Hands-on Web Hosting Blog

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all the rage these days, and rightly so.  If you have not optimized your site to attract the search engines then you’re relying on people who visit your site to spread the word.  On site SEO is one of the most overlooked parts of web design, but it’s a vital part!  Many people associate SEO with generating links from other websites, but on-page optimization is quick and an easy way to help boost your page rankings.  Here’s a few quick and easy steps to help improve your page ranking with the major search engines.

Read more…

The PCI Standards Council announced some change for the next version of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS), however the majority of the changes will not feature any major changes.  This is welcomed news to merchants given that we’ve all just gone through a major overhaul in preparation for the July 1st 2010 deadline of changes (mainly affecting Payment Application standards or PA-DSS).  The new release is in preparation and will be released in October 2010. Read more…

On August 6th, Qualiteam, the makers of X-Cart, released their latest version; X-Cart Gold 4.4.0.  The new version has received mixed feelings from the X-Cart community as it was more than a year ago that the makers of the software announced that they were going to cease programming on the 4.x branch and release a new 5.x version of X-Cart.  Originally, this was planned to be released in the 4th quarter of 2009, but here we are in the 3rd quarter of 2010 and still no further along.  The new X-Cart 5.x release is slated for some time in 2011.  But lets get back to the 4.4 version! 

Read more…

On Thursday July 22nd 2010, PHP made two major announcements that affect everyone running PHP.

The first was the long awaited update to 5.2.14 and the news that the latest version is the last version being released in the 5.2.x branch.  This strikes fear into the hearts of many script users as many scripts fail to work correctly on the PHP 5.3.x branch.  While the 5.2.x branch will remain in a release state and MAY receive the ocassional security fix, it’s no longer being developed.  This means UPGRADE for anyone concerned about PCI Compliance!

Read more…

For more than 9 years, Fantastico has been a big part of our shared web hosting business.  While the software has been a great help to our users in installing scripts with a click of the mouse, the software has also been lacking (for a very long time) regular updates to the packages that it installs.  Wordpress, one of the most popular installs for many of our clients, has been one of the biggest let downs of Fantastico along with other scripts in that the makers of the softwares make critical updates but Fantastico fails to compile the exploits ina timely manner.  For the past year Hands-on Web Hosting has been installing Softaculous to aid our clients with installations on VPS and Dedicated Servers but we’ve held off on our Shared Hosting servers in the hopes that Fantastico would get their act together.  It’s now clear they will not.  Bye Bye Fantastico!

Read more…