Site hosting news, tutorials, tips, How Tos and more
We have updated our Windows 2012 servers to support ASP.NET Core 1.0. This is the latest rewrite of ASP.NET from Microsoft (which they had previously called .NET 5). Learn more about .NET Core here.
If you want to use .NET Core 1.0 but your site is not on a Windows 2012 server, we can migrate you to a newer server. Just log in to the support portal and open up a ticket. We’ll take it from there. You can see the web server your site is running on in the Site Info section of Control Panel, under “Web Server.”
The latest versions of the following applications are now available through our App Installer tool:
We have partnered with Spam Experts to bring you the leading premium spam filtering service. Because Spam Experts filters millions of emails daily, they have the ability to detect emerging threats early, so their spam filtering engine is always up-to-date.
Not only will you get a cleaner inbox, you also get access to a feature-rich management portal called SpamPanel. Missing an expected email? You can check your email logs. Want to whitelist or blacklist a user or an entire domain? You can do that through SpamPanel. You’ll also get a daily report listing your quarantined emails.
You can try Spam Experts spam filtering FREE for 30 days (limited time offer until March 31, 2016 free trial extended to April 15th!). After the free trial you can continue using SpamExperts for as little as $3.45 a month.
For more information on Spam Experts spam filter pricing and features, check out our website.
Just wanted to announce the availability of ASP.NET 4.6 hosting – more precisely it’s ASP.NET 4.6.1. Many of you have been asking about it, and now it’s here at Winhost!
Note that we didn’t roll out ASP.NET 4.6 on all servers, so if you are interested in using ASP.NET 4.6 and your server doesn’t have it, then contact us and we’ll move your site to a server that supports ASP.NET 4.6.
Looks like El Niño is finally here, but that isn’t going to stop us from keeping the app-installer up to date!
If you’ve never heard of a CDN or you’re not sure exactly what it is, CDN is an acronym for Content Delivery Network. What a Content Delivery Network does, in very basic terms, is serve your site files from multiple data centers all over the world so that your visitors download files from a server near them and experience faster page loads. As a bonus, you get to experience reduced bandwidth use due to your content being cached at the various locations on the network.
How does it work? You change your domain’s name servers to point to the CDN, which then handles the requests for your site. When a request comes in to the CDN, here’s what it does:
That makes for a better visitor experience, since visitors are getting files from a local server. And it saves bandwidth on your Winhost account, since the files don’t have to come from the Winhost servers every time they are requested.
There are a lot of CDNs these days, and their setups vary in levels of difficulty. We’re offering a CDN that’s really easy to set up, and if you already have a SiteLock security plan for your site (and you really should, but that’s a separate article), you can add the basic CDN for free.
If you’re thinking that sounds great, but your site doesn’t contain much static content, SiteLock TrueShield CDN can also serve dynamic content from more than 25 data centers around the world via its Dynamic Content Caching system. It’s all completely automatic, but you have control over the cache and can purge files any time you need to, for instance when you update or change content on your site.
On average, sites using the SiteLock TrueShield CDN load 50% faster and use 40-70% less bandwidth.
The TrueShield CDN can also handle end to end encypted SSL (https) requests, and perfoms advanced CDN optimizing techniques, including content minification, image compression, session reuse optimization, “on the fly” file compression, TCP optimization & connection pre-pooling and progressive image rendering.
The TrueShield CDN isn’t only about speed, it also offers a layer of protection for your web applications. Does your site use WordPress? If so, you probably know that WordPress is a common target for exploits, and if someone gets into your WordPress installation, the cleanup can be a nightmare, not to mention the probable damage to your site and your reputation.
The SiteLock TrueShield CDN protects you against many web-based exploits with a Web Application Firewall, which blocks malicious bots from accessing your site, and depending on the plan you use, can protect your site against many SQL injections and cross site scripting. Whether your site uses a third party application that runs on a database or works with a database you designed and built, the Web Application Firewall can help keep you safe.
I know this sounds like a commercial for SiteLock, but we’re big fans of their service, and we’re able to offer you some really cool and useful tools through them. We see the damaging effects of website exploits every day, and as I mentioned, cleaning up after them is no fun. It’s either going to cost you time or money – sometimes both. So prevention, as they say, is the best medicine.
Here are the latest versions of the applications available through our App Installer tool:
On July 14, 2015, Microsoft ended their support of Windows 2003. That means they won’t be issuing any more security patches or updates.
If your website is still hosted on a Windows 2003 server, it’s time to move away from that unsupported technology, and Winhost is here as a Windows hosting option for you.
Winhost has never offered hosting on Windows 2003 servers, so we have no legacy O/S servers to contend with. We support all the modern Windows Stack including ASP.NET and SQL database, but we also continue to support legacy technologies like Classic ASP and Access databases.
It’s the best of both worlds, so come and enjoy it.