CloudFlare, a web performance and security company, is excited to announce our partnership with Orpheum Hosting Solutions! If you haven’t heard about CloudFlare before, our value proposition is simple: we’ll make any website twice as fast and protect it from a broad range of web threats.

Today, hundreds of thousands of websites — ranging from individual blogs, to e-commerce sites, to the websites of Fortune 500 companies, to national governments — use CloudFlare to make their sites faster, and more secure. We power more than 40 billion monthly page views — more than Amazon.com, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple and Bing combined — and over 25% of the Internet’s population regularly passes through our network.

Faster web performance

CloudFlare is designed to take a great hosting platform like Orpheum Hosting Solutions and make it even better.

We run 14 data centres strategically located around the world. When you sign up for CloudFlare, we begin routing your traffic to the nearest data centre.

As your traffic passes through the data centres, we intelligently determine what parts of your website are static versus dynamic. The static portions are cached on our servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours, before we check to see if they’ve been updated. By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.

CloudFlare’s intelligent caching system also means you save bandwidth, which means saving money, and decreases the load on your servers, which means your web application will run faster and more efficiently than ever. On average, CloudFlare customers see a 60% decrease in bandwidth usage, and a 65% in total requests to their servers. The overall effect is that CloudFlare will typically cut the load time for pages on your site by 50% which means higher engagement and happier visitors.

Broad web security

Over the course of 2011, CloudFlare identified a 700% increase in the number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) we track on the Internet (see the chart below). As attacks like these increase, CloudFlare is stepping up to protect sites.

CloudFlare’s security protections offer a broad range of protections against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about our approach is that the system gets smarter the more sites that are part of the CloudFlare community. We analyze the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped.

In time, our goal is nothing short of making attacks against websites a relic of history. And, given our scale and the billions of different attacks we see and adapt to every year, we’re well on our way to achieving that for sites on the CloudFlare network.

Signing up

Any website can deploy CloudFlare, regardless of your underlying platform. By integrating closely with Orpheum Hosting Solutions, we make the process of setting up CloudFlare “one-click easy” through your existing Orpheum SiteWorx control panel. Just look for the CloudFlare icon, choose the domain you want to enable, and click the orange cloud. That’s it!

We’ve kept the price as low as possible and plans offered through Orpheum Hosting Solutions are free. Moreover, we never charge you for bandwidth or storage, therefore saving you tons via reduced bandwidth costs.

For site owners who would like to take advantage of CloudFlare’s advanced offerings, we also offer a ‘Pro’ tier of service for $20/month. The ‘Pro’ tier includes all of the ‘Free’ tier’s offerings, as well as extra features like SSL, a full web application firewall, and faster analytics.

We’re proud that every day more than a thousand new sites, including some of the largest on the web, join the CloudFlare community. If you’re looking for a faster, safer website, you’ve got a good start with Orpheum Hosting Solutions, but the next step is to join the CloudFlare community from within the SiteWorx control panel.

There are four major species of Unix sysad:

1. The TECHNICAL THUG. Usually a systems programmer who has been forced into system administration; writes scripts in a polyglot of the Bourne shell, sed, C, awk, perl, and APL.
2. The ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST. Usually a retentive drone (or rarely, a harridan ex-secretary) who has been forced into system administration.
3. The MANIAC. Usually an aging cracker who discovered that neither the Mossad nor Cuba are willing to pay a living wage for computer espionage. Fell into system administration; occasionally approaches major competitors with indesp schemes.
4. The IDIOT. Usually a cretin, morphodite, or old COBOL programmer selected to be the system administrator by a committee of cretins, morphodites, and old COBOL programmers.

Just click here for the rest of the field guide, and be prepared to laugh!

Enjoy!

We wanted to provide an update on some of the things we’re working on here at Orpheum Hosting Solutions.

CloudFlare Integration

CloudFlare is a really neat service that provides enhanced redundancy, security, and analytics for websites. The next version of SiteWorx will have a plugin to allow for native CloudFlare integration for your website. This means that, with the flick of a switch, it’ll be really easy for you to access CloudFlare’s content delivery network and security mechanisms, making your website faster and even more secure than it is now! This should be available within two weeks from now, and available to all Clustered Hosting customers.

Virtual Fax Service

We have a couple of Business hPBX and iVoice customers already testing this out, and so far the feedback is great. The Virtual Fax Service lets you eliminate your physical fax machine and replace it for a fraction of the cost of your current fax line! We will formally unveil this soon once we have the backend looking the way we’d like it to, and have fully fleshed out the pricing details.

New Support Staff

Orpheum is growing really well, and soon we’ll be bringing in some new support staff to help lighten the load. The new staff will be trained to provide the same level of service as the existing Unrivaled Support Team, and we hope that adding a few new people will reduce the response times and make it easier for the administrative and Tier 2 folks to focus on getting things right.

We also are going to be looking for developers this summer to help us start building out our service portfolio so that we can start offering things like cloud computing (Infrastructure as a Service). We want to give developers the chance to work on something really cool, so when we need you, we’ll let you know!

1. “That’s weird…”
2. “It’s never done that before.”
3. “It worked yesterday.”
4. “How is that possible?”
5. “It must be a hardware problem.”
6. “What did you type in wrong to get it to crash?”
7. “There is something funky in your data.”
8. “I haven’t touched that module in weeks!”
9. “You must have the wrong version.”
10. “It’s just some unlucky coincidence.”
11. “I can’t test everything!”
12. “THIS can’t be the source of THAT.”
13. “It works, but it hasn’t been tested.”
14. “Somebody must have changed my code.”
15. “Did you check for a virus on your system?”
16. “Even though it doesn’t work, how does it feel?”
17. “You can’t use that version on your system.”
18. “Why do you want to do it that way?”
19. “Where were you when the program blew up?”
20. And the Number One Reply from Programmers when their programs don’t work: “I thought I fixed that.”

Credit: http://www.digitalconsciousness.net

Alpha: “Guess what, mate. Yesterday, I met this gorgeous blonde girl in a bar.”

Beta: “What did you do?”

Alpha: “Well, I invited her over to my place, we had a couple of drinks, we got into the mood and then she suddenly asked me to make her feel special!”

Beta: “You’re kidding me!”

Alpha: “Nope! So then I lifted her and put her on my desk next to my new laptop.”

Beta: “Really? You got a new laptop? What configuration?”

Alpha: “It’s got 4GB RAM, 802.11n, a 15.4″ widescreen, 180GB SSD…”

New Virus Warning

This just in : NEW VIRUS WARNING

If you receive an email with a subject line of “Badtimes,” delete it immediately WITHOUT reading it. This is the most dangerous email virus yet.

It will re-write your hard drive. Not only that, but it will scramble any disks that are even close to your computer. It will re-calibrate your refrigerator’s coolness setting so all your ice cream melts and milk curdles. It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards, reprogram your ATM access code, re-write the ID3 tags on your MP3s, and use subspace field harmonics to scratch any CDs or DVDs you try to play.

It will give your ex-boy/girlfriend your new phone number. It will mix antifreeze into your fish tank. It will drink all your beer, and leave its dirty socks on the coffee table when there’s company coming over.

It will hide your car keys when you are late for work, and interfere with your car radio so that you hear only static while stuck in traffic.

Badtimes will make you fall in love with a hardened pedophile. It will give you nightmares about circus midgets. It will replace your shampoo with Nair and your Nair with Rogaine, all while dating your current boy/girlfriend behind your back and billing their hotel rendezvous to your credit card.

It will seduce your grandmother. It does not matter if she is dead, such is the power of Badtimes, it reaches out beyond the grave to sully those things we hold most dear.

Badtimes will give you Dutch Elm disease. It will leave the toilet seat up and leave the hairdryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub. It will wantonly remove the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, and refill your skim milk with whole milk. It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous and terrifying to behold. It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve.

There are tonne of web hosting companies out there, including Orpheum. Some compete purely on price, but the old adage is true – you get what you pay for. Any free web hosting service either has very strict, and harsh, limits on how much disk space or bandwidth your website can consume, or they make it very obvious that you’re using a free service through the use of ads or co-branded URLs (e.g. http://YourBusinessName.HostingCompany.com). This doesn’t look professional, and probably isn’t how you want to present your business.

Instead, you need to purchase a domain name (e.g. YourBusiness.ca). Then, find a professional hosting company that charges reasonable rates, has good customer service, references/testimonials, and is willing to answer questions before you sign up. Pre-sales support levels are usually a good indication of what post-sales support will be like. Also remember that there is no such thing as “Unlimited.” Every web hosting company offering “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth will have a “fair use clause” in their Terms of Service that states the host can cut you off if they believe you’re using more than your fair share.

At the same time, don’t over pay. $15 or $20 a month is far too much for a company to host a small website designed to get your business online and noticed.

The other thing to look for is a web hosting company that makes it really easy for you to get started. Some companies offer web design services, typically starting at around $500. Other web hosting companies take a different approach, giving the entrepreneur/small business owner the tools they need to get started, like the ability to install a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal with just a couple of clicks.

WordPress, in particular, has many templates (called “themes”) available that make it very easy for you to have a professional looking website up and running. All in, including the domain, your first month of hosting, and a nice WordPress theme, your small business can have a website up and on the web for under $100 plus a few hours of time spent writing content and inserting some images.

You can also take advantage of your hosting account to install your first customer relationship management (CRM) solution, like vTiger CRM or SugarCRM, and host it on the same account as your website. A CRM solution takes some learning, but there’s no reason for a small business to pay $20/month/user until you can actually afford it. By the time you have 500 or 1,000 customers in your CRM, it’ll be time to upgrade to a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server anyway. Now you’re in full control of your software, and your customer information – that’s not the case with many software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, like Salesforce.com.

You could also install your own web-based analytics software (Piwik), live chat software, e-commerce solution (Magento, Cube Cart), or project management software. All available for free, and available to be hosted on the same account/plan as your website.

Now, when you’re ready for a more sophisticated website, that is when it’s time to start looking for a freelance developer, or a web design/development company to take over. Many are turning to the same tools I mentioned above, but the designs they create are entirely custom, built to your specs, and designed to really help your business succeed.

The bottom line is that, especially when you’re starting out, you have very limited capital to invest in an online presence. You know it’s a necessity these days, but that doesn’t mean you have to commit thousands, or even hundreds, of dollars to your first website. Take advantage of the tools available to you from your web hosting company, and do it yourself the first time out. Having a decent, self-designed website is better than not having a website at all.