International Business and Technology Blog

Hosting websites is a massive, technological, fast evolving and growing global business. Website hosting is all about managing and optimizing the rapid rise in the number of websites: there are over 1.8 billion websites today compared to just 3,000 in 1994. These zillions of webpages compete for prized online real estate, to attract the more than 6 billion targeted internet users worldwide. To succeed, companies, organizations and individuals demand that the website hosting service providers deliver for their websites the four key S’s of website hosting success: speed, security, scalability and support.

The hosting industry is yet another deeply technological subject for those concerned to master and manage. At IBT Online we want the best for our clients online business and this includes getting the best hosting experience in global markets. Service delivery from hosting providers ranges from good (5) to bad (1) (see below for criteria). We see averages of 4 in home markets, but 2 when it comes to global website hosting! The IBT Online Global program best practice for website hosting, is to get our clients a top 5 score in all their markets.

Brazil - The largest economy in South America and with exciting potential for further growth. No wonder exporters have Brazil firmly in their export destination sights. While its size and potential growth are tempting, it is not for the inexperienced exporter. Brazil is a difficult market to enter, subject to a history of complex protectionist policies.

But for the persistent exporter, Brazil holds out the trophy of a lucrative and growing market. Use online tools to your advantage to be found, understood and transact your business in Brazil – one of the most internet-aware markets in the world. The infographic below will help you grasp and understand the potential of Brazil’s online environment, social media, and ecommerce.

This is the second in our 4-part blog Service Company Exporter Series that explores the challenges service companies face when exporting and what tools and support service companies might benefit from. Previously, we looked at the importance of the service sector for the U.S. economy. The current blog compares the most common barriers to export faced by service companies versus manufacturers.

If the U.S wishes to maintain its global stature, it needs to support its service exporters more as they compete in international markets. Traditional federal and state export assistance programs need to acknowledge the economic shift in favor of services and adapt their resources and activities to support the growing number of U.S. service companies that are looking to export. This blog series will discuss the different resources service exporters need compared to manufacturing exporters and will make suggestions on how U.S. state export development programs can address the exporting needs of service firms.

New to China and wondering how to get brand recognition? One of the fastest and most cost-efficient ways of building brand awareness in China, particularly for B2B companies, is to use SINA Weibo. The name Weibo means microblog in Chinese and the app is sometimes likened to a Chinese version of Twitter. But that comparison undermines one of its key attributes: from an online marketing perspective Weibo is more like Facebook. Weibo allows companies to post content to specific targeted audiences in China. It gives you a segmented audience base to grow page likes, create social buzz and to drive traffic to your website. This is the main reason why Chinese businesses are increasingly using Weibo for their online marketing and why savvy non-Chinese companies are joining in. 

If you want to be a global leader, you need global websites – this was the conclusion of Custom Biogenic Systems' management. In 2016, IBT Online rolled out the first 2 localized websites for them: now 2 years later, Custom Biogenics is online, optimized and fully visible to their international clients and prospects, with 6 websites across 6 international markets. IBT Online first built 4 localized websites for Custom Biogenics for Europe: French, German, Spanish and Italian. In early 2018, the company decided to add Chinese and Russian. These 6 languages equate to over a quater of the world's population. This multi-website presence allows the company to push forward its international ambitions, growing together with the global biotechnology, pharma, industrial and research sectors that they service.

When you go online today to use one of your Apps, you are one of more than 3.4 billion App-empowered users – that’s 40% of the world’s population. By 2021, that App utilization figure is expected to be >6.3 billion users; some 80% of the projected 7.8 billion world citizens. This means that over the next 3 years, a further 2.9 billion people will be using Apps, implying a doubling of the penetration rate to 85%. The big picture therefore and the message of this blog, is that we are all, the world’s billions of citizens, going to be App users. The details, and the focus of this IBT Online App blog-series, concern geographic location, the rate of uptake, which devices, platform and use.

An important insight is that globally, users are increasingly accessing Apps through their mobile smartphones (today >2.5 billion users) rather than their desktops. Innovative, easy to roll out and cost effective technologies facilitating the mobile 1^st world (think China, India and Indonesia…), have enabled these countries to leap-frog the infrastructure dependent PC route, of users in mature Western countries. Let’s take a dive and see where all the App users are in this world and then make a case study of the world’s largest App market, China.

Selling specialized products to consumers these days requires a fantastic website and regular postings of quality social media across multiple media platforms. Shire Post Mint from Arkansas do this well. Their US home website allows customers to browse and purchase easily while their blogs and regular social media postings include great visuals and engaging content. Now how best to grow internationally? Management chose to leverage their digital presence through localized websites and international online marketing for their key export markets. IBT Online is delighted to help: the first step was to build German and Spanish localized websites.

I have always loved the letter S: it is the best letter in the alphabet. It is always, all about that "S". In fact, S is such an important letter that we added it to our web browser, so we are HTTPS, to make it safer for you! And everyone in the online community, should be doing the same. The online world and internet of things are fundamentally insecure, with cybercrime rising exponentially and now reckoned to be the second most reported economic crime, costing billions.

Could cybercrime happen to you? Yes. Worried? You should be. If not secured, “when you load a website someone else on the network can look at or modify the site before it gets to you”. And that happens all the time, with most users blissfully unaware. The not-so-elegantly named solution is Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), denoted by an S in your web browser. Just glance up now and check it out: does it read HTTP or HTTPS? You will see that IBT Online is HTTPS = secure. This is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. Hence the online mantra is HTTPS good, HTTP bad! Add an S and you’re good. An HTTPS website should make you smile as it is has three essential qualities: identity, confidentiality and integrity. So you know where you stand; safe and secure.