We’re doing everything we can to try and change that impression by making managing your website and email easy, painless, and (hopefully) fun! With our completely custom designed client centre, our easy to use web applications installer (for installing apps like WordPress in just a few clicks) and our jam-packed knowledgebase full of up-to-date and relevant information, we’re doing everything we can to make web hosting as painless as possible. Adding INTERAC Online as a payment option to ensure you can pay with as many online user-friendly and instant payment options as possible is just one more step in the right direction.

All of our packages allow you to take advantage of INTERAC Online payment, so if you’re a Canadian looking for web hosting, then you’ve come to the right place! Our existing customers can also take advantage; simply login to the client centre to complete payment on any future invoices manually. You will be presented with the INTERAC Online payment option right alongside the usual payment options like PayPal, VISA, Mastercard and American Express.

Have any questions? How about suggestions? (We love those!) Send them on over by commenting below or sending us a quick email. The more ideas you have about how to improve our services, the better we get.

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Carbon Credits

Let’s start with carbon credits. This is what I consider one of the more frustrating reasoning to call a company green. While it’s true that buying carbon credits does go to fund green initiatives, such as erecting wind turbines and solar arrays (or generating green energy with them), it hardly makes a company environmentally friendly in any way. The company can continue to waste energy, paper, and pollute its environment as much as it wants, as long as it continues to pay for carbon credits that offset its likely massive fossil fuel powered electricity usage. In the short term, this is an effective strategy, since more funding for the growing number of green initiatives means more green energy output to hopefully take over from fossil fuel generated energy. From a long-term perspective, if the purchase of carbon credits is supported in perpetuity, there will always be companies that are continuing to pollute the environment and we (as a society) will never overcome that thanks to these ‘dirty’ tricks we put in place to avoid real green business practices. At the very least, this should not be a valid reasoning to brand or market a company as a green company — the companies that pursue this route are not green.

Other Ridiculous Reasoning

I stumbled across a website the other day that included the use of an old version of RedHat as a reason for their green hosting solution. They said that because they’re using Redhat 5.2, they are a green web hosting provider. Firstly let me put it out there that, yes, there have been great improvements in operating system technology that reduces unnecessary power consumption and that on a massive scale these miniscule improvements are going to add up to some power savings. But let’s be honest here, the real benefit of this is to save money at the datacentre level. If the company were truly committed to green energy to the extent that they are marketing it, they would switch their power source to a green power source like wind, hydro, or solar. They would not be simply reducing their non-renewable energy source consumption by tiny little amounts at a time while stating how green they are all over their website.

How They Should be Doing it

The attempts at green hosting solutions above are most certainly good first steps, but none of them are what I would consider a true green hosting provider. I believe the extent to which these companies are advertising their green initiatives are blown way out of proportion compared to their actual involvement in green hosting. In the case of many of these providers, they have changed the entire colour scheme of their site to green and inserted tidbits about how green they are all over the place; header images, footer text, sidebars, etc. To the casual observer they are lying about their commitment by making it appear that they are actually green. They make it seem as if they are sourcing energy from a renewable power company, using little-to-no paper, have energy efficient lighting, recycle water, and of course investing in hardware and software that is energy efficient and non pollutant to the environment upon disposal (among other great tactics). However, a more curious viewer will find their green commitment somewhere on their website (not often front-and-centre) and realize they aren’t actually doing very much at all to be a green company. I highly doubt many people actually look further than the green colour themed homepage with “Green Hosting” written everywhere.

Instead, I believe these companies should advertise their green commitment with the same amount of force as they’ve put in to actually being a green company. If they’ve bought energy efficient hardware and software, then great! Advertise it on your servers page perhaps with a small green box. If you’ve purchased green credits, that’s also good for now; put a “We buy green credits” link in bright green at the top of your homepage. Don’t use your truthfully tiny involvement in the green energy movement to call your entire company and all your hosting service green: in doing so, you’re lying to your customers.

What impact do we have on the environment?

While we are not a 100% green provider, we also don’t advertise anywhere that we are. We don’t have a massive amount of income to be able to afford the purchase of carbon credits and since we don’t run our own datacentres, we can’t guarantee renewable energy sources for our servers. That said, here is what we are doing:

1. We make use of virtualized environments running on the very latest Intel power managed, low voltage, multi-core CPUs
2. We keep our operating systems at the very latest kernel releases to ensure they take advantage of the power savings available in current generation CPUs
3. We make absolutely sure to keep our virtual machines within datacentres that support great power efficiency. Sure the datacentres save money by doing this, but we choose to use them, after researching dozens of providers, for their lower environmental impact.
4. Our primary datacentre provider contributes to reforestation projects at levels exceeding the overall draw of their infrastructure by at least 10 percent. Although similar to purchasing green credits, this has a considerably more specific goal in-mind: we like it!
5. We use only part-time offices so there is no off-hours power usage.
6. We use energy efficient laptops for all of our monitoring machines (rather than power hungry desktops).
7. We have requested emailed documents wherever paper would normally be required. For those items that must be printed and mailed, we scan them in, shred, and recycle the paper copies.

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Zero Day Vulnerability in Many WordPress Themes

Luckily, and more importantly he managed to pinpoint the issue and identify a very new vulnerability in many WordPress installations. It is estimated that this issue could affect hundreds of thousands of WordPress installs.

Unfortunately, because this TimThumb library is included in themes and plugins and not in the core WordPress installation, it is not easily patched. We are unable to mass-patch this issue using our automated application installer because of this very problem.

Although premium theme creators will no doubt release updates to their themes that fix this issue, it may take some time for these updates to come out. It is also likely that free themes or outdated plugins may never get an update to this problem. As such, it is a very good idea to check your site and look for this vulnerability and fix it as soon as possible.

Note: if you currently have our Support+ web hosting package, this has already been patched if you had this issue.

So how do I know if I’m at risk?

Almost everyone using the TimThumb library that downloaded it before August 1, 2011 is likely at risk. If you are not sure if you are using TimThumb, the easiest way to check is to look through your theme folders for a file called timthumb.php or thumb.php. This can be done using an FTP program or the file browser in your Plesk Control Panel.

This file may also be called thumb.php. It could be in any theme folder, not just necessarily your active theme. Also, it’s possible it is in your plugins folders as well so be sure to look thoroughly.

Oh great, it’s there. Now what?

The quickest way to fix this issue is by editing your timthumb.php or thumb.php files and finding the following lines:

$allowedSites = array (
‘flickr.com’,
‘picasa.com’,
‘blogger.com’,
‘wordpress.com’,
‘img.youtube.com’,
‘upload.wikimedia.org’,
);

The issue with this vulnerability is due to the way the script handles these remote sites being allowed to inject images. The issue can be fixed by simply removing the websites displayed in the $allowedSites array. After you remove them it should look like this:

$allowedSites = array (
);

An empty array.

Update:

Fortunately, because of the quick find by Mark Maunder, the team at TimThumb already has a patch in place. All you need to do is download the following file and replace your existing file with it:

Download: http://timthumb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/timthumb.php

If your local file is called thumb.php, simply rename the new file to thumb.php before uploading.

—

That’s all there is to it. If this process is beyond you, or you just want to make sure that you fixed the issue completely feel free to open a support ticket through our client admin area, or find us on twitter @websavers.

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The datacentre and hosting industries have seen a huge green push over the last several years and it is interesting to see a client with the purchasing power of the Canadian Government make an announcement like this.

With space being such an issue in data centers, it is easy to sacrifice energy efficiency with space efficiency. Although much attention has been put on making data center infrastructure and design more energy efficient, it’s nice to see a push to get the servers in those data centers more efficient as well.

Lydia Aouani of Natural Resources Canada said “Soon, any server purchased by our government will be Energy Star (certified).” She also noted that “If all data centers were using state of the art energy efficiency technologies, by 2011 we would go back to our electricity consumption levels of the year 2000,”

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