Category: Hosting Related

September 22, 2026

Hosting Related

Reading Time: 29 minutes

If your business is in Edmonton, the electricity running your office, your shop floor and, if your website is hosted locally, your web server comes from one of the more carbon-intensive grids in Canada. That is not a knock on Alberta. The province has cut the emissions intensity of its electricity sharply over the past two decades and finished moving off coal in June 2024, years ahead of its own 2030 deadline. But the grid that remains runs mostly on natural gas, and on the federal government's own numbers it sits in a different category from the hydro-dominated grids to the west. That one fact changes how an Edmonton company should think about green hosting. Most advice on the subject assumes a reader whose local grid is already fairly clean, or one whose only lever is buying credits. For a business in Vancouver or Montreal, the local grid already does most of the work, and the question is mostly about efficiency and accounting. For a business in Edmonton, the province where your server physically sits is the largest variable you control. It often matters more than whether a host describes itself as green. This guide works through that decision without the usual marketing gloss. It explains what green hosting means in practice, sets out Environment and Climate Change Canada's provincial figures, and runs an illustrative calculation so you can see the real scale of the difference. It then tests the benefits commonly claimed for green hosting. Some hold up; some do not. It also covers the part most guides skip entirely: since 2024, Canada's Competition Act has contained specific rules for environmental claims. Those rules govern what you say on your own website about your hosting, not just what a host says to you. What "green hosting" actually means Three different things get called green hosting or sustainable web hosting, and they are not interchangeable. A provider may be pulling one lever, two, or all three, and the difference matters when you try to verify what you are buying. Where the electricity comes from The first lever is the source of the electricity reaching the servers. A data centre on...

September 21, 2026

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security Related

Reading Time: 30 minutes

When this article first appeared on the 4GoodHosting blog in December 2015, the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses for North America had run dry only three months earlier. IPv6 was described, here and almost everywhere else, as "the future of internet addressing." That framing has aged. IPv6 is no longer a future event that website owners need to wait for. It is the protocol that roughly half of the people reaching Google now arrive on, and it is already carrying traffic to and from a large share of websites whether their owners have noticed or not. Meanwhile, IPv4 has become something it never used to be: a scarce asset with a price attached. So this rewrite drops the "future" question and answers a more useful one. If you run a website in Canada, what does IPv6 mean for you right now? What should your hosting do, what can quietly break, and what is worth checking this week? The short answer If you only read one section, read this one. Your visitors are already using IPv6. Many phones on mobile data and many home connections reach websites over IPv6 first, and fall back to IPv4 only when they have to. Your website does not need to be IPv6-only, and should not be. The practical standard for a public website is dual-stack: reachable over both IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time. A half-configured IPv6 setup is worse than none. Publishing an IPv6 address in DNS for a server that does not answer properly on IPv6 can make your site slow or unreachable for some visitors. IPv6 is not a ranking factor, but a broken IPv6 path can still cause crawl and availability problems. IPv4 addresses now cost real money. That cost shows up in hosting prices, dedicated-IP add-ons and cloud bills, and it is not going back down. Firewalls, email and logs are where problems hide. Rules and settings written only for IPv4 are the most common source of IPv6 trouble on otherwise healthy sites. The rest of this guide explains each of those points and gives you a checklist you can work through with your host. Why "the future" no...

September 21, 2026

Domain Related, Hosting Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 29 minutes

Most advice on this subject promises that making your website better on phones will push it up Google's rankings. That is partly true and mostly beside the point. Google's own documentation is unusually direct about it. Its ranking systems use Core Web Vitals, the three metrics for loading, responsiveness and visual stability. Other aspects of page experience, such as mobile layout or avoiding pop-ups, do not directly help a page rank higher, although they make a site more satisfying to use, which is aligned with what those systems reward. Google also says it will always show the most relevant result even when its page experience is poor. So if your page is the best answer to a search, a clunky mobile layout probably will not stop it ranking. And if it is not the best answer, a polished mobile layout will not rescue it. What mobile user experience does decide, very directly, is what happens after the click. It decides whether a visitor on a phone finds your phone number, finishes your quote form, books the appointment or completes the checkout. For most Canadian small businesses, that is where the money is. A page that ranks third and converts well on phones will usually earn more than a page that ranks first and loses half its mobile visitors at the form. This guide is about those fixes: the ones that are easiest to make and pay back fastest. Where a fix also affects rankings, it says so, and says how much. Indexing and the Core Web Vitals metrics themselves are covered in depth elsewhere on this blog, so they get a summary here and a link, not a repeat. What Google actually rewards on mobile, and what it doesn't It is worth being precise, because a lot of wasted effort comes from getting this wrong. Google indexes and ranks the mobile version of your pages. That process, mobile-first indexing, is complete across the web, and its practical requirements are content parity between mobile and desktop, crawlable resources and consistent structured data. If you need that side of things, our mobile-first indexing guide covers it fully. On ranking, Google's current page...

September 21, 2026

4GoodHosting, Domain Related, Hosting Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 29 minutes

There is a particular kind of frustration that hits a business owner about three months after a landing page goes live. The page converts well. The paid traffic is working. Somebody suggests "we should get organic traffic to this too," and a check in Search Console returns one of two answers: the URL is not in the index at all, or it sits in a state called Crawled – currently not indexed, which reads like a technicality and is actually a verdict. The page was not unlucky. It was built that way. Almost everything that makes a landing page convert well makes it hard to index. Stripping the navigation removes distraction — and severs the page from the site's link graph. Keeping copy tight respects the visitor's attention — and produces a page with nothing to rank for. Running three headline variants improves conversion rate — and creates three near-identical URLs. Building the page in a dedicated tool ships it in an afternoon — and frequently publishes it on somebody else's domain. None of those are mistakes in isolation. Each is a deliberate, defensible conversion decision. Taken together they produce a page that no search engine has any reason to index, and the sixteen articles you will find on this topic mostly do not mention it, because they are describing a page that ranks and quietly assuming it is the same page that converts. This article is about the conflict. What actually stops landing pages indexing, which of those causes you can fix without hurting conversion, which require you to accept a genuine trade, and where the page should physically live — because that last decision turns out to govern more of the outcome than any on-page factor. It is written for Canadian businesses running lead-generation or product landing pages, and for the people who build them. One note on sources: Google's own SEO Starter Guide is the correct starting point for general on-page work and this article does not attempt to restate it. What that guide does not cover is landing pages specifically — the structural tension described above — which is the gap this piece occupies. The two...

September 21, 2026

4GoodHosting, Domain Related, Hosting Related, Web Hosting

Reading Time: 24 minutes

"Managed hosting" sounds like a simple product: you pay more, and someone else looks after your server. In practice it is one of the least consistently defined terms in the hosting industry. One provider's managed plan means it patches the operating system and nothing else. Another's means it updates your WordPress plugins, tests your backups and rescues you at 2 a.m. when a checkout breaks. Both use the same word. That is why most "pros and cons" lists are less useful than they look. They compare an idealised managed service with an idealised do-it-yourself server, and conclude that managed is easier but more expensive. That is true, and it does not help you decide. The better question is who does which job. Every website sits on a stack of layers: hardware, network, operating system, web server, PHP, database, control panel, application and content. Someone has to keep each layer secure, updated and working. Managed hosting moves some of those jobs to your provider. Which jobs move, and which stay with you, determines whether managed hosting is a bargain or an expensive misunderstanding. There is a timely example. PHP 8.2, still common on business websites, reaches the end of its security support on 31 December 2026, according to the PHP project. After that date it receives no further security fixes. On a fully managed plan, moving your site to a supported version is usually the provider's job, possibly with some testing on your side. On an unmanaged server, it is entirely yours, and if nobody does it, nobody does it. Multiply that by every component in the stack, and you have the real trade-off. This guide maps those responsibilities, then tests the pros and cons against them. It includes a cost comparison that counts your time, a Canadian angle most guides miss, and the questions to ask any provider before you sign. What "managed" actually means: a responsibility map The clearest way to understand managed hosting is to look at who is responsible for each layer under each type of hosting. The table below shows the typical pattern. Individual providers vary, which is exactly why you need to ask. Layer Shared...

September 13, 2026

4GoodHosting, Hosting Related, Web Hosting, WordPress, WordPress Hosting

Reading Time: 28 minutes

Every hosting company sells uptime, and almost every hosting company sells it with a number: 99.9%, 99.99%, occasionally five nines. The number is presented as the answer to a question, and it is worth being precise about what question it actually answers. It answers: how often did our server respond to a request? The question a business owner is actually asking is: how often was my website working? Those are not the same question, and the gap between them is where most real downtime lives. A WordPress site can return a clean HTTP 200 response with a white screen where the content should be. It can serve a homepage perfectly while the checkout throws a fatal error. It can load in two seconds for a visitor in Toronto and time out for a visitor in Halifax. It can look entirely healthy while the contact form has been silently failing to send for eleven days. Under every uptime SLA in the industry, all four of those sites were up. This article is about the difference. What actually takes WordPress sites offline — which is almost never a hardware failure — what a managed environment genuinely prevents, what it demonstrably cannot prevent no matter what the sales page says, and how to monitor your own site in a way that catches the failures the uptime number is blind to. It is written for Canadian business owners and the people who look after their sites: the ones who have been told managed WordPress hosting is more reliable, and want to know specifically what that buys and where the limits are. What an uptime SLA actually measures Start with the arithmetic, because most people have never done it. SLA figure Downtime allowed per month Per year 99.0% 7 hours 18 minutes 3 days 15 hours 99.5% 3 hours 39 minutes 1 day 19 hours 99.9% 43 minutes 8 hours 46 minutes 99.95% 21 minutes 54 seconds 4 hours 23 minutes 99.99% 4 minutes 19 seconds 52 minutes 36 seconds 99.999% 26 seconds 5 minutes 15 seconds Two things jump out. First, the difference between 99.9% and 99.99% is not a rounding detail — it...

September 11, 2026

4GoodHosting, Hosting Related

Reading Time: 39 minutes

Most advice about increasing online sales is written for nowhere in particular. Improve your product photography. Write better email subject lines. Post consistently. Reduce friction at checkout. It is not wrong, exactly, and it is also the same list you would get in Manchester or Melbourne. What it leaves out is everything that is actually specific to operating from here — the two separate sales tax systems you have to run simultaneously, the municipal licensing that fragments the moment you serve more than one city, the question of which privacy statute governs your customer list, and a set of operational realities that come from sitting three hours behind your largest domestic market. This guide is about that layer. It assumes you have already read the general advice and want the part that applies because you are in Vancouver. Some of it is tax, some is legal, some is infrastructure, and one item has a deadline nineteen days from the date this was written. Scope and a necessary disclaimerTax and licensing rules change, thresholds get adjusted, and the right answer frequently depends on facts specific to your business. Everything here is general information, not tax or legal advice, and it is written as of September 2026. Verify anything consequential against the current guidance on gov.bc.ca, vancouver.ca or with your accountant before acting on it. The cost of getting sales tax registration wrong falls on the seller, not on the customer. What is actually different about operating from Vancouver Four things, and the first two catch people repeatedly. You run two sales tax systems, not one British Columbia does not have harmonised sales tax. You collect federal GST at five percent and provincial PST at seven percent as two separate taxes, with different rules about what is taxable, different registration thresholds, different filing, and — critically — different recoverability. GST paid on business inputs is generally recoverable through input tax credits. PST paid on business inputs generally is not. That second point is the one that changes decisions rather than just paperwork. In an HST province, tax on your business purchases washes out. Here, PST on the things you buy to run...

September 10, 2026

Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 49 minutes

There is a particular kind of conversation that happens when a small business gets breached. Somebody asks where the firewall was. And the honest answer, increasingly, is that there wasn't one, because there was nothing left for it to sit in front of. The business runs on a website it doesn't host, email it doesn't run, a payment processor it doesn't operate, and a laptop that connects to all of them from a kitchen table. There is no network edge. There is no inside. The thing everybody spent twenty years learning to defend simply isn't there any more. That is the shape of the problem, and it is why the security industry keeps announcing that the perimeter is dead. But the perimeter is not dead. It moved, it fragmented, and it multiplied. For a business whose most exposed asset is a public website, the new perimeter is small enough to write on a single page — which is precisely what makes it defensible, and precisely why so few businesses have done it. This guide is about drawing that page. Not a zero trust architecture programme. Not a reference model written for an organisation with a security team. An actual inventory of the things that, if someone else controlled them, would end your ability to operate — and what to do about each one. What the ‘perimeter’ used to mean, and what actually changed The traditional model was physical before it was digital. Your computers sat in your building. They talked to each other over cable you owned. Anything from outside had to pass through one controlled point, and you put your defences at that point. Castle and moat, as the metaphor goes, though the more accurate comparison is a factory with one gate and a security desk. It worked because two assumptions held. The first was that everything valuable sat inside a boundary you could draw. The second was that traffic crossing that boundary was rare enough and slow enough to inspect. Both assumptions have now failed, and they failed for ordinary commercial reasons rather than security ones. The three shifts that dissolved the boundary Software moved off your premises....

September 9, 2026

4GoodHosting, Domain Related, Hosting Related, VPS Hosting, Web Hosting, WordPress, WordPress Hosting

Reading Time: 43 minutes

Most advice on building a retail brand is about how things look and feel. Colour palette, typography, store layout, shelf presence, packaging, the tone of the signage, the workshop where everybody agrees on three adjectives. It is a large and well-developed body of work, and for a physical shop it is largely correct — when the customer is standing in your space, the space is the brand. Then the customer is not standing in your space. They are on a phone, on a bus, at 9:40 on a Tuesday night, with your site half-loaded and a payment method you do not accept. Nothing about your colour palette is relevant to what happens next. This article is about that second situation, which is now where most of a retail brand's damage occurs. Not because design does not matter — it does — but because design is the part everyone already works on, and the failures that actually destroy trust are almost entirely invisible to the business until a customer tells them, or does not. Written for Canadian retail businesses running a website alongside, or instead of, a physical location. It covers what breaks, in rough order of how badly it damages you, and what the infrastructure underneath has to do to stop it. What ‘brand’ becomes once the store is a website The useful starting point is to be precise about what transfers from physical retail and what does not, because a great deal of retail branding advice is written as though the online version is the same exercise on a smaller screen. It is not, for one structural reason. In a shop, staff absorb the failures. Online, nothing does When something goes wrong in a physical store — an item is out of stock, the card terminal is slow, the queue is long, the price on the shelf does not match the till — a person intervenes. They apologise, they check the back, they offer an alternative, they honour the shelf price. The failure still happened, but it was absorbed, and the customer's memory of it is mediated by someone who was visibly trying. Online there is no one on...