WebNow Online Solutions Simplified

An online presence, whether personal or business, has become an almost every day necessity. Such demand has seen a growth in web hosting companies, large and small, competing to host websites, mail and online applications.

WebNow might be able to help...

Multi-Platform Hosting
WebNow can offer hosting across Linux or Microsoft Windows Server to ensure you web applications run in the most optimal environment.

Multi-Application Hosting
Our hosting environment allows the provisioning of multiple website languages to run across multiple database engines; whether it is PHP and MySQL or ASP.Net and Microsoft SQL Server.

Optimised Infrastructure
All our servers run on the latest enterprise-class Dell PowerEdge servers; each designed for its specific role, whether its serving web content or hosting web application databases. Our servers are hosted in the Teraco Data Centre, in the heart of Cape Town. This vendor neutral Data Centre allows us to run across of a number of upstream providers, all housed in an N+1 environment. Such an environment offers complete redundancy across all hosting variables such as power, cooling, security. and connectivity.

Web Security
Each hosting environment is protected by external hardware firewalls, protecting your applications from malicious attacks. This ensures each environment is running optimally from a systems and connectivity point of view.

E-mail Anti-Virus and SPAM Protection
MailCleaner offers professional protection against viruses and eliminates up to 99% of spam. MailCleaner is installed between the Internet and your mail server. It blocks all intrusive messages before they reach their destination mail server, ensuring your mailbox stays clean and safe.

Custom Designed Packages
WebNow has refined, and continues to refine, its hosting packages to ensure we constantly offer the best value for money and aid in the upgrade process of your web applications as they grow. We can help you choose the best plan to suit your current needs and advise as your needs grow.

Control Panel
Each hosting environment runs WebNow’s Control Panel, allowing you to take complete control of every feature of your domain. Users can edit DNS records, configure mail accounts, set website file/folder permissions, backup websites, schedule tasks, inegrate with Google, define programming language compatibility and create databases.

Value Add
We believe in offering a wider range of features over offering extensive disk space and mail accounts. This allows us to offer better value for money, by providing services such as a Site Builder, Webmail, and a variety of web statistics and analysis tools.

Dedicated Support team
Experienced support members with web application experience, are available via E-mail, telephone, Instant Messenger or our advanced ticketing system, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

WebNow is pleased to announce that we are sponsoring the Hosting and Re-Development of the “Consider Us” website.

About Consider Us

The Consider Us campaign has been conceived and developed by Zoom Advertising, part of the Ogilvy group.

  The campaign calls for children, between six and eighteen, to explain in 20 words why world leaders should consider them when signing their climate change treaties. What is precious about our world? Why is it worth saving?       These messages then appear, in real time, on a dedicated website, serving as a voice of the generation with the most to lose.

  A TV, radio and print campaign will advertise Consider Us; a ‘guerrilla' campaign masterminded by Heart (the social enterprise hub that incubates new social enterprises) includes a chalking project, whereby messages are chalked up in the communities and a greening/planting project. Two dedicated websites are now live for the posting of messages. A social media campaign using free MXit and website banner advertising makes up a full digital media campaign to support Consider Us.

Parents, teachers and children are being encouraged to participate in the campaign so that these messages can be delivered to the world's financiers, who can deliver them to the United Nations Climate Change Conference that is currently underway in Copenhagen.

Follow the campaign on www.considerus.org or www.considerus.mobi.

Jean-Pierre Dumont, CEO of WebNow,  on sponsoring the online channel for Consider Us: “ I can certainly see that the “Consider Us” project is an extremely worthwhile initiative and our organisation would definitely like to be associated with it and assist where we can. “

We will be using an Enterprise hosting infrastructure that will be tailored to suite their specific needs such as anticipated increase in global site activity and subsequent load.

On the Web Development side, WebNow has a proven track record in the design and development of content management and database driven websites. We have made a name for ourselves by providing best of breed solutions for brands such as Toyota.

In addition WebNow will also be advising on the correct and most effective use of social media networking.

We are developing a flexible yet robust framework to support the site now and into the future!

Please view www.considerus.org and make a difference.  

You have a business therefore you have a website, this goes without saying. You refer many of your potential customers to your website and many potential customers come across your website while surfing the Internet with this in mind your website is your primary marketing tool and therefore you update it daily or at least weekly.

If you doing all of the above you are on the right track, but which hosting package should you be using for your website? First of all to start with and then secondly as your website grows what do you need to upgrade to.

The first question you need to ask yourself is where are your website visitors coming from, this will help you decide where the server your website sits on should be. If you are getting most South African visitors then your website should be in South Africa, it is going to have a much faster response time when people are on your website.

Next question, is your site going to be a static website that never changes (hopefully not), or is your site going to be connected to some sort of content management system or e-commerce shopping solution. If it is a static website you can get a very basic hosting package, if you are going to have a more advanced website you are going to need a hosting package that gives you access to a database and scripting.

This leads you onto your next question, which technology are you going to use. If your business is aligned to a specific vendor already, for example Microsoft you will want to keep you website aligned to that. But maybe you want to cut your hosting costs (Microsoft is more expensive than Linux for example) or cut your website development costs (Microsoft development is cheaper than Java for example).

Now how much content are you going to have on your website, work this out by taking the average size of the images and other multimedia items on each page of your website and then multiplying this by how many pages you are going to build. The hosting package you choose should allow you enough disk space to cover this need.

You can also try and work out how many visitors are going to visit your website on a daily basis, and together with the amount of pages they will visit and the amount of content on those pages you will be able to calculate how much bandwidth you require.

Lastly, you need to make sure that what ever hosting package you choose you can easily upgrade or downgrade to other hosting packages as your requirements change.

Last week Trevor Manual the finance minister of South Africa gave what many believe was his last budget speech in his successful career.

In these tough economic times it certainly was a difficult budget to prepare, but as usual he has done a fine job and I believe he has provided every citizen of South Africa the opportunity to become an entrepreneur.

Why do I say this? For every tax bracket he has reduced the amount of tax an individual is paying which means that you will have additional money in your pocket every month. He says he has done this to ease the effects of inflation, but hopefully you have become accustom to your current financial situation so you will be able to use this extra money to become an entrepreneur.

Instead of using these additional Rand's to go out and buy clothing, watch a movie or go to dinner, I would recommend you sign up for an ADSL connection to your home and a starter hosting package, together costing you no more than R200 a month.

The power that a permanent Internet connection gives you is incredible, it's the platform that gives you an equal opportunity to every single other business out there. By being connected 24x7 you can communicate with customers, research and market your business.

Once you have done your research, and come up with a business name the next step is to get yourself a website. Register a domain, sign up for a starter hosting package, and get a simple template driven website online. Once you are that far register yourself on Google and start spreading the Word (marketing) your business and watch your business grow.

All that thanks to Mr. Manuel, so before you go and over commit yourself with life's little pleasures; think ahead! Think ahead, become an entrepreneur by following this simple plan.

Well why stop at a website revamp - why not look at hosting plans as well?

Well, that's exactly what we have done - and have we made some changes:

• We have dumbed down the offering, added more feature and allocated more disk space and traffic quotas across all plans.
• Traffic on SA servers has been substantially increased.
• Prices on disk and traffic overages have in some cases been halved.
• We are giving away free domain names on selected plans.
• Our top end plan has been significantly dropped from over R800 to a much more manageable R499.
  

For more information: http://www.webnow.co.za/hostingMatrix.asp.