March 13, 2023

Domain Related

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There’s always going to be the need to make distinctions between wants and needs, but when it comes to space and resources there’s many times that having a greater amount of it is much more of a need than a want. That is obviously true for people, and the best example would be how a married couple with 3 kids can’t make do with a 1-bedroom condo even though it’s in the most desirable part of town. But it can also be true of objects and inanimate items of all sorts, and it’s true for servers too and the data centers they reside in. It's never going to be a situation where businesses, organizations, or ventures uniformly have the exact same data management needs and for ones that have especially large ones server colocation often makes a lot of sense. This is where a server owned by one of them is deployed and hosted within a managed service facility / environment, and usually an existing data center or IT facility. The customer retains control of server services, operating system and applications while the MSP provides the physical space, power and network resources. Obviously with 4GoodHosting being one of the best Canadian web hosting providers this is a topic that we’re very familiar with even though a hosting provider is going to have their own expansive data centers all the elbow room we need for our clients’ data storage needs to begin with. We’ve got two excellent ones full of capacity in both Vancouver and Toronto, but that’s all we’ll say about that and instead let’s move to discussing what sort of server colocation services you will want to be aware of if your data management needs are much bigger than they used to be. Tower Server Colocation Server colocation is sometimes also referred to as ‘carrier hotels’ and having the maximum of safety when having your server within a facility is best achieved with tower server colocation. It provides your servers with an extra layer of security that wouldn't be available with another type of server colocation arrangement. Server colocation pricing and things of that nature also need to be...

March 6, 2023

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People may think of Abraham Van Brunt or the Legend of Sleepy Hollow when they hear the word headless, but in the context of it we’re about to lay out here we’re not talking about horsemen. We’re talking about headless commerce, which is a separation of the front end and back end of an e-commerce application where brands are more free to build whatever and however they want. One of the many offshoots of conventional e-commerce since it came around some 25 years or so ago. Headless commerce has gained attention as a method that businesses can employ to address some of the challenges associated with the evolving eCommerce market and it does allow businesses to obtain a substantial competitive advantage when the presentation layers and the backend of the application are built and operated distinct from each other and continue to be standing apart from each other as the business gains traction. And of course a primary resource for any e-commerce business, venture, or other commercial enterprise online - headless or not - is going to be the website. And as a top Canadian web hosting provider, 4GoodHosting is always all ears when it comes to whatever it may be that might be relevant for the small / smallish businesses that have their websites hosted by us. Dedicated hosting is often a better choice than shared hosting for many reasons, but it is especially so for headless commerce interests and that’s what we’re going to look at with our entry for this week. Challenges With Headless Commerce There are common challenges that need to be overcome by organizations implementing a headless commerce environment. What is quite common is that these challenges aren’t overcome sufficiently (or easily) and the company then decides to choose to deploy a traditional e-commerce solution. But if they were to move to a dedicated server arrangement with their Canadian web hosting provider then at least a PART of why that is would be taken out of the equation. These are the most common challenges: Cost - There are often substantial initial cost of implementing a headless commerce architecture and there may not be a fit...

February 27, 2023

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Businesses that are more centrically attached to a certain industry do tend to be ones that do not have as much of their success invested in e-commerce, or in a more simpler sense reliant on having a certain type of web presence. But countering that is the fact that often they have a greater amount of their investment connected to profit-generation capacity that is related to the infrastructure of their operations. Industry clouds are a good example of that, and we’ll skip the W5 overview of them and go right to saying that industry clouds are nearly always vertical for obvious reasons. They also need to be more agile way to manage workloads and accelerate change against the particular business, data, compliance or other needs of their segment. The last part of that is important to note, as business compliance needs are a characteristic of operations for these types of very industry-connected businesses in a way that is not seen at all for most of them that are strictly commercial in their operations. So yes, the vast majority of businesses operating commercially and nearly all in online retail will be the types that make the services of a good Canadian web hosting provider part of their monthly operating budget. You’re basically invisible without a quality website and developed online presence and identity these days, and providers like us are just conduits that make your website up and visible on the information superhighway. Data Fabrics Factor Industry-aware data fabrics are in many ways the biggest part of how these clouds differ from conventional or community clouds. Innovative technologies and approaches are a close runner-up, but one constant is that using industry-specific services will add cost and complexity. There will be more value returned to the business but it’s not a simple or straightforward equation for exactly what and how is the best way to make that happen. Investment in industry clouds is really taking off now as companies seek higher returns on their cloud computing investments, and these are investments they’ve had no choice but to make. As industry-related technology becomes better and more available, enterprises that climb on the industry...

February 20, 2023

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Needs usually diminish, and that’s the way it goes the majority of the time for whatever reason. But as so much more of the work and personal worlds for people has gone digital and ever greater amount of everything is in the Cloud there is so much opportunity out there for cyber attackers to go after and attempt to acquire valuable data and information. From malware to ransomware and all wares in between, they’re out there and they’re becoming more complex right in step with how the digital world makes its own daily advances. Here at 4GoodHosting like any other good Canadian web hosting provider we have hosting SSL certificates that can secure a website for basic e-commerce purposes. But that’s the extent of what folks like us are able to offer with regards to web security. Cybersecurity is a much lager umbrella, and a more daunting one if it’s possible for an umbrella to be daunting. But fortunately there are much bigger players at work working on defences so the good guys still have a chance of staying intact in the face of ever-great cybersecurity threats. One of the more promising developments there as of recently is Deep Reinforcement Learning, which is an offshoot of sorts from other artificial intelligence aims where researchers found cross-purpose applications for what they’d been working with. So let’s use this week’s blog entry to look at this as these days nearly every one has some degree of an interest in cybersecurity. If not an outright need for it. Smarter & More Preemptive Deep reinforcement learning offers smarter cybersecurity, the ability for earlier detection of changes in the cyber landscape, and the opportunity to take preemptive steps to scuttle a cyber attack. Recent and thorough testing with realistic and widespread threats had deep reinforcement learning being effective at stopping cyber threats and rendering them inept up to 95% of the time. The performance of deep reinforcement learning algorithms is definitely promising. It is emerging as a powerful decision-support tool for cybersecurity experts and one that has the ability to learn, adapt to quickly changing circumstances, and make decisions autonomously. In comparison to other forms...

February 13, 2023

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Clipping can have all sorts of different meanings for different people, but the only time it has a positive context is if you’re talking about scrapbooking or something similar. When the maximum speed limits for broadband internet connectivity are reached you are going to experience something called broadband speed clipping. This happens very often with video streaming, conferencing, gaming and other bandwidth-hungry pursuits. To put it in perspective how much of a problem this is becoming, a little more than a year ago there was a report that the number of U.S. broadband users who regularly push the upper limits of their provisioned internet speed around 9 p.m. at night increased 400% from just one year earlier. Makes sense when you consider how many people are streaming content at the time of the night in a country of 350+ million people, and the only reason that doesn’t happen in Canada to the same extent is that we have only 10% of that population. All of this leads to the inevitable reality that the entire world is stretching broadband networks to their limit like never before, and for us here at 4GoodHosting this is something that any reputable Canadian web hosting provider will take some interest in given the nature of what we do and how connectivity speed and the simple availability of sufficient bandwidth is quite front and center for a lot of the businesses and other venture for whom we provide reliable web hosting. Hybrid Infrastructure Strain Where we are now is that the percentage of subscribers pushing against the upper limits of their broadband networks’ speed tiers had increased dramatically over the past few years, putting massive strain on hybrid infrastructures, and along with it data consumption within infrastructures has rocketed right alongside it. All of this was measured with a suite of broadband management tools, and used to pinpoint usage patterns, especially the differences between two key categories. Those being the number of subscribers on flat-rate billing (FRB) plans that offer unlimited data usage and in comparison to those on usage-based billing (UBB) plans where subscribers are billed based on their bandwidth consumption. The results for the...

February 6, 2023

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Wordpress is a big deal around here at 4GoodHosting, and like other Canadian web hosting providers we’ve recently recently debut our Managed Canadian Wordpress hosting here. It’s optimized for Wordpress sites, and the reason it’s been worth the time and efforts to put it together is that Wordpress powers more sites than any other source around the world. It’s certainly come a long way from its humble beginnings as a means of putting your blog on the web. But its popularity is also based on the thousands of plugins that users have to choose from to customize their pages. That popularity is the reason that these plugins and have become the target for SQL injection attacks recently, and with many of our web hosting in Canada customers having WP sites it makes sense for us to use this week’s blog entry to discuss this and make any one who the needs the info aware of the risk. This is because a little less than 2 months ago (December 19, 2022) a critical security alert was issued for users with multiple Wordpress Plugins. Apparently their inability to properly verify request parameters were increasing the risk for SQL injection attacks. The assumption was that the threat factor was magnified even more by the fact that many people have so many plugins utilized within their website that they may not even be able to identify whether or not they’re at risk. These types of attacks can give an attacker the ability to access sensitive information, prompt the deletion or modification of data, or even take control of the entire website. Input Validation Issue The biggest of these discovered vulnerabilities in a plugin specifically relates to the lack of proper input validation in the ‘code’ parameter in the /pmpro/v1/order REST route. What results is an unauthenticated SQL injection vulnerability, able to occur because the parameter was not properly escaped before being used in a SQL statement. The next serious vulnerability was found in a plugin that relates to the lack of proper input validation in the ‘s’ parameter in the ‘edd_download_search’ action. This specifically is being sent to stem from the ‘edd_ajax_download_search()‘ function located...

January 30, 2023

Domain Related

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Unless something is entirely weightless it has the potential to be pulled earthward by gravity, and the term is used figuratively for data when used in a discussion of data gravity. As you likely know from being here we do like to talk about data in our blog, and given the fact that 4GoodHosting is a Canadian web hosting provider that shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. But anyone and everyone who’s operating in the digital space has more demands than ever before when it comes to managing and warehousing data, and so if you’re not familiar with data gravity that’s where we’ll start this week. The clinical definition for data gravity is to say that is the ‘propensity for bodies of data to draw an expanding swath of applications and services into closer proximity’. It affects an enterprise's ability to innovate, secure customer experiences, and even deliver financial results on a global scale. As such it’s an issue that major businesses will have to deal with if they’re going to continue to have the same benchmarks for themselves operating their business in the way they have for likely more than 2 decades now. If not longer. No one anywhere is taking their foot off the gas even a bit with making progress, so data storage and management challenges continue to be magnified. Data gravity is certainly one of them, so let’s look at it in more detail with this week’s entry. Heavy Sets When data piles up, applications and services are always going to move closer to the data sets and this data gravity at work. It’s already been identified as a key megatrend for certain industries, and the prominence of it is foreseen to double in the next couple of years. It may mean problems down the road with some organizations and their IT infrastructure. Data should be openly available to access by its related applications and services, easily managed, analyzed, and activated regardless of location. In order for that to happen traffic must flow easily everywhere across a company’s network footprint and including – among other point-to-points - from the public internet to every private...

January 23, 2023

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People with computing know-how won’t need an introduction to DDR5 RAM, and that’s in large part because the upgrade on DDR4 has been rolled-out in full and with widespread adoption for about a year and a half now. What also doesn’t need a whole lot of explanation is how Random Access Memory is what allows everything to happen at the most elemental levels for digital devices, and for a layman’s terms understanding of it a person can look no further than how that 8GB smartphone they used to have needed to be replaced much sooner than they thought. In comparison to V4, DDR5 RAM has better speeds, better power management and efficiency, and more RAM itself in the same physical package. The reason DDR5 is so noteworthy here is that utilizing it has a lot of significance for servers too. We’ve talked about it at length and are definitely qualified to do so, but servers are really being pushed to the limit these days and that’s going to be an ongoing reality for the long-foreseeable future. DDR4 memory bandwidth per CPU core has declined, and in the same way this means reaching its limit for next-gen CPUs the same type of ceiling has been hit for servers. Staying ahead of resultant significant lag and lessened performance is something that every good Canadian web hosting provider will be able to relate to and that certainly applies to us here at 4GoodHosting too. Exceed 50% for First Half The way DDR5 prices continue to fall for downstream manufacturers has created an opportunity to upgrade iterations of the product and that’s what is being seen with Intel, AMD and other manufacturers offering conversions to the point that DDR5 penetration rate will be further enhanced. As this relates to server side, new CPUs that support 12 DDR5 memory channels are right in line with what’s needed for servers now and all web hosting providers in Canada are looking to the Sapphire Rapids release for the data center sector that will be coming very soon this year. The penetration rate of DDR5 server memory modules will continue to rise in the future as mainstream server...

January 16, 2023

Domain Related

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Fair enough to think of the World Wide Web as the most vast expanse you can think of, but when we are talking about the literal natural world there are no more vast expanses than the world’s oceans. Let’s look no further than the Pacific Ocean, with a size that exceeds that of all the continents on earth put together and is 46% of the water surface on earth. But the Indian Ocean needs a nod here too, as it has the greatest stretch of open water with absolutely nothing stand on between points. 19,000km between the Colombian Coast and the Malay Peninsula. Enough about ocean bodies of water for now, the Web is a vast expanse in its own right but the number of devices in the world that rely on utilizing it is a fairly mammoth number in its own right. And perhaps the two are coming together now with news that researchers are well on their way to finding a way to harness the energy in the oceans to power devices needed out there. It’s been said that there’s no stopping the tides, and when you think about the way the tides move based on lunar cycles and the all-powerful nature of all of that it’s really no surprise that this is considered as a potential supremo power source. We’re like any other reputable Canadian web hosting provider here at 4GoodHosting in that we’re the furthest thing from scientists, but the prospect of anything that can provide solutions to the world’s growing power needs is something that we’ll take interest in right away. So this is something that is definitely interesting, and as such its our blog entry topic for this week. Utilizing TENGs In a world of global warming and resultant wilder weather there is even more of a need to stay on top of tsunamis, hurricanes, and maritime weather in general. There are sensors and other devices on platforms in the ocean to help keep coastal communities safe but they need a consistent and stable power supply like any other type of device. It is required for those ocean sensors to collect critical wave and...