Tag Archives: tech

Microsoft Teams OR Slack For A Small Business?

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Both Microsoft Teams and Slack are excellent collaboration tools, but they have different strengths that might make one more suitable for your small group of entrepreneurs. Here’s a comparison to help you decide:

Microsoft Teams

  • Integration with Microsoft 365: If your team already uses Microsoft 365, Teams integrates seamlessly with apps like Word, Excel, and Outlook, enhancing productivity.
  • Video Conferencing: Teams offers robust video conferencing features, including screen sharing, meeting recordings, and breakout rooms, which are great for remote meetings.
  • Collaboration Tools: Teams provides shared to-do lists, file sharing, and private channels, making it easy to collaborate on projects.
  • Security and Compliance: Teams offers strong security features and compliance with various industry standards, which is crucial for protecting sensitive information.
  • Pricing: Teams is often included in Microsoft 365 subscriptions, making it a cost-effective option if you’re already using Microsoft services.

Slack

  • Ease of Use: Slack is known for its user-friendly interface and ease of use, making it quick to set up and start using.
  • Customization: Slack offers extensive customization options, including custom emojis, themes, and integrations with over 2,200 third-party apps.
  • Communication: Slack excels in chat-based communication, with features like private messaging, group channels, and threaded conversations to keep discussions organized.
  • Integrations: Slack integrates with a wide range of tools, including Google Drive, Trello, and GitHub, making it versatile for various workflows.
  • Free Plan: Slack’s free plan is more restrictive compared to Teams, but it still offers essential features for small teams.

Which One to Choose?

  • Microsoft Teams: Best for teams already using Microsoft 365 or those needing robust video conferencing and collaboration tools.
  • Slack: Ideal for small businesses looking for a simple, easy-to-use chat-based platform with extensive customization and integrations.

Ultimately, the best choice depends on your team’s specific needs and existing tools. If you prioritize seamless integration with Microsoft apps and strong video conferencing capabilities, Teams might be the better option. If you value ease of use, customization, and a wide range of integrations, Slack could be the way to go.

You can find more detailed comparisons here and here.

Optimizing Your Website

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A newsletter came in today from WordPress.com. If you don’t know, WordPress.com is a commercial website. It isn’t the same website that you get WordPress plugins from, which is WordPress.org. Anyway, the newsletter was about optimizing your website. They claim:

  • Nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.
  • Almost half of consumers say they’ll try to refresh a page at least once when it takes 3 seconds to load. But 22% say they’ll close the tab, and 14% say they’ll visit a competitor’s site.
  • 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
  • If a website takes more than three seconds to load, 40% of the people will leave that site.

They offer a free tool you can use to check how well your site is optimized. You just need to past in your url and click the button and a report is generated instantly. If you don’t get the reults you were hoping for, you can try Site Kit from Google

How to Use Site Kit

I have Site Kit installed on this site, but it takes 72 hours to gather all of your Analytics if you hook it up to this Google kit too. Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. I found a video that gives a pretty good introduction to Site Kit, and how to use it.

When I ran this site through Site Kit, one of the recommended improves was to optimize this site using SMUSH. It’s the leading image optimization plugin – optimize, resize, and compress images, as well as convert images to WebP format for faster loading web pages.

If you take advantage of these tools in this article, you will have a much better optimized and faster loading website.

 

 

Add a Little Windows

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If you read a post where I suggested one needn’t buy a new computer to run a business, but could refurbish an older computer with Linux — I’d like to show you the best of both worlds if you have a newer computer.

Windows 10 isn’t going to be supported much longer. As a Linux user, this doesn’t bother me, but I’ve often had to check clients websites with Windows. So I have Windows installed on Linux in a ‘virtual machine’.

What does that look like?

Watch this video, and you will see me launch Windows from my Linux computer:

 

As you can see, it’s still easy enough to run Windows if you need it for something that you can’t do in Linux.

Your Website hosting service needs to be fast and reliable

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This website is hosted on Hostinger on a business package for WordPress. I also have three websites hosted on Hostgator, and they’ve been established for a number of years.

PC Magazine lists both web companies as being very good. Their “best” list for 2024 includes:

  • Hostgator
  • Bluehost
  • A2 Hosting
  • Hostinger
  • Dreamhost
  • Accu Wed Hosting
  • Liquid Web Hosting
  • InMotion Hosting

Liquid Web was out of the question. I have a client who used to be hosted by Rackspace. Years ago Liquid Web bought them out and my experience working with them as not been good. Their tech support has at times not been able to find my client’s hosting account. They have given me the wrong information more than once, and I even had one tech tell me he was too green to help me. The technician I should speak with wouldn’t be in until Monday.

InMotion was a consideration but it’s more for large scale deployment. I sent their tech support a couple of questions before I considered their service and I was brushed off.

Bluehost and Hostgator are actually owned by the same parent company. What you don’t like at one, you probably won’t like at the other. I put a lot of clients on Hostgator’s servers over the years. Then when I decided to come out of full retirement to start this venture, they wouldn’t accept me as an affiliate because all of my traffic had died down.

Then I found Hostinger. The servers are fast. Not at all clunky like my account on Hostgator. Truth be told, I could have upgraded my account to get a faster server on a SSD drive but without extra cost, the server being used by my hosting account on Hostinger is an NVMe.

In case you’re wondering, IBM explains the difference between SSD and NVMe:

While the terms SSD and NVMe are often used to describe two different types of drives, they are different data storage technologies that are can used to complement each other. SSDs are a type of semiconductor-based storage used with flash storage, and NVMe is a protocol for data transfer with reduced system overheads per input/output operations per second (I/O, or IOPS) that is used in SSDs with flash memory.

Flash storage devices can achieve high-speed response times (microsecond latency), compared to hard drives with moving components or memory sticks. It uses non-volatile memory, which means that data is not lost when the power is turned off. It uses highly available solid-state drives, and less energy and physical space than mechanical disk storage.

What does this mean?

Basically, all this means is the servers are lightening fast compared to my Hostgator account running on an older, mechanical hard drive (HDD).

Forbes has a good article on the difference between Hostgator and Hostinger. It says:

Although both Hostinger and HostGator provide excellent, quick, and reliable performance, Google’s Core Web Vitals survey suggests that Hostinger could be up to 7.3% faster for mobile pages and about 3% faster for desktop pages than HostGator. One factor contributing to Hostinger’s faster loading time is LiteSpeed Web Server technology, although it’s mostly limited to WordPress hosting.  Nevertheless, clients should expect a quick average response time of under 600ms from Hostinger and HostGator.

The authors of the article are quick to get their affiliate links in there so you will buy from them, regardless of which direction you go, but I’m not sure if they fully understand the jest of what they speak. If they had websites of similar low cost set up with both companies, they would clearly KNOW Hostgator’s service can be clunky and unresponsive at times, while Hostinger’s is fast. And always available. A large part of their better uptime will be due to the NVMe drives with Flash.

My daughter gave me a brand-new HP desktop computer for Christmas three years ago. It came with a 256GB NVMe and a 1TB HDD drive. Of course, the first thing I did was replace the Windows operating system with Linux. That was an improvement right away. But the NVMe wasn’t big enough for all the programs I wanted to put on it, let alone the files. So a lot of these items were stored on the HDD making the computer much slower than I wanted.

To improve my system, I cloned the 256GB NVMe and then removed the drive and replaced it with a 1TB NVMe drive. Then I installed the cloned operating system onto the drive and partitioned it to hold the file-system as well, that had previously been regulated to the HDD. The HDD was erased and reformatted and mounted back in as a secondary drive that I used to keep backups, movies, music and documents.

The point to the last two paragraphs is to show you I understand hard drives, know how they work, and what to expect from them. You can’t expect Hostgator low-cost hosting packages to compare to Hostinger packages of equivalent value.

This post is also available in the forum if you would like to comment on it there.