The IT Nerd

Canadian Web Hosting (www.canadianwebhosting.com) announced today the commencement of their new “Snap Spectacles Sweepstakes” contest.

Entrants are able to win 1 of 2 Snap Spectacles (a wearable accessory for Snapchat). To be eligible, new Canadian Web Hosting registrants can enter their names in the sweepstakes by visiting http://bit.ly/CWHSnapRegister and entering in their information. Note: Making a purchase is not a mandatory condition to enter the contest.

The Snap Spectacles allow users to share hands-free, wide angle videos on Snapchat. The exclusive Spectacles are only sold from Snapbot Spectacle vending machines in select locations in the USA and Europe and are not available in Canada.

Existing Canadian Web Hosting customers are also eligible to receive 3 months of free hosting by referring a friend to sign up for a hosting service.

This sweepstakes is in addition to a contest they are currently running to celebrate Canada’s 150^th anniversary where four individuals will receive a very “Canadian Care Package” and one grand prize winner will receive the “Care Package” and 150 days of free hosting.

The contest begins on June 26, 2017 at 12:00:01am PDT and concludes at 11:59:59 pm PDT on August 1, 2017. It is open to legal residents of Canada, except the province of Quebec, who have reached the age of majority in the province or territory of residence. Other restrictions apply; see http://bit.ly/CWHsnapspectacles for details.

To learn more about Canadian Web Hosting or the Snap Spectacles Sweepstakes, contact Canadian Web Hosting today by calling 1-888-821-7888 or by emailing sales@canadianwebhosting.com.

Canadian Web Hosting, the leading provider of Canadian web hosting, cloud hosting and infrastructure services in Canada, announced today the release of their new Virtual Private Server Plans with built-in disaster recovery called VPS SAFE. These new plans offer customers true business continuity across Canada at a fraction of the cost of traditional disaster recovery systems and help prevent local outages and interruptions to business applications and websites. Moreover, these new disaster recovery plans can be added in just a few clicks and make it easier than ever to have true disaster recovery.

Canadian Web Hosting’s new VPS SAFE plans work by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to learn customers data patterns and maximize data protection by seamlessly moving data between data center locations and helping to prevent data loss. The new plans utilize enterprise-ready virtualization from VMware and Veeam’s replication technology that run on top of Canadian Web Hosting’s highly available, SSAE 16 compliant infrastructure. These new VPS SAFE plans deliver high-performance and scalable servers with recovery and data-loss avoidance to ensure guaranteed recovery of files, applications, and VMs. Anytime you upgrade, or modify your plan, your disaster recovery plan changes with it automatically.

Upon signup, Canadian Web Hosting will automatically enable disaster recovery on the designated VPS SAFE plan and enable disaster recovery to a secondary location of the customers choosing. Once Disaster Recovery is turned on that server begins replicating to the customer’s remote site, and will remain in continuous sync indefinitely, turned off only when it is disabled by the user. Canadian Web Hosting’s flexible data center locations options including locations that meet Canada’s privacy requirements including Toronto and Vancouver, as well as secondary sites like Dallas that can give customers further geographic flexibility.

By default, Canadian Web Hosting’s implements a standard Recovery Point Objective of 15 minutes for all new plans but offers additional flexibility by giving customers options for replication including real-time continuous replication for the most stringent RPO and RTO requirements helping to minimize any potential data loss with no need for slow or expensive hardware systems.

Customers can signup for Canadian Web Hosting’s new VPS SAFE plans today start at $15.00 per month.  Learn more by visiting www.canadianwebhosting.com or by phone at 888-821.7888.

Canadian Web Hosting has announced that it has once again successfully completed its annual independent audit for Service Organization Control (SOC) 2, in accordance to AT 101, making this its seventh consecutive year of completion.

The SOC 2 audit was conducted between February 2016 and January 2017, and examined all of Canadian Web Hosting’s services, including dedicated server hosting, cloud hosting, Canadian colocation and web hosting services. The audit process scanned Canadian Web Hosting’s compliance to industry best practices, covering controls, processes and procedures. Upon completion, it was determined that its control activities were compliant and the company displayed the ability to effectively operate throughout the reporting period.

In addition to the annual SOC 2 audit, Canadian Web Hosting also completed the SOC 3 audit, which adheres to the Trust Service Principles and focuses on the design of e-commerce systems. The SOC 3 report is available for download, while the SOC 2 report can be obtained by customers, members of the media, or other interested individuals upon request.

One of Canadian Web Hosting’s core missions is to help businesses meet their certification requirements in accordance with AT 101 (formerly SAS70 and CSAE 3416 Type II), which meets the new international service organizations standards for Type I and Type II reporting. As a result, its web hosting customers with services including dedicated servers, VPS, cloud servers, cloud computing, cloud storage and/or shared hosting can feel confident that they are in a secure, reliable and effective environment equipped with the proper controls for internet operations and highly available IT services.

Here’s a link to Download Canadian Web Hosting’s SOC 3 report.

Canadian Web Hosting announced yesterday the first beta release of their Customer Intelligence Platform Cloudash. This platform brings together their expanded Hosting as a Service (HaaS) platform with deep insights driven by artificial intelligence.

Cloudash is an entirely new way to interact with web hosting and cloud hosting services and is built on React using GraphQL. The platform incorporates Canadian Web Hosting’s web hosting services, including Shared Hosting, VPS, Containers, Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage that can be instantly provisioned with a free registered account. React is the same development platform used by leading applications HipChat, Facebook Chat and many others. It delivers proven performance and flexibility for end-users.

This is Canadian Web Hosting’s first application built using GraphQL, an open-source data query language that delivers exceptional latency and bandwidth performance. GraphQL incorporates a new microservices architecture, removes the Rest API layer, thereby improving the time for new product updates and makes it easier than ever for customers to write GraphQL queries directly into their applications.

To support end-users, Canadian Web Hosting has added artificial intelligence capabilities to Cloudash, including deep integration of Watson and AI driven communication platforms to help customers receive actionable insights and easily understand their data.  Customers have the ability to receive real time insights, regular daily and weekly summaries and ongoing resource audits that help customers understand their usage and how to decrease their overall infrastructure and cloud hosting spend.

Canadian Web Hosting’s new major release for Cloudash is scheduled for June that will offer additional capabilities around public cloud computing, OpenStack, object storage and so much more.  To learn more about Canadian Web Hosting or Cloudash, contact Canadian Web Hosting today at 1-888-821-7888 or by emailing sales@canadianwebhosting.com.

Canadian Web Hosting announced today that it is expanding its community outreach programs and is helping local non-profit organizations and charities through partnerships, volunteerism, and corporate donations to give back to the local communities including Union Gospel Mission and Canucks Autism Network.

One area of focus is sports. Sports are essential in the lives of children for many reasons and helps promote mental and physical health, build self-esteem, facilitate friendships, and develop teamwork skills. Despite the countless benefits of participation in sports, not all families can afford it. That is why Canadian Web Hosting takes great pride in supporting non-profit organizations and associations that work towards helping children (and adults) participate in sports.

The Society for Kids at Tennis (KATS) is one of the organizations supported by Canadian Web Hosting. Based in Victoria, KATS provides children in poor financial circumstances and children with developmental disabilities with the opportunity to play tennis for free. Working with 36 partner organizations to deliver its programs, including the City of Victoria, low-income schools, social agencies, community centers, and municipal recreational centers, KATS fosters the physical, emotional, and social well-being of disadvantaged youths. In just three years, KATS has helped over 4,000 youths participate in fun, inclusive environments to nurture good sportsmanship and celebrate improvements to boost their self-esteem.

As more than 1/3 of Canadian children are unable to participate in sports due to financial barriers, Athletics 4 Kids (A4K) has made it their mission to provide funding assistance to ensure all B.C. children have access to organized sports; they support kids in over 40 different kinds of athletic pursuits, both team (like hockey) and individual activities (like swimming). A4K is a charity based in Vancouver that has been helping financially disadvantaged children enroll in sports since 2002. To date, A4K has helped thousands of families bear the expense of having their children get active in sports.

Canadian Web Hosting is attending A4K’s third large fundraising event this year – the A4K Charity Boxing Gala. “While we have hosted our annual Gala in West Vancouver for the past 14 years, this is our first Gala held at the Molson Canadian Theatre, Hard Rock Casino Vancouver, and we are very excited! Our goal is that another 200 to 300 children will be able to participate in sports next year because of the funds that we raise from the Hard Rock event this year,” says A4K’s Executive Director, Sandy Hancock. The evening will be packed full of entertainment, cocktail receptions, gourmet dinner, silent and live auctions, and amateur boxing matches. Tickets to the event are almost gone but available here if you hurry!

Newest to the Canadian Web Hosting Sponsorship family, Paralympic Sports Association (PSA) is a charity dedicated to enhancing the social, physical, and mental health of children and adults with a disability through adapted recreational and sporting activities. PSA offers over a dozen different adaptive sports, is working in 5 communities across Alberta, and partners with over 50 different business and organizations to achieve its mandate. PSA has created many of the first adaptive sports programs in the province, such as sledge hockey, wheelchair basketball and athletics. “The organization has underdone many changes throughout the decades and is currently focused on providing grassroots sport and recreation opportunities. We pride ourselves on offering quality programming that helps our members develop into fully participating members of the community,” says PSA’s Executive Director, Amy MacKinnon.

To learn more about KATS, visit their website, Twitter, or Facebook.

To learn more about A4K, visit their website or Facebook.

To learn more about PSA, visit their website, Twitter or Facebook.

Canadian Web Hosting has announced the public availability of their new Private Cloud Hosting plans in Canada through Canadian Cloud Hosting, giving customers instant access to enterprise grade hardware with the latest virtualization technologies from VMware including VMware’s enterprise ready Virtual SAN (vSAN) storage service.  Customers get true high availability combined with IPv6 read Private Cloud infrastructure running on a secure backbone network across Canada that is flexible and scalable by using a high performance distributed storage system that gives customers and their users the fastest speeds possible at a fraction of the cost while maintaining a level of control unavailable in public clouds.

With every cloud hosting deployment, customers will benefit from Canada’s unique business environment that ensures maximum privacy for every deployment, as well as reduced costs with the Canadian dollar at an eleven-year low.  All cloud servers are located in Canada and every new Canadian Cloud Hosting plan including VMware Private Clouds is charged in Canadian dollars and will customers save an average of 40% on their monthly cloud spend compared to the leading US providers.

These new Canadian Private Cloud Hosting plans with VMware vSAN distributed storage give customers enterprise-grade SSDs for high-performance read/write caching, in combination with hard drives for cost-effective data persistence and enterprise grade reliability. Using vSAN shared storage gives customers integrated Fault Tolerance and granular non-disruptive scale-up or scale-out upgrades.  As more resources are brought online, customers are able to minimize potential downtime and maintain hardware independence.   Unlike traditional SAN hardware that utilizes RAID, vSAN leverages RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes) and can easily withstand disk or host failures, maximizing redundancy and client uptime.

It is easier than ever to move to 100% Canadian Cloud enterprise-grade infrastructure. Canadian Cloud Hosting is now offering free migration services for any new or existing customers looking to move their existing cloud servers over to the Canadian Cloud.  In addition, customers get true 24/7 support, the safety and security of Canada’s privacy regulations that are certified 100% Canadian-owned and operated. For more information, visit www.cacloud.com or call 1-866-821-8355 for more information.

AURO, the public cloud division of Canadian Web Hosting, has announced that they have made available several new security enhancements on their OpenStack-based public cloud platform, including Two-Factor Authentication. Two-Factor Authentication adds an extra layer of security on top of the standard username and password style of authentication and provides an additional security mechanism for businesses and developers to meet their ongoing corporate authentication requirements. Specifically, they’ve implemented several authentication services including Twilio and Google’s Security Token Service (STS) that enables user authentication, authorization and single sign-on to to services located virtually anywhere – including perimeter networks, partner networks and in the cloud.

AURO was built to give Canada its first true enterprise public cloud that can support a wide range of cloud computing requirements. With a free account, open APIs (Application Program Interface), Canadian cloud storage and enhanced management tools, customers get immediate access to a single platform that can deliver highly scalable public cloud computing, private cloud and hybrid cloud services. AURO’s services were designed to include operational and architectural compatibility with AWS (Amazon Web Services).  In addition, businesses now have cloud computing pricing that matches or beats all other providers along with data control by keeping their data in Canada and benefiting from Canada’s robust data privacy laws. Plus they’ve use a defense-in-depth strategy that embeds security controls at every layer of the cloud. Some of these controls include:

• OS Hardening (such as removal of non-essential packages and services)
• Logging for a secure network audit trail, Network Access Control Lists for resource network partitioning
• Encryption via SSL/TLS-enabled API endpoints
• Restricted Operator Access via the secure administration gateway
• Virtual Private Cloud that increases network isolation for application services

For more information, visit www.auro.io/start