3 steps that will help you grow your brand
Branding takes a lot of time and it is difficult to measure? You often hear this reaction when you drop the term ‘branding’.
Fortunately, this is a thing of the past.
I can already hear you thinking, “How do I get people to recognize my brand? And what does it take to make them part of the buying process?”.
I’ll help you on your way!
By getting started with the principles below, you will grow faster than ever before.
The 3 principles for brand growth:
- The louder the better
- Mix it & fix it
- Stand out of the crowd
The louder the better
The more people who know your brand, the larger your market share is. That’s just the way it works.
According to research, there is a strong link between market share growth and investment.
In other words: SOV (share of voice) = SOM (share of market). That basically means that when you shout louder (spend more money), you end up taking a larger share of the pie.
In other words: you have a larger market share, your share of market.
Just an example. Think of a physical Friday afternoon market. The one man behind his vegetable stall who screams so loudly probably also has most people at his stall.
This is the same effect as online.
How do you know if you are using this tactic optimally?
The most reliable is calculating the excess share of voice where you compare your SUM to your competition.
For this it is important that you have the figures ready. But… it can be a big challenge to get this done yourself.
Looking for an alternative? Look at the share of search (SOS). This is the percentage of a brand’s total search volume relative to its competitors.
Studies show that SOS often equals SOM.
By looking at the search volume of a product category versus your brand name plus product category, you can find out how you stand.
Here’s a quick look:
SOV = Share of voice
SUM = Share of market
SOS = Share of search
But beware! It’s not a matter of ‘just increasing budgets’.
Increase your budgets and only start shouting louder after you have the following two principles in order: mix it and fix itandstand out of the crowd.
Mix it & Fix it
Performance and branding are two different things.
Performance teams focus on short-term results such as conversions, while brand managers think about the whole funnel and creating brand awareness.
You can imagine that this can cause quite a few discussions within a company when you split the two teams.
Why do we settle for impressions in a branding campaign and why is the emphasis on a higher CTR and a lower CPC for performance?
These two approaches reinforce each other when they are combined.
Take a look at your branding campaign with your performance glasses on. And vice versa.
For example, the performance team can learn from storytelling. The branding team in their time again of applying more analysis and data-driven decision making.
Ideally, you no longer want to look at performance or branding.
Instead, you look at brand growth. The growth of your brand.
That’s what you end up doing it for.
Mix your teams and make use of each other’s strengths. Only in this way can you really grow.
Mix it and fix it.
Make sure you have a healthy balance between your long-term and short-term campaigns.
The overall ratio between brand building and sales activity is 60:40. This of course depends on the industry and the maturity of the brand. This is based on official research by Les Binet & Peter Field.
This way you achieve results much faster. You can also determine your next steps more clearly on the basis of data.
Stand out of the crowd
Social media channels are designed to let you scroll.
We see 4,000 ads a day. Bizarre a lot!
Sometimes it feels like we stand out in the crowd, because our ad just scrolled by without being clicked on or even noticed!
Imagine what this means for your business…
How do you make sure you stand out?
It’s super important that you get people to stop scrolling.
You have to find something that sets you apart. You have to dare to jump out of the crowd.
By being creative you have a chance to be seen and remembered. According to Nielsen research, creativity even has a 49% impact on final sales.
What can you do to stand out?
Start working on your brand salience!
Brand salience is a similar metric to brand awareness. The difference is that brand salience is aimed at measuring awareness during the actual purchase decision rather than overall brand visibility.
If you have a high brand of salience, then you have a strong brand presence that consumers recognize and think of when they need a product.
An example: suppose you are in the mood for coffee and are on your way to a customer appointment.
Where would you stop to get a coffee? Which brands are you thinking of at the moment when you want to make a purchase?
Right, those are the brands that have a high brand of salience for you.
Ask yourself, “Which coffee brands do you know?”.
The answer you get to this is brand awareness.
It is therefore very important to map out where your customer may be thinking of you.
This way you can increase your brand salience and make a difference with your brand and if you want to know how to attract more customers to your brand, you may check the article “Create perfect lead magnets that customers can’t ignore.”
If you are looking for a good Digital Marketing Company in Kolkata that can handle your Social Media Marketing or Brand Promotion, then you may check our reviews on Google.
Create perfect lead magnets that customers can’t ignore
You scroll for hours and hours on social media along different pages. Ask yourself: “What really catches my attention?”. When do you stop scrolling and take the time to read something?
While scrolling, you are distracting your brain, overstimulating it, and taking your focus away. As an organization, you want your content to stand out. You want to stimulate the customer and ensure that you come to the attention.
In this blog, we tell you how to create lead magnets that do not pass your customer by.
A good example: how do you tell a detailed story to a good friend during a big and busy concert? Pretty tricky huh? It can also be difficult to make your ads stand out on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
Productive Mindset for lead generation
Advertisements on social media are often aimed at getting people off the platform. So basically you use a platform to advertise and then you want the customer to go off that platform and visit your website. Quite a difficult task.
If you want to succeed in that, you have to ensure a productive mindset among users. A productive mindset consists of:
- Focus
- Attention
- Interest
Focus, attention, and interest can be retained by sending the perfect message at the right time and in the right place. What helps you with that are lead magnets.
The secret ingredients for epic lead magnets
When you start using lead magnets, you have to focus on a target group that is problem-aware. After all, they are looking for a solution. The image below shows you where they are located.
A lead magnet ensures that you make this group solution-aware. With your lead magnet, you offer a solution to their problem.
Ingredient #1: the target group that benefits from the lead magnet
Ask yourself: is the target group defined without being too niche?
Below you can see examples of lead magnets that have worked and have not worked. The bottom lead magnets did not achieve the right result because the focus was too much on a niche target group.
Lead magnet | | Target audience |
9 Health Benefits of Beans | Healthy foodies ✅ |
A legal checklist for starting a business in Rotterdam | Entrepreneurs in Rotterdam ✅ |
5 must-haves for reaching retirement age | Parents reaching ❌ retirement age |
7 Tax Saving Strategies for Pharmacy Owners | Pharmacy owners ❌ |
Don’t make the target audience too specific. It becomes all the more difficult to get hold of them.
Ingredient #2: The applicability of the content
Ask yourself: Can the reader use this now or is there more work to be done?
We’ve been talking about attention retention. You can only hold a user’s attention for a short time. After all, they want to scroll further quickly to see holiday photos or cool videos.
In this short time frame, you have to make sure that the reader does not have to do too much work to take action. Otherwise, you’ll lose them. Below you can see two examples of lead magnets that have or have not worked. Are you watching?
Lead magnet | | Kind |
Spaghetti with scallops | Recipe ✅ |
5 easy exercises to learn the English language | Exercises ✅ |
7 financial strategies for brokers | Strategies ❌ |
How to: buying investment properties | Buyers guide ❌ |
Recipes always do well. You read the lead magnet in the afternoon and can get started the same evening. Users can put themselves to work right away.
The same goes for 5 easy exercises to learn English. This lead magnet is successful because an important ‘keyword’ is used. The word ‘easy’ tells the reader that there is not much work behind this lead magnet. Other words you can use are for example: simple, simple, or small.
For example, a word that you should avoid in a lead magnet strategy. That word makes the reader think that there is still a lot of work to be done. At that point, readers drop out.
Ingredient #3: The relevance of the lead magnet
Ask yourself: is the content on time or is it poorly timed?
The title of your lead magnet is important. With this, you finally trigger the reader. A successful lead magnet often contains a year or time in the title. It makes the reader aware that it is or may be relevant at the moment.
Take a look at the examples below:
Lead magnet | | Timing |
Why you should buy real estate in East Groningen right now | Good content: right time ✅ |
Why You Should Consider Building a Modular Home in 2022 | Good content: right time ✅ |
How to buy a house as a starter | Good content: wrong time ❌ |
How to sell your dental practice | Good content: niche time ❌ |
Two lead magnets have had no success. Why is that? The timing of both lead magnets was wrong. For many people, it is currently hardly possible to buy a house because of the scarcity of the housing market. Starters continue to rent and cannot yet buy a house. A good example of timing is key.
Ingredient #4: The emotion the lead magnet evokes
Ask yourself: Could this topic work in small talk or is it too focused on productivity and work?
When the latter is the case, you won’t get many downloads. Topics that appeal to the reader are often topics that you also discuss in the bar, for example. It should be a topic that people like to talk about.
Lead magnet | | Emotion |
How we can positively influence our daily lives with compassion | Compassionate and caring ✅ |
10 lessons to find happiness in life | Happy and fulfilled ✅ |
Is it cheaper to buy or rent a water heater? | Productive and informative ❌ |
Three essential checklists for a safe working environment | Practical and work-related ❌ |
When you scroll through your social media feed, you don’t think of a water heater. That is exactly the reason that this lead magnet was not a success. It’s a topic that doesn’t appeal to readers easily.
To respond to the emotions of readers, you can use a number of smart words. Words like positivity, impact, and happiness release dopamine in our brains. We make a connection between these words and our feelings. A successful lead magnet responds to these emotions.
Convert readers to buyers
A successful lead magnet contains the above 4 ingredients. The last step is that users actually read the lead magnet. The infographic below gives you insight into how you can ensure that a lead magnet is read.
It doesn’t stop at sending one e-mail. Many emails end up somewhere between the dozens of emails you receive in a day. Therefore, send users a reminder to open the lead magnet.
Follow the further step-by-step plan to actually turn readers into buyers. Step by step you create the perfect lead magnet and if you need help from any marketing agency then we are always ready with our market-tested lead generation strategies.
If you are looking for a good Website Design Company in Kolkata that makes SEO-friendly websites, then you may check our reviews on Google.
Good luck!
The SEO Trends for 2023
SEO in 2023 is going to be more vital and Xpert Digital has already looked ahead to the new year: 2023.
The end of 2022 is approaching and that means that the new year is not that far away from us at all.
Do you want to discover new trends in SEO? Here we will discuss here a number of topics that will be on the agenda in the coming year.
The SEO trends revolve around quality, looking beyond just search engines and more focus on visual and interactive content.
Quality over quantity
Google has been optimizing its search engine and the underlying algorithms since its foundation in 1998.
Despite the hundreds of signals that Google has started using since then, it, unfortunately, remains the case that you as a searcher do not always see relevant search results.
It’s also not easy given the huge increase in content over the years. AI has been causing an extra deluge of content lately.
There doesn’t have to be anything wrong with AI content. Especially if it is generated by a qualitative AI tool.
Then it is even very useful and especially efficient, but it is still desirable that people check the generated content for quality and originality.
Google’s “Helpful Content” update last September means that the media platform will take better action against poor-quality AI content, in order to keep the search results as relevant as possible.
Less is more. It is better to occasionally publish very strong quality content than regularly very short or weak content.
You have to fight against increasingly fierce competition. So pick your battles.
Moreover, people are already struggling with a heavy information overload, so the quality requirements are not only becoming stricter from search engines, but also from users.
If your content can’t effectively answer the questions or problems of your target audience, you won’t get anywhere.
About 15% of searches are new to Google. You can imagine that this makes it difficult to present the right results.
Partly for this reason, Google is introducing additional search suggestions. If you as a user type search queries in, Google provides suggestions for related search terms, for example, to refine by “nearby”.
Google is also introducing buying guides for Shopping. In addition, Google offers many extra filter options to get to the right products faster from the large Shopping product range.
In order for a company to be able to sail optimally on this new Google function, it is important that you optimize your product = feed now and enrich it with detailed content.
So provide Google with as many product attributes and context as possible. Think, for example, of color, style, moments of use, variants, and sizes. For clothing shoppers, there will even be a shop the look function.
Targeted searches and channels by search intent
Google’s market share is still huge within the offer in various search engines and remains by far the most important.
However, Google is not always the starting point anymore. There is more and more diversity in channels with a search function, such as TikTok, Pinterest, and Reddit / Quora.
If the search via such a different channel has been successful, there is a good chance that visitors will return to that same channel more quickly. As you also see, for example, more and more people go directly to Marketplaces to find products.
But at the same time, it can also ensure that people already know a brand (preferably your brand of course) if they have first seen it on TikTok.
Then if they are a bit further in their search process, they may later still use a search engine, but then they use your brand in the search. That of course gives you a big head start.
In short; make sure that you are also present outside search engines on all possible channels for your target group, so that they encounter your company in all phases of the customer journey and remember it.
Search results become more visual & interactive
There is a change in media preference going on. TikTok and Pinterest are well-known social media platforms that are very visual and show almost only visual content.
If you want to piggyback on this development as a company, you must ensure that you have enough visual material within your offered content; think of video and photo material, but also AR or VR and 360º visuals.
Also take a critical look at your forms. Can’t you turn that into a game, chat flow, calculator or quiz? Do you already use QR codes, videos, shorts or 3D images?
Google seems to be tapping into the popularity of the visual platforms, by making more use of visual aspects in their search engines and thus remaining the most popular search engine.
Instead of just textual links to websites or videos, the search engine increasingly shows images, shorts, and verticals (specialized search engines, such as flights and shopping).
Multisearch
After a successful beta in the U.S., Google will continue to roll out MultiSearch. This is searching with a combination of text, image, and speech. This works via the Google app on Android or iOS.
For example, you can choose an image or take a photo via Lens and then swipe to add an extra search such as “green”.
Google remains number 1 when it comes to SEO, but other (younger) channels can further increase your organic reach.
Be critical of the content you create.
Provide more visual and interactive elements.
Create one super-strong piece of content that answers all possible questions from your target audience, rather than writing 10 thirteen-in-a-dozen blogs.
Do you want to know how Xpert Digital deals with the new SEO trends or how we can help you with more growth?
Importance Of Website for Business In 2022. Learn HOW To Make A Good Website
Want to know the Importance of Website for Business/Companies in today’s World? The website is a series of internet links, usually identified by a domain name, which are generally hosted on a single web server and usually have a series of related web pages, including video content, audio content, and even much more commonly published content on multiple servers. If you do not already have a site and do not own a business, you are losing out on numerous chances for the organization you run.
There are a variety of forms of sites, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. You can go online to look for “website design” in your favorite search engine. Below are some of the ordinary things that you will find in any successful web designing.
Among the most important things that the website for your company must have been the content. Without a website for your business, you’ll probably have no clients and will probably be spending a lot of time explaining what it is you do, or your own services you provide. If your website doesn’t offer the content you want to convince people your company is what they need, then they won’t come back for more.
One other important thing in website design for your company is the appearance and feel of the site. A fantastic site for your company can make the difference between a potential customer and someone who will never buy from you. A fantastic web designer will be able to earn this look so professional people will wonder how the person managed to create such a beautiful website.
Another thing that a web designer should put into consideration when creating a website for a business is the ease of navigation and use. People who have trouble navigating a site on their computer might not return to purchase from you in case their first experience with your company is via your site.
The Importance of Website for Business is one of the most essential things for a company, but the web design for the site isn’t the only thing that you ought to think about. There are other aspects to take into account when you build a web site for a company.
By way of example, you want to be certain that your web layout can support any type of search engine you might have. That could possibly be employed by men and women who could be looking for goods, or services which you offer. You also should be certain that the content and graphics on the site are what you expect people will discover attractive.
When you build a website for your business, the value of a website for business is quite important. It’s vital that you take the opportunity to make sure your website design is appealing to your clients and is an excellent source of information for those who may be looking for it. You need to use a reputable web design company that has years of experience building websites like yours, and one which know how important it is to your organization.
The next thing you would like to consider when creating a web site for your business is the ease of use to your client. The very best web design will permit them to get what they’re searching for without needing to devote much time seeking to understand what it is they’re searching for.
By having a fantastic web design, your web site will not only be effortless to use but will help you rank high in search engine results. This will help your customers make the most out of your site for business. You need to make sure your web design is something which your customers will appreciate, too. Make certain it’s simple and easy to navigate.
The last thing you want to take under consideration when building a website for your company is the cost of building the web design. Although a lot of cash is required to be able to get the plan of your site for a business up and running, you don’t wish to spend too much money. You would like to locate a web design company that offers affordable prices with quality layout.
How to Choose a Good Website Designing Company in 2022
How to choose a good website designing company is the question most people ask. But how can they find the right company for their needs? There are many questions you should ask and look into before choosing a web design company. Here are some points you need to look at before hiring a website designing company:
Ask yourself if the website design company you hire offers any sort of certification, especially if you want to use your services on an online business or e-commerce project. A lot of companies only offer web design certification or work experience. There are a lot of companies that will say that they have certificates and only give them out after the project is finished and the client has made money with their site.
Look into the reputation of the website designing company you are hiring. You can easily look up reviews online about the company you are considering. You will find all sorts of comments, positive and negative, about different website design companies and even about each individual person who work there. This can give you an idea of the company’s reliability and how much work they do on a daily basis.
Ask about any special features they offer such as training, tools, or training packages. You might not know a lot about the software they are using, but if it is good enough, they might be using it themselves. If they offer training packages that are not included in the standard package, it would be best to opt out and get something you can use as well.
The most important thing to look for when hiring a website design company is their reputation. If you are able to find a few good reviews online, this could be a sign that the company is worth considering. Another thing to consider is the cost. You might not be comfortable with paying a large amount of money for a training package, but at least you will know that you are getting the most bang for your buck when it comes to hiring a website design company.
Choosing a good company that offers good customer service is very important as well. By offering good customer service to their clients, the designers will be able to make sure that they are satisfied with everything from the beginning, and that will make sure that they stay with them for years to come.
You might not be able to find the answers too many of these things when looking for a website designing company on the internet, but with a little research and time spent with friends, you should be able to find out some things that will help you choose a good website design company for your business.
If you are planning to start a small business and need web services, then you might not be able to do everything yourself, but that doesn’t mean you have to choose a poor website design company. Take the time to find a good one and see what you can find out about them before committing to them for your services.
You want to make sure that the website designing company has good web skills as well as being able to create a website that is pleasing to the eye, so keep this in mind. Make sure that the company has good experience with HTML and other web design tools, as well as the ability to create websites that look professional and search engine friendly.
It is important to take the time to ask questions about the website of a website designing company before agreeing to hire them. When you ask questions about the site, ask for references, or ask for samples of previous work so that you can see how the company does.
Ask questions such as: “Why did you become a web designer“, “What makes you so good at it”, “When are you planning to expand to more clients”, and “Where can I find clients who need web design jobs?” The last question is extremely important, because it will give you a good idea of the type of people who work for the web designing company. When you find out a little about the company, it will be easier for you to tell whether the company fits the description of a good web designer.
Finding a good website design company can be challenging, but the rewards of having a nice website are worth it. There are a lot of companies that claim to be good, but when you do enough research to find one that is good, then you can be sure that you are choosing the best.
Advantages for Companies of Hiring Freelancers vs Salaried Workers
Nowadays companies are hiring freelancers on their own when carrying out specific projects or to work regularly in the company, but these types of employees have different conditions than employees. There are many advantages that make an increasing number of companies want to have this type of employee in their templates.
Hiring a freelancer or freelancers can become a good solution when it comes to carrying out a specific project or giving way to tasks that within the company would take too much time or dedication. It can also be convenient because of the savings that companies can obtain. But is it better to have self-employed or salaried workers? In this post, we will tell you the advantages and disadvantages of each type.
Before focusing on the main topic, let’s make clear the differences between self-employed (self-employed) and employed (salaried).
Self-employed definition: A self-employed person is one who resides in the country whose income comes in a proportion equal to or close to 80% from the performance of commissioned work, such as activities of commerce, mining, fishing, sports, electricity and gas, wood industry, etc.
When we talk about self-employed is the same as saying self-employed or freelance. In this case, you work for yourself, you have to work hard and you must be in continuous recycling. This way of working can give a high quality of life, always with good advice and delinking the personal accounts of the professionals, in order to face the taxes with liquidity and the payments that may arise.
Definition employed by an employee: A person who works as an employee is one who is hired under an employment contract by an employer and is hired at least one hour a week and receives consideration for it.
In this case, as we have mentioned, we work with an employment contract where the working conditions are stipulated, both hours and payroll, an employee is limited, since he has a schedule to meet and economic expectations as he has agreed in the employment contract that he has signed with the employer, it is less flexible work than self-employment.
Differences between self-employment and working as an employee
- The person who works as an employee has a stable and fixed monthly salary, while the one who works on his own account will depend on the billing issued by the company.
- The employed person (employed) must be subject to the schedules, breaks and place of work established by the employer, while the self-employed person shall establish his schedules and breaks while choosing the place where he wants to work.
- The employee depends on his company: if it closes the worker also ceases his activity, unlike the self-employed who, if he loses a client, will go to another sector of the market looking for new customers.
- The employee to access a job must have more experience than the freelancer.
- To be self-employed, it is necessary to fill in Form 037 to obtain the registration of Economic Activity and to work as an employee, a model of an eventual, full-time, temporary or indefinite contract is filled in according to the type of contract.
- The employee has to pay from his gross salary the Social Security contributions and the withholding on account of the IRPF, but as the procedures are done by the company, many do not know how much and what they really pay. Like employees, the self-employed also contribute to Social Security by paying a monthly contribution and personal income tax is deducted. In addition to social contributions, the self-employed pay taxes, through Personal Income Tax and VAT. In relation to Personal Income Tax, if you have the bonus of a newly self-employed person it drops to 9%, if not, it ranges between 15% and 19% of income. As for VAT, they adjust accounts with the State quarterly: they pay the Treasury the difference between the VAT they have charged their customers.
Having seen the most important points to understand the types of employees that exist, it is important to point out that if there is something that has changed significantly it is the “wanted” permanent or indefinite job since it has been transformed. Now companies have skyrocketed the hiring of self-employed workers. It is a way for companies to significantly reduce labour costs. A study carried out by the American consultancy Tower Lane said that 54% of companies plan to increase the hiring of freelancers.
Working as a freelancer is “necessarily” fashionable, due to the situation of the country, because it is a model that triumphs abroad, but each scenario has its advantages and disadvantages, so each company must assess what needs it has and if it prefers to have a varied workforce of employees and self-employed or only of one type or another. Next, we tell you the different advantages of hiring a freelancer and an employee:
Advantages of a company for hiring freelancers:
- With the economic crisis, many of the companies began to bet on the self-employed instead of salaried employees. The main advantage for the company of hiring a self-employed employee versus a salaried employee is that the cost to the company is lower. If a salaried worker is hired, social security contributions are higher.
- If the company hires a self-employed person, he or she runs with social security contributions and taxes and his vacations are not remunerated as it happens when he is an employee. Yes, there are companies that are willing to pay the self-employed fee, since it is still cheaper than the social security contributions of a conventional employee, although it is strange that this happens.
- The employer has the advantage of not paying maternity leave or leave or any other justification to which he would be entitled if the employee were an employee.
- The fees paid by the company to the self-employed employee represent a tax-deductible expense for the company in concept of independent Professional Services, that is, it allows the company to deduct VAT every quarter.
- Companies that hire freelancers have fewer administrative ties. It is the self-employed who have to make their invoices and carry out their own management, compared to salaried workers where the company has to take care of their registration in the social security and pay the contributions.
- In most companies, if a salaried employee works more hours than those set out in his contract he has the right to free hours, but if he is self-employed the company does not have to give them to him.
Advantages of a company for hiring an employee:
- If the company intends to have a closer relationship with the employee and continuously in the hope that he wants to grow within the company, it is better to hire a salaried person.
- When the company wants to create a safety zone in the company and thus retain talent, it is better to hire employees. If someone has, even with a minimum wage, has the ability to cover their basic needs, if their salary is considerable like that of an executive, this will give them a financial level that gives a lot of security.
- In relation to the previous point, when the company offers this type of contract with a fixed salary, financial stability is created for the person and when someone has a fixed income, they can plan their life with a fair level of certainty and this makes the employee much more productive and motivated in the company.
- Companies that hire employees have employees in the company for a few defined hours. It is a very good thing when you want to have a follow-up and an order of work.
- Companies have the advantage of having people much longer, this translates into a greater experience of the staff that knows their functions well and that is prepared to grow professionally within the company.
- The commitment on the part of employees for the company is much greater with salaried employees than with hiring freelancers.
So what’s the best option for businesses? In reality, it is not a question of which is objectively better, but of what your priorities and needs are as a company according to the current situation and what is expected of the workforce.
In summary, we could say that if you are looking for employees to carry out specific projects it is a good option to hire a freelancer, but if you are looking for professional growth and attract the talent it would be a better option to hire a person as an employee.
In Xpert Digital we want to help you, if you need more information about this topic, do not hesitate to take a look at our website. Get in touch with us!
Cloud Hosting Growing Faster Ever in 2022
For years, companies have relied on dedicated servers and managed dedicated hosting to store their data and provide an online presence. However, with the proliferation of cloud computing, this preference is shifting more and more towards cloud hosting. And for good reason. Not only do tech-savvy companies use cloud hosting today and immediately benefit from the advantages of the cloud. Both cloud hosting and dedicated servers can support any application or service but show their respective strengths and weaknesses in certain scenarios. Choosing the right hosting platform can help businesses reduce costs, increase flexibility, and get the most out of infrastructure.
What is cloud hosting, how does it work?
Cloud hosting is the provision of online virtual servers that can be created, modified, and deleted as needed. Cloud servers are allocated resources such as CPU cores and memory by the physical server on which they are hosted, and can be configured with the operating system and associated software chosen by each developer. Cloud hosting such as servinga’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution can be used to host websites, send and store emails, and provide web-based applications and other services.
“The cloud” is a common term that refers to servers that are connected to the Internet and can be used publicly. A cloud-based service can take many forms, including web hosting, file hosting and sharing, and software distribution. The term cloud is also used to refer to cloud computing, where multiple servers are connected together to share the workload of a task. Instead of running a complex process on a single powerful computer, cloud computing distributes the task among many smaller computers.
Cloud hosting environments are divided into two main areas: the virtual servers, which can host apps and websites or store data, and the physical hosts that manage the virtual servers. This virtualization is behind the features and benefits of cloud hosting: the relationship between host and virtual server provides flexibility and scalability not available with other hosting methods.
A common form of cloud hosting is the use of a virtual private server (VPS). A VPS is a virtual server that behaves like a real computer with its own operating system. Virtual servers share the resources assigned to them by the host, but their software is well insulated, so operations on one VPS do not affect the others.
How are virtual servers deployed in cloud hosting?
The virtual servers are provided and managed by a so-called hypervisor, a special software on the physical hosts. Each virtual server has an operating system that is installed by the hypervisor and is available to the user to add software. The available resources of the physical server are allocated by the hypervisor to the virtual servers. The hypervisor is responsible for allocating memory, CPU cores, and a network connection to a virtual server when one starts.
For many practical purposes, a virtual server is identical to a dedicated physical server, although performance may be slower in some cases because the virtual servers share the physical hardware resources on the same host. A constant task of the hypervisor is to schedule processes between the virtual and physical CPU cores, as multiple virtual servers can use the same physical cores. The term “hypervisor” is often used as a synonym for the physical hosts on which the hypervisors (and their virtual servers) are installed.
The Benefits of Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting offers a number of benefits that can give you maximum flexibility and improve the productivity of your business.
Performance: Cloud server customers are limited to the processor speed and cloud node type offered by their hosting provider. While additional cores can be provisioned for a cloud tenant, constraints can occur based on occupancy and resources allocated on the node. This can limit large hosts within a cloud environment. However, if cores are available on the server, they can be deployed immediately and performance degradation is avoided. With our managed cloud solution, we at servinga ensure that you always have the maximum performance available.
Improved business agility and cost control: With colod hosting through servinga, you and your company are not tied to long hosting contracts and do not have to install and maintain expensive infrastructure on-site. With our cloud-based infrastructure, you can add and remove servers very quickly as needed. You can deploy new servers as needed when you need them. If you no longer need them, they no longer have to pay for the infrastructure. Cloud hosting enables just-in-time computing. Additional resources are immediately available as needed.
Reduced downtime due to high fault tolerance: The biggest problem with using a dedicated server is that your business will be offline if a dedicated server experiences a hardware failure. To compensate for this, organizations often use costly load-balanced clusters. Your advantage of servinga’s managed cloud: If the hardware on which your cloud infrastructure is hosted fails, this leads to virtually no downtime due to automatic recovery on other hardware.
Future-proof hardware: Cloud computing is based on a virtualized computing environment. Multiple virtual server instances run on dedicated hardware nodes. The actual server you are using is abstracted from the hardware and runs under it regardless of the hardware configuration. With servinga’s cloud-based solution, as soon as new hardware is available, the virtual server instances can be migrated from their existing hardware to the new hardware “as-is and intact” without the time-consuming and costly migration problems that a dedicated server migration can cause. It only takes a few clicks and your server is on the latest hardware and ready to take advantage of this new performance right away.
Flexible costs: Companies want to pay for what they use when they use it. This is one of the main differences between managed cloud hosting at servinga and the operation of a dedicated server. With servinga, you only pay for the services and resources you actually use.
Data protection: Your data is priceless. Therefore, the security and protection of your data is our highest priority. We operate all servers for our managed cloud hosting in Frankfurt am Main in a highly available and multiple redundant environment in compliance with the strict German and European data protection guidelines.
Every organization has its own business needs, and each application has specific workload requirements. Cloud hosting is extremely reliable because it draws its resources from several different servers – if one server fails, the other servers fill the gap. In addition, cloud hosting is flexible and scalable, so it can grow with your business. If you need more resources, just add them. The value proposition for cloud hosting is proven by studies showing that most dedicated servers use only a fraction of the actual physical resources over a longer period of time.