Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Hosting on Aug 05, 2010
We’re changing our current default version of PHP from 4 to 5 from the 6th September. As many of you will know, to use PHP 5 at the moment you need to enable this in a .htaccess file on the server. From the 6th September, we will swap this around so that PHP 5 is the default and PHP 4 may be called via a .htaccess file in the directory you wish to use PHP 4 from.
This is unlikely to affect many people as nearly all scripts written in PHP now operate on PHP 5 (for example all the PHP scripts available in your eXtend control panel).
We’re now at a point where having PHP 5 as the default version makes more sense for users; PHP 5 was released in 2004, whilst PHP 4 hasn’t been updated since 2008. If you’re operating legacy software that will not work on PHP 5, please set up a .htaccess file with the following line in it:
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Hosting on Jul 16, 2010
We’re pleased to announce that we’re now offering one-click installs of WordPress’s forum software, bbPress. Message boards are a great way to promote visitor interaction and can be a useful tool to discover what your visitors are interested in, who they are, and what else they want to see from your site.
bbPress is open source and focused on speed and security, meaning you don’t have to worry about slow loading pages or the risk of being hacked. The streamlined software is also lightweight and efficient for better use of space and bandwidth. bbPress is easy to install thanks to our one-click install solution, and the user-friendly control panel also means less work for admins and moderators once you’re up and running.
bbPress enjoys many similar customisation elements to WordPress so you can develop and install themes and plugins (e.g. for ratings, video and private forums) to customise your forums. Furthermore, bbPress can be integrated with WordPress so it has access to your blog’s functionality and users signing up to your message boards can also be users on your blog. This is especially useful for multi-author blogs, blogs with regular commenters and those looking to build up integrated site communities from an existing WordPress blog.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on May 09, 2010
A couple of weeks ago we looked in to Google’s announcement that they are using a page’s load time to rank a sample of sites (1%) and what it meant for your website.
One of the most resource hungry ways of creating a website is WordPress. With its multiple CSS, JavaScript and PHP files and a heavy reliance on calls to databases a WordPress site can easily become bloated and slow. Web masters who use WordPress need to look at how they can decrease their website‘s page load speeds. Here is how.
How do I find out how fast my website is the first place?
To see how your site is performing and to get a list of recommended changes I would start with looking at “Site Performance” within the Labs section of your Google Webmaster Tools.
To check out your site on spec you can also install Google’s page speed plug-in for FireFox here http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html. This site within Firebug (also required) and gives a page a score out of 100 along with what you need to improve.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Apr 28, 2010
Modern cars are incredibly difficult to break in to and steal, so much so that thieves often find it easier to break in to a house and steal the car keys to make off with it. Hackers targeting your website are faced with a similar problem when it comes to getting access to your website.
Few hackers target the web host directly, with all the money large web hosts such as ourselves spend on security and monitoring it is simply too difficult to gain access. Instead they go directly after the webmaster by downloading a virus on to their PC and getting the FTP log in details so often stored as an unprotected flat text file within software such as Filezilla.
What do they do with the information?
Once they have direct access to your website’s files they are any number of actions they can take:
- Insert links in to your site & create link farms
- Capture your member’s information
- Links to malware
- Spread viruses
- Destroy your site
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Hosting on Mar 11, 2010
***Latest News***
On Monday 15th March we will be implementing a new feature within the hosting control panel to allow you to set a different password for your hosting control panel access. This will allow you to have a different password for FTP access and hosting control panel access. The new feature will appear on the right hand side of your hosting control panel when you login.
*If you come across any issues on monday please contact us and we can look into them for you.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Hosting on Mar 11, 2010
You can now control your web hosting, domain names from your IPhone.
Available for both the iPhone and all Android powered phones, I.T Studio Hosting is proud to announce the launch of our Customer Control Panel and Hosting Control Panel for the iPhone and Android phone.
To access the new control panel from your phone, simply login as normal via our website and the new mobile control panel will automatically be displayed.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Domain Names on Mar 03, 2010
We have recently received several requests for the ability to add SRV DNS records to domains, and we were happy to oblige. For those who don’t know, DNS stands for Domain Name System and is how a computer translates a domain name like itstudiohosting.co.uk to the address of the actual computer that the website lives on.
There are many types of DNS records that describe how to find different services such as the web, and email servers. SRV records let some more modern programs find out how and where to connect to potentially any service. SRV records have only been widely adopted in relatively new protocols like SIP and XMPP, but it is expected that they will become more commonplace as additional protocols are developed.
With an SRV record you can specify different servers for the same service and split the requests between them in whatever ratio you decide. This is called load-balancing and is mostly only used for services with a high volume of users. It is also possible to specify two servers and have the second only be used if the first becomes unreachable. This is called redundancy and helps to prevent downtime on important services.
