Site hosting news, tutorials, tips, How Tos and more
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.
The latest versions of the following applications are now available through our App Installer tool:
Our SiteBackup service can now automatically back up your MS SQL databases to the cloud. You’ve always had the ability to back up site files and MySQL databases, but we’re excited to add the ability to back up MS SQL databases.
You can order SiteBackup in Control Panel.
SiteBackup is inexpensive (starting at only $2.95 per month for 10 GB of space!) and easy to use. You choose how often you want to back up and how long to retain the backups. Set it and forget it, your backups will be reliably and safely kept in secure cloud storage outside of the Winhost network.
We have also added Blacklist Monitoring
If your site is ever compromised, Google will flag it and our Blacklist Monitoring service will alert you and stop your site and database backups (to prevent making a backup of compromised files).
If you run third-party applications on your site, Blacklist Monitoring is a valuable tool to help you recover from common compromises. Even if you wrote all of the code on your site, Blacklist Monitoring is a great tool to have at your disposal. Even better, Blacklist Monitoring is available as part of the SiteBackup service at no extra charge.
We’re really excited about these new additions to SiteBackup because we believe they are going to make your life easier. Let us know if you have any questions about SiteBackup or anything else.
Things to note: SQL backup is available for SQL 2012 and later databases, and it only works for SQL databases that are on Winhost servers. Each backup is a full backup, not incremental. Blacklist Monitoring is only available for sites that are being backed up by the SiteBackup service. Read our Knowledge Base article for instructions on using SQL database backup and Blacklist Monitoring.
The latest versions of the following applications are now available through our App Installer tool: