Howdy-do, TurnKey Lovers?

Jeremy here, with another entry for you to gobble up. “Gobble”? Well, that’s a funny use of the word, but it actually deals directly with my current post. The word “gobble” results in thoughts about turkey. Now, this could be due to the fact that I’m hungry. Any reference to food incites a bout of extreme hunger, causing me to crave that 5-piece spicy nugget from Wendy’s that I have left over. But, I digress.

The reason that I mention “gobble” is really to talk about turkey—not TurnKey—but turkey. That, sometimes dry, meat that you have to cook perfectly on Thanksgiving, or start looking for a gallon of water to just get through the meal. Turkey brings us to Thanksgiving; one of the joyous occasions most Americans celebrate every year by engorging themselves with as much food possible, and then passing out an hour later. Ok, that might just be me who does the passing out part…

There is also another GREAT benefit to this time of the year. Have you figured it out yet? Did you even guess? I’ll give you a hint; it’s the day after you recover from stuffing yourself with delectable food. Queue the jeopardy theme song—BLACK FRIDAYYYY!!!

Black Friday isn’t considered a holiday, but with the sheer amount of people out shopping, you would think it was the busiest holiday of the year. I will give you a bit of history on the day Black Friday:

This day, Black Friday, is the official kick-off to the Christmas shopping season. You will see/hear/read about many retailers opening up at 4AM or earlier to accommodate the large rush of customers expecting to find ridiculous deals on different products. Consumers every year look forward to this one day, so that they can purchase those headphones they’ve been eying for months that were a bit too expensive, or that new 50-inch LCD flat screen that they’ve been wanting to hang up over their fireplace since first seeing the ad on television.

To put this in perspective, I’ve included the table below from our good buddy Wikipedia, which depicts the average amount of money that is spent on this day:

Retail Sales

The National Retail Federation releases figures on the sales for each Thanksgiving weekend.

Now, you may be wondering, “What on Earth does this have to do with hosting?” Well, my friends, we live in a world with a digital economy now, and it seems that everyone and their mother has a website. Almost every major retailer has some sort of ad space where they post their upcoming deals for Black Friday. With so many consumers looking for the best deal, you can imagine that sites will receive heavy traffic spikes due to the demand of finding the best deals.

These large spikes of traffic need to be handled as smoothly as possible, so that retailers and consumers do not experience any downtime during this whirl-wind of a day. Enter stage left—expandable cloud servers, multiple VPS’s (virtual private servers), or another dedicated server to handle the increase of traffic. All of which you can find here, at TurnKey Internet.

Each solution has its unique benefits. For example, let’s say you have a cloud server. On Black Friday, your traffic quadruples. Well, one of the main benefits of a TurnKey cloud is the ability to add more resources without incurring downtime. You could have more RAM allocated, increased disk space, or even increased bandwidth. The scalability is very enticing. Then, after Black Friday has concluded, you can downgrade your cloud server with no issues.

Or, let’s say you purchase an additional TurnKey VPS to handle your increase of traffic. You could then have those extra VPS’s decommissioned. You see, the real winners on Black Friday are the consumers/retailers that plan ahead. They purchase the additional bandwidth or add another server before the day occurs. As my college professor would say, “Prior preparation prevents poor performance.” That could be increasing your Turnkey cloud resources, adding an additional Turnkey VPS, or purchasing a new Turnkey dedicated server ahead of time. That way, you can keep your sales flowing in and your customers happy.

Now, my chicken nuggets are calling. Until next time, TurnKey lovers!

How many times have you suffered through the embarrassment of a missed appointment or a deadline? How many times have you forgotten an important file for a business meeting? Nothing makes an employee look worse than being unprepared. It is a huge challenge keeping up with the lightning pace of business when your tools, reminders and data are floating all over the electronic ether. As someone with her fair share of ADD and a penchant for doing a million things at once, I can attest to the personal toll my unconsolidated data storage habits have taken on my sanity and professional development. For these reasons and more, TurnKeyMail has been a game changer.

I’ve tried appointment books, wall calendars, outlook tasks, desktop schedulers, post-it notes on my bathroom mirror—I’ve even tied a literal string around my literal finger and forgotten what it was there for. For a girl who wants to make it in the IT industry, being scattered is a fatal flaw. Enter: TurnKeyMail.

Yes, I’m a TurnKey Internet employee, and it is possible that my loyalties are somewhat biased, but I can’t underestimate how much easier my life has become with all of my business files, appointments, projects and correspondence in one place. It’s kind of like having a personal assistant keeping track of me. In the same way that a mail search function allows you to be totally disorganized and still find things, TurnKey Mail’s follow-up flagging, email and task linking and file storage allow you to keep every appointment, deadline and file in order and ready at a moment’s notice.

The word of the day is “synchronization.” Sure, everyone is talking about the cloud but how many people do you know who are actually seamlessly synchronized—computer to phone to iPod to iPad to Outlook to server? By synchronized, I don’t just mean online. Plenty of people with smartphones can check email via a web browser, but can they access their files? Can they pull up that video presentation from their home computer and that excel file from their work computer and that css file from their server, from wherever they may be, anytime? Are they going to be reminded, simultaneously, by their phone, ipod, home computer and work computer about that Monday morning meeting they scheduled three months ago?

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier. It is supposed to protect us from our own human frailties, make us more efficient, faster, more agile, less responsible for keeping every detail in our brains every second. So much of the time technology has the exact opposite effect—it makes our lives more confusing, scattered, broken and frustrating. The whole mission of TurnKey Internet is to make life easier, to make business easier. A TurnKey solution is a ready-made, all-in-one, user-friendly solution, not just another technological road-block. For me, TurnKeyMail has truly lived up to its name. It has made my life easier. It has made me more efficient. Above all, it has done what technology is supposed to do: step in to help with the things we find difficult. Now I can focus on the things I’m good at instead of stressing over the things I’m not.

Watch the TurnKey Mail Video:

Learn more about TurnKey Mail

Cloud computing has become increasingly popular, even while many people (industry leaders included) continue to waffle about exactly how it should be defined. The basic consensus is that cloud computing is ubiquitous, offering resources to many users at a time, over the Internet. It doesn’t matter where, geographically the programs or applications themselves reside because they are all plugged into the cloud. Everything is available remotely, from anywhere. While the cloud is often confused with the grid (think the SETI@home project) the cloud is differentiated by its infinite scalability: it can grow as big as you need it to be, quickly, without any interruption of service. Of course, grid computing and cloud computing are not mutually exclusive, but cloud always allows for multiple users while grid does not (though grids can be used for cloud computing if they are multi-use enabled—confused yet?)

Cloud computing has grown in popularity with the rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS). Numbered are the days of downloaded software. SaaS lives in the cloud, making it remotely accessible to multiple users with scalable juice. It allows you to run complex programs and processes without having the firepower of a super high RAM computer. SaaS is easy to implement and requires no big up-front investment. It is also perfectly suited to today’s business professionals who use multiple computers and portable devices to work on collaborative projects.

One of the many benefits of the SaaS cloud is that software licenses are issued to individuals instead of to computers. This means an individual can access a program from any device. This removes the tethers—it gives every person the freedom to work from anywhere on any project. It enables small businesses to maintain completely remote offices, resulting in huge savings and increased productivity.

The SaaS cloud also reduces costs and hassles associated with software problems, maintenance and support. SaaS is the responsibility of the company providing the licenses, not the individual. How many software problems are caused by conflicting programs, insufficient hardware or simple employee error? SaaS eliminates these risks.

As businesses have enjoyed the many benefits of SaaS, many companies have focused their efforts on developing new SaaS business products for more efficiency and ease of use. Since we are in the business of making businesses more efficient (and easier to run and manage) the last few months have seen us roll out our own line of SaaS products. We pay very close attention to the needs of our business clients. Through feedback, reviews and our own business experience we have developed tools that combine the best of all possible worlds: features, efficiency, ease of use, attractiveness and speed. So far we have launched TurnKey Newsletter and TurnKeyMail, two SaaS solutions that provide necessary cloud infrastructure tools to businesses. As the fall gets underway, we will be launching more TurnKey SaaS solutions that will grow our clients’ businesses over the coming months. Bring your business up to speed quickly, easily and for less than you’re paying now. [Learn more].

As you may know, cloud computing is remote computing—housing your data on many different servers, worldwide, with remote access to files and software and an infinitely scalable (grow-able) infrastructure. What you may not know is that cloud computing has been around for a very long time. While it has only recently become the go-to hot potato, for years many businesses have been utilizing cloud services to run things behind the scenes. There is no foreseeable end to the cloud—it is growing every day as more people realize how powerful, cost effective and useful it really is—and for many small and medium-sized businesses, the sooner they implement cloud services, the better for their bottom line.

Emerging Technologies

As the cloud goes mainstream, businesses everywhere are capitalizing on the new technology—both internally and as a potential area for expansion. The faster you move your business to the cloud, the faster you will be able to incorporate new technological advances into your business model. The longer you wait, the more difficult getting a handle on the new services will become. Start now, start small, and soon enough your business will be launching ahead of your competition. It is not every day that an opportunity presents itself to take a giant business leap forward without any risk to the business’ foundation or to day-to-day operations. You can get cloud services up and running while everything else stays in place then, when you are ready to switch over, do it seamlessly and without any glitches.

SaaS

As I have discussed in a previous post, software-as-a-service is a key component to what makes the cloud so beneficial for businesses. Accessing software from anywhere, paying licensing fees for individuals instead of computer work-stations and eliminating the cost of downtime and maintenance are just some of the reasons the SaaS cloud makes sense. Paying for exorbitantly expensive software and IT support is one of the main factors holding many small businesses back from challenging their larger competition. Check out TurnKey Internet’s cloud SaaS solutions.

Cloud and the Environment

IT infrastructure is extremely costly, from a monetary and environmental perspective. Housing, cooling and powering your business servers requires a large amount of energy. From an individual business’ perspective, this matters, but it also matters on a macro level: providing a networked server cloud for all your clients is far more efficient than providing a dedicated server for each one. As more and more businesses move to the cloud, we will reduce carbon emissions exponentially. That alone is a good enough reason to switch.