Blogs: M&M’s --- Part I - This stands for Marketing and Money
Blogs: Sometimes not making money is ok....
News: SaaS Software Licensing with Insight
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By David Hamilton, theWHIR.com
August 20, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- While expired and self-signed SSL certificates may have warranted yellow flags in Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer, the latest Firefox will scare away users from SSL-carrying sites unless they are certified by a third party, causing controversy as users are blocked from popular sites like Google and LinkedIn. Reported by BetaNews (betanews.com) and other sources, Modzilla began cracking down on SSCs, which are valid, albeit unauthenticated, SSL certificates used for online encryption and website authentication to guard against phishing attacks, giving users frightening warnings, saying the certificate is "invalid" and "not trusted." Mozilla began implementing a stricter policy because self-signed certificates can potentially be malicious because there is no third party to verify the site's identity, according analysis from Royal Pingdom, the official blog of uptime monitoring provider Pingdom(pingdom.com). However, they note that most users will be turned off from websites that do not carry an expensive third-party certificate from such Certification Authorities as VeriSign (verisign.com).
"From a security standpoint, the change in Firefox 3 kind of makes sense, but from a usability standpoint, the implementation is too confusing," according to Royal Pingdom.
While site administrators can pay a one-time fee of $29.99 from a company like Go Daddy (godaddy.com) for a basic SSL package, for some it is a matter of principle.According to Scott M. Fulton's report on BetaNews, some developers self-sign because they do not want to register for security reasons with a third party when working on a covert project. Other developers find it simply more convenient and economical to self-sign certificates, especially when they have many certificates to issue. Univeristy of Massachusetts's Nat Tuck opposes Mozilla's de facto censorship because he said it infringes on net neutrality, the concept that the internet should be free of restrictions on content, sites or platforms. "This behavior means that a public web site basically can't be encrypted unless they are willing to pay an approved vendor a yearly fee for a certificate," Tuck wrote in a recent blog posting. "This has two effects: First, some sites are forced to pay for certificates that they otherwise wouldn't have bought. Second, some sites are forced to go without encryption that they otherwise would have had. "This is really an issue of the basic principles of internet openness. Everyone has equal access to the features of HTTP or SSH, there's no reason why there should be artificial constraints on access to HTTPS. But that's exactly what the Firefox SSL behavior does." Fulton noted an alternative to SSLs for budget-conscious developers is StartCom Certification Authority's free Class 1 digital certificates (startssl.com).
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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