Edit: You can replicate the old behaviour simply by renaming your php.ini file to .user.ini. We are automatically doing this on we upgrade each server to the new version.

Date/Time settings Error

Our testing has however shown up this error affecting some sites.

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings.
You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set()
function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning,
you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier.

For those of you that are familiar with php.ini files will know that you can set this variable there. And we have. There is just a small bug in PHP which unsets this settings if you use a local php.ini file to over-ride settings. Unfortunately this means that users with these files end up with no date.timezone value, and the error above.

You can fix it by adding the following value to your php.ini file or contacting our support team who will be happy to help.

date.timezone = 'Europe/Dublin'

Additional PHP Errors

Because of the same inheritance issue listed about, some sites may see additional PHP generated error messages. The easy way around this is to add the following to your folder specific php.ini file for the affected application.

error_reporting = E_ALL & ~ E_DEPRECATED

We are working to find a fix that doesn’t require user intervention and hopefully it will be in place before your server goes live with this change. As always, we will be pro-actively monitoring and updating users of any issues we notice.

Should you care?

In most cases, knowing the operating system your website runs on isn’t going to help with much of the day to day decisions. If you are uploading standard HTML pages, then any system will do. Even when you start programming, the differences do not start showing until you begin to use some of the advanced features.

So why is Linux everywhere in the web hosting world? Simple answer, the software cost is free. A Linux webserver can be setup without having to pay for licences. But since the software costs do not make up a huge part of the costs the web hosting companies feel, there has to be more right? Giant companies such as Facebook, Google or Yahoo do not choose Linux hosting based on the software cost.

Security

In today’s world, the number of hacking attempts is truly astronomical. The majority of them are automated scanners that search the internet looking for vulnerable websites. While simply running on a Linux web server will now protect everything, it definitely does help if and when a website is breached. Because Linux is Open Source Software, meaning anyone can work on the code, updates, patched, and security fixes can come from anywhere. This means a rapid fix for problems once they are discovered.

Reliability

The same fact that helps with security also helps with reliability. The open source nature of Linux means operating system patches come quicker and get reviewed by more people. The biggest benefits is the lack of reboots required. This means security patches can be updated without downtime. No downtime means your site is not offline.

Here at Vade, having your site online and accessible is our number one goal. We’ve talked previously about uptime and how our guarantee is different. Experience it for yourself with our Primus Irish Web Hosting package.

Lets step back a bit.

What is a Domain Name?

A domain name quite simply is the bit between the dots up in the address bar. So for our website, normally you would see www.vade.ie meaning our domain is vade, on the Irish registry, or .ie. For www.coca-cola.com, the domain would be coca-cola.

You probably already know that the domain usually follows the company name, or a well known word for them, or just a persons name. This is the format we recommend too.

Why Multiple Domain Names?

Have you ever typed a website name in and ended up on the wrong site? I know I have. And this does happen quite a lot across the internet. Spelling mistakes are another big one, so if you have a name that can be misspelled, this is something to look out for.

The other reason is because end users can forget which extension you are on. In most cases this simply means getting some other domain extensions for your domain. If you are starting out and they are available, grabbing as much of the top level domains like .com, .org, .net etc is a good idea. Our sales team can help you with the list of domains to get should you need any help.

Redirecting Domain Names

Since you have multiple domains, now what do you do with them? For most people, the simple answer is to pick a primary domain, then redirect the other sites to it. It’ll help with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and is easily achieved using our web alias feature under account utilities in the control panel.

Ordering

You can get your domain names over on our mail website. Alternatively, contact us if you need any assistance.

Customisation

One of the best features of WordPress is its extensibility. There are hundreds of useful plugins and thousands of themes freely available, all installable by a few mouse clicks in the Admin Suite. Some themes will layout your blog in a default post by post basis, quite similar to our blog, others can change the whole look into something you would barely recognise. From custom post names, to static pages, to full galleries, it is all possible. If you are ever stuck, our friendly support team are here to help.

Plugins

WordPress doesn’t try to be all things to all people. That is actually a good thing. You really don’t want to be overwhelmed by buttons or options when you start. However the plugins allow you the freedom to expand out to achieve just about anything you want.

Some plugins you may find helpful are listed below in no particular order:

• Google Analytics – For tracking visits to your site. This allows you to use the Google service.
• Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin automatically builds a sitemap of your blog, a very useful feature so search engines (not just Google) can find you.
• Feedburner Plugin – Blogs are built around RSS and feedburner is a popular service for hosting your blog feeds. It’ll also give you a nice reader count and help build statistics.
• All in One SEO Pack – Search Engine Optimisation is the art of “helping” search engines understand your web pages. While search engines do love WordPress, this plugin surely helps you climb up the rankings.
• WP Captcha Free – The downside to WordPress lies in its popularity. Automated spam bots will try to post comments quite often which can ruin the experience, however plugins like this one make it much more manageable. Akismet also provide another spam solution for blogs.
• Lightbox 2 – Lightbox, those clickable popup images, may be one of most seen features on the internet and this is how you make it part of your blog.

Expandability

While this may not be on your mind now, your blog may one day receive a huge amount of web traffic. Generally if you stick with it and write a lot of quality content on a regular basis, your readership will grow. The last thing you want is to have to migrate your blog to another platform or system when that happens. Luckily WordPress is able to grow with you due to its plugin system. The same plugins will help it handle correctly under high traffic and keep it responding quickly. Our team can offer any advice when you need it to help your site to grow with you.

Additional Services

After you have ordered your web hosting, if you want help, just ask. Our team can even install the blog for you. We also understand that sometimes you just want to write, and not have to worry about the management of the blog. There is the ability to leave all that to us, let us handle the upgrade, the plugins, the spam comments etc. Contact our sales team to discuss your unique needs.

Over the past year we have been working quietly behind the scenes upgrading our mail infrastructure and adding features to the control panel. What began as a simple upgrade to improve speed has expanded out all the way to additional server side – user level spam filtering, and lots in between. Read on to get an overview of the different features we have added, and even those you may not have known existed.

Server Side – Out of Office

An out of office reply is what you need for those times when you are off work. The server sends a nice email to anyone to emails in your absence, all while your email client is not turned off.

Even though this features has been in the control panel for some time, it is still regularly requested. You can find it in the Mail Manger section when logged into your control panel.

Mail Relay / Non-Local Email

Sometimes referred to a Backup MX, you can now use Vade as a secondary email server should you run your own. While previously you needed to contact Support for this, all the settings are inside of the Mail Manager under Mail Domains. First set the domain to Non-Local, then adjust the transport to where you want the email to be forwarded to.

You can also choose not to use Vade for email and simply turn off local email here. This will force our email server to use whatever DNS entries you have specified.

Updates to Spam Filters

Spam filtering is one of those items that is constantly being worked on. And we here at Vade are continuing to update the different sections to make it more effective.

Over the past year we have improved the hit ratios, both for detecting spam correctly, and reducing the number of incorrectly tagged emails. Because we understand that you’d rather not miss an important email, we always side to less false positives rather than less spam getting through.

All these updates tie closely into the rest of the features.

Customisable (per user) whitelist/blacklist email addresses

For those times when you want to block a particular email from sending mail to yourself, a black list is the way to go. We have expanded it out so that the lists are done per user and you have the ability to set the scoring on them. As such you can determine if you just want it filtered as spam, or even to a level that gets it deleted.

One question we get every now and then is about data backups for our servers. Hopefully this article can clear up what is included and what extra can be done if and when you require it.

What is a backup and why is it important

There are two types of people in the computer world when it comes to backups, those who have lost data, and those that will. When it comes down to it, it is critical to understand that there are multiple ways for data loss. Anything can play a role, from application corruption, to hardware failures, to malicious actions, to natural disasters. And any of these can require a trip to the backup data.

Recent statistics have shown that 1 in 10 harddisks fail or have a critical error each year. And since a harddisk is where your data is being stored, they are some important odds. Here at Vade, we use high quality, server grade disks as well are technologies such a RAID to lower these risks and make the hardware failures transparent to you, the end user.

The biggest reason we get asked to restore data is in fact accidental deletion. We have all experienced it. Just as you are about to copy that file, something happens that takes our attention for a split second, and the wrong file is put in the wrong place, or the wrong file clicked and deleted. In these cases, it pays to have another copy, a backup copy.

Off site backups

A backup really isn’t a backup until it has been transferred from the machine it came from. Even then, it rightly should go somewhere geographically disperse to cover in case of fire or flooding. So that is exactly what we have done.

Vades backups are all located in a complete physically separate location from our web facing servers, on a separate network, with different providers. The equipment is even using different vendors for everything from servers to the raid cards, and right down to the harddisks. Data is also fully encrypted during the transfer between locations to ensure it is protected. This gives the benefit in that if a once in a lifetime event like a meteor striking the data centre were to occur, your data would still be secure.

Does your existing web hosting provider take as much precautions for the safety of your data?

File based vs Server Based

Firstly let us explain the differences.

File based backups backup the individual files and store them either in another, usually larger compressed file, or in a full copy somewhere else.
Server based backups read the 1′s and 0′s from the harddisks and then store that in another big file.

The main difference is that a server based backup will allow the full machine to be recovered easier, but individual files will take longer.

At Vade, we understand that should you need your data back, you will want it back quickly. As such we maintain primarily file based backups. We can still restore full systems, but it is geared around recovering individual files or directories. This gives us very fine grained control over what can be restored if and when needed. If we had chosen server based backups, a single file recovery might day hours, if not days.

Additional Options

Beyond what we do above, we can offer some additional features to cover your needs. Below is just a small snapshot of what is possible.

• Real time email backups.
• Near realtime file backups.
• Near realtime database backups on shared hosting or realtime on managed hosting.
• Application specific backups.
• Weekly / Monthly / Yearly data archiving.

Restore costs

Good practice

Those days are gone. Vade are now offering a move host package where we do all the leg work in moving the site across. We do require access to your existing host to copy the files across as well as a list of subdomains and email addresses with passwords, but beyond that everything happens transparently.

The old process (or the process with another host)

1. You signed up for your new Vade web hosting account.
2. The domain(s) are transferred to Vade but DNS hosting remains with your old host at this time.
3. You login and configure up the site in the same fashion as your existing host.
4. The website files are uploaded to the new web space.
5. The email accounts are setup on the Vade servers.
6. You match existing DNS entries on the Vade servers. This is where all sub domain entries such as www.yourdomain.ie and sub.yourdomain.ie are added and pointed to your old host.
7. DNS hosting is moved to Vade but the old site still points back to your old host.
8. After the propagation period (usually 48 hours along longer is suggested in some situations), you changes the DNS entries to point to Vade meaning users are now accessing the site on the Vade servers.

The Vade way

1. You sign up for your new Vade web hosting account specifying you want the MoveHost option.
2. You send through details on sub domains and email accounts as well as details for logging in to your old host.
3. Vade then work on transferring your domains and setting up the site on the Vade servers. We also give the option of setting a test copy of the site so you can if things work fully before the switch over.
4. You tell Vade when you would like the switchover to happen and the site and email moves across

The Price

Since we are feeling generous, the additional service is offered free with new signups for a limited period. We will eventually have to charge for it but we do believe that moving should be as simple as possible and this is one of the many ways we try and show it.

As with all things, if there is anything we can do to assist, please do contact us.

The Numbers

So lets stay we were to offer a 99.99% up-time “guarantee” on our Starter Web Hosting Package. Your site could be offline for  1 hour, 52 minutes and 34 seconds before we would have to give a credit of 1 day, a credit that is actually only worth about €0.14. What is more, most of these “guarantees” have big get out of jail sections allowing the host in question to say the outage was not caused by them therefore no credits.

Then comes the question of how the up-time is measured. Is an outage only calculated after there is a defined period where the software can’t contact the server, or is every failed attempt counted as an outage. However you check the server will also have an effect on the number it ends up with as will where the checking happens from. If checking happens in Ireland but then the international connectivity to Ireland is reduced (happened a few months back) or even completely removed, does that count as an outage even though everyone in Ireland can still talk to the servers. It all remains very gray at the best of times.

Recently when we here in Vade’s Web Hosting Team had a meeting about up time, we calculated all the different bits that went into an up-time figure. This covers everything for time between hard disk failures to the time involved in running a new network cable should an existing one fail for some reason. What we came up with was that we could provide 100% up-time, 99.999% of the time, the other 00.001% would create an outage that would destroy the up-time stats for years if they happened. In real terms, one of these major problems for every 10 000 other problems is all that it takes. And who’s to say when this one time will actually happen.

For instance, all our servers have redundant hard drives so we can have a failure of 1 disk and things will still keep going without anyone noticing. (except of course our on call engineer who has just been woken up to go replace it – these things never fail during the daytime) If two hard-disks were to go at once, we would need to install two new hard-disks, rebuild the file system array, and then restore the files from the backup server. (We have a rolling 7 day backup system.) Total downtime could be a few hours or more depending on which two disks failed and how far away the on call engineer was from the server with the problem. (Vade runs a distributed network). The same is true of power supply failures, to cpu failures, to any other random part of the server that may fail. In most cases it is quicker to just completely swap out the machine and move the hard disks across, but again that requires time to physically move things, a lot more than the 5 minutes per year available with 99.999% up-time.

So after considering all the facts, we decided we wouldn’t pick a figure at which to base our up-time requirements on. Any outage is already viewed as a failure on our part and gets a full report done as to why it happened and what can be done to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Our customers are also welcome to request credits for an outage too, and I will say that we don’t use the 1 hour = 1 day rule although it has been a while since we have issued any credits. In fact the last one we issued credits for wasn’t even an outage that stopped anyone accessing the site. All I can say is that we are generous because without you our customers, we wouldn’t be operating.

Edit: We decided to share one of the external monitoring services we use. There are issues with using it but it should give an indication of our uptime from an unbiased party. Just click on the image below. It changes to display the actual uptime too.

Here at Vade, we will openly admit that we are not, and will not be the cheapest product on the market. If you are happy with a site that works, mostly, and where support is what the other company have bought, then there are a multitude of companies on the market that offer cheaper products. With Vade, you are buying a product we would hope is equal the quality of your own brand. We take pride in our work and the level of service we provide, and we want this pride to felt upon every dealing with Vade. Our support team is always available to assist in every aspect of your design and hosting needs. And unlike with other companies, if you are ever unhappy with an aspect of our business, our procedures, or how you have been dealt with, I welcome you to contact me directly at stephen@vade.ie and voice your concerns directly.

So how do you know if the company you are thinking of choosing is good or bad?
Well in my opinion this is actually an easy one to spot. The first thing we usually look at is how much of an investment has a company made to get where they are today. And by this we don’t mean how much money they have spent. These days, a hosting company can be born in half an hour by someone signing up to a reseller package, choosing a company name, and submitting themselves into Google. And for someone who only wants a simple website these “companies” are perfect as they are nearly always cheaper than the competition. If you are looking for something that will live up to the standards you have set for your own establishment, then you want a company that has invested more time and more of themselves into getting their own business to a level they themselves are proud of.

We here in Vade have spent considerable time developing our own custom hosting platform and control panel software. Everything has been designed from the ground up with our customer needs in mind. And as with all areas of our operation, we always welcome suggestions to improve to make your life easier. This gives us enormous flexibility such that if there is a feature a customer wants and we don’t have it, we can develop it, test it, and then provide it. With other companies, they usually have to request the feature from the software vendor they bought their platform from, hope it gets added, and then wait for it to be released. For more information, do check out our website. http://www.vade.ie/

Thank you for your time and I hope that this information is of some use to you and helps you make the right choice for your business.

Stephen Ryan
Director and Owner
Vade Internet Solutions Ltd

To give you an incentive to subscribe, we will post up some different coupons from time to time. We will start by giving you one now, blogspecial, which will give you 10% off on every order, domains included! To use this coupon, use the online order system, and enter “blogspecial” (without the quotes) into the coupon field. It will apply the discount at the summary page. Any trouble, please contact us.