Web Hosting News | Get Wired

StumbleUpon Gets a Fresh New Look

To my fellow stumblers, if you haven’t signed on to StumbleUpon recently, you may have missed that the social bookmarking giant recently went through a complete site re-design. As opposed to their previous design which was quite clunky (in my honest opinion), StumbleUpon has taken some design aspects from Pinterest, improved upon the color scheme drastically to come up with the nicely laid out and easy to use interface they have now.

The site now allows you to browse your interests in a Pinterest fashion with color coded interests to help you distinguish between shared content. Although StumbleUpon has updated their site design, they have not eliminated the popular “Stumble” option which allows you to view pages one by one based on your interests.

As you can see from the above image, you still have access to all the cool features StumbleUpon is known for — now just with a fresh new and easy to navigate design. For anyone that uses StumbleUpon for social media marketing (and you should if you don’t), the trending topics as well as the activity of your friend’s on the site is a great way to maintain communication with potential clients. If you establish a strong relationship with fellow stumblers (with the same interests as yours), you can drastically increase your site’s traffic all around; but more on that later.

In any case, we didn’t notice too many “new” features to point out with the re-design, but StumbleUpon did add something called StumbleDNA; here’s how they describe what this new feature is all about:

Your StumbleDNA is a representation of your Likes. It’s also a quick way to see what you and other Stumblers have in common.

Every page a Stumbler likes belongs to an Interest. All of the Interests on StumbleUpon map to one of fourteen larger categories that are represented by a unique color (see below). The number of Likes a Stumbler has per category determines the amount of a category’s color in the Stumbler’s DNA. As you Like more content, your DNA will change to reflect what you Like.

You may disagree with me, but I think that’s a pretty cool feature (although I don’t see any marketing benefits). Look forward to more information on how to use StumbleUpon to market your website or business in an effective manner.

Until then, what do you think of the new StumbleUpon? Like or dislike, leave your comments below!

Roundcube webmail gets a new look

If you are a user that uses webmail rather an email client of your own (Roundcube to be more exact), you may have noticed that the leading software just got a new look that’s supposed to greatly improve user experience.

I won’t get into too much detail about the new look but I recommend if you haven’t already, check it out from within your control panel. For anyone wondering how to access webmail from their browser, you can check out the help article: Where do I check my webmail?

[fancygallery id=’Roundcube’]

WireNine introduces unlimited shared hosting plans with redesign

After much deliberation, WireNine has finally decided to start providing unlimited web hosting in order stay competitive in the hosting industry. It’s important for people to understand what unlimited actually means as most companies in the web hosting industry advertise an unlimited amount of disk space and bandwidth but fail to meet the expectations of their clients. Unfortunately, consumers need to understand that true unlimited web hosting does not exist. Although most unlimited web hosts will not cap your disk space or bandwidth usage, they will suspend your account once they start to see a high CPU usage. This is the true limitation of unlimited as you will start to exceed memory and CPU usage limits far before you surpass any arbitrary disk space or bandwidth limits.

WireNine has access to tons of disk space and bandwidth from its data center to ensure that customers will never have to worry about their usage. However, as with any unlimited shared hosting plan, you are hosted on a server with hundreds of other customers thus sharing memory and CPU resources. Therefore, in order to maintain the quality of service WireNine is accustomed to providing, we have to ensure that we don’t let 1 or 2 individuals ruin the shared hosting experience for hundreds of other clients.

It’s only natural that people want the most value for their money and thus would rather invest into a cheap unlimited hosting plan over one that has capped disk space and bandwidth. The fact of the matter is, the majority of those individuals will barely utilize any disk space or bandwidth while still abiding by the terms of service of the company they are hosted with. Unless you are using your account for file sharing purposes (which is strictly prohibited, see terms of service), or own a high traffic website, you should be able to manage with the most basic unlimited hosting plan WireNine has to offer.

There are a few clients who will attempt to host their high traffic website on low level shared hosting plans and then blame the company for providing slow or unstable service. With that being said, WireNine does offer a semi-dedicated plan for those individuals requiring extensive CPU resources. It’s understandable that a high traffic website would perform poorly on a shared server with hundreds of other clients — so ultimately, it is beneficial for the consumer to upgrade his/her hosting plan to provide the best possible experience to their site visitors.

Additionally, with the new site launch, WireNine has also introduced VPS hosting — but more to come on that later. I do want to point out however that our VPS hardware is top of the line and we use 15,000K RPM SAS Enterprise Drives instead of SATA II drives like most other providers. This helps ensure the fastest possible VPS experience for all our customers.

P.S. We’d love to hear your opinions on our new site redesign. What do you think? Leave your comments below.