Reviews and guides for the free and open source software we love.
« Back to all postsThe open source community has been key to some of the biggest tech trends in recent years – notably Kubernetes and Docker. Both tools are undoubtedly impressive, and together they enable hyper-scalability, continuous integration and rapid software development. This is an exciting opportunity for many businesses. But what if that’s not what you need at […]
Read moreWordPress is an incredibly popular website management system, powering an estimated 25% of websites. We love it because at its very core, it’s an open source CMS. The source code is freely available for anyone to study, use, modify, and build upon. This has resulted in thousands of people across the world using it to build sites, […]
Read moreBack in 2013, I wrote about how the hosting industry is losing customers to proprietary mail platforms. I also announced that we would be supporting Geary, the email client from Yorba. Unfortunately, the Geary campaign didn’t reach the target they set. Even though that campaign didn’t work out, I still believed that supporting the development of free […]
Read moreWe’ve been testing the latest release of Symbiosis Jessie over the last few months with Let’s Encrypt and we’re proud to say it’s now packaged with Symbiosis! What is Let’s Encrypt? Let’s encrypt is a free, open certificate authority (CA) that launched at the end of 2015. It provides SSL/TLS certificates via an automated process […]
Read moreBytemark’s offices have long been missing that vital component of any tech company – wall-hanging status displays! I want to show off some vital statistics: support satisfaction statistics for our support team, the railcams, sales figures – all that movie stuff! Easy, right? We’ll use Raspberry Pis to do the display – they’re cheap and easily hidden behind […]
Read moreOne of our manifesto principles is an ongoing commitment to transparency and clear communication. That’s why since 2005, we have detailed every outage affecting our products and network on our public forum. In 2015, we built on that commitment by launching a dedicated Bytemark Status site (https://status.bytemark.org) where we have continued to report all service interruptions […]
Read moreAs you might know, if you’ve read the blog before, Bytemark’s data centre in York is right next to the East Coast Main Line (ECML). The ECML is one of the busiest lines on the UK rail network carrying passengers and freight up and down the east coast of the country. This gives us a […]
Read moreLast week, I wrote a tutorial on using “git push” to deploy Ruby applications to your own server using Dokku, a tool that lets you create an environment similar to Heroku on your own server. I demonstrated an example using a simple Ruby app to test the system, which if you haven’t done is well worth running […]
Read moreIf you’ve used Heroku you’ll be familiar with the convenience of using “git push” to deploy your Ruby application. Here’s how you can do the same on Bytemark Cloud using Dokku – a simple system that allows quick deployment of packaged applications, or “buildpacks”. Dokku uses software called Buildstep and contains your applications using Docker. That’s a lot of buzzwords to put onto […]
Read moreDid you know that YO26, Bytemark’s data centre in York, is included in the speedtest.net host directory? This means that you can carry out running connection and bandwidth tests to see how fast our services could work for you! What is speedtest.net? Speedtest is a third-party tool provided by Ookla. As the name suggests, it […]
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