Networking

If you’re looking for a web hosting provider, you have a tremendous number of choices. In my The best web hosting providers article, I looked at 15 providers who offer a wide range of plans.To get a better feel for each individual provider, I set up the most basic account possible and performed a series of tests. In this article, we’re going to dive into InMotion Hosting’s offerings. Stay tuned for in-depth looks at other providers in future articles. Because there’s such variability among plans and offerings among hosting providers, it’s hard to get a good comparison. I’ve found that one of the best ways to see how a provider performs is to look at the least expensive plan they offer. You can expect the least quality, the least attention to detail, and the least performance from such a plan.If the vendor provides good service for the bottom-shelf plans, you can generally assume the better plans will also benefit from similar quality. In the case of InMotion Hosting, the quality was quite reasonable. How pricing really works For the series of hosting reviews I’m doing now, I’m testing basic entry-level plans. In the case of InMotion Hosting, that’s what they call their Launch Plan. To get pricing, I simply went to the company’s main site at InMotionHosting.com. If you want to save some money, though, read to the end of this section.
InMotion
Like nearly every hosting provider in the business, their offering is somewhat misleading. There is no option to just get billed $4.99 per month.

While it looks like you can get the Launch plan for $4.99 per month, that’s only if you prepay for three full years, which means you’re actually paying $179.64. If you want only one year, you’re charging $83.88 to your card (which is $6.99 per month). There’s a gotcha, though: When you renew, you’re going to pay more. This is not uncommon for hosting plans and is a practice I strongly wish the hosting industry would stop. Instead of paying $179.64 for three years, you’re paying $359.64, which is more than double the price — a 100% increase.By the way, if you want to save some money, use the ‘Sales Chat’ button at the top of the InMotion site before you place an order. Just as soon as I asked for clarification, the agent offered me a few bucks off the posted price. It wasn’t much, but it was worth the five minutes it took.I harp on high renewal fees in my coverage of hosting vendors for two key reasons. First, it’s a really nasty feeling suddenly getting a bill that’s hundreds or even thousands of dollars (depending on the plan) more than you expect. Second, switching from one hosting provider to another hosting provider can be a very time-consuming and possibly expensive job, fraught with hassles and potential points of failure. Unfortunately, while not a universal practice, at least half of the hosting vendors I’ve looked at over the years do these promo deals, with big jumps in renewal fees.

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What the base Launch plan includes Most bottom-end plans are for one website and one site only. I was pleasantly surprised to find that InMotion’s Launch plan allows for two sites. While most folks starting out with their first website will only need one site, having a second site allows for both growth and experimentation. You can use the second site as a staging site or use it to try out new ideas without risking the performance and functionality of your main site. As with most hosting vendors these days, InMotion claims unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited email. In practice, these unlimited values are limited in terms of service. You can’t use your unlimited storage as a giant backup tank where you dump gigabits of video, for example. They also state, “accounts that adversely affect server or network performance must correct these issues or will be asked to upgrade to a virtual or dedicated server.” In other words, if your site suddenly becomes some sort of viral hit (you lucky thing!), you’re probably going to have to pay more to keep your site running. There are a few other wins in InMotion’s most basic plan. First, they host all their plans on SSDs. Even if a site is using caching (which reduces the load on a server), having fast drives is always a plus. Second, the company offers SSH access for even the basic plan. SSH is command-line shell access to a site. Most entry-level website operators don’t need SSH. Trust me; there are times that command-line access is the only thing that will fix a problem. Having SSH is something I consider necessary table stakes if you’re running a site you care about, but not all hosting providers offer it. Third, the company offers a free SSL encryption certificate for all accounts. While the certificate offered isn’t as complete as a fully professional certificate, it will do for most browsers accessing your site, and you won’t have to worry about Chrome flagging your site as “non-secure”. Fourth, and this is big: The company offers a 90-day money-back guarantee. This is great. This not only gives you enough time to learn their service and set up a site but run it for a while and make sure it works well for you. This level of guarantee is something I’d like all hosting providers to offer. Finally, the Launch program offers free email, a website builder, and some free ad and marketing credits. Dashboard access The first thing I like to do when looking at a new hosting provider is exploring their dashboard. Is it an old friend, like cPanel? Is it some sort of janky, barely configured open source or homegrown mess? Or is it a carefully crafted custom dashboard? These are often the ones that worry me the most because they almost always hide restrictions that I’m going to have to work around somehow. When you first log into InMotion’s dashboard, you’re greeted with their account management panel. Here, you can manage your credit card information, get support, and so on. Each account is also presented as a section in the panel.
InMotion
This is not the only dashboard you’ll be using. The main dashboard is cPanel, which is common to many, many sites across the web. Some management features are available in the main panel and in cPanel. On the one hand, that elevates some of the more major tasks (like installing apps) to the account panel. On the other hand, that can get confusing. That said, there’s cPanel. While cPanel can be frustrating at times, it’s a very capable interface that lets you manage all aspects of your site. InMotion seems to have enabled all of cPanel’s main capabilities, so even with a basic account, I didn’t find myself restricted in any way, and that’s a nice feeling on an entry-level account.

Installing WordPress There are certainly other content management and blogging applications you can use besides WordPress. That said, since 32% of the entire web uses WordPress, it’s a good place to start. WordPress sites can be moved from hosting provider to hosting provider, so there’s no lock-in. And by testing a site built with WordPress, we can get some consistency in our testing between hosting providers. I was a little surprised to see that a WordPress site had already been built for me by InMotion. So the very first thing I did was delete it. Softaculous is a standard app installer that makes it about as easy to install a web application as it is to install an app on your phone. Once I was sure that the previous WordPress files were gone and the database was eliminated, I clicked the Softaculous icon. Installation was quick and painless, and in about five minutes, I had a WordPress site up and running. I prefer using Softaculous when it’s available because, although installing WordPress is generally easy even by hand, there are text files that need to be edited, permissions that have to be gotten right, and some general fiddling. Softaculous does that all for you. Then, in cPanel, I dropped into the MySQL panel, created my database, created a database user, and assigned the user to the database. The only gotcha I found was connecting to the database. Rather than specifying localhost, I had to specify localhost:3306, which is the port used to access the database. Overall, adding an app using InMotion’s cPanel went very smoothly. Quick security checks Security is one of the biggest issues when it comes to operating a website. You want to make sure your site is safe from hackers, doesn’t flag Google, and can connect securely to payment engines if you’re running an e-commerce site of any kind. While the scope of this article doesn’t allow for exhaustive security testing, there are a few quick checks that can help indicate whether InMotion’s most inexpensive platform is starting with a secure foundation. The first of these is multi-factor authentication. It’s way too easy for hackers to just bang away at a website’s login screen and brute-force a password. One of my sites has been pounded on by weeks from some hacker or another, but because I have some relatively strong protections in place, the bad actor hasn’t been able to get in. Unfortunately, I have to ding InMotion for what I consider a pretty serious security flaw. When you log into their AMP (Account Management Panel), all you need to provide is a username and password. There is no option to set up any form of multi-factor authentication (MFA). Weirdly enough, if you log directly into your cPanel, you can set up MFA there. That’s most likely because cPanel has authentication built into it. But the cPanel MFA is essentially worthless because you can get into cPanel from your main AMP login. Ouch. I mentioned earlier that InMotion does provide a free SSL certificate, which is definitely a point in the provider’s favor. Even so, SSL is somewhat difficult to set up. The thing is, you’re going to want SSL because Google is starting to flag sites that don’t have secure HTTP connections (i.e., https://), whether or not they’re going to be used for anything that accepts payments. One quick trick on that front, if you use WordPress, is to install the Really Simple SSL plugin. This plugin makes it nearly effortless to add SSL to your WordPress site. As my last quick security check, I like to look at the versions of some of the main system components that run web applications. To make things easy, I chose four components necessary to safe WordPress operation. While other apps may use other components, I’ve found that they’re usually up to date across the board if components are up-to-date for one set of needs. Here are my findings (using the WordPress Health Check plugin), as of the day I tested, for InMotion’s Launch plan: Component Version Provided Current Version How Old PHP 7.032 7.2.11 One month MySQL MariaDB 10.2.17 MariaDB 10.3.10 One month cURL 7.45.0 7.61.1 3 years OpenSSL 1.0.2k-fips 1.0.2p (and 1.1.1) 18 months Note that versions are updated constantly, and so what I found on the day of testing could be different for you. Use the Health Check plugin during your money-back period to check versions and then compare to the official repositories to see if what InMotion is offering is sufficiently up to date. My testing, though, should at least give us an idea of how up-to-date they keep their servers.In general, these results aren’t bad. You kind of need to know the component to know how to read these results. For example, WordPress prefers PHP 7.2, so even though PHP is only one month old, it’s due for an upgrade. On the other hand, even though the cURL library is three years old, it’s up-to-date enough to support TLS 1.2 transactions (used in e-commerce) safely. Also, the company supports OpenSSL 1.0.2k, where the absolutely most current version is 1.1.1. The gotcha is that when OpenSSL went to 1.1, it broke a lot of code. As a result, the OpenSSL project is updating both the 1.0.2 branch and the 1.1 branch. I know, it’s enough to give you a headache. The bottom line is that InMotion is pretty much where it should be in terms of the system components they’re offering on their platform. Performance testing Next, I wanted to see how the site performed using some online performance testing tools. It’s important not to take these tests too seriously. We’re purposely looking at the most low-end offerings of hosting vendors, so the sites they produce are expected to be relatively slow. That said, it’s nice to have an idea of what to expect, and that’s what we’re doing here. The way I test is to use the fresh install of WordPress and then test the “Hello, world” page, which is mostly text, with just an image header. That way, we’re able to focus on the responsiveness of a basic page without being too concerned about media overhead. First, I ran two Pingdom Tools tests, one hitting the site from San Francisco and the second from Germany. Here’s the San Francisco test rating:
InMotion
And here’s the same site from Germany: Next, I ran a similar test using the Bitchatcha service: Finally, I hit the site with Load Impact, which sends 25 virtual users over the course of three minutes to the site and then measures the responsiveness. The Load Impact test shows pretty much what you’d expect. As more users are concurrently hitting the site, the responsiveness becomes more irregular. At the beginning of the test, the response time was about 33ms. By the end of the test, response time got as bad as 228ms. This is definitely a characteristic of a lower-cost hosting plan. One of the reasons you pay more for a hosting plan is if your business model can’t sustain a reduction of responsiveness. None of the tests showed spectacular performance, but I wouldn’t expect that for a low-end plan. None of them was terrible, despite the C grades shown in the first set of tests.

Support responsiveness In a word (well, five words): Way better than I expected. During testing, I had two reasons to reach out in just getting information for this article. Then one standardized test I use across hosting providers to both gauge support and learn about their backup offerings. The first contact was via chat. I suddenly couldn’t log into the AMP and kept getting error messages. I reached out through Sales Chat and was transferred to a tech support chat operator, who asked me to try a different browser. It turned out to be a Chrome issue. Clearing cookies solved the problem. That chat took less than a minute to connect. My second attempt was trying to find out if there was a multi-factor authentication option for the main dashboard, and I just couldn’t find it. That one took 10 minutes to connect. Sadly, that one also told me there was no MFA. The third attempt was via voice. I was initially concerned that there wasn’t any phone support because sometimes chatting and ticket systems can take forever. As it turns out, while there isn’t a phone number to call, there are Skype accounts to connect to. I reached out to inMotion-support, and much to my surprise, I was connected in less than two minutes. The agent I spoke to had some reasonable answers. My first question was, “How often do you backup my account?” His answer: Daily, but each new day overwrites the previous day’s backup. My second question was, “Do you backup my databases? How do I set up daily backups for both files and databases?” For this, he sent me to the cPanel backup option and offered to send me a description of how to set it up. Unfortunately, cPanel doesn’t offer an automatic, daily, incremental backup (so you can restore from last Tuesday, for example). He was unable to tell me how to do that or even refer me to some scripts to do so. There are actually a ton of options. I use the ManageWP.com service from GoDaddy to backup my WordPress sites, but WordPress plugins do the same thing. The agent mentioned it might be possible to set up a cron job to do such an automatic backup but didn’t share any resources for getting the job done. Here’s one way to do it, just for the record.Overall, especially for the cheap seats plan offered by InMotion, I thought support was just fine. Overall conclusion You never want to get your expectations too high for a bottom-end plan. The economics of running such a super-cheap offering is that the provider has to make it up on volume. Professional and enterprise hosting plans with lots of traffic and performance must, out of necessity, cost more. The only way to truly know what it’s like to use a service is to run a live website on it for a few years. That said, I was quite pleased with InMotion’s offering. The basic tests I performed indicated a well-equipped service with attention to upgrades and support. Combine that with a 90-day guarantee, and I can’t think of a reason not to recommend you try it out. You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.

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Verizon and Samsung said on Tuesday they have completed a fully virtualised 5G data session over C-band spectrum — from 4GHz to 8GHz — in a live network environment. The session was done in preparation for the US telco’s expansion of its 5G Ultra Wideband serivce, its mmWave service, which will use its newly acquired C-band spectrum. The pair’s trials were conducted over Verizon’s network in Texas, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. They used Samsung’s virtualised RAN (vRAN) solution, which is built on its own software stack, and C-band 64T64R Massive MIMO radio in coordination with Verizon’s virtualised core. The trials achieved speeds level with that of traditional hardware equipment, the pair claimed. “We have been driving the industry to large scale virtualisation using the advanced architecture we have built into our network from the core to the far edge. This recent accomplishment paves the way for a more programmable, efficient, and scalable 5G network,” Verizon senior vice president of technology planning Adam Koeppe said. See also: The winner in the war on Huawei is SamsungAccording to Verizon and Samsung, virtualisation is “critical” for delivering services promised by advanced 5G networks, such as massive scale IoT solutions, autonomous robotics in manufacturing, and smart city solutions.

Cloud-native virtualised architecture will offer greater flexibility, faster delivery of services, greater scalability, and improved cost efficiency in networks, paving the way for wider scale mobile edge computing and network slicing, they said. The technology will also allow Verizon to rapidly respond to customers’ varied latency and computing needs, they added. By the first quarter of next year, the US telco said it expects to put its new 5G C-band spectrum into service in 46 markets, with its 5G Ultra Wideband service to be made available to 100 million people. Coverage will expand to 175 million people over 2022 and 2023, the company said.  When the remaining C-band spectrum is cleared for use, Verizon will offer its 5G Ultra Wideband service on C-band to 250 million people in 2024, it added. Last year, Samsung signed a deal worth $6.6 billion to supply Verizon with network equipment. RELATED COVERAGE More

Application security company F5 Networks delivered better-than-expected third quarter financial results, reporting non-GAAP net income of $169 million, or $2.76 per diluted share, on revenue of non-GAAP $586 million.Third quarter fiscal year 2021 GAAP revenue was $652 million, beating Wall Street’s expectations of $623 million and earnings of $2.45 per share.Also: F5 to acquire multi-cloud security software maker Volterra for $500 million, raises financial outlook F5 planned to deliver revenue in the range of $620 million to $650 million for Q3, with non-GAAP earnings in the range of $2.36 to $2.54 per diluted share, according to a statement from the company. The company announced earlier this year that it would acquire distributed multi-cloud application security and load-balancing software company Volterra of Santa Clara, California. The move raised revenue expectations for Q2 up to $623 million. F5 shares are up .23% at $192.62 in after-hours trading.For the current quarter, F5 expects to deliver revenue in the range of $660 million to $680 million, with non-GAAP earnings in the range of $2.68 to $2.80 per diluted share.

François Locoh-Donou, F5’s President and CEO, said “robust software growth and resilient demand for systems drove 12% GAAP revenue growth in our third quarter, and 11% revenue growth versus the prior year’s third quarter non-GAAP revenue.””Customers’ traditional applications are generating more revenue and more engagement than ever before. At the same time, customers also are accelerating adoption of modern application architectures, like Kubernetes, for new applications,” he added. 

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One of the questions I’m asked most often by readers is: Why do VPNs have to be so expensive? Many of these folks say they loath to add yet another fee to their monthly bills or that they are operating on a limited budget. Must read: The best free VPNs: Why they don’t exist

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Many have read my advice about staying away from free VPNs because it’s unclear how those vendors make their money or even whether or not your data is being mined as it’s transiting across the free VPN providers’ networks. So, they understand it’s better when VPN vendors make their money from their customers rather than from shadowy marketing or even criminal enterprises. That said, some of my readers have asked me whether there are cheap VPN providers we can recommend. Yes, with some caveats. First, what is “cheap?” For some folks, cheap might be under $10 per month. While for others, cheap is under a buck. Since I didn’t find any VPN deals for less than a dollar a month, I’m arbitrarily defining “cheap” as less than $2 per month. At that price point, we’re entering something of uncharted space. I’m going to “recommend” 4 services that are all between $1 and $2 a month. The gotcha is that I haven’t tested any of these services, and I haven’t found much in the way of in-depth reviews other than listings in “best of” lists. So, you pays your money and you takes your chance. With that caution out of the way, let’s take a little walk on the wild side.  

$1.67 per month (pay $60.12 at point of purchase)

Best price: $60.12 for three years ($1.67 per month)Trial: 30-day refund guaranteePlatforms: Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and moreSimultaneous connections: 5Kill switch: YesLogging: NoneCountries: 62Let’s kick this off with VyprVPN (there’s no “e” in Vypr). VyprVPN is a service of Golden Frog, a company founded by serial Internet founders Ron and Carolyn Yokubaitis. Golden Frog is incorporated in Switzerland.Of the super-cheap VPNs we’re including in this article, VyprVPN is the one with the most flexibility for business customers. The company offers a full SDK to integrate VyprVPN into other, third-party proprietary solutions.One such customer of that SDK is QNAP, one of the NAS vendors we reviewed particularly positively. We found this quote from Y.T. Lee, Vice President QNAP, particularly relevant because it speaks to the performance of the VyprVPN network.”We selected VyprVPN due to the performance and speed of their network. Golden Frog has invested in its back-end infrastructure and is the only personal VPN provider that manages its entire infrastructure without third parties. They have an outstanding software development team who creates intuitive applications, and we couldn’t be more excited to offer VyprVPN to our customers.”

View Now at VyprVPN

$1 per month (pay $24 at point of purchase)

Best price: $24 for two years ($1.00 per month)Trial: 30-day refund guaranteePlatforms: No apps(!)Simultaneous connections: UnspecifiedKill switch: No ideaLogging: NoneCountries: 8Our next contender is LimeVPN, and… I’m not entirely sure about these folks. They claim a $1 per monthnth service on their home page, which would make them the least expensive on this list. But when you click the ‘Join Now’ button, that offer is nowhere to be found. It turns out you first have to hit the ‘Join Now’ button, see the more expensive offering, click into that offering, and then sign up for the 2-year plan. Whew. Way to promote your best plan, LimeVPN!We also couldn’t find out anything about who was providing this service. Their “about” page says, “LimeVPN is a team of skilled IT professionals with more than 10 years experience in the IT industry.” So is that 10 folks with a year of experience each? Or 2 guys with 5 years of experience each? Or does each worker have a decade of experience? It doesn’t matter, ’cause this service is cheap, cheap, cheap.On the plus side, the company says it uses 256-bit encryption with a 2048-bit key (over the usual VPN protocols). Interestingly, the company also states, “No 3rd parties – Our own VPN servers, our DNS, our code, our engineers.” It could be interesting if they control their own servers, even if they only operate in eight countries.Also, the service doesn’t come with any of the usual VPN apps. The service does have a hefty help library, but you’ll need to find and configure your own VPN programs to use LimeVPN. So, there’s that.

View Now at LimeVPN

$1.39 per month (pay $50.04 at point of purchase)

Best price: $50.04 for three years ($1.39 per month)Trial: 30-day refund guaranteePlatforms: Windows, MacOS, Android, iOSSimultaneous connections: Unlimited*Kill switch: YesLogging: Payment information onlyCountries: 27Atlas VPN is the second least expensive VPN service we found. That said, we were kind of (happily) surprised that the company has enlisted the services of an outside company to perform a security audit. That’s good practice.Compared to higher-priced VPN providers, the number of locations offered by Atlas VPN is pretty small. The company operates about 500 servers, compared to the tens of thousands of servers operated by its more expensive competitors.We did like that the company uses a warrant canary, which helps you know whether or not the company has been asked to cooperate with government investigations. Atlas VPN is a service of Peakstart Technologies Inc, a US company registered in Delaware.*Keep in mind that “unlimited” is never unlimited. If you push their system or otherwise impact service performance, you’re likely to be limited

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$1.64 per month (pay 59.04 at point of purchase)

Best price: $59.04 for three years ($1.64 per month)Trial: 30-day refund guaranteePlatforms: Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and moreSimultaneous connections: Unlimited*Kill switch: YesLogging: NoneCountries: 79According to its ‘About Page’, ZenMate is a German company founded by Simon Specka and his buddy Markus. The company was incubated in the Axel Springer Plug and Play Accelerator and looks to have some German venture capital funding.In terms of the client experience, the service offers simple one-click apps that are clean and well-designed. Additionally, there are installation guides for using ZenMate with smart TVs, routers, and gaming platforms.I do have some concerns due to an expose posted by my CNET colleague Rae Hodge. In it, she points out that ZenMate was purchased in 2018 by notorious scareware provider Kape Technologies. The company claims it’s given up its evil ways, but before installing ZenMate on your systems, I recommend you read Rae’s article.*Same caution as above. “Unlimited” is never truly unlimited.

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So there you go. Four VPNs that cost less than $2 per month when you buy 2 or 3 years at once. If you have room in your budget or you want to learn more about the benefits of VPN, see my complete guide:  Best VPN 2021: Top VPNs reviewed and compared.

If I have a VPN to my office, do I need a VPN service?

The VPN to your office will secure your link to your office. If you want to secure your link anywhere else, you’ll need a VPN service.

Should I use a VPN on my phone or tablet?

If it’s your data and you want it to be secure, yes. The same choices are valid regardless of what kind of device you use to transmit and receive data over the Internet.

Does a VPN slow down your connection?

Let’s be clear: Using a VPN does add a bit of a load on your computer and can often slow down your connection. That’s because your data is encrypted, decrypted, and sent through intermediate servers. Game responsiveness might suffer. If you’re a first-person shooter player, you might have enough lag to lose the shot. That said, both computers and VPNs have gotten much faster. When I first used a VPN, every… thing…slowed… down… to… an… unbearable… c-r-a-w-l. But now, the negative impact is almost unnoticeable, and at least one service we spotlight below (Hotspot Shield) actually increased performance, making it one of the fastest VPNs we’ve seen.Also, most (but not all!) of the VPN providers we spotlight limit the number of devices you can connect simultaneously, so you may have to pick and choose which home devices connect.

What’s the best free VPN service?

We’re spotlighting paid services in this article, although some of them offer a free tier. I generally don’t recommend free VPN services because I don’t consider them secure. Think about this: Running a good VPN service requires hundreds of servers worldwide and a ton of networking resources. It’s boo-coo expensive. If you’re not paying to support that infrastructure, who is? Probably advertisers or data miners. If you use a free service, your data or your eyeballs will probably be sold, and that’s never a good thing. After all, you’re using a VPN, so your data remains secure. You wouldn’t want to have all that data go to some company to sift through — it completely defeats the purpose.Now, before you choose a VPN service, free or paid, I want to make it clear that no one tool can guarantee your privacy. First, anything can be hacked. But more to the point, a VPN protects your data from your computer to the VPN service. It doesn’t protect what you put on servers. It doesn’t protect your data from the VPN provider’s VPN servers to whatever site or cloud-based application you’re using. It doesn’t give you good passwords or multifactor authentication. Privacy and security require you to be diligent throughout your digital journey, and VPNs, while quite helpful, are not a miracle cure.

You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.

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Contentsquare, which has developed a digital experience analytics platform that enables businesses to track online customer behavior, has acquired Upstride, a French startup specializing in improving machine learning performance. Terms of the deal were not released.

With the acquisition, Contentsquare gains Upstride’s deep learning experts to help it further drive innovation in ML and artificial intelligence.Fourteen Upstride engineers will join Contentsquare, bringing their experience of working for leading tech companies such as Facebook, Samsung, GoPro, and Nvidia. Meanwhile, Upstride CEO Gary Roth will fill a strategic role on Contentsquare’s operations team.Upstride brings AI talent to ContentsquarePrior to the acquisition, Upstride was developing technology that enhances the learning capabilities of optimization algorithms, particularly neural networks. The startup created a new data type called Hycor, which exploits geometric features present in data and enhances information representation. Hycor can be integrated within existing pipelines and is used by AI builders, such as Nvidia’s CUDA Deep Neural Network library (cuDNN) and Intel’s OneAPI.In 2020, Upstride introduced an open-source image-classification application programming interface. The API allows deep learning experts to save time by simplifying the most common task in computer vision: image classification. It improves accuracy, data efficiency, and power consumption of neural networks.Contentsquare helps companies improve experiences across the web, mobile, and applications by analyzing people’s digital interactions. Leading brands — including industries such as retail, telecom, and travel — use the company’s platform to collect key insights to create better user experiences. In the past year, Contentsquare revealed plans to further invest in AI both through product development and acquisitions. In October 2020, Contentsquare made two acquisitions. It bought web performance-monitoring company Dareboost and an accessibility software company, Adapt My Web. It also launched several new products and expanded its portfolio with 11 patents.

This acquisition adds to the AI capabilities Contentsquare has stockpiled and enables it to accelerate innovation with a deeper talent pool of AI and machine learning experts. AI talent is scarce and adding a group of talented people through an acquisition helps Contentsquare fast track innovation. Contentsquare closed a massive round of funding This news follows a couple of other big announcements for the company. In May, Contentsquare raised $500 million Series E funding. The investment led by SoftBank gave Contentsquare additional financing to further develop its platform and expand the company, adding 1,500 new hires around the world. The latest round comes a year after Contentsquare’s $190 million Series D funding, bringing the total to $810 million and valuing Contentsquare at $2.8 billion.By combining forces, Contentsquare and Upstride will “start pushing new AI boundaries together [with] some of the most creative and innovative minds in the tech industry,” according to Contentsquare CEO Jonathan Cherki. Contentsquare plans to do so by filling 500 new positions during the next three years in product development, focusing specifically on intent-based optimization, cookieless and predictive capabilities, merchandising insights, and content performance.Businesses need to prepare for an increasingly cookieless world In June the company announced a tool that enables businesses to access customer insights without having to use cookies. This lets organizations turn off first- and third-party cookies but still be able to create personalized experiences by analyzing the behaviors and actions of the users. This feature will become increasingly important as the industry moves to a cookieless world and is central to Contentsquare’s intent-based approach to personalization. Owning and controlling customer relationships is a significant factor in achieving market leadership. Historically, this was done using cookies placed on desktop or mobile browsers, but these are quickly going away. Safari and Firefox already have removed them, and Google Chrome will do so by 2023. Also, Apple’s IDFA is like a cookie and will require the user’s consent later in 2021. This impending “cookie apocalypse” removes the ability to track shoppers anonymously. This makes it harder for retailers to acquire and retain customers because it will be more difficult to push ads. The new tool can help Contentsquare customers move to this cookieless world without a significant loss of intelligence or insights. More

I can’t tell you how pissed I am. I’d say it’s all my fault, but it’s not entirely my fault. There was a cascading failure of errors, and the result is that three years of contacts went poof. All gone. Unrecoverable. Back story

The ultimate guide to Gmail backup

Want to make sure you have a local or backup copy of all that mission-critical business and personal history in your Gmail archives? David Gewirtz takes you through an array of options.

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So here’s how it happened. My Gmail account has years of accumulated contacts. When I got my latest iPhone, these were downloaded to my iPhone. They were stored on the iPhone in an All Google contacts group (not the iCloud group). My phone was apparently set up so that when I added a new contact on my iPhone, it went into the All Google group instead of the iCloud group. I had no contacts in iCloud. At some point, contacts added on the iPhone and in my desktop Gmail stopped syncing. I did not know this. I use Gmail on my phone every day, and I’ve had no problem with it. So I never suspected that my contacts weren’t syncing properly. I almost never use my iPhone contacts on my desktop computer. After all, I use the iPhone contacts to text and call, and that’s all been done on the iPhone. Over the past month or so, I’ve been updating my Apple hardware. While testing out new configurations, I noticed that my iPhone contacts never showed up in the Mac Contacts app. It didn’t bother me that much, but I decided to explore it because it was a mystery — and I don’t really like mysteries.

There was one other symptom. For some time now, my iPhone has been intermittently spitting out a CardDAV synchronization error screen. CardDAV is a data exchange protocol for exchanging address book information. I was never sure what was causing the error, or what apps I might be using that needed CardDAV.  I didn’t realize that even though my Gmail calendar and mail sync using Google’s protocol, my Gmail contacts were trying unsuccessfully to sync using CardDAV. It never dawned on me that all three elements of Gmail wouldn’t sync using the same mechanism. So, let’s recap. First, all the contacts I added on my phone were not stored in the iCloud group, but in an All Google group. That group does not sync to iCloud, and is not backed up by the iPhone’s iCloud backup system. That group also doesn’t backup to Google any longer, because the CardDAV authentication broke at some point. Now, here’s another gotcha. You can’t just export contacts from secondary groups on your iPhone. You can export individual vCards, but you can’t do something like a tab-delimited data dump. You also can’t transfer contacts from one iPhone Contacts group to another. My attempt to fix it made it worse With me so far? I had all my contacts on the iPhone, but they were locked into an All Google group that I couldn’t move or export. This week, after digging into this situation on and off for a while, I realized that the CardDAV error was most likely related to my Gmail contacts. Figuring this out took me a while because the CardDAV error simply said there was an authentication error, but not what it was trying and failing to authenticate. Once I figured it out, I tried to fix it. There’s an “account enabled” button in Settings for Google contacts. I turned that off, thinking that perhaps I could fix any account-related authentication errors and toggle it back on.  I never expected it to be destructive, and there were no warnings when toggling it off. Once off, the account was then listed in Settings as Inactive. I went back to my Contacts and noticed that my contacts were gone. In fact, the All Google group was gone. At this point, I wasn’t yet worried. There had been no warning that data was going to be destroyed and, besides, I’d been (I thought) backing everything up to iCloud. But when I went back to the Accounts screen and turned my Google Contacts back on, all the local data was gone. Just gone. In a bit of a panic, I tried figuring out how to restore those contacts. With no useful ideas, I called Apple Support. The Apple guy couldn’t seem to understand that I had had a bucket of contacts on the iPhone that had never made it to Google’s servers. He tried getting me to put my password in on the Google contacts account screen, but that didn’t work. It turns out that to use Google contacts on the iPhone, you need to authenticate CardDAV with a special Google App Password (you generate these one-use passwords in the Google Manage Your Account screen). I put that password into my account screen and, lo and behold, my Gmail contacts were mirrored down to the iPhone’s All Google group.

And here’s where there’s not enough coffee in the world to make it better. My old desktop contacts were now in the All Google group on my iPhone. But all the contacts I had manually added into my iPhone over the past three years were gone forever. I moved to Oregon three years ago. I can’t find a single Oregon contact in my Google contacts or my iPhone contacts. Everyone’s contact information for everyone I met in the last three years, all the services and contractors I’ve worked with, everyone I added over the last three years — is gone. Learn from my mistakes So what’s the moral of this story? Don’t be like David. Check to make sure your contacts are syncing and backing up to another source. Don’t assume backups magically work. I’m about as anal as you can be when it comes to backup strategy, and if I can lose this valuable data, so can you. Learn from my mistake. Damn, I am so upset. Also, I think it makes sense to recommend you keep your Gmail contacts and your iPhone contacts separate. I have thousands upon thousands of Gmail contacts because every email correspondence I do adds a new contact. I don’t need all of those on my phone in my iPhone’s Contacts app. So I’m not going to sync my Google Contacts to my iPhone. Instead, I’m just going to use iCloud contacts and sync to iCloud and my Mac. What about you? Are you running fast and loose with your contacts? Do you have them backed up? Have you checked that they are, in fact, syncing the way they’re supposed to? Do you use iCloud contacts or Google contacts? Let us know in the comments below. And be nice and be kind. I don’t want to hear “you were stupid” criticisms a hundred times over. Waaah.

You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV. More

AT&T reported better-than-expected second quarter earnings due to 5G demand and customers upgrading their smartphones. The company also raised its outlook for 2021 after it added 789,000 net new postpaid phone subscribers, well ahead of estimates. AT&T’s report landed a day after Verizon reported strong results due as revenue from selling devices surged amid a 5G upgrade cycle. AT&T reported earnings of 21 cents a share on revenue of $44 billion, up 7.6% from a year ago. Adjusted non-GAAP earnings were 89 cents a share. Wall Street was looking for AT&T to report second quarter non-GAAP earnings of 79 cents a share on revenue $42.66 billion. AT&T also saw a strong quarter from HBO Max. AT&T is now forecasting HBO Max to end the year with 70 million to 73 million subscribers. ×att-q2-2021-overview.pngGoing forward AT&T is focusing on its wireless and broadband businesses as it plans to combine WarnerMedia with Discovery. AT&T said it added 789,000 postpaid phone net additions and 1,156,000 postpaid net adds across devices. AT&T’s mobility unit delivered operating income of $6 billion. Like Verizon, AT&T is seeing a pop from equipment revenue.

Jeffery McElfresh, CEO of AT&T Communications, said:We’ve been able to achieve and sustain taking share in multiple segments. It’s across the board. It’s not in any one particular segment. We’re growing in consumer. We’re growing in small business. We’re growing with our FirstNet position. We’re growing in enterprise.On the broadband front, AT&T said it added 246,000 AT&T Fiber net additions with broadband revenue up 8.3%.As for the outlook, AT&T said revenue growth for 2021 will be in the 2% to 3% range with adjusted earnings to grow in the low- to mid-single digit range. AT&T is also about to close a divestiture of DirecTV and that will cut 2021 revenue by $9 billion and EBITDA by $1 billion. The DirecTV sale will generate cash by about $7.8 billion.  By the numbers for the second quarter:Mobility revenue for the second quarter was $18.9 billion. Of that tally, equipment revenue was $4.6 billion, up 32% from a year ago. T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T battling it out over 5G download speedsAT&T lost 22,000 postpaid tablet and other branded computing device net subs. Postpaid phone only ARPU was $54.24, down 0.4% from a year ago due to promotions. AT&T’s business unit saw wireline revenue of $6.1 billion, down 4% from a year ago. AT&T and Google Cloud extend 5G partnership with new enterprise servicesThe company said 9 million business customer locations are within 1,000 of its fiber. WarnerMedia added 2.8 million US HBO Max and HBO subscriber net adds to end with 47 million subs in the US and 67.5 million globally. Average revenue per customer was $11.90. More

Image: NBN
The company responsible for the National Broadband Network has said in response to Senate Estimates Questions on Notice that it has 119,000 services that cannot hit its 25Mbps obligation. However, NBN added that 80% of those on services are able to hit 20Mbps. “We recognise that we have more work to do to deliver wholesale download speeds of at least 25Mbps and we are undertaking this work as a priority,” an NBN spokesperson said. “To put the whole picture in perspective, the proportion of premises not receiving the minimum peak 25Mbps download rate represents approximately 1.4% of active services across the NBN network as at 15 July 2021.” One of the reasons cited for why those services might not be able to hit the minimum speeds was fibre-to-the-node (FttN) premises behind an 18-month co-existence period, where FttN speeds are dialled down to continue allowing legacy services, such as ADSL, to operate. During that time, only 12Mbps has been guaranteed for FttN connections. At the end of December, NBN said it found 1.3% of FttN lines could not hit the minimum once co-existence ended. The last co-existence periods are set to end on June 30, 2022, and as of May 28, 39.3% of nodes have had the co-existence profile removed.

“Once all legacy services are removed from the area, co-existence can end, enabling the node to be reconfigured for more optimised performance of local NBN services. Other common issues include line faults and in-home wiring issues in customers’ premises, which we are working with retailers and customers to address,” the spokesperson added. In response to other questions, NBN said not a single active FttN service has been moved back to satellite due to performance of a line. “While it is possible that some locations that had been planned for an FTTN service were moved into a satellite area during the design phase of the rollout, the number of premises would be negligible,” the company said. The company also spelled out how its ServiceMax Go (SMAX-Go) app for technicians interacts with its ServiceNow, ServiceMax, and Oracle back-ends, as well as the cost of some of the system. “The cost to develop the ServiceMax (includingSMAX-Go app) component of the system architecture to support the new field contracts under Unify was AU$13.3m total, over FY19, FY20 & FY21,” NBN said. “SMAX-Go went live in Victoria and South Australia on 14 April 2021, followed by New South Wales, Tasmania and Australian Capital Territory on 28 April 2021. The app is yet to go live in Western Australia, Northern Territory and Queensland.” During a hearing in May, NBN said the problems technicians were experiencing when the app launched in NSW was because the system was overloaded. “What happened, when literally it was rolled out in New South Wales, the platform went down and we then had, due to literally the doubling of our workforce on the system, we then add the issues around the functionality where it wasn’t syncing properly, so therefore it caused a poor experience,” COO Kathrine Dyer said. Dyer said the software was hit by a trio of factors: A two-day platform outage that hit NBN and technicians; it wasn’t syncing; and it was updating its functionality. “We were getting agile-based feedback from the sub-contractors in relation to the usability, and we were working with them, based on the feedback we were getting, to streamline the usability as we were rolling out the app,” Dyer said. NBN also revealed some of the details on its 260 services that form part of the Commonwealth’s AU$2 million alternative voice trial, with that number broken down into 150 satellite services, 80 low-band fixed wireless services, and 30 on the traditional fixed wireless service. The low-band fixed wireless trials are taking place at Coffin Bay in South Australia and Robinvale in Victoria. “For the trial, NBN Co has scientific licences that allow it to use spectrum in the 850MHz band (band 26). It does not currently use this spectrum for delivering its non-trial services,” it said. “The spectrum has a greater propagation distance, meaning services can be delivered over a larger area from a single fixed wireless tower than using NBN Co’s standard fixed wireless technology and spectrum.” Related Coverage More