All blog posts

Everyone has had the experience, staring at a browser and wondering why a particular website was taking such a long time to load. What makes websites slow can depend on several factors. Is the code efficient? Is the webserver efficient? How efficient is the storage? As a hosting provider mindful of sustainability, we are always trying to improve performance on our side, while also keeping redundancy in place as much as possible. Recently, we noticed one of our SQL servers was getting slower over time for no apparent reason, so we dug a little deeper to see how we could improve its performance.

Your smart phone contains a lot of your private data. But do you know how and where your data is stored? Who has access to it? How do you protect your data from third parties that are trying to collect it?

Smart phone operating systems do not give you much control over your data by default, but with minimal effort you can gain control over your data and your mobile device's behaviour. Following up the six tips below will make it a lot harder for data hoarding advertising networks to get to your private data and helps protect you against dragnet surveillance.

As you could read in our blog post from a couple of months ago we have been working on incorporating Let's Encrypt's free TLS certificates in our hosting environment.

TLS certificates are needed for a safe and good website. With it, you will have improved security, more privacy and higher search engine rankings. Please read our previous blog post for a detailed summary of how TLS certificates work.

Today (December 19, 2016), we are pleased to announce that these certificates are now available for everyone in a public beta. Using TLS makes your website more secure. You can recognise that TLS...

Deprecation old PHP-versions

Almost all our customers use PHP, and it is very important to keep this up to date. In the short term, several versions of PHP will be deprecated. This means that you probably have to change your PHP-version as well. For those readers wondering what PHP is, and what this may mean for you, we have a short explanation in this post.

Update: Let's Encrypt TLS certificates

Let's Encrypt offers free certificates for securing the connection to websites. This causes the familiar green lock icon to appear in the URL bar. Even though Let's Encrypt still has a Beta status...

Several versions of PHP will be deprecated soon. This may mean that you will have to change your PHP-version as well. For those readers wondering what PHP is and what this may mean for you, I will briefly explain in this post.

So far if you wanted to protect the privacy of people that visit your website, the only possibility you had was to purchase a Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate. Let's Encrypt offers free certificates for securing the connection to websites using TLS, which causes the green lock icon to appear in the URL bar.

At Greenhost we constantly strive to increase the security of your websites. On the 30th of June 2016 we succeeded in securing all .nl domains that are registered at Greenhost with DNSSEC. During the rest of this summer we will roll out DNSSEC for domains registered through us on other Top Level Domains supporting DNSSEC (TLDs, for example .com, .net and .org).

Update: from 21 July 2016 and onwards 95% of all the domainnames that are registered at Greenhost are secured with DNSSEC.

Ransomware is a type of malware that restricts access to the infected computer system in some way, and demands that the user pays a ransom to the malware operators to remove the restriction. Windows-based computers have always been the main target, but two weeks ago also a case of ransomware for OS X surfaced. The new OS X ransomware 'Keranger' infected the Transmission bittorrent client installer, which has put many OS X users at risk. Last week big-name sites were hit by a rash of malicious ads, spreading ransomware, which exposed tens of thousands of people within 24 hours. Ransomware is becoming a serious issue.

In this blog post an update on the things we've been working on the last few months; 2-factor authentication Service Centre, HAProxy plugin for Let's Encrypt', Internet Thesis Price, Internet Freedom Festival and the Rapid Response Service."

Important Joomla! security updates, migrations completed, DDoS and DoS attacks, Let's Encrypt and the Free Expression Film night

In this blog post an update on the things we've been working on the last few months; Migrations to Ceph platform completed, important security updates Joomla!, DDoS attacks and the impact on our platform, the Free Expression Film night and the public beta release of Let's Encrypt. Happy holidays!  

Important Joomla! security updates

An important and general rule is: always keep your software up to date! More and more vulnerabilities are found every day and the consequences...