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Daily ArchivesAugust 28, 2018

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Introducing Hostdedi Global DNS

We are excited to announce Hostdedi Global DNS. A globally distributed name service that puts DNS closer to your website visitors.

What is DNS?

The domain name service (DNS) is the phonebook of the Internet. Whenever you load a website, open a mobile app, or click on a cat GIF, your device usually searches for a web address using DNS.
 
The Internet is made up of connected devices with Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. The domain name service sits on top of the Internet and allows for convenient, easy-to-remember names, nexcess.net, to be translated back to hard-to-remember IP addresses as 208.69.120.21. This is made worse by the Internet’s next generation of addresses, known as IPv6, with long-string addresses such as 2607:f7c0:1:af00:d045:7800:0:1b.

Hostdedi DNS, Today

When you host your DNS with Hostdedi, as about half our customers currently do, DNS requests from your website visitors are answered from servers located in the US. Even if we host your services in London, Australia, or other international locations, our DNS services are still located in the US.
 
We go to great lengths to put our DNS servers on third-party networks, which isolates them from potential failures. We also host eight name servers in total, which is double the number typically found among web service providers. At the end of the day, it’s still a US-based DNS infrastructure.
 
To be clear, concentrating DNS servers in a particular location is a common setup. Due to the nature of DNS, when a user visits your website, their browser or device caches the results and doesn’t need to check DNS again for an extended period of time.
 
For new visitors from international locations, this can cause something known as first-visit page load delay. These geographically distant users may experience as much as a half-second delay. This may sound trivial, but visitors are quick to notice sluggish load times and tend to avoid sites that suffer from them.
 
Administrators and developers work tirelessly to shave even fractions of seconds from page load time. A research paper by Google last year found that when delays drift beyond 3 seconds, visitors quickly lose interest and start abandoning sites.

All things being equal – faster is better.
 

Hostdedi Global DNS

We’ve been hard at work the last couple of months deploying a footprint of 15 DNS servers distributed around the world. These servers are strategically positioned so that they provide a local DNS server option for visitors to your site, and significantly reduce first-visit load times.
 
Hostdedi Global DNS uses a technology called Anycast routing, which allows us to broadcast the IP addresses of our DNS server from multiple global locations at the same time. When a visitor loads your website, this technology allows their Internet service provider (ISP) to route the visitor’s DNS requests to the Hostdedi DNS server closest to that visitor.
 
When we stood up the proof-of-concept and looked at the latency differences of Global DNS against our existing DNS, it floored us! The results were significantly better than we expected in reducing DNS first-visit latency. This was some two months ago and it validated our all-in commitment to launching a Global DNS platform.
 
Following is a real-world example of Global DNS in action. Using a tool provided by KeyCDN.com, we tested latency (round trip time) from 16 global locations, then compared Classic DNS and Global DNS.

Hostdedi Global DNS, Going Live!

If you’re a Hostdedi customer, you will enjoy the benefits of our Global DNS for no additional cost, and no action is required.
 
We will begin transitioning Hostdedi DNS to the Global DNS system on Thursday, August 30th. The first maintenance will migrate ns7.nexcess.net and ns8.nexcess.net, with other name servers to follow in the coming weeks. Our goal is to have Global DNS operational for all nexcess.net name servers by the end of September.
 
There will be no downtime as a result of this maintenance. The existing Hostdedi DNS servers will continue to operate and respond to DNS queries until we confirmed all traffic has moved away from them.
 
For instructions on pointing your domain to Hostdedi Global DNS, please see our how-to-guide for details.

Where are Hostdedi Global DNS servers located?

  • Amsterdam
  • Atlanta
  • Chicago
  • Dallas
  • Frankfurt
  • London
  • Los Angeles
  • Miami
  • New york
  • Paris
  • San Francisco
  • Seattle
  • Singapore
  • Sydney
  • Tokyo

 

Will other Hostdedi Global DNS locations be added?

Yes! We are currently looking at adding Bangalore, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, and Toronto. These locations will help close important gaps and continue to improve the experience for your website visitors.

Posted in:
General, Hostdedi

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What Is WooCommerce Marketing Automation?

The dream of marketers is to send personalized content to leads at precisely the moment it is likely to have the most effect. Although most WooCommerce hosting clients don’t have a multi-dimensional trove of data about shoppers, we do have clues that can be used to personalize and schedule content with a positive effect on conversion rates and eCommerce revenue.

Shoppers interact with WooCommerce stores: they browse products, put them in carts, make purchases, abandon carts, read blog articles, send support emails, visit and stop visiting, leave reviews, and more. Each event presents retailers with a chance to engage with their customers.

If that sounds complicated and time-consuming, that’s because it is. There are so many different processes involved in marketing that it is easy to neglect areas that might have an impact on the bottom line. As a retailer, you are focused on getting customers to your store with inbound marketing and advertising, improving the eCommerce experience with conversion rate optimization, building a brand, supporting customers, and more.

Marketing automation reduces the labor involved in marketing by automatically sending emails and other communications when they are relevant.

Let’s have a look at some examples.

Sign-Up Emails

When a customer creates an account on your store, you have an opportunity to engage them with content and promotions to help them understand your brand and the products you sell.

Abandoned cart reminders

As I have written elsewhere on this blog, it is more common for eCommerce customers to abandon carts than it is for them to make a purchase. Well-timed emails that remind customers of the products they selected can decrease abandonment rates substantially, especially if they include a coupon code or promotion.

Win-back programs

Here, engagement is triggered by something the shopper doesn’t do, namely visiting the store or buying a product. Win-back emails are intended to give shoppers who have not visited recently a good reason to do so.

In this article I have focused on email, but there are marketing automation solutions for a wide range of platforms, including social media, SMS, advertising.

Marketing Automation And WooCommerce

WooCommerce marketing automation can be implemented as an integration to a third-party marketing automation platform or as a plugin that provides similar functionality.

Marketo is a leading eCommerce marketing automation platform, and although it doesn’t provide a WooCommerce plugin, it is possible to move WooCommerce customers into Marketo via Zapier.

HubSpot, another prominent marketing automation provider, benefits from a third-party WooCommerce plugin that provides excellent integration and real-time data syncing between a WooCommerce store and the HubSpot platform.

AutomateWoo is a premium WooCommerce plugin that includes a wide range of marketing automation capabilities. Each of the marketing automation examples I mentioned – sign-up, abandoned cart, and win-back programs — are possible with AutomateWoo, in addition to card expiry notifications, product recommendations, SMS notifications, and more.

Automating WooCommerce marketing helps retailers to take advantage of the many opportunities for engagement with shoppers without the massive investment of time and money it would take to do it manually.

Posted in:
WooCommerce

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