Funio

What do a group of devoted physicians from New Brunswick, Funio and the promotion of a healthy lifestyle have in common? At first glance, nothing. Nonetheless, Funio is proud to support the grand Défi Pierre Lavoie by sponsoring the Prescription : Action team! This endorsement helps Canadian kids make healthier choices in their everyday lives and build healthy habits that will stay with them for a lifetime. Now, I know what you might be thinking: “How ironic is it that a bunch of geeks, that spend more hours in front of a computer screen than anyone else, are promoting healthy lifestyle”? Please, let us explain ourselves!

The Funio staff, for the most part accomplished geeks and passionate about technologies, keep track of the latests developments in web hosting. More quickly than others, they inform themselves through their passions and interests what could make the Funio experience even more unique.

In the past few weeks, Jean-François Chevrette, our Tech Lead, has been working on reinforcing the security of your web services. Whether it be the recent addition of the CageFS module, the update of the ModSecurity application or the server kernels, there are numerous reasons why Jean-François could take some of his time to share with us the reasons behind these recent updates offered to our Funio community.

Within the Funio community, many customers are web development specialists. In the ideal programmer’s toolbox, SSH and Git are often essential. Good news, since our Developer’s Heaven hosting plan is now enhanced by these two tools. Better yet, the hosting plan stays at the same price!

A Well Established Plan

The Developer’s Heaven hosting plan is the optimal solution for web development specialists, providing a vast support of programming languages (PHP, Perl, ASP, JSP, and more). This plan is already enjoyed by many members of the Funio community, and to add on to the offer is our own enjoyment.

A Renewed Offer

From now on, you can gain an SSH access as well as the ideal development tool: Git. Therefore, you will be able to connect your GitHub or BitBucket account to your Funio account, and you would then be able to create [...] Continue Reading.

In a continuous effort to improve server security, we are gradually deploying a CloudLinux module (our operating system) called CageFS. This module allows us to further isolate hosting accounts one from another, in so preventing access to information of an account hosted on our servers through another malevolent account.

Over the years we have setup multiple security measures on our servers to perform similar tasks that CageFS performs. By adding and using CageFS we are replacing certain of these security measures and standardizing our approach, which allows us to be more efficient when it comes to our security prevention methods.

CageFS Security Aspects

Primarily, CageFS allows us to limit the impact that a malicious account might have on our servers. Here are some of this module’s aspects:

• It prevents the access to files/directories that have misconfigured permissions on other accounts
• It allows to hide [...] Continue Reading.

As aforementioned on our maintenance notifications page, we are presently conducting an update to the kernel of all our Panelbox servers.

For those who are less familiar with the term “kernel”, it is a fundamental part of the operating system that manages server resources and allows the different components, either software or hardware, to communicate between each other.

The kernel udpate is primordial for us for the following reasons:

• It ensures optimal security. An updated kernel ensures that security issues that have been discovered in previous versions are resolved.
• It enables us the use of new functionalities. In our case, this update allows us to fully use the capacities of the latest version of CloudLinux which is used on all our servers.
• It ensures optimal server efficiency. An updated kernel also allows us to provide you with greater server stability and oftentimes better [...] Continue Reading.

We are currently looking for companies or consultants that would have the skills to help certain of our customers in the migration of their PHP4 websites/applications to PHP5. If  you are a Funio services customer and that you are interested in suggesting your services as an expert in this matter, please leave your coordinates in this article’s comments.

Indeed, Funio has already stopped supporting PHP4 on most of its infrastructures approximately a year ago. However, we still have a part of our old infrastructure that is still hosting a number of customers that still use this older technology. In an effort to continue offering stable and efficient services, Funio is in the process of migrating these customers to newer servers, which also implies that PHP4 will no longer be supported for these customers in the next few weeks.

We are very conscious that these [...] Continue Reading.

For several months now, we have been using a security module called ModSecurity, which allows us to better protect your sites by filtering Web requests through predefined rulesets. Today, we are deploying a major update on this system and activating new complementary features to improve its efficiency and performance.

In a nutshell, ModSecurity allows us:

• the optimization of performances by controlling web requests that abuse resources on our servers
• a more efficient and centralized control over the protection of your sites

Optimized Functionnalities

Here are the main ModSecurity functions that will be optimized.

Dynamic Banned IP Address List

Our system recuperates lists of known IP addresses that attempt to send spam or that pollute forums and blogs. We recuperate these lists from valid sources that combat spam and from addresses we compile ourselves.

The IP addresses that are blocked by our system [...] Continue Reading.

Following our recent update of the One-Click application scripts included on our Panelbox hosting platform, we noticed that certain customers are looking for a way to take advantage of its automated update system. Indeed, one of the features that lead us to change our installation scripts provider to Softaculous, was that we can now provide a reliable and easy-to-use update feature. In fact, as soon as a new software update is made available, you can make an upgrade in a single click.

Importing Software

Although we have imported all installations that had been made by the previous version of One-Click (Fantastico) into the new version (Softaculous), manual installations could not be imported automatically. This means that if you had manually installed Magento, for example, it would not be listed in the One-Click software list, or upgrade list. However, you can now integrate it to [...] Continue Reading.

You probably know that we offer a unique email marketing solution by partnering with CakeMail. In order to contineue being efficient and to offer you more, we have updated the Funio CakeMail platform. If you are a current user, you will immediately notice a new welcome page, and maybe some of the additional features that have taken place. What you will probably notice the most, is that this happened seamlessly.

By going from version 3.4 to 3.5, our customers can take advantage of a more complete solution. In a nutshell, here are the important updates:

• a new welcome tab and some additional goodies to welcome users
• a completely redesigned campaign report page
• a way to disable the advanced editing mode in the campaign editor (HTML and WYSIWYG) right from the template source code
• a more secure Single Sign-On (that’s how you connect to CakeMail [...] Continue Reading.

As you surely know, the “Customer Hub” is an interface unique to Funio and the ideal tool to contact our support department, as well as manage your account and your products. Recently, new products have been added to our array of services (such as SSL Certificates and Funio CakeMail, our email marketing solution), but until now these products were not available for customers that did not own a Funio hosting plan. Not anymore!

If you wish to exploit your Web presence to its maximum, you can now do so with Funio! Starting now, our customers can obtain related products (SSL, Funio CakeMail, SpamShield) without first having a hosting plan. This is particularly interesting for our reseller customers that wish to provide complementary services to their own customers, but also for consultants or web developers that would like to offer more to their customer [...] Continue Reading.