Tag: Website
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Simply Remind Me’s Year in Numbers
I’ve added a new feature to the website for Simply Remind Me – my free email and simple text reminder app. The website now shows live statistics, read directly from the Simply Remind Me platform.
The statistics show the number of new users, events created, reminders sent and the number of unique timezones the app has users registered in – since the start of 2023.
DevOps , Reflections Read more
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Fasthosts VPS: an honest Review
I have hosted my website and applications on a Fasthosts VPS since September 2019. Each year, I have upgraded my VPS to a current model.
What has kept me hosting with Fasthosts for nearly 3 years, and confident in their services that I can recommend them to others?
This article answers those questions and dives into the Fasthosts VPS product to create an honest review from a real, current customer.
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Happy New Year! Welcome, 2022…
2021 started with much hope of vaccines to bring an end to the COVID-19 pandemic, alas it wasn’t enough.
A year – and three vaccines later – and there is no end yet in sight. Although hospitalisations are steady, despite the rising number of cases of the Omicron variant, so maybe there is a glimmer of hope for 2022.
As I reflect on the last year, I’ve made some achievements I’m proud of – both personal and professional.
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Upgrading an application from Bootstrap 4 to 5
Over the past few weeks I’ve migrated my website to a new content management system – ExpressionEngine.
I took the opportunity to upgrade my website’s front-end technologies to their latest releases – Bootstrap 5 and VueJS 3, for example.
This post documents some of the changes I came across migrating Bootstrap 4 to 5.
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Website maintenance: 16/17th October
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 upgrade to the core network adding additional capacity and DDOS protection.
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Install a LAMP stack (Apache, MariaDB, PHP) on Ubuntu Server
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.
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Brexit forced me to change my identity
A year to the day before the UK leaves the EU, the European Commission announced that all .eu domains registered to a UK address would be dropped.
Horrified at the thought of losing my andys.eu domain name (and with it, my primary email address of 8 years) I tweeted out to EURid – the organisation that manages .eu domain names.
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Redirect all visitors to a primary domain in Apache
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 secondary domains (e.g. “spelling mistake” domains, or alternative-spelling domains) to your primary domain
I have recently implemented the following on my own website, and I would like to share this Apache trick.
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The Great Big Cloud Hosting Speed Test 2017
2017 was an exciting year for the bigger players in the cloud hosting arena.
With all these improvements in cloud hosting, I thought it would be interesting to focus on a key metric of hosting providers that many overlook: network speed.
Most modern cloud hosting providers give your dedicated server or VPS a 100Mbps or 1Gbps network connection. But how close can you actually get to that speed?
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Content Delivery Networks can improve your website’s performance
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.
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