We are a company that was born out of Joomla it is a great honor to be part of the Joomla community. We're passionate about contributing to the project, and we're lucky to be a part of it. We have so many great employees that comprise our company - people who are committed to our goals and the community. Please watch the thank you video below.
When visitors come to your site, their browser displays content that is served from a web server. The web server is told what content to send based on the output of the Joomla application. Each page that the visitor loads requires Joomla to generate content into an html page for the visitor's browser. Sometimes Joomla has to generate the same content over and over. When this happens, site administrators can take advantage of caching to reduce the amount of work required from Joomla and the web server, which can greatly improve performance.
Compression comes into play when the files and data that is generated by Joomla gets sent from the web server to the browser. In many cases, compressing that data can increase the speed at which the data is sent, as well as the performance of the web server itself. In combination, these two factors can greatly decrease the speed at which your pages load for site visitors.
Memcache (memory caching) works within core Joomla and is a server-side caching technology. CloudAccess.net offers memory caching as part of our servcies, but the problem with Joomla and memory cache is that, once you start adding plugins, components and other extensions to your site, things become more complex. If Memcache is turned on and 3rd party extensions are installed, there may be compatibility issues that cause a looping effect, ultimately slowing down your site.
This looping effect slows down your site’s load time or could cause the site to become completely unresponsive. If you want your site to use memory caching you have to program it into your PHP code. The core Joomla CMS has a decent implementation of Memcache and we hope to see continued improvements overtime. If your site is only core Joomla, go ahead and try out Memcache and run a speed test. If you use 3rd party extensions, templates, modules, and other things that render when the Joomla site is called upon by a browser, your site may be slow to load.
We've scheduled two upcoming webinars to help answer some of those questions. The first webinar is Joomla! 3.1 ACL Explained. Hosted by CloudAccess.net Operating Manager Jonathan Gafill, this webinar will focus on core Joomla ACL. Jonathan will:
The second ACL Manager Webinar will be presented by Sander Potjer, a leader in the Joomla community and the developer of the ACL Manager extension. Core Joomla ACL can be difficult to comprehend and that’s where the ACL Manager comes in! Available in 28 languages, the ACL Manager features tools to help users easily understand and manage Users, User Groups, Permissions and Access Levels. During this one hour webinar, Sander will discuss:
I am a member of the Joomla Extensions Directory Team and I was fortunate enough to receive an invitation to attend J and Beyond 2013, which was held in Noordwijerhout in the western Netherlands from May 31st until June 2nd. Before the conference began I experienced the Netherlands a bit and I tell a few stories below, but there was a moment on the first official night of the conference when I grasped just how wonderfully global and diverse the Joomla community really is.
After a very funny keynote presentation from Peter van Westen, attendees migrated to one of the fabulous restaurants at the NH Conference Center Leeuwenhorst. I sat down to dinner with Saurabh Shah, my colleague from India and a member of the Joomla Social and Events Teams, and OSM Board Members Javier Gomez from Barcelona, Spain and Ofer Cohen from Tel Aviv, Israel. Four guys from four countries on three different continents talked about Joomla and recent strides the community has made to reach more users worldwide. Saurabh shared his passions for marketing Joomla internationally. Ofer told a story about Eden Orion, an Israeli who was making Joomla more accessible to Hebrew-speakers. Javier talked about the importance of people like Guillermo Bravo, who won a J!OSCAR Personal Contribution Award earlier in the night for his work promoting the JCM to Spanish speakers.
Red Sage Communications, Inc. is an award-winning web services company based out of Decatur, Alabama. They provide everything from graphic design to branding, website development and marketing. They are really a one-stop-shop for brand building, marketing, SEO, and web development, and they have a very broad client base. CloudAccess.net is proud to call Red Sage a partner, and the story behind that partnership is quite interesting.
Red Sage was founded in 2006 by Ellen Didier. When they opened, the company used a proprietary product, ExpWeb by SunGard for website development. At the time ExpWeb made building sites efficient and relatively easy for the staff of novice programmers. However, SunGard eventually chose to package ExpWeb with some of their other products and it was no longer a stand-alone piece of software. At that point they stopped supporting it with even basic functionality and support patches.
With that little shove from SunGard, Red Sage decided it was time to circle the wagons and review other options. After a few days of looking at various choices the team narrowed it down to three: Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla. After many pro/con lists and discussions, they settled on Joomla due to the large community that was behind the project. Teresa Smith, Red Sage Web Products Coordinator, said, “we were able to find extensions that did things our clients needed, both effectively and at a great price point.”
With that decision behind them they began looking for seminars and classes to help get through the learning curve as well as become involved with the community to find out things like what hosting companies were best, which ones to avoid, etc. With the support of Ellen (aka Dragon Lady), Teresa traveled to the CMS Expo in Denver in November 2008 to learn about Joomla and hopefully meet some people in-the-know, and in a twist of fate, it’s there where she first met Gary Brooks, then the founder of MichiganMedia.net, an ISP in Northern Michigan.
Teresa said, “I don’t know how we would have gotten to the point where we’re at without Gary’s hand holding. He spent lots of time with us, walking us through the Joomla installation process, explaining the content management system and sharing resources to help us get started.” Happy with their choice in Joomla, Teresa returned to Red Sage to share what she had learned. They contacted Steve Burge at OSTraining for additional Joomla training and from there set out to find a suitable host for their newly developed Joomla sites.
They found a host in late 2008, at which time MichiganMedia.net hadn't yet evolved into CloudAccess.net. Red Sage was developing in Joomla 1.5 and building with hired front end development talent through MichiganMedia.net, taking Photoshop designs and having them custom programmed for Joomla through the Real Design Process. They were hosting on a dedicated server elsewhere, but weren’t completely satisfied with the level of support that hosting company provided. In the meantime MichiganMedia.net had become CloudAccess.net and began to offer hosting services.
Once again, positive change is brought about by necessity when Red Sage began to create a plan for all the 1.5 sites they were hosting. They knew their current hosting company wasn’t going to be of much help in the migration process and they knew what great support they had received from CloudAccess.net in the past. So, a conference call with Gary Brooks was scheduled to discuss options.
Gary took the time to talk Ellen and Teresa through the options of hosting with CloudAccess.net as well as the pros and cons. The CloudAccess.net Partner Program was the perfect fit! Great support, great pricing, and a relationship with someone they knew they could count on! The next challenge was to move the existing sites from their current server to CloudAccess.net, as well as take the 1.5 sites through the upgrade process to Joomla 2.5. CloudAccess.net was able to assist in the migration as well. Red Sage ultimately moved 49 websites from their previous hosting company to CloudAccess.net and have since upgraded most of those sites to version 2.5.
Teresa said, “if you’re hosting a Joomla site, there is no other better solution. As a client of CloudAccess.net, you’re treated with respect, and they’re great at solving problems.” The Red Sage team is pictured above.
You can learn more about Red Sage Communications, Inc. by visiting www.redsageonline.com . CloudAccess.net has several partner types, and Red Sage is a Reseller. Resellers offer a redistribution of CloudAccess.net hosting services, but they support and bill their own clients for that service. It's kind of like setting up your own hosting company. We supply our Resellers a drastically reduced monthly shared hosting cost, and they sell that hosting service for any price they choose and they do their own billing. For example, if you're a web developer, you can bundle hosting with development together into one package. Resellers pay the low flat rate for hosting and provide their own support, but they have access to our 24/7 Insane Support.
In April, Xen became a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and unveiled a new community site at xenproject.org. Xen Project leaders worked closely with CloudAccess.net in the development of their new online home, built using Joomla.
The Xen Project is the open source community of developers that have contributed virtualization technologies licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2). In the last 10 years, the Xen Project has produced many cloud technologies and “is the leading open source virtualization platform that is powering some of the largest clouds in production today. Xen powers Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Public Cloud and many hosting services.” CloudAccess.net is one of the countless cloud-based companies that benefits from Xen technologies. Thousands of users launch free trials of the Joomla CMS through our platform every month and the Xen Hypervisor is at the center of it all. It's the critical component that provisions compute and allows for Joomla application virtualization.
Ann Arbor, Mich. – May 13, 2013 – CloudAccess.net today announced that it has been selected to present at the 2013 Michigan Growth Capital Symposium. The company, an industry-leading Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering hosting and support for the Joomla! Content Management System, is among a roster of 36 promising, high-growth companies from the Midwest and beyond seeking funding in the next 12 months. CloudAccess.net will deliver its 10-minute presentation to attending investors, which include nearly 100 regional and top national venture capital firms, on Wednesday, May 22 at 10:30 a.m.
The Michigan Growth Capital Symposium is the oldest university-based venture capital fair and the premier Midwest networking event for leaders in venture capital investment to connect with emerging growth companies actively searching for partners and funding. Since 2001, the Symposium has provided nearly 400 companies with the opportunity to present to investors. Roughly 70 percent of these have raised capital totaling $1.7 billion in investments and nearly 20 percent have realized successful exits. More than 70 companies applied to present at the 2013 event and CloudAccess.net was selected following a rigorous review process.
Helping educators put Joomla in the hands of thousands of students worldwide
To protect highly sensitive cardholder data, the Payment Card Industry Security Standard Council (PCI SSC) released 12 Top Level Data Security Standards (DSS). Financial organizations are required to validate their adherence to certain DSS requirements. Below is an overview of the 12 PCI DSS requirements.
| Control Objectives | PCI DSS Requirements |
| Build and Maintain a Secure Network | Requirement 1: Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data Requirement 2: Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters |
| Protect Cardholder Data | Requirement 3: Protect stored cardholder data Requirement 4: Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks |
| Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program | Requirement 5: Use and regularly update anti-virus software Requirement 6: Develop and maintain secure systems and applications |
| Implement Strong Access Control Measures | Requirement 7: Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know Requirement 8: Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access Requirement 9: Restrict physical access to cardholder data |
| Regularly Monitor and Test Networks | Requirement 10: Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data Requirement 11: Regularly test security systems and processes |
| Maintain an Information Security Policy | Requirement 12: Maintain a policy that addresses information security |
There are over 130 Approved Scanning Vendors (ASVs) that can be used to detect vulnerabilities found in a public cloud. CloudAccess.net, a Michigan-based Platform as a Service (PaaS), used McAfee and Comodo to perform security scans on targeted hosting environments. Using the results, the company adjusted server specifications to pass subsequent scans, ultimately helping several clients validate the security of their content including Reliance Bank, a full service bank with twenty branches in the St. Louis metropolitan region, and CIMA (the Center for Information Management and Assurance), an organization that aims to elevate the information security community. CloudAccess.net is helping clients pass ASV scans on an individual basis, but the company is developing an automated PCI-DSS hosting layer that can be applied to any environment with a click of a mouse.