Monthly Archives: December 2022

Reading Time: 5 minutes

We are nearing the end of another calendar year, and we imaging many of you are like us in thinking that this one has flown by just like the last one and the one before that. Apparently this is the way as you get older, but we’ll prefer to believe it’s just because we are all busy at work most of the time and that is why those 12 months go by as quickly as they do. And if you’re reading this it’s more likely that what’s keeping you preoccupied is some type of business or personal venture that involves a website.

You don’t get far at all these days without one in business, and it’s probably fair to say you don’t actually get anywhere at all without one. We’re fully in the information age now, and if you want to be reliably visible to the greatest volume of prospective customers you need to be discoverable via their smartphone or notebook. Simple as that, and we won’t go on anymore at length about. But as mentioned 2022 is coming to a close here so we thought to take our last blog entry of the year here and center it around one of the most newsworthy topics of all for the digital world in 2022 – A.I.

And more specifically how artificial intelligence is changing the parameters of what we do here as a good Canadian web hosting provider – providing web hosting with reliable uptime in Canada and the best in affordable Canadian web hosting too. We’re not the only one, and we’re not the only one who can attest to how artificial intelligence is changing the web hosting industry and able to discuss it in some detail. So here goes.

Functionally Influential

Major advances in computerized and internet computing can be attributed to AI, and particularly over the last 10+ years. The different uses and applications of AI have given it the upper hand over computer-generated reality and Augmented Reality (AR) and it’s been quite the influential factor in the relatively short time it’s been a factor in the big picture of technology trends and their levels of influence.

AI is factoring in in so many ways, from human resources to business operations along to advanced showcasing, security, and all types of innovative technology development that is being built to improve upon our existing digital technologies. This is without even mentioning all the new potential uses and applications for medical care, education, security, and retail. Even web facilitating is an industry that is being revolutionized by A.I. and that starts to point us in the direction we’re going to go here.

One the ways that A.I. is poised to really factor into better web hosting in the immediate future is with detecting malware and other cybersecurity risks more capably and more reliably. Giving web hosting providers a possible means of incorporating these tech advances into a possible product that can be offered along with Canadian web hosting packages is something that we’ll be keen to see, and the demand for them for people who have e-commerce websites (and especially larger ones for larger businesses) goes without saying.

A.I. may also be better enabling web service providers for keeping track of outstanding tasks for their clients, and doing so much more quickly than would otherwise be possible. Anticipating the needs of customers and staying on top of their expectations will have really obvious benefits for providers too, although it doesn’t have the same product-incorporation appeal that AI for advanced malware detection via your web hosting provider would.

More on Better Safety

We all know how the number of cyberattacks and digital assaults has increased exponentially over the last few years, and webmasters definitely have to be more aware and more vigilant as well as more concerned overall. Most malware and other threats take aim at sites via algorithms, but the simple truth in explaining how A.I. has huge potential in this regard is that – quite plainly – the machine is always smarter than the man. A.I. has the ability to outsmart the malware makers and reliably stay one step ahead of them at all times.

Pairing machine learning technologies with A.I. is something we can expect to see implemented into the web hosting industry too when it comes to offering better cybersecurity through web hosting. As is always the case, the key will be in anticipating attacks more intelligently and then making better decisions about the best way to deploy defenses.

Aiming for Increased Accuracy

Any and all tedious tasks required of webmasters or developers when it comes to cyber defenses are made simpler by AI, but with the assignments still being carried out with the utmost precision. Regardless of the volume of traffic or sudden changes to the site, computer-based intelligence ensures uninterrupted web page execution.

Better computer-based intelligence will be used to do things like send pre-programmed messages, respond to visitors, and so on. We can also look forward to A.I. doing more of the work that human programmers have had no choice but to do until this point, and that freeing of time and human resources is another offshoot benefit for how A.I. is going to benefit the web hosting industry more in the near future.

Better Data Reports and Improved Domain Name Performance

Data generation in web hosting will benefit from A.I. to by having reports better analyzed over a long period and then with the data received and sent helping to clarify any adjustments that need to be made or changes in direction with any number of different metrics and so forth. Better analyzing of purchase and repetition rates, the cost of procurement, and much more will be improved by utilizing artificial intelligence.

Improved domain name performance will be part of this too, with better research and intuition on how well domain names will perform later on by observing traffic and conversion rates. Other aspects such as the substance’s composition will undoubtedly influence site execution, but this information will help them determine which approach yields the best results for their target audience.

Even Better Uptime Guarantees

Artificial intelligence (AI) can help service providers like us in this way too, with AI improving web hosting uptime reliability by intelligently suggesting what is needed to optimal system redesigns, recognizing any example within a framework and recalling it at any time or place as needed and taking any and pretty much all guesswork out of the equation.

One absolutely huge factor that we can by and large count on at this point is A.I. better anticipating increases in website traffic during peak hours. That alone is going to be HUGE for improving uptime reliability all across the board.

Automated Self-Maintenance

A.I. is also going to factor strongly into web hosting services by providing smarter and more focused improves to website infrastructure and optimizing protocols for how computerized data is going to be used. It will be helping to fix and maintain the structure on its own and this ‘self-healing’ will allows hosts to check the framework to see if there are any issues before they arise and then taking preventative measures as needed.

We can look forward to A.I. enhancing security, automating system preparation, improving thwarting of malware and viruses, and overall improving web hosting services in Canada and everywhere else in the world as well.

4GoodHosting wishes all of you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year and we’ll see you next week for our first entry of 2023.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

You’ve probably heard the cooling fan in your desktop or notebook whirring feverishly on more than occasion, and the truth is that computing devices are overheating more often that ever before these days. Those fans are really working overtime as the devices themselves are being put through their paces especially hard, and in the bigger picture of things the technology they’re being made to accommodate is pushing them like they haven’t been pushed before.

But as the expression goes, you’re not going to stop progress and so those demands aren’t going anywhere. Devices are going to be getting hot and overheating, so what’s the solution for that if there is one at all? Innovation always goes right along with progress fortunately and what we have on the immediate horizon right now is something called momentum computing. We’ll get into what that is with this blog entry, but what it does is provide a cooling solution that’s a roundabout benefit that comes with a revolutionary way of handling computing requests.

This is something that is going to be of interest to any other reliable Canadian web hosting provider in the same way it for us at 4GoodHosting. That’s because large-scale applications of this same issue – namely data center cooling – is always front and center for all of us. So what exactly is this momentum computing, and what’s to be made of it?

Countering Heat

With computer circuitry becoming smaller and more densely packed all the time it becomes more prone to melting from the energy it dissipates as heat. But there is a new way of carrying out computation that has the added benefit of dissipating a much better amount of the heat produced by conventional circuits. Expanding on what they understand of this now could bring heat dissipation capacities in computing down below what are the theoretical minimums understood now.

We’ll keep the tech part of this to a minimum, but a conventional computer sometimes has to erase bits of information in its memory circuits to make space for more. When a bit is reset, a certain minimum amount of energy is dissipated and at a value depending on the ambient. The unit of measurement for this dissipation factor is a Landauer, and a Landauer’s limit on how little heat a computation produces can be undercut by not erasing any information.

The key is that these computations done this way are fully reversible because throwing no information away means that each step can be retraced. But to avoid transferring any heat in what is called an adiabatic process, the computation and its operations must be carried out extremely slowly. Frictional heating is avoided this way, and it is frictional heating that is making that cooling fan of yours run like crazy like it is these days.

The cost of avoiding this type of overheating is having it take infinitely long to complete the calculation, but this is where momentum computing is set to change things for the better – and cooler.

New Encoding Method

The key to momentum computing – in this regard at least – is encoding information in electric currents in a new way and not as pulses of charge but in the momentum of the moving particles. The key concept is that a particle’s momentum can provide a free memory of sorts by providing information about the particle’s past and future motion, not just its instantaneous state. This extra information can then be leveraged for reversible computing. And with more reversible computing comes MUCH less frictional heat.

Momentum computing looks to be something of an outgrowth of a reversible-computing concept called ballistic computing that was proposed in the 1980s where information is encoded in objects or particles that move freely through the circuits under their own inertia. When particles interact elastically with others they don’t lose any energy in the process and this means less energy is available to manifested into frictional heat.

The belief in the industry is that small, low-dissipation momentum-computing JJ circuits could be feasible within a few years, and then with full microprocessors enabled with momentum computing debuting within this decade. We may see consumer-grade momentum computing realizing energy-efficiency gains of 1,000-fold or more over current approaches. That will mean much less overheating as computing devices work as hard as they are going to be continued to ask to, and the technology will certainly carry over to web hosting data center cooling too which will make it easier for folks like us to continue to do what we do for you without some of the major challenges faced – overheated data centers certainly being one of them

Reading Time: 4 minutes

One truism that is valid all over the place nowadays is that space is at a premium. That can be for anything from parking on residential streets in the suburbs to the way major metro cities have no choice to be growing upwards rather than outwards. That is certainly macro level stuff, but if we’re going to look at it in the context of computing and data storage requirements it’s fair to say this is macro level too.

As the business (and personal) world shifts to be increasingly digital all the time there are ever-greater demands for data storage, and creating ever-more physical storage with massive data centers and the like was never going to be doable.

That reality is a big part of why there was the push to develop the solution that cloud computing eventually became. Anyone and everyone will know what cloud storage is nowadays, and most people will be using it in some way or another. Look no further than Google Docs or OneDrive for most of us, and the way businesses are taking advantage of cloud storage is definitely an instance where innovation is meeting BIG necessity.

Without it there simply wouldn’t be enough physical storage available for even half the need that business all over the world would be creating nowadays. This is something that we can certainly relate to here at 4GoodHosting as a good Canadian web hosting provider, as like any we have firsthand experience with the need to increase data center capacity and all the goes along with that.

We’re in the business of providing it through web hosting though, while nearly all other businesses will be in a situation where they need to be utilizing it. Cloud computing is there for that utilization, and a lot of work has gone into making it accessible to the extent it is. But now there are trends in cloud computing that are very much set to impact business operations, and that’s what we’re going to look at here with this week’s entry.

File Storage / Creation Foremost

Cloud computing has boomed over the last few years, with global spending on services reaching near 46 billion in the first financial quarter of 2022. A major survey found the increased use of cloud services primarily comes from storing and creating files and office documents and this is why so many businesses are looking to incorporate cloud storage technology into their operations.

These are the four primary trends being seen:

Hybrid & Multi-Cloud

No 2 systems are the same in the Cloud. There will be some that work best for a particular function or process but don’t cover every needs any one business may have. Often using more than one cloud system is the solution for this reason.

 

Hybrid and multi-cloud structures are increasingly well suited to meet this need. Multi-cloud means using different public services from several providers to cover what you need. They are not always easy to manage, but with them you can take the best parts of the top cloud solutions on the market and make a system that meets your needs. You’ll have increased options for customization and there’s also less chance you’ll be locked into one vendor.

The difference with a hybrid cloud setup is that they include a private cloud server managed on-site as part of the combination. You will be investing in and using a publicly available cloud server as well as building an in-house infrastructure and they will be designed to work in tandem for optimal application. Public cloud software does have the issue of data bottlenecks when large numbers of people using it at the same, but the cost savings it can offer are a big plus always.

Serverless Computing

Every business wants to get maximum value for every dollar they’re spending on operations. This is always true if you’re trusting another company with something as important as the servers that host your website. Companies that have built applications may require a server to host it, and spending a lot of money to make sure its infrastructure is secure is not uncommon. The fix can be serverless computing.

This method of backend service means that you’re only paying for that data you use, and this ups cost-effectiveness in a big way. The vendor handles the infrastructure of the servers is, so developers don’t have to worry about scaling too much and can put the majority of their focus on development.

Cloud Security

Few issues if any demand as much focus as Cyber security when it comes to the adoption of any new technology that may increase the risk of shortcomings with it. Businesses and even governments with any online presence or connection to the internet are nearly always at risk of being ‘hacked’ and having information stolen or accounts hijacked.

There has been a genuine focus on cloud security and real progress has been made in this area over the last few years. It has been advanced to the point that any potential damage to business is quite small when exposed to the inherent risks that come with storing data in the cloud. There is more available for companies in the way of training that includes how to identify and avoid potential threats or the inclusion of awareness messaging.

Automation

A key purpose of technology has always been to simplify and streamline processes where a lot of manual input is required. This automation can also be applied to cloud software, and when it is implemented to your servers this can mean that the infrastructure is adjusted automatically so that developers or engineers don’t have to devote any of their own time to doing it manually.

This is beneficial for the systems in several ways. Automation improves security by removing the human error of multiple engineers and IT technicians from the process of checking important systems that could be vulnerable to malicious activity when exposed on the Web. Updates and backups are also made significantly more efficient once they’re put in place and ideally automated, as they can carry out both functions without the need for human interaction.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

One truism that is valid all over the place nowadays is that space is at a premium. That can be for anything from parking on residential streets in the suburbs to the way major metro cities have no choice to be growing upwards rather than outwards. That is certainly macro level stuff, but if we’re going to look at it in the context of computing and data storage requirements it’s fair to say this is macro level too.

As the business (and personal) world shifts to be increasingly digital all the time there are ever-greater demands for data storage, and creating ever-more physical storage with massive data centers and the like was never going to be doable.

That reality is a big part of why there was the push to develop the solution that cloud computing eventually became. Anyone and everyone will know what cloud storage is nowadays, and most people will be using it in some way or another. Look no further than Google Docs or OneDrive for most of us, and the way businesses are taking advantage of cloud storage is definitely an instance where innovation is meeting BIG necessity.

Without it there simply wouldn’t be enough physical storage available for even half the need that business all over the world would be creating nowadays. This is something that we can certainly relate to here at 4GoodHosting as a good Canadian web hosting provider, as like any we have firsthand experience with the need to increase data center capacity and all the goes along with that.

We’re in the business of providing it through web hosting though, while nearly all other businesses will be in a situation where they need to be utilizing it. Cloud computing is there for that utilization, and a lot of work has gone into making it accessible to the extent it is. But now there are trends in cloud computing that are very much set to impact business operations, and that’s what we’re going to look at here with this week’s entry.

File Storage / Creation Foremost

Cloud computing has boomed over the last few years, with global spending on services reaching near 46 billion in the first financial quarter of 2022. A major survey found the increased use of cloud services primarily comes from storing and creating files and office documents and this is why so many businesses are looking to incorporate cloud storage technology into their operations.

These are the four primary trends being seen:

Hybrid & Multi-Cloud

No 2 systems are the same in the Cloud. There will be some that work best for a particular function or process but don’t cover every needs any one business may have. Often using more than one cloud system is the solution for this reason.

 

Hybrid and multi-cloud structures are increasingly well suited to meet this need. Multi-cloud means using different public services from several providers to cover what you need. They are not always easy to manage, but with them you can take the best parts of the top cloud solutions on the market and make a system that meets your needs. You’ll have increased options for customization and there’s also less chance you’ll be locked into one vendor.

The difference with a hybrid cloud setup is that they include a private cloud server managed on-site as part of the combination. You will be investing in and using a publicly available cloud server as well as building an in-house infrastructure and they will be designed to work in tandem for optimal application. Public cloud software does have the issue of data bottlenecks when large numbers of people using it at the same, but the cost savings it can offer are a big plus always.

Serverless Computing

Every business wants to get maximum value for every dollar they’re spending on operations. This is always true if you’re trusting another company with something as important as the servers that host your website. Companies that have built applications may require a server to host it, and spending a lot of money to make sure its infrastructure is secure is not uncommon. The fix can be serverless computing.

This method of backend service means that you’re only paying for that data you use, and this ups cost-effectiveness in a big way. The vendor handles the infrastructure of the servers is, so developers don’t have to worry about scaling too much and can put the majority of their focus on development.

Cloud Security

Few issues if any demand as much focus as Cyber security when it comes to the adoption of any new technology that may increase the risk of shortcomings with it. Businesses and even governments with any online presence or connection to the internet are nearly always at risk of being ‘hacked’ and having information stolen or accounts hijacked.

There has been a genuine focus on cloud security and real progress has been made in this area over the last few years. It has been advanced to the point that any potential damage to business is quite small when exposed to the inherent risks that come with storing data in the cloud. There is more available for companies in the way of training that includes how to identify and avoid potential threats or the inclusion of awareness messaging.

Automation

A key purpose of technology has always been to simplify and streamline processes where a lot of manual input is required. This automation can also be applied to cloud software, and when it is implemented to your servers this can mean that the infrastructure is adjusted automatically so that developers or engineers don’t have to devote any of their own time to doing it manually.

This is beneficial for the systems in several ways. Automation improves security by removing the human error of multiple engineers and IT technicians from the process of checking important systems that could be vulnerable to malicious activity when exposed on the Web. Updates and backups are also made significantly more efficient once they’re put in place and ideally automated, as they can carry out both functions without the need for human interaction.