Blog

Security and privacy are core values, so we take them into account all the time, it's never a finished checkbox.

After a recent review of our systems by an enterprise security expert, I'm introducing a few new security/privacy things to my hosting services. They're all what I would consider 'security in depth' type measures - i.e. they're adding additional layers of security.

Since I'm due for a new physical server this summer, I'll take the opportunity to introduce some of these features first with the new server, after which I'll "backport" them to my existing services.

Pantheon (https://www.getpantheon.com/) has become the new standard of excellence in commercial Drupal hosting, and I like to use it as a basis of comparison for our hosting service. In other words, if we can't provide something better, then we shouldn't be doing it.

Many of you have contacted us with questions and concerns about complying with the new Federal Anti-Spam Legislation that comes into force on July 01 - 2014. Fortunately, CiviCRM can help meet many of these new requirements.

The newly discovered Heartbleed bug did affect our servers, which use OpenSSL for https websites.

We've made use of the upstream patches for our version of Linux and our tests confirm that the vulnerability is now closed.

I've just updated the code and documentation, and posted a blog over on the civicrm.org site. We're getting close to a full release.

Our first public release of the new iATS Payments extension for civicrm is now ready.

I've just created the extension node on civicrm, here: http://civicrm.org/extensions/iats-payments

And I've published the code over on github, here: https://github.com/adixon/ca.civicrm.iats

One of the services we're offering at Blackly is "Drupal and CiviCRM Hosting". My first thing I always say is: we're not running a hosting business. The reason I started hosting sites back in 2007 was because the other hosts I tried to use sucked and I decided I could do it better myself. Better means not only better direct experience for visitors to the sites, but less hassle during development and maintenance - i.e. less wasted developer time.