According to recent estimates, over 570 new websites are created every minute. Even the most unique sites have competitors. That’s why your website’s performance is more important than ever. Remember, your website visitors are not patient. You can have an enormous advertising budget to drive traffic to your site, but if your site is slow, your visitors are just going to hit their back button to find a competing site.

At A2 Hosting, we’ve always said we want to provide hosting to our customers that we would want to use ourselves. Our solid state drive (SSD) Hosting falls right in line with this initiative. This is especially true since we use SSDs ourselves.

You likely already use Solid State or Flash memory every day in your smart phone and/or tablet. Today’s smart TVs or Blu-Ray players also tend to have a bit of Flash memory. It’s faster and more reliable than traditional Hard Drives because there’s no moving parts. More and more laptops are coming with a Solid State Drive in addition to or in lieu of a traditional Hard Disk Drive.

2011 was the year of the Panda; Google penalizing sites with thin content and ultimately encouraging all website owners to publish high-quality content. 2012 was the year of the Penguin; Google penalized sites who were violating their Quality Guidelines with link schemes and other fishy link building activities. Will Google unleash a major update named after another one of my favorite animals in 2013? Stay tuned! What I have done is read through a number of predictions from SEO experts to compile a list of 10 of the most popular SEO predictions (and few of my own) for 2013.

The release of PHP 5.5 has been announced, and it will be deprecating the old standard MySQL functions (such as mysql_query). It’s been known that this was coming for a while, and developers have been encouraged to migrate to MySQLi or PDO, but many haven’t. If you’ve been putting it off, it’s probably time to make the jump before moving to PHP 5.5. Of course the MySQL functions will still work in 5.5 but you’ll have to suppress the deprecated warnings.