As I talked about in my other article about some of the top Java REST API frameworks, in today's world of modern software development, REST API frameworks play a crucial role in developing efficient and scalable microservices. Java has several frameworks for developing REST APIs, but three of the most popular ones are Spring Boot, Quarkus, and Micronaut. In this article, we will compare these frameworks, their features, and their pros and cons.
Spring Boot
Spring Boot is a popular Java-based framework that is widely used for developing RESTful APIs. It is built on top of the Spring Framework and provides a simplified and opinionated approach to building microservices. Spring Boot provides a lot of built-in features and functionalities that make it easy to get started with microservices.
Anypoint Messaging Queue, also known as Anypoint MQ, is a cloud-based messaging queueing service that enables the smooth and secure movement of data between multiple independent instances of one or several applications operating in a shared environment. Acting as an intermediary, Anypoint MQ facilitates safe and reliable data transmission between applications, supporting advanced asynchronous messaging scenarios such as queueing and publishing/subscribing with fully hosted and managed cloud message queues and exchanges.
As a part of the Anypoint Platform, Anypoint MQ offers support for environments, business groups, and role-based access control (RBAC), ensuring seamless customer experiences across channels and reliable integration of devices for IoT applications with enterprise-level functionality. Managing the vast amount of data as it moves between applications, systems, and services would be significantly more challenging without an MQ.
Amazon CloudWatch metric alarm allows customers to watch a metric value, or a math expression value for the metric, and trigger actions when the value breaks a certain threshold limit. These alarms can be used to trigger notifications delivered via Amazon SNS, email, SMS, etc. It has been a requirement for customers to include the application log messages in the alarm notification message, so it becomes easier for operational staff to identify the root cause for the alarm notification. In this article, I will demonstrate how to embed the application log messages in the notification email body when the CloudWatch alarm is activated.
Container orchestration is a critical aspect of modern software development, enabling organizations to deploy and manage large-scale containerized applications. In this article, we will discuss what container orchestration is, why it is important, and some of the popular container orchestration tools available today.
What Is Container Orchestration?
Container orchestration is the process of automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Containers are lightweight, portable software units that can run anywhere, making them ideal for modern, distributed applications. However, managing containerized applications can be complex, as they typically consist of multiple containers that must be deployed, configured, and managed as a single entity.
If you want to outsource ecommerce fulfillment, ShipBob is the best service for most. Get a free quote from ShipBob today.
Optimizing fulfillment is essential to the growth of your online store. You must ensure the process is efficient and cost-effective on your end while keeping your customers happy by delivering their orders in a timely, convenient fashion. Here we’ll explain everything you need to know about the ecommerce fulfillment process and teach you how to do it most effectively.
The 5 Best Ecommerce Fulfillment Services
We reviewed the top ecommerce fulfillment services on the market today and appraised them on key differentiating factors such as scalability, shipping times, and supply chain expertise. Here are our top choices from that list:
You’ve had to consider ecommerce fulfillment from the moment you started your online business. It’s the crux of your business model, especially if you don’t have any brick-and-mortar stores for your customers to visit.
Ecommerce fulfillment refers to the storage, sorting, packing, and shipping of the products you sell on your online store, as well as the management of returns and exchanges. Some ecommerce companies take care of this entirely in-house, while others employ third-party fulfillment solutions.
If you have an actual inventory of products that need to be physically shipped to the people who order them from you, this contrasts with a couple of other ecommerce models. Some companies only deal with digital products, ranging from SaaS companies to online content creators, eliminating the need to consider shipping and fulfillment at all.
On the other hand, dropshipping companies don’t sell their own inventory; instead, they use vendors and providers to source inventory (who store the stock themselves and ship directly to the dropshipping store’s customers). Dropshippers still have to consider aspects of fulfillment, like picking-and-packing and shipping providers, but don’t have to fret about storage.
For most ecommerce stores, an efficient ecommerce fulfillment process is vital. Customers expect quick and reliable delivery, and a positive delivery experience means customers are more likely to return to your store and have a greater lifetime value.
How Ecommerce Fulfillment Works
Ecommerce fulfillment can be broken down into four steps: inventory management, order processing, shipping, and returns management.
Inventory management is just like it sounds. It requires that your product inventory be stored securely in a warehouse or similar facility. Each product needs a unique stock-keeping unit (SKU) number to keep track of it along the supply chain.
When you outsource the inventory management part of your fulfillment, that entails you sending inventory to the fulfillment company’s own warehouse. You’ll pay more for that convenience but can often unlock benefits like shorter time spans between the receipt of an order and when it ships out. And, if your fulfillment partner has multiple warehouses, you can often get items to your customers more quickly by having inventory in a warehouse nearest to their shipping address.
Shipbob can store your products across multiple fulfillment centers.
Order processing describes the sequence of events from when you get a customer’s order to prepare it for shipment. Your staff receives the information about the customer’s order, where to find the products in your inventory, shipping information, and any specific packing instructions. At the fulfillment center, staff retrieve the items, pack them, and add a shipping label.
Then, the package is shipped using the U.S. Postal Service or another carrier, like UPS, DHL, or FedEx. Whether you do this yourself or use a fulfillment service, you’ll receive tracking information that you can pass on to the customer and use to send delivery updates via email or text.
Returns management doesn’t always come into play, but it’s a crucial part of this process to prepare for. To facilitate and receive returns from customers, you must provide the means for them to send defective or mistakenly ordered products back to your company. For example, you might set up a page on your website that describes your return policy and a returns portal customers can use to print off shipping labels.
When you receive returns, they must be assessed and their value recovered where possible through resale. Alternatively, you’ll need to dispose of faulty items or items that no longer meet compliance regulations efficiently.
The Different Types of Ecommerce Fulfillment
Here are the three main ecommerce fulfillment models to consider.
In-house fulfillment entails storing and shipping products from your own premises. This may suit small or new ecommerce stores, as well as direct-to-consumer businesses that handle every step of the customer journey themselves.
Third-party fulfillment is when you send your inventory to a service provider that stores, picks, packs, and ships your products. This is the right option for growing businesses or those that want to scale effectively. A third-party provider has the infrastructure and technology to speed up shipping and reduce costs.
Dropshipping is a uniquely modern ecommerce model. You outsource manufacturing as well as fulfillment to a third party, essentially acting as a middle person promoting goods and getting a cut of the profits. This suits online entrepreneurs with little to no starting budget. Yet, it’s also difficult to make a ton of money from dropshipping alone.
Which Is the Best Ecommerce Fulfillment Model?
You may start small, even bootstrap an ecommerce store handling shipping from your own home or a small office. But, as your business grows, the logistics get more complex, not to mention more expensive.
In general, you should invest in a third-party fulfillment solution as soon as you feel financially able to do so. It means you can expand your product line, sell to more customers, and speed up the entire supply chain process, providing a better ROI and a better customer experience overall.
Third-party services like ShipBob have multiple distribution centers, meaning you can store and ship inventory from different locations across the country, close to where your customers live. It reduces the cost of shipping and means your packages arrive much quicker—a real win-win.
ShipBob provides maps to help you visualize where your customers are.
It’s crucial that you offer fast, reasonably priced delivery to stay in business. 68% of consumers abandon their shopping carts when shipping costs are too high, and 44% abandon their purchases when the estimated delivery time is too long for their liking.
Furthermore, third-party services automate much of the fulfillment process. For instance, inventory levels are automatically updated, and you’ll receive analytics reports containing sales insights and notifications to replenish inventory.
ShipBob’s reports enhance visibility across the supply chain, helping you make smart business decisions.
In other words, you get to focus on other aspects of your growing business and leave the complex processes to the robust tools that third-party fulfillment services have to offer.
The 5 Best Ways to Improve Ecommerce Fulfillment
Streamline processes, reduce costs, and increase shipping speeds to improve the ecommerce fulfillment process. Here are the most effective ways to do these things.
1. Offer Faster Shipping
Big companies have the infrastructure to ship products to customers super fast. ASOS, for example, is able to offer same-day delivery in the UK.
Customers have come to expect fast delivery times. The trouble is, it’s expensive for your average ecommerce store to make this happen.
But there are ways to get around this problem. Third-party fulfillment solutions have the infrastructure to be able to guarantee two-day delivery, for example.
They optimize where your products are shipped from and how they’re shipped. ShipBob’s two-day express fulfillment service uses a combination of ground, air, and regional carriers to transport goods, for example.
To lessen the cost of shipping, you can also use certain pricing strategies. Add shipping costs to the overall cost of the product to cover the expense of free or cheap delivery. Or, set up a minimum spend threshold on free delivery.
2. Use a Multichannel Fulfillment Program
Multichannel sales grow year on year in the United States. Selling on marketplaces, social media, and other channels in addition to your website is the norm these days.
This is because modern consumers require a simple, convenient shopping experience. They want to be able to buy items using their preferred channel or whatever app they’re browsing at the time.
This means your ecommerce fulfillment system must be equipped to handle multiple channels. Choose software or a third-party service that integrates with top sales channels as well as your online store. It makes the entire process more manageable.
ShipBob integrates with ecommerce platforms, marketplaces, and social selling channels.
Orders get sent to the fulfillment center from each channel automatically—you don’t need to be the middle person. This is another way you can streamline the fulfillment process.
3. Choose Optimal Storage Locations
Ship items from close to where your customers live to optimize shipping costs and speeds.
Shipping is calculated using zones based on the distance between the package’s point of origin and its destination. So, the closer the origin zone is to the destination zone, the better.
The best option is to store and ship from multiple locations. You can optimize the process in a granular way, using analytics data to store the right inventory in the right locations based on consumers’ purchase behaviors. ShipBob uses an algorithm to do this, for example. Or, you can manually determine what the best fulfillment provider is based on how close their warehouses are to your core customer base.
4. Adopt End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility
Capture and analyze data across your entire supply chain to increase efficiency. End-to-end visibility like this means you can improve processes, reduce costs, and make better business decisions.
It also ensures information about your inventory, orders, and shipping is accurate at every step of the ecommerce fulfillment process. Data and information are centralized, so everyone involved has the same, up-to-date information.
Technology is a game changer here. Industry experts say the aspects of the fulfillment operation ecommerce companies want to advance most in the next year are mechanization, automation, and robotics.
You can use a platform focused on supply chain analysis to increase visibility. Another option is to use technology such as devices equipped with GPS to accurately track the whereabouts of products and shipments while en route. Also, automating processes at each stage of the fulfillment process helps you track inventory accurately.
5. Reduce the Number of Returns
Returns are a natural part of running an ecommerce business, but they cost a lot of money. In 2021, returns accounted for $218 billion in lost sales for ecommerce stores around the world.
Assessing the quality of your supply chain can help you reduce the number of returns your customers make.
First, robust inventory management is key. For instance, the information on packing slips must be accurate to ensure the customer receives the right items. Automation reduces the possibility of human error here.
Naturally, products must also be stored in a safe and secure environment to reduce the likelihood of damage. And don’t cut costs when it comes to packaging. You’ll lose more money if an item is damaged in transit due to insufficient packaging.
Also, make sure to only work with credible shipping services. Naturally, customers are more likely to return an item if it’s damaged in transit or they don’t receive it on time.
5 Ecommerce Fulfillment Trends to Look Out For
It pays to stay on the cutting edge in the world of ecommerce fulfillment and supply chain management. Gain a competitive advantage by taking note of these trends:
Eco-conscious consumers: Customers care more about the environmental impact of their shopping habits. This means ecommerce companies should invest more in eco-friendly packaging and make sustainable values a part of their branding.
Predictive logistics: Using behavioral data, companies can predict what shoppers will buy and when. This means brands can have their inventory ready in the right warehouse at the right time, making fulfillment even faster and more efficient.
Real-time tracking: Companies can track their inventory and keep tabs on any order’s status in real-time by using a robust warehouse management system. This allows the brand to adjust any shipping details right up until it’s due to leave the fulfillment center.
Return to retail: Customers are increasingly shopping in-store as they crave authentic, in-person experiences that virtual stores have trouble replicating. Shipping delays, costs, and other missteps from brands are also driving people back to stores. For this reason, companies should place a greater emphasis on retail fulfillment—alongside ecommerce—than they may have previously.
Collect-in-store: Similar to the previous point, this is a smart fulfillment strategy that benefits both brands and consumers. By shipping to brick-and-mortar stores in bulk, companies are able to reduce shipping times and costs, leading to greater profits for the brand and better customer satisfaction. However, keep in mind that this won’t always be feasible for customers who may live in more remote areas.
Final Thoughts About Ecommerce Fulfillment
Ecommerce fulfillment is an important competitive differentiator nowadays. Fast, cheap, stress-free delivery is high on the list of customer expectations. Businesses must make that happen while keeping costs low.
Using a third-party ecommerce fulfillment solution is the best choice. They have the infrastructure, systems, and software to keep processes manageable, streamlined, and cost-effective. And they adapt to the ever-changing ecommerce environment well.
Automation, optimal locations, and end-to-end visibility are key to improving your ecommerce fulfillment process. This is also true of staying on top of logistics, supply chain, and fulfillment trends to ensure your company’s fulfillment strategy remains effective which contributes to the success of your online store.
I spend a lot of time in DevTools, and I’m sure you do too. Sometimes I even bounce between them, especially when I’m debugging cross-browser issues. DevTools is a lot like browsers themselves — not all of the features in one browser’s DevTools will be the same or supported in another browser’s DevTools.
But there are quite a few DevTools features that are interoperable, even some lesser-known ones that I’m about to share with you.
For the sake of brevity, I use “Chromium” to refer to all Chromium-based browsers, like Chrome, Edge, and Opera, in the article. Many of the DevTools in them offer the exact same features and capabilities as one another, so this is just my shorthand for referring to all of them at once.
Search nodes in the DOM tree
Sometimes the DOM tree is full of nodes nested in nodes that are nested in other nodes, and so on. That makes it pretty tough to find the exact one you’re looking for, but you can quickly search the DOM tree using Cmd + F (macOS) or Ctrl + F (Windows).
Additionally, you can also search using a valid CSS selector, like .red, or using an XPath, like //div/h1.
Searching text in Chrome DevTools (left), selectors in Firefox DevTools (center), and XPath in Safari DevTools (right)
In Chromium browsers, the focus automatically jumps to the node that matches the search criteria as you type, which could be annoying if you are working with longer search queries or a large DOM tree. Fortunately, you can disable this behavior by heading to Settings (F1) → Preferences → Global → Search as you type → Disable.
After you have located the node in the DOM tree, you can scroll the page to bring the node within the viewport by right-clicking on the nod, and selecting “Scroll into view”.
Access nodes from the console
DevTools provides many different ways to access a DOM node directly from the console.
For example, you can use $0 to access the currently selected node in the DOM tree. Chromium browsers take this one step further by allowing you to access nodes selected in the reverse chronological order of historic selection using, $1, $2, $3, etc.
Another thing that Chromium browsers allow you to do is copy the node path as a JavaScript expression in the form of document.querySelector by right-clicking on the node, and selecting Copy → Copy JS path, which can then be used to access the node in the console.
Here’s another way to access a DOM node directly from the console: as a temporary variable. This option is available by right-clicking on the node and selecting an option. That option is labeled differently in each browser’s DevTools:
Chromium: Right click → “Store as global variable”
Firefox: Right click → “Use in Console”
Safari: Right click → “Log Element”
Access a node as a temporary variable in the console, as shown in Chrome (left), Firefox (center), and Safari (right)
Visualize elements with badges
DevTools can help visualize elements that match certain properties by displaying a badge next to the node. Badges are clickable, and different browsers offer a variety of different badges.
In Safari, there is a badge button in the Elements panel toolbar which can be used to toggle the visibility of specific badges. For example, if a node has a display: grid or display: inline-grid CSS declaration applied to it, a grid badge is displayed next to it. Clicking on the badge will highlight grid areas, track sizes, line numbers, and more, on the page.
Grid overlay with badges in Safari DevTools
The badges that are currently supported in Firefox’s DevTools are listed in the Firefox source docs. For example, a scroll badge indicates a scrollable element. Clicking on the badge highlights the element causing the overflow with an overflow badge next to it.
In Chromium browsers, you can right-click on any node and select “Badge settings…” to open a container that lists all of the available badges. For example, elements with scroll-snap-type will have a scroll-snap badge next to it, which on click, will toggle the scroll-snap overlay on that element.
Taking screenshots
We’ve been able to take screenshots from some DevTools for a while now, but it’s now available in all of them and includes new ways to take full-page shots.
The process starts by right-clicking on the DOM node you want to capture. Then select the option to capture the node, which is labeled differently depending on which DevTools you’re using.
Chrome (left), Safari (middle), and Firefox (right)
Repeat the same steps on the html node to take a full-page screenshot. When you do, though, it’s worth noting that Safari retains the transparency of the element’s background color — Chromium and Firefox will capture it as a white background.
Comparing screenshots in Safari (left) and Chromium (right)
There’s another option! You can take a “responsive” screenshot of the page, which allows you to capture the page at a specific viewport width. As you might expect, each browser has different ways to get there.
Chromium: Cmd + Shift + M (macOS) or Ctrl + Shift + M (Windows). Or click the “Devices” icon next to the “Inspect” icon.
Launching responsive design mode in Safari (left), Firefox (right), and Chromium (bottom)
Chrome tip: Inspect the top layer
Chrome lets you visualize and inspect top-layer elements, like a dialog, alert, or modal. When an element is added to the #top-layer, it gets a top-layer badge next to it, which on click, jumps you to the top-layer container located just after the </html> tag.
The order of the elements in the top-layer container follows the stacking order, which means the last one is on the top. Click the reveal badge to jump back to the node.
Firefox tip: Jump to ID
Firefox links the element referencing the ID attribute to its target element in the same DOM and highlights it with an underline. Use CMD + Click (macOS) or CTRL + Click (Windows) )to jump to the target element with the identifier.
Wrapping up
Quite a few things, right? It’s awesome that there are some incredibly useful DevTools features that are supported in Chromium, Firefox, and Safari alike. Are there any other lesser-known features supported by all three that you like?
There are a few resources I keep close by to stay on top of what’s new. I thought I’d share them with here:
DevTools Tips (Patrick Brosset): A curated collection of helpful cross-browser DevTools tips and tricks.
Dev Tips (Umar Hansa): DevTools tips sent to your inbox!
Geolocation is an important feature for a website because it enables online businesses to provide targeted content to the prospective users based on their geographic location. By using geolocation data, the website owner can provide localized content, such as local news, weather, and events and have the content displayed in the native language. It also can help prevent fraud by allowing businesses to detect and block suspicious activities originating from certain geographic regions. It is an important tool for website owners and developers to enhance user experience and prevent fraudulence.
Geolocation can be implemented in a variety of ways, such as at the web server layer, programming language layer, or through the use of an SDK. In our previous article, we demonstrated how to install geolocation into the Apache server. In this article, I will explore another approach by installing geolocation into the PHP language using the PECL install. For this demonstration, we will be using IP2Location, the same geolocation provider, so you can have an understanding of how geolocation works in different environments.
Most modern software runs multiple versions of the application to conduct experiments (e.g., A/B testing) or to deploy new versions safely (e.g., canary, blue-green deployments). To support this, feature flags are commonly used to toggle different functionality at runtime. Developers may add feature flags to introduce a new feature and progressively roll it out in production. Alternatively, feature flags may introduce different business or behavior logic per some external variable for experimentation or data collection.
While feature flags are a great tool for minimizing risk in validating new features and modifying behavior without disruptive deployments, it also adds complexity in debugging when the number of feature flags grows to be large. For large applications, it’s not uncommon to see multiple feature flags per service. In fact, it was reported that Facebook had over 60 different versions of the navigation bar at one time. Coupling that number with all the various microservices it communicates with, the combination of possible states grows exponentially large. So at scale, feature flags may be managed by a feature management platform like LaunchDarkly or AWS AppConfig.
Status pages are now an essential service offered by all Software-as-a-Service companies. To help their adoption, startups quickly conceived status pages as-a-service, and open-source self-hosted alternatives were made available. Cachet, also sometimes referred to as CachetHQ, is a broadly adopted status page system written in PHP and has many community forks such as fiveai/Cachet.
Compromising Cachet instances is rewarding for attackers, as they store secrets for various services such as caches, databases, email servers, etc. This initial foothold in the infrastructure is helpful for them to pivot into the internal network of the affected company and to perform further attacks. In this article, I present the technical analysis of three security bugs my team and I discovered in Cachet 2.4. They can enable attackers to compromise the server.
A database Out Of Memory (OOM) error can be challenging to deal with. It can have a number of different causes, and without a thorough analysis, it can be difficult to determine the root cause of the error. Some typical causes of an OOM error in a database include insufficient memory, memory leaks, poorly optimized queries, and large result sets.
To troubleshoot an OOM error in a database, it is important to monitor the database’s memory usage over time, profile the database to identify any potential bottlenecks or inefficiencies and optimize queries and indexes as needed.
Welcome back to this series about uploading files to the web. If you missed the first post, I recommend you check it out because it’s all about uploading files via HTML. The full series will look like this:
Upload files With HTML
Upload files With JavaScript
Receiving File Uploads With Node.js (Nuxt.js)
Optimizing Storage Costs With Object Storage
Optimizing Delivery With a CDN
Securing File Uploads With Malware Scans
In this article, we’ll do the same thing using JavaScript.
Do you know that 75% of businesses in the USA use low-code or no-code platforms? Worldwide, that number is 23%, with an average estimation for this market value of $18.32 billion. According to recent studies, this movement is gaining a …
As more and more companies move to the cloud, it’s becoming essential to keep track of their resource usage to ensure cost-effectiveness. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a leading platform among cloud providers, but its extensive range of services can pose a challenge when monitoring resource consumption efficiently. This article delves into the significance of tracking AWS resource utilization for cost optimization and offers practical tips on accomplishing this.
What Is AWS Resource Utilization?
As an AWS professional, it’s essential to understand the concept of AWS resource utilization. Essentially, it refers to the computing resources that your website or application consumes on the AWS platform. These resources may include CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network usage, among others. Fortunately, AWS offers several tools you can utilize to monitor your resource utilization. These tools include Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Trusted Advisor, and AWS Cost Explorer. By leveraging these services, you can keep track of your resource consumption and optimize your AWS usage for maximum efficiency.
Playwright is an open-source Node.js library started by Microsoft for automating browsers based on Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit through a single API. The primary goal of Playwright is to improve automated UI testing. In addition, playwright is made to enable cross-browser web automation.
Intermedia services small to medium-sized businesses by providing them with cloud IT solutions, including email hosting. If you need to improve web property, email, or other internet-related performance, Intermedia can support your business ventures without requiring you to acquire on-premise servers.
Intermedia’s hosted exchange email can help you transform how you send and receive business emails through high-quality security, compliance, and onboarding. Read on to find out what this offering from Intermedia can do for your business.
Intermedia Compared
Intermedia made our top list for its powerful email security options, but it’s not the only excellent option on the market today for business email hosting. DreamHost is our best all-around pick for its versatility, user-friendliness, and affordability. Sign up for a DreamHost mailbox for just $1.67 per month.
DreamHost — Best All-Around Email Hosting Provider
Intermedia offers comprehensive cloud-based technology solutions for businesses of any size. The products and features they offer make it easier to scale while remaining productive and help you create unified communication channels that your whole team can benefit from.
Alongside Intermedia’s hosted exchange email service, its vast array of offerings includes file backup and management, security and compliance tools, and unified communications platforms with voice and video calling and conferencing.
Intermedia Health and Stability
Intermedia was founded in 1991 as a privately traded company with headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. Intermedia has two main investors, including Madison Dearborn Partners and NGP Capital.
Since then, Intermedia has helped more than 130,000 businesses and has hired nearly 1,000 employees across the United States. With a 4.6-star rating on Glassdoor, it seems that most Intermedia employees—past and present—are satisfied with the company’s work-life balance, remote work opportunities, and benefits. That, combined with having been in business for over 30 years, paints an encouraging portrait of Intermedia’s continued success.
Intermedia Pricing
Intermedia has separate pricing for each of the services they offer. For the sake of this post, I will be discussing just the pricing for Intermedia’s hosted exchange email platform, which has four different pricing tiers.
Intermedia Pricing Structure
You’ll find four packages for Intermedia exchange email, each charged per user per month. However, pricing is somewhat customized based on user needs, so you’ll need to get a quote from Intermedia for a precise price point.
For the most basic email plan, plans start at just under $8 monthly for each user, with higher-priced plans stretching up to a bit over $15 per user per month. Plans above the basic tier add features like archiving, additional protection, and even free access to Microsoft 365’s applications.
You can also build a plan a la carte, adding Microsoft 365, archiving, backups, encryption, or enhanced security to the basic email package for an extra fee. Intermedia also allows you to get hosted email as a part of their unified communications platform, Intermedia Unite.
Intermedia Pricing Comparison
Intermedia’s hosted exchange email service ranges from $7.94 per user per month for unlimited mailbox storage and basic email protection to as high as $15.44 per user per month to include all the bells and whistles. Mid-range plans run between $10 and $12 per user per month.
Compared to other email hosting providers, Intermedia offers decent functionality per mailbox, but that comes with a higher price tag. For example, with DreamHost, you only get 25 GB of storage (as opposed to Intermedia’s unlimited cloud storage on any plan), but you’ll only have to pay $1.67 per mailbox per month. On the other hand, Hostinger’s plans are even cheaper, starting at $0.99 per month, and grant you more than 14 powerful email features.
And, if you want to find an email hosting provider with more flexible pricing options, Scala Hosting starts at $2.95 per month and scales up to $14.95 per month for unlimited accounts and domains.
Intermedia Trials and Guarantees
Intermedia offers a 30-day risk-free trial on select plans. You can request a quote for most of its products and services or create a custom pricing package based on your needs by reaching out to an Intermedia sales representative.
Intermedia Email Hosting Review
Intermedia’s email hosting plans stand out for their powerful security features that help to provide an incredibly secure and worry-free hosted email experience. You’re also getting unlimited storage on any email plan and a 99.999% uptime guarantee via their service-level agreement.
You could benefit from Intermedia’s email hosting service if you are looking for a reliable exchange email platform that will improve the reliability and efficacy of how your business sends and receives emails. If you want to scope out other excellent alternatives, make sure to check out our reviews of all of the best email hosting providers.
What Makes Intermedia Email Hosting Great
Intermedia’s hosted exchange email is cloud-based and offers unlimited storage with 24/7 support.
Powerful security comes standard: Intermedia covers security by conducting SOC 3 audits of its data centers and offers PCI-DSS and general privacy protection and secure data networks. In fact, Intermedia has a security philosophy that covers seven critical facets: data security, server-side backups, endpoint protection, identity protection, infrastructure security, privacy over data, and security management. They take this seriously so your organization can have peace of mind.
Unlimited storage: Many email hosting providers don’t provide unlimited email storage unless you pay for the highest-priced plan. And if they do offer it for more budget-conscious packages, you’ll usually have to pay an additional fee for more storage space.
Fortunately, that isn’t the case with Intermedia, as it offers unlimited email storage on any plan, including its entry-level package that costs around $8 per user per month. Intermedia’s unlimited email storage ensures you don’t need to worry about the size of your inbox or the heft of attachments you’re sending and receiving.
Managed onboarding: It can be complicated to onboard your team to an entirely new email platform and migrate existing data, but that’s an issue of the past with Intermedia’s cloud concierge onboarding feature. Their expert team will work with you to create a process for implementation and onboarding that fits your business schedule and minimizes the impact migration might have on your users. Intermedia migrates over 15,000 mailboxes and 5,000 phone numbers each month, so you can rest assured that they can support your website without losing data or experiencing downtime.
99.999% uptime: One of Intermedia’s mottos is “the five nines make all the difference,” which is at the heart of their uptime-related service-level agreement (SLA). Intermedia’s 99.999% uptime SLA means you can expect less than 26 seconds of downtime per month and only a hair over five minutes of downtime per year (if you even experience that much). Intermedia helps meet this lofty standard by allowing its Microsoft-certified architects and engineers to build and customize its tech infrastructure and world-class data centers.
Compliance features: If you are looking for an email hosting provider that understands and supports your need to meet certain regulatory requirements, Intermedia will impress you. With Intermedia’s hosted exchange email, you can maintain financial regulatory compliance and HIPAA compliance for protected health information. Not only that, but Intermedia can help you comply with additional regulations, including GDPR, FINRA, NASD, and SEC, to name a few.
Where Intermedia Email Hosting Falls Short
Intermedia gives you a worry-free experience with powerful security, onboarding, and compliance features.
Not user-friendly: The bulk of Intermedia’s criticisms involve its interface not being as user-friendly as other email hosting providers. Many users found the UI clunky and hard to navigate. And, not having access to shortcuts within the inbox makes it difficult to find files and data when you need them in a snap.
Poor customer service: While it’s excellent that Intermedia offers 24/7 technical support, many of its users felt that their customer service didn’t live up to the claims on its website. Many reviewers found that the customer representatives were slow to respond, unhelpful, and some were even rude. It’s worth putting their service team through its paces on the 30-day trial period to make sure you won’t experience the same underwhelming support.
Slow mobile app: Intermedia’s mobile app is heavily outdated, with its 3.3-star rating on the Google Play Store showing that a lot of users aren’t happy with the product. Many reviewers claim that the app is slow and often lags when you attempt to complete a task. More inconveniently, the app lacks many of the basic features included in Intermedia’s email plans, such as notifications and group messages.
Intermedia Email Hosting Compared
While Intermedia offers powerful security regulations and unlimited email storage, the best email hosting provider on the market today is DreamHost because of its versatility and affordability.
DreamHost — Best All-Around Email Hosting Provider
Intermedia is a decent email hosting provider that services small to medium-sized businesses with cloud-based technology. With powerful security regulations, unlimited email storage, and a concierge onboarding feature, Intermedia can help you build a stable email network and business structure.
With more than 30 years in the industry and helping more than 130,000 businesses across the globe, it’s clear that Intermedia is a reliable company that aims to provide cloud-based solutions for easier communication.
This article provides programming solutions and implementation examples for various graph and data structure problems. Graphs and data structures are fundamental concepts in computer science, and understanding them is crucial for developing efficient algorithms for a wide range of applications.
This article covers several common graph problems, including finding a path between two nodes in a directed graph and designing a data structure that supports adding new words and searching for matching words. For each problem, we provide a detailed explanation of the solution approach and then provide an implementation in Kotlin programming language.
Data scientists are the new-age genie, and data is the very lamp that ushers business-centric insights. No doubt, tech advancements have seeped into every aspect of our lives. This calls for an umpteenth times revolution in the way we envision our data and retrieve meaningful insights.
What Is Data Science?
The science or the sheer skillset that a gazillion of recruiters around the world is eyeing, data science is the mastery every industry needs today. Data science has become the lifeblood of industries far and wide. Healthcare, eCommerce, Artificial Intelligence, and many other industries have leveraged high benefits out of the data rigmarole.
Windows Presentation Foundation, also popularly known as WPF, is a popular UI framework for building Windows applications. Since its launch in 2006, it has gained popularity, and many apps running on Windows these days benefit from its features. Due to easy interoperability with Win32 APIs and backward compatibility, WPF is still a popular choice.
Building a WPF video calling app with Dyte SDK will be a two-step process. To use the same features available on Dyte SDK, we will use the Web Components and render those in WPF applications. To achieve this, in the first step, we will create a Web App with Dyte SDK, and in the second step, we will use Microsoft Edge WebView2 to integrate the web app and render Dyte video calls.
