Category: Domain Related

March 31, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Canadians enjoy heading across the border for some great cross border shopping but, when choosing a web hosting company it is important to know what the differences between US and Canadian web hosting and what it can mean for your business. We are going to be looking at the differences in privacy between the two countries, the benefit of having your data near you, the benefit of being under your own nations law, the reason that you should be choosing local and of course the dangers of utilizing a US web hosting company, especially in regards to the DMCA concerns and lastly some added benefits of hosting within Canada. In the world of web hosting you have hundreds of options, and this article looks to show you why if you are a Canadian based business, having your web host based out of Canada is going to help your business succeed. Privacy We first start in the realm of privacy. Privacy is important, no matter what type of business you are running as proprietary information leaking to your competitors can mean the end to your success. However, how your information, and especially who has access to your information, is controlled is completely different between the two countries. In the United States their is practically no privacy protection for data owned by companies. There has been no comprehensive data protection legislation put through, and rather it relies on self regulation within the industry. The Patriot Act also allows federal authorities to block access to your data, as well as authorizes them to spy on you, through your site, all without a court order. On the other side of the 49th parallel personal data is regulated, and protects information for both individuals as well as businesses. This is from the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act passed through the Canadian government. In regards to your privacy, the only place to store it that is truly secure is right here in the Great White North. Data Location If you are looking for a fast loading time in San Diego, you store your websites information in San Diego, but if you are looking for...

March 24, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

At some points in your work with web page redirection, it can feel that you are simply dodging bombs and at your luck will eventually run out. Enter in the 301 redirect, and canonical options. These have been around for years, and yet throughout the industry they continue to bring debate and stir up questions on how to best approach them. In this article we will be looking at the two main methods to manage both the 301 redirect, as well the canonical attribute. Naturally, we will show you how to better the duplicate content issues, sustain your rankings and lastly how to improve the all important user experience. Before we dive in, lets make sure we are all on the same page with what the difference between 301 redirects and canonical redirects. In laymen terms: a 301 redirect communicates to search engines that this page is no longer here, and has permanently moved to a new page. Please remove it from your index and pass credit to the new page. a canonical redirect communicates to the search engine that, I have multiple versions of this page, but please only index this version. People can see the other versions, but please do not put them in your index thanks! 301 Redirects We have all seen the standard 301 HTTP status code that is mean to mange the complete and permanent redirection of page. Once this is established, in theory you will eventually pass the majority of the original page's link authority relevance as well as its ranking power to the page that you are redirecting to. A 301 redirect informs both the user and Google of this change. However, in realty we know that this can be trying process in which success is measured by increments rather than full authority all at once. Common issues with the 301 The first issue you may face is that it takes a long time, and I mean you are going to have to take a few turns of the calendar until some search engines will attribute authority to the redirected page. Naturally, this depends on how often your page is crawled by the...

March 4, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

According to the latest Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) one in five 18-34 year old Canadians have made a purchase on a mobile device. The CIRA announced its fourth annual .CA Factbook 2015 this last Tuesday, and within it the mobile device is becoming a central hub for ecommerce among the Canadian Youth. read_more Although the focus is on this trend, the .CA Factbook also presents the numerous statistics and findings that are related to the .CA TLD, which of course the CIRA administers, as well as Canadian internet practices and adoptions. As of 2013, over $136 million was sold in goods and services by Canadian enterprises, according to Statistics Canada, which is 11% increase from 2012. As well, the trend to buy local, or at least Canadian, as the majority of Canadians spending more money at domestic websites than international competitors. With this trend to buy Canadian, International enterprises may see a chance to increase sales by creating or partnering with Canadian sites. This potential increase, also points to this Canadian buying power as the future for ecommerce market, or at least those markets, like Canada, that have the level of internet development to allow it. Along with these statistics, CIRA also found that more and more Canadians are doing research online before coming into a store. As well, online and offline sales accounted for almost 25% of revenue by Canadian Enterprises. Canadians continue to utilize the internet to research, or complete their shopping and the importance of a effective online presence is paramount to a businesses success. David Fowler, who is the Director of Marketing and Communications for .CA summed it well, “ecommerce represents an important avenue of growth for Canadian companies. Our research found more than 40 percent of small businesses do not have websites, yet all Canadians, particularly younger adults, are increasingly making purchases from mobile devices. Canadian small business need to get online, and they need to be ready to sell on mobile.” This report also points out that 75% of Canadians now own smart phones, android, windows, blackberry or apple based, and of those 49% of their time online is spent while on their...

February 23, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

What happens if we simply allow governments to make all the regulations and rules, not us, and let corporations argue about it, not us? That would be the clear merger of state and corporate power, which are the only two ingredients in the recipe for fascism; which has always occurred through all of the past two centuries of history under similar circumstance. Our case in point for this article is: Google Claims Opposition to New (without public consent) Rule that Gives American Federal Judges and their Government Omnipresent-Global Search Warrant Powers. The American “Advisory Committee on the Rules of Criminal Procedure” is quietly and slying consider changing a rule would allow judges to issue “ global warrants” to search computers (ie. your/anyone’s computer) and networks which are outside of the judge’s district. So, they wish to give the already outrageous NSA-spylike powers to all of their federal judges? If so, shouldn’t the American people be having some say on that particular huge issue? But they seem so utterly passive. Do the American people really need a “congress” to echo their concerns and trust that their elected officials vote likewise -> when today people can theoretically all take a vote simultaneously on the internet? The simple point is that individual citizens should claim their right to express their opinion publicly or privately over the internet without government suppression of it, nor interference. And why should we care? Because what happens in America certainly affects us here too; especially when pertaining to the internet. Back to the current scoop... Google has again surprised us all by just suddenly announcing an always-untimely proposed change to a procedural rule; which the google representative says could have “profound implications for the privacy and security of all web users”. read_more Into the nitty-gritty - American Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41 dictates that federal judges cannot issue warrants to search things outside of their district, with specific exceptions. The US Department of Justice asked the Advisory Committee to make changes to allow the government to conduct “remote access” searches of content stored in a location “concealed through technological means,” { they are also saying they don’t...

February 16, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

This is a primer for most of you who are interested in but maybe still unfamiliar of what is meant by the the three letter acronym, SEO, which is short for "Search Engine Optimization"; its history and current day evolution. Over the past 25 years, the way we live and work has been utterly transformed by the creation and evolution of the world wide web or "internet". As the volume of online content has soared, search engines have become central and essential and critical to an infinite number of our online "web surfing" searches & experiences. SEO is an Internet marketing strategy, and takes into account how search engines are programmed (and updated) to function, what people are most likely to search for, the actual search phrases or keywords entered into search engines - and specific for each target audience. So let's quickly travel back a quarter-of-a-century to a time before tags, keywords, “backlinks”. clickthrus, and content optimization - to explore how SEO has changed and developed over time -> and what those changes now appear to tell us about the future! read_more 1991 : The first “website “goes live in a European research lab. The first webmaster goes down in history as “Tim Berners Lee”. With an immediate explosion in the number of websites, there's an increasingly pressing need to organize and index them. The earliest services to do this were “Archie” and “Gopher” — they were most primitive in how they worked, but both of those services are widely regarded as the first search engines. The “evolution” of Search Engines became: Altavista, LYCOS, Infoseek, , Excite, Ask Jeeves, Google, Yahoo Search, MSN, and Bing... There were various others such as search.com, but much less visible than the main group. As getting top or “1st page” listings has proven to be vitally important for any company marketing its products and services on the internet, SEO companies began to take root. A group at Search Engine Watch launched the Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES in 1996-1997). SES is still going strong today, with events all over the world frequently attended by thought leaders and industry experts. Now onto Google: Google...

February 9, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

This article is about how flash-based Solid-State Storage Drives, or SSDs, mass storage devices are designed and manufactured. A Solid-State Drive (SSD) is a type of data storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies in silicon memory to store data persistently. However it has no "drive" or motor, nor any actual moving parts. Pretty much just infinitesimally small electrons move around in a SSD drive. As of 2015, most SSDs use NAND-based flash memory, which retains data without power. Some major milestones have been: At Cebit 2009, OCZ Technology demonstrated the first 1 Terabyte (TB) flash SSD using an 8x PCI Express interface. It displayed a maximum write-speed of 654 megabytes per second (MB/s) and maximum read speed of 712 MB/s. In December 2009, America’s Micron Technology announced a SSD using a 6 giga-bits per second (Gbit/s) SATA connection interface. Here is a short video view into a Micro SSD factory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK-fXJnR5K0 Just 1G of storage take over 8 Billion transistors all wired up precisely without 1 wire out of place. As there are 3 wires for each memory cell, that is a sum total of 24 billion microscopic wires to make up 1GB of storage. Yet SSDs even come in 1TB, or Terabyte capacities. There are 8TB of SSDs available on the market today. So multiply 24 billion by another 1000, as 1000 gigabytes = 1 TB, so that is 8 billion transistors and 24 Trillion wires in our Enterprise Flash Drives (EFD - another name for Enterprise hosting grade SSDs). read_more Most of the advantages of SSDs over regular hard drives is due to a SSD’s ability to read and write data completely electronically instead of electro-mechanically; which allows for incredibly fast access and transfer speeds and shock proof reliability. The only advantage hard disks offer is a much reduced price for their capacity. While the price of SSDs have continued to lower over time, SDs are still roughly 6-7 times more expensive per gigabyte than hard drives. Susceptibility to magnetic fields is very low for SSDs as well. Low impact on flash memory SSD technology uses connection interfaces entirely compatible with standard block input/output (I/O) hard drives;...

February 2, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Movie, photos, music sharing websites and email servers, globally, are targeted in mass terror surveillance Forward: Would you like having your house searched anytime some agent from the government felt like it? Maybe next we’ll be coerced to give the government a copy of all our keys to our houses and vehicles? Well, guess what, that is almost happening. Many governments, not just our Canadian system, are already actively searching through most everything you do through your internet connections. Years ago we didn’t expect that... how creepy right? If that has already happened, then what is next? How can we put a stop to all these limitless intrusions of privacy? Does our constitution really rule the government, or does the government absolutely rule us? Frighteningly, they have labeled all of us as suspects in this war on terror environment in which agents of the current system still in power have created. Strong words? Well just look at what is being done to us today. Canada-based CBC news has learned that Orwell’s hellish vision of a future ruled by bureaucrats and thugs is already here, yet it is still cloaked in secrecy. Every day Canada's electronic spy agencies are sifting through hundreds of millions of videos and documents emailed by all of us all around the world, spending untold billions; allegedly to find extremist suspects. read_more But maybe they are mostly really looking for people that resent the unchecked amount of power this system in claiming over all our lives. Most likely so. This started gearing up right before 9-11-2001; of which over 3000 architects and engineers in America and elsewhere have sufficiently proved their claim that was a staged hoax on the world or or “inside job” by this very same interconnected system that is incrementally and relentlessly putting the screws down on all of us now years later. We have been fooled our of our previous way of life, and we are still to timid to get on the same page and fix these kind of issues. Here too. You can share this article with 100 others - why don't you? That is pretty much this case in point....

February 2, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 1 minutes

Soon you can add a .CA domain to your .com website for under 5 dollars, for our.ca sale, $4.95. This time limited special is running through March 31st, 2015 only. Why would you want to do that? There is a benefit by gaining a higher ranking in search engine rankings especially during google.ca searches. Also, having a .CA domain is one way to express your Canadian patriotism - for the price of a mapleleaf keychain. Here is how it works: For example, we also take advantage of having a .ca domain pointing to 4GoodHosting.com. When someone clicks on http://4goodhosting.ca through google it automatically redirects the visitor to 4goodhosting.com read_more What is CIRA? The Canadian Internet Registration Authority is the not-for-profit Canadian corporation responsible for operating Canada’s .CA Internet country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD).

January 27, 2015

Domain Related

Reading Time: 1 minutes

On January 28, Canada, along with many countries around the world, will celebrate Data Privacy Day. It is being recognized by privacy professionals, corporations, government officials, academics and students around the world, Data Privacy Day highlights the impact that technology is having on our privacy rights and underlines the importance of valuing and protecting personal information. Please also see the more in-depth article below.