Author: nalex

Server products

We have rebranded our “hosting” products as “Servers”. Instead of “hosting” your website, we provide a configured server. If you need additional subdomains for a microservice, we simply add them. In the old model, you would need more “hosts”. Since we are adding new software capabilities, this would become cumbersome and expensive.

Instead we setup the hosting you need. Our basic Cloud Host is usually sufficient for your development project, but when you have a million users logging in each month, you will need an upgrade. Our upgrades will scale your Cloud server according to predictable needs.

Our Software Server is required for Email and many popular Content Management and Software Systems, including WordPress, Drupal, BBS, Galleries, Ecommerce and whatever you require.

Unline Hosting Companies we charge very little for these resources, therefore we only offer annual deals. And, unlike hosting companies we only provide Servers for our Development clients.

New Clients

As a seasoned contractor I got used to a market paying good rates for my skills and now I believe I am able to deliver faster for more clients remotely. It stands to reason that the market for remote teams is a better one than a market for a remote individual. There is nothing to stop software development being more effective and efficient online than it is to house employees. Avoiding massive costs to both sides of the negotiation. Costs can be productively invested.

The issue has been, in the past, trust and credibility. I believe strongly that I have a commercial answer to the problems posed by managing a remote team. By building small teams of developers, linking them into teams and managing projects real value can be delivered. The Open Source community has done this for years. It has driven knowledge progress.

New clients for Software Antelope’s development services will be the first customers of our latest project: www.remotedevelopment.co.uk. Read more about how this works.

Making your site secure

You may notice this site is only accessed via SSL. There are many breeds of SSL you can use, including EV (Extended Validation) that basically carry a level of insurance against fraud if someone were to actually crack SSL. Most levels of SSL are secure enough for the average site, and the Everyday Security level of SSL we recommend for most applications is highly secure.

On this site we use Stripe for Web commerce, which is fully secure as you are entering your credit card details effectively on their site and we never record those details. We just receive payment without any exposure of your financial details “in the open” on the web. We also add SSL to our entire site as that makes it hard for hackers and trackers to see anything of what you are doing as all pages are encrypted.

1 Year SSL Subscription (including install on our servers)

WordPress attacks

Millions of sites in the world use WordPress to build and manage their sites, from individuals to multinationals. An exploit using the ability to post to the site from mobile devices can be closed off if that functionality is not being used.

Add these lines to the .htaccess for the site:

<Files xmlrpc.php>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>

A number of 3rd party plugins use this function, so blocking it may break plugins. Some of the most well-known plugins that require XML-RPC are:

WordPress Mobile App
JetPack (just some parts of it)
LibSyn (for podcasts)
BuddyPress
Windows Live Writer

But for the vast majority of WordPress sites the XML-RPC function isn’t used and can be used as an exploit, hence it is best to disable it.

Let us know if you need this security measure applied to your Antelope hosted CMS site.