Andy Heathershaw

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, […]

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.