NameHero has a partnership with DropMySite to backup your website on a daily basis. One of the advantages of this, is that it allows you to see which files are modified – particularly, the error logs can be quite useful. Recently, this allowed me to isolate a recurring error logged in a “php_errorlog” file that […]
When Just “Web Hosting” Isn’t Good Enough
Pure web hosting services are dime a dozen. Provided a host fulfills some basic requirements like having DNS tools and hosting space, you can get your website online on any one of them. And for many, it’s a race to the bottom to see who can get away with making it as cheap as possible! […]
Why Amazon AWS Will Never Replace Web Hosting
The big tech giants are scary companies to compete with. I remember there was a time when Google was entering industry after industry, and the local players were petrified that it would destroy them. Folklore has is that VCs, when presented with a business proposal, used to ask, “What will you do if Google comes […]
NameHero’s Offsite Backups Give It The Edge
Lately I’ve been writing a lot about backups – particularly offsite copies that are separate from your hosting, and don’t live on the same network. The reason for this is pretty clear. No matter how experienced, how secure your web hosting’s infrastructure is, there’s always a chance that they will be systematically compromised – and […]
How to Have an Offsite Backup: Part 2
Earlier in part 1, I’d written about one method to have offsite backups, involving a local plugin on your site that creates zip archives of your site and database, and then dumps them to an external storage service like say Dropbox or Google Drive. In that, I explained that the disadvantage is the server performance […]
How to Have an Offsite Backup: Part 1
Offsite backups are important. Even though NameHero is one of the few hosting providers to allow free automatic and manual backups and restores, these are all still stored on the same servers and networks that host your website. They protect you if something goes wrong with your site, but not from a systemic system-wide outage. […]
Stop Pushing JavaScript To The Footer
Advice on how to improve your page speed can be a double-edged sword. For one thing, a lot of people who write these articles don’t know what it’s like to actually run a medium-sized or large website with even a little bit of complexity. If they did, they wouldn’t be so confident in their recommendations. […]
How To Defer Inline JavaScript – Finally!
Inline JavaScript has been the bane of attempts to speed up my site. I’ve been fighting with the jQuery JavaScript library for years. All advice on making your website faster talks about the importance of deferring JavaScript so that it doesn’t execute in the header and slow down your page rendering. But the problem with […]
What Cloud Hosting ISN’T (And What It IS)
The past few years have seen hosting providers try and differentiate themselves in many ways – and one of the hottest buzzwords has been “cloud hosting”. Unfortunately, there’s no standardized definition of what this means, and so companies have been free to capitalize on the confusion. In this article, I’ll explain the various things that […]
It’s Time for WordPress To Reduce Its Reliance On jQuery
This morning when I went to my site’s dashboard, I saw that the Automattic team had released the latest version of the Jetpack plugin – 8.4. As per my usual habit of never updating a plugin until at least 4 days had passed, I first went through the update notes to see if there were […]