Welcome to the personal website and blog of software developer – Andy Heathershaw.
I’m a commercial Microsoft .NET developer and open-source PHP developer based in the West Midlands, England. I live with my husband and I’m daddy to a nine-year-old Labrador called Mickey and two growing boys.
Check out About Andy Heathershaw to read more about me, or browse my blog posts below.
Friday, 12th October, 2018
My new hosting provider (blog post on that coming soon!) has notified me of 2 maintenance windows next week:
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.
Thursday, 26th July, 2018
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.
Following the release on July 26th*, Ubuntu 16.04 machines everywhere will soon start to get notifications that a new release is available to upgrade to.
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.
Sunday, 1st July, 2018
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 using encryption to protect your personal data.
Let’s have a look at what it can do and how you can set it up. You won’t have to make a single change to your website or application!
DevOps , Software Development Read more
Sunday, 1st July, 2018
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 been before, or are going for the 20th time, this is a list of the top 10 things to do in Florida that I think will make your visit that little bit more memorable.
(Spoiler alert: Disney features a lot!)
Disney , Reflections Read more
Wednesday, 11th April, 2018
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.
DevOps , Software Development Read more
Monday, 9th April, 2018
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.
Sunday, 1st April, 2018
There are several scenarios in which you may want to redirect all your website visitors to a single, primary domain in Apache:
I have recently implemented the following on my own website, and I would like to share this Apache trick.
DevOps , Software Development Read more
Saturday, 10th February, 2018
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.
At the start of February 2018, I provisioned a new Cloud VPS to run my website and other apps. I also chose to migrate all my private Git repositories to it and cancelled my paid Github subscription.
This article explores the reasons why I went self-hosted.
DevOps , Software Development Read more
Sunday, 21st January, 2018
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?
DevOps , Software Development Read more
Monday, 27th November, 2017
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.