Just over a month ago, WannaCry ransomware struck a massive blow that circled the globe. Now, as the dust has barely settled from its cyber attack, a new threat from Petya has appeared on the horizon.

Ransomware, a new criminal venture born in this century, invades and takes over computer systems. The owner/controller of a hijacked system is told they must pay the perpetrator, usually in bit coin, a type of digital currency, to regain control of their systems. Businesses and governments, who rely heavily on computerized systems today, are the usual targets of the crime.

It was originally thought that this was a phenomenon limited to the Ukraine, but incidents have been reported in other countries, including France, Spain, Russia, and India. The threat goes well beyond the borders of these countries as more and more of those in positions of power find they cannot access their computers.

In 2017, fast-loading content is key to keeping customers on your site. Is yours up to speed? Consider the following tips to improve your website speed.

Using a content delivery network will speed up your site's loading time considerably and improve user experience. A content delivery network (CDN) uses an efficient file delivery system that allows users to quickly access pages. Many CDN's use services located around the world. Choose a location close to the end user, and improve the experience dramatically.

Secondly, reduce the number of redirects your site uses. While redirects can sometimes be handy, too many redirects can unnecessarily slow a site due to bad server requests. Reduce the number of redirects to as few as possible. You should also scan your site for any broken links, as these delay site load time.

GoDaddy, the web-hosting service provider, is looking to broaden its service offerings. It took a huge step towards that goal recently by acquiring WP Curve, a service designed for startups and websites using WordPress. The financial details of the deal are now known publicly. GoDaddy will be picking up WP Curve's customer list and their assets. Some of the employees will transition over to GoDaddy as well.

Dan Norris and Alex McClafferty created WP Curve three years ago. The Australian software designers one place to access many different startup services. Some of the most popular services offered by WP Curve are SEO, conversion, and even website design. Pretty much ever online service a new company would want to use is offered through WP Curve.

Generally, people who run online businesses constantly need to make daunting decisions. Perhaps the biggest of this is the choice of hosting service to reliably power a WordPress blog. The WP Engine is a service that claims to offer support, speed and security all while providing utmost uptime.

Why Consider WP Engine as Your Primary Option?

There are various features that make this hosting service highly beneficial for bloggers. For starters, this service will greatly help your effort to establish and anchor yourself in the web arena for a long time. WP Engine has maintained a good reputation in the WordPress community for a while now. But to be honest, one would likely start searching for an alternative hosting service upon viewing the price at which WP Engine's entry-level hosting plan goes for.

Whether you are searching on your laptop, desktop or tablet, if your pages take a while to load, it can affect your ranking in Google's ranks, and of course, your ability to attract and keep customers.

Three Suggestions for Website Speed Improvements

Compression Images

Using high quality images is important, and today's technology allows you to reduce the file size of your images, without losing the overall quality. To lower the image size, use an image compressor after you have saved it in the most appropriate format, such as jpg.

Streamlining Code

These days, advances in technology means you can use less code to create more features. You may well be using outdated technology if your website is a few years old, and your site may well be slower than it needs to be if you haven't updated it in two or three years.

The best tools and resources for your website include a content management system such as WordPress, along with a good web hosting company and some other tools that will help bring in traffic to your site. WordPress is the top recommended publishing platform for building and maintaining a website. It's flexible to a wide variety of your specific needs, whether as a hobby or to set up your own business. A few other content management platforms are available, but WordPress is definitely worth investigating. This site runs no DotNetNuke for instance.

BlueHost or InMotion is recommended for any self-hosted website. This option gives you more freedom and flexibility as far as the design and content you want to place on your site or blog. The tech support from BlueHost has earned the company plenty of good reviews. And the Pro account at InMotion provides great Wordpress hosting at an incredible price.

Only advanced SEO methods produce the results that you really want. There uncommon tactics will help your site get better positioning in Google.

Use a service like Ahrefs to find sites that are linking to your competitors. You might have trouble getting page 1 competitor links but as you move further down in the results, you will find that older sites linking out to page 5+ will be willing to add your site to their set of relevant links. Send their webmaster a request to link to your new more robust content.

Info graphics still work but are getting a little overplayed. Make sure your info graphic has great data and looks incredible. Add some motion to your info graphic to get a lot more social shares and traffic back to your site.

You might have seen one of GoDaddy's Superbowl ads or the GoDaddy girls on the Internet. They're really everywhere. GoDaddy is one of the leaders in the domain name and hosting market. They make it easy to get your own site up and running. This could be the solution for a better blog with WordPress or a better site for your thriving business. Here are some things you should know about GoDaddy hosting.

WordPress is easily a very popular blogging online platform. Knowing how to operate the software properly makes running a blog easier and more effective. Follow these simple suggestions on while using the platform to take full advantage of your blogging experience.

There was an exploit discovered just this month that allows remote code to execute on the popular content management system (CMS). A popular file download plugin could be used by a hacker to execute code on your site. If you are running WP Download Manager 2.7.4 or lower, you should upgrade right away. Sucuri discovered the issue and the plugin developers but a new version out to protect against hackers gaining access to your admin accounts.

In the past GoDaddy focused on small businesses that did not want technically advanced websites, but now is introducing Pro Hosting for companies with technical staff that want an advanced custom web programming platform. The company sees 6 million developers and designers that maintain websites for a majority of the small business today. Extra support options are a part of the Godaddy Pro hosting program. These developers support sites for multiple companies, making them a prime target.

Some of the new features include web hosting with CPanel, managed Wordpress, and VPS (virtual private servers). Administrators will be able to patch the operating, stage website changes, clone current installations, control backups, have direct access to the server, and plan for disasters. The Pro plans come fully managed to self-managed.