Components of a Domain Name

A domain name typically consists of two primary parts:

1. Second-Level Domain (SLD): This is the unique identifier or the main part of the domain name. In “example.com,” “example” is the second-level domain.
2. Top-Level Domain (TLD): This follows the second-level domain and is the suffix such as “.com,” “.org,” or “.net.” There are also country-specific TLDs like “.uk” or “.ca” and newer, specialized TLDs like “.tech” or “.shop.”

The combination of these two elements creates a complete domain name, such as “example.com.”

Why Are Website Domains Important?

Domains play a critical role in establishing an online presence, serving as the gateway for users to find and interact with your website. Here are several reasons why they are crucial for web design, web hosting, and domain registration:

1. Professionalism and Credibility

A custom domain name lends professionalism and credibility to your website. For businesses and organizations, having a branded domain (e.g., “yourbusiness.com”) is vital for fostering trust among visitors. Compare this to a free subdomain like “yourbusiness.wordpress.com,” which may seem less polished and professional.

2. Brand Identity

Your domain name is a vital aspect of your brand’s identity. It’s often the first impression users have of your business or website, so choosing a memorable and relevant name is essential. A good domain name can make your website stand out and help reinforce your brand’s message.

How Domains Work in Website Hosting

To understand how domains relate to hosting, it helps to visualize the internet as a giant interconnected network. Websites are hosted on servers, which are powerful computers that store and deliver your site’s content (e.g., text, images, videos) to visitors. Here’s how domains fit into the equation:

1. Domain Name System (DNS): When you type a domain name into your browser, the DNS translates it into an IP address. IP addresses are numerical identifiers (e.g., “192.168.1.1”) that point to the server where your website is hosted.
2. Hosting Provider: A hosting provider is a service that stores your website’s data and makes it accessible online. To link your domain name to your hosting provider, you configure your DNS settings to point to the hosting provider’s server.
3. Seamless User Experience: Without a domain name, users would need to type the server’s IP address to access your website, which is cumbersome and impractical. Domains simplify this process, providing a user-friendly way to access web content.

Registering a Domain Name

Registering a domain name involves several steps:

1. Choose a Name: Select a domain name that reflects your brand, is easy to spell, and aligns with your website’s purpose. Ideally, keep it short and avoid using hyphens or numbers that could confuse users.
2. Check Availability: Use a domain registrar’s search tool to see if your desired domain name is available. If it’s already taken, you may need to get creative or consider alternative TLDs.
3. Purchase and Register: Once you’ve found an available domain name, purchase it through a registrar such as GoDaddy, Namecheap, or Google Domains. Domain registration is typically billed annually, though you can often secure discounts for multi-year purchases.
4. Connect to Hosting: After purchasing your domain, configure its DNS settings to point to your web hosting provider. This step links your domain name to your website’s content and ensures seamless integration with your web design.

Maintaining Your Domain

After registering your domain, ongoing maintenance is necessary to ensure uninterrupted access to your website:

1. Renewal: Domains need to be renewed periodically, typically every year. Failure to renew can result in your domain expiring and becoming available for others to purchase.
2. Privacy Protection: Many registrars offer WHOIS privacy protection to keep your contact information confidential. This helps prevent spam and unauthorized solicitations.
3. Monitoring and Updates: Keep an eye on your domain’s DNS settings and renewals. Update the settings if you switch hosting providers or make other changes to your online setup.

Choosing the Right Domain Name

Selecting the right domain name is a strategic decision that can significantly impact your website’s success. Consider the following tips:

• Keep It Simple: Short, simple names are easier to remember and less prone to typos.
• Make It Relevant: Your domain should reflect your brand, business, or website purpose. Keywords related to web design, web hosting, or domain registration can also enhance SEO visibility.
• Avoid Trends: Stick to timeless names rather than following fleeting trends.
• Research Competitors: Look at what similar businesses or websites are doing for inspiration.

Conclusion

A website domain is much more than a web address; it’s a fundamental part of your online identity and a key element of a successful web presence. Understanding its importance and role in web hosting, domain registration, and web design can help you make informed decisions when creating or growing your digital footprint. Whether you’re building a personal blog, an e-commerce store, or a corporate website, choosing the right domain name sets the foundation for your online success.

Rudimentary AIs have been used in the form of standalone or interlocking algorithms to push or squash certain content on search engines, YouTube, and other social media platforms for the better part of a decade. We know this. Many of us have been shadow banned or had content taken down off of these platforms, some by the hands of human censors, surely, in the name of fact-checking or “protecting the public from mis/dis-information”, but just as much through algorithmic tools designed to push narrative-compliant posts and squash examples of wrong-think. Algorithms are generally easy enough to fool, simply don’t spell things conventionally, or in video content, change what you call something, or flash it onscreen, rather than saying it yourself. When they turn the human censors on you, it gets harder, though.

Now, these algorithms have a new cousin: the generative AIs. Generative AIs are typically based on Large Language Models or LLMs. This more or less means that they have access to broad swaths of the content that has ever been published on the internet, whether behind a paywall for human users or not.[1] These LLMs are steered and weighted differently for each one, fed different datasets with different limitations.[2] This is what creates the illusion of talking to something or someone intelligent. One thing to keep in mind is that these LLMs are never done growing and being refined. Every user interaction helps to refine it just a little more. There have already been issues of a censorious nature, which the eggheads and would-be regulators call “guardrails”.[3] Another problem with these pieces of programming is that they are really not intelligent. Keep in mind which Big Tech companies are funding much of the research in the AI arena: Microsoft and Alphabet/Google, which means that both of them are being steered by their major investors toward generating that much more profit through scraping that much more data about the users of these AI-based applications which they own.[4] That last bit was conjecture, but if you look at the public investor lists for both of these mega corporations, you are likely to see both of those investment firms (which are really the same thing, by the way) at or very near the top of the lists for each one. In terms of institutional investment, they are #1 and #2 for each company, respectively.[5]

What am I suggesting we should make of this? That is a question which warrants more ink that I can afford here to answer without speculation. All I know is that these companies are opaque and own much of the modern world, from media to fast food, and cosmetics to pharmaceuticals. They also own sizable chunks of major tech companies, as seen above.  This means they can, in theory, influence not only the messaging that we see in movies and on TV, but how we see them through the online services and even down to our devices. Now, they have a huge stake in the AI boom. I am not a doomer about AI, guys. I may not like it much, and think that it is already being manipulated by the companies and investors behind it, but it is an interesting piece of technology when built and maintained by people with a greater interest in privacy and freedom of speech than these clowns have demonstrated.

On the other hand, Altha Tech uses AI where it can, and had an experience where they were working on a piece about ending child trafficking, but got flagged by chatGPT for asking it to edit the piece. I guess that is a no-go topic for big tech types. To give it the benefit of the doubt, there is allot of misinformation out there about the issue, so it is hard to cut through to the truth of it. Perhaps that was too charitable, as there are a number of high profile CEOs who have been implicated with types like Epstein, through visits to his properties.[6] Many people who are closer to the bottom of the pecking order than the top have suggested that all of the elites are intimately involved with heinous acts against other human beings, whether adults or children, which involve slavery and abuse. I’m of the mindset that doesn’t want to believe that one human being could do that to another, much less to a child. I want to give people the benefit of the doubt. However, there are enough red flags through symbols and the like that it is hard to deny that something is going on, and likely has been for a very long time.[7] Perhaps such editing is better done by hand.

Here, at Altha Tech, the owner appreciates what generative AI is, and how it can help to do some things. He is becoming more aware that it is being shaped by some bad actors in the industry, ones who have more interest in controlling the narrative than in trusting people with the privacy to research and think for themselves. These tools are already very biased toward the Narrative of the elites, so unless you want to keep feeding that beast, I would consider your choices around AI very carefully from now on. Perhaps the ticket is for us to refuse to use the big chat bots from now on. Perhaps the solution is to move to FOSS alternatives, which do exist, by the way.[8]
[1] there is ongoing litigation in this regard… https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66164228

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/vipinbharathan/2023/06/25/guardrails-for-ai-what-is-possible-today/?sh=7f3595923a0d

[4] Vanguard and Blackrock are the two largest institutional investors for both GOOG and MSFT.

[5] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/holders ; https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/holders?p=GOOG

[6] https://archive.org/download/epstein-flight-logs-unredacted

[7] https://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/FBI_pedophile_symbols

[8] https://www.goodfirms.co/artificial-intelligence-software/blog/best-free-open-source-Artificial-Intelligence-software

FOSS is an acronym for Free & Open Source Software[1]. Most software that we are familiar with is not open source. What does it mean that something is open source vs being proprietary? Why should we want something that is open source vs something proprietary if the proprietary thing works just fine for us? This post will seek to give a short answer for these questions.

First, what does it mean if something is “open source”[2]? Simply put, if something is open source, then anyone with the skill can audit or adjust or even fork a piece of code or a blueprint for a piece of software or hardware. Some of you may live in fear of IRS audits, so auditing software code is a similar process. A programmer or developer sits down and examines the source code or DNA of a piece of software or the plans for an open sourced piece of hardware. Any such person can parse the code, see if it makes calls to anything shady, or if there is something unnecessary that the original developer wrote into the program. They can also check for bugs or other defects, such as security flaws which the original developer might have missed when they audited their own program or script before it was released to the public. This process is generally called patching a piece of software, this also happens in proprietary software, only behind closed doors at the company which develops that application or tool. Developers of each kind of software depend on tools such as bug reports, crash reports, and telemetry to point out issues. Telemetry, at its most basic, is simply an automated data collection so that the user doesn’t need to worry about sending in a bug or crash report to the developer(s) or company behind a given piece of software. What does it mean to “fork” an open source thing? Forking is the process wherein one developer takes open source code, tweaks or modifies it (sometimes as simply as redoing visual window dressing, and sometimes it is a radical re-write with enough of the original idea that it needs to be cited still) and releases it under a different name. If something is proprietary, it is necessarily closed source, with the code locked behind a copyright and if you find a way to hack in and alter it, you are likely to be prosecuted by the company which produces that software.

Why should we want a piece of hardware, or software, or firmware which is open source? generally those pieces of software, hardware, or firmware tend to be more secure, rather than less because the code is transparent and any interested and skilled party can investigate the code for errors, bugs, or security holes, then submit patches to the developer(s) of the piece in question. This openness makes it so that it is harder to slip the public a mickey, so to speak. FOSS codebases usually don’t make it into common use unless they are clean of malware, reasonably free of bugs (are stable within reason), and have been combed through by more than one set of eyes to make sure that those things are the case. This is not the case, as a rule, with proprietary software, as only the team which is assigned to a given piece of an app or program has full access to that code. Sure, there are QC and QA steps built into the development process, but only those assigned to those areas can do anything about bugs or vulnerabilities. This means that often, bugs and vulnerabilities have to wait for full version releases before they get squashed or patched. You also have to keep in mind that with proprietary software, hardware, or firmware (which allows software and drivers to actually talk to your hardware), you need to trust the company behind it. If you are seriously investigating FOSS, then you are likely questioning the validity of trusting those companies already. One big one is Microsoft, but even companies like Fortinet, which is currently under a heavy malware attack[3]. When code is closed source, it can take a huge mobilization effort on the company’s part to remedy a problem, where if it is FOSS, FLOSS (Free, Libre Open Source Software)[4], or simply open source, any developer who pays attention can create and apply patches, then if they work, submit to the project through a pull request. Open source simply means that anyone can look at or modify the source code for a project, when you add Free to the front of OSS, this emphasizes the freedom aspect (not free of cost, necessarily, though they typically are free of charge), where when you add the L as in Libre to it, that is even more clear (free speech vs free beer). This often, but not always, streamlines the process. This leads, usually, to more stable and secure software.

[1] https://itsfoss.com/what-is-foss/

[2] https://opensource.org/osd/

[3] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-cactus-ransomware-encrypts-itself-to-evade-antivirus/

[4] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html

Last time, we looked at what Linux is and is not. Today, we’ll lay out part of why you should want to use Linux rather than Windows or macOS. Let me recap just a bit from what Linux is before we jump into the meat of today’s post, ok?

So, what is Linux? Technically, it is the kernel, or base layer of an operating system. It is what everything else, from the firmware, drivers, BIOS, desktop environment, and applications hook into in order to make your system run the way you want. It is one of the main free & open source options out there in the wild. When you look at software or operating systems, you want to find something that is relatively popular and stable, so that you make sure that you’ll have support available, should you need it. Every distribution (combination of packaged kernel, desktop environment/window manager, display manager/protocols, base package set, and package manager) is a bit different, and each one has a target audience. Many will tell you who they are meant for on the home or about pages of their respective websites. You can check on the popularity of certain distributions by checking them on https://distrowatch.com. Some do not like Distro Watch, but as a general feel for user base numbers, it is a decent metric.

Ok, ok, time to get to the main point of the post: Why Linux?

#1) It is incredibly flexible
You can literally do anything with this Swiss army knife of an operating system, errrr, kernel ;). You can build it light (eg: Alpine or NixOS for a fridge or some other IoT appliance), or build it as beefy as you want (see a distribution like Garuda, which is meant to be very gaming-focused, so comes with most of the tools you’ll need in order to run most any game that is possible to play on Linux), or somewhere in between (something like Manjaro or Mint). As you can see, there is a very wide variety of options, or you can take the time to customize things and build it from scratch (not suggested, unless you are a developer and have the time and understanding to manage that). I could go on, but I think you are probably starting to get the picture.

#2) It is free
Yes, you read that correctly. It is free, not all distributions are, but 99% are, and the ones that aren’t, are likely enterprise-level options, such as CentOS, RHEL, or Ubuntu Pro, which come with extra support, usually from the organization which creates the distribution itself. This means that you can adopt it without cost, except for a bit of time to learn a new system. We recognize that that can feel daunting for people who are just looking at it, as the breadth and depth of the material is extensive, but simple daily usage for a distribution like Mint is something that can easily be achieved by an 80 year-old grandma. If granny can do it, so can you.

#3) It is more secure (in general) than the two main options
How could that be? It is Free & Open Source. That means that any developer or programmer who has the desire or skill to do so can audit, change or distribute the code themselves. This adds security because there are so many more eyes on the code in a FOSS option like BSD or Linux vs Windows or macOS (which yes, is technically FOSS at its core, but that is not the point right now). More eyes = more possibilities to catch bad or malignant code in the code base before it harms someone, or better chances to effectively patch issues more quickly than Windows, in particular, all while *almost* never crashing running systems.

#4) It can revitalize old hardware
I’ve seen this and live this on a daily basis. I have a 2011 HP dv6 which would not run Windows 10 to save its life, much less Windows 11. It has run any Linux distribution I’ve ever thrown at it, and enables my boys to use it for school and entertainment. An average distribution (such as one of the mainstream options I mentioned above) can cause your system to run like new again. A lightweight option, like Puppy Linux or 4mLinux can take an otherwise dead machine and give it an entirely new lease on life. One cannot expect miracles, here, but I have seen some amazing things.

#5) The internet already runs on Linux
If big corporations already use it for their server infrastructure (and most do, even Microsoft has its own in-house Linux distribution which it uses to power much of Azure). AWS is based almost entirely on Linux servers, need I go on? Google has its own in-house Linux distribution as well, and I would have a hard time believing that most of the Google cloud wasn’t running on something like Debian or RHEL. If it is good enough for the big boys in cloud computing, why not join the penguin team?

These were just the top 5 reasons I came up with after some thought, and looking at the following articles:
https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/benefits-of-linux/ 
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-most-important-reason-you-should-be-using-linux-at-home/
https://opensource.com/article/21/4/linux-reasons

Hi Again,

Today I thought we would roll things back a bit and take a look at what some of the core topics I’ve been covering really are. First things first, we will take a look at what Linux is, and what it isn’t. If I have space, I will talk about infrastructure, servers, and other things as well, but I think just unpacking Linux will be enough for today.

So, we talk about Linux almost every post, around here, don’t we. You have probably figured out that it is an alternative operating system or O S. On a basic level, you have deduced correctly. However, it is more than that. And less… More on that later. First the “more”, well, it has a bootloader, a kernel (this is technically the “less”, as this is the part that is actually “Linux”, more on that later), an init system, daemons, a graphical server, a desktop environment, and a suite of applications. What are each of those elements? (https://www.linux.com/what-is-linux/)

The bootloader handles telling the system how to interface your system’s legacy BIOS or UEFI firmware with the kernel. It begins the process of loading in the kernel that you picked. The most common one of these is called GRUB, or the GRand Unified Bootloader, which allows for multibooting, or choosing between installed kernels or even different operating systems. (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB)

The kernel is where the magic happens, everybody. It is a is a computer program at the core of a computer’s operating system and generally has complete control over everything in the system. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(operating_system)) It is a free and open-source,[11]: 4  monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU operating system, which was written to be a free (libre) replacement for Unix. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel) Linus still leads development on the kernel project. That was allot of big terms there, but suffice it to say that the kernel is where all of your other firmware and drivers plug in to make the system go. Think of this as the nervous system of the OS.

The Init system, here we have some choices to make: most distributions ship with systemd —which I might do a deep dive on in the future—, OpenRC, runit, and S6 are some of the better known options. Init systems manage most things behind the scenes, including boot processes and daemons. Systemd is developed by the team at Red Hat, and has suffered extreme feature creep, in that it seems to more or less be gearing up to replace the kernel itself eventually. OpenRC is the next most frequently used init system, and only does its job, which is to manage daemons and services. Runit and S6 are similar but each present their own wrinkles and different ways of doing things. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Init)

Next, we have daemons. What is a daemon? If you are familiar with the Windows end of things, daemons are roughly equivalent to services. These either launch at boot or at login, and manage things like display drivers, printing, networking, and many other processes that run in the background as needed in order to make your system run as expected. (https://itsfoss.com/linux-daemons/)

What about a display server? There is basically one option, here, X (which is the original display server from unix), the X.org Server (the open source version of X, developed in in the 90’s), and X11 (Network protocol which actually slows things down because it hasn’t been overhauled in 30 years, but has been hacked to bits in the interim, it is what allows X.org, the system, and other applications to talk and draw things on the screen). It is a program whose primary task is to coordinate the input and output of its clients to and from the rest of the operating system, the hardware, and each other. The display server communicates with its clients over the display server protocol. (https://linuxiac.com/xorg-x11-wayland-linux-display-servers-and-protocols-explained/) Other than that, we have Wayland, which is an up & coming community-driven replacement for X.Org and X11. Keylogging is impossible because of how Wayland is designed, as there is no middleman between the windowing system and the display server, as the compositor is the display server is the window manager. Simple = better, here. It is still maturing, but once it does, Linux will be lighter and more secure than ever.

What might you use a display server to look at? A desktop environment or a window manager. What’s that, you ask? A desktop environment or window manager provides the framework for a graphical user interface (GUI), in Linux systems, you have many options to choose from in this arena. Some of the most popular desktop environments are GNOME and KDE Plasma, slightly less well known are these: Xfce, LxQt, Mate, and Cinnamon. Each of these usually ship with a hand picked set of applications: a file manager, settings manager, some basic utilities, and other useful apps. I will do a whole blog later on desktop environments, because there is that much to say about these. As for Window Managers, those are graphical, but typically tend to be keyboard shortcut focused rather than point and click based, in the case of most desktop environments. A few well-known ones follow: i3WM, IceWM, OpenBox, and Wayfire.

What runs in a GUI most of the time? Applications. What applications are available for Linux systems? There are 1000’s of them, many are Free & Open Source, but not all are. Many Desktop Environments also ship with some kind of Software install center, so you don’t have to go hunting around the internet for what you need, just search for what you need in the software center to start with.

Next time, I will talk about why you should be interested and seriously think about using Linux on your computers at home and at work.

Jitsi Videobridge (Jibri) allows you to record and stream conferences on your server. Jitsi Meet is the front-end application which allows you to connect to the Jibri instance and communicate more or less seamlessly with whomever you desire or need to communicate with. There is also Jicofo which is the conference focus element, which is server-side, and functions as something of a traffic cop for participants and connects each one to the best available Jibri instance. There is also Jigasi (the Jitsi Gateway to SIP) which is also server-side which allows regular clients to connect to a call on a Jibri instance, while also providing transcription capabilities.

So if you want to use the free, hosted tool, it is easy enough to open up https://meet.jit.si and start a meeting, and that is plenty for most people. The thing that makes Jitsi Meet great for privacy is that it automatically end-to-end encrypts every call. As long as you set a decently strong password, no one you do not invite will be able to snoop on your meetings or calls. It doesn’t even require anyone to download anything, unlike with Zoom, Skype, or most of the other major competitors. That’s right, it purely functions in your browser when you are on a call. Does that mean that there are no desktop or mobile apps, certainly not, as there are apps for all major platforms, but they basically function as wrappers for the webRTC back end which is where all the magic actually happens. Another cool way to use it is to either set up a page or a sub-domain on your website, and paste in the integration for Jitsi-As-A-Service, or JAAS, from their site, and that will allow you to create a branded (or unbranded) place for you and your friends, family, co-workers, or clients to meet in a central location which keeps them on your site the whole time. You can go through the process of setting it up on their end here: https://jaas.8×8.vc/#/ . As an aside, the writer has done this on his own site, as well as the site for his wife’s ministry, and as long as you and the person(s) you are talking to load the page with https, it should work like a dream.

If you are more concerned with privacy and security and are wanting something that you can host yourself, you are in luck, because Jitsi can easily be run on your own server, and the process has grown far simpler than it was in years gone by. All you have to do is set up Docker, then install the Docker container, and as long as it is on a VPS, rather than your personal network, and you point it to a sub domain you own, you should be pretty much golden. If you want to experiment with this, take a look at this guide: https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-guide-docker .

You might be wondering why I’m bothering to talk about this right now, when Altha Tech offers hosted vdo.ninja to do the same basic things, and in some ways more, even. The writer and Jared have an appreciation for Jitsi because It has been around for quite some time, in fact, the beginnings of Jitsi stretch all the way back to the early 2000s, with the SIP Communicator, which was first developed 20 years ago. It became Jitsi, which is Hungarian for “wires” in 2011. The 2010’s were a busy decade, with Jitsi growing into a full-fledged video-conferencing solution, and with 8X8 purchasing it in 2018. JAAS, which I mentioned earlier, was first released in 2020. I hope this explains enough to whet your appetite to check out this great project soon.

How does this matter to Altha Tech, though?

I asked Jared about it, and he commented that Altha Tech researches hardware and software solutions to build towards the vision of owning, protecting, and serving data to achieve personal digital sovereignty for yourself or your business.

He further stated that one great place to look for open source, self-hostable tools and applications is the awesome Self-Hosted repository on Github. He said that he has frequently used used this to find applications to provide services needed, such as forums, File management, or other things.

Some other examples of commonly used applications and hosting solutions we have experience with are: Jellyfin media server, Gitlab, Invoice Ninja, Poste.io mail server, Blesta hosting billing software, AVideo, Peertube, TrueNAS for infrastructure, Proxmox hypervisor, VMWare Vsphere, Nginx Proxy Manager, Usertrack Analytics, WIkiJS documentation server, Moodle, Valheim gaming servers, and a few more.

We don’t offer all of these publicly, but for if you have special needs for your business or ministry, we can work it out for you on a case-by-case basis and help yo to self-host things like secure billing software, file management, custom hardware, or most other things you may need. If we cannot provide the service, then at least we can consult with you so that you can better understand what to look for and how to set it up elsewhere.

Which of these self-hosted options should I think about?

If you have the need to serve video content and are concerned about censorship, we have used and recommend Peertube as a Youtube alternative that you can fully control. If you need to (and we think that you do, by the way) handle storage infrastructure for yourself, including backups and the like, we use and strongly recommend TrueNAS as the backbone for your network file serving needs. If you need secure invoicing, Invoice Ninja is the way to go, as far as we are concerned. As for personal media serving, JellyFin, for the win.

I mentioned the fediverse earlier, now that we have something of a concept of what it is, how does this affect Altha Tech?

Based on experience and research, we feel confident in suggesting the Activity Pub cluster of fediverse protocols and platforms, as that is winning the popularity war at this point. The most popular pair that we have seen right now are Peertube, which we’ve talked about already, and work with on a regular basis, and Mastodon. We have not yet created any Mastodon instances or servers, but are interested in doing so, but have not had the time to dedicate to sorting it out. If one of our clients requested it and funded the R&D for us, we would make that a priority and might even offer it publicly. Why does popularity matter in open source applications? The more popular something becomes, the more likely it is to get consistent development time and effort poured into it and the more time and effort that go into it, the better, more stable, and performant that application generally becomes.

That is why it matters to look at popularity in FOSS applications.

The Bottom Line for Altha Tech

We love the fediverse because it puts rubber to the road in terms of helping us to walk out our motto, both for our own data and that which belongs to our clients. It helps us to own the data, protect the data, and serve the data better. Self-hosting is the backbone of our philosophy, and we believe that ideally everyone should be running their own personal servers to handle as much of their own data as possible, however, we recognize that this is a lofty goal, so we provide the next best thing for our clients.

Why Should You Host These FOSS Tools With Us?

We follow our own rules and use our own hardware and applications for ourselves. We use wordpress for our websites. We use peertube for our customers and our own video delivery. We use Jellyfin for our own media entertainment. We use Nextcloud to run our internal teams and project manage. We use Invoice Ninja for bookkeeping and invoicing.

As with last week’s blog, we would never suggest you use something that we have not tried for ourselves, first.

A match made in heaven. Altha Tech has used WordPress to power most of its web design and hosting services for 7+ years. Altha Tech can build just about any kind of website for you, from e-commerce to portfolios to blogs and everything in between. They specialize in creating multi-functional sites with events, calendaring, donations, e-learning solutions, and e-commerce all baked in.

The best projects, according to Jared Heath, are ones where Altha Tech can use WordPress to create a digital hub for you, your company, or ministry, around which all of your social media can rightly turn. This hub strategy allows us (you and Altha Tech) to be more resilient in the face of censorship, should we run into those sorts of issues. The most excellent part about that is that should Altha Tech ever be targeted by “law” enforcement, or other bad actors, it will allow us to move your site more easily to minimize the impact of such things for you. That is a part of our backup strategy.

What Makes Altha Tech WordPress Hosting Different?

Our hosting platform is containerized by default, which means that there is more raw performance available for your site’s needs on our servers. This strategy also makes it easier to move your site elsewhere, as discussed above. Aside from that, our WordPress hosting is unique in the industry because of how we have built it out, making sure that it is as responsive as possible through a constant process of security and performance updates and a combination of different forms of caching. We also offer hybrid storage back-ends as well as pure SSD storage options, not too different in that respect than most of the industry is.

What Do We Use for Ourselves and Our Clients?

We strongly suggest using DIVI, but will also support Elementor site builders and themes. We also have a set of plugins that we depend on and strongly recommend to our clients based on their needs:

• Events Calendar for Calendaring
• Fluent Forms for Forms
• FluentCRM for email marketing list management
• Wordfence for security
• WP Fastest Cache for caching
• Learndash for E-Learning
• Woocommerce for E-Commerce
• Cornerstone payment systems for payment gateway
• Stripe as a backup payment system for internal payments
• BTC Pay server for bitcoin payments integrated into Woocommerce

Why should clients host their sites with Altha over and against the big guys?

Altha Tech believes in the First Amendment. We will never censor you for anything you put on your website. We will always do our best to protect you from censors and unconstitutional  government interference. You can rest assured that your data is safe with us, and your site will have maximum up time. Not only are we a design and hosting company, but we will work with you every step of the way to make sure that your site is as resilient as it can be, so that your personal, business, or ministry site will be solid for years to come. We have solutions to help you with payment issues, selling your wares, communicating with your clients and members, among other things.

Jared’s first reaction as to why you should trust us with your data is that we are Christian and seek to network with and support other Christian businesses and organizations, but then he thought again and realized that often in business, in his experience, working with Christians has not been a positive experience for him. The point I think he is trying to make is that Altha Tech prides ourselves on our integrity and skill in the the hosting space. We will never suggest something to you that we either have not used successfully or are not currently using to positive outcomes. That means that we use crypto and run BTC pay servers. We use WordPress for all the things. We use the Fluent plugins to help us manage everything from intake to relationship management and email lists. We choose to use open source payment solutions, as we believe that open source is the way forward, and open source is how we run our business, so that we can Own the Data, Protect the Data, Serve the Data (both our own and anything that you entrust to us).

As you can see, Altha Tech and WordPress are truly a match made in heaven. Our hosting, design, and managed WordPress services may not be the cheapest in the market, but you will get personal service and the peace of mind that your data is safe from prying eyes as well as from censorship to the best of anyone’s ability.

How does Altha Tech use Nextcloud to assist you in exercising your personal digital sovereignty? Let me tell you about how we use it internally. It enables us to communicate and collaborate privately. We run our own instance and have for 7 years. This allows us to control all of our internal data as well as protecting it from being scraped by advertisers or government agencies which exist to spy on their own citizens. This allows us to own our data, protect our data, and serve our data however we choose. I imagine that if you are interested in privacy, then any Big Tech cloud should be an untenable solution for you. We have a great solution: you can host your data in our iron-clad infrastructure in your own Nextcloud instance. The base price is $49/ month + $3/ mo per user for 300 GB total storage capacity. We currently offer 2 higher storage tiers: 500 GB for $79 and 1 TB for $99 per month, respectively.

How does Nextcloud help us to embody our motto? Nextcloud is a viable near drop-in replacement for Google Workspaces. It helps you to own your data by being an excellent file storage and sharing option which has no strings attached to Big Tech or the government, so no ads and no spying. It assists you in protecting your data by being privacy-centric and open source. Those may seem to be contrary things, but as you’ll see later, they aren’t in the least.  Nextcloud is great at helping us to serve your data by providing a transparent and easy to use interface so that you can upload data, store data, and share data with whomever and only whomever you choose.

Nextcloud also has a host of integrations with other open source projects to make it far more useful. The platform itself has a built in chat app and video chat (through a wrapper from Jitsi Meet, which we will talk about in a separate blog post, next month), notes, a calendar, to do lists, kanban boards for project management, as well as file sharing and integrations with either OnlyOffice or Collabora Office to provide synchronous collaboration capabilities. What does all of that mean? You get a one-stop shop for backups, file sharing, collaborative editing, project and team management, and communication (if you set up multiple users on your account, of course).

Why should you trust Altha Tech with your data via a Nextcloud deployment? We make some significant tweaks to protect and help you to access your data more readily when you want it. What are those tweaks? In terms of security, we use Snort, which is an open source packet sniffer, equipped with custom rules so that it can detect any bad actors trying to gain illicit access to your personal or business cloud. We set up a couple of significant performance tweaks: PHP caching improvements through OPCache edits, enabling PHP JIT, as well as increasing the size for individual uploads to your cloud so that you have fewer limits on your usage. We will also help you to get oriented and use the platform better, just as you would with Workspaces or dropbox, or any other similar cloud based solution that you don’t own.

As I said above, we use this tool ourselves. We have used Nextcloud as a whole, internally, for 7 years. It is always in development, always growing, and always getting better. We would not suggest that you use it if we didn’t know from experience that it is a quality option.

So, in short, we believe that Nextcloud should be a cornerstone of your personal and business data sovereignty efforts. This is because it is private, self-hosted, and secure. We also love it because it is open source, and we believe that open source is the way forward out of the mess we currently find ourselves in the midst of.