I have heard complaints that there is not enough ways to get a hold of our staff. Well there are now more ways to get a hold of us and yes actually speak to a human being.

You can see from our contact us page that we have now added some online options for chatting live online.

Also we now have a live person answering the phone 24/7 for sales questions. That means that if you get the urge to ask a question at 3AM in the morning then go ahead and give them a call.

I know a lot of people want to be able to call billing and talk directly with them. For legal reason we do not allow any calls to billing so that your personal details are only ever shared with the account owner. Everything can be documented and stored appropriately. If you have a credit card or something to submit to billing then the best way to get a hold of them is through email where they can provide you  a secure method of updating your payment.

What contact method do you prefer?

In just over 45 days we have gained 300+ twitter followers. If you are following be sure you read these posts…

• BlueFur Twitter Contest
• Fraser Valley Tweetup

Follow me on twitter if you want to be part of our community

To kick off the new year we are pushing out our Bandwidth Overload Sale.

Purchase a server in the next 72 hours and get a free Unmetered 10Mbps port. This means that you will not be capped by a monthly bandwidth limit.

These plans are good for anyone that is running a streaming radio station or have a high bandwidth site.

This sale may never happen again so take advantage of it while you can. After 72 hours all our plans go back to normal. So act now!

By now we all know that you should not buy a product unless you see the little lock in your browser. The lock symbolizes that they are using an SSL Certificate which encrypts the page with 128 bit encryption. This has been in place for a long time and everyone online has come to trust it.

This is no longer the case.

Just before the new year it was exposed that SSL and MD5 were both cracked. That means we can no longer trust every site that has SSL.

Netcraft’s SSL Survey shows that 14% of valid third party SSL certificates have been issued using MD5 signatures . an algorithm that has recently been demonstrated to be vulnerable to attack by producing a fake certificate authority certificate signed by a widely-trusted third party certificate authority.

The researchers achieved this by producing a hash collision . they submitted valid certificate requests to a certificate authority (CA), while producing a second certificate that had the same signature but entirely different details. When the CA signed the valid certificate, the signature applied also to the invalid certificate, allowing the researchers to spoof any secure website that they liked. This attack is the first practical use against SSL of already-known attacks against the MD5 checksum algorithm.

How can I check if my SSL or the site I am using SSL is susceptible?

Double click the lock icon and look for the Signature Algorithm. If it says MD5 your SSL is not secure. If it says anything else you should be ok.

Here is what it looks like in IE…

and here in FireFox…

If you come across any SSL with MD5 then let them know about his post.

Note – All SSL’s sold by BlueFur.com do not use the MD5 so there is no need to worry if you purchased one from us.

Our blog is made up of writers, readers and commenters. We thank everyone who contributes to making our blog the what it is. The following are our top commentators for 2008…

1. Matt Freedman

2. Andrew Flusche

3. Webkinz

4. Dr. Cossack

5. Derek Semmler

6. Rinko

7. Aaron Hall

8. Raul Pacheco

9. Tony Chung

10. Chuks Ugoji

As it was posted earlier we will be adding more development topics. The following topics will start next week…

Follow along as this on going series covers taking a server from SSH to production. This will be good for those that want to purchase an Xdev server and follow along. Although we use cPanel for our shared and managed servers there is a lot of things you can do differently if you install it manually.

Did you purchase web hosting so you could build a site you can be proud of? This weekly topic will cover how to do web development from HTML to XML and everything in between.

WordPress development has been one of the main focuses of this blog over the last few years. Most of our top 25 posts are all in regards to some type of WordPress development. It only makes sense to introduce a weekly topic covering WordPress development.

As a Linux based company PHP is one of the keys to using our hosting. If your not using PHP then you should be. There are so many applications you can build with PHP if you just has the knowledge, this topic will help you gain that knowledge.