Category: Domain Related

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...

November 6, 2014

Domain Related

Reading Time: 8 minutes

As a business owner, you probably know your business inside an out, but what about your web hosting service? How well do you know web hosting? You might find it hard to believe, but your web hosting company can make or break your business. A fast, reliable host means your web traffic gets what it’s looking for – a fast site that doesn’t throw any errors. A slow web host discourages users, creates a loss in sales, and it can even harm your rank in search engines. Canadian web hosts are fast and affordable. Here are some tips when you’re looking for a reliable web host. Do Your Hosting Resources Scale? As with any business, you should not only look at your current state but your future. Not every business succeeds, but if you take off, you need a host that can handle speed and resources needed for large volumes of traffic. Most businesses also see seasonal traffic, which means the industry is popular for a part of the year, it dies down a bit, and then traffic skyrockets again. For instance, the diet industry is slow at the last quarter of the year, and then it becomes a very popular topic in January when everyone wants to lose holiday weight. Does your host offer the right resources to handle the rush? To summarize, the traffic you have now might not represent what you could have in a few months or a year. If your web hosting account is somewhat slow now, what happens when you increase your traffic? Resource usage spikes and the website gets even slower. Canadian web hosting infrastructure is rated among the top 10 in the world. Not only do you get fast bandwidth, but Canadian hosting offers the latest in technology, just like its US counterparts. What Type of Business Do You Have? There are generally three types of online businesses (although there are some variances): affiliates, content sites, and ecommerce. An affiliate site uses web traffic to generate sales to other sites, content sites generally make money on sales such as a blog with Adsense, and an ecommerce store makes money by selling product...

October 22, 2014

Domain Related

Reading Time: 8 minutes

If you run a .ca domain or a site that targets Canadian customers, you should look for a Canadian web hosting company. Canadian web hosting companies offer you the right infrastructure, SEO, workforce, and connection speed you need to service Canada web traffic. If you can’t decide on whether or not you want to host in Canada versus another country, here are some reasons why you want to go the Canadian route. Canadian Infrastructure Canadian infrastructure is fast. Fast is what you need for your users. Statistically speaking, you lose a percentage of your traffic for each second that it takes for your website to load. For instance, if your site takes six seconds to load, you can lose up to 50% of your traffic versus losing only 30% of your traffic if it takes 5 seconds to load. In other words, your site should load as quickly as possible. You can’t control the speed of your host’s servers and the backbone network (such as fiber cabling) that connects the host’s data center to the Internet. However, you can choose the right hosting and fast hosting is a part of a Canadian host’s infrastructure. Canadian infrastructure has 100megabit-1gigabit since 2011, which is faster than the average US hosting company. Canadian hosts have the latest in technology as well, so you receive the most up-to-date equipment when purchasing hosting services. Overall, Canada’s Internet services are ranked among the top 10 in the world in terms of speed, reliability and performance. Workforce and Website Support With any website, there comes a time when you need support. Support comes in several forms including account help, technical services and website uptime. All of these issues affect your bottom line, so you should look for a hosting company that offers the best in web hosting support. A good company will offer 100% uptime with 24 hour support, 7 days a week. Something you won’t get from most other web hosting companies outside of Canada is the friendly, courteous support and educated staff. Canadian web hosting staff are highly educated and skilled. Compared to the US, Canada has a better educational system and is ranked in...

October 14, 2014

Domain Related, Hosting Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

On a Wednesday afternoon in the first week of October 2014 in Palo Alto California, some of biggest names in technology, together many less famous others, were talking with harsh words in response to the ongoing US government surveillance scandal; during a meeting to discuss the potential of the ever creeping state funded spying activities. The event included Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Microsoft's Brad Smith, and Dropbox representative Ramsey Homsany, and a long list of others. Breaking the Internet? They spoke their thoughts on the matter to a Senator from Oregon, Ron Wyden. Google's CEO warned that the impact of all the hyper-surveillance is “severe and getting worse." Fired NSA employee Edward Snowden exposed the US government’s creepy and secretive multi-billion dollar surveillance activities; by coping thousands of official documents (perhaps to a tiny memory card) that clearly outlined the mass surveillance of regular internet user to be far more extensive than the ever-gullible population were aware of. "We're going to wind up breaking the Internet," Google's chief added. World-wide effects and ramifications on the US economy The concerned interests focused on the sequence of issues... read_more after of the uncovering of the massively illegal and unconstitutional mass spying on all of our digital 'effects'. They talked about how some governments are already seeking to make technology companies build their data centers <i>within</i> their borders in order to improve security (from the NSA spies and peeping-toms). The tech companies generally said, if most countries end up following that path the costs would be astronomical would without any doubt damage the US economy. Example fallout from it all has already hit American companies such as Verizon; which recently lost its contract with the German government over concerns about network security. Snowden’s documents pointed out that more than 100 world leaders were swept in for surveillance by the NSA, with German leader Angela Merkel as a leading example. Lack of trust in Ecommerce? Bradly Smith, of Microsoft, raised concerns at the meeting, stating that "in the same way as someone wouldn’t leave their money with a bank they don’t trust, nor would they use an Internet they don’t trust." "The trust element...

October 6, 2014

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Forward: There seems to be quite a lot of confusion around regarding the origin of the internet, which has been around since the 1960s, and began as a US DoD project known as ARPANET, and the origin of world wide web, which has only been around since about 1990. Mr. Berners-Lee, a former employee of CERN and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use hypertext "to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will". The first web browser and web server was created by Mr. Berners-Lee using a Next workstation. Long before the web, the internet existed in the form of newsgroups, e-mail, and FTP sites for exchanging files. Tim, currently aged 59, is a director at the World Wide Web Consortium ( http://www.w3.org ), a think-tank which publishes guidelines for the future development of the world wide web. So the British man generally mistaken or over-rated “inventor of the internet” is still quite great guy regardless because he is using his status for the protection of internet freedoms. On Saturday the 27th of September, at the London 'Web We Want' festival concerning the future of the internet, he gave a speech asserting that freedom over the internet is under attack/threat by governments and corporations who are in many ways independently and jointly interested in controlling the web; for additional profit and also tightened over-control over all our lives. He called for a “Bill of Rights” that would guarantee all of us independence on the internet and protect end-user privacy. Much like an internet version of the Magna Carta, a famous English charter from the 13th century enshrining and guaranteeing basic rights & freedoms. read_more "If a company can control your access to the internet, if they can control which websites they go to, then they have tremendous control over your life," he went on to say ... "If a Government can block you going to, for example, the opposition's political pages, then they can give you a blinkered view of reality to keep themselves in power. Suddenly the power to abuse the open internet...

September 10, 2014

Domain Related

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Hi everyone! Before the end of next week - we are partnering with SpamExperts(.com) to bring our customers one of the best enterprise-level anti-spam solutions. Next to telephone calls, email communication is certainly the next most important type of communication in today’s busy business world. But as you and everyone else knows, spam, or otherwise unwanted types of email, is only detrimental to our personal communication and individual productivity when reading our inboxes. Internet scammers are motivated by the dreams of easy money or perhaps simply mischievousness. So utilizing an anti-spam + anti-virus filter is pretty much a 'must have' for any email intensive organization today. That is why 4GoodHosting engaged in a partnership with SpamExperts to provide a new time-saving cutting-edge value-added service for you and your website account users. We are now working on securing you from spam emails, virus attachments, phishing scams, and malware attacks! read_more We had a solution in place from years before, as you might have noticed in your cPanel, but we noticed that the performance of that service was degrading with time. But, now we are fixing that for good! Through SpamExpert's ingenious server-side software which we are running on our servers in both datacenters, Vancouver and Toronto, the SpamExperts enterprise application acts as a middle-man with proprietary artificially intelligent technology to *filter* all incoming email before it comes into anyone's inbox; therefore eliminating spam before it reaches your eyes! SpamExpert's enterprise-capable anti-spam network spanning the globe is a direct result of scanning millions of emails every second of every day; all the while detecting new patterns and identifying malicious email instantly. The aggregate intelligence is shared real-time with 4GoodHosting; assuring instantaneous protection against new variants of spam. This will be included in all our shared hosting accounts at no additional charge. Our hosting prices are set to remain the same for the foreseeable future. Better email continuity and delivery, with no more than an extra second of delivery delay. The new protective overlay of the SpamExperts incoming email filter to our email flow infrastructure actually *adds* redundancy and continuity to your email delivery process. How? If for any reason your mail server...

August 11, 2014

Domain Related

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Dear 4GoodHosting customer, now google is suggesting that everyone buy a SSL certificate for their website; in yet another way they are declaring it will soon give websites a small boost in rankings. They are using this with the excuse that such websites are less vulnerable to giving up site passwords via unencrypted network traffic that your website generates as pages traverse across the internet. We are not excited nor promoting this; hoping that we sell more SSL certificates to our customers. We generally think google has too much power already to be calling such absurd shots anyhow. And we barely make any profit on our SSLs, as they are already priced quite near rock bottom. http://4goodhosting.com/sslcertificates.html We however, just want to express on our blog, not only this 'insight' into google's next ranking algorithm, but we just want to show you a sampling of how a lot of people out there feel about this 'non-content'-related google search engine ranking factor: List of some intelligent and eloquent tweets on the topic: The information on my site wouldn’t change if it were switched to https, so should https really be a ranking signal? — Bill Slawski (@bill_slawski) I wonder how many people at Google today are laughing at everyone ready to jump through hoops again. Next “Now we want floating snowflakes.” — Melissa Fach (@SEOAware) Google launches domain registrar. Google encourages use of SSL for SEO that are a massive pain to buy. Next, Google starts selling SSL… — Ben Hall (@Ben_Hall) read_more Should have invested in the SSL company instead of sinking all my money into that lousy Google authorship photo service. — Cyrus Shepard (@CyrusShepard) I suspect it won’t be long before we start seeing secure certificate ads with “Get your Google ranking boost with our SSL certs!” — Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) Today is a day I wish I was in the SSL Certificate business. — lorenbaker (@lorenbaker) Wonder what graph of SSL certificate sales will look like June-Sep for providers — Chris Gilchrist (@hitreach) @RavenJon if G was really that behind SSL, they’d allow us to switch our sites without it being considered a site “move” #justsayin —...

July 28, 2014

Domain Related, Hosting Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The time has come. You decide to redesign one of your website’s pages or just a part of a page or three. Now do you want to spend unknown number of hours writing new code? Most likely not. That is why a hosted website builder application is a good tool for anybody who has a website and and need to make occasional changes. If you want to move one of your website's page objects, such as an image or a video, using a 'sitebuilder' you simply drag it to its new spot and drop it into place. This does not require any coding knowledge and takes just a few seconds. Having a website is one of the first steps towards business growth and success. It is pretty much imperative for most every business to have an attractive and easy to use website to promote their services and products. However, developing a website from scratch is a time-consuming task. No need to feel bad. Most people lack basic knowledge of web designing and all the various commercial or shareware utilities and tools with which a website is created. Even less people have code programming and editing skills. But if you want to have a professional looking website for your business without spending a week or three learning HTML and/or PHP, etc., then an online website builder can quickly come to your project's rescue. The clear advantages of working with an Hosted Website Builder ( link: 4GH Website Builder ) 4GoodHosting is one such host that offers a website builder with 100+ business templates pre-populated with relevant text, images and navigation; and each one displays on-screen ready to edit. Small businesses can realize their vision and complete their website quickly. Intuitive WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editing and drag-and-drop design modules help enable success for people of all skill levels. read_more The first step is to select a template, typically from the categorized listing of templates by business type. Next is to insert your custom content in it, text, images, videos, slideshows, music, etc. The next step is to 'publish' your changes after your updates. No FTP program is...