Andy Heathershaw

My first post of 2019 is a tutorial that’s all about the cloud.

I’m going to show you how to use the RunCloud control panel to deploy a PHP application with a MySQL database on a cloud server from UpCloud.

My friends at UpCloud have also provided a promo-code to get ample free credit to try out their service. Check out the tutorial for the details.

It’s almost two years since I published the post on the Visual Studio IDE information message: “delegate invocation can be simplified.” It is now the second most visited article on my blog! While reviewing some error messages in a new MVC project, I recently learnt something equally as simple and eye-opening. This time, the suggestion […]

My new hosting provider (blog post on that coming soon!) has notified me of 2 maintenance windows next week: 16th October, 22:00 – 02:00 17th October, 00:00 – 00:30 The first window specifically targets the VPS platform, and will see my server powered down and migrated to new infrastructure. The second window will see an […]

The Ubuntu team will this week release Ubuntu Server 18.04.1, the first minor revision to 18.04 since its release on April 26th.

In this article, I’ll show you how to upgrade Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 using the command-line. This can be used on all Ubuntu derivatives, but is mostly aimed at Server installs that do not have a graphical interface.

The new EU data protection legislation, GDPR, mandates that every reasonable effort and technology is used to protect personal data. It even goes as far as specifying encryption. The open-source database MariaDB (a drop-in, compatible replacement for MySQL) has supported “encryption at rest” since version 10.1. Use MariaDB encryption to satisify the GDPR recommendation of […]

Florida is my go-to destination for a holiday. I’ve been several times since our honeymoon in 2012 and yet I still manage to find something new to see or do each time. When I fly into MCO airport and walk through the stunning atrium, I know I’m back in my happy place! Whether you’ve never […]

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, […]