

Harnessing the power of color to communicate emotion and tone and highlight areas of your website is only one step to communicate your call to action to users. Website copy, font and design still need to match up to a cohesive whole. A skilled web designer can help you achieve this.

Intel Comes Around to Mobile Chips, Keeps ARM at Arm’s Length

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smartphones

While Intel initially rebuffed the mobile market, it seems the company is changing its position. Recent news has emerged that Intel chips will now be used inside mobile devices including tablets and phablets (smartphones with jumbo screens sized 5 to 6.9 inches in diameter). In a recent disclosure, Intel representatives said that they expected to see Intel chips inside 30 Android and Windows tablet devices in 2013 alone. Samsung Electronics and Asustek are just two of the companies including Intel chips in their devices. While so far the chip manufacturer has not been able to sway Apple — Intel chips are inside Apple desktop products but not iOS devices – they hope to influence Cupertino to change their minds and ditch ARM-base chip makers.

What’s behind the change of heart?

With the popularity in smartphones and tablets, sales of personal computers have declined, and with it, Intel’s projected revenues. Third-quarter FY 2013 revenue was projected to drop 8 percent, per Intel. This puts Intel in a difficult position, as it had not expanded into the device market and was putting its chips in desktop and laptop PCs only. With the chip market for mobile devices relative empty of major names, competitors like Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics became the go-to chip makers for these devices. As Intel has changes its tune, the company’s chips have also become more energy efficient and smaller. Intel plans to put 14nm chips into production in 2014; currently, its rivals’ smallest chips are twice the size at 28nm.

With recent leadership change at Intel, geeks speculated over whether Intel’s CEO would be open to making ARM chips for Apple. Speculation ran that if the new CEO came from outside Intel, they might move in that direction. However, if the new CEO came from inside Intel — as has been customary since 1987 — then the company would remain committed to forgoing the ARM chips. When the CEO came from within, Cult of Mac reporter John Brownlee suggested that we can all pretty much forget about Intel chips making their way inside our favorite iOS devices. So even though Intel has updated its strategy somewhat, it cannot achieve market dominance without Apple devices.

What does this mean for the marketplace?

Time will tell, but an early indicator spells turbulent times for the chip marketplace: ARM stock dropped after Samsung selected an Intel chip for one of its tablets, Bloomberg reported. While ARM does have a new chip out geared to boost performance of chips in mid-range tablets and phones, will this be enough to compete with Intel? If Intel goes after the high-end devices and ARM sticks with the mid-range performers, these two companies could coexist quite peacefully for some time. But of course, if someone gets greedy or if new products or devices come on the market, there could be tension between the two.

More efficient chips lead to longer battery life for devices, overall a very desirable thing. While consumers may not care which type of chip is in their tablet, they do care about performance and battery life.