Next Level Ops Archives

Podcast | The Importance of Digital Presence with Jens Meggers

Hello Pleskians! This week we’re back and we’re kicking off Season 2 of the Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops. In the episode, we’ve got Jens Meggers setting the stage for the entire season, as we talk about the importance of having a digital presence, and the growth of eCommerce in 2020.

In This Episode: You Need a Digital Presence, The Future of eCommerce, and how WebPros can help

COVID-19 and the global pandemic changed how many people are doing business. Anyone who relied on foot traffic and in-person shopping needed to make a serious pivot if they wanted to survive. As a result, eCommerce grew considerably. But as Jens points out, it’s not just a the website that matters:

“It’s all about getting the results fastest with the least amount of effort, because they also don’t necessarily want to hire a whole bunch of people…And it’s also not only just creating, it’s entire workflow. We already know that [a bagel shop] has bagels. But you want to pick your favorite bagel Monday morning 8am, without touching anyone. So the workflow and the automation around that is the most important thing.”

This lead us into the future of eCommerce. Jens believes there’s no going back to the way things were. We’ve shown customers what they can have, and we can’t take it away now. The convenience of ordering online and picking something up is too great. Similarly, lots of people are learning for the first time that they can make good money online. That’s the highest priority now, so we will see more people creating digital presences and better experiences. “As many experiences as possible will move into the virtual world,” says Jens.With that in mind, WebPros is equipped with all of the tools necessary to help all businesses create better digital experiences. cPanel and Plesk, their flagship products, are designed to help you create and manage your website, giving you a huge suite of tools to do so.

WHMCS, the fastest growing product, allows you to automate your hosting business. XOVI helps you see how traffic is being driven to your website. Jens says, “We see this as a responsibility…to help you after [your site launches]. SolusIO and SolusVM are virtual machines done right! They simplify virtual infrastructure management – an important task in an increasingly remote-work centric world.”

Key Takeaways

We saw industries digitize over the last 10 years. Video meetings, retail stores, digital price tags, and much more. This got accelerated with pandemic.
Customers thought, “Get me to the results faster.” It’s not just website, it’s workflow. And during the pandemic it needed to be good, fast, and cheap.
We have set the standard on digitization and business digitization, and it’s here to stay.
A lot of people are moving to transact and make money online. It is the highest priority for a lot of people.
WebPros supports business owners by supplying the technology that creates digital experiences (not just a shopping cart or web page). Their vision is to create a digital presence for anyone.
Soon, anything we can do in the physical world, we’ll be able to do in the virtual world.
“It’s always a good time to start a business if you have a good idea.”

The Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops Featuring

Joe Casabona

Joe is a college-accredited course developer and podcast consultant. You can find him at Casabona.org.

Jens Meggers

Jens is the CEO of WebPros
Did you know we’re also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts? In fact, you can find us pretty much anywhere you get your daily dose of podcasts. As always, remember to update your daily podcast playlist with Next Level Ops. And stay on the lookout for our next episode!

Next Level Ops Podcast: Solving the Most Common WordPress Problems with Lucas Radke

Hello Pleskians! This week we’re back with the eighth episode of the Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops. In this installment, Superhost Joe and Product Wizard Lucas Radke talk about common WordPress problems and what hosting providers and users can do about them.

In This Episode: Noisy Neighbors, Fixing WordPress Problems, and What Hosting Providers Can Do

What are the most common WordPress problems for hosting providers? In what domains do common WordPress problems fall for most users? How much does WordPress itself mitigate these problems and what can hosting providers and users do? In this episode, Joe and Lucas discuss the three main areas under which WordPress problems usually fall — performance, updates, and security. You can have noisy neighbors when an environment is shared by too many users, impacting your website’s performance.

Frequent updates are also often a pain point as non-updated plugins and themes can lead to security issues. Hosting providers should ideally provide solutions for this, otherwise it can lead to backdoors that compromise websites. For instance, tools such as Smart Updates for Plesk WordPress Toolkit analyzes WordPress updates and identifies and performs changes without breaking the production site. It also notifies users of any potentially critical updates.

It’s essential for users to be proactive about potential issues from their side, especially non-savvy tech users. What can users do to ensure that they are taking the right precautions? The first thing is to make sure that they use a trusted web hoster who provides them with a secure hosting environment. Recently, WordPress has also had an increasing emphasis on security and recommends some basic security protections. For example, to make sure that access is limited, keeping backups, regular updates, and installing plugins and themes from trusted sources. For WordPress, security is about risk reduction.

“The great and terrible thing about WordPress is the amount of freedom you have. The freedom to set up whatever website you want considerably cheaply. But also the freedom to cause problems for either yourself, your client or your hosting provider,” says Joe, “Because if you’re on a shared host and your website is compromised, then it’s possible that other websites are compromised as well.”

Key Takeaways

What are some of the actions hosting providers can take to fix common WordPress issues? Hosting providers are responsible for how well the site performs. Users may expect high performance without paying the price for it. Many users install plugins to help with the performance or security of their website. The hosting provider has to make sure that plugins are updated and to make sure that there are no open doors for hackers. It’s also essential that hosting providers have a properly trained support team, specialized in solving WordPress issues.
What can users do to minimize some frequent WordPress problems? Being proactive is very important for users. Along with being informed about what’s happening in the community from a security perspective. Which plugins are having potential issues? What are some of the security issues coming up in the WordPress community? Trying to get the information that helps users reduce security risks should be a priority, especially for non-tech savvy users.
To what extent does WordPress mitigate these problems? WordPress has had a recently increased security focus. It’s forcing stronger passwords; it’s verifying email addresses; it has a site Health Checker and Troubleshooter performing checks on users’ WordPress installations; and other criteria for running WordPress sites securely.
Which plugins can mitigate some of the issues? iThemes Security is a useful plugin. Smart Updates for Plesk’s WordPress Toolkit has some cool features. WordPress Toolkit checks for updates for plugins, themes, and core. It can automatically perform updates if you choose to do so. Smart Updates makes sure that the proper changes are identified and implemented without breaking the live site.

…Alright Pleskians, it’s time to hit the play button if you want to hear the rest. If you’re interested in hearing more about WordPress hosting, check out this Next Level Ops episode. We’ll be back soon with the next installment.

The Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops Featuring

Joe Casabona

Joe is a college-accredited course developer. He is the founder of Creator Courses.

Lucas Radke

Lucas is a Product Manager at Plesk.

Did you know we’re also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts? In fact, you can find us pretty much anywhere you get your daily dose of podcasts. As always, remember to update your daily podcast playlist with Next Level Ops. And stay on the lookout for our next episode!

Hosting Lucas Radke Next Level Ops Next Level Ops Podcast Plesk WordPress Toolkit podcast WordPress WordPress issues WordPress Problems WordPress Toolkit

Next Level Ops Podcast: Tips for Scaling Your Hosting with Jan Loeffler

Hello Pleskians! This week we’re back with the seventh episode of the Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops. In this installment, Superhost Joe welcomes back Jan Loeffler, Plesk’s CTO and Tech Mage, to talk about optimizing and scaling your hosting.

In This Episode: the TikTok Effect, Jan’s Downtime Checklist and When to Scale

What do we mean by scaling and why should you be thinking about it? What do you do if you suddenly become popular on TikTok and visitors are streaming to your website? Before you scale online, what is the first thing you should be doing? Jan and Joe answer these questions and more in the latest Next Level Ops episode.

Avoiding downtime is the first thing you should be considering, according to Jan. “Downtime is the worst problem for your business. Because that means that customers are not able to visit your site anymore,” says Jan. “Most of the downtime is not happening due to the hosting stack or the hosting infrastructure. Usually, downtime happens more often from the user.”

Before you consider scaling and performance tuning, make sure that you have a process in place for:

Disaster recovery and creating regular backups.
Not making changes on a live site and using tools that provide you with test environments.
Making sure that your website is fast because businesses lose revenue when sites take more than 3 seconds to load.
Not using “too poor” hardware and always making sure that you have enough server capacity left.
Profiling your server and site activity by using performance monitoring tools to find out where your bottlenecks are.

To get the best out of scaling your hosting, make sure you follow Jan’s Downtime Checklist above. And remember, “It’s also like running a marathon. You shouldn’t always run at the limit because afterwards you’ll get a cold.” says Jan.

Wise words.

To check out Jan’s previous feature, go here to learn all about optimizing your website (and get bonus training tips for your next big marathon).

“Downtime is the worst problem for your business. Because that means that customers are not able to visit your site anymore. Most of the downtime is not happening due to the hosting stack or the hosting infrastructure. Usually, downtime happens more often from the user.”

Jan Loeffler

Key Takeaways

What’s the Downtime Checklist? Before scale and tuning websites, make sure that the user is not contributing to downtime. Have access to regular backups, test environments, good hardware and monitoring tools.
Speeding up your website and caching. Everything that helps you reduce database calls is your first priority. The second priority is to reduce processing PHP. It’s even faster when you don’t need to call up your web server. This is possible through the Content Delivery Network (CDN). You can use the Speed Kit to speed up your website.
Scaling your website. A website should usually be able to handle 200 requests per second. If you’re scaling your business or brand, make sure whether you need a static or a dynamic website. If you run an ecommerce website, then you need horizontal scaling.

…Alright Pleskians, it’s time to hit the play button if you want to hear the rest. If you’re interested in hearing more about site optimization, cloud services and WordPress hosting, check out the rest of our Next Level Ops episodes. We’ll be back soon with the next installment.