Cloud and Web Hosting Automation Platform for Plesk Partners

As usual, it was an expected hectic beginning of the week in the office today. Back at home now, with the TV’s remote control in my hands, my mind is wondering, “How to manage all this – the upcoming assignment in office, today’s menu for the dinner at home and my kiddo’s homework, which in itself is a mighty task for today’s moms.“

How I wish I could have a remote control set for most of the things, if not all. :)

Managing everything with a remote control may sound a fairy tale dream. But having automated control on your cloud and web hosting business via a single platform isn’t! Let’s see how.

Plesk – An introduction

Plesk is the most robust and easy to use platform for individuals to manage their website, and for system administrators to sell web hosting and reseller hosting, and manage web servers through a web based interface.

Plesk’s ease of usage and flexibility makes it the most preferred tool by everyone – a single website owner; a web host who runs thousands of customers; a developer; and an infrastructure provider. Around 300,000+ servers round the globe are currently installed with Plesk, and 10 million+ websites and over 15 million mail boxes and applications run on Plesk.

Why is there a need for Plesk cloud and web hosting automation?

Everything can be made easier and error free with automation now-a-days. Same is true for your web hosting and cloud business.

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The critical role that Cloud plays in the success of your business

Innovations in the technology improve operations of companies and irrespective of their size help them become more productive and global in nature.

Cloud computing is the major innovation in the field of IT that has enabled companies to reshape their business and capitalize on the digital transformation. It has become popular worldwide with its different service types- Public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud and different models -SaaS, PaaS, IaaS.

 

It has changed the way of doing business online-it’s turning business process into business advantage for organizations everywhere.

 

 

What cloud truly does for your business?

 

The best thing about the cloud is that it allows you to work as you wish to, allowing you to stay flexible in your business while supporting innovation. Cloud products provide benefits to your business and outweigh the restrictive capabilities of traditional software.

 

Cloud benefits for your business:

 

Enables business agility - Agility is the most important attribute required by any business to continue seamlessly. Cloud technology with its on demand self-service and rapid elasticity feature enables business agility for organizations. This helps a business to create new processes, introduce new products and services, modify existing ones, enter new markets and adapt to changing circumstances speedily and easily.

 

All – public, Azure private cloud and hybrid cloud can deliver this benefit.

 

Provides improved allocation of resources- Improper resource allocation can starve a business if the allocation is not managed properly. But resource provisioning feature of the cloud enables cloud hosting providers to manage the resources for each individual module.

 

Many times, deployed services experience increase or decrease in the usage volumes and in order to meet the user demands, business require corresponding increase or decrease in supporting IT resources. Cloud handles these requirements most efficiently.  

 

Resource Allocation Strategy (RAS) of the cloud dynamically allocates resources within the limit of cloud environment to meet the needs of the cloud applications.

 

Amplifies employee productivity- Smooth and quick collaboration between team members, clients and partners is the fuel for the success of any business. It provides a more productive environment for working and improves productivity by enabling participants to share the processing logic.

 

Use of cloud based online tools for sending business emails, instant messaging, online meetings and file sharing have helped to reinforce the benefits of collaboration and boost business productivity as well as substantial revenue.

 

Facilitates anywhere anytime access on the go- In today’s connected world, running a business from a fixed location can be a constraint for any business. With cloud’s top-of-the-line business productivity tools, you can work from office, home, in the car, or on a remote island, while enjoying your vacations— anywhere in the world.

That means employees -even a  salesperson of your company who is at remote job site, can access your company’s computer systems from anywhere with a web access.

So do business from anywhere you want.

 

Drives cost efficiency- Maximizing cost efficiency is the principal aim of any business. Cloud computing helps you to achieve cost reduction as it works on the subscription based model i.e. it allows you to pay as you pay for the usage, just like you do for household utilities like water and electricity.

Thus, helping you preserve your cash flow and save on the resources which your business does not consume. You can put back that saved money into the business to increase headcount, boost wages and drive innovation.

Cloud helps you to make huge cost savings as-

·        Cloud secures and backs up your business data.

·        Prevents your system from going offline as it guarantees no single point of failure, ensuring business must go on!

·        You don’t need to spend on upgrades, it helps you to derive maximum from your existing infrastructure.

Thus, cloud offers a big list of benefits required by every business to succeed.

If you have any doubt regarding this write –up, feel free to contact and drop comments in the section below.

Which Microsoft Office 365 plan suits your business?

A plan for every business need, whether you’re a budding business, an SMB or a large/government enterprise, following are your basic requirements that you want to fulfill to improve your business operations:

1. Data protection. 

2. Virtual collaboration.

3. Business intelligence tools.

4. Enterprise mobility solutions.

5. Storage scalability and flexibility.

Thoughtfully assembled Microsoft Office 365 plans by ZNetLive help to facilitate and establish proper communication between your team and your customers, irrespective of the size of your organization.

Below are all the plans in detail to make it easier for you to decide as to which office 365 plan suits your business.

Let’s take them one by one:

    Business plans:

Business plans include MS Office365 Email, Office Apps or combined plan to efficiently & easily operate your business and get your work done anytime and anywhere. If your business needs business class email, office apps, and the capability to do online meetings and video conferencing, then go for Office 365 Premium Suite. It comes with OneDrive, which provides 1 TB per person storage space in the cloud through which, your critical data is saved online by default, providing data backup automatically. Online office applications allow you to create, edit or share documents with others.

If you are a medium or small sized business, then go for Office 365 Business Suite that has all the features mentioned in premium suite plan except features of business email and web conferencing. Lastly, if you’re a small business, then go for Office 365 Essential suite that comes with all the above features discussed except the office applications. 

    Exchange online plans:

These plans are especially designed for unlimited users. It is a productivity enhancing solution for startups in India and across the globe with no dedicated office or employees without desk – shift, retail or those using shared PCs.

If your business needs large mailboxes with 50GB inbox and message size of about 150MB with the features of data and group collaboration, then go for Exchange Online Plan 1. It also comes with inbox management that helps you filter your low-priority email—saving time for your most important messages.

Our O365 plans allow you to pay only for those services that you require. For e.g.  If your business doesn’t need a large mail box and third party apps, then why pay for it? Choose O 365 Enterprise K1 suite that comes with POP support and provides access to SharePoint online sites and exchange active sync (EAS) for smart phones.

Whereas our Exchange online kiosk suite comes with business class email with 2GB inbox and calendar with EAS and POP support and is an ideal productivity enhancement solution for small and medium sized businesses.

With all the above three O365 Exchange Online Plans, you get complete data security and privacy with anti-malware protection and anti-spam filtering capability.

    Plans for large enterprises:

These plans provide comprehensive communication via Skype for Business that helps you to connect with your colleagues by instant messaging, conduct online meetings (up to 10,000 meeting attendees) with your clients or team members anywhere and anytime. Going for E1, E3 and E5 O 365 Enterprise suite plans eliminate the need for maintaining multiple conferencing solutions if you have a large organization. These suites also provide Enterprise management of apps with Group Policy, Telemetry, and Shared Computer Activation.

With O 365 enterprise E5 suite, you also get enhanced analytics tool -Delve Analytics which provides insights on time and relationships and business intelligence tool -Power BI which enables workers to visualize and analyze data with greater understanding and speed through live data dashboards, interactive reports with excel.

For compliance and information protection, E3 and E5 suites provide advanced eDiscovery—to reduce the costs and challenges with predictive coding and text analytics. Also, you get Cloud PBX for cloud-based call management, so that you can make, receive, and transfer calls across a wide range of devices.

All the above plans provide digital storytelling tools enabling anyone to create interactive web based lessons, project reports, movies and slides in an impressive way, right from a phone, tablet or browser.

    Plans for Government Organizations:

A government office, agency or unit of any local or state government in India or abroad established by law, can buy and benefit from the following four plans for government organizations provided by ZNetLive MS O 365 at most economical prices.

O 365 Enterprise E3 suite has all the features of O 365 enterprise E5 suite – a plan for large enterprises that’s discussed above, except digital story telling tool, corporate video portal, analytics tools and cloud PBX.

If there is no need for online Office applications, then go for Enterprise E1 suite. Also if your organization doesn’t need audio/video conferencing, then why pay for it? Go for Exchange Online Plan 1 and Plan 2 suite.

Wrapping up

All these office 365 plans are undoubtedly value for money and help you manage your business more effectively and efficiently with guaranteed 99.9% uptime backed with SLA, whether you are an SMB, a startup or a large enterprise, hence buy Microsoft Office 365 plan- anyone from the above that suits your business best and you get personal assistance and technical support from ZNetLive with only a minimum monthly charge.

Please use the comments section below for any queries you’ve regarding MS Office 365 and its plans.

Types of Cloud Hosting: Private, Public & Hybrid

Today everyone is moving to cloud. But, did you ever think what kind of cloud they are moving to and why? NO! Don’t worry, I’m here to introduce you with the basic idea behind cloud hosting and its types.

What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting is based on the idea of cloud computing where unlimited machines act as a single system and the security is assured by multiple servers. In cloud hosting, integration of extra resources is allowed like RAM or space. It’s also called as on-demand hosting and cloud server hosting.

Types of Cloud Hosting:

Majorly, Cloud Hosting is classified as: Private, Public and Hybrid. As it’s important to choose a right cloud solution for your business, so you have to know about all these three kinds.

1. Public Cloud: It’s the most common type of cloud, as common as the buzzword “Cloud” refers itself to the public cloud. In this cloud, the cloud service providers offer access across the internet, so that it’s available for general public. Everyone on public cloud has to share the same infrastructure pool with restricted security, configuration and accessibility options. But as the infrastructure cost is spread across all customers, so it’s the lowest cost as well as the most scalable model.
Good for those who want consistency throughout all services.

2. Private Cloud: This type of cloud is dedicated to a particular organization. Unlike public cloud hosting, the physical resources are not shared here, hence security and control concerns are highest in this cloud hosting with full guarantee of privacy by the hosting provider. Private cloud hosting is more expensive but more secure than any other hosting service.
You can make your data center more efficient with this secure cloud hosting service.

3. Hybrid Cloud: This hosting service is a combination of both of private and public cloud. It lets the workload move between public & private clouds according to the needs that’s why flexibility is highest in hybrid cloud hosting. Things that make it better than other hosting are, elements of private cloud make it secure and elements of public cloud make it scalable and cost efficient, therefore you can call it an all-in-one cloud hosting that’s suitable for E-commerce sites where security concerns are high and you need not spend for the resources that you don’t need.

Being more convenient and rewarding, the idea of cloud is highly admissible by tech geeks and it will continue to grow with time. Hope, you have understood about all kinds of cloud hosting and their benefits but still if there’s any doubt, just write it down in the comment section.

Moving to cloud is a bright idea indeed. So, are you ready to opt for this Pay-As-You-Go service? :)

Importance of Cron Jobs in Dedicated Server

In dedicated server hosting your backups, updates, security mechanisms and other tasks are all self- managed. Although these daily tasks do not take much time but still repetitive nature of these tasks and manual involvement of yours, consume that precious time which you can spend on other tedious tasks.

So in order to meet business challenges and face competition, you need to cut down this time to few minutes. How? By automating or scheduling important tasks.

Why automate server tasks?

•  To manage time and resources better and in an efficient manner.
•  To minimize routine manual work which you have to perform.
•  To concentrate on other dynamic tasks.
•  To stimulate server functionality.
•  Need to perform specific tasks like updates or maintenance even during non-business hours.

What are cron jobs?

It is a time-based task scheduler for Linux based systems, which helps you to execute recurring tasks, automatically on specified time interval -day, month and week.

But remember, cron executes the scheduled task, only when the system is on. 

Benefits of cron jobs:

Learn few advantages of cron in dedicated server-

1.  Automate routine backups by using cron jobs and make your life easy and worry less as you do not have to remember to run a backup script at certain time.

2.   Similarly, you can schedule system updates by installing cron and running specified commands.

3.   Schedule routine rebooting of the dedicated server at specific intervals.

4.  Perform malware and virus scans by scheduling a cron job daily and get alerts against malicious programs.

5.     Schedule emails/newsletters for  your clients and send them regularly.

6.    Execute PHP scripts which you  want to run on a scheduled basis

7. Deactivate/delete accounts on your membership site that have passed their expiration dates.

8.    Expire and erase cached data files in a certain interval.

9.   Auto-check your website content for broken links and have a report e-mailed to yourself regularly.

If you have any doubt regarding this write-up, feel free to drop comments in section below.