₦airaland Forum

Customer confidence is a key issue in the e-commerce business. If people cannot trust your website, they are not likely to input their credit card details and authorize payment, make payment and transfers through your platform. Customer confidence is so paramount that once you loose the confidence of your customers, you greatly loose business as far as ecommerce business is concerned.

Customer confidence is also greatly important to effectively win on the side of increasing conversion rates. According to Symantec's 2016 Internet Security Threat Report, web-based attacks increased by 36 percent from 2014 to 2015, with a fourfold rise in malware attacking Linux - the most widely used operating system on web servers. With new malware, phishing scams, and other cyber-threats appearing on the web every day, customers need to know whether or not your website can be trusted. That is where Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates come in.

SSL: A Visible Sign of Security

SSL is the standard security protocol used by millions of websites to encrypt their online transactions with their customers. By creating a secure link between an Internet browser and a web server, SSL ensures that all information transmitted between the browser and the server remains private.

The SSL certificate is an essential tool for anyone conducting transactions online. Not only does adding an SSL certificate to your e-commerce site help protect your business, but it also reassures your customers that your online store is a safe, secure e-commerce site. An SSL certificate is a clear, visual confirmation that your business has taken the necessary steps to ensure your online store is a trustworthy place to conduct business.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/build-up-customer-confidence-in-your-website-with-ssl.html

How to install a module in SMF

Simple Machine Forum, simply referred to as SMF is one of the most popular forum software. By default, it will enable normal forum functionality but with additional modules installed, you will be able to add more features to your forum and make it more interesting, functional and user friendly

This tutorial will provide a step-by-step guide on how to install additional packages on your SMF website. The will help you add more functionality that you need on your website. So you can get the needed packages and modules and install them on your SMF website

Installing a module in your SMF website will involve three simple steps:

Step 1: Upload the Installation Package in SMF

Step 2: Install New Package in SMF

Step 3: Review the Installed Packages in SMF

Lets look at each of these processes and how to go about them.

Step 1 Upload the Installation Package in SMF

In order to manage the packages you need to login as an administrator on your website. You can use the login form which is placed at the top left corner of your forum.

Log Into Admin Area in SMF


After you login to your admin account you should hover on the Admin button and from the dropdown menu, you then choose the Package Manager.
In order to install a new package open the Download Packages tab. After the tab loads scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Choose File button, which is positioned in the Upload a Package section. Navigate to the folder on your local computer where you have already downloaded the package. After the package is selected press the Upload button on right bottom corner of the page.

Step 2 Install New Package in SMF

After the package is successfully uploaded you should press the [ Install Mod ] link in order to install the package you have just uploaded
On the following page you will see several sections. They will provide more detailed information about the module you are about to install. Read this in full so you can understand what changes are about to be performed on your website. After you check everything press the Install Now button in the lower right corner of the page.
After pressing of the Install Now button you will be redirected to a page with status message for the installation. Your installation will be successful if you have done the right thing and then you can proceed to the next step.

Step 3 Review the Installed Packages in SMF

From the Browse Packages button between the Package Manager and Extracting section you will be able to check the installed packages. On the bottom of the page you will see the modules on your website and perform various configurations on them such as:

Uninstalling the package
List files of the package
Delete the package if you wish. This could be done if ou have found a more functional package better than the one you have installed or if you no longer need that functionality on your SMF forum.

You will also be able to check the version of the package and to see if it is up to date.

4. Modify Packages in SMF

Congratulations you have successfully uploaded and installed your SMF package.

Full article at: How to install a module in SMF https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/758/How-to-install-a-module-in-SMF.html

Google's comments in response to a legal battle against a publisher throws up some controversy over position on Search Engine Optimization. Some think Google could come against SEO. But Google condemn Search Engine Manipulation and not SEO per say.

Lets look further into this scenario.

Does Google now view search engine optimization as bad, as spam, as something you could get banned for?

Certainly not, but that’s the take away you could now get based on a legal fight between Google and a publisher that was banned from its search results. Many of us have gotten a Google penalty including an outright ban. But this legal battle throws up some interesting questions and we will be seeing a possible change in the behavior of Google following this development when a publisher could sue for being delisted from search results. It equally suggests that there could be a suit for being penalized and downgraded.

The case involves e-ventures Worldwide, which had many of its sites banned by Google and is fighting in court for damages as a result. Google challenged the suit applying to the court to have the case dismissed. Google lost the battle to have the case dismissed, so the fight continues.

This week, an article in the Entrepreneur highlighted an interesting part of Google’s legal arguments, that “search engine manipulation” is something the company fights against, might ban anyone for and, importantly, is defined about the way many people might define SEO. The later is quite frightening – that Search Engine Manipulation could be defined about the same way we define SEO. Which suggests that Google could view a good, honest and genuine effort at good SEO, to be some sort of search engine manipulation?

There are three ways you can reset the password of your email account. The mail referred to in this case is the email on your web hosting account. Something like yourname@yourdomain name.com.

Option 1

Reset your email password from client area
1. Visit www.todhost.com
2. Click on the client area icon. This will be found at the top right corner on the Todhost website.
3. Authenticate your membership by entering your email address and password. Note that the email address and password used for authentication is the one you entered when you were creating your account on Todhost and not the one for which you are trying to reset password for.
4. Once logged in, locate the header which reads: Your Active Products/Services. If ou do not find the domain under which you created the email whose password you want to change, then click the “view all” button and all your services will be displayed.
5. Click on the status of the domain to view details pertaining to the domain.
6. Scroll down to the “Quick Shortcuts” section and click on email accounts. You will be automatically directed to the email section in cPanel where all created emails on your account will be displayed.
7. Locate the relevant email and click on the “change password” link. Follow the guideline on strong password to reset our password. Remember that your password has to have at least one capital and special character included and should be at least 10 digits.
8. Save your changes by clicking the change password button at the bottom once you are done.

Read also: How to Create Email Addresses in CPanel

Option 2

Reset your password directly with the webmail link. Note: This works when you know the password and you want to change it.
1. Logon to your webmail link. Something like www.yourdomain.com/webmail
2. Authenticate by entering the email address and password as appropriate.
3. Click on the password link and proceed to change the password. Once you are done, save your changes by clicking on the change password button.

Also read: How to Add Signatures to Your Webmail

Option 3

Reset from your website control panel
1. Logon to yourdomain.com/cpanel
2. Authenticate by entering the requested information – the username and password of your website. This will usually be contained in the “New Account Information” of sent to you on account creation.
3. Once you are authenticated, click on email accounts under the email section in control panel. That will display a list of all the emails you have within your website.
4. Proceed to reset your account password by clicking on password.
5. Once you are done with the new password, click the change password button to save.
Now you know how to change our email account password.

Read full blog at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/757/How-to-reset-your-email-password.html

This tutorial will take you through the basic steps you need to take to optimize the performance of your SMF forum without installing additional services. This will improve your website speed, protect your website from some kind of exploitation and penalties related to load issues on your hosting server and help improve your website ranking on search engines. You will find the suggested steps needed to optimize your website below:

By default, version 2.0.xx of the Simple Machines Forum installation comes with easy to optimize settings. In this tutorial we will review few of the SMF optimizations options.

Follow the best techniques for SMF optimization:

Step 1: SMF Caching

Step 2: Disable SMF Calendar

Step 3: Configure Search Method in SMF

Step 4: Disable Recent Posts on Forum Index

Step 5: Change Avatars Upload Folder


Read full post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/756/How-to-optimize-your-SMF-forum-website.html

Added to our notes. We'll do a post on this soon.

flamming20:
Pls how do I install Facebook and Twitter share button on Simple Machine Forum. THANKS

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a common word and if you have worked within the web development industry or even manage a simple personal website, you will likely have come accross this word. It affects websites and will significantly determine its placement in search engines and visitor traffic. In this post, we shall examine the key friendly factors that search engines love and which if implemented, will affect your website performance.

What is SEO?

First, let us refresh our understanding of what is SEO. SEO is the umbrella term for all the methods you can use to ensure the visibility of your website and its content on search engine results pages (SERPs).

The methods vary from the practices you can achieve behind the scenes on your website (we tend to refer to this as ‘on-page SEO’) to all the promotional ’off-page’ approaches you can use to raise your site’s visibility (link-building, social media marketing).

Also read: 3 Important SEO Considerations Good for E-Commerce Websites

For the purpose of this article, when we talk about visibility, we mean how high up the SERP your website appears for certain search terms in the ‘organic’ results. Organic results refer to those that appear naturally on the page, rather than in the paid-for sections.

Paid search is also a large part of search engine marketing.

Why do you need SEO?

Good SEO through building a strong site architecture and providing clear navigation will help search engines index your site quickly and easily. This will also, more importantly, provide visitors with a good experience of using your site and encourage repeat visits. It’s worth considering that Google is increasingly paying attention to user experience.

When it comes to how much traffic is driven by search engines to your website, the percentage is substantial, and could perhaps be the clearest indicator of the importance of SEO.

In 2014, Conductor suggested 64% of all web traffic comes from organic search, compared to 2% from social, 6% from paid search, 12% direct and 15% from other referral sources.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/seo-what-search-engines-love-and-hate-about-websites.html

Backing up a Simple Machine Website requires two simple steps. You need to backup the files and then to backup the database.

Backing Up the Files

You can download all the files usingyour favourite FTP software. This can be done using Filezilla or WS-FTP-Pro from Ipswich. There are lots of FTP software around and they will all be suitable for the file backkup. A second approach to backing up files will be to use the cPanel tool.

Backing Up Files in cPanel

You can simply select all files and click the "compress" button in cPanel. Choose a name for your file and select the zipped file option. Now proceed to compress the file. This will create a file backup in your public_html folder or in any destination of your choice in your website control panel.

Source: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/755/How-to-backup-a-Simple-Machine-Forum-website.html
Backup the Database

There is a database backup tool in cPanel which makes this process easy. That is the phpmyadmin tool. phpMyAdmin can be found under the database section in your cPanel environment. Click on the phpMyAdmin tool and select your database - the database you want to backup and click the export button to download your prefered database. You can use the phpMyAdmin tool to restore your downloaded database.

Backing Up With SMF Tool

You can backup your website database from within the SMF website dashboard. This wil be after you have successfully logged in with the required information for authentication. This can be done with the “Backup Database” option in the Administration Center of your SMF forum Admin > Forum Maintenance tab.

Make sure you save both structure and data of the database as well, either in two different steps or in one unique save.

It is always recommended to have backups created on weekly or at least monthly bases. Backups age good so that if your website have issues, it can be restored back to the point when it last functioned effectively without error.

In Simple Machine Forum, packages are used to change forum's operation, add features, remove features, and a lot of other possibilites. Essentially, SMF forum functionalities are defined by packages.

At the official website of SMF you can find a lot of packages for your forum. Just visit the SMF Mods page and download the mods you need to run.

You will need to login to the administrator section of your SMF forum to begin to manage your firum website. You can do that from the login form at the top left corner of your forum.

Once you have logged in as an administrator's using the required credentials for authentication, you'll just need to simply click on the Admin button to proceed.

After the admin panel is loaded follow the Package Manager link:

To install a new package just open the Download Packages tab. Then click on the Choose File button at the displayed page, you will then have to navigate to the package you have already downloaded on your local computer and click "Upload". Once it is uploaded you will see a confirmation page.

To install the package, you have to click on the Install Mod link besides the package you have just uploaded and then click on the Install Now button.

Be careful to ensure that you read all the notes provided in the SMF installation package to avoid any issues.

Read full tutorial at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/754/Simple-Machine-Forum-Packages-Tutorial.html

Simple Machines Forum or SMF is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes.
It’s powerful and comes with a custom made template engine which puts you in full control of the lay-out of your message board and with our unique SSI – or Server Side Includes – function you can let your forum and your website interact with each other. Simple Machine Forum is designed to provide you with all the features you need from a bulletin board while having an absolute minimal impact on the resources of the server. SMF is the next generation of forum software.

Once you have installed SMF, it is important that you secure it as it is usually the target of malicious attacks due to the huge traffic it attracts. You will need to restrict bots from your forum. SMF can be installed with one click via QuickInstall and Softaculous.

How to restrict bots from your SMF installation :

1. Email Activation
• Turn on email activation for all new registered members.
• Login to Admin panel » Administration Center » Registration » Settings
• Choose the method of registration for new members.
• This will not allow new members to post unless they activate their account.
2. Code Verification before posting for new members
• Login to Admin panel » Administration Center » Security and Moderation » Anti-Spam
• Change the value for “Post count under which users must pass verification to make a post” value to 10 (or more if you want).
• This will ask the user to pass verification unless they reach the above amount of posts.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/753/How-to-Protect-a-Simple-Machine-Forum-Website-From-Attacks.html

WordPress powers more than a quarter of all websites the world today. For a lot us involved with the WordPress community, this was a fantastic piece of news. Despite the efforts of the large WordPress community, security issues with WordPress websites still remain a major concern and cannot be deemed an issue that has been completely overcome.

WordPress is easy to setup and use. A step by step guide to setup WordPress manually or using an automated script will be completed without knowledge of how to code.

Starting a WordPress blog is now something anyone can do especially using the automated scripts which are available freely with nearly all web hosting packages.

WordPress has come under attacks severely and has a huge target from the growing number of cyber attackers. One security report stated that 78% of successful attacks were against WordPress websites. Another stated that 76% of WordPress users don’t use a backup plugin at all.

The large number of articles on the issue wjich are actually not an indept analysis on the issue is not helping and also worsens the situation as they do not deeply guide readers on what to do to stay safe.

The general rule and recommended best approach is to stay up to date. Sure, it’s great to keep everything up to date. It’s also great to use something other than admin for your username. But those are not the fundamental things to do which keeps you secure. They help, anyway, to keep the attackers at bay.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/wordpress-security-beyond-the-use-of-plugins.html

There is a limited time available for you to renew an expired domain. You can still renew an expired domain but that will be within certain period

Normal renewal can take place within the first 27 to 30 days. This period is known as the grace period. After that period, your domain will move into a redemption period when it will cost you an additional $200 to recover the domain. During the period when your domain is in redemption, you will no longer be able to renew it from our account on Todhost.

The period within which your domain stays in the redemption state is not defined by the registrar. The registrar can decide to renew or not renew a domain that is within the control of the registrar and cannot be influenced by us.

Can You Get a Domain Out of Redemption?

This is an issue many of our customers have tried to do when in difficult condition and want to recover a lost domain. We have seen that attempts to force a domain out of the redemption state to enable normal ordering rather prolong its release. The registrar could find that the name is probably important to you and decide to extend its redemption period in other to get some more money out of your business. Sometimes, when you attempt to backorder a domain in redemption, it extends it by an additional 1 to 2 years before it is released. The way to go is to ensure that your domain does not expire. When it does before your knowledge, simply ensure its renewal within the period of 27 to 30 days grace period.

Once your domain is expired, you will will find it marked as expired in your account client area. You can still be able to renew it as long as it is still within the grace period. In the Todhost client area, you will not see your domain marked as been in the grace or redemption period. It will simply show as active or expired. To determine the state of the domain, you will have to check the expiry date and see if it is within 30 days or more. If it is more than 30 days, then it is likely already in the redemption period. You may contact customer support to sonfirm the true state for you.

Why Choose Todhost!

You will find numerous reasons, those we can enumerate and those you will discover during your engagement with us and in the use of our services. However, we have outlined four basic reasons why you will want to use Todhost web hosting services:

Years of Web Hosting Experience

Since 2009 when we started web hosting business at Todhost, we have sustained our quality of service and worked hard to always improve on service delivery. Our web hosting is loved by customers for its reliability, security and all our web hosting plans are carefully tailored to provide the best service. We offer robust and dedicated disk space for web hosting and reseller hosting services and we have set very high standards for web hosting with many unlimited features including bandwidth, emails, databases and add-on domains

Technical Capacity and Customer Empathy

We have been around for years and have seen it all. You can always rely on our strength and technical capacity to support your online business. Todhost understands the needs of customers and so we stop at nothing to offer additional free services including website backups using R1Soft enterprise backup software, 24/7 support using telephone and our constantly monitored ticketing system.

Trust, Quality and Reliability

Todhost has been providing high quality service with unmatched reliability since 2009. We offer shared web hosting service, reseller web hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated server hosting and domain registration services. Since 2009, Our clients love our web hostingand you will love it too! Todhost's exceptional performance, experience, commitment, and continuous investment in web hosting infrastructure guarantees Superior Quality Web Hosting services in Nigeria!

Free Transfer Services

We provide free transfer services when you move your site to Todhost. We move your files, scripts, emails, databases and domain name with no downtime.

Todhost also provides web hosting services with the following Key Website Hosting Features...

We place ourselves in the position of customers and offer the best service We see customer relationship as a partnership that requires us never to stop giving excellent service. We continue to make that best efforts that would grow with your business and support it every step of the way? We call it the Todhost Advantage, the advantage of working with the best web host in the industry. Since 2009, Todhost has distinguished itself as a versatile and trusted partner for any serious website owner. The following are only a few points of a large list of reasons why you should choose Todhost as your trusted web hosting provider.

Our web hosting technology is great and unrivalled. We are proud of our services, our clients are happy with us and we believe you too will be happy with using our services.

Free with all web hosting packages

- Unlimited/unmetered Bandwidth
- Unlimited email locations and databases
- Flexible, easy to use Control Panel
- 99.999% Uptime Guarantee
- No Contract, cancel at any time. No questions asked - with a 45 Day Money Back Guarante,
- Web Hosting powered by wind energy

Loaded With Each Web Hosting Plan...

- Free Weebly site Builder and Web Building Tools
- Over 400 simple to-utilize Free Website Templates
- Free Website Transfer administrations: Domain Transfer, MySQL Transfer, Script Transfer
- Free scripts and website building apparatuses for CMS, web diaries, e-business thus on can be in a blaze presented for you with a few ticks

Control Panel Features...

- Latest cPanel and constantly updated user Control Panel
- Website Statistics: AWStats, Webalizer, Raw Log Manager, Referrer and Error Logs
- Free instant Shopping Carts, Blogs, Portals, Forums, Counters, and Form-mail
- Password Protected Directories and Custom Error Pages
- Web Based File Manager, Hotlink Protection, IP Deny Manager, Redirect URL

Programming and Database Features

- Unlimited MySQL Databases with phpMyAdmin Access
- Programming Language: CGI, Fast CGI, PHP 5, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python, SSI
- Programming Modules: Curl, CPAN, GD Library, ImageMagick
- System Management: SSH Access and Cron Job Scheduling
- FrontPage Extensions

E-Mailing Features

- Unlimited POP3 Email Accounts with SMTP
- WebMail Access: Horde, SquirrelMail, RoundCube
- Receive your email to your phone by method for IMAP Support
- Prevent spam with SpamAssassin
- Unlimited Autoresponders, E-Mail Forwards, Email Aliases, Mailing Lists

Applications

- Instantly introduce more than 200 open-source scripts with just a tick!
- WordPress Hosting - Host your own unique WordPress blog
- Joomla Hosting and Drupal Hosting - Professional CMS Solutions
- Magento Hosting - Free E-business applications for your own specific store
- Wiki Hosting - Start a Wiki site with MediaWiki
- Presta Shop web facilitating - Instantly present your e-business application and set up your own particular online shop.

Read article from Source: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/752/Can-I-Renew-My-Domain-After-Expiry.html

How to grow your mailing list ethically. Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/index.php

WordPress will by default update itself when a security or minor release is available. For major releases, you have to run the update yourself. Plugins and themes also reuire manual updates. It is important especially for security reasons to keep your WordPress site updated. So also it is necesary to keep up with the latest version of plugins and themes installed on your website. You need to install updates for themes and plugins to get new features and bug fixes.

However, you may have noticed that some of them are updated more frequently than others. A lot of popular plugins are updated almost weekly.

Two Different Update Types

Functional Updates

This type of update adds features and options to the WordPress core. It involves the major core updates. Functional updates are first offered as a beta and then the release version is made available.

Security Updates

This update type contains security or minor fixes that are set out to repair a vulnerability or bug in the WordPress core.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/

Changing a WordPress theme is a common and usual thing. If you use a free WordPress theme, then changing your theme is something you will most likely do quite often.

Website managers are concerned about the effects of changing and will often ask two questions:
• Will it affect my site SEO?
• Will it affect my site’s traffic?

The answer will be dependent on the situation. But we will attempt an answer from a more general perspective with regards to WordPress, SEO, and traffic.

Before we proceed, you need to understand some fundamental underpinnings:

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/seo-effects-of-changing-a-wordpress-theme.html

WordPress websites have very recently experienced an infection without any outdated plugin or known vulnerability. In this, it is a porn spam infection. Upon investigation, it's been discovered that that the common denominator across these WordPress sites was the plugin WP Mobile Detector that had a 0-day arbitrary file upload vulnerability disclosed on May 31st by the Plugin Vulnerabilities team. The plugin has since been removed from the WordPress repository. A patch to fix this vulnerability is now available.

How This Vulnerability is Exploited

The vulnerability is quite easy to exploit and requires the attacker to simply send a request to resize.php or timthumb.php (yes, timthumb, in this case it just includes resize.php), inside the plugin directory with the backdoor URL.

This WordPress vulnerability was publicly disclosed on May 31st, however Sucuri said this vulnerability had been on since May 27 according to reports from its logs.

Read full post on author's website: https://www.todhost.com/blog/wordpress-security-wp-mobile-detector-vulnerability-fixed.html

Every website owner needs to draw up a strategy to deal with attacks such as Cross-Site Scripting, Local File Inclusion and SQL Injection which all start with transmission of hostile commands via the HTTP Request. One challenge in dealing this kind of issue is how to separate legitimate requests from those that are hostile or malicious. If the website is hosted on an Apache server, there is a powerful mechanism available to help mitigating attacks: that is the Apache .htaccess file. When properly configured, the .htaccess file on a server with mod_rewrite enabled can provide a robust defense against many HTTP Request attacks. The .htaccess file is very powerful; therefore is recommended that there bbe a full backup of your website before you start editing your .htaccess […]

Read more: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-secure-your-website-from-attacks-using-the-htaccess-file.html

It is a common practice to set your website to maintenance mode when updating major sections of the website such as trying to fix a faulty code or running an updated version of a plugin.

Visitors to your website can be turned off in such cases when you will have to set your website to the maintenance. If you are updating your live and hosted website then users are more likely to return if they know what is happening.
What is Maintenance Mode?

Generally, the phrase, maintenance Mode, is a term that had been used when you need to take your regular site offline to perform updates. The updates can be on your software of content. So for example, when WordPress needs to update itself, a plugin or a theme it has a built-in maintenance mode it uses to display a message to visitors that your site is down. Or say you have redesigned your site and you need a few hours to implement the new design. In this case you would use a maintenance mode plugin to put you site into maintenance mode so you can access the site to make your updates but your visitors would get a custom message about why it’s down and when it will be up again.

Also read: 16 Mistakes That Turn People Away From Your Website
WordPress has two versions of a Maintenance Mode.

WordPress Built-In maintenance mode – designed to do core, plugins and themes updates. When WordPress puts itself into Maintenance Mode to perform updates you can not access both the front end or the admin back-end. WordPress returns a default message that says: “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” This message can be customized. The second is the plugin maintenance mode - which involves using a custom plugin to set your website to maintenance mode.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-not-to-hurt-your-visitors-when-using-the-wordpress-maintenance-mode.html

If it is enabled, then that should be ok.

Barywhyte:
I said at some point. I enabled it afterward. But actually I don't know. What implications are you talking about?

The web has changed significantly. Loading flash has become obsolete and does not work for search engine ranking. A smarter way to use animations is to use an animated image. This can be achieved in Photoshop and in this article, we will look at how to get this done.
What is a GIF

There is the saying that iIf a picture is worth a thousand words, a GIF is worth 10,000’.

But what exactly is GIF? GIF stand for Graphics Interchange Format, and it was born before the popular explosion of video. In fact, the GIF is probably the lead to the development of Web 2.0 video. The GIF tells a story more than a static image ever could – it is literally a series of timed images patched together, invented by photographer Eduard Muybridge in 1878. It was eventually developed for the web in 1987 by CompuServe.

As internet speeds increased, streaming became popular with dominance of channels like YouTube. GIFs got cool again. They were recycled and reborn in new ways, as users realised the advantage of easy-to-use content over long-form videos.

They were also perfect for getting your point across – or to explain your feelings in a fun, ironic way.

Read full article at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-create-an-animated-gif-image.html

Todhost is a Nigerian web hosting company that is committed to continuous improvement and drives one of the best quality web hosting service in Nigeria. Todhost prioritizes customer service, convenience and makes the ordering and activation process simplified.

Get flexible web hosting plans that fits every budget, Todhost is one of Nigeria's most reliable web hosting companies offering quality web hosting services and supporting small, medium scale and large businesses in Nigeria and beyond. Our focus is on quality service delivery and we provide 24/7 customer help via telephone and client support portal. We also have over 1000 articles in knowledgebase tutorials to guide you on every key area of using our web hosting services. Our knowledgebase tutorials cover cpanel articles, email articles, domain tutorials and web design tools amongst others. In addition, we have a blog that highlights the latest happenings in the industry and provide solutions to numerous and emerging problems.

You will find below, details about our company and why we can be a dependable web hosting ally to you and your business.
Why Choose Todhost!

You will find numerous reasons, those we can enumerate and those you will discover during your engagement with us and in the use of our services. However, we have outlined four basic reasons why you will want to use Todhost web hosting services:

Years of Web Hosting Experience

Since 2009 when we started web hosting business at Todhost, we have sustained our quality of service and worked hard to always improve on service delivery. Our web hosting is loved by customers for its reliability, security and all our web hosting plans are carefully tailored to provide the best service. We offer robust and dedicated disk space for web hosting and reseller hosting services and we have set very high standards for web hosting with many unlimited features including bandwidth, emails, databases and add-on domains

Technical Capacity and Customer Empathy

We have been around for years and have seen it all. You can always rely on our strength and technical capacity to support your online business. Todhost understands the needs of customers and so we stop at nothing to offer additional free services including website backups using R1Soft enterprise backup software, 24/7 support using telephone and our constantly monitored ticketing system.

Blogging is common with WordPress. But can also be done with Joomla. This post will show you how you can makke a blog out of your Joomla website.

Joomla! is a Content Management System based on PHP 5.3+ and MySQL or PostgreSQL database.

There are three steps to it:

1. Install Joomla

2. Configure Joomla to function as a blog

3. Secure your Joomla webbsite.
Joomla Installation Guide

We have ealier detailed the steps involved in manually installing Joomla. Let's briefly look at the simple steps to install Joomla manually:

Login to your Todhost client area.
Access your website cPanel area using the shortcutmethod. This not require you to enter username and pasword.
Scroll down to the software section of our cPanel environment.
Click on QuickInstall or Softaculous.
Select Joomla from the list and click on "Install Joomla".
Enter the required information: select the domain name where you want the installation to be done, enter the installation path if you want it to be installed in a folder, enter the admin email, admin username and the site name.
Click the install button to proceed with automatic installation.

Joomla will now automatically instally and send the login details to the email you have provided during installation.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-create-a-blog-with-a-joomla-website.html

The following checklist and advice against cyber crime had been created out of a collection of eperiences and epert advice. It provides a good measure of what needs to be done to fight cyber crime and some proactive measures needed to stay protected. Our checklist is based on best practices from the 2016 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR).

Types of Cyber Crimes
Every crime committed over the Internet it is referred to as a cyber crime. There are several forms these crime take. Below are a list of the most common:

Hacking: This is a type of crime wherein a person’s computer is broken into so that his personal or sensitive information can be accessed. This is different from ethical hacking, which many organizations use to check their Internet security protection. In hacking, the criminal uses a variety of software to enter a person’s computer and the person may not be aware that his computer is being accessed from a remote location.

Theft: This involves the violation of copyrights and downloading of music, movies, games and software. There are even peer sharing websites which encourage software piracy and many of these websites are now being targeted by the FBI. Today, the justice system is addressing this cyber crime and there are laws that prevent people from illegal downloading.

Cyber Stalking: This is a kind of online harassment wherein the victim is subjected to a barrage of online messages and emails. Typically, these stalkers know their victims and instead of resorting to offline stalking, they use the Internet to stalk. Sometimes, they combine offline stalking along with cyber stalking to make the victims’ lives more miserable.

Identity Theft: In this cyber crime, a criminal accesses data about a person’s bank account, credit cards, Social Security, debit card and other sensitive information to siphon money or to buy things online in the victim’s name.

Malicious Software: These involve the use of Internet-based software or programs to gain access to a system to steal sensitive information or data or causing damage to software present in the system.

Child soliciting and Abuse: In this case, criminals solicit minors via chat rooms for the purpose of child pornography.

Read full blog at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-checklist-against-cybercrime.html

The Web hosts a large set of applications all aimed at enhancing the productivity of userss such as Google Docs, calculators, email, storage, maps, weather and news — everything that is needed daily by the users. Application attacks are usually the hardest to defend. The vulnerabilities encountered within the application layer often rely on complex user input scenarios that are hard to define with an intrusion detection signature. This layer is also the most accessible and the most exposed to the outside world. For the application to function, it must be accessible over Port 80 (HTTP) or Port 443 (HTTPS).

In 2014, SQL injections, a type of application attack, were responsible for 8.1 percent of all data breaches. That makes it the third most used type of attack, behind malware and distributed denial-of-service attacks. There are also other common application attacks such as security misconfiguration, using components with known vulnerabilities and cross-site scripting. Attackers are able to manipulate application input and obtain confidential data without being detected by network defense systems.

Most vulnerabilities found in Web applications are unknown to security defense systems; these are called zero-day vulnerabilities. This is because these vulnerabilities are specific to each application and have never been known before. A skilled attacker can easily find these vulnerabilities and exploit the issue without being detected.

The best defense against these attacks is to develop secure applications. Developers must be aware of how application attacks work and build software defenses right into their applications.

Educating and informing developers about application vulnerabilities is the goal of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). The organization has put together a list of the 10 most common application attacks. This list is renewed every three years, with the latest refresh in 2013.

The IBM Security Ethical Hacking Team shares this goal. With this in mind. So let’s take some brief look at the 10 most common application attacks.

To read the full blog post, visit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-prevent-the-most-common-application-attacks-against-websites.html

SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is a standard technology for establishing an encrypted connection between a web server (host) and a web browser (client). Using an SSL secured connection between the two makes sure that all the data passed between them remain private and intrinsic. SSL is an industry standard and is used by websites to protect their online transactions with their customers. If you have ever visited a website using the https:// in the address bar you were creating a secure connection via SSL.

Since the announcement by Google that it was including the https protocol as a ranking factor, webmasters have scrambled to get SSL for their sites in other to gain the anticipated Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) advantages.

Whatever you think about Google’s approach and position on SSL, implementing HTTPS on a website do offer some benefits and we can take look at a few of them.

The security of the internet is evolving continually and no one can ignore the challenges of this continual evolution. It is important to keep up with cyber security environment and not write off security challenges especially internet fraud as something that only happens to e-commerce websites or something that will not come near a website that is not about credit cards or money.

In a December 2014 research by Tele Sign and RSA, just 11% of US companies said they hadn’t experienced any fraudulent incidents on their ecommerce sites in the past 12 months. Source Cyber security study conducted by J Gold and Associates , Feb 2 , 2015.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/guard-your-website-reputation-stay-protected-with-ssl.html

abujaticket:
pls i need d teacher

Have you tried the steps outlined in the tutorial and still could not do it?

WordPress is a great and free publishing platform that can be used to create bogns and its use had been etented to corporate websites and applications like social networking, real estate management and a lot of other uses. WordPress is easy to use, and a fast and flexible script. It comes with some good features whichmakes user experience pleasant. With WordPress you can easily:

Publish and edit posts;
Sort articles in categories
Search within your content
Manage users' access
Change your website themes and more.

For you to automatically create your WordPress blog using the 1-click install tool in cPanel, this tutorial will guide you effectively on what you need to do to get your blog running.Let us get started with the required steps:

Tools needed to start a Self hosted WordPress Blog

Domain name
Web hosting account
Blogging software

Read full story at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-step-by-step-guide-on-how-to-create-a-wordpress-blog.html

Barywhyte:
Yea your right bro! It wasn't from there Server, after several googling, the misconfiguration was in settings.php file and I had 2 disable .htaccess file at some point too. The site is online now and things are working! Thnks bro.


Note: the site is www.barywhyte.com.ng not the other one. Sorry about that

Disabling the .htaccess file could have security implications.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is ever changing and have proved to be far more beneficial than advertising and other online marketing methods. With Google rolling out more frequent and complex updates, SEO will significantly shape the future of many companies. Google is constantly pursuing a better search experience. Focusing more on user experiences. The result had been the changes to how they index and rank pages, resulting in changes to SEO.

It is likely that in 2016 and beyond, new tips and SEO practices will start emerging. In this post, we shall look at some of the emerging SEO Trends for 2016 and beyond.

Before we proceed to examine the upcoming SEO trends for 2016 and beyond, let us delve briefly into some background understanding of SEO.
What is SEO

We will adopt the definition of Rand Fishkin which serves our purpose quite aptly. He defined Search engine optimization (SEO) as "the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of the traffic that you earn through the organic results in search engines".
This definition underscores three components: Quality of traffic, quantity of traffic and organic results.
• Quality of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they're coming to your site because Google search engine results presents you as a resource for web hosting when you are actually only involved on website hosting and not providing any learning resources, you will find that you get the traffic but they won’t be quality traffic. It is better to attract traffic who are interested in products that you offer.
• Quantity of traffic. Having the right interests click your link from the search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Organic results. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don't have to pay for. These come from several sources including links and referrals.

Read full blog at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/

Keeping a healthy back for your website is a golden rule. You cannot run a website, especially a content management system, CMS. without maintaining a healthy backup. The emphasis on backup is not necessarily because something bad is sure to happen. It is a safeguard, a preventive measure to ensure that something happens and you are unable to get an effective repair, there should be a backup to fall back on. Even though it is a week old, at least, you are not made to start all over.

You will find a lot of WordPress plugins in the WordPress plugin directory but not all of them are so effective to do a complete backup for your website. If fact, you will discover that only very few can effectively deliver a complete backup for a website. A complete backup will involve taking backup of plugin, themes, backup wp-content folder. Moreover, it’s always recommended to automatically backup WordPress to make sure; you have most recent version of backup available for your website or blog.
Why backing up your WordPress blog is important

If you rely on your web hosting company and fail to maintain a backup, then you will be making a mistake. We recommend that you always maintain a healthy backup and here are the reasons why:

Hackers can bring down your website

Hacking is not a new word for anyone who is knowledgeable about the internet. It is common to hear of hackers. Most hackers will target sensitive information like credit cards while most hackers simply want to prove their skill and ability to hack. The majority of hack er attackson small, simple and small business websites are just to cause trouble. The only guarantee to be sure you can recover or fix your hacked WordPress website and protect your website from further security hacks is if you have a healthy backup available. For as long as your website on online, there are chances that it can be attacked and compromised. The safe way to go and be safe is to maintain a backup.

Read more blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/