Recently From the Blog
Blog Categories:
Domain Name Registration Scams
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...
Monitoring Linux Systems with Nagios
17 February 2016 Nagios is extremely versatile, and can monitor just about anything. I first tasted Nagios when I worked as an Operations Intern for a Drupal services. In today's post, I'm going to share some of my accumulated knowledge in using Nagios to monitor the...
Why a Sync is not a Proper Backup
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 Performance Tuning: Making Your Site Faster
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...
Dealing with Website Spam
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...
Why You Should Backup Your Website
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...
Internet Scams – Technical Support & Domain Names
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...
Synology NAS Review: Setting Up & Comparing DS713+ and DS215j
There are many reasons why nonprofit organizations should centralize and backup their data. But often times, a fully functional Microsoft Windows server isn’t necessary. It is overkill, and there is no reason why an organization (or individual) should pay so much...
Introduction to SSH and SSH Keys
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...
High Availability Web Hosting
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...
Web Hosting and Website Maintenance
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...
2015 Nonprofit Tech Trends: User Experience in the Cloud
2015 is here, and technology innovations are constantly advancing. According to Forbes, organizations will get smarter about using cloud technology. User experience will be critical, they argue. TechRadar agrees: By digitising information-intensive processes, costs...