You are Browsing the December 2010 Archive:

Steam and the Power of a Good CDN

December 31st, 2010 . by Jonathan

We’ve talked a lot on this site about the power of a using a content delivery network (CDN), such as CloudFlare (free and easy to install), and using W3 Total Cache to integrate the CDN with a WordPress site. . But what if using a CDN wasn’t merely an optional improvement for your site, but [...]

7 Things You Can Do for Your Site Over the Holidays

December 29th, 2010 . by Jonathan

There’s not much doubt that it’s the holidays. The shopping malls are full, the roads are packed and Web traffic, for the most part, is down. Unless you’re a webmaster of an ecommerce site that does most of its business during this time of year or operate some other holiday-themed site where there is peak [...]

How Many Domains Can You Host on One Account?

December 20th, 2010 . by Jonathan

One of the most common questions new hosting customers have, especially when they are stepping up to a VPS or a dedicated server account with a set amount of resources, is “How many domains can I host?” Most of the time, there is no limit to the number of sites a server can hold. CPanel [...]

CloudFlare: Two Week CDN Review

December 17th, 2010 . by Jonathan

Two weeks ago I announced that I had moved my personal blog over to CloudFlare, a CDN and site-caching service that works through your domain’s DNS to avoid the need for installation or configuration. While my earlier writeup was a good overview of what CloudFlare does, it was very thin in terms of actual performance. [...]

Gawker Hacked: User Passwords Leaked

December 16th, 2010 . by Jonathan

Gawker Media operates a series of popular blogs including Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku and Jalopnik. They recently suffered a security breach that (potentially) has exposed the passwords of all of the commenter accounts on their sites – all 1.25 million of them. Hackers gained root level access to Gawker’s servers and were able to obtain a [...]

5 Reasons to Avoid Reseller Hosts

December 13th, 2010 . by Jonathan

These days, literally anyone can become a Web host. With a cheap reseller account, a free template and a catchy name/logo, you too can create your own host with almost no experience, expertise or resources. This has effectively flooded the market with ‘also-ran’ hosts that are really just leasing server space from a larger company. [...]

CloudFlare: A Free CDN With Zero Installation

December 3rd, 2010 . by Jonathan

Over the past few years, we’ve talked a great deal about the importance of using a content delivery network (CDN) to speed up your site and buffer it against traffic spikes. We’ve also looked at the different kinds of CDNs, how W3 Total Cache makes it easy to integrate a CDN into your WordPress blog and [...]

3 Bizarre and Extreme Hosting Setups

December 2nd, 2010 . by Jonathan

‘Exciting’ isn’t a word you often hear when describing the hosting industry. Don’t get me wrong; working for a hosting company can be an exciting job, with security issues, angry customers, attacks, downtimes and other daily disasters, working at a hosting company can feel like being in a warzone. It’s fair to say though, when [...]