Top 7 Magento Extensions You Should Be Using

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Extensions add functionality to your Magento site that you won’t typically get out of the box. The right extensions will increase conversions and generate happy, loyal customers. Here are seven extensions you should be using.

#1 Subscriptions

You’ve probably noticed some Amazon product pages ask you to “subscribe and save.” The product is available for a one-time purchase, but you’ll get a discount if you subscribe to a regular delivery (such as monthly, bi-monthly).

A subscription discount is a highly effective marketing strategy that encourages consumers to commit to future purchases. It works well with products consumed on a regular basis such as protein powders, nutritional supplements, coffee, and just about anything people might purchase on a regular basis.

Statistics show the majority of consumers are looking for a good deal; about 93% use at least one discount code during the year. Subscription discounts make obtaining a discount even easier.

The Subscriptions extension from Web Solutions NYC allows you to:

  • Offer a customizable subscription schedule; customers can choose which day of the month to reorder
  • Designate subscription products
  • Transparently display the minimum cancellation time on both the product page and in the cart
  • Restrict subscriptions to specific customer groups
  • Create custom terms

#2 Free Shipping Threshold

“Free shipping on orders over $30” is a great marketing strategy, but customers aren’t good at keeping track of their totals as they add items to their cart. At checkout, if their purchase totals only $29.95, they’re apt to be annoyed.

Web Solutions NYC’s Free Shipping Threshold extension displays the remaining purchase amount needed to get free shipping. This helps customers reach their goal and also encourages people to purchase more items.

Tip: Take the price of your most popular item, add ten percent, and round it off to the nearest five dollars. Make that your free shipping threshold to encourage people to make additional purchases.

#3 Quick View

The quick view feature is something more theme developers ought to include in e-commerce templates. This Quick View extension shows customers the details about a product without taking them off the category or search results page.

With one click, a pop-up displays product information and the option to “add to cart” in any quantity selected. The customer can see the options for all variations, including color, size, and customizations. They can also click through to the product page if desired.

You choose how much information to display in each pop-up. For example, you could display all product details, including the full description, and even product reviews. Or you could display just the summary.

The pop-up supports all product actions, including:

  • Add to cart
  • Browse images
  • See samples
  • Add product rating
  • Add product review
  • See product reviews and ratings
  • Add to compare
  • Add to wishlist
  • Email to a friend

Consumers are inconvenienced when they have to navigate back to their search results page after perusing a product. Twenty-eight percent of shoppers abandon their cart when the purchase process is inconvenient.

Making product information available to customers without forcing them to leave the search results page makes the process convenient, and will reduce the rate of abandoned carts on your site.

#4 Tax Jar

Many companies commit tax errors in their first year in business. The most common mistake is the failure to collect sufficient sales tax.

The Tax Jar Sales Tax Automator extension automates the amount of tax you collect based on current rates calculated by the SmartCalcs API. Rates are updated monthly.

When tax time rolls around, you’ll be able to sort the tax you’ve collected by state, county, city, or zip code so you can file properly. If you’re running an Amazon or eBay store, you can use this extension on those platforms, too.

For an additional fee, Tax Jar will file your state sales tax return for you each month, quarter, or year. The great news is this extension comes with a 30-day free trial, so what have you got to lose?

#5 Abandoned Cart Email

Abandoned carts are a significant source of lost revenue. Although not all abandoned carts can be turned into a purchase, some can.

Multiple marketing statistics show an average cart abandonment rate of 69.89%. Consumer surveys reveal that 58.6% of U.S. shoppers abandon carts because they were just browsing or comparing prices.

The remaining 11.29% of abandoned carts likely occur for other reasons, usually attributable to a difficult checkout process, hidden shipping costs, or being required to create an account. All these factors are within your control.

The Abandoned Cart Email extension automatically sends a follow-up email to remind users they left an item in their cart. Not everyone intends to abandon his or her cart, so this extension may help you recover lost sales.

Some key features of the extension:

  • Customizes the email schedule
  • Generates coupons to encourage checkout
  • Allows customers to unsubscribe from reminder emails
  • Admin users can disable customer groups from receiving reminder emails
  • Reminders can be automatically stopped when the customer visits or clears the cart

Statistics show 29% of abandonment reminder emails result in sales, so you can’t afford to skip this extension.

#6 Shipping Restrictions

Businesses can be held liable for shipping products to locations where those items are illegal. You can also be held liable for shipping items without the required restrictions.

For example, during the Obama administration, laws were passed that made it generally illegal to send cigarettes through the mail, with a few exceptions. If your product is age-restricted in other states, you’re responsible for controlling sales in accordance with local laws.

It’s impossible to keep up with individual state laws since they change frequently. The Shipping Restrictions extension equips you to create a list of banned zip codes, states, and countries where your product can’t be delivered.

That way, you may control shipping only to the locations you can be certain the products are legal. As soon as users enter their address, the extension lets them know the product carries shipping restrictions. This happens before they can finish checking out.

#7 URL Rewrite Index Optimizer

Magento’s default URL structure isn’t search-engine or user-friendly. The URL Rewrite extension makes it simple to create friendly URLs and optimize the process of re-indexing URL rewrites.

Friendly URLs will certainly boost your SEO efforts and give customers an easier time navigating your site. If URL rewriting seems too technical, read this introduction to URL rewriting published by Smashing Magazine.

Some highlights to be aware of include:

  • The URL should be relevant, appropriate, and memorable. For example, if your product pages follow a memorable hierarchy such as /category/product-name/, visitors will have an easier time navigating your site. They’ll know they’re in the right place.
  • A URL should contain relevant search terms. Google and other search engines take the URL into account when they rank pages. Readable URLs are consistently ranked as one of the most important components in optimization.
  • In a friendly URL, non-alphanumeric characters are replaced with hyphens to make it easier to read.

Rewriting a URL also requires the creation of redirects, but the URL Rewrite extension takes care of those for you.

Given a handful of vital extensions, Magento’s functionality can be expanded to support your marketing efforts and sales goals. Remember not to go overboard with extensions, though; too many can overload system resources.

Install only what you need. Don’t be afraid to experiment, but remember to deactivate extensions you decide not to use.

Website Live Chat Could Improve Your Conversions By 45%

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In the arena of digital marketing, business owners focus their efforts on increasing a handful of conversions. Sales, email signups, AD clicks, and video views are among the most sought after.

But actually, any action you want a visitor to take can be treated as a conversion. Conversion is the process of turning a curious visitor to a committed participant, whether the commitment consists of making a purchase or consuming your content.

According to digital marketing expert Neil Patel, making live chat available on your site can boost your conversions by up to 45%, and he shares data and strategies to back it up. Patel notes the average conversion rate is about 2.35%.

A chat study released by ApexChat revealed that live chat can increase online leads by 40%. Patel was able to engineer a 45% increase for one of his clients, but he says anyone can do it.

He calls live chat “instant customer service,” but Patel notes that few businesses use live chat correctly because they don’t know how. If you’re committed to boosting conversions, this article will help you incorporate live chat into your website in a way that will be effective.

Live chat is a customer service tool

Live chat is the preferred form of customer service in terms of satisfaction. eDigital’s Customer Service Benchmark surveyed 2,000 consumers to find out which customer service channel pleased them the most.

It turned out that live chat has the highest satisfaction levels, at 73%, followed by email (61%), and phone (44%). Emails can seem to take forever to garner a reply. Phone support users are frustrated by long wait times, being put on hold, and automated answering systems.

Live chat is instant, and it should meet the requirements of any other customer service format you provide. For example, live chat should:

  • Ensure customer satisfaction by answering pre-purchase questions, help a customer place an order, or provide support for making a return
  • Support an ongoing, positive customer relationship
  • Create an empathic and courteous interaction
  • Be powered by knowledgeable representatives
  • Offer prompt solutions to complaints
  • Fully resolve issues or escalate the problem to the right team
  • Satisfy the customer’s needs without making them feel the need to call headquarters to speak to the CEO

Most important, live chat should be … live.

Live chat shouldn’t be powered by a bot

Many businesses sense the potential power of offering live chat, but they compromise with software that provides automated responses, otherwise known as a bot. It’s okay when the bot’s job is to gather information to route a customer to the right human representative. It’s just not a good strategy for helping the person.

Chatbots powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) would change everything, but despite what’s been reported, AI bots don’t exist. AI is a misunderstood technology. The term “Artificial Intelligence” is being erroneously applied to any computer program that uses machine learning to increase its capacity to respond, but that’s not AI.

Until a chatbot can process incoming information autonomously and identify and respond to nuance, customers will know they’re talking to a machine.

Your customers want live interactions

Live chat is attractive to consumers not because they can type into a magic box on the screen, but because they sense the person at the other end is real. Customers are disappointed when they receive automated replies that don’t address the nuances of their question.

Even the most sophisticated chatbot can only answer questions it’s been programmed to answer. And it’s safe to say, even if a bot could answer questions exactly like a human, the experience would be ruined if customers ever found out they were talking to a robot.

Nicolas Cole from Inc.com interviewed a representative from live chat software company Tagove — a firm whose well-known clients include Citibank and Upwork, among others. “Live chat adds that human touch that can’t be replicated elsewhere,” the company rep said.

“Even though much of the industry is moving toward automation, us included, everyone is hyper-aware of maintaining the human element. Chat software is what builds confidence in a user’s web experience.”

Bots can’t identify or respond to nuance, nor can they read human emotion to deescalate a complaint or deliver above-and-beyond customer service. They can answer simple questions, and a smart bot can hold a longer conversation, but none of them can provide authentic customer service.

If you’re going to use bot-powered software, don’t call it live chat. Doing so will frustrate, confuse, and anger some customers when they realize what’s happening.

Live chat gives customers instant gratification

Immediately available, live customer service reps are essential. In today’s IoT-connected world, consumers expect companies to be available around the clock. A large number of consumers prefer live chat because they don’t want to be put on hold for even a minute.

A chat box should never disrupt the visitor’s experience

Live chat should be noticeable, yet unobtrusive, to visitors. There’s no need to present a live chat box as a popup in a modal window upon a visitor’s arrival.

Not only does this prevent your visitors from seeing your call-to-action, but popups are an intrusion in the digital environment. If a visitor has to close a chat box to get to your content, that increases the likelihood that he or she won’t come back.

Skip the chat box pop up. Place your chat box strategically in the lower right corner of the screen. Remember to allow visitors to minimize the chat box and don’t force it to stay open and cover your content.

Chat agents should be available at all times

Once you’ve committed to making live chat available on your website, you need to manage the availability of chat agents. You may have to outsource to an outside company for the hours your firm is closed, or totally outsource your live chat. That’s up to you.

Make sure the live chat software you choose lets you designate hours of availability so people know when a live chat agent isn’t available.

Live chat should be accessible via mobile devices

There’s no way to avoid the mobile environment we now inhabit. You should have a mobile-friendly website already, but that’s not enough.

Since a majority of people use mobile devices to browse the Internet, it makes sense that 62% of shoppers expect access to live chat from their mobile devices. If you’ve had a live chat feature for a while, you might need to replace it with mobile-compatible software.

Does your web host support live chat?

If you’re unable to install live chat software due to an incompatible hosting environment, contact us to find out how we can help. We offer boutique hosting plans that are tailored to meet the needs of every company. Reach out to discuss how we can accommodate your needs.

 

How To Make Moving To A New Webhost A Stress-Free Experience

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Moving to a new web host, also known as ‘migrating,’ can be stressful regardless of how big your site is. The potential for lost or corrupt files is ever present. The bigger your site is, the harder it is to thoroughly test it before letting go of your old hosting account. You can’t hang on to your old account forever.

If you’ve never moved a website before, it’s important to know that a smooth migration requires more than transferring files. Careful planning is necessary to ensure the preservation of databases, backups, email accounts, cron jobs, and directory structures.

If all you have is a single directory with a few files, a quick transfer is all you need. When you have a large number of pages and databases to move, planning is essential.

To handle the intricacies of moving to a new host, here are some tips to make the process stress-free.

Back up your website – twice

It seems unlikely, but what would you do if your website backup contained corrupt files and you couldn’t get the originals because you already canceled your account? What if your .zip files are corrupt? What if your account is deleted in a power surge overnight? It happens more often than you think. That’s why we offer our customers disaster recovery services, but not every host does.

Backing up your website is essential regardless of how you’re migrating your site. For instance, you should backup your website even when your web host is using the cPanel to cPanel transfer.

Create a step-by-step written plan

Having a written plan with tasks you can check off is essential for a smooth website migration. There’s always a chance you’ll forget something, but you’re better off with a written list.

Rather than relying on a random checklist from the internet, take the time to write down, on paper, every step you need to take to complete your transfer. Your list should be a customized checklist. Internet checklists are an excellent place to start, so use them to your advantage but don’t rely on them as your only list.

For example, you might want to change your directory structure on the new server. You might want to wait until you’ve uploaded everything, or you may decide to manually create a new structure and upload files as you go. This process should be part of your step-by-step plan.

Your plan should include everything, even the small tasks like designating a “catch-all” for unrouted email.

Document the details

In addition to having a well-documented plan, you need to document your account details. Make sure to write down everything you need to recreate on your new server. For example, you’ll need to recreate all email addresses, cron jobs, and upload all databases. Databases can be especially tricky – document them thoroughly.

When you download all of your databases, you don’t automatically get a list of installation URLs. If you used one-click installation software in the beginning, you wouldn’t be able to identify your databases by name because you didn’t name them. You have to create a list for reference.

For instance, did you create multiple installations of WordPress? Unless you manually installed WordPress and chose a custom prefix, your databases will have the same prefix (wp_) followed by a number. This makes installations hard to tell apart.

To identify your WordPress databases, go into phpMyAdmin. Click on each database name in the list and navigate to the ‘options’ table. You’ll find the installation URL listed there.

For other automatically installed applications, you probably aren’t aware of the database prefix, either. You can find this information by using phpMyAdmin.

If you have more than one SQL database, document what domain and application each database belongs to, as well as the database usernames and passwords.

Check for cron jobs

Depending on the software you’ve installed, you might have cron jobs running that you didn’t create. Some applications automatically set up cron jobs and if you don’t replicate them in your new hosting environment, your website functionality will suffer.

Don’t update your nameservers too early

Update your nameservers only after verifying all files have been successfully transferred and you’ve set up all email accounts. Changing nameservers may make your email stop working temporarily, which means you won’t be able to request lost passwords if needed.

Without updated nameservers, you’ll need to rely on your new hosting account’s IP address to view your site. If you’re running WordPress, you might need to temporarily change the URL in your database to the IP address to navigate the site to verify it’s working. WordPress now uses relative URLs, so unless you change the URL in the database to your IP address, you can only navigate so far. Alternately, you can edit your HOSTS file to force your computer to look to the new server for the website.

Know your way around FTP/SFTP

You can edit virtually any file through SFTP, which comes in handy when you’re editing data through an admin panel and get locked out when you save your changes.

Practice using phpMyAdmin

As long as you have access to phpMyAdmin or something similar provided by your web host, you can change database names, usernames, passwords, and email addresses. This gives you guaranteed access to your site even if you lock yourself out of your content management system’s admin panel, which might happen during a migration.

For instance, say you’re using WordPress, and you’ve migrated all files and databases successfully. When you try to access your wp-admin page, you get a 404. Chances are, you haven’t changed the URL in the WordPress installation to point to the new domain. This needs to be changed in two places in the ‘options’ table. Normally, you’d change this while logged into your WordPress backend, but without access, you need to change it through phpMyAdmin.

Practice MySQL dumps and imports

If you’ve never transferred a database before, you’re in for a learning curve. Before transferring your actual website, install test software that uses a database and practice moving that over first. To learn how it’s done, follow this guide for migrating a SQL database between two servers.

Ask your new web host to initiate the transfer for you

Professional web hosts know how to transfer files and databases quickly and efficiently. If the process of migration seems too complicated, or the value of your site is too great to risk downtime or corruption, give it up to the pros.

Make sure your new host will meet your needs

Does your new host meet all of your needs? Would they customize a plan just for you? When you’re ready to experience web hosting at its best, contact Skylands Networks today for boutique website hosting services tailored to your specific business needs.

Why Your Website Must Be SSL Compliant

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As internet technology evolves, website best practices transform from courtesies to mandatory elements. For example, firewalls were once used only by tech-savvy enthusiasts. Today, most people wouldn’t dream of using a computer without a firewall. With cybercrime on the rise, providing an encrypted connection has become one of many security elements visitors have come to expect.

Website security is a big deal. Every bit of data transferred across a network is susceptible to being intercepted mid-transfer. While encryption can’t prevent hackers from stealing data, it does ensure stolen data remains unreadable. Encryption uses a complex algorithm to scramble data streaming across a network, making it unreadable by anyone without a decryption key.

Secure Socket Layer encryption, or SSL, is a high-level encryption standard that uses both asymmetric and symmetric keys to authenticate data and secure it. SSL uses a public key from the website server and a private key from the user’s browser. Since both keys are needed, an SSL certificate is a package of information that delivers a public key to the user.

Once a secure connection is made, all data transfers are constantly encrypted in real time by something called a cipher. This is where the word “decipher” comes from. When you decipher data, you convert it into normal language.

When an SSL encrypted connection is terminated, so is the private encryption key; a new key is generated for each connection. To learn about SSL encryption in-depth, check out this Beginner’s Guide to SSL.

Website encryption has been standard for a while, but some website owners have been dragging their feet. If you haven’t given serious consideration to securing your website with SSL, here’s why you can’t put it off any longer:

SSL protects your visitors from identity theft

You care about your visitors – they’re the reason you’re in business. Protecting their data from hackers should be your number one priority.

Chances are, visitors submit some kind of information through a web form on your website. It could be a simple signup form, an account login page, or a complete e-commerce transaction requiring credit card information. All of this data is susceptible to theft and should, therefore, be encrypted.

It makes sense to encrypt an e-commerce website that handles credit card information, but what if you don’t sell anything on your website? What if you run a blog, and only collect email addresses from your followers? Even if your visitors only submit their name and email address, that transmission needs to be encrypted because hackers piece together information from various sources to eventually steal someone’s identity.

All visitor data needs to be protected

Any website with user accounts should use SSL encryption to prevent account information from being stolen. Stolen account information is how cybercriminals obtain enough information for identity theft.

Against good advice, many people reuse passwords for multiple accounts. Once a hacker has an email address and a password, they’ll use that password to gain access to other accounts they can find. Most user accounts have a personal profile where people provide links to their other accounts; it’s all low hanging fruit for the cybercriminal. If your website visitor uses the same password for their Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram accounts, leaving their data unencrypted could cost them more than a compromised account.

Protecting your visitors’ data is no longer the only reason to use SSL. Browsers are starting to monitor and inform visitors of the presence of SSL encryption, and Google officially made SSL encryption a search ranking signal.

Using SSL makes you look better and rank better on Google

On August 6, 2014, Google reinforced its commitment to making the internet secure by informing webmasters everywhere that the presence of SSL/TLS encryption is officially a lightweight search signal. At the time, Google said the signal would affect fewer than 1% of global queries, but they might strengthen it in the future to encourage website owners to switch to HTTPS.

Browsers are telling visitors if your site is secure

A securely encrypted website connection between a client (visitor) and the server (website) is what enables the use of the HTTPS protocol. Google not only gives more weight to websites using HTTPS, but its popular browser, Chrome, warns visitors when a website is not using HTTPS.

In September of 2016, Emily Schechter from Chrome’s security team published an announcement that Chrome was going to start labeling HTTP connections non-secure. A small information icon (i) with the words “not secure” are displayed to the left of the webpage URL in the address bar. As of January 2017, all HTTP pages, including ones that collect passwords or credit card information, are being marked as non-secure. In the future, Schechter says the HTTP security warning will be a red triangle with an exclamation point in the middle, currently used for broken HTTPS.

Firefox implemented a similar strategy to warn of password security vulnerabilities. When login credentials are requested over HTTP, Firefox gives a warning to the user by placing a red slash through a lock symbol in the URL bar. According to the Firefox security team, each page is checked against the W3C’s Secure Contexts Specification to determine whether it’s secure.

Firefox and Chrome are popular browsers, and these warnings may not look sinister today, but given time, they will evolve, and it’s only a matter of time before visitors start bouncing from unsecured websites.

SSL protects public Wi-Fi users unaware of potential threats

A secure browser connection prevents Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks, which are fairly common, especially on public Wi-Fi.

Unfortunately, consumers don’t realize the urgency of securing their own data over public Wi-Fi. Studies have shown that over 60% of Wi-Fi users believe their personal information is protected when using public internet. About 50% don’t know they’re responsible for securing their own data, with 36% believing it’s either the website owner or Wi-Fi providers job.

Although everyone should do their part to protect their data, at the end of the day, the website owner will take the legal blame if data gets stolen. Even when a consumer is careless with data security, they can sue a business for any data breach that caused them provable harm.

Get hosting from a provider that offers SSL

Your visitors depend on you to protect their data. You might not have SSL enabled, or you might find it difficult to implement site-wide. At Skylands, we offer SSL encryption and handle the setup for you.

Contact us today to find out how our fully managed boutique hosting can create a secure website connection for your visitors.

How To Spot A Reliable, Secure Web Host

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A high level of customer satisfaction doesn’t necessarily mean a web host is reliable or secure. A customer is satisfied when their needs have been met. Most web hosting customers have simple needs, and wouldn’t notice if a host lacked specific security features.

In this regard, the majority of web hosting customers are easy to satisfy. As long as their website stays online and their email isn’t interrupted, they’re happy.

Happy customers often post reviews sharing their positive experiences, but a positive review doesn’t equal a secure experience. Some customers use the word ‘secure’ in their review without ever having an experience that tested or proved the existence of security. In their world, their site is secure because they’ve never experienced a problem. In reality, their site might have multiple vulnerabilities just waiting for a cybercriminal to find.

For example, many people wouldn’t know if their host provides them with an SSL certificate because they don’t need one. At least they think they don’t need one.

This July, Chrome began displaying warning messages on all non-SSL websites that the site is ‘not secure.’ In response, hosting companies have started offering free SSL certificates to customers. The truth is, an SSL certificate has become necessary to earn a visitor’s trust because just filling out an unencrypted web form can result in a data breach.

Rave reviews will tell you a company has excellent customer service, but to find a truly secure web host, further investigation is needed. Here’s what to look for:

What secure services does the web host provide?

Figuring out if a web host is secure begins with knowing what secure services they provide. The following services are considered best practices in the hosting industry:

  • Backup and restore points: With all hosting accounts, you’re responsible for backing up your website. Web hosts don’t guarantee their backups because anything can happen to digital files. Regardless, good hosts will provide backup and restore services that either run automatically or can be manually configured. Some will help you restore your site from backup files, and others will go the distance to restore corrupted files.
  • Firewalls: Firewalls are a standard in website security and help prevent attacks that crash websites. It helps to know what kind of intrusions your web host’s firewall is likely to stop, and what other security measures they have in place.
  • Antivirus and malware scans/removal: You’ll probably have to pay for these services since they eat up precious resources, but your host should make them available to you.
  • Disaster recovery: Does your web host have a bare-metal image of your server to recover from a system failure in a pinch? If they do, your website is in good hands. Disaster recovery is more than saving a copy of your files. It begins with encrypted data backups and also involves a plan for file restoration and database recovery.
  • Redundant hardware and software: Your English teacher told you to avoid redundancy, but that doesn’t apply to web servers. Having redundant hardware protects against downtime caused by hardware failure. The same is true for software. Redundancy is best when the backup device is separate from the primary device. You can ask support about this but your host’s customer service representative may not know these finer details.
  • Load balancing: Hosting your website on a server that uses load balancing makes your site less likely to crash due to excessive traffic. The server uses an algorithm to distribute increases in traffic across multiple servers so that no single resource becomes overburdened.
  • Restricted physical access to servers: Cybercriminals and hackers aren’t the only threat you need to be aware of. Remember, servers are physical computers and must be stored Usually they’re housed in a data warehouse. With poor physical security, anyone can access and potentially sabotage the servers that house your website. If you can, find out if your host limits physical access to technicians with security clearance.
  • Strict policies for employees and their passwords: Hosting company employees have access to areas that would be a hacker’s playground. A secure hosting company will have a routine for changing passwords when an employee leaves and will have rules for not sharing passwords through unencrypted emails.

Reliability is about more than 99.9% uptime

Web hosts pride themselves on being able to offer 99.9% uptime (or higher), but are they available when you need them? In addition to having a reliable server, you need a host with a reliable team of customer support agents who respond to requests and resolve issues to your satisfaction.

If you’re going through customer reviews, look for reviews describing pleasant interactions with chat agents and phone representatives that ended in resolution.

Transparency from start to finish

You should have no problem relying on your host to provide you with accurate information in a straightforward manner. What you see should be what you get. If you can’t figure it out, keep looking.

Many popular hosting companies try to bring in customers through misleading prices. For example, they’ll publish an unbeatable low monthly price, but the catch is you must buy three years of hosting at once to get the deal.

They don’t tell you the real cost until the end of the checkout process. If you decide to make the purchase anyway, when your three years are up, you find out the deal ends with it, and you’ve got to pay full price. Many people choose to switch hosts at this point.

There are professional hosting companies that don’t need to obscure hosting plan details to get customers. Skylands Networks is one of those companies. Our base prices are transparent, and we will customize any hosting plan to meet your specific business needs.

We employ best practices including load balancing, disaster recovery, security scanning, firewalls, and patch management.

We also offer server monitoring so you can define your own criteria to monitor more than just server up/down status. You can run premade conditional responses to thwart problems before a critical alert is triggered.

If you’re looking for a reliable host that takes security seriously, contact us today for boutique website hosting tailored to your specific business needs.