Why we like fiverr

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Odd jobs for a Fiverr?

Fiverr is an online marketplace offering tasks and services all beginning at $5. It has millions of services listed (known as Gigs) and can be a great resource for businesses and start ups looking to supplement their internal resources.

There are lots of freelance resources online but fiverr stands out because you can buy micro-jobs that consist of very simple tasks for a fixed $5 fee – which is great for things like copy writing, odd design jobs, new blog articles, SEO tasks and social media marketing.

Since there is no commitment you can “hire” adhoc services based on a sellers feedback and reviews and assemble a team of helpful resources that can bolster your online armada.

One of the most useful tools is – you can see how “busy” a seller is as you can see the number of orders in their que, and use this as part of your decision making process.

Whereas we work with tried and tested partners offering a managed service – our clients have used it successfully to acquire services such as translation and copy writing.

A word of caution though – about 50% of the Gigs offered sell for more than 5$ and we would NEVER suggest you allow third parties to access your website or other confidential information without first considering the consequences and setting up correct access credentials with scope limited to the job at hand.

 About fiverr – https://uk.fiverr.com/
Fiverr was conceived in 2009 and by August 2014 it had secured a total funding of $50 Million over three different funding rounds.

 

The website that narrows funding options

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Its somewhat of a contradiction these days that existing lenders now expect you to have found your initial funding online. This can be a challenge for startups and new businesses especially with so many funding options available.

That’s why we like new funding comparison site The Funding Centre. It allows you to compare a range of financing routes from crowd funding to invoice finance and P2P loans.

We think this is great as it allows you to see other options that you may not have been aware of.

Embracing Cloud Based Services

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At GURUS we have always had the mantra that the buck stops with us. This is mainly due to the fact that when we first started we didn’t think anyone could provide the levels of service that our clients deserved.

That’s why we built our own data centre and core services including DNS, shared hosting, co-location and email broadcasting to name a few.

Times have changed and we now look to sector specific experts who have paved the way and cut the cost of enterprise level features for the mass market.

Our current favorites are:

CloudFlare:

We love CloudFlare. CloudFlare makes using a content delivery network (CDN) simple and cost effective. In the past using a content delivery network was cost prohibitive and had complex pricing arrangements making it hard to understand the true cost of deploying a CDN. CloudFlare has helped our international clients get better user experiences and higher google page ranking by speeding up website response times.

We especially like CloudFlare’s use of a propriety technology they call “Railgun”. Railgun accelerates the connection between each CloudFlare data center and an origin server so that requests that cannot be served from the CloudFlare cache are nevertheless served very fast.

Highly Recommended. Tt’s one of the reasons we run a Coudflare Railgun Optimised Data Centre.

SendGrid:

When it comes to transactional websites – emails are at the sharp end of the business. SendGrid specializes in email delivery. It can handle large volumes and avoids your email communications being relegated to the spam folder.

By allowing SendGrid to deal with outgoing email customers can reduce costs and get better deliverability rates.

WPengine:

Whilst we are not a WordPress shop – there’s no disputing the fact that WordPress is by far the most prominent CMS out there. Let’s think about that shall we? What does that mean?

Well 74.6 Million web sites depend on WordPress, and if you thought WordPress was for news and blog sites, well you’d be wrong – five times as many business sites are powered by WordPress than the number of news sites.

Sometimes you just need a website to serve a very simple purpose and when you do WordPress is a good choice. Traditionally WordPress has been hampered by low cost hosting that fails to take advantage of the benefits of having a WordPress site. Well that was before WPengine came along.

WPengine makes hosting and securing a WordPress site easy and stress free. We rate them so highly that we have migrated all of our WordPress websites to WPengine. It saves us time and energy and they believe in the same levels of support as we do. Awesome!

Domain Name Management Update

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Just before the end of 2014 we informed our clients that we were phasing out our domain registration and renewal services.

This was driven by market factors and a change in our business model. The market had lots of companies who specialised in this space and providing more competitive pricing and much better domain management tools.

We also wanted our clients to use this as an opportunity to consolidate their domain names with a single registrar and review their domain management needs.

We remain a founding member of Nominet and still actively participate in how domain spaces are administered.

As part of this process we asked our clients to consider a new registrar using the following advice.

Review your domain management process:

  • Make sure you understand how and when domain names are renewed and billed and make sure that any alerts are directed to the correct people in your organisation. We have always recommended using a company broadcast list for this so that you don’t miss an alert when someone is away on holiday.
  • Review who domain names are registered to and who has access to change, modify or migrate domain names.
  • Use this opportunity to see if registering additional new domain names can benefit the business and protect your online identity.

Shop Around:

  • Find a registrar that provides the services or services you require.
  • Compare costs – but make sure you look for hidden charges such as transfer fees and update fees.
  • Consider using specialist services if you have global domain name assets.

Check the small print:

  • Review the Terms and Conditions and pay attention to your rights to move any domains to a different registrar.
  • Confirm the domain renewal policy and its connection to other services such as web hosting, email forwarding etc.

Check the support offered:

  • Confirm whether a support services agreement is in place and how easy is it to get support when you need it.
  • Check that the registrar is available in an acceptable time zone or country of operation.