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Posts published in April 2021

What is SaaS, and how does it work?

By Bob on April 14, 2021

How many times per day, you hear clients or colleagues mentioning “the cloud”? And still, there’s no proper comprehension of the scale and scope of it.

There are diverse cloud choices for running your business: PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS. Do you know about them? Let’s give it a look at SaaS.

What is SaaS?

SaaS stands for Software as a Service, and it is a business model of software licensing. The software is supplied by providers through subscription. This means the software is held on external servers instead of being on client servers, employees’ computers, or hardware in general. 

SaaS supplies plenty of different business apps: email, auditing, file sharing, human resources, management (contacts, clients info, sales, purchases, etc.), document collaboration, calendars, databases, and the list can go so long.

Most important Cloud Computing trends you should know!

A bit of SaaS history

The basis for making SaaS real was set around the 1960s. Decades of constant development passed and for SaaS to get matured. 1999 was finally the year when Salesforce released the first SaaS solution. A platform called Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Originally, due to the sluggishness and instability the Internet still experienced, it was thought SaaS solutions were suitable just for small businesses or startups. But with time, Internet improvements, like fewer bandwidth limitations, higher speed, more affordable hosting rates, etc., totally boosted SaaS possibilities. These type of solutions proved their benefits for all kinds of businesses, big ventures included. Easy use, cost-efficiency, and functionality pushed their growth exponentially.

How does it work?

SaaS works really easily. Users need a device connected to the Internet, a browser, a username, and a password to log in to the system for accessing the software. No matter their location, service is available and users’ accounts accessible due to the web connection. This fits perfectly with the useful and popular home-office trend.

A big advantage for clients is, they are not in charge of updating software to new versions, enhancing security, or maintaining servers. SaaS providers do that for you. 

SaaS helps companies acquire software without disks, downloads, and extra time for installing or updating it on all business computers. Software is accessible via the Internet. You get a subscription paying a regular fee, and that’s it.

*some SaaS requires a client application to be installed and update on client devices

What to consider while picking a SaaS provider?

Hiring such a service is a way to open access to your company. External people will manage a key chunk of your IT systems. Don’t hire risks!

  • High-security level – Employees will exchange info daily. A lot of sensitive data from your company and clients will be transferred. High-security standards and modern tech are a must. SaaS providers can’t guarantee 100% security. But reliable ones take responsibility in case of an outage, breach, etc. 
  • Flexibility –  Businesses change. New needs appear, employees get hired, others fired, etc. You need a flexible platform to remove or to add users, more features, etc., fast and easily. 
  • Scalability – To have extra room for your business’ growth matters. Don’t be stopped by the tech limits of your provider.
  • The highest uptime – It must be accessible at any moment for you and your employees. The closest to 100% uptime, the better. 
  • Customer support – Check availability and conditions.
  • Service and payments – Usually, providers charge based on the company’s number of users, the set of apps required, but be sure about everything. What does the regular fee include? How frequently does it increase? What if you need to scale the service or cancel it, etc.
  • Service Level Agreement (SLA) – This can be complex but analyze every detail of service, provider’s responsibilities, fees, legal protection, data security, penalties, and many more relevant policies. Don’t sign blindly.

Conclusion

SaaS solutions are out-of-the-box tools’ sets to efficient your daily business operation. It is an easy and helpful choice of cloud tech.

Error 404 – how to fix it?

By Bob on April 5, 2021

Servers have a way to communicate for informing about queries’ status. They do that through different HTTP response status codes, like the error 404.

Once servers receive a query, they start a process to answer the client with the required website. Using different codes, they indicate if it was successfully completed or not, if there was an error and its type, etc. There are five categories of responses.

  • 1, informational responses.
  • 2, successful responses.
  • 3, redirects.
  • 4, client errors.
  • 5, server errors. 

HTTP 404 vs Soft 404

What does error 404 means?

Error 404 is an HTTP response status code that belongs to the category of “client errors”. It means “not found”. 

  • The server can not find the resource that was requested.
  • When it’s about the browser, the meaning is URL is not found.
  • In Application programming interfaces (APIs), the endpoint is valid, but the resource does not exist.

Error 404 very frequently appears online. The web holds plenty of dead or broken links and exactly those that obtain such response status code when clicked.

This code does not give the user information to know if the resource is missing permanently or temporarily. 

Error 404 format

It commonly appears like:

  • Status 404 Not Found 
  • 404 Not Found Error 
  • The requested URL was not found on this server
  • 404 File or Directory Not Found
  • 404 Page Not Found
  • HTTP 404 Not Found

How to fix error 404?

Redirect. Use the response code 301 to redirect browsers. Through this code, you point that content requested is available now with another URL. 

Track broken links (internal and external) on your website and fix them. There are tools to find them, or you can do it manually, but it will take longer. 

Fix internally broken links by correcting typos. Mistakes while writing URLs’ lead to broken links. Moving links to their right places also helps. If you put an article in the wrong category, you can produce a broken link. 

If you include links from different websites (external) and re-located or deleted, this generates broken links on the other site. Delete them or replace them with another site (link) that offers similar info.

Restore cleared pages. People can keep looking for a page you already deleted. If it is possible and it has a sense for your business, restore it. Whenever you delete pages from your site, redirect users to similar content pages to avoid broken links. 

Customize Error 404 for being less annoying. Besides website’s owners, we are Internet users. So we all know how disappointing it is to request a page and not to receive it. If the “Error 404” appears after long waiting, the bad feeling gets worse. For users, not to leave your website definitely, better give the 404 page a nicer look and make it helpful for them. You can explain on it the steps to follow for reaching you later. You can apologize and offer a nice and concerned ‘face’. 

For sure, you have seen designs including cute animals with the popular “oops”. A cute doggie saying, “Oops, I may chewed up the power cord,” can be forgiven easily, don’t you think so? Others prefer fun messages, meme style. Shit happens, and we know that, but a bit of humor can make the difference with your clients not to be so angry.

Be free and creative to design your own custom 404 page.

Other errors from the 4 category

Client’s error category (4) also includes the following codes.

  • 400 Bad Request Status Code.
  • 401 Status Code — Unauthorized Request 
  • 402 Status Code –Payment Required
  • 403 Status Code
  • 405 Status Code — Method Not Allowed Code
  • 406 Not Acceptable
  • 407 Proxy authentication required
  • 408 Request timeout
  • 409 Conflict
  • 410 Gone
  • 411 Length Required
  • 412 Precondition Failed
  • 413 Request Entry Too Large
  • 414 Request URL Too Long
  • 415 Unsupported Media Type
  • 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable
  • 417 Expectation Failed
  • 422 Unprocessable Entity Status Code

Suggested article: Error 502 Bad Gateway – 5 quick fixes

Conclusion

Error 404 is common but fixable. Digging into the error causes is vital because SEO, bounce rating, and client satisfaction can be affected by such a response. Be prepared to create a friendly and useful 404 page, just in case.