U.S. ecommerce sales rose by over 44% last year, the most significant single-year increase since ecommerce became a serious player in the retail space at the beginning of the century. As COVID-19 closed brick-and-mortar stores and kept customers at home, shopping moved online and retailers rapidly expanded ecommerce operations. Shopify, the cloud ecommerce platform, is one of the biggest beneficiaries. Shopify aims to lower ecommerce’s technical barriers and simplify store management. That …
With the introduction of the Jupiter theme in version 98, you may have wondered about the fate of Paper Lantern. Today we officially announce Paper Lantern’s deprecation and its eventual removal from the product. What does this mean for you? If you are already using Jupiter, relax; you are good for all future updates. If you are using Paper Lantern, why not give Jupiter a try? You can continue using Paper Lantern for the short term, but eventually, we will stop supporting this theme. How much …
Cookies are how websites remember. Without them, they forget you as soon as a page finishes loading. This ability to remember allows you to log in to a content management system or put products in an ecommerce shopping cart. It’s what allows a dynamic CMS like WordPress to personalize web pages. But sites don’t need to include a cookie with every file they serve, and needless cookies increase latency and generate unnecessary network traffic. Cookie-free …
cPanel & WHM’s main shared IP address is used by new shared hosting accounts created on a server. This allows web hosts to create new accounts easily and automates the otherwise complex and time-consuming domain and web server configuration process. But what if you want to change the main shared IP address on your cPanel server? In this article, we outline a three-step process for changing a server’s shared IP address. Changing the main shared …
It’s super easy to install and manage SSL certificates in cPanel & WHM. Certificate requests and installations happen automatically with AutoSSL and an integration such as the cPanel Let’s Encrypt™ plugin. SSL automation saves web hosting providers time and eliminates the deluge of support requests that traditionally accompany SSL certificate issues. AutoSSL includes a default certificate provider, which we chose for its reliability, usability, and generous domain and rate limits. However, we also made it …
Data that exist in one place barely exists at all. It’s a hardware failure or mistyped command away from disappearing completely. That’s a scary thought, considering business’ most valuable assets include data. Imagine recreating everything in your database from scratch! Regular database backups are essential because that’s where your most important data are stored, whether it’s customer details, email addresses, product catalogs, content, or the hundreds of other types of information businesses need to function. …
When you host your email on your domain with an SMTP server, you are in control. You can choose an email address to suit your business or personal brand. All the data is stored privately on a server or hosting account only you can access. If you want to move to a different hosting provider, there’s nothing to stop you because you aren’t locked-in to a hosted service. So why don’t more people host their …
In our increasingly busy world, we’d be lost without email, calendar, and contacts apps to communicate, collaborate, and manage our time. Unfortunately, getting all these apps to work with each other can be a frustrating challenge. There are so many incompatible platforms that we often struggle to make our calendar and contact hosting services talk to our preferred devices and applications. That’s why, in addition to web and email hosting features, cPanel & WHM includes …
WordPress 5.5.1 is now available! This maintenance release features 34 bug fixes, 5 enhancements, and 5 bug fixes for the block editor. These bugs affect WordPress version 5.5, so you’ll want to upgrade. You can download WordPress 5.5.1 directly, or visit the Dashboard → Updates screen and click Update Now. If your sites support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process. […]
August was special for WordPress lovers, as one of the most anticipated releases, WordPress 5.5, was launched. The month also saw several updates from various contributor teams, including the soft-launch of the Learn WordPress project and updates to Gutenberg. Read on to find out about the latest updates from the WordPress world. WordPress 5.5 Launch […]
Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attacks can take any website offline. Even Google and GitHub, with their immense resources, struggle to stay online during a large attack. Even worse, anyone with a few dollars can launch one. If you host websites, you and your users could be hit with a denial of service attack big enough to take sites down for hours or even days. However, the worst effects of DDoS attacks can be avoided …
The Netcraft Browser Extension now
offers credential leak detection for extra protection against
shopping site skimmers.
With brick-and-mortar shops around the world closed due to COVID-19, consumers turned to online businesses to fulfil their shopping needs. According to Adobe’s Digital Economy Index report, US online spending in June was $73 billion, up 76% from $42 billion last year. Even with restrictions lifted, research commissioned by Visa suggests that 74% of Britons who shopped online more often during the lockdown will continue to do so.
Now more than ever it is important to protect against JavaScript skimmers. These are snippets of malicious code which criminals upload to compromised shops. Unbeknownst to the store owner or the user, they transmit entered card details directly to the criminal. Unlike scams such as phishing, which can often be avoided by a vigilant internet user, skimmers are invisible to the human eye without a tool such as the Netcraft Extension to expose them.
Netcraft currently blocks over 6,000 shopping sites which contain skimmers, and even large companies such as British Airways, Ticketmaster and Puma have fallen prey to these attacks in the past.
The Netcraft Extension identifying and blocking a skimmer on an online shop
When you visit a shopping site, the Netcraft extension will
evaluate all requests made by the web page. If a request is found to
be sending credentials to a different domain, the extension
will block the request to prevent your data from being stolen. A block
screen will notify you about the request and provide
information about the malicious behaviour that was detected. Only
card number leaks are currently blocked, but other types of
credentials may be enabled in future updates.
For example, if you check out using your credit card on
exampleshoppingsite.com but your card details are sent to
examplebadsite.com, the extension will block the request. This
checking is done locally and securely in your browser – no sensitive
information is sent to Netcraft.
The extension will also block pages which make requests to
malicious domains that are part of JavaScript attacks.
An influential IBM® engineer once said that measurement is the first step towards control and improvement. He was talking about business systems, but it’s just as valid for servers. You can’t control or improve web hosting operations without monitoring, which is why cPanel & WHM is packed with tools to give you insight into your server’s hardware and software. This article will show you how cPanel & WHM’s server monitoring tools make it easy to …
As freedom of speech and fake news take center stage in the international dialogue, The Internet Governance Forum USA 2020 took these subjects and who is responsible head-on. cPanel’s General Counsel, David Snead, was part of the online panel discussion on “Should online platforms moderate and be accountable for user-created content?”. Other panelists included Former U.S. Congressman Chris Cox, Berkley Professor Hany Farid, Syd Terry – the Legislative Director …
Do you find yourself wasting hours on tedious and repetitive server administration tasks? If you answered yes, you’re going to love this article, which explores how cron and cPanel & WHM help you automate these boring but essential aspects of web hosting. Cron is a time-based scheduler. It allows server administrators to run scripts known as cron jobs automatically at scheduled intervals. cPanel & WHM runs several essential server maintenance scripts in this way, and …
cPanel is excited to be added as a blueprint on Amazon Lightsail. Getting started with cPanel on Lightsail has never been easier! Amazon Lightsail is an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers you everything needed to build an application or website, plus a cost-effective, monthly plan. If you’re new to the cloud or looking to get on the cloud quickly with AWS infrastructure, the simplified administration of cPanel is now just a few clicks away. In this …
Tech-support is at the heart of any technology company. As a business grows, so does the number of support requests, and the level of customer service/support can make or break a company. The way customers connect and interact with tech-support has been changing over the past decade. Today, customers have become more demanding expecting answers now, not tomorrow or the next day. Long hold times, canned ticket system responses, and email chains are becoming a …
The Apache web server is a critical component of cPanel & WHM, but no software can be all things to all people, and that’s why we’re happy to offer alternatives like NGINX and the LiteSpeed Web Server. We recently wrote about using NGINX instead of Apache in cPanel, and, although we’re working on it, NGINX isn’t yet a fully compatible replacement. LiteSpeed is a different story. It is easy to install, integrates perfectly with …
WordPress, the world’s most popular CMS (Content Management System), turns 17 years old this year, and what a year it has been! WordPress 5.5 “Eckstine” is the second major release this year and includes over 307 bug fixes, 157 enhancements, and feature requests, and 31 blessed tasks. From auto-updates to new improvements and block updates, WordPress 5.5 is feature-packed! Let’s jump in and take a look at some of the most significant updates: Automatic Theme and Plugin updates: Maintaining a WordPress site …
Version 5.5 “Eckstine” of WordPress is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. With this release, your site gets new power in three major areas: speed (lazy-loading images), search (sitemaps included by default), and security (auto-updates for plugins and themes), along with many new features and improvements to the block editor.
Do your users’ emails disappear somewhere between your server and the recipient? They send emails, but the messages never reach their destination. Somewhere out there, in the wilds of the internet, a system beyond your control scrutinizes messages and thinks: Nope! Email delivery issues can be incredibly frustrating. Messages that go missing in this way are collateral damage in the never-ending war against spam. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and inbox providers want to stop spam …
Are you as ready as we are for these challenging times to be over and for COVID-19 to be a thing of the past? Despite much of the situation we face together being out of our control, we are trying our best to support you and your business as the world continues to grapple with the effects of the global pandemic. In the past few months, we’ve expanded our Technical Support to an office in Barcelona to help provide …
The second release candidate for WordPress 5.5 is here! WordPress 5.5 is slated for release on August 11, 2020, but we need your help to get there—if you haven’t tried 5.5 yet, now is the time! You can test the WordPress 5.5 release candidate in two ways: Try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (choose the “bleeding edge nightlies” option) Or download the release […]
July was an action-packed month for the WordPress project. The month saw a lot of updates on one of the most anticipated releases – WordPress 5.5! WordCamp US 2020 was canceled and the WordPress community team started experimenting with different formats for engaging online events, in July. Read on to catch up with all the […]
Hashes to hashes, dust to dust The following databases will reach End of Life status within the next year: MariaDB® 10.1 on October 17 2020. MySQL® 5.6 on February 5, 2021. cPanel, L.L.C. will no longer provide support for systems running MariaDB 10.1 or MySQL 5.6 after they reach End of Life status. System administrators who do not upgrade their servers to newer supported versions of those databases are at risk of not receiving essential patches to security vulnerabilities and …
The domain name system (DNS) is fiendishly complicated, and managing the nameservers that power it can be perplexing. Server administrators know how frustrating it is to change DNS configurations and patiently wait for them to propagate, only to find out something went wrong and the site is still unreachable. You’ll be happy to hear that cPanel & WHM makes it super easy to manage domains and even a private nameserver. In this article, we’re going …
