All posts by 2020Media Blogger

2020Media is a leading UK web host offering Linux and Windows website hosting. The company specialises in WordPress, Joomla and Drupal support.
Opinion

Super Fast Hosting

We make every effort to keep our hosting and network as fast as possible. We have multiple redundant links out to the rest of the internet and our network is entirely under our own control.

We recommend customers use third-party sites to test their websites as results from your own browser can be misleading (due to caching).

Website loading speed is mainly affected by the page design itself – one with a lot of large images is clearly going to take longer than a text only page.

However a customer recently responded to our annual survey and I happened to check his site against third-party testing site Pingdom.com. Have a look at these cool results:

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/ezZWtk/http://mso.org.uk

Yes your eyes do not deceive you, MSO.ORG.UK is faster than 96% of all tested websites

mso.org.uk testing results
mso.org.uk testing results

If you visit the site, www.mso.org.uk it’s by no means a plain text boring website – so all credit to the web designer (and a pat on the back for us!)

Technical

Tomcat 8 now available in Beta

tomcatThe Apache Tomcat Project is proud to announce the next release candidate for Apache Tomcat 8 – 8.0.0-RC3 (alpha). Tomcat 8 is aligned with Java EE 7. In addition to supporting updated versions of the Java EE specifications, Tomcat 8 includes a number of improvements compared to Tomcat 7. The notable changes include:

  • Support for Java Servlet 3.1, JavaServer Pages 2.3, Java Unified Expression Language 3.0 and Java WebSocket 1.0.
  • The default connector implementation is now the Java non-blocking implementation (NIO) for both HTTP and AJP.
  • A new resources implementation that replaces Aliases, VirtualLoader, VirtualDirContext, JAR resources and external repositories with a single, consistent approach for configuring additional web application resources. The new resources implementation can also be used to implement overlays (using a master WAR as the basis for multiple web applications that each have their own customizations).

Apache Tomcat 8.0.0-RC3 includes numerous fixes for issues identified in RC1 as well as a number of other enhancements and changes. The notable changes since RC1 include:

  • Switch to UFT-8 by default for connectors and example web applications.
  • Switch to the asynchronous logger and one line formatter by default.
  • Add Servlet 3.1 non-blocking IO support to the AJP connectors.

Full details of these changes, and all the other changes, are available in the Tomcat 8 changelog.

The purpose of this release candidate is to give users an opportunity to test Tomcat 8 and provide feedback to the Tomcat community. It has been given an alpha status which means that it is not judged as being ready for production usage. The implementations of the 4 Java EE 7 specifications are all complete but there is some internal refactoring to be completed before the alpha label is removed.

Download the Release Candidate | Get Tomcat Hosting

Tips and Tricks

Protect your WordPress website

The WordPress brute-force login attacks show little sign of abating and we recommend all users ensure their sites are secured against this attack.

The Attack

Since spring 2013, hackers have been calling the WordPress login url with “standard” usernames (like ‘admin’) and thousands of passwords.  In our experience nearly all users have ‘admin’ as a user account so this makes them especially vulnerable.

The Solution

Well – not a solution exactly but it should protect your site being hacked.

The solution we propose is to change your username to something only you know about. If you are creating a new WordPress site, don’t use the default ‘admin’. Choose a new username.

If you have an existing site, you can’t simply delete the user ‘admin’ – therefore there are lot’s of free plugins around to change it instead. The one we’ve been using is called ‘Username Changer’. Install it, activate it, change your username and then remove it.  It’s a one off job.

2020Media can help

Additionally 2020Media would like to  see these WordPress attacks stop – realistically this is not going to happen – it’s a distributed attack from botnets, and things will change only when it’s not worth the hackers while any more.

2020Media are happy to change your login username for you plus we can add additional server-side security which will mitigate the denial-of-service aspects of the attack.

Managed WordPress

The Managed WordPress service from 2020Media is something anyone not logging in to their WordPress site on a weekly basis should seriously consider. Even if you do, get peace of mind as updates to WordPress, Themes and plugins are done for you. Read more

Opinion

Less than 3 weeks until JoomlaDay UK 2013

Joomla!Day UK takes place on

Saturday 5th & Sunday 6th October 2013

(with a pre-event social on Friday, 4th October)

 

There is a great line-up of speakers from the UK, Europe and the USA who will be covering a huge range of topics pitched at all levels of experience, from complete newcomers to developers, designers and administrators.

Find out more and book on the JoomlaDay Site

 

Find out what’s new

Joomla! 3 – Are You Ready? Joomla! 3.x has many new features, including being responsive-friendly both front and back-end by default.

There are lots of exciting features being released in the forthcoming update 3.2 including a Rapid Application Development (RAD) layer and Content Versioning (allowing you to see who made changes and roll back).

Several speakers will be explaining these new features and exploring how you can use them with your own projects – it’s an ideal opportunity to make sure you’re up to date with the latest developments and stay ahead of the game with new features in the pipeline! Find out more and book your tickets here

2020Media Supports Joomla

joomladay2020Media had a stand at last years event but will be attended as delegates this time around. We hope to meet you there.

Read more about Joomla here.

Technical

Attention Joomla and WordPress users

Two updates within 24 hours.

1. Joomla users should check what version they are using and download and install the latest patch.

Joomla! version 2.5.13 and earlier 2.5.x versions; and version 3.1.4 and earlier 3.x versions has been declared vulnerable to Inadequate filtering leads to the ability to bypass file type upload restrictions. This basically means if you have a upload box on your site, hackers can use it to upload malicious code to your hosting space.

The solution is to upgrade today to the newest Joomla version, Upgrade to version 2.5.14 or 3.1.5 depending on which release you are on.

2. WordPress has released a new version, which fixes 700 bugs and includes a brand new template. The new version is 3.6 and all users are advised to upgrade.

2020Media strongly recommends users make a backup before doing an upgrade. We are also happy to do upgrade for customers on request, free of charge.