All blog posts

For many, many years, we have been ambivalent regarding our presence on social media in general, and Facebook and X/Twitter in particular.

Already back in 2010, we wrote a (Dutch) blogpost on whether or not to quit Facebook, and in 2015 we joined a large global initiative asking Mark Zuckerberg to stop his internet.org scheme. Since then, things only got worse.

Although social media are undeniably a very powerful tool in community building, we now feel the abuse of power and the tone of voice on X/Twitter, and the endless list of privacy concerns with Facebook far outweigh any benefits, and...

For over 20 years, Greenhost has focused on what we believe truly matters: sustainability, digital civil rights, and security. These ideals are at the core of what we do, and we’ve pursued these ideals with great passion and conviction— and we remain as committed to them today as we were when we started.

To continue pushing our ideals and amplifying our impact, we have recently become part of The Sharing Group (TSG).

Greenhost’s small scale and independent position are a key reason for some of our customers to host with us. That’s why we’d like to explain the new partnership, why we made this...

As you might know, every year a new PHP-version is released. This year that was PHP 8.3. We try to offer this new version on our hosting platform as soon as a stable release is available.

Together with the adding of a new version, each year support for an older version was dropped. PHP developers no longer supported the older versions and, as a result, we could no longer securely offer these versions. This is why we removed these older PHP-versions for our customers at that point. This has resulted in problems, such as websites that were no longer functioning correctly, but in the trade-off...

For the past ten years, we have been using the familiar User Interface (UI) of our Service Centre to manage technical tasks, make administrative changes and everything in between. The functionality of our Service Centre has expanded steadily over the years, but the design and structure of these pages have never received the attention they deserve.

Today, we are excited to introduce the first step in the design project that aims to rectify this. We plan to enhance the user experience without compromising the functionality you already know. Because the Service Centre has grown to be a large system...

Planning to upgrade your Greenhost VPS? Great! Keeping a VPS's operating system up to date is important to make sure it keeps running smoothly and safely. OS updates bring new features, as well as security improvements, bug fixes, and resource-saving optimisations.

The latest versions of Debian and Ubuntu made a significant change in how some system files are stored. In some situations, you will need to do a quick and simple intervention before upgrading to Debian 12 Bookworm, releasing today (June 6th, 2023), or Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, as the upgrade will not work out of the box on a...

It is not uncommon to read in the news about websites being taken offline by malicious DDoS attacks. At Greenhost, we strive to provide the best protection for your website against such threats.

In this article you will learn about various types of DDoS and similar attacks, and what we do to protect your website.

DDoS attack, what is it?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to take a website offline. The attacker floods the website's server or network connection with massive amounts of requests or data, overwhelming...

The services we manage and operate are not affected by the Log4J vulnerability. However, our VPS customers should check the systems they manage: this article provides useful steps and tips on how to do it.

Last Thursday, a critical zero-day vulnerability was discovered in the logging utility Log4J. It is very likely you have already heard about this, since it was widely reported in mainstream media. And that is not without reason: Log4J is a very common component in thousands of applications.

As standard procedure, we investigated our own infrastructure for the use of Log4J. Fortunately we...

Greenhost stops providing hosting services to gefira.org

Amsterdam, 5.11.2021

As providers of socially responsible digital infrastructure, we believe protecting human rights is at the core of our service. We take a very careful, but principled, approach when striking a balance between protecting freedom of speech on one side and championing freedom from persecution, and protection from incitement of hatred on the other.

On Wednesday 3.11.2021, we became aware that one of our clients has been publicly accused of promoting antisemitic hatred. This violates our Terms of Service, and is counter...

Incident summary

During routine maintenance, the movement of a network cable brought to light a dormant issue in one networking component, resulting in a degraded connection. Later, while trying to fix this issue, an unrelated network cable was accidentally disconnected for a few seconds. As our infrastructure is built redundantly, both incidents should have had no impact. However, a software malfunction prevented another connection to take over on both system. This put them into an unstable state that resulted in a partial unavailability of our services between 15:20 and 19:45 CEST.

Resolution...

Totem is an online learning service focused on digital security training for activists and journalists. Totem aims for optimal security of the platform to protect its users and partners. For that reason, we are looking for a security auditor that can make sure our server has been setup securely, and that no information leaks out of the Open edX platform.

Launched in 2016 by Free Press Unlimited and Greenhost, it currently has more than 30 courses in five languages. Totem uses a MOOC platform called Open edX which is set up as a combination of Docker containers, orchestrated with Tutor. In addition...