Website Hosting
News from Website Hosting
Good hosting is mostly invisible: pages load quickly, email arrives, backups are there when you need them and nobody has to think about the server. This category covers how to get the most from a hosting account, and explains the parts that cause problems when they are misunderstood.
Articles include speeding up a website, moving a site between hosts with minimal downtime, email deliverability with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, reading email headers when a message goes missing, WordPress scheduled tasks, XML sitemaps and hotlink protection.
Our plans are described on the website hosting pages, including shared hosting, cPanel hosting, specialist plans for CubeCart, WooCommerce and Magento, and reseller hosting for developers and agencies. For sites that need their own resources, see our dedicated servers.
Converting MyISAM Tables to InnoDB: Why and How
MySQL moved away from MyISAM in 2010, but plenty of WordPress, WooCommerce and older store databases are still quietly running on it. Table level locking costs you exactly when you are busiest.
Hotlink Protection: Worth Enabling, Easy to Overdo
Other sites displaying your images from your server costs you bandwidth and gives away your product photography. Blocking it is a checkbox, and breaking your own Google Images traffic is just as easy.
Website Security: The Measures That Actually Matter
Almost nobody attacking your site has chosen you. That is good news, because the defences that stop automated attacks are unglamorous, mostly free, and take an afternoon.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC: Getting Your Email Delivered
If your order confirmations land in spam, the cause is usually not your mail server. It is that receiving servers cannot verify you are allowed to send for your domain. Here is how to fix that properly.
How to Find and Read Email Headers
When email goes missing, lands in spam, or looks forged, the answer is in the headers. Where to find them in every major mail client, and how to read the one line that answers most questions.
A Beginner’s Guide to Website Speed Optimisation
Most speed advice is a checklist with no order to it. This is the sequence we actually work in, why the server comes before the images, and the optimisations that are not worth your time.
WordPress Cron Jobs: Why Your Scheduled Posts Do Not Publish
WP-Cron is not a cron job. It runs on visitor page requests, so a page cache and a CDN can silently stop your scheduled posts, backups and WooCommerce renewals. How to fix it properly, in the right order.
What Is an XML Sitemap and Why Does Your Site Need One
An XML sitemap hands search engines a list of your pages. It takes minutes to set up, it is easy to break silently, and on a shop with a deep catalogue it is the difference between pages being found and ignored.
The End of Passwords: How Passkeys Actually Work
We first wrote about the end of passwords in 2013 and the candidates all failed. Passkeys are different, because the browser and operating system makers built it in themselves. How they work, and where they still fall short.
How to Secure Your Email Accounts
Your email account can reset almost every other account you own, which makes it the most valuable thing you have online. The checks that matter, including the one almost everyone misses.
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