If you're looking to make your website live, you'll need some form of web hosting.

The best web hosting services provide the required infrastructure, including storage, bandwidth, and a suite of other features to get your website up and running, once you've used one of the best website builders to put it together.

In your search for hosting, you'll likely come across two terms: web hosting and WordPress hosting. Web hosting is an umbrella term that covers all kinds of hosting, including shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated server hosting, and cloud hosting.

WordPress hosting also falls under this general term, but it’s a type of platform-specific hosting optimised for WordPress sites. With WordPress powering over 40% of all websites on the internet, it's certainly an option worth considering. But should you go for web hosting or the best WordPress hosting for your site?

In this web hosting vs WordPress hosting comparison, we'll compare their features to help you decide which one to go with. Although performance, support, and pricing depends largely on the provider you choose, we’ll give you an inkling of what you can expect with each type of hosting.

Web hosting vs WordPress hosting: Features

Often, web hosting – including WordPress hosting – comes with included features such as a free domain, SSL certificates, email accounts, marketing features, and ecommerce features. But there are some key differences worth noting between general web hosting and WordPress hosting.

One key feature of WordPress hosting is that it only works for WordPress-based sites. In other words, if you're using CMSs like Drupal, Magento, Joomla, Squarespace, or Dreamweaver, you shouldn’t choose WordPress hosting. However, most web hosting options can run WordPress with ease. So general hosting gives you far more flexibility in selecting a content management system.

One thing that stands out about WordPress hosting is that it usually comes with the WordPress software pre-installed on your server. You won’t have to work through potentially confusing or difficult installation processes like you often have to with shared or other hosting, making dedicated WordPress hosting an attractive option for newbies.

With managed WordPress hosting, you will generally have full technical support, with a team on hand to install updates, including updates for your WordPress software and security patches. Such updates ensure that your website is robust and secure. This feature is particularly helpful if you aren’t tech-savvy, and don’t want to manually handle such updates.

Other web hosting options can also offer some form of automatic updates, although you often have to go for more expensive plans to access these. Additionally, third-party integrations help you extend the functionality of your website. Thankfully, most web hosts have a wide range of third-party apps and widgets, including themes and plugins, to help you customise your site.

WordPress hosting is somewhat more limited than most other forms because it can’t be used with other CMS or site creation platforms. However, WordPress itself has a vast library of plugins, themes and third-party apps and widgets that you can avail of.

Web hosting vs WordPress hosting: Performance

Your website’s performance affects everything from your brand reputation to sales. Any website that takes more than a few seconds to load is sure to turn visitors away. In some cases, WordPress hosting can offer a higher level of performance compared to general shared hosting options.

First, a WordPress host’s entire tech stack is typically designed to make your WordPress site perform better, whether we’re looking at uptime, page load times, server responses, or something else.

With WordPress hosting, you’ll get WordPress-specific caching that saves your data in the form of static files, so that your site can load faster. While other hosting options generally offer some kind of caching, they are not often WordPress-centered by default, and they tend to be a tad slower.

However, you can use a CDN to improve the performance of your website, whether you're using WordPress hosting or web hosting. CDNs store your website’s images, videos, and pages across several data centers. That way, the distance between a server and a user is reduced, and a single-point failure in one server doesn’t affect the performance of your website.

It is important to note that even the most basic shared hosting can be configured to run a WordPress website in a fast, efficient manner. This will take a fair amount of work, though.

Web hosting vs WordPress hosting: Support

Unsurprisingly, the level of customer support you get depends on the kind of web hosting you choose. People on shared plans typically get access to a knowledge base, in addition to phone, live chat, and email support. But response times, especially by email, can be slow.

Higher paying customers, like those on VPS and dedicated hosting plans, often get priority customer support. Some hosts even offer a strategic team on standby (24/7) to help you address issues quickly.

The advantage of choosing WordPress hosting, especially managed WordPress hosting, is that you get a support team who are experts in WordPress. Managed WordPress hosting allows you to focus on your business, while the support team undertakes proactive monitoring to identify issues as soon as possible.

Take Kinsta's top-level WordPress team, for instance. They check the status of the websites they host every two minutes; that amounts to a whopping 720 checks each day. So they'll notice and get right on top of any website issues before you even know it.

Web hosting vs WordPress hosting: Pricing and plans

Web hosting prices vary widely depending on the kind of site you want to run and the extra features you need. Shared hosting, the cheapest of the lot, ranges anywhere from less than £1 to £15 a month, or even higher.

For instance, InMotion Hosting's shared plans start at £2.03 a month, and can go as high as £10.59 a month. Meanwhile, Bluehost's plans range from £2.34 a month to £11.08 a month.

VPS hosting can be much pricier, although low-end plans come in at less than £5 a month. However, the price can go as high as £50 a month, or even higher. For example, Bluehost's entry plan for VPS hosting costs £15.08 and the highest plan costs £47.64. Expect to pay at least £60 a month for dedicated hosting, increasing all the way to £300 a month depending on the extra features you choose.

WordPress hosting also has an extensive pricing structure. You can get it as cheap as basic shared hosting in many cases, and prices can reach thousands per month for custom enterprise solutions. InMotion's WordPress hosting starts at £3.25 a month, but you have to be ready to pay for two years.

WP Engine has one of the more expensive managed WordPress hosting plans we found, with costs rising to about £151 a month.

Web hosting vs WordPress hosting: Verdict

Which is best: web hosting or WordPress hosting? The short answer is that it depends. If you are running a WordPress site, choosing WordPress hosting is a no-brainer. You'll get better features, higher performance, and more effective support.

That said, several web hosts offer WordPress-focused hosting packages that are worth looking at. Although these packages are not WordPress hosting, they have features tailored for good performance of WordPress sites. However, if you are running your website on other CMSs, we recommend choosing from the wide range of web hosting options out there.

For small businesses and people building their first site, shared or WordPress hosting will likely be your best bet. If you want more space, bandwidth, and control over your website, choose between VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, and cloud hosting.

Further reading on web hosting and website builders

Check out our guides to the best unlimited web hosting, and the best VPS hosting. If you’re still unclear about why you need hosting, you can find out more in our article asking what is web hosting?

If you're considering the best WordPress hosting for your WordPress site, make sure to look at our listicles outlining seven great reasons to choose managed WordPress hosting, and the four S's of managed WordPress: security, scalability, speed, and service.

RateGain has unveiled its self-serve software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to help hotels streamline content across demand partners.

Dubbed Content.AI, the new solution leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to help hoteliers prioritize content updates. The end-to-end AI platform also helps optimize, enhance, and distribute content to achieve higher conversions.

“As travel comes back, potential guests are looking at online channels and hotels to provide accurate information about room amenities, health and hygiene standards as well as the overall experience,” explained RateGain.

Using Content.AI, hotels of any size can meet the triple challenge of completeness, consistency, and conversion. The platform’s augmentation feature allows hotels to enhance content quality with minimal manual effort.

Hoteliers can also edit or optimize images to showcase hotels’ best attributes to prospective guests. Furthermore, hotels can auto-tag images for easy identification and group by demand partners to boost search engine optimization (SEO).

One-click publishing ensures content consistency across channels, and Content.AI’s wizard helps identify the most critical conversion attributes among demand partners.

"Trust is the most critical criteria for winning over guests in the new normal, and consistently providing high-quality content across all customer touch points is no longer an option for hotels and a necessity to improve retention and conversions,” commented Bhanu Chopra, founder of RateGain.

Chopra added: “For most of the last decade, content management has been an extremely time-consuming operational task which has not been related to conversions, however, with the share of digital bookings increasing and the guest being more aware, hotels would need to solve this quickly and Content. is the only end-to-end platform to facilitate that."

For more than two decades, the humble blog has been something of an unsung hero in the world of business communications. Most companies have one as a notice board, but there are some, like fitness specialist Freeletics, that use a blog to offer more value for customers.

Freeletics, a popular fitness app created in 2013 by three students in Germany – Joshua Cornelius, Andrej Matijczak and Mehmet Yilmaz – didn’t actually start as an app at all. In its first incarnation, it consisted of simple exercise tutorials posted to YouTube that were supported with a weekly newsletter. It was also published in PDF format, with all training carried out in the Munich Maßmannpark. Eight years on, however, it’s now a global multimedia app used by more than 32 million people across 160 different countries.

It took two migrations to get to that point, though, with the PDFs quickly evolving into an encyclopedic blog, with over five thousand posts in ten different languages on the WordPress platform. The blog has remained a key element of Freeletics, with articles covering nutrition, wellbeing and exercise. But as its popularity grew around the world it became harder and harder to manage, Szymon Nowak, the company’s engineering manager, tells IT Pro.

From the slow process of translating multiple articles from German, to the limited tools at their disposal, the Freeletics editorial team was crying out for a better CMS. In particular, it needed more consistency for the visual aspects of the blogs, where typography, images and video embeds were becoming increasingly important additions.

“That’s why we decided to migrate our blog from WordPress to a headless CMS,” Nowak explains. “Initially, we migrated all our content to Contentful and used Gatsby.js for generating the blog website. However, after a while, we realised that we needed more advanced features that Contentful didn’t provide, such as scheduled releases or workflows. Thus, we decided to switch again, this time to Contentstack.

“Since then, we’ve started using Contentstack for more than just our blog. At the moment, it’s providing content for almost all of our main websites, and also some parts of our mobile apps. Contentstack’s flexibility also allowed us to integrate it with some third-party services, like translation services that we use and our internal systems.”

Unlike a traditional CMS, where the content controls are combined with the presentation layer, a headless CMS is essentially decoupled from the end result and simply comprises the content element. It requires a stateless API to present the content, or in the case of Freeletics, multiple APIs; its content is managed in the headless CMS and from there it is sent to different platforms, such as the mobile app or the website.

The benefits of a headless CMS can mostly be labelled as ‘flexibility’, because it can be tailored to fit developer needs and offers seemingly limitless scalability. For Freeletics it also provided a faster editorial process and vastly improved operational efficiency.

The real key for the company, however, was Contentstack’s automated translation services. Translating content from the company’s native German into the nine other languages it offers previously took around four weeks. According to Contentstack’s metrics, this process can be reduced to under one week, enabling an 80% reduction of time to market. The company further claims that developer productivity actually went from around 22.5 days to just four and a half, on average, an 85% increase.

While website builders like WordPress, with all their innovative plugins and widgets, have helped many businesses build their online presence, they can’t match the flexibility and scalability of a headless CMS. However, this also comes with the burden of more technical responsibility, depending on which service you use. In the case of Freeletics, a little more effort has resulted in multiple gains, and it still hasn’t reached its upper limits.

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A modern content management system (CMS) can be an opportunity for businesses to reimagine the digital customer experience, but how do you do it correctly?

Upgrading your CMS is an important decision that requires you to get the timing, solution, and process right since it’s likely a big expenditure and a platform you’ll have to work with for at least several years, but the benefits are worth it if you can get it right.

Download this guide to find out more about:

• Five signs it’s time to upgrade your CMS
• What to look for in a new CMS
• Steps to a successful CMS deployment

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Virtual collaboration will be a commonplace feature of the future workplace, and your employee portal needs to support it.

Legacy tools can slow your workers down in a time when they need to connect easily and quickly in order to be productive, which creates a bad employee experience and will come back to bite your business in the long run.

Download this whitepaper to find out more about the five essential building blocks to creating a modern employee portal, including centralised content management and exceptional personalisation tools.

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After being in and out of lockdown during the pandemic, it’s fair to say that consumers are craving interaction. For brands, it’s important to capitalise on this - when the majority of correspondence has been through technology - and deliver those personalised experiences that will help meet their needs.

From how to build a digital foundation to delivering personal experiences at scale, discover why personalisation matters.

Download this guide to learn:

• How to map your customer journey
• What data to track and how to measure success
• The main personalisation challenges facing brands

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Organisations these days are spending a lot of time considering how to create, deliver and optimise amazing content-led experiences for their customers. Targeting and personalisation continue to be a top priority for leaders in CX, and it’s clear to see why as those organisations with outstanding customer experiences are more likely to exceed their business goals.

With the evolution of cloud-native CMS platforms, even more businesses can innovate and introduce personalised experiences they never thought possible.

Download this resource to learn how to choose and deploy a CMS that will deliver the best results for your business.

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The majority of CIOs agree that AI and machine learning will continue to be critical to their businesses over the next five years; however some guidance is required for brands who aren’t quite sure where to start and how to make the most of it.

Content management is one of the areas where AI is excelling, from personalised content, A/B testing and content production.

Download this guide to learn:

• Three ways AI can transform your content
• Six tools of the AI trade
• How to future proof your AI

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Launching a website can feel like a landmark moment. It’s the digital age equivalent of hanging an ‘Open For Business’ sign in your window. If your proverbial sign is static and rarely requires updates - for example, if it’s simply intended to communicate basic operating practices like opening hours, contact information and a list of services - then you can likely build a simple site in HTML and CSS, and wrap the project there. But for most businesses, something far more dynamic is required.

As the term implies, a Content Management System, or CMS, is a structure that enables users to model, edit, create and update content on a website without having to hard-code it into the site itself. Many businesses use off-the-shelf CMS tools like WordPress, Joomla, Magento or Squarespace to handle this function.

When it comes to pin-pointing the factors that really make a really good CMS stand out, the most successful out-of-the-box solutions share one common trait - they’re easy to interpret. For any CMS, its success as a product completely relies on how easy it is for teams to create, manage and update logical data structures. The more pain-free this process is, the easier it becomes for teams to create robust content models. That being said, as any engineer will tell you, the implementation of relational databases is in itself its own art form.

The problem with these out-of-the-box solutions is that they can often include far too many features, cater to completely different levels of tech literacy, and what’s more, can make it far too easy for you to rack up an expensive bill. An alternative option is to build your own custom CMS that’s designed to meet your specific requirements.

While building the thing that you need is often viewed as the scenic route to solving your problem, when tackled the right way, it can turn out to be the quickest solution. An excellent way of streamlining a project with the potential for infinite scope-creep, while putting any information that’s lying dormant in a spreadsheet to good use, is to use Google Sheets as the foundation for your CMS.

Despite the best efforts of AirTable, Notion and even Smartsheets, there’s a reason why spreadsheets have stood the test of time as a widely accepted file format. Chances are, no matter the skill level or aversion to technology, most people within a business are going to know how to navigate their way around a spreadsheet.

In the following tutorial, you'll see how using popular JavaScript tools including the Node.js framework and React library, you can stand up a dynamic web application built right on top of Google Sheets. We’ll create a Node project to act as a container for our API queries, and then harness React to parse our data, which will then be presented and served to the user via a dynamic front-end. Here we’ll be taking advantage of React’s tendency to abstract away a lot of the internal complexities of our application’s inner workings, along with its reusable components. The latter feature is perfect if you’re building out a broad website with a multitude of pages that you’d like to all have a consistent look and feel.

For this example, we’ll be using the ‘Meet the Team’ page for a fictional technology enterprise business. If you’d like to use the example data we’re using for the purposes of this demonstration, you’ll find the spreadsheet linked below.

What you’re essentially going to do is access your spreadsheet as an API, querying it in order to pull out the content for your front-end React page. We’ll be accessing the data from the sheet in JSON format, and then using the dotenv package in order to store the credentials needed to access the information from our Node project. This will parse the information and feed it through to the front-end, presenting it in a far more polished and stylised format.

First up, let’s use the terminal to generate a new project from which we’ll be working from. Create a new directory for your project by running ‘mkdir’ followed by your project name, and then step into that directory using the ‘cd’ command. To create our Node project we’ll firstly run ‘$ npm init -y’ from the terminal, before creating two additional files we need to get up and running, using the ‘touch’ command.

One of these is our .env file which will contain any sensitive keys, credentials or variable settings we’ll need in order to access our Sheet. Remember to keep this section in your .gitignore if you decide to share your repository publicly to prevent your keys from being deactivated and your credentials from being stolen. The last step, as illustrated in the code snippet below, is to install a few external packages we’ll be using in our project. We’ve covered off dotenv, and the googlesheetsapi is no surprise. The final one is Express, which we’ll be using as our Node.js framework due to its lightweight nature and its ability to quickly spin up servers.

Once you’ve installed your external packages, open up your node project in your preferred text editor and initialise your server using the below code snippet:

Here, we’re essentially calling the packages which allow us to access the spreadsheets object, and on line six, we’re setting a variable of ‘p’ that creates a shortcut to process.env. Essentially, this will represent the state of our system environment for the application as it starts running. By adding a shortcut, we’ll be able to effectively access the spreadsheets object with far less effort.

The rest of the program is initialising our express GET route (a.k.a. how we’ll be querying our sheet) and setting up a listen function in place to assist with our build. This will give us a handy prompt as to which port the express server is running on while we’re working to connect our React front-end to the application.

Lastly, head into your .env file and assign your port number as per below in plain text, “PORT=8000” and hit save.

Run node index.js from the root in your terminal, and you should see the listen console.log message appear stating which port your server’s currently running on - in this case, it’s port 8000.

If you head to your browser and access the port that your application is running on, you’ll notice that your GET method is failing. Let’s fix that.

At the moment, we’ve got our method for querying our data established. We now need to get the data flowing through our server. The next step here is to assemble your Google Spreadsheet with both the headings and the content you’d like your node project and React app to pull through. If you’d like to follow along, feel free to make a copy of the ‘Meet the Team’ spreadsheet we’ve created.

The first thing you’re going to need to lift is your SPREADSHEET_ID. You can find this by copying the long string (or slug) found in the URL following the /d/. For example, in this case, our slug is “1f7o11-W_NSygxXjex8lU0WZYs8HlN3b0y4Qgg3PX7Yk”. Once you’ve grabbed this string, include it in your .env file under SPREADSHEET_ID. At this stage, your .env file should look a little something like this:

Next, head to the Google Sheets Node.js Quickstart page to enable the Google Sheets API. You’ll need to click the blue ‘Enable’ button before naming your project, selecting ‘Web Server’ and entering your localhost URL when configuring the 0auth values.

If executed correctly, this step will have enabled the Google Sheets API from your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) account. To confirm that’s happened, simply head over to your GCP console and you’ll spot your project in your profile page.

To authenticate this exchange of data, we’ll need to generate an API key. This will authorise your app to access your Google Drive, identify your Spreadsheet via the SPREADSHEET_ID, and then perform a GET request to retrieve the data to be parsed and displayed on your React front-end.

To get hold of your API key, you’ll want to navigate to the credentials section of the GCP console, click blue "+ CREATE CREDENTIALS" and select the "API key" option.

Once your key’s been generated, copy it and add it into your .env file under API_KEY.

Perfect! Now let’s initialise and use the key within our code to authenticate our Google Sheets query. In the snippet below, you’ll notice that we’re using the await operator to coincide with the async function initiated at the beginning of the index.js program shown earlier in this tutorial. To view the complete code as a reference, you can head here to review and even clone the repository.

Now we’ve authorised our sheets object, it’s time to minify the data. This is a process by which we remove any unnecessary, superfluous data from the JSON object, so that we’re left with only the most vital sections of the object which we’ll model within our React front-end.

Head to the index.js file of the linked repository and you’ll see how we’ve been able to do this. We start off with an empty array, and then we iterate through the rows in the sheet assigning a key corresponding to the column header, and match the value to that of the cell data for that particular row.

If you’re familiar with React, then you’ve more than likely used the package create-react-app which is by far one of Facebook’s greatest gifts to the world of application development. With one command, you’re able to spin up an instance giving you the file structure and most of what you need to get going out of the box.

The ‘create-react-app’ command generates a locally hosted, single-page React application that requires no configuration in order to get going. When you run the command, create-react-app will run local checks on your target directory, builds your package.json, creates your dependency list and forms the structure of your bundled JS files.

Let’s kick off this process by running the following at the root of our application:

If you run into any problems with the version of npm/npx that you’re running, then the below modified command with an added bit of cache clearance should steer you right:

If your command has run successfully, you’ll start to see create-react-app install its required packaged and build out the below file structure.

Lastly, you’ll notice that your application now has two package.json files. We’ll need to make an edit to the scripts section in the root, and then add one line below the ‘private’ section of your client directory. This is so that you can fire everything up with one simple command - the eternal saviour that is npm start.

In your root:

And in your client:

Now with one run of npm start you’ll be met with your React front-end pulling through information from your Google Sheets CMS.

If you check out the back-end server (running on port 8000) in your browser, you’ll be met with a JSON object displaying your CMS data in its raw, unformatted form.

But, more importantly for the many stakeholders eager to access your newly-built site, here’s what you’ll see displayed on the front-end.

What was once entries on a spreadsheet, is now a fully-formatted, somewhat shiny React web app, ready to be deployed through your favourite hosting service. The great thing about this solution is that it can be incorporated into your wider React-based application, and styled using one of many free themes and templates out there, meaning that your final output can actually scale with you. There you have it - yet another reason to love spreadsheets.

An active botnet comprising hundreds of thousands of hijacked systems spread across 30 countries is exploiting an old vulnerability to target widely-used content management systems (CMS).

Dubbed KashmirBlack, this sophisticated botnet has a well-designed infrastructure made up of a single command and control (C&C) server, and more than 60 surrogate servers.

The botnet exploits the PHPUnit remote code execution vulnerability, a well-known flaw that’s almost a decade old, that's present in a number of older CMS platforms. These kinds of platforms are notorious for their poor cyber hygiene, mainly because many users deploy legacy versions, use unsupported plugins, and often set weak passwords, according to researchers with Imperva.

This particular flaw is known and entirely patchable, however, the botnet has managed to capitalise on a sudden surge in the number of companies that have been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, which now require easy to use web frameworks to help move their business online. This includes well-known platforms like WordPress, the researchers claim.

The team have published technical details around KashmirBlack following a six-month undercover investigation, monitoring its evolution over time and the nature of its underlying infrastructure.

The operation, which began around November 2019, is now made up of hundreds of thousands of bots organised in a highly sophisticated architecture, making millions of attacks each day. The researchers claim its architecture “works like magic”, with attackers able to expand and add new exploits or payloads without much effort at all.

KashmirBlack also uses sophisticated methods to camouflage itself, as well as exploiting a number of vulnerabilities to maintain uptime and protect its operation. Imperva also uncovered evidence of widely-used software development frameworks and methodologies, including DevOps and Agile, that the hackers are deploying to help the botnet evolve and add new targets with ease.

“This is the first time we have been able to get visibility into how exactly a botnet like this operates; an important discovery that will help the industry better understand how these nefarious groups evolve and sustain their activity,” said security researcher at Imperva, Ofir Shaty, who co-authored the research.

“The level of orchestration is remarkable. It’s a very polished operation using the latest software development techniques. With potentially millions of victims across the world, this level of sophistication should be a cause for concern. Once a server is being controlled by a hacker, it has the potential to compromise other servers in the domain in a domino effect, leading to potential data leakage, driving down brand reputation, and eventually losing revenue.”

The botnet itself appears to specialise in cryptocurrency mining, spamming, and defacement, although priorities have shifted over time. This capacity to shift focus also allows the botnet to change which repositories it may use to store malicious code and scripts deployed.

Researchers believe the KashmirBlack botnet recently evolved to use the popular cloud-based service Dropbox to replace its C&C server. They found evidence that the Dropbox API is being used to fetch attack instructions and upload reports from ‘spreading bots’.

Moving to this type of system also allows the botnet to hide criminal activity behind legitimate web services, working to camouflage the botnet traffic and secure the operation.

Based on a hacking signature, Imperva has identified the hacker known as 'Exect1337' as being part of the crew running the botnet. This individual is a member of the Indonesian group PhantomGhost, which normally focuses on defacement. This individual also accidentally left a marker within the botnet code, which gave rise to the name KashmirBlack.

Billionaire entrepreneur Marc Benioff made his name by founding the cloud-computing giant Salesforce. These days, he’s also a major backer of Brandcast, a code-free content system that’s making it possible for non-techies to produce web content.

In a bid for business, the startup just announced the launch of the Brandcast Content Studio (pictured above), a platform that allows users to create mobile-ready websites and other digital content — even if they’re not technically trained.

The goal, Brandcast says, is to break the logjam between the insatiable demand for digital content and the relatively limited supply of designers and programmers who can produce it.

“Companies face an enormous backlog of requests for digital content — especially revenue-generating content,” the company said in its news release. The coronavirus pandemic has forced more customer interactions to go online, making “digital first” an imperative for businesses’ survival.

The Brandcast Content Studio is designed to enable sales and marketing teams to produce a wide range of business communications: product websites, catalogs, and landing pages; sales presentations, proposals and collateral; customer case studies and market research reports; corporate and investor communications; entertainment and event websites; and customer communications portals.

The idea is that Brandcast’s software will do all the tech-heavy work for the users, without forcing them to choose from a limited menu of generic themes and templates. The software is designed to break down digital design and content editing into an intuitive workflow.

“We solved this massive content backlog problem by doing all the really difficult coding inside our platform — a massive amount of code, so customers don’t have to,” said Conor Egan, Brandcast’s chief product officer.

The company had previously launched its Brandcast Design Studio, a code-free system for professional designers and creative teams.

With these moves, Brandcast is strives to compete in the lucrative web and digital design marketplace, which the company estimates is valued at $50 billion overall.

The content management landscape is changing. To support the modern enterprise in its quest to meet evolving customer expectations, technology is shifting away from on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure, both of which are outdated and unable to deliver the modern customer experience, towards cloud-native infrastructure which holds agility and flexibility at its core.

The driving force behind this shift is that customers in the present day are demanding an enhanced experience along their e-commerce journeys, even though this may appear at odds with the direction of data protection legislation. Essentially, consumers want their shops to recognise them without the shop in question infringing far into the territory of personal information. At its best, therefore, enhancements should be subtle yet effective, a difficult balance to achieve.

Unfortunately, many organisations are struggling to quickly and efficiently deliver enhanced content experiences as, while 64% report to having a CMS in place, only 31% can publish content to multiple channels without having to laboriously create each piece of content separately. This bottleneck can slow the entire content delivery process, making it difficult for businesses to deliver the contextualised experiences their customers have grown accustomed to.

Fortunately, technology has responded to pick up the slack. Organisations are turning to modern, cloud-native content management software powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to provide both IT personnel and marketers the foundation necessary to deliver upon evolving customer expectations.

Personalisation

The role of AI within the enterprise continues to grow, with CIOs on a constant lookout for new ways to use developing technology to gain an edge over their competitors. When it comes to content processes, the intervention of AI technology is nowhere more apparent than in its ability to impact data and help deliver the level of personalisation that customers expect. Because of this AI is integral to the cloud-native CMS pitch, as it’s essential to delivering the most relevant experiences to an audience.

Personalisation can come in many forms. Relevant advertisements, suggested items, and message pop-ups, all driven by data, comprise the types of targeted advertisements sure to enhance the customer experience.

Machine learning specifically can be used to capture data over a period of time and translate that data to understand how audiences interact with the content present on a website. That information can then be used to automatically deliver personalised experiences to future visitors based on what it believes that person wants to see. Advertisements and so forth can then be tailored to each individual customer, resulting in more relevant content that receives greater rates of engagement.

Faster content creation

One of the main positives of AI in any use case is in its ability to shoulder tasks, complete these tasks efficiently and quickly, and simultaneously liberate parts of the human workforce to focus on more valuable initiatives; and when it comes to content management there’s no exception to the rule.

Even today the regular content management process involves lots of manual tasks that, given the right technology, could be automated. However, a cloud-native CMS is able to offer automatic tagging to ensure employees can focus on the creative elements of their job rather than, for example, spending work-hours sourcing and modifying photos and videos. Further, AI can make reusing content simple through its ability to adapt text parameters to fit various screens, allowing authored content to be promoted across multiple channels and devices.

A cloud-native CMS smooths out the wrinkles in the content delivery process. The time saved through automation is, of course, useful and enables employees to focus on the tasks that really add value, but the real reward here is the enhanced customer experience the cloud-native CMS is able to deliver to each content channel in real time.

Optimisation

In saturated markets where each sliver of space is valuable, optimisation can be the key differentiator between an organisation remaining competitive or sinking to murky depths. Optimisation can be achieved through thorough testing in order to identify what works and what doesn’t. Content teams should compare different variables, combining different types of content, navigation, design and so on, and then conduct A/B testing to understand how those changes perform. The best performers can then be used going forwards.

However, varying content and conducting systematic testing uses up valuable resources and time. Often A/B testing is seen as a luxury that organisations can't afford, meaning content isn’t tested, performance suffers, and customers are liable to flock elsewhere.

A cloud-native CMS can help developers create different testing variations of navigations, interactions, and so on, by running A/B tests automatically. Similar to the ability to allow for faster content creation, a cloud-native CMS permits more efficient testing to free developers to focus on other projects that add more value to the organisation, with perhaps the more potent benefit being that content is optimised to serve each user, enhancing the all-important customer experience.

It used to be that big companies bought high-end systems and adapted them to fit their needs, while midsize companies settled for solutions with a basic set of standard features. But the advent of cloud-native platforms is levelling the playing field—letting smaller companies customise and innovate in ways they never thought possible.

This whitepaper will help you choose, deploy, and optimise a CMS that provides more engaging experiences for your customers and better results for your business.

Download it now for a simple yet comprehensive 3-step guide to deploying a modern CMS in your business.

The world of content management is shifting. Real-time, personalised experiences—like receiving offers on your mobile device when you enter a store or seeing content online based on your recent browsing activity—are now commonplace.

To remain competitive, businesses must deliver contextualised, real-time experiences quickly. Fortunately, content management technology has evolved to keep up.

This whitepaper explores how replacing your current content management system with a cloud-native one can help speed creation and delivery of digital experiences, simplify production and the DevOps environment, and improve your ability to optimise and personalise experiences.

Enterprise content management (ECM) may sound like a repackaging of a long-established business tool, the content management systems (CMS), but it’s not.

A regular CMS is typically used to keep a website fresh, which means it’s all about what’s new: your audience is interested in what’s happening today, not yesterday. ECM tackles the other end of the attention-span spectrum, as it relates to storing items with a long, useful lifespan, or which need to be retained for regulation and reference reasons. This means it needs a different design philosophy – one that’s ready for the day in the far future when today’s trivial edit turns out to be the pivotal statement at the heart of a billion-dollar lawsuit.

ECM systems are used to manage more than standard text files. Modern company data can easily include videos, CAD pictures or even algorithms. One client I’ve worked with regularly handled drawings of oil tankers, as part of the documentation for a particular contract. Some digital assets might even exist solely in long-defunct file formats, which can only be accessed by maintaining a complete fossil operating system in a virtual machine – and yes, that too needs to be managed.

An unnecessary security risk?

If you’re worried about losing data, your enterprise repository ought to be read-only, and both you and your CMS provider ought to be keeping both backup and frozen-archive copies of everything. As for hacking, most ECM systems are just too unwieldy for intruders to digest; if it’s big enough to be in this delivery platform, it’s going to be expensive to extract much value out of it.

The two are related. “Intelligent information management” (IIM) means appraising your digital asset mass and being intelligent about what you get back out of it. Admittedly, that’s a can of worms these days, because while “intelligent” ought to mean transparent and auditable, many decision-makers are AI fans, and prefer their conclusions with a whiff of godlike inscrutability about them. Either way, you can think of ECM as the mechanism that feeds your IIM processes.

ECM doesn’t mean holding onto every scrap of data forever – even if big data advocates might suggest you should do that regardless. Most of the questions you’re likely to ask of an ECM system will, in any case, be time-limited – not by your reserve of cloud credit, but by market conditions, which tend not to last as long as the computers and databases that represent them. Smart asset management can call for an ice sculpture-type approach; shave away what you don’t want to expose what you do want.

A tool for companies big and small

The question might not be how little your business is, but how digital it is – and who it transacts with, because that will leave a footprint in any number of external digital asset platforms. If you’re just starting out down the ECM path, perhaps the most important lesson comes from BT, which has a person in charge of saying “no” to data-search requests and the like that would be too onerous or time-consuming. Building such a role into your own plans could save you a lot of worry and expenditure in the future.

ECM use cases

Like most good things, ECM systems require an investment of both time and money. Therefore the first step towards deploying one is to identify whether it’s actually needed. Is your business concerned with complying with government or industry-specific regulations? If so, chances are an ECM tool would be useful.

Use cases can then be explored in order to further justify the investment, with a deep-dive into the basics of what an ECM system has to offer surfacing benefits in addition to ensuring compliance.

For instance, ECM systems are a mobile and remote workforce enabler, supporting wider digital transformations. Content management tools often support hybrid cloud deployments. Sensitive information is stored on-premise, with everything else easily accessible in the cloud. Choosing a hybrid ECM deployment gives enterprises security and control while getting all the benefits of the cloud.

At their core, EMC systems offer basic file sharing and library services that allow users with certified permissions to access repositories. A repository can be created, read, updated, or even deleted. Comprehensive user authentication allows documents to be shared across the system with ease and the knowledge that only the correct eyes are privy to the information they contain.

The overwhelming majority of hacked content management system (CMS) websites last year were built using WordPress.

Approximately 90% of hacked CMS sites were powered by the open source content platform throughout 2018, analysis Sucuri has shown. This represents an increase from 83% of hacked CMS sites in 2017, despite WordPress market share remaining at roughly 60% across the last few years.

Websites powered by Magento and Joomla! represented the second and third most hacked CMS platforms last year, at 4.6% and 4.3%. This was followed by Drupal!, ModX, PrestaShop, OpenCart, and others.

The security firm analysed a total of 18,302 infected websites and a total of 4,426,795 cleaned files in its report.

Meanwhile, the leading cause of infections stemmed from vulnerabilities introduced with add-ons like plugins, themes and extensions. They also generally encompassed improper deployment, security configuration issues, and a lack of security knowledge.

Infections that had exploited outdated CMS platforms, meanwhile, accounted for 44% of all instances, against 56% of websites that were deemed up-to-date.

WordPress represented the lowest proportion of infected sites that were powered by an outdated installation, 36.7%. This was a decline from 39.3% last year.

The CMS with the highest proportion, on the other hand, was PrestaShop with 97.2%, followed by OpenCart with 91.3%, and both Magento and Joomla! also registering a score of above 80%.

"This data demonstrates that the work WordPress continues to do with auto-updates has a material impact," the report said.

"The one area that requires considerable attention, however, are the extensible components of the platform (e.g., plugins). These extensible components are the real attack vectors affecting tens of thousands of sites a year.

"The primary attack vector abused when infecting WordPress are plugins with known and unknown vulnerabilities. This makes the role of third-party components more significant for this CMS."

The 2018 analysis also showed two-thirds of sites that made cleanup requests revealed at least one PHP-based backdoor that hidden within the system. Although this was a 3% reduction against last year's figures, it is still the number one leading infection type.

"Backdoors function as the point of entry into a website's environment after a successful compromise and are one of the first things an attacker will deploy to ensure continued access," the report added. "These tools allow an attacker to retain unauthorized access to an environment long after they have successfully infected a website.

"In many instances, we see attackers scanning sites for known backdoors in target hosts, looking to potentially abuse another attacker's backdoor. Backdoors give attackers the opportunity to bypass existing access controls to web server environments and are particularly effective at eluding modern website scanning technologies."

Meanwhile, malware was found in 56.4% of instances, while SEO spam was in 51.3% of sites. Overall there was a significant increase in the general malware family distribution from 47% in 2017 to 56.4% in 2018.

SEO spam campaigns were the fastest growing form of cyber affliction in the previous year, having soared from just 7.3% in 2017.

The researchers found this form of attack is difficult to detect, and most commonly involves search engine poisoning, which involves attempts to abuse site rankings to monetise on affiliate marketing.

IT Pro approached WordPress for comment.

The BBC has scrapped its 98.4 million Digital Media Initiative (DMI) and suspended its chief technology officer on full pay.

The project was intended to make it easier for staff to find and retrieve video footage from their computers and was supposed to save the corporation over 95 million.

However the initiative did not deliver on its promise after a review found that 'its ambitions had not been met' and director general Tony Hall took the decision to halt the project with immediate effect.

The waste is the equivalent of almost 660,000 licence fees.

"The DMI project has wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers' money and I saw no reason to allow that to continue which is why I have closed it," said Hall.

"I have serious concerns about how we managed this project and the review that has been set up is designed to find out what went wrong and what lessons can be learned."

Hall said that ambitious technology projects like this always carry a risk of failure. "It does not mean we should not attempt them, but we have a responsibility to keep them under much greater control than we did here."

In a letter to Margaret Hodge, chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, the BBC Trust's Anthony Fry said DMI had generated "little or no assets".

"It is of utmost concern to us that a project which had already failed to deliver value for money in its early stages has now spent so much more of licence fee payers' money," he said.

DMI was started in 2004 and outsourced to Siemens, however the company failed to deliver the project and it was then brought back in-house. An internal review was set up in October 2012 after the BBC Trust expressed serious concerns.

Following the DMI debacle, John Linwood, the BBC's chief technology officer, has been suspended. The corporation's technology controller Peter Coles will take over as acting chief technology officer.

A commercial alternative will now replaced the doomed IT system, while the only part of the system to go live, the Fabric archive database, will continue to be used by the BBC.

CASE STUDY

Businesses often need to weigh up the pros and cons of using open source software against the benefits of proprietary systems.

In the case of LOVEFiLM, now a well-known name in the DVD and digital film market, open source has underpinned much of the company's work thus far.

Its love affair with open source has remained the same throughout a period of sustained growth, but this has not meant the IT infrastructure has remained the same. As the business started to expand at a rapid rate, it found that some open source options were better for its operations than others.

Growing means changing

One major area that needed something of an overhaul was the CMS at LOVEFiLM. With the level of traffic going through the website, which gets more than 4.3 million unique visitors every month now, the CMS needs to run smoothly.

When Mike Blakemore, chief technology officer at LOVEFiLM, joined the firm around two-and-a-half years ago, he actually inherited a competent system using the Perl programming language. On top of this, he had a top team of Perl engineers.

The problems with the set-up became noticeable, however, when LOVEFiLM began to expand quickly. Blakemore found that he wanted to work on and grow various areas of the website, from the emerging digital films section where customers can rent and watch movies online to the entertainment portal that he wanted to enhance.

"We decided we wanted to start working in parallel on lots of different things," Blakemore told IT PRO.

Cumbersome content management

Various issues began to emerge with the content management system in place. What the firm had was "one big, monolithic platform built in Perl", Blakemore explained, which ran the website, the warehouse and the reporting systems.

The CTO found that every time he wanted to do something new, such as overhauling a section of the website, the IT team had to build from scratch with new tools and a new homepage management system.

"It was really fragmented," Blakemore said.

"Every part of the site was powered by a different data entry system. It wasn't content management really, it was just data entry and it was just really unmanageable."

What LOVEFiLM needed was a fit-for-purpose model, that could be easily-understood by non-technical employees and which could work with the existing open source infrastructure.

"The business is built upon lots of commodity hardware. We don't have any big vendor licences," said Blakemore, who did not want to "rock the boat", but rather try and work around the systems already in place.

Blakemore, with a limited budget, went in search of the right CMS for the job, looking into both open source and proprietary options, as well as different languages including PHP, Java and Perl.

Eventually, he opted for the Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition, whose development partner Sceneric assisted with implementation.

The benefits of change

With Magnolia being completely open source and working on a "great new standard" - Java Content Repository Blakemore was happy. He had a language he was comfortable with, content that he could manage well and plenty of support for him to take advantage of.

The editorial staff are now able to manage content, images and layout in a browser-based rich text editor, with Magnolia and the internal Perl system working in tandem.

As for tangible gains, Blakemore explained: "Magnolia CMS has a good, open technology stack, is easily extensible, and there are good development houses providing valuable implementation services.

"By choosing Magnolia, we saved about $100,000 in licensing alone over the next-best proprietary option."

All about open source?

Despite his obvious predilection for open source systems, Blakemore recognises the benefits of proprietary software.

With vendors you can get "security and confidence in the product", meaning it can be worth the licensing and the investment, he said.

However, cost was a notable hurdle to going down the propriety route for Blakemore and one that he could not afford to jump over. The community aspect of open source was also what led him away from other options.

Being able to work with various partners of Magnolia and collaborate on different parts of the IT set-up at LOVEFiLM proved to be ideal for the company. Furthermore, not being locked into working with a vendor gave the organisation the freedom it wanted while enjoying a community spirit at enterprise level.

"Open source really gives us that pace for change and the flexibility to do exactly what we want," Blakemore added.

"I think open source is going to be fine for a long time for a lot of businesses."

Electronic documents need to become standard across councils and government departments, according to a council manager.

Anne Wright, project manager for electronic content and document management (ECDM) at Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council, admitted that however well it works for them, all councils need to get on board to make it a success.

"There needs to be an agreement for what is accepted. Some councils don't use electronic documentation at all. Electronic documents are legally admissible and this has got to be brought in across the board," she said at an EMC sponsored roundtable in London yesterday.

It is not just local councils, however. Wright said even central Government needs to go digital, noting the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) still demands paper copies rather than accepting digital versions.

Wright believes people at the top of councils are making the decision to avoid digital documents due to personal opinions rather than what is right for the organisation.

She called for a government wide standard to be set so everyone accepts the use of digital documentation, but Mike Davis, a senior analyst at Ovum, warned this had been attempted before.

He noted a standard called ISO/TR 15489, which was brought in by the national archives in 2002. It called for regulation and acceptance of digitised content management, but Davis said: "By now we are so far behind achieving it."

North Yorkshire police get new content management system

GOSS has partnered up with North Yorkshire Police Authority to create a website redesign.

The project will involve using GOSS's content management system iCM, on a .NET platform. IT will also be hosted on GOSS's dedicated web servers.

The GOSS iCM solution will give North Yorkshire Police Force the power to enable multiple contributors to up-load content quickly and easily with a minimum of training, offering force-wide devolved content contribution.

Website development project coordinator at North Yorkshire Police authority Gina Allen said: "With the new system, we will be able to devolve responsibility for updates down to areas and Safer Neighbourhoods Teams meaning that the information is written by the people on the front line who really understand local priorities and needs and can update and feedback to their communities in real time."

The new system will also offer full WYSIWYG editing contribution, copying Microsoft Word and Excel-based content directly to the website, automatic discover and relationship building of related information hidden within content using GOSS iSuggestor, forum and blog management and RSS input and output control.

The new website is expected to go live in November 2008.

Cable & Wireless pens framework agreement deal with NPIA

Communications service Cable & Wireless has signed a deal with the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) to equip them with mobile information solutions.

The three-year agreement will give police forces across the UK instant information when out on patrol.

The solution, which includes software and hardware, works by interfacing with force systems and applications, giving officers access to vital information while they are out on the beat. The solution runs on handheld computers and works as a functional mobile computer unit.

Using the mobile information units, police officers can input and update information, such as criminal record checks, via their mobile computers. Officers out on the beat will now have access to core operational systems, reducing the amount of time they spend at the station completing administration duties.

Chief executive officer at Cable & Wireless Jim Marsh said: "The agreement we've signed with the NPIA could revolutionise the way police work. Our mobile information solution fully meets the current requirements of the Police Service and is available to police forces today."

Local authorities to close management skills gap

Local authorities expect more help to deliver a complete service programme for the government's Transformation Agenda, according to Civica.

The survey questioned 102 local authority chief executives, policy makers and change managers across the UK and found that seven out of ten local authorities expect shared services within three years but three out of five want expert help to engineer reform.

Civica found that 34 per cent of respondents claim to have made significant progress on service transformation so far.

Meanwhile 48 per cent said that they expected to do so over the next six months, but only one in six believes that significant progress on service reform will take them a year or more.

However, there is still a feeling among local authorities that management skills needed to be improved in order to deliver transformation.

Up to 60 per cent of respondents viewed management skills training as a high or significant spending priority and 95 per cent said IT consulting and service was a high priority.