July 20, 2020

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

It’s plain for all to see that nearly everything is becoming increasingly data driven these days, and the explosive emergence of the IoT has fuelled a lot of that. Every effort made to harness data and either implement it or make decisions based on it is in the interests of competitive advantages, and for as long as we live in a capitalist society where only certain birds get worms that’s going to be the driving force behind much of what goes on in the digital world. Visualizations, analytics, and the ‘biggie’ – machine learning – are among other aspects of big data that are demanding more attention and more budgetary investment allowances that ever before. Machine learning in particular is kind of like an unexplored continent and it 1620 rather than 2020. Most of you who’ll be reading this blog won’t need us to go into the how’s and why’s of that, so we’ll just continue with where we’re going with all of this in today’s blog. Here at 4GoodHosting, it probably goes without saying that we’re very front and center in as far as the audience for all these developments are concerned. While anything regarding big data isn’t immediately relevant for us, it certainly is in a roundabout way and that’s very likely true for any good Canadian web hosting provider in Canada. The changes has been revolutionary and continue to be so, and so let’s get to today’s topic. While we are not shot callers or developers, we know that some of you are and as such here are 3 solid tips for applying agile to data science and data ops. All About Agile Methodologies Nowadays you’ll be hard pressed to find even one organization that isn’t trying to become more data-driven. The aim of course is to leverage data visualizations, analytics, and machine learning for advantages over competitors. Strong data ops programs are essential for providing actionable insights through analytics requires and the same goes for a proactive data governance program to address data quality, privacy, policies, and security. The 3 components and their realities that should be shaping aligned stakeholder priorities are delivery of data ops,...

July 6, 2020

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

We’re coming up on 4 months into this current topsy-turvy world of ours that is the global COVID pandemic. While absolutely no one is pleased that this has transpired the way that it has, there’s going to be more than a few who’ll say it’s best to just roll with the punches and do what’s needed to get through it. Any time you have a chance to have the mettle of something tested in the climate of challenges and adversity there is the possibility for learning, and when that’s about learning about the application of what you ‘have’ there’s value in that. We imagine we are much the same as any other good Canadian web hosting provider here at 4GoodHosting in that we can’t help but take an interest in every single turn in the world of digital connectivity and the realm of e-commerce. Not so much because we work in it of sorts, but really more because the nature of what we do gives us a front row to seat to all of this. Both in what has the potential to do or become for the people who make up our clientele, and also with how it has the potential to affect the directions we’ll be taking in the future. The meteoric rise to precedence taken by cloud computing has been one such topic. One of the things that people like us and industry experts have taken notice of is how the new and challenging realities of COVID have made us all come to new understandings about our utilization of the Cloud. 3 of them in particular are ‘hard lessons’ worthy of some discussion, so that’s what we’re going to do here today. Cloudops - More Important Than First Realized For most enterprises, cloud operations have continued to be by and large an afterthought and that’s been especially true after the deployment of them. While IT organizations have given it some attention, the reality is the constraint of cloudops best practices and the use of the technology is most attributable to limited budgets and a general lack of understanding. With this pandemic those shortcomings have had a spotlight shone...

June 29, 2020

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The expression ‘the future is now’ has been bandied around for decades now with regards to new innovations, and perhaps so much so that it really doesn’t have the same weight of meaning anymore. But every once in a while we do see genuine examples of futuristic technology being realized and becoming available to everyday people. Being able to gain access to resources online through you face or fingertips definitely meets the criteria for being one of them. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re just the same as any other reliable Canadian web hosting provider in that we fill only the basic of roles in the big picture of what the ever-expanding digital world is. But what it does provide for us is an even more engaging view of all of these advances and something of a platform to share the futuristic news with the likes of you all. So here it is - with Safari on iOS 14, MacOS Big Sur and iPadOS 14, you'll now have the abilit to login to websites using Apple's Face ID and Touch ID biometric authentication. All of this is being made possible with a technology called FIDO (fast Identity online) that's speeding our way to a future where typing in a password is by and large an obsolete approach. The term that’s being used for this is ‘biometric authentication’, and Apple made the announcement of this on Wednesday of last week at an annual developers conference. While biometric scan access means aren’t entirely new, they are stating that the appeal of this new wrinkle is that it’s faster and offers more solid security. Big Leap for Web Authentication All of this is a major boost for Web Authentication browser technology (often shortened to be WebAuthn) as it’s been constructed by FIDO consortium allies. Apple joins Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge among other allies here, and this is the same engine that’s been behind Windows Hello facial recognition and Android fingerprint authentication. Now of course Apple's clout in the smartphone market makes it so that any such development on their side of the fence creates a much bigger splash in the pool. And...

June 22, 2020

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Last week we talked about ways you can make sure your website is optimally indexed, and in keeping with that theme will talk about another aspect of being proactive in ensuring your website is optimally ‘positioned’ as it were when it comes to be indexed by search engines. Nearly all of you will know spam to be a reference to unsolicited, unwelcome communications through the Web rather than as jellied meat concoction that most of you most certainly don’t have in your kitchen cupboards. Truth is, however, it’s a lot easier to avoid that kind of spam than it is to avoid the email kind and the like. The fact that spam - of this sort at least - is so universally unwelcome is the reason that search engines make the effort they do to ensure those of us surfing the web for whatever reason are exposed to it as little as possible. To that end they’ve developed algorithms that evaluate a website about whether or not it’s oriented to serve ‘spamming’ purposes. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re like any other SEO Service provider in that we know maximizing organic visibility is going to be a priority for anyone who’s having a website hosted for e-commerce purposes or any website in WordPress ,Magento ,PHP etc . There’s a lot that goes into that, but making sure your site is indexed as it should be and without anything that’s marginalizing it in that way is a big part of what’s important. So today we’re going to talk about what you can do to see to it your site isn’t ‘spamdexed’ without you even being aware of it. What’s Spamdexing? Spamdexing is defined - and loosely considering it’s an industry-lingo slang term for the most part - as an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings and generate traffic which is used later to fuel a scam designed by people who have less-than-legit intentions. How this is accomplished is these threat actors gain access to a normal, healthy website before injecting malicious keywords and links into it. It’s defined a little differently when it’s in occurring in the sphere of digital marketing and online...

June 15, 2020

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

When it comes to your online presence, you’ve got to be seen in order to be heard. Reliable web hosting in Canada like the type we’ve been providing for customers for years here at 4GoodHosting will have you set up and open for business along the Information Superhighway, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be especially visible to prospective visitors moving along it. A site that is properly indexed is going to be optimally situated alongside the highway, and that’s what you want for yours - especially if it’s the primary resource for e-commerce interests. So what we’ll look at here today is 5 very doable tips that can improve the indexing of your website, and what you’ll likely find is that you don’t need to the most knowledgeable of webmasters to do them. Plus, the good thing is that you don’t need anything more than the same web browser you’ve always used to be able to test the effectiveness of what you’ve done. Let’s get right to them, because it’s fairly important to ensure that Google can index and read your website easily. Be Welcoming for Bots When Google’s bots crawl over your website, they’re looking to access information about what your website covers, how fresh the information is, and how authoritative and trustworthy you are for whatever subject it is you’re presenting yourself. This is a big part of what goes into Google presenting your website as a relevant result when web searchers search for information. Before we get to our tips for improving website indexing, we should maybe go over the ‘crawling’ part of all of this for anyone who might not be as tech savvy as others here. What does ‘Site Crawling’ Entail? Creating the website is only just the first part of the equation. You then need Google to index it to determine how and when it will be displayed to searchers. ‘Bots’ or ‘Crawlers’ are the automated programs that browse the web for content to index and these programs add information to Google’s index. There’s then an algorithm that determines which relevant information makes the cut to be served up in response to individuals Google...

June 8, 2020

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

It’s been a while since we chose to go web development with the theme of our blog, and so that’s what we’re going to do today. While these are not topics that are going to have a wide-reaching appeal in as far as what’s interesting to most readers, it’s always valuable stuff and of course like any other Canadian web hosting provider a good many of our customers here at 4GoodHosting are going to be ones who are the architects and overseers of their websites. One aspect of retaining visitors and increasing the likelihood of their interacting and participating / purchasing within your web presence is to have effective redirects. This is especially true when your site grows more complex. In addition to considering upgrading and looking at different web hosting plans, you will also have more pages, posts, and URLs to deal with. There’s more likelihood of pages and posts that no longer exist, or you may have decided to simplify the URL structure of your content. Then there’s the scenario where you’ve purchased a domain name you want to redirect to your site, or another one where you want to switch domains altogether. All create the need to redirect from one website to another. However, before we get into best practices for setting up website redirects, perhaps we should define what exactly a website redirect is. What’s a Website Redirect? A website redirect is simply when one website URL (or ‘address’ as many people know it) proceeds to point to another. Type in or clicks on the original URL and you’re automatically taken to the new page or website. Provided the website redirect is functional. Now for the most formative developer knowing how to implement a redirect may be something you haven’t come to yet, but it’s probably something you’ll need to do eventually. Knowing how to implement a redirect will a valuable skill moving forward. Implementing redirects on a URL or page-by-page basis is the norm, and there are a few different types of URL redirects you’ll want to be aware of. Here they are: 301 Redirect A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, and is the...

June 1, 2020

Domain Related

Reading Time: 40 minutes

Run your site through PageSpeed Insights and you get a number out of 100 in a coloured circle. It is satisfying, it is comparable, it fits in an email to a developer, and it feels like an answer. It is not the number Google ranks on. And for a large share of Canadian small-business websites, the number Google does rank on is not visible in the report at all — the panel where it should appear is simply empty, and most people never notice, because the score below it is right there being green or red and demanding attention. This article is about that gap. What the score actually measures, why it is not what Google uses, why your field data panel is probably blank, and what to measure instead when it is. The metrics themselves — what LCP, INP and CLS are, what the thresholds mean, how to fix each one — are covered properly in our complete guide to Core Web Vitals and SEO. This piece is about the tool, and specifically about reading it correctly when it is only telling you half of what it was designed to tell you. PageSpeed Insights is two tools sharing one screen The single most useful thing to understand about PageSpeed Insights is that the report is not one assessment. It is two entirely separate data sources stacked vertically, produced by different means, measuring different things, on different timescales. The top panel: what real people experienced The upper section — headed along the lines of discovering what your real users are experiencing — comes from the Chrome User Experience Report, usually shortened to CrUX. This is aggregated performance data collected from real Chrome users who have not disabled usage reporting, gathered over a rolling 28-day window, and reported at the 75th percentile. It is field data: actual visits, actual devices, actual networks, actual conditions. This is the data Google uses in its page experience assessment. When Search Console tells you a group of URLs is failing Core Web Vitals, this is where that judgement comes from. The bottom panel: what happened in one simulated test The lower section is a Lighthouse...

May 25, 2020

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Anyone who won’t agree that technological advances have been arriving in leaps and bounds these days will probably be told they’ve had their head in the sand or something similar. If technological advances weren’t to the greater benefit of all of us they’d never get past the prototype stages, but with many of these advances come certain degrees of risk. We’re all aware of how our increasing reliance on the digital world has made us more at risk of cyber fraud, and when it comes to cards many people have chosen to keep theirs in some sort of RFID sleeve that prevents card information from being scanned unwillingly. There’s all sorts of other examples of this sort of stuff, and we won’t stray too far off topic. Here at 4GoodHosting, we’re like any other reputable Canadian web hosting provider in that we take an interest in any type of technology-related topic that might be of interest to the people who count on us for keeping their websites optimized and at-the-ready for visitors on the World Wide Web. So today’s topic is smartcards, and what you can do to ensure any person who’s looking to steal your information from them is thwarted in their attempts to do so. Completing a transaction, opening security systems, and achieving a whole array of other operations in this smart technology era can now be done with a simple swipe of a smartcard. They have continued to gain popularity over the world, and as you might then expect security attacks have become increasingly common as they target owners and users. Fortunately, the right information on technology-based use and applications is usually made available to keep you one step ahead of any attack, and some of that is what we’ll be sharing with you here today. For any of you who are not familiar with them, this is how smartcards work. They use microchip technology and secure authentication to provide purchasing security and are equal parts convenient, practical, and reliable for data transfer with transactions. Nonetheless, smart hackers have still worked out various ways of observing their operations and then setting their sights on gaining access to...

May 18, 2020

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

One of the things that many of us have realized - and particularly those without high-speed internet at home - is that for some people available bandwidth is at a real premium these days with so many of us forced to stay at home. Whether you’re being productive or just keeping yourself entertained, you probably find yourself taking advantage of the wonders of the Internet during this pandemic time. Perfectly natural that you do, and for the average person who doesn’t have a stake in their own website there’s not much to think about. However, if you’re not only a website visitor but also a website owner and someone who’s got a vested interested in the reliable Canadian web hosting that we provide here at 4GoodHosting then you’ve got more skin in the game. Especially if your website exists for e-commerce purposes, and that’ true for a good many of them. You won’t be cool with any type of shortcomings where your site isn’t able to handle a large influx of visitors at any one time. Something that - as it so happens - is increasingly likely during these Covid times! So we thought that today we’ll share information on something we know quite well - how to make sure your website is ready to accommodate traffic ‘spikes’, as they’re referred to. Let’s get right into it, because the truth of the matter is no one like website crashes or those darn 404 error messages. So what should you do? Have Your Own Host Shared hosting packages are the cost-effective way to have your website up and open alongside the Information Superhighway. While that’s fine and dandy, you also might like to know that websites hosted in shared hosting arrangements are going to the be the least well equipped to handle traffic spikes. And it has everything to do with not enough bandwidth to go around. It’s safe to assume that if your traffic is increasing, the websites that you’re sharing your hosting with are also experiencing more traffic. The smart move here is to be proactive and move your site to an individual server. Doing so will ensure that...