Networking

When I started using computers, my computer was an IBM 360 mainframe, and I worked with it using a 3270 terminal. I was very lucky. My alternative was to do all my work with 80-column IBM Hollerith-style punch cards. Then, CP/ M, Apple, and IBM PCs starting in the late 70s and early 80s, changed everything. Computing power moved from distant DEC PDP-11 and VAX mini-computers IBM Big Iron to your desktop.  Forty years later, your IT work is moving more. This time, it’s moving from your PC to cloud-based Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offerings such as Windows 365 and Chrome OS.

I know some of you hate this idea. Too bad. With Microsoft and Google both backing their own distinct takes on DaaS, tomorrow’s desktop will be living mostly on the cloud and not on top of your desk. That said, the idea never really went away. After company, such as Sun and Oracle with the Sun Ray, company after company tried to keep remote desktops alive while  Lantronix, Aten, and Raritan are all still producing keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM) over IP that enables you to run multiple remote machines from your desktop. Other approaches, such as thin-client computing, which runs off a central server’s resources, still live on. For example, Dell will still happily sell you Wyse Thin Client hardware. Heck, you can still even buy dumb terminals, such as the ADM-3A, Televideo 922, and my beloved DEC VT-102, if you look for one hard enough. Why? Because much as you may love your PC, many managers still love the idea of central control. Rather than trust you with a $1000 PC on your desk, which at any moment you may infect with malware or waste your day on playing Fortnite, they’d rather you spent your time securely working on your spreadsheet. You know, if we’re honest, they have a point. And so it is that from terminals to Windows 365, the DaaS lives on. Now, let’s take a closer look at how this has, is now, and will play on in the future.YesterdayBack when I sunk my teeth into computing, dumb terminals were all we had. And, compared to flipping switches and feeding cards into an IBM 1442 card reader and hole punch, they were much better. Even my TI-Silent 700, a dumb terminal that used a built-in dot matrix printer and heat-sensitive paper for its “interface”, was an improvement over cards. Today dumb terminals live in businesses and agencies that will never, ever pay their technical debt. The IRS, for example, still uses, when I last checked, some dumb terminals for its antique COBOL programs running on equally old IBM mainframes. 

Good news, though! The IRS hopes to have modernized its systems by 2026. And, you wonder why your tax refunds are late! But, except for dinosaurs like the IRS, we’re never going back to dumb terminals.With the rise of fat graphical desktop operating systems such as Windows and OS/2, you might have thought that remote computing would have shrunk to almost nothing. You’d be wrong.As early as 1989, former IBM operating system guru Ed Iacobucci decided it would be possible even with networks limited to 10Mbps to run Windows remotely. So he founded Citrix to see if he could make this idea pay. He did.Rather than fight with Microsoft, Iacobucci partnered with the guys from Redmond to make sure its remote desktop take on MS-DOS and Windows would work. And, he also wanted to make sure he wouldn’t be overwhelmed by Microsoft in a legal battle. It worked. In 1992, Iacobucci persuaded Microsoft to license Citrix technology for Windows NT Server 4.0. This led to Microsoft’s first remote desktop product: Windows Terminal Server Edition.Unlike many companies, which tried to partner with Microsoft, Citrix was and still is successful. Today, with products such as Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Citrix Managed Desktops, Citrix is still profiting from its approach to remote Windows desktops to the tune of several billion dollars a year.While Citrix was winning by partnering with Microsoft, Oracle took a very different approach, thin-client computing. This would fail for Oracle, but the concept of thin-client computing lives on. In 1993, Tim Negris, then Oracle’s VP of Server Marketing, and Larry Ellison, Oracle’s God-King CEO, came up with the term “thin client” to described dedicated terminals with more local smarts than a dumb terminal, but which still relied on a server for their real computing power. Such systems, which were also called network computers. Thin clients still live on in call centers, single-task worker offices, and highly security-conscious businesses. Companies including IGEL, ClearCube, and Teradici still offer thin-client systems to niche and vertical businesses. Oracle finally gave up on thin-client hardware. They found there simply wasn’t a big enough market for terminals, which did nothing but talk to Oracle DBMSs. Traces of this Oracle initiative lives on in Oracle’s Instant Client software line.  TodayAs first local area networks and then Internet speeds grew faster, interest developed in a variety of other remote desktop approaches. Instead of running programs on a server, these offered a hybrid approach of server and client-based computing resources. These remote desktop programs enable you to see and control a network-connected PC as if you were sitting in front of it. While remote desktop software has specialized uses, such as real-time collaborative work, technical support, and demonstrations, you can also use them to use remote software on your local PC. Remote desktops are both specialized programs for running desktops remotely and protocols and built-in operating system functionality for the same purpose. For the former, there are such programs as TeamViewer, Splashtop, and VNC Connect. There are also specialized remote desktop programs. These include GoToAssist, LogMeIn Rescue, and FixMe.IT. As their names suggest, they’re all about technical support. Then, there are the operating systems, such as Windows with the often renamed  Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection and Linux with a variety of programs. The Linux remote desktop programs include Remmina, TigerVNC, and Vinagre. Windows uses its proprietary Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to run virtual Windows sessions. While RDP-based programs only work on Windows, RDP clients enable you to run remote Windows sessions from almost any operating system. RDP is the descendent of Citrix and Microsoft’s Terminal Server. Today, Citrix supports both RDP and its own more network-efficient protocol, HDX. Citrix’s current family of applications, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, all use HDX. As for Linux, Unix, and macOS remote desktops, they almost all use the open-source Virtual Network Computing (VNC) protocol and its related programs. This is a graphical desktop sharing system. It uses the Remote Frame Buffer (RFB) protocol to transfer the desktop from a server to a PC or thin-client computer. So, what’s the difference between these two main approaches? Well, let’s start with what they have in common:Both enable you to access computers remotely.   Both require client-side and server-side software to work. And with both, the server must be configured to facilitate access and to deal with credentials. Both rely on peer-to-peer communication. Both support security protocols and provide user administration tools.But then they separate their courses.  Besides the obvious, RDP is proprietary, and VNC is open-source; their differences include:You and other users are logged into the server with RDP, whether it’s a Windows 10 PC, Windows Server 2019 server, or an Azure operating system instance. VNC, on the other hand, captures the desktop rendered on a remote desktop. The VNC client, or viewer, allows you to share the VNC server’s virtual desktop screen, mouse, and keyboard. In short,  VNC is a screen-sharing tool.RDP typically is faster, while VNC is more secure. Since both performance and security vary depending on your configuration, this is only a rough rule of thumb. Today/TomorrowAll the approaches above have several core problems. The first is they’re all bandwidth hungry. Users eternally complain about how much slower their remote desktops are than their local PCs. The second is that while the client-side can get so thin that there’s such a thing as zero-client desktops where there’s no local storage at all, it still requires specialized software or firmware to make it work. It may look like when, for example, you use Windows 10 Remote Desktop Connection to help a buddy fix his Windows 10 PC that there’s nothing to it; there’s actually a lot going on under the hood to make this work. 

Finally, remote desktops don’t tend to scale well. For example, when you use an RDP or VNC approach, you often run a virtual machine (VM) for every remote desktop instance. These eat up server resources, whether your servers are physical or cloud-based like an elephant does peanuts.The keyword here is “cloud.” Clouds are all about automating, adding and removing compute, storage, and network services to meet your workload demands. So, just over a decade ago, Google reasoned that since it already had multiple popular regular business Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings such as Google Docs and Gmail, why not create a Linux-based thin operating system, Chrome OS, to access them? So, it was that Chromebooks were born.But, there was another aspect to the birth of Chromebooks. Google also worked out that the web browser itself was enough of an interface that there was no need for a specialized remote desktop client. The browser itself, Chrome, was more than enough. Thus, Chromebooks have been slowly but at an ever-increasing pace, becoming a major “desktop” player. Sure, traditional Windows continues to rule the desktop, but have you looked at its numbers lately? In 2021’s first quarter, Windows dropped to 75% of the global PC market from more than 80% in 2020, by IDC’s count. Windows hasn’t had such a small share of the desktop market since the 1990s. On the other hand, Chromebook shipments soared by 276% year-over-year from 2020 to 2021. True, its 1st quarter 2021’s 12 million unit sales are still way behind Windows laptop and PC sales of 84 million units for the same quarter; it’s not insignificant either.True, the COVID-19 pandemic which forced schools to use Chromebooks relying on Chromebooks, had a major effect in making Chromebooks popular. But, while the Coronavirus may finally fade into the background, the change to a work-from-home and hybrid work business world isn’t going to go away. Chromebooks, which tend to be cheaper than their Windows counterparts, are proving very attractive to business users. They also have the advantage that if your Chromebook gets run over by a truck, you only need to buy a new one, and you’re back in business again without a word of lost work. Finally, since they’re built for security thanks to their built-in sandboxing, Chromebooks are also attractive to CISOs. They’re also easy to manage remotely. In short, Chromebooks continue to grow in both the education and business world. Will they challenge Windows 10 and 11? Not anytime soon, but like Macs, they’ll grow into a substantial share of the overall “desktop” market.TomorrowI have seen the future of the desktop, and its name is Windows 365. With apologies to Jon Landau and Bruce Springsteen.  This Microsoft DaaS move has been coming for years. Yes, Windows has had remote and virtual desktops for even longer, but this is different. 

With Windows 365, you’ll be able to stream all your personalized applications, tools, data, and settings from the cloud across any device. And it means any, including Chromebooks, Macs, Linux PCs, Android devices, and even iPads.  No matter what you’re running, you’ll get the same Windows experience. Well. Maybe. Microsoft also says Windows 365 will run better when hosted on a Windows system. What exactly will that mean? Stay tuned, and we’ll find out. It also means, said Wangui McKelvey, Microsoft 365’s General Manager, “You can pick up right where you left off because the state of your Cloud PC remains the same, even when you switch devices.”Microsoft claims, of course, that this last feature is brand new. It’s not. You’ve been able to do that with Chrome OS since day one. But, it’s a major shift for Windows. It also shows that Microsoft is taking the threat of Chrome OS seriously and that the people from Redmond also believe that the future belongs to hybrid work. This is a killer feature when your staffers may be working from their kid’s Chromebook over the weekend, their Mac when they’re at the office on Monday through Wednesday, and their corporate Windows laptop when they’re on the road for a business trip.What’s different about Windows 365 from what has gone before is that it vastly simplifies the virtualisation process while it’s built on Azure Virtual Desktop. It will handle all the setup details for you. In other words, it’s going to act more like how you expect a cloud service to act. You ask for more resources or set it up, so more resources are made available automatically,  without worrying about the details.For instance, thanks to a Twitter screenshot, we know that a small business with up to 300 users can pay $31 per user per month for a 2vCPU, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage Windows 365 instance. This SKU also comes with Office apps, Outlook and OneDrive; Microsoft Teams; Visual Studio, Power BI, and Dynamics 365. The administrators can also scale the processing power as needed. Say it turns out that the programmer using Visual Studio needs more vCPUs; you can easily give them those extra CPU horses.  It also has tools to monitor the overall performance to make sure your users are getting the best experience.  As Microsoft puts it, “you can also upgrade them at the touch of a button, which is immediately applied without missing a beat. Our new Watchdog Service also continually runs diagnostics to help to keep connections up and running at all times. If a diagnostic check fails, we’ll alert you and even give suggestions for how to correct the issue.”All of this is much easier than the old-school ways of setting up virtual desktops and servers, with, of course, the exception of Chrome OS. Will this next generation of remote desktops put an end to PCs? No, there will be niches, such as gaming, video editing, and programming, where you’ll need all the power you can get on a local PC. But, just as many users have abandoned home PCs for their smartphones, many businesses will leave traditional PCs behind for their office workers. And, so we will have come full circle. We started with mainframes, and dumb terminals, then moved to PCs, and now, thanks to the combination of the cloud and the web, we’re heading back to a centralized managed computing paradigm. I, for one, am going to be very interested in seeing how this all works out. Brace yourselves people, I may still not have a clear idea how this will all work out, but I know for certain that major change is coming to the office desktop. Related Stories:

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Samsung Networks vice president and head of advanced system design lab Jeongho Park 
Image: Samsung
A Samsung executive has claimed the role of virtualised RAN (vRAN) technology in wireless networks will continue to grow even when telcos move onto 6G and beyond. The claim comes days after Verizon and Samsung announced the completion of a fully virtualised 5G data session over C-band spectrum, from 4GHz to 8GHz. Samsung is currently the network equipment provider for the US telcos’ 5G network deployment, having signed a $6.6 billion supply contract last year.”Samsung has been partners with Verizon for a long time,” Samsung Networks vice president and head of advanced system design lab Jeongho Park told ZDNet.”Some years ago, when vRAN was just beginning to gain traction, Verizon expressed their desire to shift to vRAN. When we received this request, we were already preparing to launch vRAN. We began making preparations to launch a virtualised distributed unit around 2018, having already developed a virtualised central unit prior to that for a full vRAN solution.” Samsung launched its first “fully” virtualised 5G RAN last year, which includes a virtualised distributed unit for its virtualised central unit that went into service a year prior in 2019. “vRAN requires technology, optimisation, and commercialisation experience. We believe Samsung is the only vendor that meets these three requirements, putting us ahead against other companies by 1.5 years in this space,” the Samsung lab head claimed.Samsung has been one of the more aggressive companies in rolling out vRAN solutions among the major 5G network equipment vendors. Networking powerhouse Ericsson, which calls its vRAN solution Cloud RAN, currently has plans to roll out the first stages of the service in the fourth quarter this year. Nokia, meanwhile, made its full vRAN solution commercially available last year and is trialling the technology with US telco AT&T. The company is also planning to roll out the solution with C-band support later this year. 

Huawei, which is still the world’s largest 5G network equipment vendor despite US sanctions, has been the least active in promoting the technology. This is likely due to most carriers outside of China linking it with Open RAN, a term used loosely by different organisations and a concept that the Chinese giant has not been willing to embrace so far.’Flexibility is a big advantage of vRAN’The way vRAN operates is that it delivers network functions as software instead of hardware. Instead of using proprietary hardware-based baseband units and central units, which is what traditional RAN does, vRAN has virtualised distributed units and virtualised central units — software running on commercial off-the-shelf (COST) hardware. The core network also runs on software.  Through this software, vRAN offers the same network functions as its fully-hardware counterparts in traditional RAN, but virtually. Samsung has touted that this “full” vRAN solution, which means it offers the distributed unit, the central unit, and the core in software allows it to provide flexibility.”Before vRAN, mobile network operators received dedicated hardware from a specific vendor. In effect, operators would feel, in a way, dependent on the specific vendor. But in vRAN, operators can now use hardware from company A and software from company B as they wish like Legos. This flexibility for operators is the big advantage of vRAN,” the Samsung lab head said. According to Park, this gives operators two benefits: They can pool their network resources efficiently, which in turn, leads to lower costs.”In traditional RAN, a dedicated processor is used in the baseband unit to process the signals. But this processing power isn’t needed 24 hours a day. Some coverage areas may not need the full processing power. Processors installed on population-dense areas like Gangnam are usually made to handle the expected data traffic. But sometimes, one population-dense area may have intense data traffic while another similar area has almost no traffic. So this shows that you don’t need maximum specs for every processor. “In vRAN, software replaces the function of the processors. This software can determine when and where it wants to use its resources. We also offer an orchestrator solution that manages all the virtualised distributed units, which was previously done individually. This leads to an overall decrease in cost of ownership and operation cost,” he said. Samsung was a major part of South Korea’s 5G rollout in 2019 and has been attempting to emulate it outside of South Korea. Samsung and SK Telecom in 2019 developed a 5G SA switchboard prototype with a modular design where quantum security or high-pass filter modules could be added. 
Image: SK Telecom
A more ‘transparent’ network with O-RANThe purpose of vRAN, which is to give mobile operators more flexibility in choosing its vendors and managing networks, is also tied with O-RAN, Park claimed. O-RAN is a concept pushed forward by the telco industry and aimed at creating a multi-supplier RAN solution using hardware and software from different vendors that all use a common open interface. An O-RAN Alliance was formed by operators and equipment vendors in 2018 to develop this concept. The alliance sets the common specifications and standards for the concept. Chinese telcos and network equipment vendor ZTE are members, but Huawei is noticeably not part of the alliance.”Samsung’s vRAN solutions use open interface and O-RAN defined protocols. These are basically white boxes that guarantee transparency between blocks. Previously, in traditional RAN, when one specific vendor would provide its own software and hardware solution, the operator could not see what was going on inside them as the vendor would use its own protocol.”Operators believe this will increase their network security. They can now see the messages, that is the protocol, passing between the solutions provided by various vendors. So we believe vRAN’s use of O-RAN standards makes it quite attractive for operators,” the Samsung lab head said.Telcos around the world have so far shown various degrees of enthusiasm in adopting vRAN. Verizon and Rakuten Mobile in Japan have been some of the more vocal telcos that support the technology. Vodafone UK is also planning to deploy vRAN. Other telcos, meanwhile, have been more conservative in their attitude towards the technology. “Some operators believe vRAN is the right direction, while others are yet to adopt it. For now, vRAN is a very new and progressive space. I think it’s better to think of vRAN as one option among many that operators have for their network deployment, and Samsung has developed and is offering that option first compared to other companies,” Park said.At the same, the Samsung lab head said the company does expect more operators around the world to adopt vRAN.”There are operators in Asia that are showing interest in vRAN now. We feel that the overall attitude towards vRAN has turned positive over the past year. We believe that vRAN’s portion in the market will be much bigger five years down the road than it is now,” he said.vRAN present on x86, future could be GPUIt is also important to note that the global 5G network market is just beginning. In the US, though mmWave spectrum support has been deployed, telcos like Verizon are just now grouping it with C-band spectrum to expand coverage. In South Korea, telcos are yet to even deploy mmWave services. The increase in base stations and coverage will require  more computing power from networks going forward.Samsung’s vRAN solutions use x86 CPU on the COST servers, sometimes with accelerators. The Samsung lab head said while the processing needs would indeed increase for ultra-high spectrum from the wider bandwidth going forward, x86 CPU would be sufficient to handle this.”Bandwidth becomes wider and more complex as we move from C-band to mmWave. Networks will indeed need more computing power. But at Samsung, we believe CPU products launching up to next year can handle multiple times the workload of what they handle right now,””Many companies, including Samsung, are also considering applying GPU. But for now, our commercialization roadmap is drawn based on CPU. We are still looking at the pros and cons of GPU,” the Samsung lab head said.The evolution of cloud will also inevitably be tied with vRAN, Park noted. “Cloud groups processes into one place and is flexible. Its purpose corresponds with that of vRAN. We think in the future, there will be companies that offer vRAN in cloud form,” he added.RELATED COVERAGE More

Image: Getty Images
The veil on the Telstra monolith has been slightly lifted, with Telstra InfraCo announcing on Wednesday it would create a pair of carrier-neutral data centres in Sydney and Melbourne. While initially only available through Telstra Wholesale, the company said the centres would provide “greater flexibility for customers working with other carriers for their connectivity”. Depending on uptake of the offering, InfraCo could roll it out to another seven data centres, it added.”InfraCo data centres provide highly secure, reliable, and flexible environments for network operators and service providers, such as global carriers, internet service providers and over the top providers, to connect out to their business locations, facilities and other data centre operators,” said Telstra’s InfraCo Exchanges & Infrastructure executive Rachel Johnson-Kelly. “These Data Centres provide 100% power availability targets, which are backed by service levels and rebates. They use dual grid feeds with state-of-the-art equipment and support for high power densities, allowing customers to scale on request, without the need to re-configure powering requirements to deliver big data analytic services and peak workloads.” The company also said InfraCo would own or have renewable energy generation contracts equal to all the energy use used in its entire operations. Last year, Telstra as a whole was certified as carbon neutral, saying at the time it was difficult to purchase carbon offsets from local projects. See also: Blaming China is handy when trying to keep telco infrastructure away from Beijing

In November, Telstra announced it would be restructuring into fixed, tower, and service entities. The service entity would gain the bulk of Telstra, owning its retail business, active electronics and radio access network, spectrum, as well as offering services and products to customers. However, the existing Telstra corporate body and its debt would sit with InfraCo Fixed. It later said it would create an arm to hold its international assets. Telstra brought forward a AU$2.8 billion sale of part of its InfraCo Towers business last month after being approached by a consortium including the Future Fund, Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation, and Sunsuper. Once the deal is closed, which is expected to happen in the first quarter of fiscal year 2022, InfraCo Towers will have no debt and a 15-year deal with extension options for Telstra to use its infrastructure. Earlier in the year, InfraCo opened up its dark fibre network, offering 250 pre-defined paths across six state capitals that connected to 68 metro data centres, 78 NBN points of interconnect, and two cable landing stations. The company recently confirmed it was approached by the Australian government to purchase Digicel Pacific, with the government set to stump up “significant funding” for any transaction. Related Coverage More

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.

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$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.

View Now at ZenMate VPN

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