A lot more than a .BAND aid
Getting social has never been more important. It’s where you’ll find the fans – and therefore, it’s where the music industry’s eyes are pointed too. The days where blagging a few plays on local radio was enough to start building a following are gone. If you’re not online and active, you’re not at the gig. Today you need a strong, proactive presence on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Flickr, iTunes, Amazon to name but a few. That’s where .BAND comes in. It’s somewhere you can aggregate your online presence, and create a unified band for your brand. Being in a band is being in a business, and with .BAND, business is booming.
MAINSTREAM MUSICIANS
This is the prime audience for .BAND, and appeals to both individual musicians and existing groups. Bands can use .BAND to focus their online marketing, raise awareness and build a fan base, whilst also hunting down industry representation and gigs.
Pubs: the most social of social scenes
Think of a local pub and what’s the first thing that pops into mind? It might be a small establishment with horse brasses and wooden beams, or a glitzy sports bar with huge screens, mirror and chrome. Chances are, though, it’ll be an Irish bar. Extraordinary as it seems, at best estimate, there are well over 50,000 Irish pubs outside of Ireland. Some achievement when you consider there are probably fewer than 10,000 in Ireland itself – and dropping. You can recognize them by their names, their tricolours, harps, shamrocks and leprechauns. Over the last couple of decades, the Irish pub has somehow managed to become the gold standard for a certain type of bar worldwide. Perhaps, it’s their place in colorful widespread literature and media, or their renown for being welcoming places where there are no strangers ‘only friends yet to meet’. Whatever the reason, Irish pubs are big business.
Pick any major city in the world, and at the heart of its social scene, you’ll find an Irish pub. St Patrick’s Day is now an unwritten holiday across the globe, not just amongst the Irish diaspora, but for anyone who wants to take pause and celebrate one of the most sociable days of the year.
Sociability is at the heart of the future of Irish – and indeed all – pubs. With the growth of the Internet, social media and online reviews, managing social media is essential for reaching out to customers and potential clientele. The new .PUB TLD is a worldwide meeting place, where pubs, publicans, staff and pub-goers can meet online and while away some time in the company of like-minded enthusiasts.
We imagine we’ll be seeing plenty of the likes of joyce.pubs, mollymalone.pubs and sheebeen.pubs amongst the growing number of establishments on the new .PUB TLD.
Design Has A New Name
From the creative portfolio to the digital storefront, the .design domain is a home for the innovators, for the changemakers, for those who can’t help but create. It is a collaborative and global community united through threads of artistic creation. The word is tied to millions of people and billions of dollars of commerce and adopting .design, adds a serious boost to your personal and professional brand. First impressions have never been so powerful.
As exemplified by iconic brands like Apple and Nike, a modern company’s commitment to design defines its products, its customers, and its business as a whole. The word ‘design’ directly applies to countless professions and its members come from a diverse array of backgrounds, from web design to fashion design. Even industries that do not ‘design’ anything are capitalising on the undeniable cachet of the word, such as the financial institutions that design retirement plans and the personal trainers who design washboard abs. The word is also international, implying both creativity and prestige, and meaningful to both the consumer and the producer.
Refine and define your brand through Atelier Hosting from registration of your .design domain name through to all your hosting needs.
CloudFlare Partners With Atelier Hosting
How CloudFlare increases speed and security of your site
This is a guest post written and contributed by CloudFlare. CloudFlare makes it easy for any site to be as fast and secure as the Internet giants.
CloudFlare, a web performance and security company, is excited to announce our partnership with Atelier Hosting! If you haven’t heard about CloudFlare before, our value proposition is simple: we’ll make any website twice as fast and protect it from a broad range of web threats.
We power more than 400 billion monthly page views – more than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple, Bing, eBay, PayPal and Instagram combined – and over 1.2 billion monthly users regularly pass through our network. We’re really glad Atelier Hosting has partnered with CloudFlare – said (name of the person and his/her job title) from CloudFlare.
Faster web performance
CloudFlare is designed to take a great hosting platform like Atelier Hosting and make it even better.
We run 86 data centers strategically located around the world. When you sign up for CloudFlare, we begin routing your traffic to the nearest data center.
As your traffic passes through the data centers, we intelligently determine what parts of your website are static versus dynamic. The static portions are cached on our servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours before we check to see if they’ve been updated. By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.
CloudFlare’s intelligent caching system also means you save bandwidth, which means saving money, and decreases the load on your servers, which means your web application will run faster and more efficiently than ever. On average, CloudFlare customers see a 60% decrease in bandwidth usage, and a 65% in total requests to their servers. The overall effect is that CloudFlare will typically cut the load time for pages on your site by 50% which means higher engagement and happier visitors.
Broad web security
Over the course of 2011, CloudFlare identified a 700% increase in the number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) we track on the Internet (see the chart below). As attacks like these increase, CloudFlare is stepping up to protect sites.
CloudFlare’s security protections offer a broad range of protections against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about our approach is that the system gets smarter the more sites that are part of the CloudFlare community. We analyze the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped.
In time, our goal is nothing short of making attacks against websites a relic of history. And, given our scale and the billions of different attacks we see and adapt to every year, we’re well on our way to achieving that for sites on the CloudFlare network.
Signing up
Any website can deploy CloudFlare, regardless of your underlying platform. By integrating closely with Atelier Hosting, we make the process of setting up CloudFlare “1 click easy” through your existing Atelier Hosting dashboard. Just look for the CloudFlare icon, choose the domain you want to enable, and click the orange cloud. That’s it!
We’ve kept the price as low as possible and plans offered through Atelier Hosting are free. Moreover, we never charge you for bandwidth or storage, therefore saving you tons via reduced bandwidth costs.
For site owners who would like to take advantage of CloudFlare’s advanced offerings, we also offer a ‘Pro’ tier of service for $20/month. The ‘Pro’ tier includes all of the ‘Free’ tier’s offerings, as well as extra features like SSL, full web application firewall and faster analytics.
We’re proud that every day more than a thousand new sites, including some of the largest on the web, join the CloudFlare community. If you’re looking for a faster, safer website, you’ve got a good start with Atelier Hosting, but the next step is to join the CloudFlare community.