Who Is Hosting This

As the hosting industry becomes more diversified it is also becoming more specialized. These days, there are hosting brands and services for nearly every single application, operating system, CMS, client type and country. If you have a specific need for your site, there’s a company out there that can meet it. HostBaby is a predictable [...]

The blog commenting landscape is dominated by a handful of big names. Currently, Disquis and Facebook have the lion’s share of the market, although Automattic, the owners of WordPress.com, have a large presence with their Intense Debate platform. However, a different company is hoping to challenge these stalwarts of the industry. Livefyre, although it’s been [...]

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. [...]

W3 Total Cache, previously covered here, has released version .9 (technically, as of this writing, .9.1.1) which adds new features and fixes several of the bugs and gripes users had with the previous release. According to the changelog, over 35 new features and fixes were added into version .9, not counting some additional 10 changes [...]

In April I wrote about a new service by Hostgator I had registered for, Site Auto Backup (SAB). At the time, I was too new to the service to offer much of a review but, with my first month done and my second payment having been made, I definitely have a perspective on the service [...]

If you monitor your Web sites and enjoy doing so from your iPhone, there are precious few applications to choose from. Though many monitoring services have mobile-friendly versions of their site, if you want a native iPhone app, which enables a variety of new features (including push messages and easier/faster access to settings), there are [...]

If you use a VPS or a dedicated server, you most likely have some form of control panel installed to help make management a little bit easier. If that’s the case, odds are better than average you’re using CPanel. While it is no substitute for SSHing into your site and managing things directly, it can [...]

If your site goes down at 1:00 in the morning, will you find out about it? If so, when? Though large corporations routinely have infrastructure that alert administrators to outages, smaller webmasters may not get any alerts at all. Even managed web hosts don’t always actively monitor connections, waiting instead for customers to report outages [...]

Last week we took a look at why webmasters should consider hosting static files with a content delivery network (CDN). However, with so many options available, choosing the right one can be very daunting. Even the CDNs themselves make things difficult, with pricing and features that are alien to most webmasters, even those who have [...]