August 8, 2016

Domain Related, Hosting Related, Security, Security Related, SEO Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

You may have heard of the 3 more popular content management applications: Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla - but you are not sure which one is best for your needs. Perhaps you remain curious; so we will focus the the two ‘other’ choices besides Wordpress: Drupal & Joomla. Each particular CMS will provide the basic functions of: adding, deleting, and publishing various types of content. Each program has different strong points (and weaknesses) which should be considered whole-cloth, prior to making your ultimate decision. First write down your business’ objectives and goals. This should be is the first step in selecting the best CMS application suited for your particular business needs. Ultimately, optimally serving your business’ unique target audience. Choosing the right CMS (by the way, easily confused with CNS (Central Nervous System)), is the backbone for your project it will save you a great deal of headaches later. A reliable web host, with super customer support, also saves you from initial and future headaches. With 4GoodHosting.ca you can get both ultra-reliable hosting and the CMS of your choice for free: Joomla, Drupal, or of course; Wordpress - or any of the 200+ free scripts we offer you with any of our hosting package. Drupal: In 2016, there is an estimated 1 million+ websites built atop the Drupal CMS. Drupal is common to government offices, universities and colleges, Non-government Organization, Canadian & otherwise global enterprises. America’s White House website is taking advantage of Drupal’s strong website security features. Drupal is a comprehensive, expandable, powerful content management framework suitable to be the foundation of virtually any type of website. Drupal’s Advantages: * Tested Enterprise-level security; advanced control over URL structure * Lots of functionality - including advanced menu management, graphics modification utilities, poll management, and administration/users management * Built for high performance; pages load fast because of its defaulting caching features * Ability to handle large amounts of content & data * Extensive selection of themes, modules & extensions * Ideal for community platform sites (requiring multiple users - admin, editors, logged in users requiring customized content, private groups, etc.) * Large robust community generally responsive to inquiries and concerns. * Good SEO...

August 3, 2016

Hosting Related, Security, Security Related

Reading Time: 2 minutes

(US & Canadian News) Microsoft actually championed a huge victory in regards to user privacy {which certainly has affect on Canadians using Microsoft products and services: Email, Cloud Storage, Skype, etc.) on July 28th. An appeals court has ruled that a federal warrant to seize email from a Microsoft server in “Ireland” is invalid. Federal investigators received a spy warrant (for email contents) as part of a criminal investigation in December 2013, which touched off a debate between the tech-industry and law enforcement about jurisdiction & data storage. The timing of this coincides with Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) - where the company’s president and chief legal officer Brad Smith promoted a vision for the internet that "respects people’s rights" and is “governed by good law.” Microsoft said: “We obviously welcome today’s decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The decision is important for three reasons: it ensures that people’s privacy rights are protected by the laws of their own countries; it helps ensure that the legal protections of the physical world apply in the digital domain; and it paves the way for better solutions to address both privacy and law enforcement needs.” Privacy protections for information stored on paper should persist as data moves to the cloud. This decision helps ensure this result. — Brad Smith (@BradSmi) July 14, 2016 Microsoft has publicly acknowledged a need for cloud providers, particularly those based in the U.S., to win back over consumer trust. Representatives for like-minded lobby groups include: the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), i2Coalition, plus big tech companies such as: Rackspace, Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and Verizon - and notably in this case Ireland’s Parliament - and each submitted briefs in support of Microsoft’s initial statements and position. “We conclude that Congress did not intend the SCA’s warrant provisions to apply extraterritorially,” the judges said in the ruling (PDF). “The focus of those provisions is protection of a user’s privacy interests. Accordingly, the SCA does not authorize a US court to issue and enforce an SCA warrant against a United States‐based service provider for the contents of a customer’s electronic communications stored on servers located...

July 25, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

For company names- how much “creativity” is just too much? Google is undoubtedly the most recognized domain name the whole world round. More people have typed in g o o g l e . com than any other domain; Youtube, Amazon, you name it. These are 10/10 (perfect) domain names. Here we will contrast and compare to less easily memorable domain names. A lot of companies with good plans, and good service or products have failed at their current choice of business/domain/brand names. It’s never too late to change your company/domain name. The proliferation of domain-name squatting has led online start-ups to resort to increasingly ridiculous branding. So many companies, especially technology companies, have and still are making quite a mockery (some would argue an ‘evolution’) of the English language. The saddest part is that it is often not their business model or core company’s fault that their start-up business has flopped over time. Reviewing failed start-ups in the past couple of years, it has become obvious that about 9 out of 10 companies that have gone downhill over time - have had domain names that made it quite difficult to tell what they did (by looking at the name of the company/domain ). In contrast, if you look at the companies in the Fortune 100, you can pretty much figure out what they do - Shell Oil, International Business Machines, United Parcel Service, Microsoft, etc... Most of the successful company's have names that match what they do - making it pretty clear upfront. Fledgling companies, that have had to spend more than a minute, teaching each consumer ‘what it is they do’ have inadvertently positioned themselves to swim against the tide from day one. It takes a lot of skill with the English language - to think up the best names and brands that are catchy to consumers within a particular service or product-line. But there is the additional modern problem of coming up with a domain name that isn’t already taken or “squatted”-upon. For example: think up a dozen-or-so names for a new business and then look them up to see if those domain names are available. read_more...

July 18, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Question: Does your business (or personal) site also have a blog on it? Have you considered adding a blog but aren’t sure about the return on your time investment? Adding a blog is free (Wordpress, etc.) but we are not talking a standalone blog which “is” the website. (Standalone blogs are typically created around an interest or hobby, a cause, usually as a way to attract web surfers - in order to generate advertising income for the blogger.) In this article we will review the top reasons for making the decision to add a blog to your website. TOP 3 reasons to add a blog to a business website: * 1st - search engines eat them up and keep coming back for more. Blogs are particularly savory to the appetite of Google’s stomach (and the other various search portal out there). * 2nd -it a marvelous way to provide current, or chronological information, to educate and entertain your visitors about your: industry, products, services, etc. * 3rd - a blog gives a more ‘human’ face to your website - making it potentially more appealing than your competitor’s sites. 1) Blogging SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits Every webmaster, that is paying attention, would like for their website to appear on the “first page” of the search engines for particular keyword searches. Considering the bigger picture, the reality is there are a lot of other sites (and webmasters/marketing agents) striving for the same high ranking spots. Search engines wisely don’t reveal the secrets they use to determine or program which sites will display above others, for a given keyword search. However, we all can agree that search engines rank higher for fresh, relevant, high-quality content. Google (and others) have the same goal as webmasters: they want their visitors to keep coming back. So logically they need to make sure the most relevant, high quality, (and often fresh/recently-updated) links are returned for searches. A problem many small to medium sized businesses currently face is that their websites lack extra text content. The typical site contains 1-2 dozen pages of static page content. Also it is not uncommon for the pages to *not contain*...

July 11, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

External fraud is the enemy of all businesses. It can be argued that internal fraud is also an enemy of business, but this article will focus on common types of fraud that customers commit against a variety of e-commerce businesses - especially ones that sell tangible items that need to be shipped. Knowing what people do to trick businesses out of their own products (and time) can help defuse these techniques. How much is customer-driven ecommerce fraud costing online businesses? Customer-driven fraud cost merchants billions (with a “B”) every year. Some reports and statistics show that the level of fraud exceeds 10 Billion each year. Where online business really feel the pinch is with “charge-backs”. When the payment processors receive a complaint from a customer - they tend to believe the customer. Keeping investigation time to a minimum they typically process a charge-back transaction again the merchant. More often than not it is the merchants who are getting the short end of the stick. Customer-driven fraud has been on the rise. It has simply been easier for the payment processor to screw the merchant - even when the facts points the other way. Also, online transactions are often “card-not-present” situations, therefore making online stores particularly vulnerable to “stolen-card” fraud too. One type of fraud, particularly on the rise, occurs when scammer-customers order physical (or digital) goods, with the covert intentions to make a false claim to their bank (or even their victims bank) that products were “not delivered” - and fraudulently demand a charge-back. Fraud stings online merchants of all kinds, no matter how big or how small. In fact, it is on the rise in online world because E.M.V. [ (E)uropay, (M)astercard, (V)isa ‘smart card’] controls have made it more difficult to commit fraud over the counter. So thieves have been shifting their energy to e-commerce storefronts - which are more vulnerable to credit card fraud. [ EMV is a technical standard for smart payment cards and for payment terminals and automated teller machines that can accept them. EMV cards are smart cards (also called chip cards or IC cards) that store their data on integrated circuits in addition...

July 4, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

OpenVPN has become the most widespread VPN (Virtual Private Network) protocol used by today’s commercial VPN providers. However, did you know you can set up your own VPN service on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) which provides a closed environment situated as a physically remote server? If you lease a VPS from 4GoodHosting you can do anything you want with it, such as installing any operating system, and basically treating the VPS as your own personal remote server. If you are interested in running a VPN service on your VPS then this article will be helpful. Using automated installation scripts, the process has become easier for the average person to use. The following is how to install OpenVPN on your own VPS server running Centos 6.x or 7, Debian (or Ubuntu) Linux. - download an auto-installer for OpenVPN, such as this one openvpn-install - Next: login to your VPS (as root) and run the following: - wget http://git.io/vpn --no-check-certificate -O openvpn-install.sh; chmod +x -openvpn-install.sh; If you are not logged in as root you type: sudo ./openvpn-install.sh The OpenVPN auto installer will execute and it will then prompt you for more information as follows: 1. The script will first autodetect your public IP address. (if you have multiple IP addresses on your VPS you can set it via the script to utilize a specific one.) 2. Next, type in the port number used for incoming OpenVPN connections (or use the default of “1194”). Any port can be used, any random one will likely do - as long as it is not in-use by other application server, or service. Select whether to listen on port 53 too; which is useful for covert connections. 3. Next, you will be asked for a name of client certificate. You can use anything such as “user1”, “anonymous”, “johndoe”, yourdog’s name, etc. That’s all the OpenVPN installer needs to know. Subsequently it will download the packages, generate the encryption keys and certificates and then after that it will attempt to start the server. OpenVPN uses 2048bit RSA keys for authentication and the 128 bit Blowfish algorithm for data encryption. If everything went smoothly, the auto-installer will notify...

June 27, 2016

Domain Related

Reading Time: 8 minutes

If you are not currently using a VPN ( a “Virtual Private Network” [remote server connection]) to help restore privacy to your online world, then you probably are not aware that about 20% internet users worldwide in 2016 already periodically use a VPN to help them connect to the full global internet; especially in totalitarian countries that ban such services such as youtube. People’s motivations vary from reason to reason (and there are quite a number of good reasons; many of them we’ll cover in this article). Reasons typically vary from a desire for privacy & increased anonyminity and general security, to overcoming censorship, and even *improving* their internet connection globally as some ISP restrict, limit (or as it is termed “shape”), connection speeds to certain websites - making them less attractive to use, some ISPs block p2p (peer to peer connection such as torrents) , and some VPNs supply data buffering to help even out slower, or shaped/moderated, connections. How did VPNs come about? In this article we will go over the history of this technology of how VPN use has generally progressed over time. In a subsequent article we’ll go more into advanced topics such as encryption. The Beginnings of a Secure Internet In the late 1990s, PPTP (that is “Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol”) was developed. PPTP was the first internet protocol for creating virtual networks. This is one aspect of technology Microsoft was a leader (instead of a follower or hijacker in some cases) in pioneering; as much of PTPP was initially developed in-house at Microsoft. Microsoft saw the growing need to allow internet users to have a secure/encrypted connection to work effectively and securely from home - for companies to be able to provide a work-from-anywhere infrastructure. PTPP a big milestone event and henceforth set the stage for the birth and evolution Virtual Private Networks. VPN Technology Over the years, different types of VPN technology have come about. Today there are different types of VPNs (mainly Personal and Corporate) with different protocols (PPTP, OpenVPN, L2TP/IPsec, SoftEther, SSTP). How does VPN security work? A VPN is technically a WAN (Wide Area Network). the front end (that is, your...

June 20, 2016

Domain Related, Hosting Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

There has been a lot of buzz recently about “Cloud Hosting”. But how does that really relate to how websites are hosted, with the great majority of hosting accounts hosted in a manner known as ‘shared hosting’. Cloud offers distributed scale-out storage as well as virtualized infrastructure. However, more than 9 of 10 websites out there are small business, personal or hobbyist websites - which see no visible benefit to the site administrators or the site visitor when served from a conventional standalone shared server compared to from a virtualized and distributed cluster of servers. The benefits of a cloud or hosting based on a clustered arrangement of servers are recognized with larger scale websites, deploying enterprise level applications, or websites is expected to suddenly serve enormous spike in traffic at times - such as hosting a video conference with hundreds or thousands of participants. At 4GoodHosting, we have been serving out thousands of long-term (and happy) hosting customers for well over a decade. Our servers today are state-of-the-art and powerful. About every two years, we upgrade our shared hosting server with new faster equipment, RAID hard-drive data redundancy, plus disaster recover servers, and also solid-state SSD storage for SSD-hosting customers. Our up-time for the past year has been better than 99.9%; and besides infrequent server restarts, our shared hosting servers have been 100% reliable. Whenever a hard-drive, in one of our dozens of shared hosting servers, starts showing a sign of wear-and-tear (and we have special monitoring software for that), we replace it immediately with no downtime for our clients - due to our redundant RAID storage architecture. So, in order to keep our hosting consistently low, we plan to continue hosting our customer’s website on state-of-the-art stand-alone shared hosting servers. We don't see shared hosting or virtual private server (VPS) hosting going away, we see it continuing strong into the future. Also, we believe in standard monthly pricing to give our customer’s more peace of mind; as we strive to keep our prices as low as possible across the board. Shared hosting and virtual private servers have traditionally offered standardized pricing which is not variable. In contrast, the...

June 13, 2016

Hosting Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

What is meant by NoSQL databases? NoSQL databases schemas and applications have now emerged into the mainstream as a modern tool for organizations battling big data requirements. But what does NoSQL actually imply, and what advantages and disadvantages does NoSQL deliver for data storage? Here is everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask about NoSQL. To begin with, NoSQL”is not a specific database product. It is a term that refers to a general category of database methodology and techniques; and a handful of vendors have implemented NoSQL administration in different ways. Yet all NoSQL products share a basic defining characteristic; which is that NoSQL implementations do not use the “relational-database” model of traditional SQL-style databases; such as currently ubiquitous in shared hosting “MySQL”. “Traditional” DBs Gaining an understanding of exactly what NoSQL means requires a recap on how most databases today have typically functioned for the past several decades. With a relational database like MySQL, the database architect or programmer needs to define and detail in advance where the data is going to be stored. Different tables are created, different pieces of data are stored inside different tables, and data is retrieved based on table structure. So MySQL, and other relational databases, are close to perfect if you know ahead of time what structure your data will be represented in; and also have a sense of how much data that will need to be stored. But what happens when your storage needs not so predictable? What if your applications data storage needs to be highly scalable? Relational databases don’t work quite so well in those situations. Simplicity, Openness, and Scalability NoSQL allow you to stream data into a database without defining a formal storage structure ahead of time. As a result you do not need to write as much cryptic code for an application to interact with the database. Also you can retrieve data quickly without having to tell your application where precisely to pinpoint what data you want within a large, rigid, syntactically very sensitive database structure. NoSQL DB’s also tends to scale better as they are designed to be able to run easily on...