Site hosting news, tutorials, tips, How Tos and more
Years ago, I wrote an article on how to configure Elmah to be used on Winhost. You may have noticed that there is no official support for ASP.NET Core, however, you can use ElmahCore by barestan to perform the same logging to a database, and this blog provides an example on how to set that up.
First, we’ll start by creating a New Project in Visual Studio:
services.AddElmah<SqlErrorLog>(options =>
{
options.ConnectionString = @"connection_string";
});
app.UseElmah();
That’s it. If you want to know if it’s working, you can generate a sample exception like this:
app.Run(async (context) =>
{
await context.Response.WriteAsync("Hello World!");
int[] numbers = new int[5];
await context.Response.WriteAsync(numbers[6].ToString());
});
That will generate an “Index was outside the bounds of the array.” exception which will be logged into the database. You can query the dbo.ELMAH_Error table to see the results.
Visit Winhost to learn more about our .NET Core hosting solutions
Earlier this year, Google announced that their Chrome browser v68 update will warn users that any non-HTTPS site is “Not Secure”. The release date for this update is slated for July 2018 – this month!
Check out what the Chrome browser will display (from the Chromium Blog):
Over the past years, Google has been slowly pushing all sites to be under SSL. Their efforts thus far shows that over 60% of Chrome traffic is now protected. Now that a majority of sites are protected, Google is moving to their next phase, which is to use their large install base of the Chrome browser to push even further. From our research, the update hasn’t made it out yet but it is slated for this month.
RapidSSL Flash Sale
So it is time to consider securing your site. And to help you out we are having a Flash Sale on RapidSSL SSL certificates.
For the rest of July we are reducing the RapidSSL pricing to:
1 Year: $29
2 Years: $50
Customers can order RapidSSL through their Control Panel and they can get this special pricing during this time period.
Other SSL Options
Please also note that you can use an SSL certificate that was purchased/obtained elsewhere with your Max and Ultimate hosting plan.
If you have any questions, please contact our technical support team.
The latest version of these apps are now available:
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I just found out that March 31st, 2018 is World Backup Day!
We had a quick meeting and decided to celebrate this special day by checking our backup system to make sure its functioning and continuing to backup our customer’s site/data like we do every day for disaster recovery.
If you haven’t done so in a while, we do recommend that you take the time to backup your websites and databases. March 31st would be a good day as any but it’s a good idea to make a schedule for backups at whatever time interval works for you and your needs. If you have any questions about backups, please contact our technical support team.
And if you want to celebrate World Backup Day everyday like us, then you can check out our SiteBackup service, which will automatically perform a daily backup of your website and databases for any of your websites hosted at Winhost or even websites and databases that are hosted at another hosting provider.
Happy World Backup Day!
Hosting on Windows 2016 is available as an option when you sign up. Windows 2016 hosting comes with IIS 10.X.
If you are an existing customer and wish to move to a Windows 2016 server, contact our technical support team and they can migrate your site.
Visit Winhost to learn more about our Windows hosting solutions
Scott Hanselman recently blogged about getting ASP.NET Core to run on a cheap shared Linux hosting account at GoDaddy. The point of the article was to demonstrate that .NET Core is cross-platform and can even run with all the constraints of a shared hosting plan.
The post was impressive, but Scott repeated several times and even put it in the title of his post – “Don’t try this at home” – because of all the hacky hoops you had to jump through to get .NET Core to work.
I found the post an interesting read, but while I was reading through the article, I couldn’t stop thinking – why go through all that trouble to run .NET Core on a “cheap” ($3/mo plan that turns into $8/mo) linux plan, when you can run .NET Core out-of-the-box on Windows hosting providers – like Winhost. Even with our Basic Windows hosting plan (that starts at $3.95/mo), .NET Core is supported.
At Winhost you can deploy .NET Core apps straight from Visual Studio or, if the specific Core framework version is not on the server, you can use Self-Contained Deployment.
I totally understand that Hanselman’s blog was a “theoretical” exercise to demonstrate the versatility of .NET Core. But when you actually want to do something real with .NET Core, you are going to want to be on a hosting environment that makes it easier for you, not harder.
You may be aware of the problem that Symantec has been having with Google over issuing of a large number of SSL certificates for major domains to individuals who were not associated with the domains. It’s a long story, but the result was Google informing Symantec that the Chrome browser would no longer trust SSL certificates issued by Symantec. The revocation of trust was to occur gradually over certain dates.
As a result, Symantec sold their SSL certificate business to another company that Google does trust. It becomes a little confusing though, since the new company is keeping the Symantec name for the certificates they issue.
If you bought an SSL certificate from us, you have either a RapidSSL, GeoTrust QuickSSL or GeoTrust True BusinessID certificate, and those are Symantec certificates.
If, like most users, you renew your SSL certificate every year, this issue should not affect you. When you renew, the certificate will still be issued by Symantec, but it will be issued by the new incarnation of Symantec which Google trusts.
If you purchased a multi-year SSL certificate, check this timeline to see if there are any important dates that you should be aware of:
The Chrome browser will no longer trust this certificate after March 15, 2018. In order to retain trust by the Chrome browser, you need to replace this certificate.
The Chrome browser will no longer trust this certificate after September 13, 2018.
If you have a multi-year cert and aren’t quite sure if you’re affected, open up a support ticket and we’ll help you out.
As 2017 comes to a close, we reflect on the year that’s passed and look forward to a new year. Here are some of the new features, services and enhancements that we introduced in 2017.
Last year, we launched support for ASP.NET Core on our hosting platform. Since then, Microsoft has been busy with many minor updates and also a major update with ASP.NET Core 2.0. We’ve been working hard to support .NET Core and support the different versions that our customers may be using. Winhost supports Framework Dependent Deployment (FDD) and also Self-contained deployment (SCD).
While Microsoft continues to update their latest .NET Core initiatives, they continue to update ASP.NET 4.x as well. We kept up-to-date with Microsoft’s ASP.NET 4.x framework and support ASP.NET 4.7 hosting on our platform.
Since WordPress is one of the most popular apps on the web, we host a fair share of WordPress sites. Ans due to its popularity, WordPress gets a lot of attention from hackers, so we’ve helped many of our customers with compromises and hacks. To insure security, it’s important to keep up-to-date with WordPress updates, theme updates and plugin updates.
To that end, we understand that many of our customers may not have the time or the know-how to maintain their WordPress site – so we launched a Managed WordPress service. With our Managed WordPress service, we harden your WordPress application and will update your WordPress core, plugins and themes monthly. Our expert staff will also personally review your WordPress installation every month, looking for any signs of compromise or malicious files. And if any malicious activity is found, we’ll clean it up.
Due to customer requests, we added support for Node.js. If you are interested in using Node.js, get in contact with us.
We also increased the number of FTP users that can be created for each of our plans. The Basic plan supports 10 FTP users, the Max plan supports 30, and the Ultimate plan supports 100.
Although I didn’t highlight any of the behind-the-scenes activity in this list, you can rest assured that we continue to make improvements to our back-end infrastructure, security, processes, hardware and support.
We’re honored that so many of you trust Winhost with your important websites and applications, and we work hard every day to make you happy that you’ve made that choice.
Wishing everyone a very happy new year!
Visit Winhost to learn more about our Windows hosting solutions