Hosting

DDoS Attacks or Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

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DDoS Attacks

What is a DDoS Attack? Have you read or heard about Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks? This is probably the most common way to disrupt a website and even an entire server! The DDoS is a very simple way of attacking a server: when you visit a particular website from your computer, phone or tablet the server has to use its resources (processor and memory) to show you the website you want to see. Servers are prepared to handle a lot of requests where hundreds or thousands of users are visiting websites hosted in that server. A typical user would spend few seconds per page before browsing another web page but what happens if  there is a large group of devices visiting this same website, several times per second in a very short time-frame? The server would get overloaded and collapse, unable to respond to any more requests. At this point it is likely that all other websites hosted […]

Your Business Phone Service can be a lot Cheaper!

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Business Phone Service

Expensive Business Phone Services Traditional businesses probably call their local phone provider (AT&T, BellSouth, etc.), and setup a business account with multiple extensions. In other cases they get a business phone service from their internet service providers. Some businesses have a work from home or have a remote team that needs to be on the same phone system and use popular VoIP based services such as Vonage Business, RingCentral or Nextiva. These services tend to be cost-prohibitive for some businesses or start-ups and creates a fixed or variable cost per extension. We were using a popular VoIP system that worked well with our distributed team, however, it created an added cost per extension and/or direct line. Our company requires several direct lines and a main line because we provide white label services to some of our partners. Some of these services charged for every feature we would need such as a conference bridge, a call tree and others. Our First […]

Create a VPN Server on a budget

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how to setup vpn on a budget

You don’t need to spend a lot of money to have a VPN for your workplace.  It is pretty easy and cheap to do. Besides, it can really make things a lot more secure for your work. What is a VPN? VPN or Virtual Private Network is a way to keep things as secure as possible in a company or organization by creating a “tunnel” between your remote location and your office’s network. With a traditional VPN it makes it easier for you to connect to your company’s network, access files and applications and more. This way it doesn’t matter where you are because when you use it you will work as if you were in the office.  All the data, files and applications you normally use in your office will be accessible from any location. How can a VPN be useful or more secure? An office can control and separate things from the inside and the outside network. For example: your network […]

What is cloud hosting and why use it?

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what is cloud hosting

What is Cloud Hosting? Cloud hosting is when you are able to combine several servers or machines to work together and act as one big scalable hosting server. On top of that you can set up multiple virtual environments and containers inside this cloud and each one will work independently. This provides improved scalability (it is much easier to increase resources, processing power, disk space, and more). So in effect, a cloud hosting solution can be seen as a very big server with tremendous resource capacity, high network speed and intelligent software that allows an administrator to create independent smaller hosting environments that share resources effectively without affecting each other. Advantages of Cloud Hosting With traditional dedicated or shared hosting providers (these ultimately depend on a single server) it is harder to scale and has less disaster recovery options. If multiple hard drives fail, or a RAM chip goes bad, it affects the entire server. It is harder to scale […]

Difference between domain hosting and web hosting

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difference between web hosting and domain hosting

It can get confusing on understanding the difference between domain hosting and web hosting. Often when I ask a client “Where is your domain hosted?”, they say one of the following: “Oh, I have everything in GoDaddy or X service.” “What’s domain hosting? I bought the domain many years ago, I don’t know.” “Don’t you host my website? You should know.” “I don’t know, ask my IT guy.” What is a Domain? A domain is the “master” address of your internet name, for example nearsource.net is our domain. You purchase domains at registrar sites, for example we have our own registrar nearsourcehosting.com available for clients to register domains. There are many popular registrar sites like www.godaddy.com and register.com. These usually also offer web hosting as well (explained later in this article). Domains are normally purchased (registered) for 1 or more years and needs to be renewed yearly or when it expires. There is no one-time purchase option when registering a domain. […]