Update: All of our Gen7 SmartVPSs now have the option of running PHP 8.2 on any site, at any time.
One-click PHP upgrade instructions are here: https://support.brownrice.com/content/2/283/en/how-do-i-upgrade-my-php-and-mysql-versions.html
Worry free software updates: When you sign up Brownrice WordPress Management we’ll update your WordPress core software, as well as all plugins and themes each month, ensuring that your site is always running the freshest software. This also helps ensure that your site doesn’t get hacked…
Hack Clean Guarantee: We’ll install malware software that alerts us in case hacker code is detected in your site (it won’t be since we’ll be updating your software) so that we can spring to action and get the hacker out of your site, at no additional charge to you.
Performance Bottleneck Analysis: If your WordPress site is running slowly you can have one of our WordPress specialists identify performance bottlenecks so that you can get things fast again.
Monthly Reporting: We’ll also send you a monthly report detailing everything we’ve done.
And all of this is included in the monthly price. That monthly price is $9.95 per month for the first site on a SmartVPS, and $4.95 per month for each additional site on the same SmartVPS.
Just shoot us an email to support@brownrice.com if you’d like to get signed up!
It was a heckuva busy pandemic for us here at Brownrice and we thought you might be interested in some of the things that we’ve been doing behind the scenes to ensure that your web sites, webcams, email, and servers are serving up the things they serve quickly, securely, and reliably!
Data Center Upgrades
During the pandemic we grew at unprecedented speeds and as a result we upgraded nearly all of our infrastructure to keep up with our growth. We upgraded our generators, our battery systems, our solar array, our routers and switches, much of our electrical systems, our monitoring and alerting systems, our upstream internet pipes and our redundancy.
Continue reading 2023 Brownrice Internet NewsAt $1 per email account per month we’ve always lost a lot of money on the email hosting side of our business. In fact most hosting businesses of our size long ago abandoned email hosting altogether because it’s so hard to do well and is such a money loser. And nearly all of the huge providers – Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc – simply do not provide phone support for email. Why? When done right there is simply no other hosting service which requires anywhere close to the amount of support, knowledge, and hardware that email hosting requires.
Here are are few of the things that go into hosting email:
Continue reading Email hosting price to increase on June 1st, 2022
We’re extremely pleased to announce our new GeoSync Cluster hosting. A GeoSync Cluster is a fully automated, three-VPS cluster of servers spread across three data centers, in three different time zones. If one data center goes offline your web site’s traffic will be automatically redirected to the remaining data centers, ensuring no downtime. It is the ultimate hosting platform for those seeking redundancy, reliability, and ease-of-use.
No! If you are a web site user (i.e. WordPress, Joomla, custom code, etc) or developer and your web site is hosted on our GeoSync Cluster service you might actually not notice the difference between it and regular hosting. The service is fully automated (and amazing!) and comes with managed support if issues or questions arise.
Our new 50kW solar parking structure has been live for a few weeks now, and WOW, we’re loving this. For a few hours each day its producing more power than our entire building is using: That includes our data center, our offices, and all lightening and cooling for Brownrice as well as THREE other businesses – one being our sister company TaosNet. Here’s a quick view our our electrical production (white arching curve) verse our usage (green squiggly line) yesterday. We anticipate that this array will produce about 66% of all of Brownrice’s electrical consumption over a year and or goal is to continue to add solar until all of our electrical usage is produced by the sun. Stay tuned, we’ll get there.
First of all, many thanks to the wonderful Let’s Encrypt community for all the help with this, credit where credit is due: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/rhel-centos-6-openssl-client-compatibility-after-dst-root-ca-x3-expiration/161032
That is a lengthy thread, and after a lot of trial and error and considerable head scratching I wanted to share the fix that worked for us, from start to finish. Hopefully it’ll save you some time so you can get back to your wgets and API calls.
Here are the steps that worked for us:
Continue reading Let’s Encrypt expired root (X3) certificate fix on a CentOS 6 serverWhile we host VPS’s, email, and dedicated servers one of the most enjoyable parts of our business is our webcam hosting services. Our clients cameras literally transport us around the world, every day.
And one of our favorite webcam customer webcams is the Marshall Point Lighthouse and Museum which provides incredible views of the Maine waterfront throughout the day.
Fortunately for us, and you, Carolwood Productions, the tech team that purchased and install the Marshall Point webcam wrote up a fantastic how-to what they did, which can be found right here.
Update: All of our Gen7 SmartVPSs now have the option of running PHP 8.0 on any site on your server.
One-click, per-site, upgrade instructions are here are here: https://support.brownrice.com/content/2/283/en/how-do-i-upgrade-my-php-and-mysql-versions.html
Update: All of our Gen7 SmartVPSs now have the option of running PHP 7.4 on any site on your server. Some benchmarks claim that PHP 7.4 is 20% faster than PHP 7.3 and over 60% faster than PHP 5.6.
Instructions are here: https://support.brownrice.com/content/2/283/en/how-do-i-upgrade-my-php-and-mysql-versions.html