Businesses, large and small, are in the midst of preparing for compliance with the European Union’s (EU) new data privacy laws: The General Data Protection Regulation, or the GDPR, which will go into effect on May 25, 2018. The GDPR is very broad in scope and can apply to businesses both in and outside of the EU. Businesses that don’t comply with the GDPR could face heavy fines. Here’s some information about GDPR. (Note: you should also consult your own legal counsel to determine if you are subject to the requirements of GDPR.)  

What is GDPR?

GDPR is short for the General Data Protection Regulation that goes into effect on May 25, 2018. It was passed by European lawmakers to create a harmonized data privacy law across all the EU member states. Its purpose is to:

• support privacy as a fundamental human right;
• require companies that handle personal data to be accountable for managing that data appropriately; and
• give individuals rights over how their personal data is processed or otherwise used.

 

What is personal data?

In a nutshell, GDPR defines personal data as “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person.” Ok, so what does that mean? In addition to the kinds of information you might think about – name, address, email address, financial information, contact information, identification numbers, etc., personal data can also include information related to your digital life, like an IP address, geolocation, browsing history, cookies, or other digital identifiers. It also could mean information about a person, including their physical, mental, social, economic or cultural identities. Therefore, if information can be traced back to or related in some way to an identifiable person, it is highly likely to be considered “personal data” under the GDPR. You can find out more about the GDPR here.  

What rights does the GDPR provide to individuals?

There are several rights an individual may exercise under the GDPR, including:

• Right of access: Individuals can ask for a copy of the personal data retained about them and an explanation of how it is being used.
• Right to rectification: Individuals have the right to correct, revise or remove any of the personal data retained about them at any time.
• Right to be forgotten: Individuals can ask to delete their personal data.
• Right to restrict processing: If an individual believes, for example, that their personal data is inaccurate or collected unlawfully, the individual may request limited use of their personal data.
• Right of portability: Individuals have the right to receive their personal data in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format.
• Right to object: Where an individual decides that they no longer wish to allow their personal data to be included in analytics or to receive direct marketing emails or other personalized (targeted) marketing content at any time, the individual may opt out of use of their data for these purposes.

Please note that these rights are not absolute, and limitations/exceptions may apply in some cases.  

What is HostGator doing to comply with the GDPR?

If you exercise any of these rights as an individual HostGator customer or representative of a HostGator customer, HostGator will respond in accordance with our Privacy Policy. The HostGator explains what information we collect about you as a HostGator customer and how your personal data may be used or shared by HostGator. We suggest that you review how this applies to you. Note that we will be updating our privacy policy to align with GDPR. No worries, though, we’ll send all users a notice letting you know that it will be changing, so you’ll know what to expect. Where required, we will also support you, as a HostGator customer, in fulfilling GDPR related data subject requests you receive from your contacts. Also, from May 25th, we will not publish the personal data of domain name registrants located in the EU in the WHOIS. This is to ensure our WHOIS output is compliant with the GDPR. However, access to personal data of domain name registrants may be granted when such access is necessary for technical reasons such as for the facilitation of transfers, or for law enforcement when it is legally entitled to such access.  

“Controllers” and “Processors”

Generally speaking, there are two types of parties that have a responsibility regarding the handling of data: the “controller” and the “processor.” It is important to determine if you are acting as a controller or a processor and understand your responsibilities accordingly. A “controller” determines the purposes and means of the use of personal data. A “processor” on the other hand, only acts on the instructions of the “controller” and processes personal data on their behalf. So, what does this mean? HostGator can be either a “controller” or a “processor” depending on the data processing activities that are being performed. Usually, HostGator is a controller in relation to the personal data that you provide to us as a customer. In certain circumstances, you are acting as the controller, for example, when you decide what information from your contacts or subscribers is uploaded or transferred into your HostGator account.  

How does the GDPR affect my business?

Individuals, companies, or businesses that have a presence in the EU or, if no presence, offer goods or services to, or monitor the behavior of, individuals in the EU need to comply with this law. We are reviewing and updating, as necessary, our agreements with you and with our subcontractors (to include the necessary GDPR terms), as well as notices, policies and internal processes, features, and templates to assure our compliance and help you achieve compliance. Please consult with your own legal counsel about whether GDPR applies to you and your business and what actions you need to take to ensure that you comply with the GDPR.  

What do I need to do differently to comply with GDPR?

If the GDPR applies to you, there are various obligations you will need to comply with in order to continue doing business with your customers from the EU. Luckily, not all of these obligations are new, so you should be complying with some of them already. The most important differences in this context are as follows:

• More information about your use of personal data must be communicated to your customers. You should make sure that your privacy notices/policies are updated to reflect the new requirements of the GDPR, including setting out the purposes of your processing personal data, how long you are retaining such data, and what legal basis for use of personal data are you relying on. As a customer of %%Brand%%, your agreement to our Terms of Service requires you to lawfully obtain and process personal data appropriately, including that of EU Individuals as part of the GDPR.
• You should determine the legal basis for your use of personal data: If you are relying on consent to use your customers’ data you should ensure that the consent you have meets the new requirements of the GDPR . Please note that sending marketing emails or showing promotional content in any form to your customers may require, in certain circumstances, prior opt-in consent from them. As a reminder, you have already agreed through acceptance of our terms of service to lawfully obtain and process all personal data appropriately and have attested that you have permission to expose your customers to promotional content.
• You will also need to comply with the rights provided to individuals by the GDPR. See section above “What rights does the GDPR provide to individuals?” for details.

You should consult with your legal counsel on the above and your other obligations under GDPR.  

What if you have more questions about GDPR?

If you have specific questions about GDPR, please, contact Support.  

Other changes

The rules contained in the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications is under review and we are expecting a new ePrivacy Regulation to be finalized soon. Once these new rules are finalized, we will be reviewing our forms and features again to provide our customers with the necessary tools to achieve compliance. NOTE: The information included on this page is meant to guide you through the process of understanding GDPR and is not a substitute for legal advice. Find more information on the GDPR website.

  As technology evolves, it’s important for us to offer a cutting edge product while also maintaining a tried and true standard. With this is mind, we have launched our new dedicated server platform. Our goal with this post is to briefly outline the differences between our two generations of servers. The new servers build upon our legacy platform with an increase in resources, essentially offering up to double the current configuration of memory and processing power as well as SSD storage. Another feature of the new servers is the dynamic scalability. The demands of your website may change over time, and we understand the realities of this as well as the inconvenience of needing to physically upgrade to a new server when you outgrow your current one. To that end, you can now upgrade your RAM or CPU within the same physical server. This means no change of IP address or data migration. The one caveat to this feature would be a change from HDD to SSD storage. There is simply no way around a physical migration in this instance, however we have streamlined this migration process to make it as transparent and efficient as possible. Both generations of dedicated servers are still powerful and flexible in regards to SSL and operating system options, though the new servers do allow for multiple Linux distributions. The security features are still top-notch, including DDOS protection and an IP-based firewall. All told, our new dedicated servers will set the standard for the future of web hosting. Give us a call today at 844-218-7741 to discuss your new HostGator dedicated server.

Announcing Our New Dedicated Hosting Platform

Very excited to announce our new Dedicated Hosting Platform with high performance options including up to 16 cpu threads, 32GB Memory and 1 TB SSD Storage.    HostGator has amped up their Dedicated Platform to meet the increasing demands of doing business online.  With Dedicated Server options that literally double both the processing power and memory available on our current platform.     

Double the Processing Power

With more and more business being done online, your server has to be able to handle multiple processes simultaneously as the number of visitors to your sites grow, that is why we included the Intel Xeon-D 1541 processor with 8 cores and 16 threads in our new Dedicated Platform.   What is a cpu thread?  Think of cloning yourself 16 times so that you could do multiple different things at once, wouldn’t that be great!?  

Double the Memory

To keep up with the increased processing power, we made sure that we had the latest DDR4 Memory with up to 32 GB RAM available on our high end package.  

Your Choice of Storage

Of course with the increased compute power, we had to make sure that the storage could keep up the pace.  So we now offer the choice of HDD or SSD for your storage needs.   If you are looking for a lot of storage but don’t need it to be super fast the HDD option is perfect but if speed trumps space demands for your site, the SSD storage is the right solution for you.  But don’t worry with either option, the drives are mirrored in a RAID1 configuration so your data is protected in case of a drive failure.     

Increased Scalability

My personal favorite is the improved scalability.  We realize that the compute demands of your website change as your site’s complexity grows and your traffic increases, that’s why we made it easier to increase the resources when you need them.  With our new platform, we are able to dynamically scale the resources so adding more cpu or memory is easy; just pick the package that fits your needs and we will resize it for you right on the same server, no physical migration required.   There is one caveat, if you choose to move from HDD to SDD, we would still need to do a physical migration but don’t worry, we have streamlined that process as well.     

Free SSL Available

One other important item is the SSL certificate, both cPanel and Plesk offer free SSL encryption solutions that you have full access to with the new platform.  Fear not, if the limitations of the free Control Panel SSL Options don’t work for you, HostGator still provides other options as well like Extended Validation (EV) or Wildcard Certs.     

Choice of Operating System

For those users who prefer command line access to the Control Panel, we now offer your choice of the latest Linux distros including Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS and on the Windows side the Windows 2012 image.  

Beef Up with a Dedicated Server!

Our Value Server plan offers 8GB of memory and 1TB HDD. The Power Server plan comes with twice the memory (16GB) and your choice of 2TB HDD or 512GB SSD. Finally, for the ultimate in memory, check out our Enterprise Server plans offering 32GB of memory and 1TB SSD. As always our Dedicated Servers include:

• Full root access
• Unlimited email accounts
• Unlimited databases
• Unmetered bandwidth
• 3 Dedicated IPv4 IPs
• cPanel/WHM or Plesk Onyx Control Panel
• Free Reseller account with cPanel
• Fully redundant network in Top of the line datacenter
• DDOS Protection
• 24x7 Support via chat or phone

We are really excited about our new Dedicated Server Platform and hope you are too.  As always if you are looking for something we don’t offer, please let us know. We are always up for designing a custom configuration to suit your needs.  

Ready for maximum performance?

Get started with HostGator dedicated server hosting!

We are very excited to announce the launch of the new HostGator Paper Lantern cPanel theme.    The goal of this redesigned cPanel theme is to provide a better user experience to our valued customers.   This new theme will be rolling out to our customers over the next few days. So if you don’t see it immediately, please know that it is coming soon. Some of the key features that come with this release are:  

Search Bar to Find What You Need Quickly

A full page window that allows you to type in any word and it will pull up the relevant cPanel sections or functions.  

Search Support Articles Without Leaving cPanel

A window that allows you to type in a word or phrase and a list of matching articles in our support documentation will be listed for quick reference. Here’s an example:  

Push Notifications So You Don't Miss Anything Important

Get notified instantly of upcoming changes or exciting news or relevant information about your account.  

Access Key Areas Through The Left Sidebar Navigation Menu

We’ve also introduced a navigation on the left side so that you can easily access key areas quickly, such as:  

Website

This is the traditional cPanel Index page with 10 different sub-categories for faster access to the section you are looking for.  Another great feature is that if you choose to move the sections up and down to better suit your needs, the left navigation bar updates right along with it.  Just move them around to the order that you want, refresh the page, and the navigation bar will be in sync with their new order you have created.  

Popular Links

This is a new section that we’ve added and we hope that customers find it as useful as we intended it to be. Popular Links is where we put our most popular links across both cPanel and the Marketplace for quick access.  If for some reason, you decide that Popular Links section is in the way, you can easily get rid of it by clicking the X in the right hand corner.  

Server Stats

Stats at your fingertips! The stats section allows customers and support agents alike to get a quick look at the status of their account, including when the latest backup was run or how much data you’re using on the server.  We will continue to refine this page and add more information so please let us know what other data would be valuable in this section.    

Domains

Currently this links to the HostGator Domains page. There aren’t any changes to this page with this release, but be on the lookout for some changes coming soon to improve the overall experience of registering new domain names.    

MarketPlace

The MarketPlace is our new and improved QuickInstall page. It gives you easy access to things like the HostGator Website Builder, WordPress Themes, or one-click installs of many of the most popular applications.  It also provides links to add-ons like CodeGuard and Sitelock that help you protect your website and its critical data.  

Help

When you need help with an issue, the last thing you want to do is try to dig through pages to find it.   With the Help page, you have direct links to the support portal or one-click access to our chat system. There are links to many of HostGator’s custom self-help tools for troubleshooting performance or application problems. We know that this is a completely different experience for many cPanel users. However, we believe that it is designed in a way that everyone will be able to use it easily and effectively. If for some reason you don’t love the new theme and want to switch back to the X3 version, no worries - you can do that easily. In the upper right corner, simply select Change Style option under the user profile menu and select the X3 HG theme. This can also be found under the preferences section. Fair warning for those that wish to switch back, though - cPanel is transitioning to this new theme style and the X3 theme will no longer be supported in the near future. Ready to switch to Paper Lantern? Simply click on the Snappy icon in your preferences section and the new theme will be applied, or you can watch our Facebook Live video below where we walk you through the process. (After pressing play, it takes about 10 seconds or so for the video to start.)  

As a marketer, you’re great at growing a website, but you probably don’t know how to make one from scratch. That’s not a problem because you can easily create one using WordPress.

WordPress makes it super easy to create a website by installing “plugins.” Just like on your smartphone, plugins are “apps” you can install to give your WordPress website more features, and without having to write a single line of code.

But the problem with WordPress is that there are over 44,000 plugins to choose from, and the majority of them, well… suck. Some of plugins are so bad that they can dramatically slow down your website, which may have negative consequences to your search ranking results.

Fortunately, with this list, you’ll only see the best WordPress plugins recommended by the best marketers. Everyone mentioned in this list have built several websites and have tons of experience using WordPress plugins.

Let’s get started...

 

1. Noah Kagan (Co-founder of SumoMe and AppSumo)

Noah was employee #4 at Facebook, Director of Marketing at Mint, and is currently the Co-Founder of SumoMe & AppSumo.

Suffice to say, Noah has built plenty of websites and many of them on WordPress. His favorite plugin is Share. Share makes it very simple for your visitors to share your content to their friends, family, and others. The more people that share your content, the more viral traffic you’ll get to your site.

       

2. Pat Flynn (Owner of Smart Passive Income)

Pat’s website, Smart Passive Income, has over 150,000 email subscribers and his podcast has been downloaded over 8 MILLION times. One of the most common questions he receives is which plugins his website uses.

Here’s his response each time:

Pretty Link: “Pretty Link allows me to take long links with lots of characters and quickly create nice looking, short and trackable links that are easy to share and remember. This is handy for me, but also handy for those listening to my podcast or watching my videos who don't have access to a computer or pen and paper!”

CoSchedule: “CoSchedule allows me and my entire team to be on the same page when it comes to our editorial calendar. It can even help you schedule your social media posts to promote your content ahead of time.”

 

3. Lewis Howes (Host of The School Of Greatness)

Lewis has built several multi-million dollar online businesses, including The School Of Greatness podcast, which has received millions of downloads.

His favorite plugins?

LiveFyre: “This lets me show all the social media comments from my podcast episode posts on the actual show notes blog post as well as comments people make on the blog. It's awesome to be able to have all the comments consolidated in one place under the show notes, plus I can moderate the comments easily from that plugin.”

Pretty Link: “I can make short, easy to remember URL links like http://lewishowes.com/book to redirect anywhere I want. This is super helpful to promote things like my books and podcast without the hassle of getting my developer to make special links for me.”

 

4. Chris Guillebeau (Owner of The Art of Non-Conformity)

Chris is both a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He’s the author of The Art of Non-Conformity (translated into 20+ languages), The $100 Startup (300,000+ copies sold), and The Happiness Of Pursuit (NYT Best Seller).

For his personal blog, his two favorite plugins are:

Wufoo Shortcode Plugin: This plugin makes it super easy to include surveys into your site so you can gain a better understanding of your audience. Here’s what Chris had to say about it, “It helps me integrate awesome survey forms (example: http://chrisguillebeau.com/side-hustle-survey)”.

Widgets on Pages: The default WordPress settings makes it difficult to manage widgets on your page. But this plugin makes it super easy, as Chris said, “It makes arranging and updating things so much easier”.

 

5. Jeff Goins (Author of The Art Of Work)

Jeff is an author of four books including the national bestseller, The Art of Work. He also has a personal blog where he shares his reflections on writing and life. For his blog, these are his two favorite plugins.

Welcome Mat: Jeff was able to acquire 100,000 readers in just 18 months. To do this, he used Welcome Mat to display a full-screen call to action like a welcoming landing page to collect his visitors’ emails. What were his results? Here’s what Jeff had to say, “Crazy conversions on that thing!”

All In One SEO: On top of being an author, Jeff is also really good at SEO. Just type his domain into Ahrefs and you’ll see that he’s able to rank for some pretty competitive keywords. A big part of this is using the All In One SEO which automatically optimizes his site for SEO. Here’s what Jeff had to say about it, “Great simple tool to make sure all your metadata is solid.”

 

6. Sol Orwell (Co-Founder of Examine)

Sol has been an online serial entrepreneur for over 15 years, created 6 companies, and generated more than 8 figures. With all his current projects, he does not take any outside investments and instead bootstraps them all himself.

Which plugins does he use for his sites?

Yoast: “Why Yoast? Because it makes optimizing for Google, Facebook, and Twitter (modified tags are KEY for virality and social sharing) simple stupid.”

Facebook Comments Plugin: “I'm a big fan of associating comments with the actual person who makes it; it builds a one-on-one community aspect, makes it easy to comment (most people have FB), and keeps the trolls at bay.”

 

7. Nathan Chan (Creator of FoundrMag)

Nathan is the creator of Foundr, a digital marketing magazine dedicated to helping entrepreneurs all over the world.  He’s interviewed some of the highest profile entrepreneurs including: Richard Branson, Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin and many more.

His favorite WordPress plugins?

Optimizely: “Great for A/B testing to find out what's working and what's not. It's extremely important for us as a data driven company to constantly re-work and out perform our conversion stats.”

Smart Podcast Player:  “Looks amazing, and allows people to access our podcast easily. Our podcast is a big part of what drives traffic to our site, so it's important that we make it super simple for people to listen to episodes when they view our website.”

Pretty Link: “Nice little easy tool to create custom links that we use frequently!"

 

8. Justin Mares (Founder of Kettle & Fire)

Justin is only 26 years old and has started several successful companies, including: Programming For Marketers ($60K in 5 months), Traction Book (over 175 5-star reviews), and Kettle & Fire (6 figure business in less than 1 year).

Whenever he uses WordPress for his websites, these are his two must-have plugins:

SumoMe: “Makes capturing email addresses SUPER easy”

GoSquared: “It's a really cool real-time dashboard to use to evaluate traffic stats.”

     

9. Ryan Stewart (Founder of Webris)

Ryan is a leading digital marketing consultant who has been featured on many of the top blogs including Kissmetrics and MarketingProfs. For his clients, he often recommends these two plugins:

Yoast SEO: “It’s a pretty heavy plugin, but it's worth it. If you've ever optimized a non-WordPress site for SEO, you understand how much of a pain it is to change titles, metas, URLs, sitemaps, etc (especially if that site has thousands of pages). Yoast cuts through needing a dev or access to a site's root, it's incredibly powerful and the team at Yoast is constantly updating the software with new features.”

Live Composer: “It's a front end page builder that allows you to drag and drop pages, similar to designing in Weebly. My background is actually in graphic design so I've always been a HUGE believer in building content that looks amazing. Using a plugin like this also allows us to be agile, get things done quicker without having to go through Photoshop and our dev team. I don't use it to build websites, but it's incredibly handy to design blog posts and content / guides.”

 

10. William Harris (Founder of Elumynt)

William is a growth marketer who has helped several businesses grow exponentially. He’s been featured on publications such as: Entrepreneur, SocialMediaToday, Search Engine Journal, and much more.

As far as his favorite plugins goes, whether if it’s for his clients or for his personal blog, he highly recommends these two plugins:

Postable: “I love drafting in Google Docs, but hate having to reformat everything in Wordpress.  Postable makes it super easy to migrate my Google docs articles to WordPress with literally a click of a button, which is a huge time saver.”

Plugin Vulnerabilities: “Because I really really really hate the idea of getting hacked, and want to keep my plugins up to date”

 

11. Sarah Peterson (Owner of Unsettle)

Sarah has built several passive income businesses and is also the Marketing Sumo at SumoMe. For every single online business she builds, she always downloads these two plugins:

List Builder: “List Builder is one of the apps that contributes the most to the growth of my email list. By creating a bonus for my most popular articles, visitors have to provide their email to access the bonus material. Since I don’t know how to code, I use List Builder’s Click Trigger feature to do all of this. I’ve created Click Triggers that convert over 70% for my content upgrades.”

Yoast SEO: “I love Yoast because it guides me through optimizing my content without me having to be an SEO expert. It makes SEO simple, and also allows for custom meta so you can control how your content shows up on different social platforms.”

 

12. Benji Hyam (Co-Founder of Grow And Convert)

Benji has built several websites, including ThinkApps where he was responsible for turning it into one of the top 30,000 US websites with the most traffic. For each of his websites, he installs these two plugins:

Revive Old Post: “It automatically takes old post from your blog and shares them on Twitter. All you have to do is set it up once, and it automatically schedules and tweets out old content.”

Shortcodes Ultimate: “It allows us to place nicely designed callout boxes and buttons on our blog, which helps us increase our conversions.”

     

These Plugins Are Just The Tip Of The Iceberg

We just gave you 25 of the best plugins determined by expert marketers. But there are still plenty of amazing WordPress plugins you should be aware of (we have blogs on the best WordPress plugins for photography, SEO, video display, e-commerce sites... just to name a few).

That’s why we decided to crowdsource, curate, and brainstorm all of the best, plugins out there - no matter what you need. We then organized it so you can easily find the exact plugins that are relevant for your business.

Click here for the 57 best WordPress plugins to help you take your website to the next level.

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Wilson Hung writes actionable step-by-step guides for SumoMe. Join our Sumo community of over 450,000 subscribers to learn how to grow your website and build your email list. Click here for the 57 best WordPress plugins to help you take your website to the next level.