Tweaks to Speed up Your Website – Part II

4GHadmin | 29 August 2016
Reading Time: 7 minutes

4GH-SpeedingUpWebsiteArticle

As a website owner, the impact of your website speed on traffic, conversions and revenue should not be underestimated. A report by Akaimi found that 46% of people on the internet expect a wesbite’s pages to load in less than 2 seconds and 40% of people will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Many other studies have been published on the impact of website speed, another study found that a 1 second delay in site loading time resulted in a 6% conversion decrease, and 12% decrease in page views and a 15% decrease in customer satisfaction. As you might already know Google uses website speed as a ranking factor.

So, having a slow loading website will negatively impact the following:

  • Brand image and perception in the mind of your visitors
  • Traffic & page views
  • Conversions
  • Sales

Before you start optimizing your website to load faster, there are two things you should consider:

First, go and check your current website load-time via Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights. This helps you to compare the speed increases once you have tweaked your site.

Secondly, make sure to back-up your site as some of the methods require tweaking/editing files that can mess up your site. Here’s how to back up WordPress website and here’s how to backup any other…

Here are the tweaks, in no particular order. Just pick ones that you think can be easily performed first.

1) Remove Unnecessary Plugins & Add-ons

Unnecessary plugins and add-ons can reduce your website speed by A LOT, and it’s especially important to pay attention to them if you use blogging CMSs like WordPress or Drupal.

For reference, you might be able to increase your page load times for 4 second to 1.5 seconds.

It’s very important to note that it’s not just about the number of plugins you have installed on your website but about the quality as well. A website with 50 plugins can load much faster than a website with 10 plugins if the website with fewer plugins have crappy plugins. Generally, you want to avoid plugins that load a lot of scripts and styles, plugins that perform lots of remote requests and plugins that add extra database queries to every page on your website.

Indeed, plugins help enhance your website’s functionality but it is also important to only use a plugin if you’re convinced that it is absolutely necessary.

If you’re a WordPress user, you might want to install the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler);

This plugin will scan all of your WordPress plugins to find the bottlenecks, and give you a report so that you can see how each plugin affects your website performance.

2) Significantly Limit (or Remove) Social Sharing Buttons on Your Website

If you believe that you need to have 100 social sharing buttons on your website, think again. It’s hard to pinpoint research that establishes a massive boost in website traffic due to having social sharing buttons (if anything, too many social sharing buttons will confuse your readers), but research shows that a slow website does reduce traffic.

Most social sharing buttons use JavaScript, and this can be very troublesome when it comes to performance; social media site, outages significantly impacts the website speed of people who have installed their share buttons.

The solution is to either limit/remove social sharing buttons, or to configure them to load asynchronously so that an outage of a particular social media site won’t slow down your website.

3) Enable “Expires” Headers

There are several factors that influence how fast a website is, but the server response time contributes a great deal to site speed; the more requests are being made to your server, the slower it’ll take your website to load.

Expires Headers tell your visitor’s browser when to request certain files from your server vs. from their browser cache; if an Expires Headers is configured so that your visitor’s browser only request a file once in a month, and that file has been stored in their cache from a recent visit, then their browser won’t request that file again until a month is over. This is like a double-edged sword for boosting site speed because it limits the number of HTTP requests on your server and at the same time reduces load on your server since the same file won’t be requested repeatedly.

If you want to implement Expires Headers on your website, this GTmetrix tutorial shows you how.

4) Enable HTTP Keep-Alive

Usually, when a visitor’s web browser tries to request a file from your web server, it will grab each file individually; in other words, a connection closes when a file has been grabbed, and then reopens to request a new file. This uses more processor, network and memory and eventually leads to a slower website if there’s a lot of load on your server. Enabling HTTP keep-alive ensures that all file requests to your server will be made via a single open connection, leading to a much faster website for your users by limiting the number of connections to your server.

You can enable keep-alive by copying and pasting the code below into your .htaccess file:

Header set Connection keep-alive.

5) Enable Caching

Caching ensures a much faster experience for your website users by storing a version of your website on their browser and serving them that version until your website is updated or until you instruct it to refresh the version of your website they are served.

Enabling caching for your website can boost its speed significantly, and research shows that enabling a full cache for a website can reduce the website loading time from 2.4 seconds to 0.9 seconds; now, that’s massive!

There are different ways to enable website caching depending on what platform you are using; for WordPress, you can install the following plugins:

If you want something more advanced, go ahead and buy WP Rocket (it’s probably the best!). For Drupal, you can follow this resource.

Here are more tutorials on how to enable caching for your website:

6) Optimize and Reduce Image Size

Un-optimized images can be very heavy, and as a result use a lot of server resources and take longer to load; if the average image size on your website is 1mb or 2mb+, you’ve got serious work to do.

7) Regularly Optimize Your Database

This is an often ignored but very powerful way to boost your website speed; it is especially effective if you use WordPress or any CMS that rely heavily on database usage.

Some CMSs, and the plugins you install, rely a lot on your database to save data; this increases data stored in your database as you use the CMS/plugin, making your website gradually slower. This especially applies to plugins that save logs, statistics and user data. It also applies if you use WordPress and enable post revisions, pingbacks and trackbacks.

You can make your website much faster by regularly cleaning up your database, a process that can be automated with the WP-Optimize plugin if you use WordPress, or manually (for other platforms)

8) Minify Javascript and CSS Files

If your website uses a lot of JavaScript and CSS files, there’s a high likelihood that your site is telling your visitor’s browser to treat these files individually; this leads to a lot of requests that eventually impacts your site speed negatively. Minifying JavaScript and CSS files reduces the number of individual JavaScript and CSS files, by having them in one place, thus significantly improving your website speed.

9) Combine Your Background Images into Image Sprites

The more requests a user’s browser has to make to your server, the slower your website will be for that user; most website templates are made up of multiple background images, and this ends up creating several different requests whenever visitor’s try to load the website. The solution to this is to combine those images into one, so that a visitor’s browser only has to request one image when trying to load your website; this can be achieved with image Sprites.

By combining background images into image sprites, you’ll be able to reduce request overhead, the number of bytes your visitor’s browser downloads and delay caused by roundtrips made when your server is downloading other resources. This will lead to a much faster website.

You can use SpriteMe to combine your images into sprites, or you can follow the suggestions in this Smashing Magazine article.

10) Avoid Image Hotlinking and External Requests

Image hotlinking, also known as “inline linking” is the act of linking to an image on another person’s website, instead of loading the image on your own server. On the surface, this seems like an act that will save you a lot of bandwidth, especially if you have a high-traffic site, but it can actually make your website really slow if the website that hosts the image you hotlinked is experiencing a downtime or is slow.

Whether it is images inside your content, or banner images for your ads, be sure to first host your images on your website before linking to them.

To ensure a fully functional website, you have to rely on files and resources from other websites; as a result, you have to embed videos, presentations and other multimedia files. While this isn’t necessarily bad, if it’s too much or if you’re requesting external files from slow websites, it can have an impact on your site load time.

Try to limit the number of external requests your website will make; if possible, host as many files as you can on your server. For other files, only let your website request them from very reliable websites.

11) Prevent Others from Hotlinking Your Images

Just as it is important to avoid hotlinking other people’s images, you should also prevent others from hotlinking your own images.

When people hotlink your images, they are basically stealing your bandwidth since a request will be made to your server every time their readers tries to view the images on their website. You can prevent this by disabling hotlinking of images hosted on your server.

This article on Hongkiat will teach you how to prevent hotlinking of your images, and this tool will help you automatically generate an .htaccess file that prevents your images from being hotlinked.

Your Turn To Test Your Website Speed

After implementing the above suggestions, you should go ahead and test your website speed to see if there’s a difference (leave a comment below if you see difference :). Here are my top recommendations for testing your website speed:

Pingdom Website Speed Test: With this tool, you should aim to get a reduced site load time as well as a reduced number server requests. This tool also compares your website speed to other websites online.

GTMetrix: This tool analyzes your website speed using Google Page speed Insights and and gives you a rating from A to F. It also offers suggestions for improvement.

Webpage Analyzer: This tool gives you information on your page size and website download time, and it offers suggestions on how to improve your site load time.

Google Pagespeed Insights: You should aim towards a score closer to 100. It also has a mobile speed test tool that you can use.

Yslow: This tool analyzes your website speed based on Yahoo!’s rules for website performance.

WebPage Test: The closer your score is to 100, the faster your website is.

You need professional web developers who specialize in technical SEO services, understanding how to diagnose and fix the problems that might be hindering your website from operating at top speed and efficiency – 4GH can help.

With years of experience in the industry, we’ve assisted numerous clients in achieving faster and more efficient websites through our affordable seo services. Contact us to learn more about our offerings and how we can help enhance your website’s performance.

 

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The Biggest Common Mistakes Made with purchasing Facebook (mobile) ads

4GHadmin | 22 August 2016
Reading Time: 3 minutes

20160706142953-facebook-business-social-media

Mobile advertisements are the new big market arena and will likely stay that way for a long time. That is, perhaps until we become telepathic? Mobile ad spending will account for more than 60% percent of the industry by 2017.

Smartphones, tablets,even watches are already what today’s shopper uses to discover products and services across the internet. Perpetually siphoning in endless content and digital social venues. Shopkeepers and service providers have already smelled the blood.

Nowhere is this shift to mobile more noticeable than with Facebook. Facebook interaction is also mostly happening over mobile devices; more than a billion daily active users/losers. Over 80% percent of ad revenue on Facebook revenue is mobile.

If you are hoping to rope in conversions/customers from FB advertising, the double your mobile.

First, beware of the common FB advertising money-pit-falls.

Don’t Ignore call conversions

As people are naturally staring at their phone in hand whenever noticing an interesting digital advertisement, they usually prefer to call rather than type.

The number of mobile advertisement call conversion to businesses is expected again to triple over 35 billion inquiries by 2019.

Call conversions are not something most digital marketers have given much attention to – yet click-to-call and ‘whatsapp’-type free-voip functionality is heavily re-landscaping the marketplace.

Today’s supercomputer phones are still phones. Even better, click-to-call is therefore the easiest conversion path for consumers considering a purchase. Motto of this paragraph is to make sure to optimize your FB ad campaigns for call conversions.

· Include an easily-readable phone number or call button on every ad or banner on your website.
· Test your ad’s “call now” button; your ad’s main call to action.
· Do your best to accurately measure “cost per lead” to prove and/or improve ROI, return on your “advertisement”

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The Movement For Decentralizing the Internet

4GHadmin | 15 August 2016
Reading Time: 2 minutes

4GH-Article-DecentralizingTheWeb

Tim Berners-Lee is a famous name on the internet. Back in the early 1900’s Tim was the programmer, at the right place at the right time, who first successfully served a webpage from a web server to a client computer through the newly invented “http” (“Hyerptrext Transport Protocol”).

The web was initially dreamed to be a decentralized democracy, enabling free speech forum of all networked computers around the world. However, in recent years, the attraction to big brand services, such as Google, Youtube, Facebook, Yahoo, you name it – has caused a ‘centralization of the internet” – making it ever more easy for those corporations, and America’s “NSA” to spy on the bulk of your online activity.

Now Tim is again wishing to help restore the web to a decentrailized, more open, more free, more private internet. He is spearheading a project named “Solid”. The goal of it is to let you solely “own” your personal data. Digital Trends recently reported this in detail.

With “Solid”, you store your data in “pods” (personal online data stores) that are hosted wherever you would like. But Solid isn’t just a storage system: It lets other applications ask for data. If Solid authenticates the apps and — important — if you’ve given permission for them to access that data, Solid delivers it.

The paragraphs below offer a quick summarization:

Solid’s name is derived from the phrase “social linked data” and it stores your data in personal online data stores, or pods.

You can then choose which applications have access to your data and how much of it they can see.

According to the website for Solid, the system is “modular and extensible”; and relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards & protocols.

Development of the project is taking place at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute.

Solid has similarities to ”Diaspora”, a social network that was built on a decentralized architecture, but which failed to become the “Facebook killer” data ownership and privacy advocates were hoping for.

Thank you for reading the weekly 4GoodHosting.com blog.

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On Choosing the Best CMS for Your Particular Needs

4GHadmin | 08 August 2016
Reading Time: 3 minutes

4GoodHosting-Drupal-Joomla-Wordpress

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 configurability
  • * Clean/professional looking designs/themes.

Drupal’s Disadvantages:

  • * High/technical learning curve; not user-friendly
  • * Developer skills needed to install and apply upgrades requiring experienced knowledge of PHP and HTML languages as well as CSS
  • * More expensive: premium themes and plugins (modules) are prices considerably higher than say WordPress (and Joomla)
  • * Big name Brands who are Using Joomla:
  • * The Weather Channel
  • * NBC.com
  • * Twitter
  • * Oxford University
  • * Verizon Wireless
  • * The White House
  • * The Economist Magazine
  • * Forbes Magazine

Joomla:

Another good option for small to mid-sized websites or e-commerce stores (or for building a community or a social network with a membership features, forums, newsroom, articles, and a writing staff). However, if you need something more powerful for larger/enterprise projects where scalability, stability, & high versatility are essential, then learning and using Drupal would be more appropriate.

Joomla is becoming an increasingly popular CMS platform. Trailing WordPress, it is the 2nd most accepted CMS. Joomla is currently housing over 3 million websites.

Joomla level of complexity is somewhere between WordPress (simplest) in most advanced and enterprise-class Drupal.

Joomla has the extensibility of being extended in order to produce even new functionality. Joomla has won the Packt Open Source Awards now several years in a row.

Joomla entails a slight learning curve, particularly for novices, yet webmasters usually wind up happy with Joomla’s built in features.

Joomla’s Advantages:

  • * Installation is simple (developer knowledge of CSS, PHP, or HTML is not required) updates installs are easily done through web browser
  • * E-commerce made easy
  • * Thousands of free extensions available (for increased functionality of your site)
  • * Advanced administration panel offers many functions for complete optimization
  • * Manage users simply and easily
  • * Joomla’s application framework makes it possible for developers to create powerful add-ons
  • * URLs generated are SEO friendly
  • * Active community support (programmer tools and tutorials for users )

Joomla’s Disadvantages:

  • * Some learning curve to ride – but not as much as Drupal.
  • * About half of the plugins/extensions & modules are for purchase
  • * Limited configurability options (particularly for advanced users); Limited “access control list” (ACL) support
  • * Occasional compatibility issues with some of the plugins, which requires some PHP skill to iron-out the functions to work properly

Big name Brands who are Using Joomla:

  • * IKEA
  • * IHOP
  • * Harvard University (Graduate School of Arts and Sciences )

If you have some experience with content management systems and you’re considering alternatives to WordPress, and the prospect of diving into Drupal seems quite daunting, then Joomla might be your best option. Thank you for choosing 4GoodHosting.com, your trusted destination for white label SEO services and B2B SEO services, as your 5.0 Google-rated, A+ BBB Canadian Web Host.

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“Irish”(Similarly Canadian) Search Warrant Found Invalid – Microsoft Currently Victorious in Fight for User Privacy

4GHadmin | 03 August 2016
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Microsoft

(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 outside the United States.”

Thank you for reading and sharing the 4GoodHosting Blog.

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Dumb Main names: Does the “ring” of company’s domain name count?

4GHadmin | 25 July 2016
Reading Time: 4 minutes

4GH-DumbMain NamesFor 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.

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The Benefits of Maintaining a Blog on your Website

4GHadmin | 18 July 2016
Reading Time: 3 minutes

4GH-Benefits of BloggingQuestion: 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* a lot of text… i.e. “juicyness” for search engines! Static content only makes it difficult for a site to rank on the first page.

Adding dynamic frequently updated blog content (of relevant/high-quality) helps a site jump ahead in the search engine results pages. By definition of a “blog”: a lot of text and new content is added (or updated) regularly. Sprinkle in cleverly chosen keywords (or phrases) into the mixture and your site should soon be moving up in those results pages.

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E-Commerce Fraud: How some people Sabotage Small Businesses

4GHadmin | 11 July 2016
Reading Time: 4 minutes

4GH - Fraud AlertbExternal 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 to magnetic stripes (for backward compatibility). These include cards that must be physically inserted (or “dipped”) into a reader and contactless cards that can be read over a short distance using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. Payment cards that comply with the EMV standard are often called “Chip and PIN” or “Chip and Signature” cards, depending on the authentication methods employed by the card issuer.

EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, the three companies that originally created the standard. The standard is now managed by EMVCo, a consortium with control split equally among Visa, Mastercard, JCB, American Express, China UnionPay, and Discover.[1] ]

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How to install OpenVPN on a Linux VPS

4GHadmin | 04 July 2016
Reading Time: 4 minutes

4GH-OpenVPNInstallation

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 you that the security client certificates have been saved into a .tar.gz archive, e.g. “ovpn-client.tar.gz”.

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How a VPN works – then next, How to Setup your own VPN on a VPS

4GHadmin | 27 June 2016
Reading Time: 6 minutes

4GoodHosting-VPNs

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 browser or other connected application) retains the same functionality and appearance as it would your ISPs unsecured, point or origin, network.

You are probably wondering just how it all works. It can appear to be a complicated business, with unfamiliar words like ‘encapsulation’ and ‘tunnelling’. Don’t be scared though, using a VPN just requires a couple of mouse clicks, and sometimes, depending on your setup – a user name and or perhaps just a password to log into the remote VPN server.

You already know from having read the above, a VPN secures traffic to & from your computer straight through your ISP connection; so hackers nor creepy spies (creepies) will be able see your data or keyboard inputs while it is in transmission (and most importantly your IP address is changed to your VPN ip-address).

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