Every St. John’s business that has a website is running a small stack of dependencies. There is the domain name that points everything to the right place, the hosting environment that serves the pages, the business email that arrives (or silently doesn’t), and the backups that restore everything if something goes wrong. Most owners build this stack once, then leave it alone. That is when the gaps open up. This...

St. John’s has spent the last decade building a technology sector that now contributes $1.8 billion to Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial economy — up 24 per cent from 2016, according to data cited by techNL and The Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University. The city’s startups, ocean-tech firms, professional services companies, and trades businesses increasingly depend on a website that not only exists but performs. A slow or unreliable site costs...

Most guides to choosing a web host are feature comparisons: storage, bandwidth, number of email accounts. Those matter, but they are the easy part. Plan pages are designed to make features comparable. What a plan page is not designed to tell you is whether the company is what it says it is, and what its guarantees are actually worth. It also won’t tell you how the contract behaves at renewal,...

Most hosting trend articles are lists of buzzwords: AI, edge, green, serverless. They are hard to act on because they have no dates attached. For a small business owner, the useful question is not “what is fashionable in hosting?” It is “what will break, cost more, or need a decision from me, and by when?” That question has unusually concrete answers right now. Several changes that affect every small business...

Ask three Canadian sources how many businesses were hit by a cyber attack last year and you will get three different answers. Statistics Canada says 16%. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) says 43% were targeted. An IBM-sponsored study puts the average breach at more than seven million dollars, which would bankrupt most of the businesses in the first survey. None of these sources is wrong. They measure different things,...

A VPS is usually sold as a bigger version of shared hosting. That framing undersells it and leads people to buy it for the wrong reason. What you are actually buying is three things that shared hosting cannot give you at any price: resources nobody else can consume, the ability to run software you choose rather than software your host permits, and a machine you can grow deliberately instead of...