Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer science fiction, it’s a real part of our everyday lives. Over the last few years, it’s been adopted across an increasing spectrum of sectors: healthcare, education, security, retail and even HR. It’s also become an important tool in web hosting. In this post, we’ll show you four ways that AI can benefit your website and hosting service.

Artificial intelligence, however, is turning out to be an important tool in helping web hosts respond to cyber threats. The advanced firewall technology they use to protect their clients is able to detect encoded threats and attack patterns as they develop. And with machine learning, every time it faces a new threat, it can incorporate what it has learnt to improve its defences even more and predict future attacks at the earliest possible time. When this happens, it can put effective measures in place and send alerts to both the web hosting team and their clients.

Domain names are essential to the success of your brand so it is important that any you own are protected and that any others, which could be associated with your company, are not being used in inappropriate or illegal ways.

Whilst there are plenty of domain name checkers you can use to see if a domain is available to purchase, many of these don’t provide 100% accuracy and this has led, in the past, to registration errors.

 Artificial Intelligence, however, provides another layer of protection. It can be used to track any attempts by others to buy or register a domain that is similar to your own or to use it through a proxy server. This enables you to have constant warnings if rogue traders set up a site selling counterfeit goods or if scammers are cloning your site as a way to defraud individuals out of their money. In this way, it helps protect your business and your online reputation.

AI works by understanding patterns in data and coded environments. It analyses them and learns through adding new patterns to its memory. As it learns,  Artificial Intelligence is able to make predictions and this is one of its key uses within industry.

For those with online businesses, AI can use its predictive intelligence to forecast how well domain names and individual URLs will perform over time. This is done through the analyses of existing web data. This means companies can use AI to research the ideal domain name and extension for their business and get predictions of how well their website might perform in terms of traffic and conversion rates.

Whilst a website’s performance is based on a whole range of factors, such as the nature and the quality of its content, how well it is optimised, and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, etc., companies that have several potential domain names in mind can use this information to help them choose the one which is likely to have the biggest appeal to the market they are targeting.

The maintenance of any digital platform, whether it’s a website or an entire suite of business-critical applications, requires significant input. Today,  Artificial Intelligence is already at the stage where it can help your IT staff undertake those tasks in more effective and efficient ways.

One example of this is self-repair or self-healing. Hosts that use self-healing artificial intelligence, use it to scan systems, diagnose potential issues and then undertake preventive measures before problems materialise. If, for example, defective hardware is found, a self-healing system can transfer systems running on that hardware to failover servers before the server crashes and thus maintain uptime. Similarly, it can install updates or change settings. In the case of major issues, AI will alert your web host’s IT team to the problem so that human intervention can take place.

Besides providing a more robust service,  Artificial Intelligence also reduces the maintenance burden on your web host, giving them extra time to improve the performance of your server and giving clients better technical support.

In the future, a combination of robotics and AI could lead to all hardware and system maintenance being carried by machines, with only the minimum of human input. If robots can already build cars, it may only be a matter of time.

Artificial intelligence is likely to be a permanent feature of our lives. It has enormous potential in all kinds of areas and those businesses that do not make use of it are likely to be at a big disadvantage. In web hosting, it provides us with better security, advantageous domain names, and automated maintenance and repair of the systems on which our websites run.

If you are looking for highly secure, state of the art web hosting that takes advantage of self-healing, check out our homepage to see our wide range of web hosting services.

Source - Web Hosting UK Blog

Blogs are a well-established feature of the online landscape enabling people and businesses to publish posts on a wide range of topics and to reach out to a broad spectrum of readers. The go-to platform for blogging is WordPress and, in this post, we’ll provide tips and advice on how to create a truly successful WordPress blog.

Rather than simply writing lots of posts and publishing them straight away, it’s much better to have a strategic approach to creating your blog. Think of the different topics you might want to cover so that you can create clearly defined categories, create a content calendar so you know the best times of year to publish things, consider the different types of content you can create to add variety, put together a style guide that helps you communicate in the right tone.

At the same time, you have to decide the long-term goals for your blog and work what you have to do to achieve these. Do you want more visitors or more social media shares? Do you want a blog that influences or one which makes money? Each of these will affect what you write about and how you write.

Having a strategy in place before you start will prevent you from setting off on the wrong path or publishing content that doesn’t meet your needs.

Before reading a single word, the first thing any visitor will see is the theme – the style, colours and layout of your blog. If this is off-putting to them, they may leave straight away. This is not just a matter of taste, but also expectation. While the presentation needs to be attractive, visitors will also have expectations about what a blog on your topic will look like. If your choice of theme is completely at odds with this, they may turn elsewhere. In this sense, you need to have a balance that takes into consideration your own unique style and the preconceived notions of your visitors.

Besides the look, there are other things you need to take into consideration when choosing a theme. It will need to be compatible with any plugins you want to use, it has to be mobile-friendly, fast-loading and it needs to be user-friendly from a blogger’s point of view so that you can customise the look and post content with ease.

Clever research can have big benefits for bloggers, helping them know which topics are trending and which people want to read about. Keep your eye on the media and social media for hot topics and trending hashtags.

You should also research blogs which are similar to yours to pick up tips about what makes them successful. Which of their posts have the most likes or comments? How do they craft their titles? What impression do the theme and layout create? Make a list of good and bad points that you can use to help you.

Finally, remember to research keywords, (the words people type into search engines) so that you include these in your titles, subheadings, meta descriptions and content. Placing them here will help your posts rank better when people search for these terms and increase the number of visitors you get. There are specific online tools you can use to help you, such as the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool.

Most bloggers just want to write posts, however, if you want to rank well on search engines and attract new visitors, search engine optimisation (SEO) is an important task you’ll need to undertake. Luckily for WordPress users, there are various SEO plugins you can use to help.

One of the most popular is Yoast SEO, which does a lot of the technical optimisation for you and provides an optimisation analysis of every post your write, giving you essential information about any changes you need to make to help them rank higher.

Categories and tags are used to organise your blog posts into discrete sections. When you put posts into the right category or tag them with the right labels, it enables visitors to easily find relevant content. This helps them stay on your site for longer and increases the chance of them coming back for another visit. Using categories correctly can also help search engines understand how the content of your site is structured and this can help them index your site better.

A blog where people feel welcome and where they are treated well is one which will get visitors returning time and time again. What’s more, these loyal visitors are more likely to share and like your posts, helping you to grow your audience even more.

To make your blog user-friendly, you have to focus on giving them the best user experience when they visit. There are many things you can do to make this happen, for instance, use welcoming language, respond to comments, ensure the site loads quickly and works on mobile devices, and make it easy for visitors to find the information they need.

Understanding who visits your site, where they come from, how they get there and what they do once they have landed can provide you with essential information to make your blog even better. Luckily, all this information is free from Google Analytics and, for WordPress users, setting it up is a breeze thanks to the range of free plugins you can use.

With this information, you’ll find out which posts are getting the most hits, how long people spend reading them and where they go on your site after finishing reading. This can help you improve the content and SEO on poorly performing posts and create new posts which will appeal to the people who are actually visiting your site.

Blogging, when approached in the right way, can be extremely rewarding. It enables bloggers to express their ideas, promote issues and market their brands. Hopefully, the advice given here will help you reach out to a wider audience, increasing the number of visitors you receive and turning them into loyal fans.

If you are considering starting a blog, take a look at our fast performance, highly secure WordPress Web hosting packages. With WordPress preinstalled, your blog can be up and running in no time.

Source - Webhosting UK