Month: January 2015

January 27, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Forward: Pretty much all of us have heard or know that privacy rights no longer exist in the United States. Gone, finished, beyond recourse (except through using end-to-end encryption techniques ; however the NSA can probably still secretly grab your screenshot or logged keystrokes or live microphone through a backdoor partnership with Microsoft and Apple). Any per-existing privacy laws have been overwritten by new creepier laws that have paved the way for absolute intrusion into the American people’s personal world by their out-of-control government. Even if there are a few scraps of privacy protection in the states, it has become clear that any such laws are completely ignored by large and sophisticated spy organizations such as a the NSA. Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing reports are a case in point. But did you know our home country of Canada has some of the most protective laws regarding internet privacy in the world, at least on paper? Our nation even has appointed a “Privacy Commissioner”: The Commissioner is currently Daniel Therrien. He was appointed on June 5, 2014. [ There have been eight Privacy Commissioners since the office was established in 1977. ] You even have the right to contact him or his office with your own related personal privacy concerns, anytime. More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_Commissioner_of_Canada Here is his youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/PrivacyComm The first incarnation of a privacy law came in 1977 when the Canadian government introduced data protection provisions into the Canadian Human Rights Act. read_more Then in 1982 The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms stated that Canadians have "the right to life, liberty and security of the person" and "the right to be free from unreasonable search or seizure"; but strangely avoided using the word ‘privacy’. The following year, in 1983, the Federal Privacy Act regulated how federal government collects, passes around and utilizes people’s personal information. In the 90’s and 2000’s, other privacy legislation placed restrictions on the archival, the use and disclosure of citizen’s personal information by territorial and provincial governments, and likewise also by companies and institutions within the private sector. The latest ruling to emerge out of this fray is the recent June 2014 Canadian Supreme Court...

January 19, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Solid State Devices further compress into the acronym SSDs. This applies for ssd-based shared and vps hosting. The best advantage of a SSD comes by its random access reading/writing latency, which is 0.01 milliseconds or less; virtually zero delay. Much larger delays are caused by a conventional hard drive’s mechanical read/write head “seek” time, which can take many milliseconds per operation. So when in use with intensive database applications, a SDD offers a new dimension in speed. However, all other kinds of storage memory access are sped up too: access time of webpages, e-commerce applications, and especially databases... are all sped up significantly. To speed up your web enterprise, it is already time to upgrade to a SSD sharedrather than the traditional shared hosting or hard-disk based shared Hosting. SSDs are also much less likely to ever breakdown or otherwise malfunction. Typical SSD memory is expected to last 4 million hours before a hardware failure - enabling both a speed & reliability perfection in web hosting. The Top 10 SSD-Web-hosting and SSD-VPS hosting benefits: 1) Super ultra-fast random access read/writes Comparing a SSD to a HDD (hard drive), is like comparing the difference in speed between a laser printer compared to a dotmatrix printer. The major benefit is that SSDs are lightning-fast compared to a hard drives since there is no physical read/write head movement required. Again, there is virtually no (zero) latency in SSD data reads or writes. Until something now unknown, such as holographic memory or something such as that, is invented, SSDs are the fastest mass storage devices in this part of the universe and will be for many more years. 2) Super fast transfer speeds Moving parts in HDD slow down drive performance while SSD has no moving parts within it, which makes data transfer extremely faster. With more disk space, a high traffic site can host multiple images, videos and handle incoming traffic. 3) No disk fragmentation issues - ever! As there are no moving or mechanical parts on a SSD, slowing because of fragmentation which is always happening on traditional hard disk drives is not an issue with Solid State Drives. Therefore, SSD’s offer...

January 13, 2015

Hosting Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 8 minutes

If you’ve been on the hunt for a web hosting company, you’ve probably heard the term “virtual private server.” A VPS is similar to a dedicated server in look and feel as a web host customer, but essentially they are a different service. Canadian web hosts offer fast broadband speeds, good technical support, and friendly service. Canada’s infrastructure and Internet backbone are among the world’s top 10 services. You won’t find better service in North America, but what type of service should you get? Why Move On from Shared Hosting? If you currently use shared hosting, these plans are great for simple blogs or websites that don’t get much traffic, but there are some disadvantages with shared hosting. First, you share the same servers with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of other customers and their sites. Shared hosting is inherently slower, because you have hundreds of other sites using the server’s resources. If one site gets hacked, your site could be vulnerable if the site left a security hole on the server as a whole. Basically, you are at the mercy of several other site owners, and you have no options. Next, you can’t customize your server’s settings. Maybe you have a custom API, maybe you have specific site settings, or maybe you just want to set up multiple sites on one account. All of these aren’t possible with shared hosting. VPS gives you these options. read_more If you find that your site is suffering from slowness issues or you need some more flexibility, Canadian web hosting offers VPS service that’s fast and affordable. Of course, suffering from slow server performance isn’t the only issue. Shared hosting also limits the technology you use to connect to your server, storage space is usually much smaller than VPS, and you must use the host’s interface to manage your site instead of the server’s Apache or IIS interface. What is the Difference between VPS and Dedicated Servers? Although it feels like the same interface, VPS and dedicated servers are distinctly different platforms. First, a virtual private server is exactly what it says – a virtual server. You have a sandboxed environment from other site owners,...

January 5, 2015

Hosting Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Subject: Responsive Webpage Design According to statistics gathered by the HTTP Archive the results shown in the below graph show the average web page grew in size 14.6%; about 2 megabytes in the past year. In previous years, 2013, and 2012, the rate at which the ‘average’ webpage grew annually, were at rates of 30%, and 32% respectively. What were the factors associated with the increases in average size? CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a typical portion of web page source code, grew 23% in size compared to 2013’s average webpage. Also the amount of and size of images used on the average webpage also expanded by 20%. Javascript was more prevalent too with a 7% increase, but the use of Adobe Flash in web pages decreased around 4%. Although at home internet surfers are experiencing a richer page viewing experience, this is also a drawback for those surfing on portable devices that rely on slow cell phone network data connections. A solution would be to design mobile-friendly-pages perhaps utilizing a mobile sitebuilder ; and using a javascript function to decide if a regular sized webpage or a more compact mobile version should be sent/downloaded to your website visitor. read_more Currently only a small percentage of web pages download fast and are not annoying to load/view on mobile devices. Responsive design will probably be a more pressing issue in 2015 as the average webpage size continues to grow while more website browsing is done on smartphones and tablets. If you need tips on responsive design for your website, just write us at support@. You or your webpage developer should design for increased page loading speed, but we would be glad to help you with suggestions too. The average web page PageSpeed score was reported at 78 for 2014, which is surprising given the extra bloat each year. Slower page loading has remained most obvious on mobile device connections. So why create and publish a badly-optimized websites? There are solutions to page bloat or weight. We believe our clients have an incentive to make their presentation effectively with small, fast-loading web pages. This is because people are using cell phones and tablets...