04.28.22
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GetLark Simple Business Hosting platform


GetLark is a group of experienced product experts and technology enthusiasts who desire to change the status quo of the market landscape. The company’s mission is to provide a shared hosting platform for web developers, agencies, or freelancers, offering hosting services, domains, and free hosting for 14 days. 

The web hosting platform has over 5000 users, meets everyone’s needs, and is one of the fastest-growing web hosting companies. It’s simple to create an account with the company, and the webmaster is granted account access within 30 seconds. Suppose anybody doesn’t like the services; it’s easy to revoke access. The company claims that its hosting services are the right place for web developers, as they dedicate free hosting accounts for their web developer’s clients. The web developer can create a free account on them and hand it over to website owners after complete development.

The control panel is user-friendly, and web developers can use it without hassle. It comes with safe authorization standards that enable easy management of clients’ services. The hosting services are offered on 100% pure SSD storage. The clients can pay quarterly, yearly, or biennially and get a 30-day money-back guarantee. The hosting provider championing simplicity in the web hosting industry offers hosting services to any brand looking to project itself on the Internet. The hosting service’s benefits include greater security, backup features, technical support, better performance, and even restoration if a site is hacked. The clients can park domains, transfer, and create email accounts and databases. 

The company claims to provide the best performance with hosting features like a Free ‘.com’ domain, Lets Encrypt, PHP, MariaDB, Perl, Python, Backup every 12h, kept seven days back, WP-CLI, DDoS protection, Support 24/7, & GIT.

GetLark’s dashboard control panel, which is currently the easiest to operate in the industry, comes with the following desirable features:

  • SSH access
  • LiteSpeed & LiteCache Lightning-fast service management
  • Advanced and straightforward webmail solution
  • Deployment of new hosting in 50 seconds and Free hosting during the site-building process
  • Creation and configuration of a new website in 30 second
  • Great performance on smartphone
  • All statistics in one place
  • One-click apps installer
04.27.22
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Choosing Windows Web Hosting Services Over Linux


The web hosting business can thrive only when it can retain existing customers and keep adding new ones. The web hosting platforms like cPanel & Plesk have provided ease of integration and migration. Still, the web hosting providers are categorized as Windows & Linux web hosting service providers. Each has its allegiance, revenue, and marketplace, as web development goes in all these languages Laravel, ASP, Microsoft’s .Net.

Microsoft offers and is continuously developing tools for the web service provider industry & hosters with products such as Site Server and Commerce Server to gauge the application management, integration, and packaged value-add delivery nuances of Web services and .Net. Microsoft makes it easy at work to integrate and build responsive websites for handsets and PDAs. The company has remained a solid contender for the Linux web services space and has continuously improved and overcome shortcomings.

Linux is open-source, accessible, and cheap to deploy back-end services. Thus, it’s gaining much popularity & accounts as a leading platform for the web. While being economically viable, the hosting platform provides the best security, stability, and transaction support. Most hosting providers offer Linux hosting solutions with plan customization.

The choice of Linux or Windows platform largely depends on the web programming language as ASP, Visual Studio .Net, and .NET run only on Windows and its excellent reliability. Web developers still use these languages as the toolsets and resources make it easier to modify applications, customize them faster, integrate changes, and the ability to deliver them with the best functionality. Thus, bringing dynamism to customer applications as per needs. The customers didn’t need to wait around to get results. Furthermore, .Net applications are considered secure compared to others magnified by ten and hence dominate the web development market. With the best engineering, full support, and Microsoft build products, the Windows web hosting services will stay for long in the web hosting business and keep drawing the attention and momentum.

Microsoft upgrades and enhances the web host’s capability of deploying Microsoft Microsoft architecture in their data centers. Furthermore, it supports the development of an internal service-level management application built entirely using .Net. Most hosting providers endorse ‘.Net’-based web hosting services to small and midsize businesses to use a shared hosting environment and when applications outgrow the use of windows dedicated servers.

The web hosting services market is growing fast, as the amount of application-to-application or server-to-server traffic will explode.

04.27.22
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End of Life (EOL) ‘.htaccess’


WP Engine announced ending support for the ‘.htaccess’ directive and has a set date of October 2022 for its complete removal. And, when managed WordPress hosting provider WP Engine is saying this, it means a lot. WordPress websites stop working if something happens to ‘.htaccess’ and, with time, become an integral part of the platform. The WordPress platform generates the default version of .htaccess while installation. It’s a longstanding established practice to customize the file for better performance and security tactics and control certain website aspects. 

Most web admins use the ‘.htaccess’ file for URL redirection purposes or for blocking IP addresses of malicious hackers and scrapers, among many other uses. But for this, the WordPress plugin ‘Redirection’ can easily manage redirects and headers. The plugin provides a convenient log file that shows 404 responses and alerts inbound misspelled links. The plugin offers the most efficient way of managing activities like blocking IP addresses or redirecting URLs. Another way is by creating Web Rules that allow users to manage IP-based allow/deny rules and setting header responses. Yoast SEO plugin also comes with a redirect manager.

WP Engine, such an announcement sounds like a deal-breaker. Is the company looking for some new technology, as most web admins won’t find the web hosting suitable for their professional websites? The company might be doing this with complete strategy and planning. Their decision is not pop-up like a surprise, and it would be well researched and thoughtful. The company has been in the WordPress Managed Hosting business since 2013. Their team is dedicated to improving website performance, protection, and accelerated development. 

The company is giving the reasons behind removing .htaccess from site-level is achieving performance and matching industry trends. The company has developed a list of recommended alternatives, and rewrites will be handled at the server level. Another reason the company provides is that the official Apache Software Foundation itself recommends not using .htaccess at the website level. According to developers of the Apache server software, the only time ‘.htaccess’ files should ever be used when access to the server configuration file is restricted, such as one might find on budget shared servers. The file is used on servers that run Apache open-source server software and Nginx servers that run as a reverse proxy for Apache.

The Apache Software Foundation documentation advises:

“There is, for example, a common misconception that user authentication should always be done in .htaccess files, and, in more recent years, another misconception that mod_rewrite directives must go in .htaccess files.

This is not the case.

You can put user authentication configurations in the main server configuration, which is the preferred way to do things. Likewise, mod_rewrite directives work better, in many respects, in the main server configuration.”

WP Engine claims that there are clear benefits for their users and website visitors.

The large ‘.htaccess’ file hurts SEO and conversion-related metrics such as the Time to First Byte (TTFB). The metric measures how long it takes for a server to download web page resources. It impacts both server performance and scalability, as it has a measurable and significant impact on CPU & memory usage. The WP Engine wants to create website friendly environment to make the website faster.

Will other web hosts follow WP Engine and deprecate the .htaccess file?
04.27.22
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Multi-Vendor Marketplace


Most businesses list their products on top marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Etsy, and others to increase sales. While focusing on their e-commerce portals, SMEs list products on branded marketplaces that helped increase revenues by 80 per cent. The global marketing websites allow listing men’s and women’s clothing, fragrances, skin-care products, cosmetics, and much more. Their product pages look like brochures. With managed services, these marketplaces make buying, selling, and sophisticated transactions easier.

Most businesses start their e-commerce portals, but one in thousands begin getting traffic. Thus, these businesses find it comfortable to list products on marketplaces where traffic is already there. The e-commerce marketplace provides fully managed services, responding to the complex needs of SMEs and large businesses. Hence they are gaining popularity as more businesses go online. The company gets the liberty to sell products worldwide with hosted applications and even don’t need employees scattered across those selling destinations. The standard, the preconfigured platform, enables companies to list products instantly after signup to get customers.

The marketplace provider installs base e-commerce software, apps, round-the-clock monitoring, caching, 100% uptime, periodic backups, and other plugins on standardized hardware and server infrastructure and configurations. The technical team takes care of performance, complex needs, and speed deployments, and manages the application, content distribution, network, storage capability, and service-level agreements and licensing. Furthermore, it makes data accessible anytime and anywhere, with real-time access to billing information, trouble tickets, and other data associated with their accounts.

The businesses find the cost of listing or launching products on marketplaces much lower than implementing and maintaining e-commerce portals themselves. Thus, they decided to go with branded marketplace instead of making a significant investment in bringing up sites, thus capitalizing on the marketplace’s extensive infrastructure.

Most companies don’t have the skills, technical staff, & technologies for those pieces. Marketplaces like DownTown.us do much more marketing stuff like offering streaming media services, social media sharing, & business listing apart from providing the platform, thus making the companies profitable by increasing the visibility and demand of their products. Therefore, most small and midsize companies are moving into the managed services arena.

04.27.22
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Listing Web Hosting Services


After this CORONA pandemic, online businesses have taken a significant stake. Almost every company has come online with substantial investment and started an e-commerce website to facilitate sales, ordering, and other online transactions. Businesses have started relying on online sales much compared to their physical stores. The factory outlets started their online e-commerce portals to provide products or services at lower prices, eliminating intermediaries. Thus, online business has become highly competitive; hence, it requires quality websites and the best web hosting services. No company would like to risk its online presence to host its website on a notorious web hosting provider who has server downtime, provides no security and backups, and have frequent technical gaffes.

Online e-commerce businesses need fast servers, security, backups, and the best look-n-feel to attract potential customers.

https://ananova.com/best-hosting-providers

The hosting providers set up high-performance criteria with cloud hosting living consistently with their claims. Ananova.com reviews all such web hosting providers to ensure they continuously meet standards and then list them on its top Web hosting providers list.

The web hosting providers ranking in the list depends on the customer/visitors reviews and ratings, professional hosting ethics, customers support and services, and brand acknowledgement in the web hosting market. Most website visitors rate hosting providers and consider these criteria necessary to meet website requirements, including a money-back guarantee, 24×7 technical support, payment options, hosting prices, hosting resources, usage, and access logs. Business Hosting Journal (BHJ) considers Ananova criteria can strengthen the web hosting industry as s whole.

04.25.22
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Satya Nadella – Microsoft’s CEO


Microsoft’s (MSFT) stock is 18% up this year on Wall Street and hit a new 52-week high on Tuesday. It’s now 10% below the all-time high it hit way back in December 1999 during the Bill Gates era. The company is ahead of the broader market and doing better than its rivals, Apple (AAPL), Oracle (ORCL), IBM, and SAP. Its cloud sales boomed up in the latest quarter.

Since Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer in February 2014 as CEO, shares go nearly 60% up, almost more than double the gain of the Nasdaq during the same time frame. Could Satya Nadella be compared to Bill Gates? All Indians say it proudly as he is delivering on that count.

Satya Nadella emphasized cloud products like Office 365, cloud-centric Windows 10 operating system, and Azure. That brings Microsoft to compete in the web hosting services with Google and Amazon’s lucrative AWS division. Microsoft is emerging as a cloud provider from its old model of selling software. Even though its overall revenue has gone down, its profits rose. Microsoft is emerging as the most user-friendly and transparent, allowing free Windows 10 downloads and listening to developers and customers. Windows 10 has pushed consumers and businesses to upgrade from older PC machines and benefitted Intel (INTC).

The company shareholders are pretty enthusiastic about the company’s prospects. It’s an old story now when in 2013, Microsoft bought the smartphone business of Nokia (NOK). In 2014, the company cut 7,800 jobs on top of the 18,000 announced. 

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation that produces computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. It is also emerging as a leading provider of Microsoft 365, Xbox, Windows, and Azure.

04.25.22
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HOSTING COMPANIES BANS HATE SITES


No hosting company allows hate sites, and the latest example is Godaddy cancelling the website registration for the white supremacist and neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. The website posted an extremely misogynistic post mocking Heather Heyer, the young 32-year woman murdered at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, by a neo-Nazi. It certainly appears that he deliberately drove his car into her and numerous other counter-demonstrators.

In this case, a GoDaddy spokeswoman said The Daily Stormer crossed the line and “encouraged and promoted violence. In instances where a site goes beyond the mere exercise of these freedoms, however, and crosses over to promoting, encouraging, or otherwise engaging in violence against any person, we will take action.”

Under the GoDaddy ToS, GoDaddy had the power to terminate a domain registration based on the user’s “morally objectionable activities,” including “[a]ctivities designed to encourage unlawful behaviour by others, such as hate crimes.”

After that, the website didn’t get any hosting platform, and they tried on Google and then Russian servers but quickly withdrew the registration. The hate content violates the web hosting company’s contractual Terms of Service (ToS), and now the website has a hard time finding a place on the web. No primary web hosting provider is willing to register the Daily Stermer domain and provide hosting.

The Daily Stormer is an American far-right, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, misogynist, Islamophobic, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website that advocates for the second genocide of Jews. It is part of the alt-right movement. Wikipedia

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech and expression from government censorship and government punishment. Also, Internet neutrality claims to transmit any content, but the land laws of all the countries ban and restrict such objectionable hate content. Legally drew a line and held web hosting companies responsible for not allowing any such website. Furthermore, even the website hosting companies have the policy not to host such websites. It’s within the web hosting company’s rights to decide whom they conduct business with, and they don’t allow the expression of hate, racism, and bigotry on their platforms.

04.25.22
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No Criminal is beyond FBI Reach


Every parent wants decency in every media, whether movies or the Internet. But, on Internet, you may find everything. During the Corona pandemic, even small kids were given access to the mobiles and Internet. Keeping an eye on children every time is not possible. Although firewalls block specific websites and routers also come with parenting guards.
There has been a sharp decline in adult hosting websites in recent years, and even now, the hosting providers are very stringent on this. But, online adult websites still exist on the Dark Web, and land laws are not sufficient or powerless to some extent to stop them. It creates a sense of urgency to stop abuse and adultery. Negative things gain more popularity, such as adultery websites, images, gallery rack up a substantial number of views.

A single collection of images, labeled “Melinda – my daughter,” was viewed more than 467,000 times. The most challenging part is that viewers or members of such sites are not punished, or significantly fewer numbers get punishment. The agencies find investigations of such websites costly, slow and difficult.

Recently FBI hackers resorted to hacking to hunt down pedophiles hiding anonymously on the Internet. They took down a child porn ring on TOR by hacking, spying, and conducting home raids. The details came into focus when the FBI played the hacker spies role going beyond legal boundaries with court authorization.

In Operation Torpedo started in 2011, Netherlands police found a large child porn site and gained administrative access. The web server was located inside a data center at Power DNN, a Web hosting service located in Bellevue, Nebraska. Prosecutors said police rescued over half a dozen children. According to court records, Dutch cops then tipped off the FBI.

The judge approved FBI spying on Omaha, Nebraska, home of one Power DNN employee, Aaron McGrath. In late 2012, The federal agents burst into his house and caught McGrath signed in as the administrator of PedoBook, a social media site where people shared photos of child pornography. His laptop data was encrypted and locked, but investigators could determine the password and unlock the computer, as per court records. FBI agents could not identify the website’s visitors, as the website on the Dark Web was accessible through the TOR browser, which hides visitors’ location by bouncing Internet traffic signals around the globe. Then FBI was granted a search warrant for a “network investigative technique,” allowing agents to slip computer code into photos on the child porn website.

Every time a website visitor clicked on an image of a naked child, their computer also downloaded extra data that reported its actual IP address and operating system and identified users. The FBI agents exploited notoriously vulnerable Flash to establish a direct connection to reveal IP addresses. Those using an outdated version of TOR and didn’t set computers block Flash, their IP got revealed. They catch the slowest, dumbest of the bunch without breaking TOR’s anonymity.

One more challenge is that few, in the name of free speech, criticize the government’s actions and question the legality of bringing down such websites; they say the Internet is free and such websites can also run, and people can freely watch them. Challenging the FBI hacking methods in the Operation Torpedo case, the defense attorney claimed the mass hack was “overreaching of law enforcement.” “FBI unfairly sneaked upon his client.” The defense argued that the search warrant required notifying the suspect of the electronic search within 30 days.

These criminals’ acts were beyond one’s imagination. A 22-year-old from Ashford, Alabama, promised to produce images of his yet unborn daughter while still in her mother’s womb, and the FBI stopped him, and now he is in prison for 15 years.
A 42-year-old boasted about the many girls he raped in the Philippines. He’s now serving 20 years.
(source: https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/25/technology/fbi-child-porn/index.html)

04.25.22
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ANANOVA LISTED POWER HOSTING PROVIDER


ANANOVA NEWS March 25, 2022

Ananova.com lists the power hosting providers to help businesses running e-commerce websites that do heavy business transactions pick the best web host. Ananova selected the hosting providers by considering security, SSL/TLS to enable “HTTPS” pages, handling payments, guaranteed 100% uptime SLA, cloud resources, snapshot backup facility, and other features, thus helping Webhosting customers to reap the benefits.

The world is moving fast toward online markets, and every business considers it must have an online presence to sell goods to consumers worldwide. The businesses create online marketing plans and strategies to reach, catch & communicate to customers, thus fostering a community around their company.

The Ananova listed hosting provider offers professional e-commerce templates to enable businesses to build a website with all available capabilities. It’s good to have a business e-mail address, blog, and social media presence for a business.

Ananova recommends WordPress.com eCommerce & Business plan for e-commerce sites and shopping carts. The programs offer Premium themes and more than 50,000 WordPress plugins to provide businesses with the best look-n-feel and functionality with the best security and backups. The provider takes care of security, making the website 100% secure to minimize hacking or malicious activity. For an e-commerce website, this feature is a must as customers do share sensitive credit card information while making purchases. SSL/TLS – Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security ensures information encryption.

Furthermore, WordPress allows customization, accepts payments in 60+ countries, and integrates with Top Shipping Carriers.

Share your Web hosting tips and experiences in Business Hosting Journal (BHJ.org)

04.19.22
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Why is WordPress Best For You?


WordPress has been the most widely used CMS platform throughout history and continues to be so today.

Do you wish to create your website on the WordPress platform and look for the best plan. The Ananova would guide you to choose the best hosting plan for your online business presence. CPWebHosting is an affiliate to WordPress.com and earns commission whenever anybody purchases hosting plans using the partner links. The Ananova editorial team’s opinions and evaluations are unbiased, honest, impartial, comprehensive, and current despite the above. The team highly recommends WordPress.com to build a business, e-commerce, stores, blogging, & individual websites because of its competitive pricing, features, security, and the best customer support.

Although one can ask why only WordPress.com website builder, when WordPress offered is same through WordPress.org?

Further, is it necessary to have a premium domain? Why not use the freely available sub-domain with WordPress.com like Ananova.wordpress.com.

A website looks professional with a premium domain, and it should not be a staging domain. You can get a domain from Godaddy, Enom, Dynadot, Google domains, or other registrars. The premium domain costs from $8 to $14 if the domain code is .org or .com annually. 

WordPress.com offers:

‘WordPress Free‘ with limited functionality, storage, and traffic. It is free and does not include a custom domain name, premium themes, WordPress plugins, premium support, WooCommerce, SEO Tools, advanced social media tools, professional email, WordAds, SFTP, database access, automated backups, and jetpack essentials. This free plan comes with 1GB storage, does not allow uploading videos, displays ads, and allows only one administrator.

‘WordPress Pro‘ plan includes a custom domain name free for one year, premium themes, Unlimited WordPress plugins, premium support, Sell Products with WooCommerce, Collect payments, SEO Tools, advanced social media tools, professional email free for 3 months, WordAds, upload, videos, SFTP, database access, automated backups, and jetpack essentials. This free plan comes with 50GB storage, without ads, and allows unlimited administrators. The plans enable the installation of 3-rd party premium themes and plugins.

For those who want to try other hosting providers, Ananova provides a list of trusted web hosting providers

https://ananova.com/best-hosting-providers

where they can install WordPress through cPanel Control Panel. 

Since early April 2022, WordPress.com has offered two plans as listed above with differences. The Pro plan includes everything a business website needs.