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...
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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....
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Reading Time: 36 minutes Most hosting comparisons answer the wrong question. They line up two products, declare that one is cheap and one is powerful, and leave you to guess which description fits your site. The guessing is where the money gets wasted — either on a plan too small to hold your traffic, or on a server that costs five times more than you need and requires skills nobody on your team has. The useful question isn't which product is better. It's this: what is your site actually asking for right now, and what will it ask for in eighteen months? Answer that, and the choice between shared and VPS hosting stops being a judgment call and becomes an obvious one. This guide covers both sides honestly. It explains what shared hosting has genuinely become in the last few years, which is not what most articles still describe. It sets out the benefits of VPS hosting without pretending it's a free upgrade. It gives you the specific, measurable signals that tell you when you've outgrown a shared plan — not vague advice about "growing sites." And because your visitors, your customers, and in many cases your legal obligations are Canadian, it covers the part almost nobody writes about: where your data physically sits, and why that increasingly matters. Shared vs VPS hosting at a glance Before the detail, the short version. Shared hosting places many customer accounts on one physical server, each with a capped allocation of CPU, memory, processes, and disk I/O, all managed by the provider. You get a control panel and a website; you never touch the operating system. VPS hosting (Virtual Private Server) uses a hypervisor to divide one physical server into several independent virtual machines. Each one runs its own operating system, holds its own reserved slice of CPU and RAM, and can be configured down to the kernel by whoever holds root access. Shared hosting VPS web hosting Resource model Capped share of a pooled server Reserved allocation, guaranteed to you Operating system One OS shared by all accounts Your own OS instance Root access No Yes (on unmanaged and most managed plans) Who patches the server...
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Reading Time: 14 minutes By the year 2026, having a website is almost useless unless it is tailored to the specifics of the digital world: fast loading times, secure with a combination of various defenses against attacks, and complete adherence to the reshuffling privacy laws. For millions of businesses operating on WordPress, this need becomes a constant call for functionality improvement without much increase in overhead. The exciting part? Within this broad repository of free WordPress plugins lie many tools that can enable a rank beginner to quickly turn their website into a full-fledged-performing professional digital asset. But with more than 60,000 plugins available, the battle is with finding the ones to really rely on for the modern web. You want those geared for speed, tested for security, and compliant when it counts. Here comes your grooming guide. We will show you in detail which of the 50+ most useful free WordPress plugins, sorted by function, we have tested and compiled for your site to give your business the edge in competition as it stands today. We shall show you the tools you will need to optimize SEO, secure your site, and provide an exceptional user experience-all while being gentle on your budget. Security & Maintenance: The Unshakeable Foundation Cyber-attacks against websites are constantly changing. In 2026, security is no luxury but a bare necessity. One breach that leaks sensitive information, and a small firm's name, can be buried through damage to its reputation before it even has time to recover from the costs of the shutdown. One good thing is that there are several free plugins that manage protection on an industrial scale. Firewalls, Malware Scanners, and Intrusion Prevention : Your website needs proactive defense. These plugins act as digital bouncers, blocking malicious traffic before it ever reaches your core files. Wordfence Security: The gold standard for a reason. Its free version offers a robust firewall (Web Application Firewall) that blocks threats like brute force and SQL injection attacks, along with a malware scanner that checks core files, themes, and plugins for infections. Sucuri Security: An excellent companion tool. While Wordfence excels at server-side protection, Sucuri focuses on website integrity monitoring, file change...
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Reading Time: 10 minutes Ahoy, fellow Vancouverites! Well okay then, we’re not going to dive head first into the principles of website security without some preparation, so grab your virtual life jackets. Whether you are managing a café in Gastown nook or a Slalom startup from the North Shore, no one wishes to feel a chill online as in a careless suburban construction site. If you decide to go with an insecure web hosting company, your website can be easily hacked. It can delete important data and documents, as well as capture the virus in a mission to attack other computer, leading to lots of harm to your reputations. Antaraya reports from Google show web hosting to be the main reason why web site gets hacked is due to poor web hosting. Google reveals online hosting service as the most common cause of hacked websites. So let’s discuss what we believe should be one of the focal points about your Vancouver website hosting provider – security – in addition to some of the best poutine places to grab a bite in town – or online. Secure Hosting Vancouver: Your Digital Fortress Let’s start at the very beginning: secure hosting Vancouver isn’t just some PR hype phrase that insiders in the tech community bandy around – it is designed to protect you from the wild wild web. You can just image this as the walls of a log cabin protecting you against the gusts of ugly winds and, of course, nasty cyber threats. SSL Certificates Vancouver: The Magic of HTTPS If you ever spot the green padlock in the lower section of the browser, know that you are safe. That’s the sign of SSL certificates working of course. They work to encode messages between your users and your websites, and more significantly, it becomes difficult for the sneaky hackers to capture and maliciously dean your important details. Those sites that exchange delicate client information for example credit card information require SSL certificates. Most websites hosting services provide free SSL certificates for web hosting services being offered. Any respectable Vancouver website hosting provider should deliver SSL certificates as easily as a local barista delivers your morning...
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Reading Time: 11 minutes When artificial intelligence first started making its presence known we were all told that before long it would be incorporating itself into nearly everything, and of course that’s proven to be entirely true. Some people say that’s a cause for concern, and whether or not that’s true would need to be the subject of another discussion entirely. But it is indisputable that the analytical and evaluative capacities of AI have been hugely beneficial to the working world, and that does able to web hosting in Canada too. Whether we like it or not, at this point in the game it is true that synthetic smarts are outdistancing natural smarts in a big way. Even collectively human brainpower can’t match up with AI in certain aspects of the working world where decisions need to be made based on an understanding of the information available. That doesn’t apply to ever corner of it, but when it comes higher-level linear thinking it certainly does. It is also entirely true to say that AI is more adept and capable with making executive decisions about how machine learning should be directed. This part of it is key in how AI improves website security when it is utilized by your host. You will always be looking for an affordable hosting provider in Canada, but you’ll also want to have one that is known for having solid security against cyber threats. Especially if your website is an ecommerce one and you need to be receiving sensitive financial data from customers. Here at 4GoodHosting we are always keeping ourselves at the forefront of technologies and trends in web hosting, and as such we have been open to incorporating AI in web hosting right from the start. We’ve done just that, and nowhere is it more notable than with our virtual private servers (VPS) that are very popular with those types of bigger and more traffic-heavy ecommerce websites that we talked about earlier. So this is what we’re going to talk about with this blog entry, looking specifically at how AI can improve web hosting security. Impressively Scalable – And Secure Cloud-based virtual private servers (VPS) are tops for...
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Reading Time: 4 minutes Our Canadian Windows VPS, or virtual private server hosting, allows a company to upgrade from regular hosting options to more configurable resources that allows them to deploy full applications and eCommerce models without having to pay the high costs of a dedicated server or dedicated hosting arrangement. Windows VPS is a server virtualization software that uses Windows technology on high performance multi-cpu hardware. A VPS arrangement creates a virtual server inside a physical server. For many people, especially businesses, Windows VPS offers several advantages. Each windows virtual server is indistinguishable from a real standalone server. 4GoodHosting has the infrastructure and expertise to create many of these digital servers utilizing a single high-performance server machine. And we have many such server racks in our datacenters. This allows us to offer fairly inexpensive packages for other companies; which enables our server clients to create and run complex websites, control large amounts of data, and stream a variety of adaptable services. Windows VPS hosting also allows you to run as many websites on your server as you wish for/can manage. The primary advantages in addition to the cost savings are increased resources and scalability. VPS servers are created in a virtual state so VPSs can be quickly and easily scaled or “beefed-up” as, and when, needed. The working of 1 virtual server does not affect any neighboring digital servers. A VPS is are also ideal for customers that are not sure how much web traffic they need to plan for. You will receive your own dedicated IP; and extra IPs can be requested and configured as needed. Another advantage is RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol connectivity). Do you need to access your server almost as if it was sitting under your desk? Well, it is entirely possible to view and manage your server through your remote monitor. We supply the instructions and support for you on how to do that. We create Windows Server 2008 or 2012 Standard 32 or 64bit VPSs, depending on your preference. This is very much like the familiar windows interface you are comfortable with if you have used the windows on a desktop computer. These Windows operating systems uses...
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Reading Time: 6 minutes Things change quickly in the digital world, and what was barely even on the radar can become a front and center issue overnight in some cases. Go back 10 years and the issue of privacy in web browsing wasn’t something the vast majority of people paid even the slightest bit of attention to. Nowadays, however, it’s definitely a hot-button topic given all the news that’s come out about web browsing histories and the like being tracked, monitored, and then made available to whoever doesn’t mind paying for information about what people like YOU search for online. Some people don’t have a problem with that. Other people have quite a significant problem with that. If you’re part of the second group there then you may have already switched over to using a web browser like DuckDuckGo or something similar. It’s a fine privacy-promoting web browser in itself, but it’s a bit of a generalist in that it works suitably well across the board but not especially well for any one framework. And that’s where and why Epic coming onto the scene is as noteworthy as it is. It is a Chromium-based browser designed to ensure privacy without giving up anything i speed or functionality. It blocks ads as well as prevents user tracking, and also includes built-in protection against a wide range of surveillance methods cryptocurrency mining scripts among them. It promises to be just what the Doctor ordered for those who think these types of overwatch activities are unacceptable, and here at 4GoodHosting we’re like any other quality Canadian web hosting provider in that we agree with you wholeheartedly. Let’s take a look at what makes this new no-tracking web browser such a good fit and why it promises to be especially well received. Surfers 1 / Watchers 0 It’s fair to say that it’s really a shame that the innocence and carefreeness of using the world wide web to gain information is gone now, and that government agencies, corporations, and malicious hackers lurking in the shadows and taking notes is entirely unacceptable. Even those who aren’t overly incensed at having their privacy violated will almost certainly choose to stay...
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Reading Time: 4 minutes Today, websites mostly run either on a Linux or a Windows based web server. However, a large chunk of sites run using Linux hardware. If your site is a HTML-based static web site, the operating system of your hosting server won't make any difference but, it makes difference when your site uses dynamic scripting languages like ASP or PHP/Perl (Linux technologies). Yet there has been success when websites run on PHP and Perl on Windows OS for years together. But, the licensing and technology for running ASP and Microsoft databases is being ironed out. A Windows server runs an MS Windows IIS (Internet Information Server) and is important for websites based on ASP/.NET scripting languages whereas, a Linux server is used for running the remaining websites, which is more in usage because of its availability at no cost. How the hosting computer is compatible with your home computer? Some people are worried about the compatibility of their system with the web hosting system. They are unnecessarily worried whether their system is compatible with the web hosting system. In reality, you won't run any program from your system on host's web server. And, the host won't run anything on your system. So, it doesn't matter what type of system you use. The only thing that makes a big difference visible is a Windows server runs a Plesk control panel. On the other hand, Linux uses cPanel to manage the hosting accounts of the users. Does your website need Windows technologies ASP or .NET or MS SQL or MS Access? If you need Windows technologies for your website and your website or web applications are executing directly ASP or .NET code, or if it is using MS Access or MS SQL or possibly using advanced databases/interfaces that connect remotely to the required Microsoft-based web servers, it is essential to sign-up for a web hosting package that uses Windows. There are also other ways of using Windows applications on Linux systems. But if your site is depending on the Microsoft technologies, you may face a smaller number of challenges and concerns. If you are going to use a Windows server and if you...
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Reading Time: 6 minutes Shopping online is pretty much a ubiquitous activity for people all over the world these days, and - not surprisingly - so much so that it’s now the preferred means of shopping for many people. Especially for certain goods, and not only do these people want selection, good prices, and the like, but they also want to be able to enter their credit card information and not have to worry about it being exposed. Offering that peace of mind is absolutely essential if you’re in the e-commerce world, and nothing is more important in this regard as having your online transactions guarded by an SSL certificate. Even if you may not know exactly what these are, you’ve probably seen the ’##-Bit Encryption’ tag prominently on display once you get to the checkout when you’re shopping online. Here at 4GoodHosting, not only do we offer very competitive prices on highest-quality SSL Certificates but like any good Canadian web hosting provider we have plenty of customers who are trusting our web hosting to ensure they’re ‘open’ for business 24/7 and all day, everyday. Probably safe to say that there’s few if any of those folks who don’t already have their SSL Certs in place, but for those of you who are new to your business online then we thought we’d dedicate one post here to discussing SSL certificates and what you need to know to choose one for yourself. Overview There is a plethora of certificate types, and several categories and plenty of CAs. In advance of highlighting the different SSL certificates and how to choose the right one, we’ll first discuss why an SSL certificate is so important nowadays. The reach and strength of cyber crimes has grown rapidly over recent years. So much so in fact that cybersecurity has become the #1 concern issue for both web users and website admins. The truth of it all is that cybercriminals can cost online businesses millions. The worldwide economy loses unimaginable amounts of money every year due to cybercriminal activity. What SSL certificates do to protect agains this is that they enforce a secure connection between a server and its web users....
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