How to setup a Rackspace Cloud Load Balancer to serve SSL

Posted by & filed under blog, business, hosting, rackspace, security, wordpress, wordpress hosting, zippykid.

This post should explain how to setup an SSL site that’s load balanced across your web nodes using Cloud Load Balancers, and nginx on your web heads. This assumes you know how to setup the following: Nginx with an SSL vhost Verify that the vhost is working, by using an ssh tunnel Test that your… Read more »

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Posted by & filed under blog, business, personal, rants, zippykid.

Your words are weapons of mass destruction. They can be used to make people pull a trigger, or lay down their arms. Share your words wisely. The only security checkpoint against this weapon is your own heart. Keep it in check. This is universal, it applies in business, and in your personal life.

Why we recommend and provide Gravity Forms for our customers

Posted by & filed under blog, Managed Wordpress, wordpress, wordpress hosting, zippykid.

There are many reasons to host with a managed WordPress hosting company like ours, automatic updates, backups, security, WordPress experts.. etc etc. One of the things we haven’t advertised or done a poor job of advertising, is the inclusion of premium plugins, like Gravity Forms. Since we host a few thousand WordPress websites, we’ve seen… Read more »

WordPress – It’s not just for blogs any more

Posted by & filed under blog, business, Managed Wordpress, wordpress, wordpress hosting, zippykid.

In August, WordPress.org released the data of a survey they conducted. You can see Matt’s keynote and some of their findings yourself. We took their challenge to task, and did some analysis of it ourselves. Being a WordPress hosting provider, my interest was more towards figuring out who our target customer is, and what they’re… Read more »

Life lessons from a dog

Posted by & filed under blog, personal.

Last night, two of my 3 dogs got into a fight.. one of them lost her eye. My wife and I have gone through a range of emotions since then.. I haven’t slept since waking up yesterday morning.. I was just getting over the shock of Steve Jobs demise, when I got the call from… Read more »

Using the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel via Openstack CLI tools on OS X Lion (and other unixes)

Posted by & filed under blog, business, rackspace, zippykid.

If you’re like us, and use Rackspace Cloud Servers a lot, you eventually get tired of the web based control panel. It’s slow, it’s a pain to switch to a browser and to login, and search for servers.. it’s a pain to deal with over the web based interface. Luckily, the smart folks at Openstack… Read more »

WooThemes security update for ZippyKid WordPress hosting customers

Posted by & filed under business, themes, tips-and-tricks, wordpress, wordpress hosting, zippykid.

The awesome folks at WooThemes have issued a security update, we’re going through our list of sites and figuring out which ones need upgrading. It turns out we have a couple of hundred customers that use WooThemes, so we’re trying to figure out how to execute these updates en masse. If you got the email… Read more »

SSL on WP-Admin for all customers

Posted by & filed under business, security, wordpress, zippykid.

WordCamp San Francisco 2011 is under way, and I’d like to the the opportunity to make some announcements for our customers, with upcoming features, and releases. The first announcement is security related. We’re going to be turning on SSL for the WordPress backend for all customers starting September 15th 2011. What does this mean in… Read more »