One would think that a strong password is one that contains special characters, numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters. This can be true, but it has been shown that all a password needs to be is long. Lets take a look at two passwords and compare their strength.

Is your website mobile ready? If not, you’re certainly behind the times according to a new report by eMarketer. They are reporting that 2015 will be the first year that mobile ad spending will surpass traditional desktop/laptop digital ad spending. eMarketer is speculating that digital ad spending on smartphones and tablets will increase to 50.1% of the total spend, up from 38% in 2014 and just 25% in 2013. They speculate that the trend will continue, with mobile ad spends raising to 77% of the total spend in 2018.

In January 2014, we looked back at our top 5 newsworthy announcements for the previous year and declared that 2013 was our most exciting year to date. It was easy to see why we thought 2013 was so exciting with the launch of SSD Hosting, Cloud Hosting and a European data center.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a post about the importance of page load speed. Instead of just telling you about how important page load speed is, you probably care more about how page load speed impacts your bottom line. Kissmetrics, an Analytics solution provider, has done extensive research regarding how page speed can impact your success. This report mentions:

We are excited to announce the launch of our Turbo Servers. With up to 20X faster page loads compared to standard hosting, Turbo servers mark our fastest hosting service to date.

Google Analytics is a great tool. We use it at A2 Hosting and it’s something that I look at everyday. However like any tool, it isn’t perfect and there are stats that you shouldn’t necessarily take for granted. One of those stats, and it is an important one, is your conversion rate.

From time to time, our support team receives the following question:

About 4 years ago we saw the birth of a new tactic to target potential customers called remarketing (also referred to as retargeting). You may not be familiar with this term, but I would be very surprised if you haven’t seen remarketing in practice. Remarketing is when you visit a website and then you start seeing banner ads and even ads in Facebook promoting the website you visited.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Shellshock is the name of a particularly nasty vulnerability in Bash, the standard shell for most Linux distributions (and other Unix-like systems.) As of press time, new vulnerabilities due to this bug are still being discovered. Some distributions have only released patches that fix part of the problem, and a vast number of Internet connected computers are unpatched and vulnerable. There’s bound to be some negative outcomes from a security problem like this, but let’s see if we can scrape out some positive results.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise WordPress users really care about page load speed and website security. After all, page load speed impacts everything from your bounce rates, conversion rates, page views and Google rankings. On the security side, over 10 million websites are hacked each year and the total cost to fix those hacks are rapidly escalating.