https://prnt.sc/vK4kQ6tJ0HAJ

Our accountant discovered the error during a routine check, noticing we were still being charged for this server long after the cancellation. When we reached out to the provider, it initially seemed promising. Michael Lowe, the Chief Revenue Officer at QuadraNet, admitted the mistake, explaining that a PayPal subscription wasn’t canceled when we terminated the server. He proposed a repayment plan. However, this wasn’t just an isolated incident—other customers had faced the same issue before. Despite this, the company let it continue, costing us $13,000.

https://prnt.sc/Egd8mebzpdGl

What’s more concerning is that the PayPal payment authorization was used to continue billing us long after the server was canceled, which goes against legal standards.

Unfortunately, despite Lowe’s promise to resolve the situation, we’ve made no progress. Our follow-up attempts have been ignored, and our remaining two servers were shut down without notice, causing further financial damage. Since we’re based in Europe, pursuing legal action is complex and costly.

After Edge Centres acquired the company under CEO Jonathan Eaves, we hoped the issue would be addressed quickly under new leadership. However, nothing has changed. QuadraNet’s CEO, Tim Caulfield, under whose leadership these overcharges occurred, hasn’t resolved the matter. We have received a partial refund through PayPal, but they still owe us over $10,000.

https://prnt.sc/6iT6frXlJV-Y

Screenshots of multiple refunds issued through PayPal

It’s been incredibly disappointing, not just because of the money but because of the lack of transparency and accountability. If anyone has advice on how to get this resolved, I’d appreciate hearing it.

Types Of Webhosting I Used to get Confused with – Part 2

3. Dedicated hosting
Dedicated hosting services

Dedicated hosting implies one server is dedicated to one website. There is no sharing whatsoever. Your website gets the full capacity of that single server so you have absolute control over the server and optimal site performance.

Pros:
Reliability and consistency: Thanks to having a server for yourself, you can shed off those worries about other websites eating up your bandwidth and performance speed.

Flexibility: Enjoy the freedom to control the whole space of a dedicated server and switch up its configurations as you like.

Cons:
Requires Maintenance and Technical Knowledge: This may lead to not only the cost of a dedicated server but with hosting professionals who can manage and maintain it.
Possible Wastage: Due to the large capacity available on that a single server has, there’s a possibility that some remain unused even if you’re paying for the whole server.

What we think: A dedicated server requires considerable investment. To justify the cost, your website should be fairly large (many web pages) with high-traffic.

4. Cloud hosting
Cloud hosting services

Cloud Hosting means goodbye to a single physical server and hello to virtual server hardware! This type of hosting is gaining popularity because of its reliability. Your web files won’t be stored on a single server but distributed across multiple networks within the Internet.

That means if one of the servers goes down or is underperforming, there are numerous backups. In addition to protection from malfunctioning servers, cloud hosting also promises unlimited resource expansion!

Pros:
Multiple servers: Ensures that your website’s performance remains optimal by moving it to the best performing server in its network.

Scalability: This setup allows you to scale up your resources if your traffic is high and scale it down if it’s low.
Varied prices: The prices you pay for cloud hosting services vary depending on your resource usage. In short, you only pay for what you use

Cons:
Downtime: Cloud hosting relies on a network of internet servers to function. Any issues with the internet connection of the hosting service will result in your encountering problems with your website.

Costly: Due to its convenience and flexibility, cloud hosting may be the most expensive option among the types of hosting. Although this is still dependent on your hosting provider.

What we think: This option offers you the ability to scale your website along with your business. Increased traffic, bigger bandwidth and RAM usage, all of these factors can be adjusted to suit your budget and website needs. But the most important factor? Stronger Security.

We also have another alternative for hosting website which falls under a different category. Sites like Wix and Shopify does not require any server. This runs like a SaaS model, which does not require the end user to know or have any technical knowledge. However in such arrangement, you dont own the asset of the website. There are also several limitations when it comes to customizations to the web design or functionality. Therefore these are the key few things that needs to be considered be fore making any decision.

All in all, a reliable web server is the backbone of your business website. If you have an existing website or are in the process of getting one – it’s time to start thinking seriously about your web hosting needs.

The different web server options as mention in this article should help you understand better in terms of options in the market. It is important that you don’t jump the gun and pick the first option you come across. Your website’s loading speed and performance depends on the hosting server. That’s why it is imperative to choose the right web hosting service that best suits your website’s specific hosting needs.

Types Of Webhosting I Used To Get Confused With – Part one

This article illustrates the different types of hosting available and briefly touches on the advantages and disadvantages of each to help you decide which one works best for your website.

What is web hosting?
Web hosting allows the files that a website comprises to be viewed online. This is done when a hosting provider shares or dedicates space on a web server for the website to store its files. With standard web hosting, you’ll be storing your website’s files on a single server. The amount of space allocated on the server depends on the type of web hosting.

Factors to consider before picking a web hosting service
– the size of your website,
– expected site traffic
– your level of technical expertise.

The common types of web hosting are shared, dedicated, VPS and cloud hosting.

1. Shared hosting
Shared hosting services

With shared hosting, website owners pay for a set amount of storage space within a single server. That single server is divided along with numerous other sites. This is currently the most popular option because it is the cheapest and ideal for beginners looking for the quickest solution to getting the website live.

Pros:
Cost-effective: You pay only for the portion of the shared server you’re using.

Round-the-clock supervision: Majority of the shared hosting plans available include 24-hour supervision, maintenance and support. With the number of websites relying on a single server, it is essential you choose a shared plan that provides this otherwise if the server malfunctions, your website will pay the price..

Cons:
Shared assets: Sharing assets with other websites mean sudden surges of activity in those websites may cause interruptions and issues within your own website.
Unsecure: Security and data breaches in those other websites or within the server itself may also affect your website.

What we think: Due to these factors, shared hosting plans are mostly used by websites that are just starting up or have low traffic. If you’re a startup or in a heavily specialized industry that doesn’t require heavy site traffic, this might be the most viable option for you.

2. VPS hosting
VPS hosting services

A VPS hosting arrangement still has you sharing a single server with other websites. But the key difference is that your portion of the server is separated from the others. This ensures that the resources your website uses remain yours.

With this setup, you don’t have to worry about the traffic from other websites affecting your website performance. This is great if you notice your website traffic is growing. But in the unfortunate event that the server goes down, your website along with the other websites hosted on the same server will be affected.

Pros:
Partitioned resources: This allows you to rest easy knowing that the overloading of websites within your shared server won’t affect your website’s performance.
More assets: Since fewer websites share the same server, your website is allocated more resources compared to a shared hosting plan.

Security: Due to your server assets being partitioned, there is a lesser chance for your website to be affected by security breaches.

Cons:
Less control over your server: Since VPS hosting plans still require you to share your server with other websites, you have significantly less control over how it’s maintained.
Heavier price: Since there are fewer websites sharing the one server compared to shared hosting plans, it results in you shelling out a little more cash.

What we think: If you have a website that’s regularly exceeding the resources of shared hosting plans, but don’t have the need for a dedicated server, then this type of hosting is the one for you.

Don’t look now, but right now your data is being analyzed. And maybe you don’t care, maybe it’s not really that big of a deal for you, but a lot of people may not know much about the topic and get scared by these issues, and also a lot of people know a lot about the topic and have concerns that are legitimate, like the desire if you don’t want to be bombarded by targeted marketing pieces or simply want to have your privacy respected, no matter how simple the data that was going to be generated was.

And for those who care, and even to comply with the law in many countries, you need to have a privacy policy, where you address important issues and explain to users what data is ultimately being collected, how you store it. data and what to do in certain situations. Ideally, especially in large companies and in countries that have specific legislation for this, a lawyer would help with this matter.

But in the vast majority of cases where you will be providing this foundation yourself for your own sites and those of your customers, WordPress can help! And with that you will follow the law, act openly and loyally with your user and probably delight those who care about the subject.

How to generate the basis for your privacy policy through WordPress?

First, make sure you have your WordPress up to date, I confess that I can’t say for sure from which version this function would be available. Also make sure you’re doing this step at the end of the site’s production process, with all plugins already installed, you’ll soon see why.
Checked the version and installed all the plugins, let’s get started!

Log into your WordPress dashboard, go to settings and then to Privacy.

On this page, you will have the option to create a new privacy policy page, or use the address of an existing page to have its content updated with the WordPress privacy policy base template.

Once the page is created, you will see a base of this policy. An obvious first step is: remove “suggested text” at the beginning of each subject paragraph. After all, we might change some or all of this content, but it wouldn’t be nice to see that you just took a template and didn’t do anything.

Now keep this page open, open another tab and go back to the WordPress dashboard, go to settings and then to Privacy (yes, again).

Now, select on the entire screen, next to Settings, the “Policy Tab” section. In this section you will see a guide with some instructions and you will see a section down the screen for each plugin relevant to the theme on your site (at least you should have). Here is a note of congratulations to WPMUDev: all their relevant plugins have their texts in this section!

Here you will see a base text for each plugin installed on your site that has included in its documentation a text for that part.

In this step, reflect a little if there is any plugin that should, but doesn’t have, have your text here. Examples of plugins that should have their text here are email marketing, forms, tracking plugins that collect data for processing or that somehow redirect or show some external image.

Now, look at the text for each plugin and think about it: does this text fit for my site?

Some examples:

Maybe some plugin, such as WPMU Dev’s Hummingbird, uses an external CDN, but maybe you don’t use this function.

Some plugins like has a lot of texts on integrations with various types of email marketing and CRM tools, but obviously, you’re only going to use one or two of those.

Another issue is that some plugins, such as form plugins, need to have added and explained in the privacy policy what data is collected, for example:

“We collect name, email, phone and texts entered in the subject field of each form.”

Lastly, also consider providing a way for your user to erase their data. This medium can be something as simple as a form or a contact email AND be concerned about making this medium really work, for the user and for your customer. It’s no use putting an email there from your client who owns the site, if he is not technically able to take some action, such as deleting someone’s data from the email marketing list.

So that’s it for today!

If you have any questions or have any ideas that I didn’t address, share them with us in the comments.

If you found this content useful, you believe it will help you in your day-to-day work. 😉

I was looking for a solution myself to run cronjobs, either open source where i could host it a cron job scrip myself or a hosted solution, but most of the options I found was paid hosted cron job services like for example https://www.easycron.com/user/register

I also found a script on codecanyon which is quite is actually quote nice  called “Web CronJobs” which is a self hosted solution.

Neither of these filled what I really wanted through to so kept searching.

But eventually I found this really neat website which I’d like to share called cron-job.org:
https://cron-job.org/en/

They offer you to run unlimited amounts of cron jobs for free. No ads or anything. It just that a free service and it works great. Just register at their website and set up the cron jobs you need.

Cron-job.org also offer to have custom time-outs for each cron job, but it is a premium feature which can be accessed if you sign up as a monthly donator to the project. 

Cheers!

The Basic Rules Of Speeding Up WordPress load-times

Well basic rules are as follows:

1.) Don’t use too many plugins. A range of 20-30 max plugins installed and activated should be the “rule of thumb”. Using plugins impacts your server negatively in terms us each plugin use more server memory, and adding load times in terms of individual css, js and php files etc. which must be loaded and read each time a browser client request a page on your website. Add on top of that the increased need for read request to the database too.

Use real code instead if possible. It is always faster and will have much less impact on your system/server.

2.) If you must use a plugin use a MU-Plugin and also load code into that instead of functions.php. Just note that it will impact the whole network if you use WPMU, (E.g. all sub-sites and the primary site):
WordPress mu-Plugins: Your Guide to Using Must-Use Plugins

3.) Use server side caching like WP-Rocket or Hummingbird

4.) Use Browser client caching

5.) Use a CDN nextwork such as CloudFlare or Max CDN

6.) Combine CSS and JS files if possible:
  ** How to Combine External CSS in WordPress
  **How to combine CSS and JS files for WordPress

7.) Make sure your server have enough memory allocated to your WP site. Depending on if you run a Stand-alone WP Install or a WPMU network site is huge difference also in memory requirements.

8.) Make sure you have Gzip compression enabled:
  ** Enable Apache Gzip Compression (mod_deflate) in cPanel Account
  ** Check Gzip (& Brotli) Compression

9.) Make sure that your website is optimized for mobile too!
  ** 8 Quick Tips to Optimize WordPress Website for Mobile Users

10.) Minimize the number of DNS queries/lookups needed when a client request and loads your site:
  ** How to Reduce DNS Lookups? (Tips to Fasten Up the Speed)

11.) Don’t use larger images than you have to and make sure they are optimized for web so they do not weigh more than they really have to. Smaller images reduces the load times drastically. Also use jpg, webp over png if you do not need transparency in your image. Also use a image optimization plugin like WPMU Dev Smush or Imagify for even faster delivery times.
  ** An Introduction to Image Formats for the Web in 2020
  ** Image Optimization For The Web: The Definitive Guide

I guess that is most of it; if I have missed something then maybe add a comment below in this forum thread? 🙂