There are thousands of web hosting companies. So how do you pick the right company to host your website, keep it online, and keep it secure? In this blog post, I'm going to talk about just 2 of the questions you should ask yourself. Does the provider offer an uptime...

Ransomware is a new breed of computer virus that is wrecking havoc on individuals and businesses alike. Once infected, ransomware will encrypt all of a user's documents and files and then demand a ransom from the victim using bitcoin or in other hard-to-trace digital...

We recently helped a client by moving her domain name registration and DNS onto Barred Owl Web infrastructure. Over the course of one of our phone conversations, she mentioned that she had paid a company - for two years in a row - that had sent her letters in the mail...

In the past, I've written about backing up your website, Synology NAS (network attached storage) devices used for backing up and syncing data, and Data Redundancy and how that's different from true backups. In this blog post, I will explain why syncing your data...

Website speed is a metric that every website owner should be concerned about. Way back in 2010, Google even began using site speed as a metric for its search ranking algorithm. Huge businesses exist solely to speed up customer websites in the form of a CDN (Content...

You just launched your new website, and love the way it looks. You know that you can attract more visitors and that your spiffy website will convert more visitors into customers. Suddenly, your email inbox is inundated with dozens, then hundreds, of spam submissions...

One of the services we provide is web hosting, and often times, we work with clients whose websites are hosted elsewhere that want to move their website to Barred Owl Web infrastructure. Most of the time, moving a website off of one hosting platform onto Barred Owl...

Since the internet was first conceived in the 1960s, it has served as a powerful tool for communications, networking and logistics. Unfortunately, it has also provided criminals and other crooks more ways (and easier ways) to commit their evil deeds. There are many...

SSH (Secure Shell) is "a protocol for secure remote login and other secure network services over an insecure network." (See RFC 4253). Webmasters are familiar with FTP, or "File Transfer Protocol", which lets them connect to a remote server in order to upload and...

Have you ever wondered why it seems Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, or another large website almost never seems to go down? As cloud services become more pervasive, "downtime" is becoming a thing of the past. Downtime, as the word implies, is an indication that a...

One of the concepts several of our clients and people I talk to on "the street" routinely misunderstand is the difference between website maintenance and website hosting. In one of the first blog posts I wrote, I explained that there are 3 different costs to building...