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If you're hosting a store site, most probably you will need a PCI compliant hosting service, but you might be surprised there's not a dedicated plan designed for this. What's required for PCI compliant and how to get the right service provider? We have done a bit research based the industry announcements and communication to multiple hosting experts. In this article we provide brief introduction of PCI compliance and basic guidance on how to choose the right hosting.

PCI Compliance Introduction

PCI is standardized throughout the payment processing industry under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). If you accept credit card payments, you must comply with the credit card associations and networks rules concerning data security and ensure the safety of cardholder data. Thus PCI compliance solely focus on data security. Since the payment process includes different parties, we must ensure the safety on each section includes the following:

• Hosting Server. The main and most crucial point for PCI compliant hosting service. Since it's the final place for storing all data, the hosting company must apply necessary security tactics as much as they can. So when we talk about PCI compliant hosting, it's more about hosting server security.
• Payment processing company. Means the payment gateway service on our website. Since we don't have control over this part, the service provider is fully responsible for maintaining their equipments and network. So for end users, it's crucial to choose a reputable gateway provider for guaranteed security.
• Our website. It refers to how we secure our online data and onsite data transition. Especially from product order page, this requires us to apply proper coding and encryption. SSL is a MUST according to PCI standards.
• Our company policy for data protection. Means how we protect those collected data such as customer profiles, card details and all stuff submited by clients. For example if we store these data on local computer, who and how will it be accessed is big concern by PCI DSS. Limited access and password protection is basic requirement.

How to make hosting server pci compliant?

Hosting servers are fully maintained by hosting company. In order to be PCI compliant, there're lots of stuff to be considered by hosting company including the choice of server hardwares, system OS, data center space, upstream bandwidth provider and firewall installation, Continuous server optimization and monitoring etc. In a word, it's a big challenge to configure a perfect PCI compliant hosting service.

The truth is every company tries to be as secure as possible while they must reduce the overall costs to be competitive on the market. Because of this, not too many hosting providers can offer quality PCI compliant plans. Especially for some small groups who have limited budget and totally rely on third party providers, you can't really tell how they're doing.

What to do on user end?

This is actually discussed in details from our shopping cart protection tips page. Nowadays, more and more people use available scripts for cart setup. The main problem is not everybody are programming friendly. Once your site is developped, you might just focus on business promotion and forget software updates/maintenance. If you're running a personal store site, it's highly suggested setup a schedule task for regular maintenance. Business is important, but web store health is also crucial since it's carrying our business.

Who provides quality PCI compliant hosting?

As server and network security is mostly concerned for PCI compliant hosting service, what we need is a well protected hosting plan. Idealy, hosting company with their own data center space is the best choice. It simple shows their tech and financial abilities in offerring high performance and secure hosting service. But that's not all we should pay attention to. Actually, sometimes the company policy is more important because you can always get someone for problem caring.

For quality PCI compliant hosting service, we highly recommend to check out InMotionHosting and Arvixe Business web hosting plans. You pay a little more but simply put your business in safe hands. Especially when you look for balance point between cost and service quality, you can't really find better choice.

Check out Arvixe business hosting plans at www.arvixe.com
Visit InMotionHosting at www.inmotionhosting.com

When choosing web hosting service, customer caring is most important feature besides price. Regardless various cheap hosting advertisement, service quality especially customer caring policy is considered by more and more people today. This article unveils the kind of advantages we can get from a such hosting service and tips how to get the right provider.

Customer caring service is optimized side by side to support any kind clients. Not just about hosting server, they always think on customer side and provide proper solutions. Following are several tipical advantages with a reputable service.

Reliable hosting plan

A customer caring hosting plan is designed carefully by following their capabilities and user needs. They never advertise something they can never provide in order to get orders. Each feature is showing up their honesty, what you see is what you get with their service so people can understand clearly how much they can use from hosting account.

Some popular services like web server, database server and email server are all properly optimized and protected to ensure its always working online. The most important is they do monitor and apply necessary changes based actual performance.

A solid support team

When refers to customer caring, support is definitely the most important feature. A solid team is the base of our confidence in using their service. No matter if we have problem in using our hosting account or get technical problems on website, we can always seek for quick support from helpdesk center. Normally we have multiple channels to get support like direct web chat, phone calls, email and ticket. The hosting team has tried everything they can to simplify the process for customer support. Besides all live options, they also uploaded resourceful FAQs and tutorials in using their service. We can solve most problems by following this knowledge base directly.

A safe place to upload your data

Your account space is well protected by both hardware and software firewalls to filter various attack. Either for server space or data center entrance, everything is guarded and monitored by 24*7 professionals. Any outage or issues will be reported immediately for urgent maintenance.

You don't have to fix problems every day

Server performance is extremely optimized and monitored. That means your account is well supported and protected to work with all website services. You don't have to solve all kinds of problems every day so you can focus on business promotion and don't worry about the website itself because everything is well supported by hosting company.

A problematic hosting is simply nightmare for all business. We always have to check if our website is online or if everything is functional properly. Especially when there's really something wrong, we have to spend hours or might days to get final solution. It's definitely not acceptable for online business.

How can we get decent customer caring hosting service?

Because a customer caring service includes a lot of man power and server investment, it's not so cheap as traditional budget hosting plan. It's always a little expensive than many server plans because we get what we pay. With about one buck more per month, we get several times better experience in hosting our website. So if we need to be cared for less complaint, we really can't care about money too much. Just think from hosting company end, how will we support our clients for different paying?

For best customer caring and affordable hosting service, we highly suggest checking out arvixe and inmotion who have been our golden partners since 3 years before. Their price is not very cheap but definitely provides us the best value for our paying. Especially when you're hosting a business site, you can't really get better solution from other providers for the same price.

This article unveiles the web hosting lies that're promoted by lots of providers. It covers both hosting features and the actual experience in using the service. We would not like to mention the exact company name but we did experienced from multiple providers. We post our experience here just want to put a reference for our readers in case you're evaluating a service plan. Honesty is virtue for all business but it does not always apply on this full competition market.

We Guarantee 99.99% uptime

The biggest lie among all. Have you ever calculated the exact downtime for this guarantee? Less than 3 hours. How much per day? Almost none! Such guarantee requires very powerful server and data center system configuration. On hosting company end, there's no explanation for any possible case such as regular daily maintenance or network outage etc. But once problem occurs, they will give out various excuses such as backup operation, urgent maintenance etc. Why they can provide such brave guarantee? Because they know how good we are and won't blame them for small issues. Once there's really serious problem, such guarantee is nothing but words.

Any time money back guarantee

More and more hosting service support any time money back guarantee to make people believe your money is safe with them. But actually it's worse than specific period full money back guarantee service. The term "any time" simply tells us we can close account then claim pro-rated refund. For almost every company people will be charged for minimum one month. But for those 30 or 60 days full money back service, we loose nothing in case we want to leave them within this period. Don't be confused by the marketing trick.

Unlimited hosting

Another lie. Not to mention everything has a limit, it's a joke to provide unlimited service for server hosting. Firstly, no people will really need unlimited stuff. Secondly, everything is actually limited by server admin. Some essential features like CPU/RAM usage is strictly limited per account. Once you reach the limitation you will receive warning notice to ask you delete something.

Another trick for those unlimited service is the fuzzy explanation. We worked with a popular hosting service who provides "unlimited domains to site". They actuall support up to 5 sites per account and when we need to add more, it prompts up billing notice. After contacted support, they explained it's "piont unlimited domains to existing website". Why should I point unlimited domains to existing site?

Free domain

Free domain is not free! It's not a joke but truth. Normally, hosting company will provides a free domain for one year, but when it's due for renewal, the price will be more expensive comparing to certified domain registrar service. For example the regular registration fee is around $10/yr from godaddy, but when we renew from hosting provider, the price is always higher than that. Another problem is many hosting providers do not tell you where you registered the domain from, thus if you want to transfer out, they might not cooperate with us at all and simply tell us to contact the registrar directly.

We're cheap

Is cheap hosting service really cheap? Not really. Many cheap hosting service are trying to sell you addon products after account setup. Those service like scheduled backup, ssl and security scan etc are not cheap at all. They not only want to be profitable by selling those products but also want to link your business with them so you can renew year and year again. Because we have purchased those products in hosting account, we may not wish to reconfigure everything again from other providers. Also, many cheap service will be renewed at expensive "regular price".

We're working on your ticket

When your hosting support tell you somebody is working on your ticket, the technician in charge might be sleeping instead fixing problems. Normally, when a ticket is created, it will be auto assigned to according technicians and be queued in their schedules. Because technicians have lots of tickets to work with so we can't expect instant response like live communication. Live support can only view the ticket status but not sure if somebody is really working on it unless he contact that technician. However, most of the time live support just want to end the communication as fast as possible so they will not contact technician.

Multi-country service

You need hosting from different countries? It might be great idea if the hosting company provides server service in multiple countries. But please keep in mind, not too many groups can really do that since it's a costly setup. Lots of hosting service setup support branch from oversea areas but don't manage servers in that country. If you really need service from the specific area, search a local service provider directly.

We never keep customer data

There's no way to verify if our data is copied anywhere or not because we don't have access to their system. Especially for those account backups, even the hosting company itself can not tecll how its stored. There's no government policy/laws to guide how should server companies handle those data so everything is actually operated by human virtues. Because we can not verify this, any guarantee is not trustable.

This is a tech report from oversea magazine. It reviewed the overall windows development history and surprising statistics. We translated it here to help our readers know more about this huge IT emperor.

Till this month, 30 years have passed for windows. During this long period, people who purchased/installed windows are counted by billions and over half world wide computers are current running this OS. Windows brings microsoft big profits since from its first release date. In fact, microsoft can be ranked very high from top 500 of "FORTUNE" magazine just by windows. The following numbers and statistics will show how powerful windows is.

From the newest statistics, there're more than 1.36 billions clients for windows. The number is around 1.5 times of north/south American population.

The initial windows release windows 95 was sold more than 40 millions copies in the first year. The newest windows 8 is more successful with about 100 millions copies within 6 months.

If the windows users reduce 1%, the actual users are more than total population of Illinois.

Since 2009 till present, the sold numbers of windows 7 and windows 8 are more than total population of Europe.

Microsoft is ranked 35 from top 500 companies by "FORTUNE" magazine. If we just rank by windows, the actual rank is 150 or 151. The windows market share is the same as Kraft Foods which occupies over 90% market in food industry.

Windows was firstly provided in 1983 and its life is much longer than any other GUI OS.

During Windows XP times, microsoft was actually monopolistic of PC computer OS. Further more, there're about 24 millions game players using Xbox that's drived by Windows NT.

iOS is famous for its amount of APPs – about 1 million apps. However there're much more from Windows. From 2010 CES conference, their CEO Steve Ballmer announced there're more than 4 millions apps on Windows platform.

Is it safe to host your website on China hosting server? According to a recent US congress report, the Chinese cyber espionage is pretty active that could put your web properties at risk. Especially when referring to the closely connection between Chinas ministry of state security and cloud computing. It's recognized a potential threat to foreign companies who might use this service in this area.

Is that true? Why China is always criticized for internet business? We reviewed a lot of articles from both China and US professionals and concluded following points.

The China's Internet access is not free

It's not about price but the freedom on internet surfing. Comparing to most other areas on the planet, there're too many restrictions. Not to mention what kind of content you can host on website, you are also restricted to visit some websites. For example, the popular websites like youtube, twitter and facebook are not accessible directly. Recently, the IT ministry even require real name registration for internet access which is unbelivable by most people. In year 2012, there're several information leak events on multiple China's famous website. Those information include people's sensitive privacy that could bring critical issues.

It's Not so easy to get a website online

We have briefly introduced the complex process to get your website hosted from a China hosting server. The requirements were updated recently. Users need to provide more detailed personal information based those already submited materials. This includes your full home address, ID card scan and your personal photo with authorized hosting company images. If you can't pass through the ICP license checking, your website will be put offline until you submitted all required information correctly.

That's for website hosting. But now you also need to get ICP license for your domain name. The required information is the same as website license. Basically, if you want to ensure the site to be hosted properly you need to ensure the domain information and website informaiton to be matched.

Aditionally, website contents will be checked by hosting providers and cyber security organizations. You will get warnings once they found any "illegal" material on your website.

The law allows government direct access to electronic communication instruments

Means if there's need, government can access to IT equipments without notification in advance. There's no clear explanation what kind authorization they have but definitely its not good news to users because your web properties do not get necessary protection. Especially when the equipments is connected to oversea service, it brings potential security threat to the entire network.

The real cyber activities

It's not a surprise to read about various cyber espionage activities because it's popular all around the world. The US government itself is even involved. The difference in this country is such activities are from all sides and probably leaded by military organizations.

However, regardless any kind restriction, the main impact is for those big commercial groups because they're handling lots of sensitive information. In China, most personal or enterprise websites are small showcase sites. Few of them doing real business transaction directly. The ecommerce platforms are mainly operated by several popular sites like Alibaba, Taobao and amazon etc. These sites is handling more than 90% ecommerce business.

What if you operate a business in China?

Hosting is no more a complex service today. For big groups they always have their own IT department and all their web properties are hosted on their company servers in their office. To ensure the best security and reliability, it's highly recommended to setup your company IT structure. From recent events from Chinese government, they're doing lots of reforms in multiple areas and foreign telcom services will possiblely share a piece of the market in near future. So the overall security will be improved for sure. If you deeply concern about cyber security, it's suggested host your web property from a reputable oversea server service.

China cyber security reports

• 2013 US congress annual report
• Mandiant research report

Live chat is perfect solution to keep your website visitors with instant support. No matter if you manage a big a small website, live chat feature adds more scores to your website success. Choosing the right chat software is quite important to simplify and professionalize your support process. Hence, we evaluated the most popular live chat softwares/service and generated a list of top 10 solutions.

The top 10 live chat softwares are provided in two categories: server installer and web app. Server installer requires both server and client end installation while web app can be added directly as regular website software. The first 5 ranks are all server solutions and rest ones are web apps.

Sightmax
One of the most powerful live chat solutions programmed on asp.net platform. Using the latest .net and database technologies, sightmax provides secure and fast communication tunnel for small to large website solutions. It has 52 languages included and multiple packages for different requirements. Spotlights of sightmax include

• Group/private chat enabled
• Real time analytics/monitoring
• Social media included
• Live view of chat history

Because sightmax is windows software that requires server end installation. If you don't have a server yet or don't want to manage the service by yourself, the sightmax group provides a hosted service where you just need to purchase the amount of operators directly.

Sightmax official site: www.sightmax.com

Livechatinc
The mission of livechatinc is to deliver fast & simple communication between ecommerce owners and shoppers. The software project is supported by 28 passionate IT professionals and trusted by thousands of happy clients. Livechatinc provides total of 3 plans with small technical difference. The biggest advantage of livechatinc is its simplity where you can make quick integration.

Livechatinc official site: www.livechatinc.com

Comm100 Live Chat
Comm100 live chat is designed with the goal to make online chat easy for anyone without professional training needed. Being an award winning chat solution, their service is serving more than 100,000+ registered business users around the world and rated Top 3 in "2013 Best Enterprise Chat Software" on TopTenReviews. 15 days free trial available with no billing info required.

For more details, please visit website www.comm100.com/livechat

Chat4support
A similar live chat solution with sightmax but provides much better price. Chat4support has all necessary functions included for live chat communication like stats report, canned message, keywords research and ticket system. You can also capture screenshot if needed. As low As $6/month you can make full use of available features. You can also purchase the server edition by one time payment if you want to have full control.

Chat4support official site: www.chat4support.com

Liveperson
The most popular choice by lots of business sites. Liveperson is a hosted service based cloud technologies, the service provides much more than traditional chat softwares. It comes chat, voice, personalized messages and video chat, it's able to learn from every interaction, creating a feedback loop that enriches intelligence and optimizes future engagements, further enhancing business results.

Liveperson official site: www.liveperson.com

CraftySyntax
Craftysyntax is a php/mysql web application that's provided for both commercial and free editions. Because of the very few system requirements, you can setup easily on all hosting servers and do needful customization based your requirements. There's no difference in using craftysyntax comparing to all other website softwares. The most important is you can integrate to your existing site easily from code behind.

Craftysyntax official site: www.craftysyntax.com

Mibew Web Messenger
Mibew Messenger (also known as Open Web Messenger) is an open-source live support application written in PHP and MySQL. It enables one-on-one chat assistance in real-time directly from your website. Both admin and client end is pretty clean setup and you won't find a problem in using all functions.

Mibew official site: www.mibew.org

FlashChat
FlashChat is a fully customizable chat software based php/mysql technologies. FlashChat includes a set of advanced administrative options so that you can easily manage rooms, users, bans, messages, and much more. It provides full documentation on how to integrate the service to your existing website, especially for most existing cms sites. You can try out for free or purchase via $5 one time fee.

FlashChat official: www.tufat.com/script2.htm

LivechatScript
This is a hosted service where you just need to emble the codes directly. It comes with free and pro versions. The paid version costs $9.99/month and you have full access to its functions. The free version provides less features and there's link back to official site.

Livechatscript site: www.livechatscript.com
Livechatscript Pro site: www.livechatscriptpro.com

PHPFreeChat
PHPFreeChat is a simple ajax based website chat software. There's no database required but most leading features are incluced. You can easily install and customize to fulfill your different requirements. This software provides multiple languages support with professional translation.

PHPFreeChat official site: www.phpfreechat.net

Free or paid solution?

There're both paid and free solutions available for live chat service. Which should you go? Absolutely, the paid version provides much more features and actually more professional with better support. You should evaluate your business requirements then decide which will serve you right. For example if you operate a huge business that requires high security and professional support, you can never choose freeware. If you just run a personal store or just want to launch simple chat to your visitors, you don't have to pay for it.