Category: Domain Related

February 2, 2015

Domain Related

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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

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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.

January 27, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

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Forward: Pretty much all of us have heard or know that privacy rights no longer exist in the United States. Gone, finished, beyond recourse (except through using end-to-end encryption techniques ; however the NSA can probably still secretly grab your screenshot or logged keystrokes or live microphone through a backdoor partnership with Microsoft and Apple). Any per-existing privacy laws have been overwritten by new creepier laws that have paved the way for absolute intrusion into the American people’s personal world by their out-of-control government. Even if there are a few scraps of privacy protection in the states, it has become clear that any such laws are completely ignored by large and sophisticated spy organizations such as a the NSA. Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing reports are a case in point. But did you know our home country of Canada has some of the most protective laws regarding internet privacy in the world, at least on paper? Our nation even has appointed a “Privacy Commissioner”: The Commissioner is currently Daniel Therrien. He was appointed on June 5, 2014. [ There have been eight Privacy Commissioners since the office was established in 1977. ] You even have the right to contact him or his office with your own related personal privacy concerns, anytime. More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_Commissioner_of_Canada Here is his youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/PrivacyComm The first incarnation of a privacy law came in 1977 when the Canadian government introduced data protection provisions into the Canadian Human Rights Act. read_more Then in 1982 The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms stated that Canadians have "the right to life, liberty and security of the person" and "the right to be free from unreasonable search or seizure"; but strangely avoided using the word ‘privacy’. The following year, in 1983, the Federal Privacy Act regulated how federal government collects, passes around and utilizes people’s personal information. In the 90’s and 2000’s, other privacy legislation placed restrictions on the archival, the use and disclosure of citizen’s personal information by territorial and provincial governments, and likewise also by companies and institutions within the private sector. The latest ruling to emerge out of this fray is the recent June 2014 Canadian Supreme Court...

January 19, 2015

Domain Related, Hosting Related

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Solid State Devices further compress into the acronym SSDs. This applies for ssd-based shared and vps hosting. The best advantage of a SSD comes by its random access reading/writing latency, which is 0.01 milliseconds or less; virtually zero delay. Much larger delays are caused by a conventional hard drive’s mechanical read/write head “seek” time, which can take many milliseconds per operation. So when in use with intensive database applications, a SDD offers a new dimension in speed. However, all other kinds of storage memory access are sped up too: access time of webpages, e-commerce applications, and especially databases... are all sped up significantly. To speed up your web enterprise, it is already time to upgrade to a SSD sharedrather than the traditional shared hosting or hard-disk based shared Hosting. SSDs are also much less likely to ever breakdown or otherwise malfunction. Typical SSD memory is expected to last 4 million hours before a hardware failure - enabling both a speed & reliability perfection in web hosting. The Top 10 SSD-Web-hosting and SSD-VPS hosting benefits: 1) Super ultra-fast random access read/writes Comparing a SSD to a HDD (hard drive), is like comparing the difference in speed between a laser printer compared to a dotmatrix printer. The major benefit is that SSDs are lightning-fast compared to a hard drives since there is no physical read/write head movement required. Again, there is virtually no (zero) latency in SSD data reads or writes. Until something now unknown, such as holographic memory or something such as that, is invented, SSDs are the fastest mass storage devices in this part of the universe and will be for many more years. 2) Super fast transfer speeds Moving parts in HDD slow down drive performance while SSD has no moving parts within it, which makes data transfer extremely faster. With more disk space, a high traffic site can host multiple images, videos and handle incoming traffic. 3) No disk fragmentation issues - ever! As there are no moving or mechanical parts on a SSD, slowing because of fragmentation which is always happening on traditional hard disk drives is not an issue with Solid State Drives. Therefore, SSD’s offer...

December 29, 2014

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

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... the Pentagon has quietly built a multibillion-dollar cyberwarfare capability and trained its commanders to integrate these weapons into their battlefield plans. U.S. Cyber Command was officially stood up in 2010, based at Fort Meade in the Maryland suburbs of the nation’s capital, consolidating intelligence and cyberwarfare capabilities of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines under one house. Soon, billions of dollars were being invested in the concept that cyberattackers targeting America should be prepared to sustain their own damage. Little has been discussed in public about U.S. Cyber Command’s specific capabilities since, though budget documents detail a growing commitment to this form of warfare. The Pentagon’s cyberwarfare budget has grown from $3.9 billion in 2013 to $4.7 billion in 2014 and an estimated $5.1 billion in 2015. More at: original Washington Times December 22nd Article Link For an additional layer of internet security from many forms of spying and hacking, see information about our SSL certificates .

December 22, 2014

Domain Related, Hosting Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

With the release of the Web Index Rankings, that measure economic, social and political benefits from countries across the world on December 11, there are some interesting results. The United Kingdom, as well as the Scandinavian countries continue to lead the index, and Canada ranks sixteenth. The World Wide Web Foundation began to produce this index in 2012. The Foundation utilizes a wide variety of data that measure the web's contribution to the world in the areas of social, political and economic progress. The report furthers that the web has allowed a level-playing field with unprecedented access to information as allowed by Sir Time Berners-Lee and CERN when they choose not to patent the creation of the web. The report states, “Today, armed with little more than a smart phone, anyone-- regardless of where they were born and or how much they earn-- can start a business, record a music video, crowd fund an invention, take courses with Nobel Prize- winning professors, or even launch a successful campaign for office.” In this new index, some chilling statistics have come back to the Foundation. Up thirty two percent from last years numbers, political censorship has increased to forty percent. This included the blocking of political or socially sensitive content. In the news lately has been the issue of net neutrality both here in Canada and the United States, and there is a lack of net neutrality in seventy four percent of countries. It should be noted that according to the Sunlight Foundation, only one percent of the US public is opposed to net neutrality, and this is after a plea from late night show host John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. Even with an estimated 1.8 billion internet users still with little to no right for privacy nor freedom of expression, the governmental control of the web continues to this day. read_more The bad news continues, with an increase of governments bypassing legal frameworks that are in position to protect citizens from government snooping, mainly on our communications, up to eighty four percent. It was at sixty three percent in the last index, and actions like British emergency legislation that was...

December 15, 2014

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

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What are we talking about in this creative original blog post? How about a freshly deployed “blank content” completely-isolated-new-private-virtual-internet-environment; just like a starter internet on a different planet. In other words, imagine being on an internet where you and your friends are the only inhabitants of Mars but you are all connected through a common (and private) internet on the surface of that distant planet. We think you should be able to deploy and command your own completely isolated Virtual Private Internet (VPI) or perhaps better marketing name Virtual Private Planet (VPP); just add users! ) In this new age of omnipresent internet surveillance/spying/intrusions/ddos attacks, etc and creeping and shadowy “Orwellian” state takeovers, we here at 4GoodHosting thought thinking-up a new service offering, as private and secure as possible, could be a big value-add overall for our customers. So does the idea of a Virtual Private Server(VPS) still sound impressive? Well, try this instead... Virtual Private Internet(VPI) - or Virtual Private Planet (VPP - as private and secure as you and your friends and family living on another extremely distant planet and interacting over your own private internet). "Imagine" a virtual instance of an entirely other pre-configured "encapsulated internet" with almost no content stored in it, maybe just a couple of images and some started 'hello world!' webpages and templates and web builder programs. What if all “content” and logfiles were deleted from this internet, with just open-source webservers and virtualization software (vps - virtual private servers, instead of physical ones) and applications, programming languages, and scripts left on it? And then compiled and condensed into a VPI/VPP container with extra starter terabytes of storage (deeply encrypted by the VPP container) available only to itself and using its own entirely unique ip address protocol? As the whole container is encrypted other than its login sevice, so ,you would need to authenticate into, to get onto, that virtual private internet. Inside it, or on it, you could only request webpages and emails and voice communications from the other users within that self-contained virtual internet. Your ‘allowed-in’ VPI/VPP users can even pick their fantasy geographical location in your virtual fantasy world. Your...

December 2, 2014

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

In this day and age being paid using Bitcoins can be a confusing and perplexing and even a daunting experience. Yet current buzz is that the Bank of Canada is considering the advantages of using so called encrypted-currencies, notably Bitcoin. Canadian companies may be able to benefit in various ways by accepting bitcoin and then in turn exchanging those for Canadian dollars. What should business owners be thinking about cryptocurrencies today and into the next year? Would it ever be advantageous to pay your employees or refund your customers with bitcoins? You might want to check out the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada which explores these type of topics. The Bitcoin Alliance website states it is: “Dedicated to raising awareness of bitcoin among Canadian consumers, merchants, and policy makers; to promoting bitcoin adoption in Canada; and to furthering study and research in bitcoin." The need for bitcoin today This complex issue can be boiled down to some basic questions: “What percentage of people are aware of bitcoin at this time?” “What is the general impression and trust of bitcoin as an alternative currency?” “What is the real benefit for a company that isn’t involved in bitcoin as of yet?” The answer is, unless your customers already believe and and feel comfortable with bitcoin, then otherwise results won't be so good or 'worth it'. However there are some companies that are beginning to trade with bitcoins. For example, the electronics store NewEgg began accepting bitcoins from Canadian customers in June 2014. It even offered bitcoin-only deals for Black Friday. Also, Overstock.com started accepting bitcoin about a year ago and they now process about $15,000 per day in the encrypted currency. Canadian examples are: BitDeals.ca, Best Sleep Centre, and hundreds of smaller business ranging from restaurants, coffee shops, dentists, butchers, auto supply stores, and beauty spas and others. You can view a more extensive listing of them here. There are some good reasons to offer bitcoin payment. A customer may feel good buying a product (or service) that is shipped and to make the payment without having to be send private payment information, that they may fear will eventually get leaked somewhere. Even...

November 18, 2014

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Did you know what google gives a very slight ranking boost to websites that use SSL (https://...) encryption? There are other more significant reasons for your website to offer secure connections to your website visitors, especially if your website conducts ecommerce or credit card transactions. Nowadays, people everywhere have to purchase a SSL certificate if they want to offer secure/private connections to their website visitors. However, that might just be a thing of the past with https://letsencrypt.org/2014/11/18/announcing-lets-encrypt.html As their website explains: “ The challenge is server certificates. The anchor for any TLS-protected communication is a public-key certificate which demonstrates that the server you’re actually talking to is the server you intended to talk to. For many server operators, getting even a basic server certificate is just too much of a hassle. The application process can be confusing. It usually costs money. It’s tricky to install correctly. It’s a pain to update. Let’s Encrypt is a new free certificate authority, built on a foundation of cooperation and openness, that lets everyone be up and running with basic server certificates for their domains through a simple one-click process. Mozilla Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Akamai Technologies, Electronic Frontier Foundation, IdenTrust, Inc., and researchers at the University of Michigan are working through the Internet Security Research Group (“ISRG”), a California public benefit corporation, to deliver this much-needed infrastructure in Q2 2015. The ISRG welcomes other organizations dedicated to the same ideal of ubiquitous, open Internet security. The key principles behind Let’s Encrypt are: Free: Anyone who owns a domain can get a certificate validated for that domain at zero cost. Automatic:The entire enrollment process for certificates occurs painlessly during the server’s native installation or configuration process, while renewal occurs automatically in the background. Secure:Let’s Encrypt will serve as a platform for implementing modern security techniques and best practices. Transparent:All records of certificate issuance and revocation will be available to anyone who wishes to inspect them. Open:The automated issuance and renewal protocol will be an open standard and as much of the software as possible will be open source. Cooperative:Much like the underlying Internet protocols themselves, Let’s Encrypt is a joint effort to benefit the...