As you may have read on our June 29th blog post, the alpha version of PHP 7 was released. Since that post was published, PHP released the first beta version of PHP. We know that PHP 7 has a clear cut focus on performance. Let’s look at some of the contributing elements to those performance improvements and the other enhancements included with PHP 7.

Do you ever look at your referral traffic in Analytics and notice sites that aren’t even linking to you sending hundreds and maybe thousands of visits? At first glance you may be tempted to pat yourself on your back because these referrals gives your traffic stats a boost. At second glance however you realize these aren’t real referrals; they’re spam referrals. These so called visitors aren’t actually going to your site. Instead they are sending data to Google Analytics making it look like they’re visiting your site.

With the recent Alpha release of PHP 7, A2 Hosting is proud to be one of the first providers to offer PHP 7 Hosting. PHP 7 is available on A2 Hosting’s Turbo Web Hosting service. Our PHP Switcher makes it easy to move between multiple PHP versions including PHP 5.1-5.6, and of course PHP 7.

Khan Academy has released a new accessibility testing plugin called Tota11y. It’s a JavaScript plugin that can go in any web page and help you identify accessibility issues with your website. It will not only help you identify the problems with your site, but offer suggestions on how to correct the problems. Some of the categories that Tota11y will look at include:

Still stuck in the mindset that tons of backlinks and tons of content is the most effective way to skyrocket up Google’s rankings? Sure these both have an impact on your rankings, but always make sure to provide a positive user experience for your users. Google has even been quoted in previous blog posts about rewarding high quality sites that “The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. “

Recently, one of our most requested features has been for Turbo Reseller Hosting. This is understandable considering we offer Turbo Servers, featuring up to 20X faster page loads, on our Web Hosting, Managed VPS, VPS Hosting and Dedicated Hosting packages. Our Reseller Hosting customers were requesting that they get the boost provided by Turbo as well. Your requests were received loud and clear. We have launched Turbo Reseller Hosting!

It’s obvious one of our primary goals is to offer you the fastest hosting service possible. Our team of engineers work hard everyday to optimize our servers so you get this fast service. With the launch of not just one new data center, but two, we’re bringing those servers closer to your website visitors. After all, how close your data is to your visitors can have an impact on your site’s load times. That’s why we’re excited to announce the launch of our service in both our European data center in Amsterdam and our Asian data center in Singapore.

Once in awhile I’ll be looking at our traffic report in Analytics and notice a blast of traffic to us from a site that I haven’t seen before. Unless that traffic is coming from the referring site’s homepage, there really isn’t a great way to see where it’s coming from. This is especially discouraging if the traffic isn’t converting at a high conversion rate. I want the opportunity to learn how we’re being linked to, reach out to the site owner and discuss ways to improve the conversion rate.