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Commerce has been at the heart of economic interests around the world for centuries. But as with anything that start with the ‘E-‘ prefix, the way the Internet arrived on the scene 20+ years ago has made it so that e-commerce has changed the landscape of business forever. It wasn’t all that long ago that taking your business online and selling goods or services there in the e-commerce capacity was optional. Not any more – now being engaged in e-commerce is pretty much a necessity if you want your business to be able to compete.

This is the long and short of why businesses have websites, and more often that not the best Linux web hosting is powering these sites courtesy of the Canadian web hosting providers they’re working with. The reason most providers will employ Linux servers is because it is the consensus best choice among web hosting operating systems. It does the best job of accommodating different types of websites and giving them the resources they need.

The fact it is an open-source OS also goes a long way in making dedicated Linux hosting so highly recommended to the extent it is. Without going into too much detail, Linux servers contribute to end users paying less for web hosting in Canada and that’s true for the USA and elsewhere too. People who have their websites to further business interests will be operating-cost sensitive a lot of the time, so this another part of what makes Linux best for e-commerce sites.

So what we’ll do with this entry here is look at the best Linux web hosting in Canada and what are the advantages that come with the features and contribute to so many e-commerce sites having Linux web hosting behind them.

Ideal Adaptability / Dependability

Those running an e-commerce site will commonly aim to be with a best Linux web hosting hosting provider that can handle their activity and see to it their location continues to be up and running with the website open alongside the highway of the World Wide Web. For the best in adaptability and dependability Linux VPS hosting is the ideal choice and especially with the way it can be a solution for e-commerce businesses of all sizes and their websites.

So here are our choices for the best five reasons to select Linux VPS hosting for your e-commerce site.

1. Cost-effectiveness

Front and center with the benefits of Linux VPS hosting is that it is much more cost-effective than other hosting arrangements, and especially in comparison to devoted servers made available through other more costly plans. Dedicated Linux web hosting with a VPS provides you with the benefits of a dedicated server at a fraction of the cost that you’d have with a VPS on a different web hosting OS.

For as long as Linux continues to be an open-source OS this cost advantageousness will almost certainly continue, and it really is a big part of why Linux web hosting in Canada is the best choice for those who need reliable yet affordable hosting that also optimally fits their site.

2. Performance Superiority

The well-established shortcomings of shared hosting are magnified when you compare them to the superior performance you’ll get from Linux hosting and Linux dedicated web hosting in particular. Being in exclusive possession of committed assets means that your site won’t be slowed or affected negatively in any other way because of different websites being on the same server.

You can also expect to have more in the way of locations loading rapidly and effectively, and where site visitors are visiting from shouldn’t factor into page load speeds or anything else of the sort.

3. Flexibility & Scalability

The best Linux web hosting is always going to earn top marks for impressive adaptability and flexibility. Being able to effectively update or downsize your assets depending on changing needs is a huge plus, and you can have this dedicated Linux web hosting or even with shared Linux hosting to a lesser extent.

Businesses usually start to do increasingly more business through their e-commerce site, and as this happens they will be more guaranteed of nothing in the way of downtime or execution issues. Plus also being able to scale your assets up or down as needed without anything in the way of technical or web-infrastructure expertise needed.

4. Security & Reliability

One of the most appealing aspects of the best Linux web hosting Canada is the way it provides the very best in quality, reliability and security. Much of that security and reliability is attributable to the fact Linux is an open-source working framework that is consistently upgraded and kept up by a community of overweight engineers.

As a result the platform is up-to-date and secure, meaning possible cyber dangers and attacks aimed at your e-commerce site are very likely to get nowhere with that. The best Linux web hosting is much more capable for giving you the assurances you want that your IP is in the most secure hands.

5. Ease of Use

This list here is not any particular order, and the advantages of Linux based web hosting shared here have presented in no particular order. The reason we put the ease of use with Linux web hosting last is to conclude with an emphatic vote in favor of the best type of web hosting for ecommerce websites. Here as is the case with most good Canadian web hosting providers you will benefit immensely from having a user-friendly control board.

It promotes an effective overseeing of your assets, and it is much better for introducing applications and monitoring your site’s execution. For anyone who wants to be more personally hands-on with their website as part of their e-commerce business then VPS Linux hosting is highly recommended.

The way that self-webmasters can make visual changes to the site and the way it functions to better promote their business or service based on every-changing realities is something that people have commented on with regards to our cPanel controls here at 4GoodHosting and standard with the best Linux web hosting.

For the vast majority of e-commerce site Linux VPS hosting is always going to be the way to go. When you weigh its cost-effective estimating, predominant execution, adaptability and adaptability, plus superior quality and security, and ease of use, it is hard to come to any other conclusion. Linux VPS hosting is far and away the best suited for hosting arrangements when an e-commerce business website is an integral part of a company’s operations and profitability.

That’s the case with so many of them, and even more so considering the way that customers find retailers and service providers online 90+ percent of the time these days. You want to be visible, but you also want have affordable web hosting and getting superior value and reliability from it based on what you need for your e-commerce website.

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There is always everything to be said for simplicity and when you need to put something together yourself as much of it as possible is preferable. This can certainly apply to people assembling their own website. If you’re a multinational corporation or anything similarly sized you’ll need the impressive and supremely dynamic website that a professional webmaster will build for you. But for a lot of smaller ventures of all different sorts it makes more sense to do it yourself and nine times out of 10 people do that with a WordPress website.

If that’s you then you pretty much need a Canadian web hosting provider like us here at 4GoodHosting that provides Linux server hosting for websites. Linux hosting is optimized for WordPress sites and the fact it’s an open-source OS means that these hosts will be able to offer WordPress hosting Canada for less – something that is going to be very appealing for certain small business owners too. Even VPS hosting with a Linux server may be the best choice for any business website.

So the basics of it is that any WordPress site that has Linux server hosting behind it is off to the best start possible when someone is bringing their website online for the first time. It will have the best array of resources made available to it, and of the aspects that makes it even easier to modify your site on your own here is with our cPanel controls. Some of you may be just starting to explore that yourselves, and so what we’re going to do here with this week’s entry is explain some approaches to optimizing WordPress on Linux hosting servers.

Page Speeds Prominent

And it is wise to make optimizing your WordPress one of your top priorities. Nothing speaks to this more than the importance of page speeds these days and also considering that Google’s ranking algorithm has adapted to this new reality given the importance website browsers will put on it. It is well known that a slow site means less visitors and if you have a WordPress website for a small business or venture you won’t be able to afford that in a lot of cases.

So what’s going to follow here will be an overview of some of the key optimization techniques that could contribute top optimal performance from your WordPress site and your Linux server hosting. But be aware these optimization techniques may be limited based on the hosting service you are using, and in particular with free or inexpensive shared hosting plans that may sound good but leave your site at risk of being unvisitable for any number of different reasons.

Let’s start with the fact that if you are using shared hosting then you will have little control over your server setup and performing advanced optimization techniques will not be possible. Also note that many managed VPS providers do not provide full control (root access) to your VPS. It’s for this reason that Linux server hosting powered by enterprise SSD drives are recommended for running a WordPress web site. Having full control (root access) over the server to perform server-side optimizations is definitely preferable.

And the best place to begin is with a solid software stack like LEMP that promotes you getting the best of your WordPress installation. This stack is built with Nginx, smartly designed software used to run the busiest sites on the Internet. Taking advantage of it will improve the performance of your WordPress site and server quite significantly, and installing Nginx, MySQL and PHP-FPM using a guide is not difficult at all. But you will need to make sure that you are running the latest version and ensuring all your WordPress code, Nginx and the other server software are up to date. Jump up from PHP to PHP 7 too if you can, as PHP 7 uses 30% less memory and serves 3x more requests.

Remember as well that disabling the unused services running on it to reduce server load will also be hugely beneficial for your site. The server will handle more traffic without crashing some of the important services like your database server.

Caching Important Too

You need to be on top of you caching too if you want to be assured your WordPress site is able to move as fast as possible when it needs to. Implementing some good caching techniques will allow you to improve the performance several hundred times. Here are the ones industry experts consider to be the most effective caching techniques, and this approach is of the highest level of importance when it comes to server-side caching.

Start here by adding an opcode caching like OPcache to your PHP to supercharge its performance. This is very simple method as OPcache comes with the PHP core by default. Just make sure that your PHP version is greater than 5.5, and as stated above you will be best served with PHP 7 with WordPress.

Caching Plugins is helpful too, and it is something you should do with posts, pages, and other static files and the good news here is that installing a caching plugin in WordPress is fairly simple nearly all the time. But addressing the post-installation configuration may be something you need to do first. Almost all caching plugins provide user documentation for easy and quick understanding of how to configure the plugin for maximum performances. If you can’t get it on your own there are plenty of online free tutorials for w3 total cache.

You’ll also want to leverage browser caching, as this is another technique for best implementation of WordPress onto a domain name and spot along the information superhighway with the best Linux web hosting Canada. What that means is the client’s web browser will download and store the assets like CSS, JS and images into the local storage for a certain amount of time. The reason that’s advantageous is it means the number of requests for each page will reduce the demands being put on the server.

Here’s how to do it by simply adding the lines below into your .htaccess file:

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

<IfModule mod_expires.c>

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType image/jpg “access 1 year”

ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access 1 year”

ExpiresByType image/gif “access 1 year”

ExpiresByType image/png “access 1 year”

ExpiresByType text/css “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType text/html “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType application/pdf “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType text/x-javascript “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access 1 month”

ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access 1 year”

ExpiresDefault “access 1 month”

</IfModule>

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

Those using Nginx instead of Apache as their web server will need to do things slightly differently by adding the following lines in the server block for your domain name:

location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|css|js)$ {

expires 365d;

}

Additional WordPress Optimization Techniques

Many of the techniques we mentioned earlier connected to WordPress hosting in Canada cannot won’t be doable if you currently have a shared hosting arrangement where server-side optimizations need to be made with special access to the hosting environment. But what we offer to you here below is a nice exception to that, and you’ll find it is frequently recommended to and from people who work with Linux web hosting regularly.

Next up with recommended WordPress hosting optimizations is to add gzip compression. The reason for that is Gzip compression is necessary in order to decrease the size of data that is being sent from your server. Enabling Gzip compression is also quite straightforward, and you can do it yourself by adding the lines below into your .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

# Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

Header append Vary User-Agent

</IfModule>

Those using Nginx will place the following lines in the Nginx configuration file:

gzip on;

gzip_comp_level 2;

gzip_http_version 1.0;

gzip_proxied any;

gzip_min_length 1100;

gzip_buffers 16 8k;

gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

Essential plugins / Good Themes / Better Images

We’ll assume that you now don’t need much more convincing about how using WordPress plugins is essential, but also knowing which plugins and plugins are unnecessary because of being coded inefficiently is good to. These ones may affect the site’s performance and so we recommend installing and enabling the WordPress plugins that you truly need for your project avoiding those that might ultimately mean your site’s pages aren’t loading as quickly as they could be.

A lot of the reason why WordPress is as highly recommended as it is for building a website is the way users have some any easy-to-use themes to choose from to give their site a specific look instantly. Plus well-coded themes for WordPress sites make it more likely you’ll have a fast-loading website. It is great that there are so many well-coded WordPress themes out there, and while there are both free and paid ones you may find that the paid ones are worth the slight investment.

What is recommended is some basic research into the themes that will help you to speed up the loading time of your WordPress site. Because again this continues to be focus number one with what is the best Linux server hosting for you. Optimizing your images is a need that is fairly easily met with Linux WordPress hosting controls too, and that’s also a fortunate reality as unoptimized or overly large images can affect the loading speed of your website.

If that happens extensively then you will likely have a situation where visitors are leaving the site. To be time-sensitive with addressing this in your cPanel controls you can save time, bandwidth and improve your search engine ranking by manipulating the graphics displayed on your website. One of the absolute best WordPress plugins for this aim is WP Smush. But even still you may need to evaluate whether or not some images are necessary to represent something. One of the most effective ways to counter images negatively contributing to plage loads or SEO is to reduce the number of images by replacing some of them with text.

The last thing to say here is that while using a CDN (content delivery network) is a foregone conclusion for any self-managing their WordPress website, you will often get the most mileage with WordPress website and Linux server hosting if you minify as many CSS and JavaScript files as is possible given the orientation and infrastructure of the site. This is especially true when certain ones cannot be combined into a single, optimized file and that can apply for JS files too

Anyone who’d like to be assured of having their WordPress site have the best page load speeds possible without getting into the technical workings of it all can go the easy route and have us host your Canadian website with Managed Canadian WordPress here. We’ve done all the work that is required for better performance for WordPress websites and with packages that range from 20 to 60 CAD dollars per month.

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Being known as the software with the cute Penguin mascot may contribute to marginally to the popularity of Linux, but the reason that most Canadian web hosting providers will offer Linux-based hosting to their customers is because of its overall robust nature and reliability as a web hosting OS. Plus it has a greater degree of compatibility with different types of websites, and all three of those advantages along with super flexibility and cost-effectiveness grow out of the fact that Linux has been built on open-source code.

That may all sound fine to many who aren’t as tech-inclined as others, but many of those folks who have a website that is front and center for the profitability of their business will need more tangible explanations about why they should choose a Linux web hosting provider in Canada like 4GoodHosting. The obvious answers for those who are in the know will be to tell them that being open-source means that Linux-based hosting tends to be less expensive, and then there’s also the fact you won’t need to add an additional antivirus 99+% of the time.

This is just scratching the surface of what makes Linux server hosting the best and most cost-effective choice for a business’ website, and if you compared packages you’ll find that cheap Linux hosting does exist and none more so than with our shared web hosting packages here at 4GH. But many of these sites will need more ‘elbow room’, and in those cases Linux VPS web hosting is unbeatable and will get our nod as the best Linux web hosting in Canada.

Programmer / Developer Friendly

Continuing with our promotion of Linux server hosting, it really is a robust and versatile operating system and capable of supporting a number of languages and scripts. This is the reason it is one of the most preferred platforms for programmers and developers. Again, that’s wonderful but how does that translate into tangible benefits for the web hosting client who’s looking for maximum return from their website and overall web presence?

It’s easy to provide an answer to that; if greater and immediate control over your website and the ability to make structural changes is something that you’ll want to have then Linux server hosting is the best platform as users are granted full control. And this is most often through cPanel like it is here at 4GoodHosting. Programmers prefer it too as they can easily fix bugs and update the source code of Linux according to their requirements.

Enough said likely, so let’s get to the first our of 5 compelling arguments.

1. Real Usage Versatility

Linux is every bit as useful for the operating systems of newer devices as it is for ones serving older machines. It is different from other web hosting OS choices in the way it is well suited for reviving older hardware and even the most outdated systems. This is a much more relevant consideration for smaller businesses and ones that need to limit expenditure on new machines.

2. Ease of Use

Linux is impressively streamlined as a web hosting OS. System techs are able to play around in Linux and its user-friendliness makes it so that it can be reconfigured quickly and easily in the way moving parts contribute to the whole. In comparison to Windows web hosting especially, Linux is a modular system that you can ‘play’ with and this helps quite a bit when designing an application or web solution while adhering to certain ideals you want to see in it. Fiddling with source code, for example, is entirely doable as is building your own solution from ground up.

3. Open Source Platform

The only server option to offer open-source solutions to users? Yep, that’s Linux too and it’s perhaps the best advantage Linux server hosting offers to a provider. Being a collaborative system where anyone can contribute encourages more innovation in the field of servers, and the way this promotes greater and better contributions if of the highest value as the server continues to improve year after year.

4. Reduced Cyber Attack Vulnerability

There is no one operating system that is going to be 100% immune to cyber-attacks. Of all them, though, Linux has been affected the least during major cyber-attacks documented to this point. While other operating systems such as Windows rely on in-house teams to fix any problems, Linux and its open source network ensures that any vulnerabilities in the Linux system are quickly found and fixed right away. This will apply to cheap Linux hosting too, as that same open-source framework means the web host provider in Canada will be able to make more affordable web hosting available to you that still offers these assurances.

5. Superior Privacy

Most people who are knowledgeable about web hosting will tell you that data privacy is another major consideration when weighing a web hosting service provider. Operating systems gather more information about their user profiles, which may mean better usability for some but lack of privacy for others. Linux does nothing of the sort, and in fact it collects very little data from users. Plus with the fact it is customizable, you can always remove any software that you don’t like or trust.

Get the best Linux web hosting in Canada here at 4GoodHosting, and we’d be happy to answer any questions you might have about which web hosting package will be the best fit for your website. Last but not least, Happy New Year to everyone and we hope 2024 will be a prosperous year for you.

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There’s all sorts of examples where something that was once an extra, an addition, or whatever else it is you’d call it becomes much more integral. That’s definitely the case with cookies, and of course we’re not talking about anything edible at all considering what we write about here each week always has some relation to websites and web hosting. Instead we’re talking http cookies, and if you’re not familiar with what they are here is a brief explanation. Cookies are text files with small pieces of data used to identify your computer as you use a computer network, and HTTP cookies are used to identify specific users and improve a person’s web browsing experience.
Now in that sense they are something of an extra, as the extent to which a person is pleased with their browsing has no relation to whether they can literally browse or not. There are factors that will determine that, and this is where any Canadian web hosting provider will chime in and say that none of that even gets off the ground unless you’ve quality Linux-based web hosting behind the sites you direct your browser of-choice to. But cookies themselves haven’t been such an integral component of a website. Until recently that is, as what has happened is that for some websites they are unable to function properly without them.

And so all of this is relevant now with news that tracking cookies will no longer be utilized with Google Chrome – the browser of-choice for most nowadays and likely to continue as it – and the reason for that being to improve user privacy and stop websites from tracking people as they visit different URLs. The last part of that is something that many people have put a lot of emphasis on when it comes privacy concerns related to how they use the Internet. So this is what we are going to dig deeper into with this blog entry.

Option to Re-Enable

All this is happening as part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox project. January 4th of next month is when they will start testing a new Chrome feature called Tracking Protection that will automatically block tracking cookies by default so that data cannot be followed around the web. But the question then becomes what if a site relies on cookies to function as needed without them.

The answer there is that if Chrome determines that you need to – for example – refresh a page many times then you’ll be allowed to re-enable cookies for that site. Google has also said it will initially roll out Tracking Protection to 1% of Chrome users at the beginning of 2024, so most people are unlikely to even be aware of this to begin with or have it affect their web browsing. It is only once we reach the second half of the year that they are aiming to be blocking Cookies for the majority of users in Chrome, so it’s definitely something to be aware of.

Circling back the functionality of http cookies, we can expand on how they’re not just for snooping on your web browsing habits. They have other uses, like keeping you logged in on various websites. This sort of functionality needs to be maintained throughout this switch, so Google has provided alternatives. Most notably with APIs that developers can use in certain cases, and they’re also encouraging developers to review their cookie use to guarantee their sites remain working once the change becomes wholesale.

Adjoining Interests

Google is not the first to do this though, although the reason their move is more newsworthy is simply related to how it is the default browser for nearly everyone these days. far from the first browser developer to restrict third-party cookies. Apple’s Safari, Firefox and Brave have had trackers blocked in this way for a long time already, and this has already given them some renown as being more secure browsers than Chrome. Keeping pace with that is likely a big part of why Google is doing this.

One of the last things we should also take into account here is how tracking cookies are an important part of online advertising, and Google has immense business interests in that. The belief is that this more measured tactic means Google will be able to give website owners tools to ensure their sites keep working, instead of having them lock content beyond paywalls or move to more covert forms of tracking because of different interests.

In the bigger picture of all that Chrome is incredibly popular, and enjoys a huge lead in usage among web browsers. Google likely sees that improving the privacy assurances it can offer to those who use Chrome as their browser will very much be in their interest and will likely be welcomed by privacy advocates. Despite the slow rollout a huge swath of internet users will get a much more private experience over the course of 2024..