Month: July 2021

July 19, 2021

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

You might not know it, but the word hygiene has Greek mythology roots. Hygieia was a daughter of Asclepius, who you probably also didn’t know was the Greek god of medicine. Hygieia was the goddess of health, cleanliness and sanitation, and so that pretty much makes sense in as far as where the word comes from. We all know how it’s important to brush our teeth everyday, but apparently it’s possible to be healthy, clean, and entirely sanitized with those digital gatekeepers we call passwords. We’ve all seen password suggesters that give you an idea of how suitably strong your password is, but maybe far to many people are going with 54321 or something of the sort. Here at 4GoodHosting we’re like any other good Canadian web hosting provider in that we’ve come across all sorts of stories of password failures over the years and we try to make a point of giving customers some insights into good practices for the digital world if they need them. And apparently the need is there. Passwords are still the primary form of authentication, but done poorly they can leave you vulnerable to attacks if your cybersecurity is not up to scratch. Passwords get stolen, and it’s happening a lot more often nowadays. They’re obtained by all sorts of underhanded means, and you may have some of yours that aren’t exclusively in your possession anymore too. Billions Out There At present there are billions of passwords available on the Dark Web, collected via various attack methods ranging from malware to phishing for them. Many are then used in password spraying and credential stuffing attacks. The primary reason this is able to happen, according to web security experts, is that around 65% of users re use some of their passwords. That’s highly inadvisable, and if you do it then you put yourself at risk of stolen or compromised credentials. There’s another estimate that 1 in 5 companies who suffered a malicious data breach had it happen because of stolen or compromised credentials. So what is poor password hygiene? It’s really any type of choice or omission with setting or sharing passwords that leaves doors...

July 12, 2021

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

There’s no debating the fact that a higher population means higher power consumption. In the same way greater demands on data servers caused by so many more people using them indirectly are unavoidable too, and the way data centers are already using way too much power is definitely not good for the environment. Denmark isn’t anywhere close to being one of the most populated countries in Europe, but even there a single large data center consumes the equivalent of four percent of Denmark's total electricity consumption. That’s according to the Danish Council on Climate Change, and when you consider what that means you can imagine what the number would be like for much more heavily populated countries around the world. The growth of IoT and SaaS applications is going to increase this consumption and in the big picture it’s really not good. Here at 4GoodHosting, the nature of what we do as a quality Canadian web hosting provider means we can 100% relate to anything connected to operating large-scale data centers. Plus, we prefer good to news to any news that is not as good and that’s why this particular piece of news out of Denmark made the cut for our blog entry this week. Let’s get into it, and it might make us all feel a little more at ease about our own small but significant contributions to power usage. A+ Algorithm What’s behind all of this is a new algorithm developed by Danish researchers that’s able to promote major reductions with the world's computer servers and their resource consumption. We need to keep in mind that computer servers are every bit as taxing on the climate as all global airline traffic combined, and that is why green transitions in IT are so important. So why exactly is this such an issue? The world’s increasing internet usage has a very real and profound impact on climate due to the immense amount of electricity that’s demanded by computer servers. Current CO2 emissions from data centers are very high, and unfortunately they are expected to double within just a few years. Studies have indicated global data centers consume more than 400...

July 5, 2021

Domain Related

Reading Time: 11 minutes

In last week’s entry here we touched on ‘bounce’ rates, and how having higher ones can be hugely problematic for any website that’s serving an e-commerce function. If you’ve got a basic WordPress site for your blog on a basic shared web hosting package then you won’t be particularly concerned if those who enter choose to exit shortly thereafter. If your site is the avenue by which you sell products and services and make a livelihood for yourself, it’s going to be a much bigger issue if this becomes a trend. Bounce rates are something that all conscientious web masters are going to monitor, even the ones who aren’t much of a master at all. We’re like any good Canadian web hosting provider in that we make these analytics resources available to people through our control panel, and most other providers will do the same so that it’s made easier to see if there’s some deficiency to your website that’s causing visitors to leave far too soon. We found an interesting resource that puts the importance of website load times in real perspective for people who might not get the magnitude of it otherwise, and we thought we should share that here today. 2 or 3 at Most The general consensus is that a website should load in less than 2 to 3 seconds, and more simply your website should load as fast as possible. Anything more than this time frame and your risk losing potential customers. There was a study done by Google in 2017 that indicated that as page load time goes from 1 second to 3, the likelihood of that visitor ‘bouncing’ increases by 32%. It’s very possible that these numbers will have increased by this point 4 years later. The reality is the longer your page takes to load, the more likely it is users will find that to be unacceptable. There’s no getting around the fact a fast user experience is extremely important. And even more so with the increasing predominance of mobile browsing. An analysis of 900,000 landing pages across several countries and industry sectors found that the majority of mobile sites are too...