Category: Domain Related

May 7, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

A.I. is definitely one acronym that needs no explanation, and particularly if you’re deeply immersed in the modern digital world. Artificial Intelligence is the great new frontier, and while we all know well of Siri and Alexa, etc. etc., there’s really so much more to the trend and what it will mean for us in the not so distant future. It’s now clear that A.I. is being implemented practically, and for a premier Canadian web hosting provider like ourselves that’s really exactly what we were hoping to hear. We can now expect that AI will not only revolutionize the mobile industry, but also greatly influence the way mobile apps are marketed in the coming years. A.I. employs machine learning to analyze data and differentiate that data into accurate or inaccurate based on specific ‘truth tables’ and calculations made. The result is a more thorough approach to decisions in all domains, and the marketing of mobile apps is included in that. The strategy for mobile app marketers then becomes whether they should incorporate the vast potential of AI to qualify user behaviour automatically, predict buying behaviours, offer recommendations to users by taking previous purchase data into account, and making tthe app’s content more engaging. Mobile app advertisers can clearly see the immense potential and need for AI in mobile app marketing, and ways they can deploy it for best results. Here’s how: Automated reasoning ability of A.I. A.I. has now empowered apps to engage in independent deductive reasoning. Paired with machine learning, it holds the promise of enabling new apps that possess a human-like ability to judge themselves, completely independent of human input and instead based in computer science and mathematical logic. This is artificial intelligence at its most powerful, as it helps the user to achieve their goal in a much easier and speedy way. Programming these apps using A.I. allows them to analyze the actions of the users while they engage with the app, and then providing them with smart directions based on the analysis of any number of relevant factors. Users then benefit from a more customized and personalized experience, rather than any standard one-for-all solution. One example...

May 1, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Even the least tech-savvy individuals will likely have heard of firewalls, and understand the purpose they serve in keeping computers safe from becoming attacked or debilitated by external sources. For a long period of time, firewalls tended to be pleasantly reliable for the most part, and would defend against the entry of malicious threats to the unit itself or the network it was a part of. Like any solid Canadian web hosting provider, those of us here at 4GoodHosting don’t need to be convinced of the need for these safeguards. However, given the nature of our business we’re also front and center for seeing how firewalls aren’t the far-reaching and reliable solution they once were. A new report called the Dirty Secrets of Network Firewalls has found that one-in-four IT managers could not identify around 70% of network traffic, and that on average 45% of network traffic goes unidentified. The most crucial finding of the survey, however, was that most firewalls were failing to do their job adequately. Along with this ever-growing lack of visibility into network traffic comes a more threatening reality of these individuals not being able to control what they can’t see. 84% of the IT professionals who responded admitted to having real concerns about security due to lack of visibility into network traffic. A similar percentage of those same respondents agreed that lack of application visibility was a serious security concern for businesses and could impact effective network management. The results of such looseness? Ransomware, malware, data breaches and other advanced threats for starters. Reasons for Less Reliability Major increases in the use of encryption, browser emulation, and advanced evasion techniques are the primary factors that detract from a network firewall’s ability to provide a sufficient amount of visibility when it comes to application traffic. The report also states that organizations spend an average of seven working days remediating infected machines each month. Even small-sized enterprises spent an average of five working days on average doing the same thing. Larger ones? Try an average of ten working days to remediate 20 machines per month. That’s a sign of both ineffectiveness and forced inefficiency, to say nothing...

April 23, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

These days most of us won’t pay much attention to a collection of seemingly random letter and numbers with dashes, but when it comes to this one - CVE 2018-0950 - anyone using Microsoft Outlook email may want to pay a little more of it. CVE 2018-0950 is the name that’s been given to an information disclosure vulnerability of Outlook, and Microsoft released a vulnerability patch this month. Every quality Canadian web hosting provider takes the initiative to keep their customers informed in these scenarios, and we’re no different here at 4GoodHosting. This one in fact is particularly noteworthy with the fact that Outlook is one of the most popular and common email applications. Given the nature of this flaw and the reality that much personal information can be contained in email communications, this one isn’t one to be taken lightly The release of the patch mentioned above, however, came nearly more than 18 months after receiving the report that disclosed the bug, courtesy of one Will Dormann, a software vulnerability analyst with Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute’s CERT Coordination Center. This vulnerability can make it so that sensitive information is then disclosed to a malicious site. Obviously, Microsoft Outlook users need to be aware of this vulnerability and what safeguards are best to neutralize the risk. Leak Bug Threat Analysis CVE2018-0950 affects Microsoft Outlook software, and specifically by rendering Rich Text Format (RTF) email messages that contain remotely hosted OLE objects hosted on SMB (Server Message Block) server (under the control of attackers). The situation is that when other Microsoft applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint encounter remotely hosted OLE objects, the user is notified as a security caution before thos messages are rendered. Here though, Outlook took no such action and allowed attackers to have an easy access to the user’s system when they opened or previewed such mails. The resultant vulnerability makes it possible for hackers to steal sensitive information. Windows login credentials or hashed passwords are at risk of being revealed, and done by sending an RTF-formatted email to a victim and convincing the recipient to preview or open that email with Microsoft Outlook. It’s...

April 10, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The continuing boom in digital technologies - and in particular for mobile video streaming and online gaming - now has mobile devices making up nearly 60 percent of the entirety of data traffic. Come 2020 that’s expected to rise to 80 percent and it’s an indication of how totally wired we’ll all look to be in the not so distant future. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re in a spot like any other Canadian web hosting provider where we see the incredible benefits this type of mobile connectivity is going to provide for us, but we’re also obviously aware of the operation challenges that these data demands are going to put on data centers across Canada. Every online activity involves massive amounts of data that’s stored in different data centers, and while there’s many different sizes of them it is the large data centers that may overheat on account of the billions of gigabytes of data being created and used all around the world. Data centers and their IT equipment – servers, networking and storage equipment - consume mammoth amounts of energy to run AND work to cool the heat which emanates from the IT equipment going at or near capacity much of the time. In fact, cooling is far and away the biggest consumer of electrical power in nearly all data center, and sometimes they may take up to 40 or 50 percent of all the power being used in certain ones. Here’s something else to consider; this round-the-clock global data center energy consumption eats up roughly 3% of all globally generated power, and makes up 4% of greenhouse gas emissions. That puts the ICT industry at par with the airline industry in as far as those emissions, but it’s the data centers that are said to have the fastest growing carbon footprint among the entire ICT sector - to the tune of almost 1/4 of global carbon dioxide emissions from ICT. There have been energy efficiency improvements, but it’s predicted that data center energy use will grow by 4% between 2014 and 2020. Technological Advances in Cooling The biggest change from recent years is that demand for data centers among...

April 2, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

When you set out to build a website and - in the bigger picture of things - an online identity you are probably going to focus most on layout, graphics, content, SEO, marketing, and advertising. These are all vital components of a good website, but it turns out that where you choose to host your website also factors in as well. Here at 4GoodHosting, so much has gone into making us a top Canadian web hosting provider, but without a doubt seeing to it that our clients and their websites are optimally located and enabled has always been a priority. We definitely understand that before you choose your website’s design or content, you need to choose a good web host who’s got the infrastructure in place to protect your rankings. One of the factors Google and other search engines look for when indexing web pages is how fast they load. Now while it’s true that a good Canadian web host won’t necessarily get your website listed on Google’s first page, it is true that a lesser host will ruin your credit with Google and other search engines. Between a provider’s server type, location, speed, and uptime there can be an affect on your website’s relevance with search engines. It’s definitely something to consider. Here are five web host traits that search engines that Google will see unfavourably for search engine rankings. Slow Speeds This one’s probably fairly obvious. A website that is clocked to load slowly will be disadvantaged. Search engines aren’t going to rank your website high in the search results when it’s too slow, and that’s in the interest of keeping visitors on a page. Most site visitors will click off a website if the page is too slow to load. Between 7 and 10 milliseconds is considered to be the optimal speed, but anything over 100 milliseconds isn’t good. Your homepage should load in under 1 second, and there are many ways to test this. Google ‘free website speed checker’ and you should be able to find them easily. Excess Downtime Even the fastest loading website is going to be disadvantageous if it’s down too often. When...

March 27, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Data center outsourcing has really cemented itself all over the planet as a viable alternative to the demands of building and managing an in-house data center facility. Recent research results bear this out quite clearly. A study undertaken by a reputable firm last month predicts that the global market for colocation data center services should grow from $30.9 billion in 2016 to approximately $54.8 billion by 2020. Obviously there are factors driving organizations to outsource their data centers to professional colocation partners, but what are those factors exactly? Here at 4GoodHosting, we understand that part of being a Canadian web hosting provider at the forefront of the industry means being receptive and adaptive to trends in web hosting. This is certainly one of them, and it thus hasn’t gone unnoticed here. We think it’s one that may be helpful for those with big data accommodation needs of their own and a need to understand where they’ll get the most bang for their buck. Getting back to that study, the Americas as a segment is expected to grow from nearly $16.8 billion in 2016 to $26.4 billion by 2020, with the period of 2016 to 2020 seeing in the vicinity of a 12% cumulative annual growth rate. Asia-Pacific is expected to grow from $5.4 billion in 2016 to $13.2 billion by 2020, at a much higher CAGR of 25.0% for the same time period (2016-2020). Not surprisingly, cost has always been a big factor behind data center outsourcing and it will remain a key element driving the outsourcing of data centers to colocation providers. We also have the fact that customers are concentrating more and more on the value of the colocation services being provided, as well as the appeal of being able to reduce certain risks. Here are the five top reasons pushing ever greater numbers of customers to outsource their data center operations these days: Cost CIOs for some time now have been under constant pressure to reduce all costs associated with IT operations, and - again not surprisingly - running an in-house data center is decidedly expensive. There’s not getting around it. The level of investment required to...

March 20, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Most of us that long understood that while donuts are decidedly tasty, they’re equally as surely detrimental to anyone who could stand to lose a little around the middle. But it would seem that our understanding of donuts now needs the be extended beyond baked goods. donut domains are actually one of the hottest new developments in the domain name industry, and they don’t fall into any sort of a ‘moment on your lips, lifetime on your hips’ category for tasty but terrible sweets. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re not unlike any other leading Canadian web hosting provider in that we’re very much aware of donut domains. The average person, however, probably isn’t aware of them even though they’ve likely seen them often before as they’ve explored the web. We’re a long way from the days when .com was the only domain extension to be had, and it seems there’s another addition to the selection. Today we’ll look at premium Donuts domains. What are they, Why are they used, and how do you get one - without even the slightest reference to dietary concerns. Let’s get at it. Donuts Domains Defined Go back to the beginning of the internet and websites have since either been part of a top-level domain or TLD. The TLD is the last part of the website’s address, and of course the most well known and popular TLD has been .com. The majority of the biggest websites on the planet use this TLD, and our home site here is no exception. Specific country codes are the other popular TLDs, like .co.uk, .co.za in South Africa and .ng in Nigeria. WE also have other popular and frequently seen TLDs like .org, .net, and .edu. Donuts domains have arrived on the scene and being ‘suitably disruptive’ to the status quo. Donuts domains have brought new TLDs to market, and they’re extremely distinctive. Below are some examples of TLDs you can use through a Donuts domain: .today .agency .life .games .solutions Going Bigger: Premium Donuts Domains Not surprisingly, all domain names are NOT created equally. Domain names that fit together especially well with their TLD are Premium Donut Domains, and...

March 13, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

2018 isn’t even at the quarter pole and the predicted trend of increase cyber attacks for they year is coming to actualization early on. The week past GitHub was the victim of the largest ever DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack ever recorded, which topped out at 1.3 terabits - or 126.9 million packets per second. It preceded the pervious record break which came just a week before when customers of a US-based service provider received a 1.7 Tbps attack. This is the new reality of the cyber world, unfortunately. Us here at 4GoodHosting are as keenly aware of what this may forecast for the future as any Canadian web hosting provider would be, and - to put it plainly and right to the point for those of you not familiar with how the Web works - a DDoS attack makes it so that hosted websites are rendered inaccessible for would-be visitors. These recent DDoS attacks were based on UDP (User Datagram Protocol) Memcachedd traffic, Memcached being a protocol used to cache data and reduce strain on heavy data stores like a disk or databases. It lets the server inquire about key value stores that are intended to be used on systems which will not be exposed on public internet. What attackers do is spoof the IP addresses of UDP traffic, and then directing the request to a vulnerable UDP server. The server prepares the responses as it does not know the request isn’t legit. The information is then delivered to an unsuspecting host, and you have a DDoS attack. What happened at GitHub last week was its servers ceased to respond for a few hours, until Akamai was able to filter out the malicious traffic from UDP port 11211 - the default port for memcached). The conclusions was that because of memcached’s reflection capabilities, similar attacks were likely to follow with the high data rate. Further, it is believed that many other and smaller organizations experienced similar reflection attacks over this same time period, and again it seems there could be many more, potentially larger attacks in the near future. A marked increase in scanning for open memcachedd servers...

March 6, 2018

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

With ever greater numbers of companies using big data, we’re definitely starting to see the benefits of their migrating to the public cloud. There are some challenges with it as well, but overall it would seem the good outweighs the not-so-good quite handily though, and the consensus seems to be that it is often a much more ideal environment for large-scale storage, remote access and all without the need for extensive physical infrastructure. Here at 4GoodHosting, in addition to being a leading Canadian web hosting provider we’re also equally as much of a cloud computing enthusiast as the rest of you. It’s hard not to be a fan of such a positive, game changing development in personal and business computing, and it seems that the shift to the public cloud is more sweeping every day. Cloud-based Big Data Rising Big Time A recent survey from Oracle found that 80% of companies intend to migrate their Big Data and analytics operations to the cloud. Powering this decision was the success that these companies have had when experimenting with Big Data analytics. Consider as well that over 90% of enterprises had carried out a big data initiative last year and in 80% of those instances the projects were seen to be very successful. Further driving the public cloud are the many IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions that are now offered by cloud vendors, and the way they are so much more cost effective in their setup and delivery. One of the main challenges with having data in-house is that it frequently involves the use of Hadoop. Apache’s open source software framework has revolutionized storage and Big Data processing, but in-house teams have challenges using it. Many businesses are therefore turning to cloud vendors able to provide Hadoop expertise along with other data processing options. The Benefits of Moving to the Public Cloud Tangible, immediate benefits are the number one reason for migrating. These include on-demand pricing, access to data stored anywhere, increased flexibility and agility, rapid provisioning and better overall management. Add the unparalleled scalability of the public cloud and it quickly becomes ideal for handling Big Data workloads. Businesses now instantly...