We are celebrating Canada’s 150th birthday with a big bowl of poutine and a sale on web hosting and .CA domain names.
Throughout the month of July we are offering a one-time 15.0% discount on .CA domain names and any of our Canadian web hosting plans when ordering using the coupon code OHCANADA.
Click here to save 15.0% on your order! Want to maximize your savings? Select a longer billing term for even more money off!
Happy Canada Day, eh!
Earlier this month we enabled free SSL certificates for all customers to much applause and today we have another powerful new security feature to unveil to help protect your websites.
Imunify360 is an advanced firewall developed by our operating system vendor, CloudLinux.
Website attacks have become incredibly sophisticated. We used to be able to easily block brute force attacks by identifying that a visitor has submitted an incorrect password too many times in a short period. Today it is much harder to block these types of attacks as hackers no longer use a single machine but employ massive botnets of hundreds of thousands of infected computers to conduct attacks. Rather than seeing failed login attempts repeatedly coming from a single IP address, we now only see one or two login attempts before the attack switches to a different IP address. This makes it very hard to distinguish legitimate users from hackers and to prevent these attacks from reaching your website since the attacker’s IP address constantly changes every few seconds.
Imunify360 steps in by providing information on botnets and where these attacks are coming from. It uses herd immunity and artificial intelligence to detect new threats and protect all servers running the software. When one server is under attack it can alert other servers, protecting them before the threat ever reaches them.
We’ve been beta testing Imunify360 for several months and have found that our server load has been significantly reduced since we no longer have the overhead of serving websites to these bad visitors and botnets. This means your websites will even load faster as a result!
Now let’s say you’ve legitimately forgot your password and found yourself blocked by our firewall and are now unable to access your website or email. Imunify360 also helps by providing a self-service unblocking tool our customers can use to unblock their IP address without needing to contact our support department.
If you are ever presented with the above page when attempting to visit your website you can simply click the “I’m not a robot” checkbox at the bottom of the page to unblock your IP and proceed to your website.
Easy peasy!
Varial Hosting CEO Ryan Smith will be a guest speaker at #psewebUSASK as part of the conference’s social media panel.
#psewebUSASK is free, half-day conference for Canadian college and university marketers taking place at the University of Saskatchewan on Thursday, June 22nd.
Ryan will be joined by Kirsty Hack (Creative Fire) and Brianna Bergeron (Saskatchewan Polytechnic) to discuss trends in social media marketing, promotion and community engagement from their professional experience.
Free tickets to #psewebUSASK are available at:
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/psewebusask-tickets-35052203083
LiteSpeed Cache, the caching plugin allowing Varial Hosting customers to achieve lightning fast Wordpress performance has just been updated to version 1.1.0. This new version includes bug fixes and several new features.
Customers can update this plugin through their WordPress admins or install it by following this guide: https://varialhosting.com/support/faq/wordpress/#caching
Changelog:
v1.1.0
- [NEW] Added a crawler – this includes configuration options and a dedicated admin page. Uses wp-cron
- [NEW] Added integration for WPLister
- [NEW] Added integration for Avada
- [UPDATE] General structure of the plugin revamped
- [UPDATE] Improved look of admin pages
- [BUGFIX] Fix any/all wp-content path retrieval issues
- [BUGFIX] Use realpath to clear symbolic link when determining .htaccess paths
- [BUGFIX] Fixed a bug where upgrading multiple plugins did not trigger a purge all
- [BUGFIX] Fixed a bug where cli import_options did not actually update the options
- [REFACTOR] Most of the files in the code were split into more, smaller files
Today we celebrate our 14th year in business with a gift to all of our customers.
One feature we’ve been frequently asked about this year has been HTTPS / SSL support for customer websites. While this has always been possible through the purchase of a traditional SSL certificate, which would typically set you back a hundred dollars and require a manual installation, we’re about to make enabling HTTPS a lot easier.
Today we are launching a fully automated system to install and renew free SSL certificates to all domains hosted on our servers.
If you are not familiar, a SSL certificate is what is required to enable HTTPS on your website, the protocol which makes all communication between your browser and your website encrypted. If you see the https:// in the address bar of your browser and a lock icon next to it, you are browsing a secure, encrypted website.
While SSL certificates had mainly been used by eCommere websites, the Internet is moving towards an encrypted web for better security and Google even ranks websites using HTTPS higher in their search results.
We’ve been quietly beta testing this feature for over a year so SSL certificates have already been issued for all eligible domains hosted with us.
If you’d like to make the switch to HTTPS we recommend reading our SSL Certificate FAQ for more information on how they function, potential issues to watch out for and guidelines on how to make your website code compatible with HTTPS / SSL.
