Hosting and Support

By Mike Mallett on 07/03/2016
Close up of a compact disc
Backing up your data is a critical process for any business, and as computers become more ubiquitous in our daily lives it is critical for many of us in our personal lives as well. Quite often this has never occurred to a person, whether personally or professionally, and at first it may seem complicated; But it's not.
A reliable and robust backup system really has two extremely important aspects:

Your data must be replicated in a separate physical location, AND
You must be able to restore from this off-site backup.


That's all there is to it! These two principles, applied together and...
By Mike Mallett on 10/02/2016
GlusterFS Logo
What is GlusterFS?
GlusterFS is a distributed network filesystem. It acts as a file system which can be attached to a server for storage like any other, but using network sockets it can be configured in a variety of ways to distribute the files across a number of disparate servers simultaneously and in a fashion which is transparent to users.
It can be deployed to replicate the same data across multiple servers (sort of like RAID mirroring), or bring together the free space of multiple servers into a single large volume (sort of like RAID striping), or distribute data across a WAN using "geo-...
By Liz Pringi on 20/10/2015
Foreword:
   Google Analytics is a great tool to see where people are browsing on your site, to monitor traffic, and possibly some other perks I'm unaware of.  ;)  So it's important to make sure it still works when you're upgrading the Google Analytics Tracking ID and updating the Google Analytics module, or just updating the module.
   Why would you want to do that?  Well: The 1.x branch of the Google Analytics module is now no longer supported, so if you want security updates you'll have to update to the 2.x branch (pretty straight-forward).
   If you're reading this post, you're likely ...
By Mike Mallett on 04/06/2013
"$1 Hosting Sale - Reliable, Secure & 99.9% Uptime‎"
"Only $3.95/month + $10 Off Today!"
"$1/mo 30GB Space 100GB Traffic, PHP, 100 Databases, 40+ Site/Blog Apps‎"
"Cheap Web Hosting Canada from $1/mo Web Site Hosting"
... These are just some of the offers being made for bottom-line hosting solutions on today's World Wide Web. Offers that seem almost too good to be true. Often times things that seem that way end up being exactly that. It's not that they should be avoided completely, but when deciding what you need from your personal, organization, or corporate web site it is important to...
By Mike Gifford on 24/05/2007
Email is becoming an increasingly complex and unreliable medium. We expect email to be instantaneous and all pervasive. We depend on it arriving moments after it is sent because it almost always does.

Last fall we switched to using Google's Apps domain hosting service to see if we couldn't test out this product before recommending it to our clients. Email hosting is a difficult thankless task because it has become such a critical form of communications. In general we've been very happy with the services provided by Google - particularly with spam reduction. But even with all of the...
By Mike Gifford on 24/05/2007
As a small web development company that also does web hosting for some of our clients it is difficult to even consider competing against the thousands of companies out there that specialize in it. In the last two years we've started to move away from promoting our own services and instead focusing on providing technical support for folks who want to choose to work with another web host. Partly this is because many of our clients have very strong feelings about where their site is hosted (either because off past experience or the monthly cost). It is also because it is very difficult for a...