Andy Heathershaw

Ubuntu Server is a Linux distribution that is ideally suited to server workloads. For example: hosting websites and web applications.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install a LAMP stack – that’s Apache, MariaDB (in place of MySQL) and PHP – on Ubuntu Server using the latest available releases, and how to keep it up-to-date.

… but I’m OK with it. A few days ago I sat in an airport lounge in Gatwick, waiting for our flight to Florida. I had finished a diet Coke and was chewing on a piece of yoghurt-covered honeycomb (which was delicious, FYI) when I read a news article about Brexit that stunned me. Europe […]

There are several scenarios in which you may want to redirect all your website visitors to a single, primary domain in Apache: Redirect the www and non-www (root domain) hostnames of your domain to avoid duplicate content and improve SEO Redirect an old domain to a new domain, maintaining links and search engine reputation Redirect […]

It’s the year 2018 and it’s impossible for a software developer to have not heard about (or used) Github, or a variant like Bitbucket. Even self-hosted Git evangelist GitLab is a popular choice. I have held a paid-for Github account for a few years now. Github hosts my open-source PHP photo gallery, Blue Twilight. However, […]

2017 was an exciting year for the bigger players in the cloud hosting arena. Both Linode and DigitalOcean upgraded their network capacity. OVH opened new data centres in Germany and the UK. Bytemark launched an automated backup service for their cloud server platform. My own hosting provider, Memset, launched a new OpenStack region in their […]

Content Delivery Networks were created for one reason: to speed up your websites and web applications. In this article, I explore how you can take advantage of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to improve your website performance for a small cost.

Earlier this week, I couldn’t sleep. So I did what I normally do when I can’t sleep – I watch music videos on YouTube. The first video in my “here’s what YouTube wants you to watch” list caught my eye. I immediately thought I had missed a piece of new music from one of my […]

Buying the new iPhone that Apple will announce today? Interested in photography? Did you know that you can capture a photo and upload it straight into your Blue Twilight photo gallery directly from your new iPhone or iPad device. First Method – direct upload into an album Login to your Blue Twilight photo gallery and […]

My second post in a series of articles about James and my adoption journey is our experience of the first day of “prep group training.” You can read part 1 here. A few days ago we turned up at the Halesowen Barnardo’s office for day 1 of three days of prep group training – a […]

This series of posts is an insight into the world of adoption from the viewpoint of a same-sex, male couple. I decided to publish our story for a number of reasons: 1) because I’m a private individual and rather than talk to people, sometimes it’s easier to put it into writing. 2) to help others […]