Month: December 2018

December 25, 2018

Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

No one will need to be convinced of the fact there’s a massive number of shady websites out there designed to ensnare you for any number of no-good purposes. Usually you’re rerouted to them when you take a seemingly harmless action and then often you’re unable to back <- yourself out of the site once you’ve unwilling landed on it. Nobody wants to be on these spammy or malicious pages and you’re stressing out every second longer that you’re there. The well being of web surfers who also happen to be customers or friends here at 4GoodHosting is important to us, and being proactive in sharing all our wisdom about anything and everything related to the web is a part of what makes one of the best Canadian web hosting providers. It’s that aim that has us sharing this news with you here today - that Google understands the unpleasantness that comes with this being locked into a website and has plans to make it remediable pretty quick here. The first time something like this occurs you’ll almost certainly be clicking on the back button repeatedly before realizing it’s got no function. Eventually you’ll come to realize that you’ve got no other recourse than to close the browser, and most often times you’ll quit Chrome altogether ASAP and then launch it again for fear of inheriting a virus or something of the sort from the nefarious site. How History Manipulation Works, and what Google is Doing About It You’ll be pleased to hear the Chrome browser will soon be armed with specific protection measures to prevent this happening. The way the ‘back’ button is broken here is something called ‘history manipulation’ by the Chrome team. What it involves is that the malicious site stacks dummy pages onto your browsing history, and these work to fast-forward you back to the unintended destination page you were trying to get away from. Fortunately, Chrome developers aren’t letting this slide. There are upcoming changes to Chromium’s code which will facilitate the detection of these dummy history entries and then flag sites that use them. The aim is to allow Chrome to ignore the entirety...

December 17, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Having to choose between 32-bit and 64-bit options when downloading an app or installing a game is pretty common, and many PCs will have a sticker on it that reads 64-bit processor. You’ll be hard pressed to find a sticker on one that reads 32-bit. It’s pretty easy to conclude like you do with most things that more is better, but why is that exactly? Unless you’re a genuinely computer savvy individual you won’t know what the real significance of the difference between the two. There is some meat to that though, and here at 4GoodHosting as a top Canadian web hosting provider we try to have our thumb on the pulse of the web hosting and computing world. Having a greater understanding of what exactly is ‘under the hood’ of your desktop or notebook and what’s advantageous – or not – about that is helpful. So let’s have a look at the importance difference between 32-bit and 64-bit computing today. Why Bits Matter First and foremost, it’s about capability. As you might expect, a 64-bit processor is more capable than a 32-bit processor, and primarily because it can handle more data at once. A greater number of computational values can be taken on by a 64-bit processor and this includes memory addresses. This means it’s able to access over four billion times the physical memory of a 32-bit processor. With the ever-greater memory demands of modern desktop and notebook computers, that’s a big deal. The key difference in that is something else. 32-bit processors can handle a limited amount of RAM (in Windows, 4GB or less) without difficulty, while 64-bit processors can accordingly take on much more. The ability to do this, however, is based on your operating system being able to take advantage of this greater access to memory. Run anything Windows 10 or up for a PC and you won’t need to worry about limits. The proliferation of 64-bit processors and larger capacities of RAM have led both Microsoft and Apple to upgrade versions of their operating systems now designed to take full advantage of the new technology. OS X Snow Leopard for Mac was the first...

December 10, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 8 minutes

In today’s computing world, ‘big data’ - data sets that are too large or complex for traditional data-processing application software - are increasingly common and having the ability to work with them is increasingly a to-be-expected requirement of IT professionals. One of the most important decisions these individuals have to make is deciding on a programming languages for big data manipulation and analysis. More is now required than just simply understanding big data and framing the architecture to solve it. Choosing the right language means you’re able to execute effectively, and that’s very valuable. As a proven reliable Canadian web hosting provider, here at 4GoodHosting we are naturally attuned to developments in the digital world. Although we didn’t know what it would come to be called, we foresaw the rise of big data but we didn’t entirely foresee just how much of a sway of influence it would have for all of us who take up some niche in information technology. So with big data becoming even more of a buzz term every week, we thought we’d put together a blog about what seems to be the consensus on the top 5 programming languages for working with Big Data. Best languages for big data All of these 5 programming languages make the list because they’re both popular and deemed to be effective. Scala Scale blends object-oriented and functional programming paradigms very nicely, and is fast and robust. It’s a popular language choice for many IT professionals needing to work with big data. Another testament to its functionality is that both Apache Spark and Apache Kafka have been built on top of Scala. Scala runs on the JVM, meaning that codes written in Scala can be easily incorporated within a Java-based Big Data ecosystem. A primary factor differentiating Scala from Java is that Scala is a lot less verbose as compared to Java. What would take seemingly forever to write 100s of lines of confusing-looking Java code can be done in 15 or so lines in Scala. One drawback attached to Scala, though, is its steep learning curve. This is especially true compared to languages like Go and Python. In some...

December 3, 2018

Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 8 minutes

A discussion of cybersecurity isn’t exactly a popular topic of conversation for most people, but those same people would likely gush at length if asked about how fond of public wi-fi connections they are! That’s a reflection of our modern world it would seem; we’re all about digital connectivity, but the potential for that connectivity to go sour on us is less of a focus of our attention. That is until it actually does go sour on you, of course, at which point you’ll be wondering why more couldn’t have been done to keep your personal information secure. Here at 4GoodHosting, cybersecurity is a big priority for us the same way it should be for any of the best Canadian web hosting providers. We wouldn’t have it any other way, and we do work to keep abreast of all the developments in the world of cybersecurity, and in particular these days as it pertains to cloud computing. We recently read a very interesting article about how our preferences for the ways we (meaning the collective whole of society) use public wi-fi can highlight some of the natures and needs related to web security, and we thought it would be helpful to share it and expand on it for you with our blog this week. Public Wi-Fi and Its Perils Free, public Wi-Fi is a real blessing for us when mobile data is unavailable, or scarce as if often the case! Few people really know how to articulate exactly what the risks of using public wi-fi are and how we can protect ourselves. Let’s start with this; when you join a public hotspot without protection and begin to access the internet, the packets of data moving from your device to the router are public and thus open to interception by anyone. Yes, SSL/TLS technology exists but all that’s required for cybercriminal to snoop on your connection is some relatively simple Linux software that he or she can find online without much fuss. Let’s take a look at some of the attacks that you may be subjected to due to using a public wi-fi network on your mobile device: Data monitoring W-fi...