Category: Domain Related

July 18, 2022

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Improving energy storage technology is very much a part of what is going to required of humanity if we are to adhere to the eco-protection goals that are important to all countries, or at least that’s what they’re claiming. Solar has always had the potential to be a part of that, but until recently there hasn’t been the level of focus there needs to be on integrating it to the extent it needs to be. That is changing, and the best example of that will be how many people you see with solar panels on their homes recharging the Tesla or other electric vehicle in their home. But solar cell technology has had its limitations. Until now that is, or at least possibly. If you think Perovskite is the name of a Slavic rare-earth mineral you’re excused, but what we’re talking about here are 30-year Perovskite solar cells. They’re the key to an emerging class of solar energy technology, and by proving they’re capable of a 30-year working lifetime they are set to change the parameters of what solar technology is capable of. Plus meaning a lot more in the way of environmental friendliness and way less in the way of harmful practices to get the components required to build solar batteries. Here at 4GoodHosting we’re like any other good Canadian web hosting provider in that we can see the wide-reaching benefits this may foster, and we can relate in a sense in that any way you can make powering data centres more efficient is going to be music to our ears. And likewise for a lot of people who have their work and livelihood in the digital space. So let’s have a look at these new solar cells with our entry this week. Serious Lasting Power We have engineers at Princeton University to thank for this offering, and the first perovskite solar cell with a commercially viable lifetime now marks a major milestone for an emerging class of renewable energy technology. Twenty years was the previous viability threshold for solar cells, but now they’ve added a decade on top of that potentially. They are set to rival the performance...

July 11, 2022

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Everyone has their own areas of expertise, and there will always be others who are savvier than you when it comes to a certain subject. There are plenty of people who possess a lot of business savvy, but when it comes positioning their business in the digital space, they are quick to admit that’s not their forte. They delegate that part of their operations to someone who does have the needed know how, and they’re much better off for it. Making the right decisions in that sphere is more important than ever these days though, as so many businesses have a lot riding on their online presence. Choosing a domain is part of that, but it’s not as difficult a choice as choosing whether or not you’ll have more than one of them. Here at 4GoodHosting we’re like any Canadian web hosting provider in that domains are very much our specialty, and one thing we know is that business owners often come to a point where they need to decide if they’ll be using multiple domains for more than one website for their business. There are advantages to that, and disadvantages too so what we’ll do with our entry this week is compare them and hopefully put your more in the know if you need to make a similar decision for yourself. Securing & Supplementation Many times, this is done because there is a need to pointing or redirecting multiple domain names to one or two websites only. In this situation the additional domains are serving to secure business name or supplementing type-in traffic. Additional domains here may be good if you have a product or service that appeals to different audiences. Having one for each target audience makes it possible to customize the messaging, sales materials, and other marketing strategies that will be more conducive to obtaining certain type of potential customers. On the other side of that, multiple domains can be detrimental to page rankings. Many still park multiple domains as aliases for their main website, but that is less and less common these days and for good reason. One thing we can tell you with authority is...

July 4, 2022

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Some of you may not remember it, but there was once a time when you could create any password you liked and it did not have to include any capped letters or numbers at all. You could add them if you like, but they certainly weren’t necessary. Most of you will be able to tell us why it became necessary to add them, but for those who don’t it’s entirely because passwords are much more easily hacked than they used to be. That of course goes step in step with the growth of cyber security threats of all sorts, and all of this complexity goes along with the fact that we all have more passwords than we’ve ever had before. You’ll be able to say the exact same thing at this time next year, and the year after that. Some people aren’t trusting enough and will use a password manager app like RoboForm or something similar. But the majority of us are trusting enough to let Google Password Manager handle the task the majority of the time. There may be a few entryways that are more sensitive than others, and they do always give you the option of whether you want Google to do the managing (and remembering) of that password. Now if there’s any who keep all of their passwords scribbled onto a piece of paper and tucked into their wallet we’d love to hear of it, but here at 4GoodHosting we are like any good Canadian web hosting provider in that we and everyone we know are perfectly happy to let CPUs handle that. And that leads to today’s entry topic, where we’ll talk about how the new Google Password Manager is improved to the extent that even the most distrusting of us should give it a try. Superior Management The overhaul to the Google Passwords platform we are discussing here is part of Google Chrome, and it was announced less than a week ago. What the overhaul is promising to do is allow Android and the Chrome browser password management to communicate within each other, detect passwords that have been security breached, plus better and more intuitive...

June 27, 2022

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

None of us were alive when Greek Mythology was in its heyday, but if you were you’d certainly now that Cerberus was the 3-headed dog that guarded the gates to Hades. Sure, there will be a few history buffs alive today that know of this mythological creature, but it really is a shame that generally speaking humans don’t read books like they used to. But enough about that, this blog is about anything and everything related to web hosting and / or computer development so fair to ask where we’re going with this. No one at Cerebras Systems has more than one head and will never have been anywhere near any entrance to the Underworld. But Cerebras does have the distinction of being the maker of the world’s largest processor. And if you’re an engineer who works with development in AI then you may well think they’ve outdone themselves with their newest offering to the development world. Do a little research into AI and you’ll learn that the capacity it has is entirely based on being able to add more parameters to it. 20 billion is a big number, and so the reason this news around the CS-2 system and WSE-2 chip is so big is because that the newest offering from Cerebras is able to train AI models with up to 20 billion parameters. This is the ultimate in optimization at the software level, and that’s why it is something that a top Canadian web hosting provider like those of us here at 4GoodHosting are going to take an interest in. Like most, we have a nice front row seat for everything that major advances in computing technology have promise for doing for us. So let’s use this week’s entry to have a much deeper look into these CS-2 devices. Long before AI technology becomes commonplace in darn near everything of course, but it’s good to be early rather than late. No More Mass Partitioning What this all promises to do is resolve one of the most frustrating problems for AI engineers. That being the need to partition large-scale models across thousands of GPUs in order to facilitate full...

June 20, 2022

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

If you’re from these parts of North America you won’t soon forget how the weather was about exactly a year ago from now. Late June of 2021 saw the West Coast hit with a heatwave that put every other one EVER before it to shame with just how incredibly hot it got. The mercury soared to well over 40 degrees in most places and one location not too far from here recorded the hottest temperature in Canadian history. To say it was sweltering hot would be an understatement, and unfortunately it seems that we’re all living in a much, much warmer world than we used to. We are not going to segue into discussing climate change and / or global warming here, but what we will do is say that it is not just us humans and the animals around us that stand to be worse for wear because of extreme temperatures. Turns out they can be plenty harmful for the digital devices a lot of us rely on for work, and the same ones that nearly all of us will use for entertainment even if we don’t spend our workday in front of monitors and a keyboard. There a reason most GPUs come with the own radiator and cooling fan, and we’ve all heard our CPU or notebook whirring when it needs to cool itself down. This is a topic of interest for us here at 4GoodHosting, and we are like any reliable Canadian web hosting provider in that just like many of you we are mix of both those scenarios and if it’s not the desktop or notebook that is being put through its paces it is the mobile. Such is the way with modern life for a lot of us, and anything that puts the operations of that in jeopardy is going to have a target on its back. There’s all sorts of buzz around malware and DDoS attacks and the likes these days, but what about temperature extremes? Components Kept Cool Processors and graphics cards are very sensitive to heat, which is why ensuring they have the ability to stay cool when the temperature around them...

June 13, 2022

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

\ It’s pretty rare to be entirely satisfied with something, and there’s usually always little things that irk you when it comes to whatever it is. And all that despite being overall fairly satisfied with the experience of it. When it comes to web browsing, it is likely that most people will say it’s the pop ups that annoy them most, and for people who have health concerns that have connections to optic nerve overstimulation they can be more than just a nuisance. There’s no getting around the need for revenue, so unfortunately pop ups and the like aren’t going anywhere. But the web development giants of the world have made the efforts to improve the experience when using their web browsers over the years. Real improvements haven’t been fast to arrive, and in many ways that’s because the imperfections of browsers like Edge, Firefox, and Chrome are tolerable in the big picture of everything. So with that understood we can assume that anything that does make news when it comes to an improved web browsing experience has to be something rather big and significant. And it is here with Google making it clear that they are now making real strides implanting machine learning into the function of their flagship Chrome browser. A browser that – as many of you will know – is far and away the one of-choice for most people around the world. And here at 4GoodHosting we’re like most good Canadian web hosting providers in that we feel similarly, and we’re like anyone anywhere for whom a more enjoyable and tailored web browsing experience is going to sound plenty good. So let’s dig into this here today as it’s something that likely all of us are going to benefit from in the more long-term picture around this. Specific Task Focuses It was in a recent blog post that Google announced the rolling out of new features to Chrome via ‘on device’ machine learning. Improving a person’s browsing experience is the goal, by adding several new ML (machine learning) models that will focus on different tasks this will be made possible. For starters, ‘web notifications’ will be...

June 6, 2022

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Most people won’t have heard of power dressing, or if they have they’ll assume it’s a term related to style choices for people who want to make the right impression in business. We will freely admit we’ve never heard of it in either context, but it seems as if the clothing that can power devices is in fact going to be joining the many rather stunning technological advances that have been made over recent years. Indeed, portable power banks in purses have been extremely helpful for people who tend to really put certain devices through their paces during the day, but can we think that they might be replaced en masse by garments? Well, apparently they may be and what we are talking about here is a flexible waterproof fabric that is built to convert body movement into electrical energy for powering those devices. So if you’re wondering if we’re talking about a pair of pants that powers you up the more you walk – that’s exactly what we are talking about here! It really is quite the eye-opener to dig up all the technological advancements that are occurring in the world, and what we do here each week puts us directly in line to do that. This is the sort of news that is intriguing for any good Canadian web hosting provider, and obviously that’s because it is going to have an immediate appeal for everyone and not just those who are especially digitally and web savvy, or even a person who relies on someone like us for reliable web hosting. If motion can mean recharging, who’s not going to see the upside in that? Press on Polymer If what we’ve read about this is correct, this really is some cool technology in the making and as the researchers in Singapore have noted it is set up to be particularly ideal for people with wearable smart devices that have more in the way of ongoing power needs and / or aren’t quite as easy to be recharging regularly. The key ingredient in this powering fabric is a polymer that when pressed or squeezed takes vibrations produced by the smallest...

May 30, 2022

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

A cobbler is the person who will repair a shoe, although it is increasingly rare that anyone gets a pair of shoes repaired these days. In fact most shoes aren’t even made with any real possibility of reattaching a sole or anything similar. In the 21st century you can even say it’s more likely that someone will be putting those same energies into some type of digitally-built tool or resource and one that people will likely get a lot of mileage out of as compared to an inexpensive pair of sneakers. ‘Cobbling’ in that sense is putting together a collection of disparate tools and then making them works as well as can be expected when working with web development. That’s our roundabout way of introducing platform engineering, which if you haven’t heard of it is likely to be the next big thing in development and a means of bringing technologies together with more functional compatibility for builds that come together with a) much more speed, and b) a whole lot more in the way of getting to a ‘finished’ product sooner. What this stands to be replacing is the way the different home-grown self service frameworks have – for the most part – shown themselves to be brittle, high maintenance, and often way to expensive when the entirety of everything is taken into account. We’ll get into the meat of what more may be possible with this here, but it goes without saying that here at 4GoodHosting we’re like any other quality Canadian web hosting provider in seeing how this may be a very relevant technological development for the people who do the work behind the scenes that make our digital world what it is and made available with all it’s capable of doing. Interesting stuff for sure. Engineering Made Common More succinctly, platform engineering is the practice of building and operating a common platform made available for internal development teams for sharing and using with relation to software release acceleration. The belief is that it will bridge the gap between software and hardware and platform engineers will enable application developers to release more innovative software in less time with...

May 24, 2022

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Long gone are the days when you actually had to have a captive individual in order to demand a ransom. Nowadays that would even be very uncommon, as much more often it is digital property rather than a person that’s been captured and the takers are looking to get paid if that property is to be released. We’ve gone on here at some length about how costly it can be for some companies when they choose to be lax about cybersecurity, and especially nowadays. The age old dance with all of this remains the same - security improves, threats evolve, security improves to counter those evolutions, and then threats evolve again. And of course it’s the bigger fish that need to be concerned about frying. If you’re one the smaller side of the scale when it comes to running a business you probably won’t get targeted, but there’s still not guarantee you won’t be. We don’t claim to be web security experts, but here at 4GoodHosting we’re like any good Canadian web hosting provider in that we can point you in the direction of one of them if that’s what you need. We do have an understanding of the basics on the subject and that’s part of the reason why we’re fairly keen to share any news related to it here, especially when it means even better means of avoiding a ransom situation. So what is newsworthy here is a new technology that is in the process of proving itself to be MUCH faster for identifying ransomware attacks and detecting them early enough so that countermeasures can be implemented - something that will be part of a complete cybersecurity plan that is a much for any business that is of a sufficient size that there’s potentially serious loss if data is accessed and then taken for ransom. Malware Meeting Match? A new approach for implementing ransomware detection techniques has been developed by researchers, and the appeal of it is that is able to detect a broad range of ransomware far more quickly than using previous systems. We will at this point assume we don’t need to provide much of an...