When searching for a shared web hosting plan, you probably are considering many factors. Will my prices stay the same from month to month? Will I be locked into a contract? How will I be able to manage my websites? With all of these questions front of mind, you more than likely haven’t taken into account how important it is to effectively backup your data? That may be the last thing you are thinking about, but in reality you should be looking into Web-Hosting companies that care about taking backups. We pride ourselves on ensuring weekly backups for our shared web hosting customers. It provides our customers with the flexibility and peace of mind that they need when running a website.

Where Does this Option Exist?

After logging into your my.interserver.net page you will be directed to your homepage. This is where you will find any web-hosting package or other services that you may have with us. From here you can quickly go to your web-hosting package and manage it. On our control panel you should notice a button that says “download backups”. With this amazing feature readily available at your disposal you will never have to worry about losing your website as a result of a malfunction or catastrophe.

How it Works

In order to keep to our promise we use an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) called OpenStack, also known as Swift to us. Some of you may be familiar with this service and others may have never heard of it. That’s okay, because we will briefly discuss how important OpenStack is. Imagine yourself within a very large datacenter. In this datacenter to ensure data redundancy, information is stored across many different servers. Let’s just say that if one of these servers were to fail (hopefully never) then data would be copied from the cloud onto multiple servers running this service. Swift allows us the versatility to avoid major disasters. However, be aware that we only can store up to 11GB of your website’s data. If it is larger than that we suggest maintaining your own backups.

The great thing about our weekly backups is they are done automatically. You can rest assured knowing that you are in good hands. We keep at least three copies of those backups for at least 60 days. This extended time period allows for an extra layer of redundancy as a precautionary measure. Our main goal is to ensure that we provide all the necessary resources for your business to operate seamlessly.

 

While working on important information, changing files, or installing applications on a server, you always should be wary of issues. Always keep Murphy’s law in the back of your mind during these situations, “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. A major error can spell the demise of your data unless you have frequently backed up your server.

However, when you purchase a VPS with us, you will notice in your my.interserver.net we have provided a tool to properly maintain your server. On a OpenVZ or KVM VPS, there is a tab called “Backups” that will allow you to ‘backup VPS’ or ‘download/manage backups’.

What’s unique about our backup system is that it takes snapshots of a VPS. When you hear the term snapshot, you may envision some type of photography, which in fact is similar to this concept. Instead of taking a full backup, which would require an enormous length of time, a snapshot allows us to take a backup of the current state of your server. Snapshots are useful because they let users make changes to many files.

With your my.interserver.net control panel if you have a OpenVZ or KVM VPS you can take up to four of these snapshot backups. As long as you make sure that you backup your VPS, you will never have to worry about losing your data because we use software known as OpenStack Object Storage aka Swift. If a server was to ever fail, information would never be lost as this software spreads data across different servers throughout a datacenter.

At InterServer we offer a OpenVZ VPS at the affordable price of $6 a month. Along your quest for the perfect VPS you may have certain criteria that you are looking for. If affordable price, secure backups, and optimal performance, are main factors then considering an OpenVZ or KVM VPS would most likely be the best fit for your needs.

After more than a decade of development, WordPress powers nearly one-quarter of the Internet. Through its vibrant and passionate fan base of volunteer’s developers, WordPress provides power, security, stability, and convenience unrivaled by any other free blog platform.

What you may not realize is how few of the WordPress-powered sites are actually blogs. In fact, WordPress had been a go-to staple for website developers across the globe. Whether you’re building an e-commerce site, a portfolio, a niche forum, or a blog, WordPress will allow you to develop your online presence. If you’re searching for a Web Hosting provider to host your site, then no look further. InterServer offers a vast array of hosting solutions ranging from Web Hosting to Virtual Private Servers.  Below we have outlined the major features that makes WordPress a universal platform.

Themes 

The WordPress community is what makes it so attractive to users. This CMS has a passionate community of developers at its core. One of the best ways for a website designer to build a following is by creating free themes. A well-crafted theme can mean exposure, as well as a significant number of back links, especially if the designer includes his or her site in the footer.

When searching WordPress’ theme database you will find thousands of results for free themes. No matter what style works best for your website, you will find dozens (or even hundreds) of high-quality options.

Furthermore, WordPress’ core programming means most themes are easily customizable through widgets, menus, and color selection items. As long as the designer does his or her due diligence, you’ll be able to choose how you want each page of your site to appear, even with no programming knowledge.

For small businesses, this means creating a website is relatively easy compared to the days of individually coding your own website. Designers can easily utilize a pre-built theme as the foundation and customize according to their client’s needs and preferences.

Plugins

WordPress has several plugins that can enhance a site’s functionality. Whether you are looking to start a blog, forum, e-commerce site, or a photo stream, there’s a WordPress plugin that will provide that functionality.

When making minor tweaks (or even major ones), there’s a 99% chance that a plugin can do it for you. Plugins can do anything from running SEO audits, generating XML sitemaps, to automatically resizing images and thumbnails. Did you know that there’s a WordPress plugin that allows you to include JSON information in every post?

Support

WordPress’s passionate community isn’t only helpful in providing themes and plugins, but also support. Developers are willing to help beginners master the ins and outs of the system. The platform is well documented with a large resource base to help troubleshoot almost any issue. One of the greatest parts of the WordPress community is that there is no shortage of helpful forums full of people who love to teach others how to use WordPress. To top it all off there are local meet ups for several communities worldwide that are led by passionate enthusiast who want to share their knowledge. You can find these meetings posted on WordPress.org under meetups.

Security

Since WordPress is so widely used, hackers will attempt to find security holes and exploits that will allow them to take gain access to vulnerable sites. Due to its open source nature, those exploits can be slightly easier to locate. However, there is a vested interest from the community to ensure that any security problem is patched up immediately.

Additionally, WordPress comes with a cluster of built-in and add-on security features to guarantee your site’s safety, including defense from bots, brute-force logins, cross-site scripting, and many other security holes.

WordPress continues to be an outstanding platform for bloggers around the world, but it can also be a powerful tool for building any website. If you take the time to master this platform, you can easily save time, money, and energy on the design and development of any project.

Hackers and malware continue to constantly plague Internet users and ISPs. As recent as last week, the public was not able to access major websites such as Twitter, Netflix, and Amazon for several hours. This downtime occurred as a result of  DYN.com, a popular provider for commercially managed DNS services, which had been experiencing a massive DDoS attack resulting in the downtime of these popular sites.  A domain name server has the ability to change an easy to remember name such as interserver.net into a series of numbers known as an IP address. This is comparable to searching for a random phone number in a phone book.

These attackers were able to successfully pull off a major DDoS attack as a result of human error for example someone forgetting to change their passwords on their Internet devices. These devices known as “Internet Of Things” are everyday objects that connect to the Internet. When you initially set-up many of these devices, you are provided with a default password. If the owner of his/her ‘Internet of Things’ forgets to change the default password then hackers will be able to search the web for default passwords to your device. This will enable hackers to take control of your device and utilize them for their purposes. Your device can end up a part of a larger botnet used in a major DDoS attack.

The premise of this article is to inform our followers about the importance of password security. We highly recommend changing default passwords into something more complex in order to deter hackers. There has been countless times where someone’s web service is compromised as a result of having used passwords like “Password123” or their birthdate. Of course, it may be difficult to remember long and complicated passwords, so we suggest using password managers. Instead of having to memorize a bunch of passwords, you can have all of your passwords in one secure place. If everyone took the necessary steps to ensure password security it would in turn minimize the impact and damage of major caused by DDoS attacks.

Nonprofit organizations help to meet the needs of millions of people around the world. From feeding the hungry to offering shelter to the homeless, and countless other helpful good deeds, nonprofits are essential. As a small way of giving back to these selfless organizations, InterServer is offering free web hosting to all qualifying nonprofit organizations.

High Quality Hosting

Unlike many other companies that offer free hosting to people, InterServer is providing industry leading shared hosting that will meet the needs of most organizations. The hosting is housed on the state-of-the art servers, within the world class data centers. These are the same types of hosting accounts that individuals and businesses use every day. Whether you’re just starting up a nonprofit organization, or you’ve been serving the community for years, InterServer’s free hosting offer is here for you.

Hosting is Essential for Nonprofits

In today’s Internet focused world, nonprofits must have a good website in order to reach out to those in need as well as potential donors. A good website starts out on a good hosting server that can house the data and service the traffic. Of course, nonprofit organizations need to keep their expenses down, so they can spend their limited resources serving the causes they are passionate about. With the help of InterServer, nonprofits are able to harness the power of the Internet, without spending a dime on the hosting they need.

What Nonprofits Qualify

InterServer offers this exclusive deal to all 501(c)(3) organizations free hosting. After signing up for hosting, simply submit a 501(c)(3) determination letter to get the free hosting services. This free offer is an ongoing service that InterServer provides to nonprofits.