Key Selling Points:

• High-performance hosting provider
• Green web-hosting services

Address: Ann Arbor, MI

Establishment: 2003

Executives:

• Marketing Manager: Brad Litwin
• VP of Marketing: Corey Hammond

Data Center: Operates from 3 data centres, one in Michigan, the US, another in Amsterdam and Singapore.

History: A2 started as Iniquinet in 2001 and was renamed as a tribute to Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 2004, it became the first host to support PHP 5, and in 2006, it made MySQL 5 available.

Services Offered – Hosting Review A2Hosting

• Integrated open-source solutions
• Shared and Dedicated Hosting
• VPS hosting

Windows Hosting

• High-speed, fully scalable Shared, VPS and Reseller solutions
• Server includes ASP.NET, Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Classic ASP, .NET Core
• Control Panel: Plesk for easy management of files and websites

Hosting plans

Shared hosting from A2hosting.com operates on three plans: the Lite plan, the Swift Plan, and the Turbo plan. Some standard features included 24/7 customer support, 99.9% guaranteed network uptime, e-mail addresses, databases, WordPress, Prestashop, and Drupal.

The company operates 3 Managed VPS hosting plans: The Power+, Prestige+, and Pinnacle+.

Reseller hosting from the company, on the other hand, operates from 3 plans: The produce plan, the Progress plan, and the prosperity plan.

Regarding VPS hosting, the company operates three plans: the Dynamic VPS plan, the Cloud VPS plan and the Managed VPS plan.

Dedicated server hosting clients at the company can choose between the Flex dedicated server and the Managed Flex dedicated server.

Hosting Features

• Developer Tools: Magento, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and OpenCart integration
• Unlimited transfer, domains, RAID-10 storage, email addresses, and databases
• Turbo” server that boasts speeds of up to 20 times faster
• Blazing-fast SSDs, 350+ instant apps, quick and easy setups,
• A free content delivery network (CDN)
• Easy-to-use control panel choices

For Resellers

• Free billing software – WHMCS or Blesta
• cPanel integration
• Linux or Windows servers. Linux is built on cPanel and PHP, while Windows uses Plesk and .NET cores.

Customers – Web Hosting Review A2Hosting

Target Customers: Beginners, startups, and those with low to moderate usage requirements

What for Customers?

• High-performance, feature-rich, secured ultra-reliable solutions on fine-tuned SwiftServer Hosting platform
• innovative, affordable and developer-friendly website hosting
• Turbo Servers featuring page load speeds up to 20X faster than competing hosts
• Specialized Hosting to meet the needs of modern users
• High visitor satisfaction rates and low bounce rates

Support:

• 24/7/365 via phone, e-mail, live chat, and trouble ticketing system. The US-based support from their Guru Crew team.
• available via live chat, email, and telephone with friendly and knowledgeable support staff
• It provides a rich knowledge base and guides

Uptime Guarantee: 99.9%

Money Back Guarantee: Anytime

Promotions:

• A2 Hosting Swift Plan: limited-time offer at only $14.99 on TNW Deals; 1-year subscription + 1 free domain (88% off) on blazing-fast speeds and high-grade Hosting
• The reseller is hosting a 34% off on the first invoice promotional offer.
  Coupon code:34NOW.
  Shared Hosting, a discount of up to 51% on the first invoice.
  Promotion code:  QUICK51.
  She managed VPS up to 34% on the first invoice.
  Coupon code: 34PRESTA.
  Dedicated Server Packages up to 17% on the first invoice
  Coupon code: FASTDED.

View Now

Features and Control panel

Some of the features included in the company hosting are RAID-10 disk storage, WordPress, Prestashop, Drupal, PHP 5, MySQL databases, Postgre 9.4 databases, Ruby, Perl, Python, access, and Node: js,phpMyAdmin, phpPgAdmin. Clients also get to enjoy features such as SMTP, POP3, IMAP support, Cloud FLARE CDN, webmail, Horde, Squirrel mail, Round Cube, unlimited parked domains, FTP, AWStats, Webalizer visitor statistics, analogue visitor statistics, a free shared SSL certificate, access to raw log files, web statistics, unlimited sub-domains and unlimited add-on domains among others.

Conclusion

The hosting services offered by A2hosting.com are exemplary in speed, reliability, and performance. On top of that, the company’s customer support team is accessible 24/7 to cater to the client’s needs. The company furthermore offers a variety of hosting services.

• A JavaScript-based open-source front-end web application framework suited to application development. The JavaScript components complement Apache Cordova’s framework for developing cross-platform mobile apps.
• It extends an application’s HTML vocabulary, creating an expressive, readable, quick-to-develop environment.
• Full extensible and compatible with other libraries.
• It is maintained by Google and by a community of individuals and corporations to address many of the challenges encountered in developing single-page applications.
• Developers can modify features to suit unique development workflow and needs. It simplifies the development and the testing of such applications by providing a framework for client-side model–view–controller (MVC) and model–model (MVVM) architectures, along with components commonly used in rich Internet applications.

Share your valuable feedback, comments or suggestions on Adult Hosting Providers

Adult Hosting Providers

Adult hosting provides a platform for those customers or organizations dealing with adult industry or pornography. It is very similar to standard web hosting as you get an option to choose either dedicated server hosting or shared server hosting. You also get web space to host the domain, bandwidth, email addresses, domains, subdomains, etc.

A customer can host Adult or Porn Data in the form of images, videos, animations and written content. Suppose a customer is planning to build an adult website. In that case, the customer should keep in mind the stringent laws, and before taking the adult hosting from any service provider customer should read all the rules that apply to hosting an adult website. Searching for the best adult hosting company can be time-consuming.

Sexy Racy Ads

Advertisement campaigns with sex appeal in the form of scantily-clad women generate massive buzz and headlines. Such ads are more memorable to viewers. The Internet has made such content widely available.
According to Discover magazine, the first known modern advertisement featuring nudity appeared in 1871.
According to Forbes, an advertisement with sex appeal is not valid anymore in selling products. Such ads could lead to negative behaviour among some people, including sexism and self-esteem issues in women.
Meta-analysis of nearly 80 academic studies from researchers at the University of Illinois concluded that those ads don’t work, at least the way those brands want. The study found that the average man liked the advertisements with sex appeal, while the average woman disliked them. Viewers don’t remember the specific brand name or are motivated to buy that product.

Portraying Women in Sexist marketing campaigns dressed scantily is not suitable for business. It creates controversy, as seen in the ad for Superbowl 2013 GoDaddy’s ad, which featured Israeli model Bar Refaeli bespectacled ‘nerd.’ The adv commercial got expunged shortly.

Global Pornography Business – Fastest Growing Sector and has nothing to do with prostitution.
Adorned with pictures of women in states of glamorous undress.
Interactive webcamming: Sensual, intelligent and beautiful Cam-Girls models are available live and direct via the studio or home webcam. The clients logging in from North America and Western Europe served with virtual relationships and cybersex.
These models create the sensation with heavy makeup, bright, revealing lingerie or leather clothes, and sky-high heels.

Be-aware of Adult websites

Cybercriminals use clever spyware on Porn sites to spy on all text messages and deliver their scams like a phishing email, malicious app or website that infects gadgets with malware or ransomware. The scammers trick victims into clicking the links to adult games like “Virtual Girlfriend.”
The spyware displays the error message that claims to uninstall the game and runs in the background of the victim’s gadget.
The Trend Micro researchers discovered nasty spyware named after former adult film actress Mia Khalifa, dubbed Maikspy, mainly targets Android and Windows users.

Banned access to sites hosting pornography

(June 15, 2017) ‘Child abuse web host’ Eric Eoin Marques, 30, dual Irish and US citizen, fights the US extradition since his arrest in 2013, where he could be jailed for life. In Ireland, he would plead guilty and face a maximum 14-year sentence. He got charged as the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet-hosting hundreds of child sex abuse websites on Freedom Hosting’s servers. The sites are extremely graphic and depict the rape and torture of young children.

Aimed at regulating content from ISPs, as well as that of gaming applications, Video on Demand (VoD) and Over the Top (OTT) services, the Kenyan government is backing up new legislation. KFCF (Kenya Film and Classification Board) drafted the proposed Film, Stage Plays, and Publication Act 2016, which expects ISPs not to host or distribute material not certified and classified by the board.

According to the legislation, ISPs must:

• Take reasonable steps to prevent the use of their services for hosting or distributing pornography, radicalization materials, glamorization of the use of drugs and alcohol, hate speech and demining any religion and community, and
• Report all persons maintaining, hosting or distributing all content reasonably suspected to violate this Act.

Not complying with these requirements, ISP’ would be fined up to Kshs 2 million (US$20,000) or a term of imprisonment not exceeding two years or both.

Adult Service Providers who want to produce, host and distribute content from the country, including adult web hosting companies, could be affected.

Everybody in the Hosting industry is worried about performing backups. With the need, innovations in backup technologies such as CDP instant recovery, flat backups, Server virtualization, and backup appliances emerge. There is a need to protect data entirely and restore it as needed.

Disaster recovery systems must be fully advanced for mission-critical systems and business continuity, as long recovery times are unacceptable. The gap between RTO (Recovery Point Objective) and RPO (Recovery Time Objective) must be minimal.

With E-commerce proliferating, legacy scheduled backups are always inadequate. Incremental forever backup techniques are required to handle data backup daily.

Continuous data protection eliminates the problems associated with the backup window, creating frequent, block-level backups rather than nightly ones. Every few minutes, newly created or modified storage blocks are copied to the backup targets like storage arrays or remote machines. Thus reducing the recovery point objective (RPO).
Losing a few minutes of data is more affordable than losing data for an entire day.

SSL Certificate

Suitable Chrome Warning – SSL Certificate

Google Chrome will give the warning “Not Secure” for HTTP sites after January 2017. Google want a connection between Chrome and the web page to be more secure, i.e. private. A green lock in the URL indicates HTTPS connection, which points to “Your connection to this site is private.”

HTTPS establishes an encrypted connection between web browsers and servers, ensuring that third parties cannot interfere with data transfers. HTTP is no longer considered sufficiently secure and is being forcibly phased out.

Google search has already started preferring HTTPS web pages over HTTP pages. It has outlined sites operating without HTTPS and dropped down the SERP rankings, ultimately causing them to lose visibility. Any site not protected with Secure-Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) will be marked with the red triangle of an insecure location.

Web hosting providers like Automatic and WordPress.com have already turned on SSL for their hosted customers in April 2016.

An SSL certificate or X.509 Digital Certificate from a trusted third party called a Certificate Authority (CA), which guarantees the Digital Certificate’s authenticity with a Digital Signature, is a must for websites.

LinuxHost.net suggests to avoid self-signed certificates.

Types of SSL Certificates

• Domain Validation (DV) SSL Certificates: The simple websites opt for this; it implies that the DV registrant has admin rights to the sites
• Organization Validation (OV) SSL Certificates: Most commercial websites opt for this certificate. It validates the domain ownership and includes ownership information like the site owner’s name, city, state, and country.
• Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificates: It legally validates the domain’s owners. The website shows a green address bar in most browsers.

Nonprofit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG)’s Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate

Hosting Providers like ZDNet and Hivelocity offer free Let’s Encrypt certificates.

Let’s Encrypt, a nonprofit Internet Security Research Group project, provides free certificates to Dreamhost, Squarespace, and WordPress. Dreamhost requires you to purchase a unique IP address on your hosting plan for free SSL.

• It is Open Certificate Authority providing free and automated SSL-Certificates to enable HTTPS for websites supported by Google Chrome, Mozilla, and EFF.
• Difference between Commercial CA’s and Let’s Encrypt SSL: Commercial businesses back up their security with a $500,000 and $1 million warranty, but with Let’s Encrypt, it is your own. Furthermore, the organization don’t offer OV or EV certificates.

Share your valuable feedback, comments or suggestions on SME Securing Business Data

SME Securing Business Data

Train Employees – SME Securing Business Data

Train and educate employees with cybersecurity by examples. Monitor their sincerity and commitment towards it. A trained employee is less susceptible to silly mistakes that could threaten business security. Although training consumes budget, results are far better, and it appears to be an investment instead of an expenditure. This training should be a must for both new and experienced employees. Few companies arrange workshops, seminars, and conferences on the topics and ask every employee to participate. Employees are valuable assets for any company, and no company can survive without employees.

Securing Devices – SME Securing Business Data

An entrepreneur trusts its employees, thus enabling them to perform their allotted duties. For that, it provides various resources and digital devices. Although employees keep the offered digital devices safe, we know they are also humans. Mistakenly, they can lose the device, or it could get stolen. It can happen to anybody. Now, tension arises not from the equipment but the data and passwords it may hold.

It is acceptable that everybody is not technical; in that case, they can take the help of IT personnel. Most companies restrict personal devices in the office for proper management. Furthermore, they don’t allow any non-business activities using those devices. The companies consider their data secrecy of utmost importance and want to prevent any deliberate or inadvertently posting of data in the public domain.

Some companies log all the sites an employee opens, how long she/he stays on it, and what activities are performed. This kind of spy helps the IT personnel to trace the source of the attack by tracing the log.

Recommended Software & Services – SME Securing Business Data

The businesses are recommended various software and services to manage their digital assets:

• Prey: Tracks devices, allows remote wiping, and helps retrieve files from backup.
• Computrace: A perfect platform product that works at the BIOS level. If the device is reformatted to load windows, the BIOS will get it installed automatically in the background. It would help the owner to trace and wipe out the data.

Share your valuable feedback, comments or suggestions on Secure Internet Browsing

Secure Internet Browsing

Primary Work Tool – Secure Internet Browsing

Browsers are valuable in accessing applications and information and performing day-to-day activities. The most commonly used browsers include Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer. The user uses cloud applications that can run from anywhere and anytime and are accessible via a browser, e.g. Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce CRM applications, and the Zoho One Business Suite. They access them through various browser-enabled devices like smartphones, laptops, PCs and others. They don’t need to install additional components to access applications or data.

Nowadays, browsers are supplemented by operating system resources and software applications like Java and Adobe Flash Player. The HTML5-enabled browser handles everything, eliminating the need for Flash, Java and other add-ons and software components to interact with system resources.

We assume they are the most secure web browsers that block advertisers and maintain privacy by not sharing information with companies or the government.

How do you make internet browsing safe and secure?

• Padlock icon: A small icon on the top of the browser.
  • Close represents that the session is secure
  • Broken or exclamation mark shows vulnerability to adversaries
• Encrypted Communication: Download, install and activate HTTPS Everywhere plugin from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Most browsers warn a user whenever SSL is not installed on a website.
• Install and Activate WOT (Web of Trust) or Calling-ID to check the website’s or link’s trustworthiness.
• Use portable apps when browsing from public computers. Mobile apps run on the host computer without being installed.
• Mobile Anonymous Browsing: On Android, install the Orbot and Orweb apps, which funnel and encrypt the traffic through the Tor network. On iOS-enabled iPhones or iPads, use Onion Browsers for anonymous browsing.
• Use VPN (Virtual Private Network) Services to hide an IP (Internet Protocol) address with a fake one. A good quality VPN may include features like multiple hops, i.e. bouncing traffic between distant geographic locations or out-of-band authentication that does not break anonymity.

Web Browsers – Safe and Secure Internet Browsing

Mozilla Firefox

• Free, open-source
• Its version, Tor Browser Bundle, is customized to use an anonymous network, which hides users’ IP addresses and locations.

Chrome’s browser Incognito mode

Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari share user information with the government

Share your valuable feedback, comments or suggestions on Antivirus Real-time Scanner

Antivirus Real-time Scanner

Antivirus is the first software we ask to get installed on a system. Even Mac users ask for it. Whether you connect to the Internet or not, surf only safe websites, do not click on any link, do not open strangers’ emails, and do not install additional software. Still, your system needs a good antivirus.

An antivirus does real-time scanning of system memory, OS and files and detects, prevents, and removes malicious code. It applies signature-based detection methods, heuristic detection methods, and rootkit detection tools. Furthermore, it contains a significant level of intrusions and malware to prevent computers from being infected.

Antivirus Providers

Symantec, McAfee, Avira, Avast, AVG, Quick Heal, Comodo, Avast Software, ESET, Bitdefender, Fortinet, F-Secure, G DATA Software, Qihoo 360, Kaspersky, Panda Security, Trend Micro, Microsoft, Rising, Cheetah Mobile, AhnLab

Virus

A virus persists on a system after a reboot and starts with the system. They acquire strain’s ability with persistence by modifying boot sectors, hijacking the Windows COM system or DLLs and shortcut files, and using Windows Registry to add registry keys to call malicious code on boot-up.

Researchers have found a new malware persistence method on Windows 10 leveraging Microsoft UWP apps like the Cortana and People apps.

Virus Steal User Data – Mac and iPhone devices are also not safe.

(September 10, 2018) Apple removed several Trend Micro Apps from the Mac App Store, stealing user data. Researchers confirmed that Mac App Store malware called ‘Adware Doctor’ collected users’ browsing history and sent that info in zipped files to remote servers in China without user permission. They also reported other programs on the platform to indulge in similar nefarious activities. The apps behaving deceptively include Dr Antivirus, Dr Cleaner, Dr Unarchiver, Dr Antivirus and Open Any Files: RAR Support. Most of them are distributed by Trend Micro, a well-known security software firm.

App Store to Remove iPhone Antivirus Apps

iOS is designed with security in mind; an antivirus app is unnecessary. Also, its sandbox environment does not allow apps to interact with other data or scan other apps. Thus, they won’t steal data or infect other apps. Furthermore, a user cannot install an app outside the App Store. An app undergoes a thorough review process, in which code is examined before being allowed into the App Store, hence discouraging and making it difficult for the developer to sneak malicious code onto the platform.
A user can install apps outside the Google Play Store via APK files on Android.