Making periodic website backups is critical.  It is especially critical if you are running a business or e-commerce website.  The question to ask yourself is how long can you afford your site to be down?  For most people, the answer is not long.  Having a recent backup of your site will allow you to get your site back up and running in minimal amount of time, versus the alternative which could be as horrible as having to recreate or reinstall your website by hand.

So how do you make a backup?  For CPanel, which is what all Tekro hosting plans use, go to your website’s control panel.  From there, find the “Backups” icon and click it.  Then click “Download or Generate a Full Web Site Backup.”  You now have a complete backup, including your MySQL databases (note, if you are using PostgreSQL, these do not get backed up from my experiences – this requires a manual backup).

To restore, click on “Backup Wizard” and select “Restore” and follow the directions.  You do not want to do a restore unless you are in a position to test the restore or your website truly needs a restore.

You will want to keep your backups some where off of your website.  A good place is on a home computer (password protected might be a good idea if you store sensitive information in your website).  Having an off-site copy of your website is an excellent idea in case something happens to the server and everything is lost (including your backups).

If you need help performing a website backup, let us know.

There comes a time when you need to decide if you will go with PayPal for all of your online payment needs or a merchant account. Here’s some things to think about, based on our experiences at Tekro.

When starting out, PayPal has much lower startup costs and is much easier to setup than a merchant account.  You can be up and running with PayPal as little as a couple days or whatever time it takes to verify your PayPal account, if you don’t already have one.  Then, its a matter of plugging your PayPal account information into your shopping cart software and off you go.

But PayPal doesn’t always come off as “professional” for an e-commerce site.  Customers are used to plugging in their credit card information directly in the shopping cart and may not appreciate or trust the experience of being sent over to PayPal to enter their payment information. Also, PayPal takes a hefty percentage of each transaction.

The alternative is a merchant account.  The merchant account advantage is the customer never leaves your site.  It provides additional trust to your customer that your website means business and their business is secure and safe, making it more likely to complete the transaction.

The Merchant account benefit is they take a lower percentage of each transaction for the fee, but the merchant account has higher up front costs.  There usually is a “setup” fee and probably an “application fee” and when all is said and done, it may be about $300 or $400 dollars, just for the merchant account.  Plus you have to setup a payment gateway.  They have their own setup fees, which likely would be in the $25 or so range.  Then you have the SSL certificate and dedicated IP address you would need.  The SSL certificate can be as low as $25 a year and the dedicated IP address another couple dollars.  Add to that fees for PCI compliance monitoring, which can be in the $100 range per year.

So there are some steep initial costs involved with a merchant account.  But with that merchant account, you like will get a per transaction fee between 1 and 2 percent of each transaction while PayPal will take almost 5%.  So which one do you go with?

For Tekro, we calculated roughly how many transactions we thought we would do in a month and a year.  Then we calculated out all our fees we would have to pay for PayPal and with the merchant account and then worked backwards to find the break even point.  For us, it was about 20 to 30 transactions a month.  Anything below this, PayPal was the better way to go.  Anything above it, and the merchant account was better.

If PayPal will fit your e-commerce needs, it might be the perfect fit for starting up.  Once you get some income, upgrading to a merchant account will make sense when the time is right.

If money is not an issue, I highly recommend starting out with the merchant account.  It costs more to get setup and requires more effort.  But once setup, it just works and provides plenty of room to grow and save money in fees in the long run.  Every business is different and you will have to judge which service is the better fit.

Also to keep in mind, PayPal may not be the only game in town.  There are other services cropping up such as Google Checkout.  If you are serious about PayPal, check PayPal’s competitors out.  You may find a better deal.  And if you do, let us know!

At Tekro, we provide web hosting as well as web development.  One of our existing clients came to us and commented how his main business website was not ranking well in Google.  In fact, it wasn’t ranking at all when you searched.  The client suggested switching the template based design over to Joomla to provide more SEO friendly URLs and metadata, as well as enable easier updates to the website.

The client was proficient with PHP, but didn’t have the time to tweak the existing site template to work in Joomla.  Tekro was able to jump in and tweak the template and port the live website content over to the Joomla site.  Note, Tekro used a staging area to do this, so the client could observe the progress, provide feedback, and request changes at any time.

After two weeks, the content was ported over and the site was ready to go live.  After 1 month, the site is already ranking on the first page in Google’s results.

In this example, Tekro was able to provide the Joomla expertise to port the site template and quickly get the existing content ported over and set live without disrupting the client’s business or website up time.  This allowed the client to focus on their business, post meaningful content for their clients, and drastically improve their search engine rankings.

Thinking about getting into blogging?

Tekro offers the following blog applications with a simple install (requiring only a couple clicks) from your website control panel:

From “Site Software” in your control panel:

B2Evolution

WordPress (highly recommended)

From “Softaculous”:

Dotclear

Serendipity

Open Blog

You can also install any of the other blogging applications out there, but the install will be a manual process.

If you need a hand with your website, submit a support ticket to Tekro and we will work with you to update your site.