INFINCE Presented with the 2018 Great User Experience Title for Business Process Management Software by a Reputable Directory for Business Software

The highly reputable website for B2B and SaaS reviews FinancesOnline has certified INFINCE Cloud Servers with the 2018 Great User Experience award for delivering a well-designed IT solution with a consistent quality user experience. FinancesOnline conferred this award after they conducted a thorough evaluation of all our platform’s elements and features, from the “economical” INFINCE pricing to its core capabilities that simplify one’s technology needs.

To be eligible of FinancesOnline’s 2018 Great User Experience award, a solution must have an intuitive design, clutter-free interface, and user-friendly features. Comparing us against the top business process management tool in the market, FinancesOnline highlights INFINCE as a comprehensive solution that provides users with “total control” overall activities while simplifying repetitive processes through automation.

Other highlights for the FinancesOnline team include INFINCE’s “top class” administrative control, frictionless interdepartmental communication and collaboration, accessibility on any device, and customizable packages to perfectly suit specific requirements and specifications. All of these allow businesses to start achieving more with less time and effort, within a secure environment.

Aside from the comprehensive review, FinancesOnline also praised the platform as an efficient business process management system, with INFINCE earning a spot in its esteemed top 10 list. The cherry on top is FinancesOnline’s 2018 Rising Star award presented to INFINCE. This award is given to software solutions that have quickly increased in popularity and have established itself as a reliable brand despite being newcomers in the SaaS market.

Simply your business technology today on a smart and modern workspace with INFINCE!

Leading BRB Reviews Firm Confers Rising Star and Great User Experience Award to INFINCE

The leading B2B ratings and reviews platform CompareCamp has recognized INFINCE for its reliable cloud model by conferring the Rising Star of 2018 and Great User Experience Award.

The expert review team at CompareCamp came to the conclusion after a close evaluation of INFINCE’s capabilities in serving both small and large scale businesses with cutting-edge cloud IT solutions. Together, the review team undertook a detailed analysis of INFINCE, particularly in its ability to deliver. According to CompareCamp, INFINCE’s “top functionality centers on IT essentials which include secure cloud hosting, run-your-business software, and concierge IT services.” This indeed confirms the usability and versatility of our infinite cloud solution for small and medium businesses alike.

CompareCamp gave an overall 83 points for all the capabilities offered by INFINCE combined. In their product quality score, the review team gave the highest rating of 8.4 for the array of features embedded in INFINCE. They highlighted key features that differentiate our platform from the rest, which includes optimized information management, total administrative control, enhanced team collaboration and availability of plug and play business applications. From utility apps to file sharing, management and communications capabilities, INFINCE encompasses everything that a modern business must have at their disposal to maximize productivity and thrive competitively.

For ease of use, INFINCE managed to obtain an 8.2 score with its perfectly streamlined and centralized dashboards that enable effortless navigation and usage. The Great User Experience Award is conferred to INFINCE by considering its simplified cloud administration and management model. CompareCamp also lauded the inclusion of complete support for deploying and managing cloud services in INFINCE with minimal costs.

We conceived INFINCE with the aim of equipping small and medium business with state of the art cloud technology. It relies on a flexible cloud infrastructure with complete support for open source, SaaS and custom applications that encompass the IT requirements of most businesses. Besides, CompareCamp especially noted the excellent support offered by INFINCE as reflected in its 8.3 score for customer support.

Having a dedicated cloud solution with proper customer support ensures that your business is served with the right IT needs at all times. Moreover, it comes handy when you need additional compute resources or applications to accommodate the growth of your business.

INFINCE corresponds to an economical cloud solution that uplifts your business by offering affordable software options running under its secure cloud environment. It drastically cuts your IT spendings significantly through its optimally configured cloud and open source licensing.

Besides, the pre-configured setup gives you the right amount of computing resources needed to run your business smoothly. With it comes a horde of essential computing resources that will ratchet up your business productivity, all the while giving you the advantage of a true cloud service that you can access anywhere at any time.

Any business not having a website in today’s digital age not just run the risk of losing potential customers on a large scale, but also attracts serious questions on its standing as a credible firm. With business websites now simple and cheap to set up, businesses no longer have any excuse for not having a website in any case.

The Domain Name

The first step in building a website is choosing an available web address and registering the domain name. The popular names in website domain registration are GoDaddy and BigRock, among others. There are several others providers as well, and competition among the different players means very low rates on offer for the customer.

It is a good practice to register not just the .com extension for the website name, but also all the other popular extensions, such as .net, .info and any country-specific extensions such as .co.uk, .co.in and more. Consumers overwhelmingly use .com when entering a web address, but competitors taking control of other extensions for the same domain name may create serious issues for the business down the lane.

Having secured the domain name, there are many options for small businesses to set up the website.

The Conventional Hosting Route

The conventional method of subscribing of setting up a website is taking up hosting space and deploying a web admin to monitor the website on a 24×7 basis. The popular names in the hosting space are Hostgator, Amazon AWS, and others. Here again, competition means high-quality services for very low rates.

If in-house talent to design the website is not available, freelance websites such as UpWork offer businesses access to highly creative and talented designers and content writers, to design the web page. The rates are around $10 – $20 per hour.

Ready-Made Templates

Rather than painstakingly “reinvent the wheel”, businesses could access ready-made templates and website builders available in the net. The two popular options today are Wix and Weebly.

Wix offers a very large collection of ready to build templates, with an intuitive DIY builder thrown in. The easy to use interface makes it a perfect choice for non-technical users, who can set up a fairly good website on the fly. The platform offers a good app market as well.

Weebly offers ready-made templates and simple tools to create highly advanced web pages without writing a single line of code. The intuitive drag and drop elements make website creation and editing especially easy. Weebly’s responsive themes facilitate generating mobile-optimized websites on-the-fly.

While Wix and Weebly are perfect for generic websites or for selling a limited number of products, businesses that need to set up a proper e-commerce suite may consider Volusion e-commerce suite, which helps users create and manage an online store, sell products, and market your business.

Some of the alternatives to Wix and Weebly include Squarespace, Duda, Sitey, Webs, and Jimdo, among others.

Almost all the providers, including Wix and Weebly, offer free plans, allowing small business owners to start a small business website without spending a penny. However paid subscriptions get better features such as website stats, video, and audio support, removal of Wix branding, and other handy functionality. Paid plans start at $15 per month.

WordPress Website

Small to medium businesses who are somewhat tech-savvy but cannot afford to invest too much expertise into their website would do well to consider a WordPress website. The advantage of a WordPress website is access to unlimited features and functionality.

Creating a WordPress website is a 3-step process

• Sign-up for hosting
• Choosing any suitable WordPress theme. There are thousands of ready-made responsive themes on offer.
• Customize the theme to design the site.

WordPress is an intermediate website builder, and users may set up a WordPress website without any programming knowledge. However, WordPress has a traditional edit menu, and as such, users may require familiarity with backend menu. The process is fairly easy though, and it is possible to create a fairly decent website in under an hour.

While it is technically possible to set up a WordPress website for free, businesses short of in-house expertise would find it more convenient to subscribe to easy packages, which start from just $2.95 per month.

Two popular e-commerce solutions using the WordPress platform are Shopify and WooCommerce.

Creating an e-commerce website using Shopify is as easy as signing up, uploading the product details, and start selling. The hundreds of themes and extensions on offer facilitate easy customization.  However, Shopify doesn’t offer access to the direct code, limiting the ability to customize beyond a point.

WooCommerce is another advanced WordPress plugin, which also allows converting a regular WordPress website into a full-fledged e-commerce store. The significant advantage of WooCommerce is full access to the source code, throwing open the scope for unbridled customization.

Several providers such as Bluehost offers affordable all-in-one package, which may include the domain name registration, a business email account, and the WordPress website.

Regardless of the route chosen, never underestimate the importance of clean design, powerful content, and SEO best practices. A user decides whether to stay or leave a website in less than 3 seconds. As such it is imperative to make a good first impression. Clear navigation, action buttons, an overall minimalistic design, and constant monitoring to ensure speedy downloads all go in the way to making the website a powerful catalyst for the success of your business.  

The World Wide Web offers unbound potential. However, harnessing the potential requires offering stable and reliable solutions in what is essentially an extremely fluid and unstable environment. Web admins commonly encounter several issues which cause websites to go down or users to have a poor experience.

Here are the key web hosting challenges, and effective solutions to overcome such challenges.

1. Slow Website Loading and Navigation Speed:

Enterprises pay a very heavy price for slow loading websites.

Users rarely return to a website which takes a long time to load and/or which has slow internal navigation. Three out of every four web users do not return to websites which take more than four seconds to load. To compound matters, poor page load affects Google rankings negatively, leading to a downward spiral.

The best hosting providers adopt several strategies to preempt the slow loading of websites:

• Locating redundant servers across the world. The physical location of the data center hosting the website influences the page load time in a significant way. The nearer the data center hosting the server from the user’s location, the faster the load time of the website.
• Making use of quality hardware and infrastructure, to reduce network latency to the extent possible. Network latency is the time taken for a packet of data to reach one point, from another point.
• Offering Content Delivery Network (CDN), which makes available cached versions of the static portions of the website at optimized speeds, to several locations

2. The Challenge of Maintaining Uptime:

Web hosting thrives in a highly unstable ecosystem. Servers going down and various other issues are facts of life. However, downtime is fatal in the web hosting industry, and can even mean the death knell of the client’s business.

Web hosting companies need to ensure a minimum of 99.9% uptime rate, which is the industry standard.  Anything more than about 10 minutes of downtime a week is fatal. The main reasons for unplanned, emergency downtime are hardware or software failure, security breaches, and administrator errors. Planned downtime, for inevitable maintenance, is best performed at night or off-peak hours when the website visitor count is usually at its lowest.

Web hosting providers strive to maintain high uptime and overcome the challenge of downtime by:

• Deploying stable software, and updating it regularly, to prevent software failure
• Deploying high quality and proven hardware components
• Undertaking periodic software and hardware audit to pre-empt obsolescence.
• Offering online support on a 24×7 basis to clients, to resolve client queries and issues promptly.
• Offering FAQ’s, user forums and other forums to share knowledge, for speedy resolution of issues, and even preempt issues through timely client action.
• Ensuring sound network security
• Ensuring adequate protection from hazards such as floods and fire at the physical data center location

3. Challenges of Providing Scalability

Today’s e-commerce companies and website owners expect highly scalable resources. However, hosting providers are often hard pressed to provide it.

Many web hosting companies suffer from dated infrastructure, such as old server hardware, outdated software, a narrow broadband connection, and inadequately skilled support staff. Such restraint imposed a resource crunch, which impedes scalability.

Even when there is nothing wrong with the software or hardware, the limited resources being deployed, or the architecture of the data center may create bottlenecks. Emerging technologies such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data offers unbound possibilities, but also makes huge demands on resources.

Inability to scale up resources when required may lead to websites bouncing due to some unknown restrictions, inability to log on to the mailbox or send email attachments, and limits being imposed without any option to mitigate it. For clients, this translates to missed opportunities and poor end-customer experience.

Successful web hosting providers:

• Overhaul their legacy infrastructure from time-to-time to ensure they are equipped to meet the demands made by emerging technologies.
• Identify the gap between requirements and infrastructure capabilities, and work towards filling the gap by provisioning the required hardware and software.
• Upgrade staff skills through training and other interventions, to ensure they are competent to do the needful when required.

4. Security Challenges

Web hosting companies are always under the Damocles sword of security. Cyber breaches are the order of the day. Breaches are costly in terms of loss of sensitive data, crippling regulatory fines, loss of trust and reputation, and more.

A common pitfall from web hosting providers is failing to restrict URL access. Without such restrictions, unauthorized users may view pages they should not have access to. With such access enabled, attackers may easily forge URLs to access hidden pages.

Many web hosting providers offer shared hosting as a low-cost solution for clients. However, sharing an IP address among clients means linking separate domains using a single server. When a client is blacklisted as a spammer, it leads to a situation where all other clients sharing the same IP is also blacklisted.

Web hosting companies may overcome the pressing security challenges by:

• Deploying the latest and state-of-the-art security infrastructure, including firewalls, networking monitoring systems, and more
• Implementing Secure File Transfer Protocol (STFP) to plug loopholes
• Blocking all file types not served by the application.
• Create an access control matrix which stops unauthorized users viewing content.
• Implementing strict access control mechanisms at the data center to prevent rogue insiders and unauthorized attackers from taking physical control over critical web assets.

Data Centers utilize several physical and digital resources to manage the daily operations. Highly successful providers are always on their toes, to ensure the deployed resources work as expected. They also strive to ensure proper management of day to day operations, undertake prompt and periodical updates, and attend to maintenance issues promptly. Last but not least, they never underestimate the value of a skilled team with experience and expertise.