We recently received an email from a client inquiring about a suspicious letter from a company called Domain Listings LLC that they received in the mail.
A closer look at this letter (near the center) reveals that it is a “solicitation” and “not a bill.”
We recently sent out a domain name renewal reminder to a client who replied that they had already renewed.
Suspecting a game was afoot, we requested a copy of the letter they received. Upon receipt it was apparent they had fallen for a common internet scam.
The letter they received was from a company called iDNS or Internet Domain Name Service. Sounds legitimate and the letter (as seen in this article) looks professional and legitimate. A closer look at the fine print you’ll notice that it is just a trick to get you to switch your domain registrar to them. On top of that, they are charging three times (3x) what we and most registrars charge for annual domain name registrations and renewals.
So you’ve made the wise investment of purchasing a secure socket layer (SSL) certificate for your WordPress powered website. Great! Now how do you enforce https on all of your website pages, images and other resources? This article will show you how to do just that.
Testing to see if the SSL certificate is correctly installed on your website is straightforward and simple. Just visit your website replacing the “http” with “https” which should reveal the green lock icon followed by the word “Secure” next to it within the address bar (if using Google Chrome as your website browser). If you don’t see the green lock followed by the word “Secure” you will need to contact your website hosting provider to get your SSL Certificate installed or properly configured on your website domain.
If you want to take advantage of your SSL certificate you’ll need to update the URLs on your WordPress website. All of your URLs! We’ll run through these simple steps within this article.
As you may be aware, Google has begun enforcing their ‘secure by default‘ initiative. This means that they have begun marking all non-HTTPS websites, meaning websites without a secure socket layer (SSL) certificate installed, as ‘Not Secure‘ as of July 2018.
This ‘Not Secure‘ warning, visible within the address bar of Google Chrome, may scare off less technology savvy visitors. More importantly, not having an SSL installed on your website may negatively impact your website’s search ranking. It is rumored that Google may now be using the existence of an SSL certificate as a search engine ranking metric.
With this knowledge, our Naples based website design, maintenance and hosting firm has decided to provide free secure socket layer (SSL) certificates to all of our existing and future clients who have a hosting and maintenance account with us.
Manny Rodrigues, CEO @ENDURTECH
It is a frequently suggested WordPress security tip to update your default WordPress database table prefixes. However, upon doing so you now appear to have lost access to your WordPress Dashboard backend.
Attempts to login to your WordPress website Dashboard backend simply results in a redirect to your homepage with a very limited WordPress Admin bar. Furthermore, any attempts to directly access your Dashboard backend via the “wp-admin” url presents you with the following error message:
Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page.
The issue is that your WordPress website database has the previous database table prefix stored within one or more of its table records. You will have to manually update these in order to restore your Dashboard admin access. Not a big deal, using your favorite database tool (we recommend phpMyAdmin) we will show you how to quickly fix this in this article.
We were contracted to perform a few updates on an outdated website which was hosted through GoDaddy. Upon attempting to perform the updates we received the dreaded 500 Internal Server Error. In short, the theme we were attempting to update failed to do so for one reason or another.
Making matters worse, the website was now locked in WordPress maintenance mode.
The WordPress Security Team just announced a security and maintenance release for all versions of WordPress since 3.7
WordPress versions 4.9.4 and earlier were affected by three recently discovered security issues. In addition, twenty-five other bugs were fixed in this WordPress 4.9.5 release.
We were recently contracted by a new client to “fix their website” which suddenly went offline.
Our analysis revealed that they had an improperly configured Apache .htaccess file. This can happen if the hosting company migrates a website or updates the .htaccess file, which they do from time to time, but without testing for compatibility. This can also happen for a number of other reasons but you aren’t here for those.
The client authorized us access to their BlueHost hosting account so that we could resolve the issue for them. It was at that time that we discovered that their .htaccess file was not visible from within the File Manager component window under their cPanel.
Usually one would just check the box to “show hidden files” under the options menu which would reveal the .htaccess file. In this case there was no such option.
It was then that we discovered a work around which would force the reveal of any hidden files from within the File Manager component window. We will share this tip with you below.
