How to Watch USA Netflix Streaming in Australia
Australia almost got Netflix. The subscription service devoted to streaming television and movies (as well as a rent-by-mail system) had planned to follow up it’s UK expansion by further stretching around the globe and launching Netflix Australia.
Alas, for reasons kept somewhat vague but attributed to a self-imposed “pause on opening new international markets until we return to global profitability” that expansion hasn’t come to fruition yet, leaving would-be Netflix users from Canberra to Sydney to Melbourne to Perth out in the cold for an indeterminate period.
Moreover, if you’re visiting Australia from America, either on extended business or for a lengthy vacation, you won’t be able to enjoy your own Netflix streaming account on your laptop or other portable device.
Unless you read on and follow our advice. FlashRouters, with the help of some friendly affiliates, want to make sure you can take advantage of your Netflix streaming account, no matter in what part of the world you may find yourself. And it’s easier than you’d think.
How to Watch USA Netflix Streaming in Australia Using a VPN
It’s no small hassle to travel to Australia, what with the lengthy flight and the disorienting and drastic time change. So it stands to reason that your trip includes a considerable adjustment period, during which you might want to kick back with some Netflix streaming while you get your head on straight; And even though Netflix is not available in Australia, you can still do just that. All you have to do is subscribe to a VPN.
A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a subscription service designed to increase your internet security and online presence. By encrypting your data flow and tunneling your information through one of their secure serves located around the world, VPNs ensure that no one can use your online information or activity for nefarious purposes. It’s an invaluable service in a time of uncertain and ever-developing security issues.
Most importantly, considering the subject of this post a VPN allows you to change your IP address to one in any country of your choosing. This allows you to effectively trick your computer into believing it’s in an entirely different country than the one it’s in. Ergo, if you’re in Australia and you wish to visit a regionally restricted website like, say, Netflix USA, all you have to do is log in to your VPN, choose an American IP address, and boom! You’re watching Breaking Bad in Brisbane or The Walking Dead from New South Wales.
Popular VPN providers for US IP addresses include IPVanish VPN and PrivateInternetAccess VPN. FlashRouters also offers a new VPN provider comparison list to help you find the virtual private network that best suits your needs.
So Where Does FlashRouters Enter the Picture?
Every router in our lineup offers something unique, but the common thread that unites them is that they’re all flashed with firmware (either DD-WRT or Tomato) that maximizes their potential, and revolutionizes the way you use your wireless network.
How to Watch USA Netflix Streaming in Australia – Nighthawk X6 R8000
Whether you go for the Netgear AC1450 (which is our best-seller under $200), or the Netgear R8000 Nighthawk X6 DD-WRT (our best overall DD-WRT router), or if you go all out and get the Asus RT-N66U Dark Knight (our best Tomato router and one of the top routers available, especially for high end HDTVs), you’re guaranteed a device that will make your network for versatile, more manageable, safer, and much, much faster (here’s a list of some of best-sellers).
When used in conjunction with our routers, a streaming device like a Roku, Apple TV, laptop, Sony PS3, Xbox One, Samsung Galaxy etc. will operate beautifully, freeing you from the frustrations of mid-movie or mid-show stalls and freezes. And you can be certain that the same applies to gaming.
And, of course, all of our routers come with a built-in VPN connection, effectively saving you the time and energy involved in setting up a VPN connection on your own. Don’t waste an afternoon trying to configure your router when a FlashRouter takes care of that job for you. You can even use a FlashRouter to connect several devices to the same VPN account!
How to Watch USA Netflix Streaming in Asia
How to Watch Netflix US in Asia
At the moment, Netflix streaming’s huge library is available in the United States, Canada, certain countries in Latin America, and certain parts of Europe.
Noticeably absent from that list is nearly the entire continent of Asia (among other whole continents and swaths of countries). So if you’re looking to vacation in Beijing, or do some long-term business in Hong Kong, or do some extended traveling throughout Russia’s vast expanses, you’ll be stuck with no regional version of Netflix’s streaming or any popular Netflix Instant content to enjoy.
Fortunately, if you know the right tricks, you can still access your home account and enjoy Netflix streaming from anywhere in the world. In fact, you can access Netflix Canada, Netflix Mexico, Netflix UK, and many others if you just follow our simple advice.
How to Watch US Netflix Streaming in Asia
The solution is simple. In order to watch instant streaming video from popular streaming sites like Hulu, Amazon Instant or Netflix in Asia, you must subscribe to a VPN.
Whether you are moving to Japan for work, or stationed in Dubai or India for business, or taking a year off to travel through Russia, or Turkey, or Japan, a VPN is a must for allowing advanced privacy and identity protection. And, of course, a VPN will let you access all of your favorite American video and music content from services like Pandora or Hulu Plus or Amazon Instant or even the mother of them all, Netflix Instant Streaming video.
Watch US Netflix Streaming in Asia
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) service provider is a subscription service designed to increase the anonymity of your internet presence by encrypting your data flow. Instead of connecting directly to your server, by signing in to a virtual private network, all of your network traffic is tunneled through a server in any country of your choice
Using a virtual private network even allows you to change your IP address from anywhere in Asia (Japan, India, South Korea etc) to one in any country you’d like, thus effectively fooling your computer or smart device into believing it’s wherever you’d like it to be. Using a US VPN in Japan, India, China, or the Middle East allows you to access regionally restricted content from anywhere in the world!
So if you’re on an extended business trip in Tokyo, and you’re looking to enjoy some streaming video from Netflix US, all that you need to do is log in to your virtual private network and choose an American server to get your new IP address. Or if you wish to watch Netflix Canada, pick a Canadian server as your VPN connection. Simple as that. You’ll be using Netflix streaming before you know it.
Popular Asian VPN providers for US IP addresses include HideMyAss VPN, IPVanish VPN, and PrivateInternetAccess VPN. FlashRouters also offers a new VPN provider comparison list to help you find the virtual private network that best suits your needs.
So Where Does FlashRouters Enter the Picture?
Every router offered by FlashRouters comes with a built-in VPN connection options. Setting up a VPN connection within your average router can be a tricky and time-consuming process. Owning a router with a built-in VPN connection saves you the time and effort of setting one up on your own, and prevents you from potentially bricking your new router.
Additionally, a router with a built-in VPN connection allows you to connect multiple devices to the same VPN account.
This means that you can use your VPN account on your laptop, as well as your Samsung Galaxy, Macbook Air, Sony PS3, LG SmartTV, etc. through the same wireless signal. You can even use your VPN on a streaming media device like a Roku or Boxee, allowing you to enjoy Netflix streaming from any country it’s offered from the comforts of your living room.
In fact, our routers are flashed with either DD-WRT or Tomato firmware, either of which ensure that your Netflix streaming or gaming experience is devoid of freezes or stalls. FlashRouters offers powerful, durable routers like the Asus RT-N66U Dark Knight at affordable costs, and with three months of free guaranteed online tech support!
Netflix Streaming USA & UK – Watch Both From Anywhere
How to Watch Netflix USA in The UK
Whether you’re in the UK on an extended vacation, or on a lengthy business trip to London, or maybe you’re just choosing to live in England for a while, you shouldn’t be forced to do without the many streaming video options on Netflix Streaming.
Sure, Netflix Streaming is available in the UK, but the streaming TV and movie options are different from region to region. As you can imagine, Netflix caters each version of Netflix to the tastes of their audiences, and if you’re in the UK, you might think you’d have to get used to UK programming filling up your queue.
And there’s certainly plenty of great streaming television and movies offered by Netflix Streaming UK (as we’ll discuss later), but you’re liable to get homesick relying strictly on that. Fortunately for you, we at FlashRouters are here to advise you on how to enjoy Netflix Instant USA even when you’re traveling in The UK (and Netflix UK from the USA, for that matter).
Watch US Netflix Streaming Video in the UK
By taking just a few simple steps, you can ensure that you’ll be able to enjoy American Netflix Streaming from the UK, or from wherever you happen to be.
The first step in to subscribe to a VPN. A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a subscription service designed to maximize the protection around your internet presence. Instead of connecting directly to your server, a VPN reroutes all of your network traffic through one of their servers in the country of your choosing.
Doing this will encrypt your data flow, which makes your information more secure, and allow you to effectively trick your computer into believing you’re in a different country. So if you’re in the UK trying to access US Netflix, the simplest way is with a VPN service account and select a US-based IP address. Simple as that.
Some popular VPN service providers for US & UK IP addresses include Overplay VPN, HideMyAss VPN, Strong VPN, IPVanish VPN, and PrivateInternetAccess VPN. Check out our new VPN provider comparison list for more options.
So Where Does FlashRouters Enter the Picture?
FlashRouters come with a built-in VPN connection, which saves you a lot of time and effort when trying to connect to Netflix US, Netflix UK or any other popular streaming media service from anywhere in the world.
Using a VPN connection within a router allows you to connect multiple devices (or your entire network) to your VPN service – meaning everyone can enjoy the upgraded content benefits of VPN on their Samsung Galaxy, Macbook Air, Sony PS3, LG SmartTV, etc. through one connection. Using a VPN router also allows you to connect popular Streaming Media Players like a Roku to Netflix US or UK via VPN which can not be accomplished otherwise.
For more information about DD-WRT firmware and FlashRouters, visit our Support & FAQ page.
Netflix UK Popular Streaming Movies & Television (Not available on Netflix USA)
Since a VPN will allow you to switch between an American and an UK IP address, you might as well take advantage of some of the differences between the two countries’ respective Netflix offerings.
Netflix UK offers a treasure trove of streaming movies and television inexplicably not offered in the US, ranging from American classics (The Godfather, Saving Private Ryan, Mean Streets, Ed Wood) to popular hits (21 Jump Street, 50/50, Zombieland, Modern Family) to acclaimed, obscure fare (Hard Candy, The Skin I Live In, Cache).
Here’s a few more choice selections from Netflix UK:
Planet Earth – Marvel at crystalline images of the rivers, mountains, and wildlife that comprise your home planet, and learn a whole lot in the process.
The Thick of It – A precursor to the brilliant 2009 film, In the Loop, The Thick of It is top-tier, hilariously vulgar, and cutting political satire from creator Armando Iannucci, who’d later create the equally biting HBO political satire, Veep.
Life on Mars – Before the failed American version, there was the original, beloved British version of Life on Mars, which told the story of a cop who gets into a car accident and wakes up in 1973. Not to be missed.
The King of Kong – A documentary about the quest for the best Donkey Kong score ever, this thoroughly winning movie comes with obvious heroes and even more apparent villains. All the necessary components to make you stand up and cheer.
There Will Be Blood A bold, expansive examination of the way American capitalism rewards the brutal and corrodes the soul, this masterpiece from Paul Thomas Anderson is probably most known for providing another meaty showcase for Daniel Day-Lewis’ immersive and virtuosic acting.
Streaming Movies & Television You Can Watch On Netflix USA (Not Netflix UK)
How to Watch Netflix US in the UK – Comedy Bang Bang
On the other hand, there’s still plenty from Netflix USA that Netflix UK fails to offer. If you find yourself in the UK for an extended period, whether on vacation or business, you’ll want to be able to access the great streaming movies and television shows listed below. Enjoy!
Comedy Bang! Bang! – This gleefully immature, wholly absurd talk show starring Scott Aukerman and his band leader Reggie Watts is based on the popular podcast of the same name. Each episode features guests like Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Seth Rogan, Adam Scott, and Michael Cera showing up to revel in the madcap, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse-meets-Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! lunacy.
Mad Men – Well, you certainly don’t want to be trapped in the UK without access to Mad Men, do you? This rich, beautifully observed drama examines the gradual shifts in American attitudes and perspectives, as seen by a group of advertising agency employees and moguls in the 1960’s.
Barton Fink – A surreal, truly idiosyncratic work from the Coen Brothers, Barton Fink casts John Turturro as a New York playwright who gets unwillingly sucked into the Hollywood system, with all of the compromises, shady dealings, and halls of fire that entails.
Watch The Walking Dead Streaming on Netflix.
The Walking Dead – Simply put, if you’re not watching The Walking Dead, you’re out of the loop. This zombie drama from AMC, based on the popular graphic novel series, took a good season or two to really find its footing, but now it’s just bloody, rip-roaring good television.
The Grey – Surprisingly morose and philosophical, this Liam Neeson vehicle caught a lot of audiences, who were expecting two hours of Liam Neeson killing wolves with his bare hands, off-guard. Instead, you get an unusually thoughtful and reflective survival movie (and yeah, some Liam Neeson wolf fights).
Of course, this is a smattering of streaming video offered by Netflix US and Netflix UK. There’s much, much more to be had. And with the help of FlashRouters, you can sample the full-range of Netflix’s catalog from Mexico to Canada to Sweden and beyond.
How to Watch Streaming Video & Netflix USA in Canada
If you live in the United States and have a Netflix account, but find yourself frequently traveling out of the country for business or pleasure, you might feel like you’re wasting your subscription.
Sure, you can get a subscription that allows you access to your account from many different countries, but your viewing options will change depending on where you are. Netflix Latin America is catered to Latin American audiences, and is thus only offered within Latin American countries; Netflix UK is catered to UK audiences…you get the idea.
We here at FlashRouters are sympathetic to this problem, and are happy to not only provide solutions, but show you why our products are helpful whether you’re out of the country often or not.
How to Watch Netflix USA From Canada
Though Canada is certainly no place to escape the cold weather of the winter months, there is much in the way of winter activities that draw people there nonetheless. So if you find yourself in Canada for an extended period, and needing some entertainment while hiding from the cold, we’ll help you stay in touch with American Netflix to prevent you from getting too homesick.
To start with, you’ll need to subscribe to a VPN, or Virtual Private Network. VPN’s are designed to fully protect your internet presence by encrypting everything you download, stream, or browse. In the case of wanting to watch Netflix US in Canada, VPN’s help by allowing you to switch your IP address to one in the country of your choosing. As you might guess, this also means you can watch Netflix Canada in the US. It’s a simple matter of toggling between the IP addresses the VPN’s provide.
Some of the most popular VPN providers include Overplay, HideMyAss, StrongVPN, PrivateInternetAccess, and IPVanish. This is where FlashRouters comes in: our routers are set up with a built-in VPN-client connection, which saves you the trouble of making your router VPN compatible. They also allow you to connect multiple devices (Roku, Playstation 3, Laptap, Apple TV, Smart HDTV, iPad, iPhone, etc.) to your VPN through one device.
Furthermore, our routers are flashed with DD-WRT firmware, which modifies the router’s original settings in order to make it more versatile and controllable. Some of the benefits of DD-WRT firmware include:
-Advanced QoS (Quality of Service), which enables you to determine how you wish to allocate bandwidth to your network connections.
-Adjustable Antenna Power, which allows you to increase your wireless signal.
-Create Your Own Wi-Fi Hotspot or a Guest Network for sharing your internet securely.
–Wireless Repeater Bridge, which will extend your wireless range, even if you’re in a wireless dead spot.
Routers like ours will allow you to keep in touch with the familiar touchstones of your home country that Netflix US provides. And, since Netflix Canada features a variety of streaming movies and television shows not available on Netflix US, you can enjoy what both divisions have to offer without going anywhere. Find out more about that below.
What You Can Watch on Netflix Canada (But Not Netflix US)
Due to distribution deals and varying demographics that would affect DVD sales, much of the content that is available on Netflix Canada is not on Netflix USA. Perhaps, after studios feel they’ve maxed out the sales for The Hunger Games and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, those films and others like it will be available to stream in America. For now, you can just use your VPN and trick your Roku or laptop that you’re in Canada.
Here are some more choice selections from Canadian Netflix that you can’t get in the US:
Newsradio – This cultishly beloved sitcom is a near-perfect blend of wit and zaniness, featuring Dave Foley, Phil Hartman, Stephen Root, Andy Dick, Joe Rogan, Maura Tierney, Vicki Lewis, and Khandi Alexander all doing the best work of their careers, which is saying something (in most cases).
Community – Here’s another critically adored sitcom doomed to struggle to get an audience. Community, about a group of misfits who bond at a community college (including Joel McHale, Allison Brie, and Donald Glover), is simple in concept and outrageously ambitious in execution. Most importantly though, it’s always hilarious.
Justified – Though only the first two seasons are available as of publishing, it’s worth catching up as far as you can with this archly macho and unfailingly entertaining series starring Timothy Olyphant.
The Social Network – This multiple Oscar winner famously irked its subject, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, by telling his story in a less-than-completely-flattering way. Nonetheless, you should be able to appreciate that a movie about the beginning of a website is this remarkably taut and kinetic.
Inglorious Basterds – Quentin Tarantino uses the only tool in his arsenal – maniacally gleeful cinematic revisionism – to exact revenge against the Nazis in this brilliant, brutal, and brutally funny film. (You can also get Pulp Fiction on Netflix Canada, but not on Netflix USA.)
What You Can Watch on Netflix USA (But Not Netflix Canada)
The reasoning for limiting these selections to Netflix USA at Netflix Canada’s expense is less clear. Perhaps they’re a little too quintessentially American to appeal to Canadians? Then again, why would they Canadians get such a uniquely American show like Justified, while America doesn’t? Well, whatever the reason, here’s a selection to keep you checking in with Netflix USA:
The West Wing – Now this one makes complete sense. What better way to simultaneously enjoy some compelling television and brush up on your civics than with this Aaron Sorkin-helmed, hogger-of-Emmys?
Louie – Comedian Louis CK continually proves himself to be the master of all things(writing, directing, acting, editing, existential worrying) with this innovative and painfully funny anti-sitcom.
Drive – We could probably just point out that Ryan Gosling’s in it and leave it at that, but we’d be remiss in not mentioning just how bold, bloody, and just plain cool this 2011 thriller is. The rest of the cast isn’t too bad either (Albert Brooks, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston).
Mulholland Dr. – Maybe David Lynch’s best movie, Mulholland Dr. is too much of a mind-bender to get a succinct explanation, but it’s a beautifully twisted mind-bender all the same.
Chappelle’s Show – Now that it’s been a few years since people ruined every single punchline of Dave Chappelle’s wildly popular sketch show by quoting it incessantly, you should be able to enjoy it anew.
How to Watch Netflix’s New Original Series, House of Cards, From Anywhere
The way you watch television may very well be on the verge of permanently changing. With House of Cards, Netflix is launching their first serious attack on traditional viewing habits.
Though people are increasingly ingesting television shows in season-length, or even series-length, chunks (thanks to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu that post whole new seasons at a time), there still remains a loyal contingent of TV watchers who prefer to watch their favorites in the classic, network-approved, weekly format.
It likely has little to do with the archaic preferences of grumpy Luddites and everything to do with the fact that, if you’re subscribed to a channel like AMC, you get your Breaking Bad and Mad Men as early as any other audience.
At a time when many of your friends lack the patience not to spoil major plot developments on Twitter and Facebook, catching a show when it first airs is more important than ever. And though people are cancelling their cable left and right, waiting around for months until the newest season of Justified or Louie to finally come out on DVD or appear on Netflix Instant Streaming can feel like an eternity.
Netflix knows this, and rather than sit complacently with the significant victories they’ve already achieved (their successful re-imagining of the movie rental industry, their streaming model’s increasing standardization), they’re looking to open a major in-road in the world of streaming television; original programming.
Now, you might remember that Netflix already took a tentative step in this direction with the little-loved and little-discussed, fish-out-of-water dramedy, Lillyhammer starring Steven Van Zandt. This much is true, but compared to the roll-out for the upcoming, David Fincher/Beau Willimon/Kevin Spacey series, House of Cards, Lillyhammer already seems like a footnote.
House of Cards
Netflix believes in House of Cards: They better, as they’ve already purchased two seasons worth of material, and they’ve thrown down a hundred million dollars for the right to stream the show exclusively to its subscribers.
While that may seem like an exorbitant amount to pay for exclusive rights to one show, it represents a lot more than that. The company is banking on the idea that word of mouth for House of Cards will be so strong, that Netflix will become a viable home to more and more quality television, sort of like a streaming internet version of HBO.
Soon after that, scores of people will be paying the minimum monthly charge for Netflix Instant (after all, it offers plenty of movies and television). Why pay for premium cable channels that patiently, methodically release one episode of your favorite shows at a time (all of which may very well eventually end up on Netflix anyway), when Netflix will give you a season’s worth of quality television at once?
On February 1st, the entire first season of House of Cards will be available to Netflix subscribers (just like they are doing with Arrested Development), and given the pedigree of the people involved, it’s entirely possible that this will be Netflix’s appointment television show to kill appointment television.
House of Cards is a politically-oriented drama starring Kevin Spacey as House Majority Whip Francis Underwood. After being passed over for the position of Secretary of State, Underwood’s ruthless, conniving character seeks to win the nomination anyway through less than honorable means, all the while creating trouble for the administration that rejected him. Other significant actors in this high drama are Robin Wright Penn as Underwood’s wife, a businesswoman with a few schemes of her own, and Michael Kelly as Underwood’s aide Doug Stamper.
The show is based on the BBC series of the same name, which followed Ian Richardson’s Conservative Chief Whip as he plotted his way to a leadership post in the governing party, hoping to eventually land in the seat of the Prime Minister. The UK version of House of Cards is still available on the BBC iPlayer.
Written by Beau Willimon (The Ides of March), the American version’s already intimidating roster of talent is further bolstered by the involvement of producer/director David Fincher, who’s already proven that he can make dialogue-heavy scenes move in thrilling ways with Zodiac and The Social Network.
And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that, with two seasons already paid for, you know you won’t be left hanging at the end of season one.
Can I Watch House of Cards From Anywhere?
Though Netflix is planning a wide release House of Cards (according to The Huffington Post, “All 13 episodes will be available in US, Canada, Latin America, UK, Sweden, Finland and Norway”), there will be large swaths of Europe, as well as all of Asia and Africa, that will not have access to the show.
So if you want to watch House of Cards, or any of Netflix’s other upcoming original programming such as the Eli Roth-helmed Hemlock Grove, or (glory be) the miraculous return of Arrested Development, but you live in or are visiting one of the countries (or continents) that will not have access to it, you might think you’re out of luck.
We here at FlashRouters are happy to tell you that’s not the case. In order to view House of Cards, or any other regionally restricted programming, you’ll want to look into a VPN Provider subscription.
How to Use a VPN to Watch House of Cards From Anywhere
A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, has many valuable features to recommend it, such as the increased security it provides to your online presence. But, more relevantly, let’s say you want to watch House of Cards, and you’re on an extended business trip in Dubai or China, all you have to do is log in to your VPN account and switch your IP address to one located in a country where House of Cards is available such as the US or the UK.
Using a VPN allows you to effectively trick your computer into thinking it’s somewhere that it isn’t, which allows you access to the breadth of regionally restricted streaming programming. You can watch the American version of House of Cards from Egypt or the BBC version from America just by choosing the IP address that suits you.
A FlashRouter is set up with internal, VPN-client-connection (PPTP, OpenVPN, L2TP) which simplifies the process of utilizing your VPN subscription and allows you to use your VPN services on more than one computer or device at a time. What’s more, our routers are upgraded with DD-WRT firmware, which allows you to boost your antenna strength, or even create your own Wi-Fi hotspot, among many other benefits.
Some of the most popular VPN service providers include HideMyAss, ExpressVPN, IPVanish, and PrivateInternetAccess. Every FlashRouter purchase includes a router upgrade, customized configuration & VPN setup guides along with free router/VPN configuration support from our expert networking technicians.
Before you know it, you’ll be a globe-trotting citizen of the internet, free from the strictures of blocked or censored websites, and comfortable in the security that FlashRouters and our affiliates provide.
Category Archives: StrongVPN
Hide My Ass
You can’t trust free VPN providers – find out why!
Using a VPN? That’s great news! You’re one of the tens of millions of people around the world who use a VPN to surf the net anonymously, access their favourite websites and services from any country, and prevent hackers from stealing your valuable personal data. But do you use a free VPN service? Do you trust the free VPN service with your privacy? Does the free VPN service give you the same benefits as a premium VPN provider?
While searching online for the best VPN service you will no doubt have stumbled across forums and articles advertising free VPNs. What’s wrong with that you ask, it’s free VPN! Well, there are a number of issues with using free VPN services which I will explain in this article.
Free VPN vs Premium VPN
Before using a free VPN service, there are a number of important questions you should ask yourself, including:
Is the free VPN service a legitimate company – who’s behind it?
Does a free VPN service sell your personal data on to third parties?
Does a free VPN service care about your privacy and security?
What happens if you need any assistance? Does a free VPN service provide you with any help, and in a timely manner?
Plus, if you use a free VPN service you will have undoubtedly encountered limited bandwidth and slow speeds which really sucks, especially when you want to play online games.
If you answered no to any or all of these questions, you should seriously think about upgrading to a premium VPN service – such as HMA! Pro VPN.
Who is Hide My Ass! Pro VPN?
We at Hide My Ass! Pro VPN take your privacy very seriously, unlike free VPN services. When you connect to any one of our VPN servers you can be confident that all the data you send and receive is encrypted, out of the reach of thieves and attackers. Keeping you safe and secure while surfing the internet is what we do!
Is Hide My Ass! a legitimate VPN service?
Hide My Ass! Pro VPN recently celebrated its 10th birthday! HMA! was founded by Jack Cator who was frustrated that his school blocked websites, such as MySpace and online games, so he decided to make a web proxy website to bypass the school’s filters. Since then Hide My Ass! has been helping people circumvent blocks placed on websites by repressive governments. In fact, many countries today still live under such governments, and continue to block a number of websites including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Our CEO and founder Jack Cator has featured in numerous well-known daily newspapers and recently spoke at Wired’s ‘Next Generation’ event. Our COO, Danvers Baillieu has frequently appeared on a number of TV news programmes including Channel 4.
In May 2015 we joined forces with AVG Technologies, an online security company with over 200 million active users!
Hide My Ass! customer support
We pride ourselves on providing our users with the best customer support in the business! Our users can contact our support donkeys by email, Live Chat or by telephone. Put a name to the face and find out more about HMA! support donkeys!
Many users of free VPN services believe that their data or Hola bandwidth isn’t sold on to third parties – well, it is! We at Hide My Ass! don’t sell any of your data or bandwidth on to third parties!
Check out Hide My Ass! reviews to see what thousands of our users have to say about us!
You can find out more about how a VPN works and how HMA! Pro VPN can help protect and secure your personal information on our main website.
Plus! Unlike a free VPN service you can make MONEY with us by using our Refer-a-Friend program!
Remember! You get what you pay for with a free VPN service – very little!
By nicola
Using a VPN? That’s great news! You’re one of the tens of millions of people around the world who use a VPN to surf the net anonymously, access their favourite websites and services from any country, and prevent hackers from stealing your valuable personal data. But do you use a free VPN service? Do you trust the free VPN service with your privacy? Does the free VPN service give you the same benefits as a premium VPN provider?
While searching online for the best VPN service you will no doubt have stumbled across forums and articles advertising free VPNs. What’s wrong with that you ask, it’s free VPN! Well, there are a number of issues with using free VPN services which I will explain in this article.
Free VPN vs Premium VPN
Before using a free VPN service, there are a number of important questions you should ask yourself, including:
Is the free VPN service a legitimate company – who’s behind it?
Does a free VPN service sell your personal data on to third parties?
Does a free VPN service care about your privacy and security?
What happens if you need any assistance? Does a free VPN service provide you with any help, and in a timely manner?
Plus, if you use a free VPN service you will have undoubtedly encountered limited bandwidth and slow speeds which really sucks, especially when you want to play online games.
If you answered no to any or all of these questions, you should seriously think about upgrading to a premium VPN service – such as HMA! Pro VPN.
Who is Hide My Ass! Pro VPN?
We at Hide My Ass! Pro VPN take your privacy very seriously, unlike free VPN services. When you connect to any one of our VPN servers you can be confident that all the data you send and receive is encrypted, out of the reach of thieves and attackers. Keeping you safe and secure while surfing the internet is what we do!
Is Hide My Ass! a legitimate VPN service?
Hide My Ass! Pro VPN recently celebrated its 10th birthday! HMA! was founded by Jack Cator who was frustrated that his school blocked websites, such as MySpace and online games, so he decided to make a web proxy website to bypass the school’s filters. Since then Hide My Ass! has been helping people circumvent blocks placed on websites by repressive governments. In fact, many countries today still live under such governments, and continue to block a number of websites including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Our CEO and founder Jack Cator has featured in numerous well-known daily newspapers and recently spoke at Wired’s ‘Next Generation’ event. Our COO, Danvers Baillieu has frequently appeared on a number of TV news programmes including Channel 4.
In May 2015 we joined forces with AVG Technologies, an online security company with over 200 million active users!
Hide My Ass! customer support
We pride ourselves on providing our users with the best customer support in the business! Our users can contact our support donkeys by email, Live Chat or by telephone. Put a name to the face and find out more about HMA! support donkeys!
Many users of free VPN services believe that their data or Hola bandwidth isn’t sold on to third parties – well, it is! We at Hide My Ass! don’t sell any of your data or bandwidth on to third parties!
Check out Hide My Ass! reviews to see what thousands of our users have to say about us!
You can find out more about how a VPN works and how HMA! Pro VPN can help protect and secure your personal information on our main website.
Plus! Unlike a free VPN service you can make MONEY with us by using our Refer-a-Friend program!
Remember! You get what you pay for with a free VPN service – very little!
By nicola
Hide My Ass VPN Access
VPN server in San Marino added to the Hide My Ass! network
We’ve added a San Marino VPN server to the Hide My Ass! Pro VPN network this month! We’ve added an additional 12 VPN servers to our network with 1,493 IP addresses, including 2 NEW COUNTRIES! Here are the full details.
USA VPN servers added to the Hide My Ass! network
We’ve added more USA VPN servers to our network! We’ve added a VPN in Rhode Island, Providence and a VPN in Nebraska, Omaha, USA.
We’ve recently added an additional 21 VPN servers to our network with 2,731 IP addresses!
But that’s not all!
We have some very exciting news to tell you, so without further ado – are you ready? We’re delighted to announce that we now provide USA VPN servers in EVERY US State! Woohoo!
This month we’ve added the final two missing US States – please welcome Mississippi VPN and Arkansas VPN to the HMA! network!
Here are the full details:
USA, Arkansas, Magnolia VPN (Location 1 Servers 1 – 2) (248 IPs) (New Location)
USA, Mississippi, Louisville VPN (Location 1 Servers 1 -2 ) (248 IPs) (New Location and 50th US State!)
Monaco, Monaco VPN (124 IPs) (New Country)
Andorra, Andorra la Vella VPN (124 IPs) (New Country)
Vatican, Vatican City VPN (123 IPs) (New Country)
Turkey, Istanbul VPN (Location 2 Server 1) (253 IPs)
Croatia, Zagreb VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, Maine, Bath VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, Vermont, Rutland VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 iPs)
USA, South Dakota, Sioux Falls VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, Rhode Island, Providence VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, North Dakota, Grand Forks VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, New Hampshire, Bedford VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, Nebraska, Omaha VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, West Virginia, Philippi VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, Idaho, Idaho Falls VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, Delaware, Wilmington VPN (Location 1 Servers 2 – 3) (247 IPs)
USA, Wyoming, Cheyenne VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
Thank you for all your VPN server suggestions – we really do appreciate hearing from you. If there’s a location or country that you would like us to add a VPN server, please let us know by adding your suggestions right here on our blog and we’ll do our very best to make your wish come true!
No matter where you are in the United States you can connect to any one of our USA VPN servers, giving you instant access to all your favourite sites, hide your IP address and surf the net anonymously! Connect to our USA VPN servers and let us know what you think about them!
Without you, our loyal users, we wouldn’t be the world’s favourite VPN provider!
If you have any questions regarding our VPN service, please, feel free to contact us by email or Live Chat.
By - nicola
We’ve added a San Marino VPN server to the Hide My Ass! Pro VPN network this month! We’ve added an additional 12 VPN servers to our network with 1,493 IP addresses, including 2 NEW COUNTRIES! Here are the full details.
USA VPN servers added to the Hide My Ass! network
We’ve added more USA VPN servers to our network! We’ve added a VPN in Rhode Island, Providence and a VPN in Nebraska, Omaha, USA.
We’ve recently added an additional 21 VPN servers to our network with 2,731 IP addresses!
But that’s not all!
We have some very exciting news to tell you, so without further ado – are you ready? We’re delighted to announce that we now provide USA VPN servers in EVERY US State! Woohoo!
This month we’ve added the final two missing US States – please welcome Mississippi VPN and Arkansas VPN to the HMA! network!
Here are the full details:
USA, Arkansas, Magnolia VPN (Location 1 Servers 1 – 2) (248 IPs) (New Location)
USA, Mississippi, Louisville VPN (Location 1 Servers 1 -2 ) (248 IPs) (New Location and 50th US State!)
Monaco, Monaco VPN (124 IPs) (New Country)
Andorra, Andorra la Vella VPN (124 IPs) (New Country)
Vatican, Vatican City VPN (123 IPs) (New Country)
Turkey, Istanbul VPN (Location 2 Server 1) (253 IPs)
Croatia, Zagreb VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, Maine, Bath VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, Vermont, Rutland VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 iPs)
USA, South Dakota, Sioux Falls VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, Rhode Island, Providence VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, North Dakota, Grand Forks VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, New Hampshire, Bedford VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, Nebraska, Omaha VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, West Virginia, Philippi VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, Idaho, Idaho Falls VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
USA, Delaware, Wilmington VPN (Location 1 Servers 2 – 3) (247 IPs)
USA, Wyoming, Cheyenne VPN (Location 1 Server 2) (124 IPs)
Thank you for all your VPN server suggestions – we really do appreciate hearing from you. If there’s a location or country that you would like us to add a VPN server, please let us know by adding your suggestions right here on our blog and we’ll do our very best to make your wish come true!
No matter where you are in the United States you can connect to any one of our USA VPN servers, giving you instant access to all your favourite sites, hide your IP address and surf the net anonymously! Connect to our USA VPN servers and let us know what you think about them!
Without you, our loyal users, we wouldn’t be the world’s favourite VPN provider!
If you have any questions regarding our VPN service, please, feel free to contact us by email or Live Chat.
By - nicola
Facebook’s Parse shutdown has a lesson to all tech customers
On January 28, Facebook announced that they’re shutting down Parse, a service used by software developers to store and manage data in their apps.
Considered against the dismal standard of customer care in case of cloud service shutdowns, Facebook is handling the process very graciously. The company is keeping Parse up for a full year and has also released the source code for the Parse server as open source. This allows software developers to set up their own Parse-like services and transfer over the data they have on Facebook’s servers.
It’s an open question how many Parse users will do that, however. There are hundreds of thousands of apps using Parse. Most of these are mobile apps for iOS and Android, and a lot of them are not actively maintained.
The “shelf life” of a mobile app is fairly short. Teams move on quickly to new projects. Revamping a three-year-old app for a new back-end is not high on any developer’s task list unless the app is producing meaningful revenue.
What happens to non-updated apps when the Parse back-end vanishes from the Internet? For some apps that were relying on Parse only for simple data or cloud backups, the effect may be minimal — for example, a game might lose its high score list but still keep working. Most apps are probably not that resilient to server loss. In the worst case, apps will stop working completely as they can’t validate logins. In the intermediate case, local data will still be accessible but any online features will be missing… And that is not much of a relief, as few users will stick around with obviously broken apps like that.
Many developers are upset because they expected Facebook to provide more stability. In the consumer world, there is an implicit assumption that Facebook will keep your data forever and make it accessible anywhere. (Facebook has famously been in hot water with European privacy laws because they don’t delete data even if you’d like them to.)
Developers are now discovering that Facebook-the-B2B-company is very different from the Facebook they thought they knew. Keeping Parse up is a major cost center for Facebook. The free plans are good enough for a lot of apps, so many customers were not paying anything; meanwhile bandwidth and storage cost real money. Facebook-the-public-company just reported nice quarterly earnings two days ago. Shutting down Parse now is one way of ensuring that they’re making even more money next year, and that stuff always matters when you’re constantly scrutinized by Wall Street.
In a way, Facebook’s acquisition of Parse in 2013 seems to have postponed the inevitable. As a startup, Parse was always vulnerable to running out of money. As a division inside Facebook, Parse was always vulnerable to running out of strategic support. Either way the result has been the same for users and customers of the platform.
Herein lies a big lesson for anyone who buys tech products. There’s no inherent safety in buying from a big vendor. A growth-chasing startup and an Internet giant can both turn out to be too unstable to bet your technology choices on.
Instead, you should look for a company that actually wants to be in the business of selling to you. The keyword here is “selling”. Growth-oriented startups like Parse tend to give away extravagantly in order to attract users. Such a company hopes to offset the mounting losses with investor money, with the goal of either being acquired by someone with deep pockets (as happened to Parse) or becoming big enough to be a monopoly in a market, at which point they can eventually turn on the money spigot as users have become “sticky”.
Silicon Valley’s capital-fuelled gift horse rodeo cannot be a foundation for any long-term plans. If you need stability and consistency, look for a small business that cares about customers and charges a fair price. (A fair price is one where you don’t need to wonder if the seller is going out of business by selling to you.)
Small companies are often great because they can be like a partner that grows together with you. Silicon Valley startups are, more often than not, essentially looking to exploit you in order to maintain a hypergrowth graph that ends up in a place where you don’t matter by definition.
Considered against the dismal standard of customer care in case of cloud service shutdowns, Facebook is handling the process very graciously. The company is keeping Parse up for a full year and has also released the source code for the Parse server as open source. This allows software developers to set up their own Parse-like services and transfer over the data they have on Facebook’s servers.
It’s an open question how many Parse users will do that, however. There are hundreds of thousands of apps using Parse. Most of these are mobile apps for iOS and Android, and a lot of them are not actively maintained.
The “shelf life” of a mobile app is fairly short. Teams move on quickly to new projects. Revamping a three-year-old app for a new back-end is not high on any developer’s task list unless the app is producing meaningful revenue.
What happens to non-updated apps when the Parse back-end vanishes from the Internet? For some apps that were relying on Parse only for simple data or cloud backups, the effect may be minimal — for example, a game might lose its high score list but still keep working. Most apps are probably not that resilient to server loss. In the worst case, apps will stop working completely as they can’t validate logins. In the intermediate case, local data will still be accessible but any online features will be missing… And that is not much of a relief, as few users will stick around with obviously broken apps like that.
Many developers are upset because they expected Facebook to provide more stability. In the consumer world, there is an implicit assumption that Facebook will keep your data forever and make it accessible anywhere. (Facebook has famously been in hot water with European privacy laws because they don’t delete data even if you’d like them to.)
Developers are now discovering that Facebook-the-B2B-company is very different from the Facebook they thought they knew. Keeping Parse up is a major cost center for Facebook. The free plans are good enough for a lot of apps, so many customers were not paying anything; meanwhile bandwidth and storage cost real money. Facebook-the-public-company just reported nice quarterly earnings two days ago. Shutting down Parse now is one way of ensuring that they’re making even more money next year, and that stuff always matters when you’re constantly scrutinized by Wall Street.
In a way, Facebook’s acquisition of Parse in 2013 seems to have postponed the inevitable. As a startup, Parse was always vulnerable to running out of money. As a division inside Facebook, Parse was always vulnerable to running out of strategic support. Either way the result has been the same for users and customers of the platform.
Herein lies a big lesson for anyone who buys tech products. There’s no inherent safety in buying from a big vendor. A growth-chasing startup and an Internet giant can both turn out to be too unstable to bet your technology choices on.
Instead, you should look for a company that actually wants to be in the business of selling to you. The keyword here is “selling”. Growth-oriented startups like Parse tend to give away extravagantly in order to attract users. Such a company hopes to offset the mounting losses with investor money, with the goal of either being acquired by someone with deep pockets (as happened to Parse) or becoming big enough to be a monopoly in a market, at which point they can eventually turn on the money spigot as users have become “sticky”.
Silicon Valley’s capital-fuelled gift horse rodeo cannot be a foundation for any long-term plans. If you need stability and consistency, look for a small business that cares about customers and charges a fair price. (A fair price is one where you don’t need to wonder if the seller is going out of business by selling to you.)
Small companies are often great because they can be like a partner that grows together with you. Silicon Valley startups are, more often than not, essentially looking to exploit you in order to maintain a hypergrowth graph that ends up in a place where you don’t matter by definition.
Facebook Shutters Its Parse Developer Platform
Here’s a surprise: Facebook is closing its Parse developer platform. After acquiring the service, which at the time mostly focused on mobile developers, for a reported $85 million in 2013, Facebook turned Parse into one of its key developer services.
Parse will still operate until January 28, 2017, so developers have time to move their products over to other platforms. That will still be quite a hassle for the devs behind the 600,000 apps built on the platform.
Forcing developers into changes, especially ones as drastic as this, can shake their trust. In the future when Facebook opens opportunities for developers, like the chat bot SDK we recently discovered, they might be apprehensive about investing time and resources into platforms from a company with a poor history of continued support.
Parse — and its CEO and co-founder Ilya Sukhar prominently featured in Facebook’s developer conference keynotes, too. Sukhar, however, left Facebook last year and it’s been a while since we last heard about the service. Here’s a video about what Parse did:
“We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible,” Parse’s other co-founder Kevin Lacker writes in today’s announcement. “We are committed to maintaining the backend service during the sunset period, and are providing several tools to help migrate applications to other services.”
The company says it will offer a number of tools for migrating databases and it’s also open-sourcing the Parse Server so developers will run most of the Parse API from their own Node.js servers (or one hosted on a platform like Heroku). The idea behind using a service like Parse, however, has always been that developers could avoid dealing with servers, so it remains to be seen how many of its current users will make this switch.
Facebook’s decision to shutter Parse definitely comes as a massive surprise not in the least to the developers who have came to rely on it over the last few years. But the overall landscape has changed since 2013. Amazon, Google and Microsoft (and numerous other startups) now offer very similar tools for developers. It’s unclear how much traction Parse still had in the last year or so, but Facebook probably looked at it and decided it wasn’t worth its effort anymore.
The situation harkens back to the dark days of developer whiplash on Facebook’s web games platform, circa 2009. Facebook frequently made significant changes to what developers could do and how virality worked with little notice. That left developers with broken apps and lost business potential they were depending on.
This whiplash got so bad that developers became vocal critics of Facebook’s actions not unlike now:
Facebook eventually had to drum up a big campaign called Operation Developer Love in hopes of reassuring devs that it would be more cautious and communicative about changing its platform. You can feel the legacy of that effort in the fact that Parse will remain available for an entire year before it shuts down.
Yet still, it feels like Facebook has once again put its bottom line above the well being of its developer family.
Credit to - Frederic Lardinois
Parse will still operate until January 28, 2017, so developers have time to move their products over to other platforms. That will still be quite a hassle for the devs behind the 600,000 apps built on the platform.
Forcing developers into changes, especially ones as drastic as this, can shake their trust. In the future when Facebook opens opportunities for developers, like the chat bot SDK we recently discovered, they might be apprehensive about investing time and resources into platforms from a company with a poor history of continued support.
Parse — and its CEO and co-founder Ilya Sukhar prominently featured in Facebook’s developer conference keynotes, too. Sukhar, however, left Facebook last year and it’s been a while since we last heard about the service. Here’s a video about what Parse did:
“We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible,” Parse’s other co-founder Kevin Lacker writes in today’s announcement. “We are committed to maintaining the backend service during the sunset period, and are providing several tools to help migrate applications to other services.”
The company says it will offer a number of tools for migrating databases and it’s also open-sourcing the Parse Server so developers will run most of the Parse API from their own Node.js servers (or one hosted on a platform like Heroku). The idea behind using a service like Parse, however, has always been that developers could avoid dealing with servers, so it remains to be seen how many of its current users will make this switch.
Facebook’s decision to shutter Parse definitely comes as a massive surprise not in the least to the developers who have came to rely on it over the last few years. But the overall landscape has changed since 2013. Amazon, Google and Microsoft (and numerous other startups) now offer very similar tools for developers. It’s unclear how much traction Parse still had in the last year or so, but Facebook probably looked at it and decided it wasn’t worth its effort anymore.
The situation harkens back to the dark days of developer whiplash on Facebook’s web games platform, circa 2009. Facebook frequently made significant changes to what developers could do and how virality worked with little notice. That left developers with broken apps and lost business potential they were depending on.
This whiplash got so bad that developers became vocal critics of Facebook’s actions not unlike now:
Facebook eventually had to drum up a big campaign called Operation Developer Love in hopes of reassuring devs that it would be more cautious and communicative about changing its platform. You can feel the legacy of that effort in the fact that Parse will remain available for an entire year before it shuts down.
Yet still, it feels like Facebook has once again put its bottom line above the well being of its developer family.
Credit to - Frederic Lardinois
Stripe vs PayPal
Stripe vs PayPal: Who should you choose?
You've been hearing more and more about Stripe, the hottest new payment processor on the block. But what about PayPal? They have a trusted brand and a long history of processing payments on the web.
Let's do a thorough review of Stripe vs PayPal. We'll compare each payment processor in five key categories: Transaction Fees, Security, API, Data Portability, Customer Service. We won't declare a winner for each category, but we'll point out some of the important differences, which should help you make a more informed decision.
Transaction Fees
Stripe takes a simple approach. They charge you a flat rate of 2.9% + 30¢ per successful charge as long as you're doing under $1 million in volume per year. This rate varies country to country, but it's always flat. They don't disclose any special high volume rates.
The base fee for PayPal is the same as Stripe, 2.9% + 30¢. But, they offer discounts as volume goes up. The discounts kick in at $3,000 (2.5% + 30¢), $10,000 (2.2% + 30¢), and $100,000 (not published) per month. This looks like a better deal, but PayPal throws in some extra service fees that make things a bit more complicated.
Let's compare Stripe and PayPal's service fees:
Service PayPal Stripe
Charge cards from your website $30 / month [1] Free
Chargeback $20 $15
American Express 3.5% [2] Same flat rate
Refund Transaction fee Free
International cards 1% [3] Free [4]
Authorize card 30¢ [5] Free
$5 / month for PayPal Advanced and $30 / month for PayPal Pro. Compare the different features. PayPal Advanced requires you offer PayPal as a payment option.
American Express fee is only charged for PayPal Advanced and PayPal Pro, which is required for certain features (see note 1).
PayPal cross border fees.
International cards are free, but currency conversion costs 2%. Example: You connect a GBP bank account to Stripe, but charge in USD. Stripe will automatically convert your funds to GBP (for a 2% fee) and deposit them into your GBP bank account. If you instead charged in GBP (or connected a USD bank to Stripe), it would be free.
PayPal charges 30¢ for uncaptured authorizations and card verification transactions.
You'll notice that PayPal fees are far more complex and require plenty of explaining. For example, they only charge extra for American Express when you're on one of the paid plans, which seems counterintuitive.
So, how do the transaction fees compare in a real life scenario? Let's take a look at a Stripe vs PayPal transaction fee comparison chart based on sales volume. Remember, if you want to charge cards on your site using PayPal and not provide PayPal as an option, you'll need a PayPal Pro plan.
Stripe vs PayPal transaction fee comparison chart
Volume / month Stripe PayPal Standard PayPal Pro
$500 $22 $22 $52
$1000 $44 $44 $74
$2,500 $110 $110 $140
$5,000 $220 $200 $230
$10,000 $440 $370 $400
$15,000 $660 $555 $585
$20,000 $880 $740 $770
$25,000 $1,100 $925 $955
$50,000 $2,200 $1,850 $1,880
$75,000 $3,300 $2,775 $2,805
Assumes $20 for each transaction.
As you can see, $5,000 in monthly volume is an interesting data point. That's right around where it starts becoming cheaper to use PayPal. Keep in mind, we're not counting any of the service fees we discussed earlier, which would bring the PayPal costs up a bit.
When do I get paid?
PayPal usually pays out within 1 business day, while Stripe takes 7 full days. If fast access to your funds is important, keep this in mind.
Update: USA Stripe customers now get faster two day transfers.
Security
Both Stripe and PayPal take security seriously. At the core, they're both very stable and secure platforms. Let's talk about how they're different, and how Stripe intrinsically encourages good security.
Stripe's killer feature when they first launched was Stripe.js. When you use Stripe.js on your website, the credit card data entered into your payment form is never sent to your server. Instead, the data is sent directly to Stripe. Why is this so important?
Automatically PCI compliant because you don't handle any sensitive credit card data on your servers.
More secure because a breach of your servers won't result in any stolen credit card data.
You're not tempted to store credit card data on your servers, which you really shouldn't be doing unless you're a big business and want to pay for PCI compliance.
If you follow the normal flow with Stripe, you'll just automatically store your cards in their vault. You'll never touch the sensitive data. This encourages good security.
PayPal now has a way to store cards in a vault, but it isn't quite the same as Stripe.js. The sensitive card data has to go through your servers, and this puts a big security burden (see PCI compliance above) on the software developer or the customer who has installed the software.
In summary, Stripe.js encourages good developer security practices, while PayPal gives developers room to make bad decisions. They've recently taken steps to provide better options, but these options still aren't as secure as Stripe.js.
API
When Stripe first launched to the public, the Stripe API was a difference maker. It's clean, well documented, and extremely easy to use. Payment processor APIs of the past were buggy, inconsistent, and poorly documented. In fact, PayPal was one of the worst offenders.
In a way, Stripe has forced PayPal to up its game. The documentation and organization of their new RESTful PayPal API is vastly improved and modeled after Stripe (coincidentally). This is an example of competition benefiting customers. Stripe has set a new standard for a clean and well documented API, and the rest of the industry (including PayPal) is rushing to catch up.
Data Portability
This is an area where PayPal falls flat on it's face. Imagine you've built a successful membership site over the years, and you powered it with PayPal subscriptions. If you want to move to another payment processor (like Stripe), you can't transfer that credit card data. PayPal simply won't give it you. All your existing customers would have to sign up again and you'd probably lose some of them during the process.
Stripe on the other hand values data portability. If you decide to leave Stripe they'll help you migrate your credit card data in a secure and PCI-Compliant way. This over accommodating stance on data portability is certainly worth noting. It's refreshing to know you have a choice, and won't be locked in forever.
Customer Service
We haven't used PayPal in over two years, so we don't have any recent experience with their customer service. Back when we did use PayPal, email support was slow and unreliable, and it was nearly impossible to get someone on the phone. At one point, we had a running joke because PayPal's phone system kept hanging up on us before we could ever talk to anyone. This went on for months. There are also countless horror stories of PayPal freezing funds for no reason.
Stripe has open channels for email support, and they also have an IRC channel (#stripe on Freenode) where developers can chat and get live help from real engineers. This is invaluable if you're working through a tough problem and need some live help. Stripe doesn't yet have phone support, but I'm sure it's in the plans. They've always been very open and pleasant to deal with.
To be fair, PayPal is suffering from scale, age, and bureaucracy. Stripe is new and hustling for market share. They're working hard to differentiate with great customer service. The real test will be over time. Stripe will find it more and more challenging to provide top notch customer service as they get larger and larger. Hopefully we're still raving about their customer service five years from now.
You've been hearing more and more about Stripe, the hottest new payment processor on the block. But what about PayPal? They have a trusted brand and a long history of processing payments on the web.
Let's do a thorough review of Stripe vs PayPal. We'll compare each payment processor in five key categories: Transaction Fees, Security, API, Data Portability, Customer Service. We won't declare a winner for each category, but we'll point out some of the important differences, which should help you make a more informed decision.
Transaction Fees
Stripe takes a simple approach. They charge you a flat rate of 2.9% + 30¢ per successful charge as long as you're doing under $1 million in volume per year. This rate varies country to country, but it's always flat. They don't disclose any special high volume rates.
The base fee for PayPal is the same as Stripe, 2.9% + 30¢. But, they offer discounts as volume goes up. The discounts kick in at $3,000 (2.5% + 30¢), $10,000 (2.2% + 30¢), and $100,000 (not published) per month. This looks like a better deal, but PayPal throws in some extra service fees that make things a bit more complicated.
Let's compare Stripe and PayPal's service fees:
Service PayPal Stripe
Charge cards from your website $30 / month [1] Free
Chargeback $20 $15
American Express 3.5% [2] Same flat rate
Refund Transaction fee Free
International cards 1% [3] Free [4]
Authorize card 30¢ [5] Free
$5 / month for PayPal Advanced and $30 / month for PayPal Pro. Compare the different features. PayPal Advanced requires you offer PayPal as a payment option.
American Express fee is only charged for PayPal Advanced and PayPal Pro, which is required for certain features (see note 1).
PayPal cross border fees.
International cards are free, but currency conversion costs 2%. Example: You connect a GBP bank account to Stripe, but charge in USD. Stripe will automatically convert your funds to GBP (for a 2% fee) and deposit them into your GBP bank account. If you instead charged in GBP (or connected a USD bank to Stripe), it would be free.
PayPal charges 30¢ for uncaptured authorizations and card verification transactions.
You'll notice that PayPal fees are far more complex and require plenty of explaining. For example, they only charge extra for American Express when you're on one of the paid plans, which seems counterintuitive.
So, how do the transaction fees compare in a real life scenario? Let's take a look at a Stripe vs PayPal transaction fee comparison chart based on sales volume. Remember, if you want to charge cards on your site using PayPal and not provide PayPal as an option, you'll need a PayPal Pro plan.
Stripe vs PayPal transaction fee comparison chart
Volume / month Stripe PayPal Standard PayPal Pro
$500 $22 $22 $52
$1000 $44 $44 $74
$2,500 $110 $110 $140
$5,000 $220 $200 $230
$10,000 $440 $370 $400
$15,000 $660 $555 $585
$20,000 $880 $740 $770
$25,000 $1,100 $925 $955
$50,000 $2,200 $1,850 $1,880
$75,000 $3,300 $2,775 $2,805
Assumes $20 for each transaction.
As you can see, $5,000 in monthly volume is an interesting data point. That's right around where it starts becoming cheaper to use PayPal. Keep in mind, we're not counting any of the service fees we discussed earlier, which would bring the PayPal costs up a bit.
When do I get paid?
PayPal usually pays out within 1 business day, while Stripe takes 7 full days. If fast access to your funds is important, keep this in mind.
Update: USA Stripe customers now get faster two day transfers.
Security
Both Stripe and PayPal take security seriously. At the core, they're both very stable and secure platforms. Let's talk about how they're different, and how Stripe intrinsically encourages good security.
Stripe's killer feature when they first launched was Stripe.js. When you use Stripe.js on your website, the credit card data entered into your payment form is never sent to your server. Instead, the data is sent directly to Stripe. Why is this so important?
Automatically PCI compliant because you don't handle any sensitive credit card data on your servers.
More secure because a breach of your servers won't result in any stolen credit card data.
You're not tempted to store credit card data on your servers, which you really shouldn't be doing unless you're a big business and want to pay for PCI compliance.
If you follow the normal flow with Stripe, you'll just automatically store your cards in their vault. You'll never touch the sensitive data. This encourages good security.
PayPal now has a way to store cards in a vault, but it isn't quite the same as Stripe.js. The sensitive card data has to go through your servers, and this puts a big security burden (see PCI compliance above) on the software developer or the customer who has installed the software.
In summary, Stripe.js encourages good developer security practices, while PayPal gives developers room to make bad decisions. They've recently taken steps to provide better options, but these options still aren't as secure as Stripe.js.
API
When Stripe first launched to the public, the Stripe API was a difference maker. It's clean, well documented, and extremely easy to use. Payment processor APIs of the past were buggy, inconsistent, and poorly documented. In fact, PayPal was one of the worst offenders.
In a way, Stripe has forced PayPal to up its game. The documentation and organization of their new RESTful PayPal API is vastly improved and modeled after Stripe (coincidentally). This is an example of competition benefiting customers. Stripe has set a new standard for a clean and well documented API, and the rest of the industry (including PayPal) is rushing to catch up.
Data Portability
This is an area where PayPal falls flat on it's face. Imagine you've built a successful membership site over the years, and you powered it with PayPal subscriptions. If you want to move to another payment processor (like Stripe), you can't transfer that credit card data. PayPal simply won't give it you. All your existing customers would have to sign up again and you'd probably lose some of them during the process.
Stripe on the other hand values data portability. If you decide to leave Stripe they'll help you migrate your credit card data in a secure and PCI-Compliant way. This over accommodating stance on data portability is certainly worth noting. It's refreshing to know you have a choice, and won't be locked in forever.
Customer Service
We haven't used PayPal in over two years, so we don't have any recent experience with their customer service. Back when we did use PayPal, email support was slow and unreliable, and it was nearly impossible to get someone on the phone. At one point, we had a running joke because PayPal's phone system kept hanging up on us before we could ever talk to anyone. This went on for months. There are also countless horror stories of PayPal freezing funds for no reason.
Stripe has open channels for email support, and they also have an IRC channel (#stripe on Freenode) where developers can chat and get live help from real engineers. This is invaluable if you're working through a tough problem and need some live help. Stripe doesn't yet have phone support, but I'm sure it's in the plans. They've always been very open and pleasant to deal with.
To be fair, PayPal is suffering from scale, age, and bureaucracy. Stripe is new and hustling for market share. They're working hard to differentiate with great customer service. The real test will be over time. Stripe will find it more and more challenging to provide top notch customer service as they get larger and larger. Hopefully we're still raving about their customer service five years from now.
| Competition is good For Memberful, we chose Stripe, and we couldn't be happier with that decision. It's made everything we do easier from an engineering perspective, and we've been thrilled with the service and support. With that being said, PayPal has taken steps to respond to upstarts like Stripe, and has already improved their API significantly. It will be interesting to see how these two companies evolve and compete over the next few years. In the end, we'll all enjoy better service because of it. | |||||||||||
| Credit to - memberful | |||||||||||
DigitalOcean becomes the second largest hosting company in the world
DigitalOcean has grown to become the second-largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers, and shows no signs of slowing down.
The virtual private server provider has shown phenomenal growth over the past two-and-a-half years. First seen in our December 2012 survey, DigitalOcean today hosts more than 163,000 web-facing computers, according to Netcraft's May 2015 Hosting Provider Server Count. This gives it a small lead over French company OVH, which has been pushed down into third place.
DigitalOcean's only remaining challenge will be to usurp Amazon Web Services, which has been the largest hosting company since September 2012. However, it could be quite some time until we see DigitalOcean threatening to gain this ultimate victory: Although DigitalOcean started growing at a faster rate than Amazon towards the end of 2013, Amazon still has more than twice as many web-facing computers than DigitalOcean today.
Nonetheless, DigitalOcean seems committed to growing as fast as it can. Since October 2014, when we reported that DigitalOcean had become the fourth largest hosting company, DigitalOcean has introduced several new features to attract developers to its platform. Its metadata service enables Droplets (virtual private servers) to query information about themselves and bootstrap new servers, and a new DigitalOcean DNS service brought more scalability and reliability to creating and resolving DNS entries, allowing near-instantaneous propagation of domain names.
Other companies are also helping to fuel growth at DigitalOcean. Mesosphere created an automated provisioning tool which lets customers use DigitalOcean's resources to create self-healing environments that offer fault tolerance and scalability with minimal configuration. Mesosphere's API makes it possible to manage thousands of Droplets as if they were a single computer, and with DigitalOcean's low pricing models and SSD-only storage, it's understandable how this arrangement can appeal to particularly power-hungry developers.
In January, DigitalOcean introduced its first non-Linux operating system, FreeBSD. Although less commonly used these days, FreeBSD has garnered a reputation for reliability and it was not unusual to see web-facing FreeBSD servers with literally years of uptime in the past. In April, DigitalOcean launched the second version of its API, which lets developers programmatically control their Droplets and resources within the DigitalOcean cloud by sending simple HTTP requests.
More recently, DigitalOcean introduced a new European hosting region in Frankfurt, Germany. This is placed on the German Commercial Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), which is the largest internet exchange point worldwide by peak traffic, allowing Droplets hosted in this region to offer good connectivity to neighbouring countries. (An earlier announcement of an underwater Atlantis datacenter sadly turned out to be an April Fool's joke, despite the obvious benefits of free cooling).
Even so, Amazon still clearly dwarfs DigitalOcean in terms of variety of features and value-added services. Notably, Amazon offers a larger variety of operating systems on its EC2 cloud instances (including Microsoft Windows), and its global infrastructure is spread much wider. For example, EC2 instances can be hosted in America, Ireland, Germany, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Brazil, China or even within an isolated GloudGov US region, which allows US government agencies to move sensitive workloads into the cloud whilst fulfilling specific regulatory and compliance requirements. As well as these EC2 regions, Amazon also offers additional AWS Edge Locations to be used by its CloudFront content delivery network and its Route 53 DNS service.
Yet, as well as its low pricing, part of the appeal of using DigitalOcean could lie within its relative simplicity compared with Amazon's bewilderingly vast array of AWS services (AppStream, CloudFormation, ElastiCache, Glacier, Kinesis, Cognito, Simple Workflow Service, SimpleDB, SQS and Data Pipeline to name but a few). Signing up and provisioning a new Droplet on DigitalOcean is remarkably quick and easy, and likely fulfils the needs of many users. DigitalOcean's consistent and strong growth serves as testament to this, and will make the next year very interesting for the two at the top.
Credit to - Paul Mutton
The virtual private server provider has shown phenomenal growth over the past two-and-a-half years. First seen in our December 2012 survey, DigitalOcean today hosts more than 163,000 web-facing computers, according to Netcraft's May 2015 Hosting Provider Server Count. This gives it a small lead over French company OVH, which has been pushed down into third place.
DigitalOcean's only remaining challenge will be to usurp Amazon Web Services, which has been the largest hosting company since September 2012. However, it could be quite some time until we see DigitalOcean threatening to gain this ultimate victory: Although DigitalOcean started growing at a faster rate than Amazon towards the end of 2013, Amazon still has more than twice as many web-facing computers than DigitalOcean today.
Nonetheless, DigitalOcean seems committed to growing as fast as it can. Since October 2014, when we reported that DigitalOcean had become the fourth largest hosting company, DigitalOcean has introduced several new features to attract developers to its platform. Its metadata service enables Droplets (virtual private servers) to query information about themselves and bootstrap new servers, and a new DigitalOcean DNS service brought more scalability and reliability to creating and resolving DNS entries, allowing near-instantaneous propagation of domain names.
Other companies are also helping to fuel growth at DigitalOcean. Mesosphere created an automated provisioning tool which lets customers use DigitalOcean's resources to create self-healing environments that offer fault tolerance and scalability with minimal configuration. Mesosphere's API makes it possible to manage thousands of Droplets as if they were a single computer, and with DigitalOcean's low pricing models and SSD-only storage, it's understandable how this arrangement can appeal to particularly power-hungry developers.
In January, DigitalOcean introduced its first non-Linux operating system, FreeBSD. Although less commonly used these days, FreeBSD has garnered a reputation for reliability and it was not unusual to see web-facing FreeBSD servers with literally years of uptime in the past. In April, DigitalOcean launched the second version of its API, which lets developers programmatically control their Droplets and resources within the DigitalOcean cloud by sending simple HTTP requests.
More recently, DigitalOcean introduced a new European hosting region in Frankfurt, Germany. This is placed on the German Commercial Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), which is the largest internet exchange point worldwide by peak traffic, allowing Droplets hosted in this region to offer good connectivity to neighbouring countries. (An earlier announcement of an underwater Atlantis datacenter sadly turned out to be an April Fool's joke, despite the obvious benefits of free cooling).
Even so, Amazon still clearly dwarfs DigitalOcean in terms of variety of features and value-added services. Notably, Amazon offers a larger variety of operating systems on its EC2 cloud instances (including Microsoft Windows), and its global infrastructure is spread much wider. For example, EC2 instances can be hosted in America, Ireland, Germany, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Brazil, China or even within an isolated GloudGov US region, which allows US government agencies to move sensitive workloads into the cloud whilst fulfilling specific regulatory and compliance requirements. As well as these EC2 regions, Amazon also offers additional AWS Edge Locations to be used by its CloudFront content delivery network and its Route 53 DNS service.
Yet, as well as its low pricing, part of the appeal of using DigitalOcean could lie within its relative simplicity compared with Amazon's bewilderingly vast array of AWS services (AppStream, CloudFormation, ElastiCache, Glacier, Kinesis, Cognito, Simple Workflow Service, SimpleDB, SQS and Data Pipeline to name but a few). Signing up and provisioning a new Droplet on DigitalOcean is remarkably quick and easy, and likely fulfils the needs of many users. DigitalOcean's consistent and strong growth serves as testament to this, and will make the next year very interesting for the two at the top.
Credit to - Paul Mutton
Why growing cloud DigitalOcean isn’t scared of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft
NEW YORK — Fast-growing cloud provider DigitalOcean might not have hundreds of thousands of servers the way Amazon, Google, and Microsoft do to run its high-profile public clouds. But no matter. Ben Uretsky, the company’s chief executive, believes his startup has quite a few things going for it.
Perhaps most importantly, according to Uretsky, the company refuses to deprioritize user experience unlike the cloud giants that he sees as competitors.
“These providers focus on the technical features, and what we focus on is this is why were highly differentiated is we’re focused on people, and in this specific case, we’re focused on developers,” Uretsky said in an interview with VentureBeat at DigitalOcean headquarters here last week. “We are a product-driven company, whereas these other businesses are more technically driven, I guess.”
Whatever DigitalOcean is doing, people seem to like it. Netcraft now considers it the third-largest web-hosting company, and developers regularly name-drop DigitalOcean as an option for hosting sites, often citing the fast solid-state drives backing up the startup’s server slices, or droplets, in company parlance, and the prices, which start at $5 per month.
Sure, it lacks some of the popular services available from larger cloud providers, like an object-storage service and server load balancing. And it hardly brings in the revenue that, say, Amazon Web Services does. Nevertheless, the company does have developer cred. And one day, the developers who prefer DigitalOcean for side projects may want to choose it for a new application at work. Which is why DigitalOcean must be paid attention to.
Plus, feature announcements are on the way.
This year, following a $37.2 million funding round, the startup has worked to expand its global data center footprint and start hiring more people. The startup now has 110 employees.
“If 2013 was about growing the physical infrastructure, 2014 has been about growing the organizational structure and the people,” Uretsky said. “We’re in the best shape that we’ve been in in terms of team size, process, and things of that sort, so hopefully 2015 is finally a year where we can really make progress on our mission, which is to bring additional products and features to market that customers are asking for, while maintaining a simple, easy-to-use product, which is also really challenging.”
DigitalOcean has been looking to upgrade its networking hardware and centralize management across switches, and eventually roll out networking capabilities for customers, Uretsky said. DigitalOcean also plans to get compliance certificates to meet certain kinds of IT standards. Graphs for RAM and disk usage should be coming down the pipe soon, too.
But even as the startup adds features and keeps prices low “I don’t think anyone really focuses on price,” Uretsky said the directive is to ensure DigitalOcean remains user-friendly.
“We need to provide simple, powerful solutions, and that’s a complex problem,” Uretsky said. “It’s almost like a noble pursuit. It is so challenging to walk that fine line between being able to deliver something easy and yet retain its nature.”
DigitalOcean raised $83M and you don’t even know what it is. Allow me to explain
There is a very interesting company in New York called DigitalOcean. Today it announced that it has raised $83 million in new funding.
You might have heard of the company developers you know have probably mentioned it in passing but you might not know what it actually does. If that is the case, do not fear. I will explain everything.
DigitalOcean maintains and provides cloud infrastructure that applications to run on. Instead of making available a long and dizzying list of instance types and storage services for developers to choose from and tie together like top cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure DigitalOcean offers convenient “droplets” of compute and storage power for rent by the hour.
More than 6 million of these droplets have been deployed, atop tens of thousands of servers, by more than 500,000 developers, the startup says.
About 100 of the Fortune 500 have tried out DigitalOcean, the startup discovered through a recent survey. Customers include Compose, Flywheel, Ghost, InfluxDB, Pertino, and TaskRabbit.
Two months ago, DigitalOcean became the second largest hosting company in the world (second only to Amazon), at least by one metric. Last year, thanks to $50 million debt facility, the company was able to go from merely leasing servers to buying them outright. It’s growing up, in other words.
But Ben Uretsky, chief executive and a cofounder of DigitalOcean, doesn’t want to give up sacrifice the company’s simplicity in his quest to make DigitalOcean a part of many companies’ IT architectures.
“Do we really need 31 flavors of ice cream?” Uretsky asked me in an interview.
To be fair, Uretsky knows the company is missing some important features, namely an object storage service that’s comparable to the widely used Simple Storage Service, or S3, from Amazon. Uretsky wants to add advanced networking features, too.
Just because DigitalOcean’s portfolio is limited doesn’t mean companies are eventually migrating to other clouds, or their own data centers, as they mature. “That’s not what’s happening,” Uretsky told me. “Our customers don’t leave us. They don’t outgrow us. Our churn rate is the same as industry average. Infrastructure is inherently sticky. Switching costs are still very high.”
DigitalOcean is definitely not bringing in as much money as Amazon Web Services — the market leader is now doing more than $5 billion in revenue annually. And DigitalOcean operates considerably less infrastructure than Amazon Web Services, which may well be running more than 1.4 million servers at this point. But. But! If there is one cloud infrastructure startup to watch, it is, without question, DigitalOcean.
“There is no competition,” he told me. “We don’t think about the competition.”
That means no battling in the cloud price wars, no feature matching (DigitalOcean has not rushed to come out with a Docker container management service, for example), and no mad rush to set up a data center in every country. All DigitalOcean has to do is just keep it simple.
Access Industries led the new round in New York-based DigitalOcean, with existing investor Andreessen Horowitz also participating. The startup employs 150 people, and Uretsky wants to double that number.
Credit to - venturebeat
Perhaps most importantly, according to Uretsky, the company refuses to deprioritize user experience unlike the cloud giants that he sees as competitors.
“These providers focus on the technical features, and what we focus on is this is why were highly differentiated is we’re focused on people, and in this specific case, we’re focused on developers,” Uretsky said in an interview with VentureBeat at DigitalOcean headquarters here last week. “We are a product-driven company, whereas these other businesses are more technically driven, I guess.”
Whatever DigitalOcean is doing, people seem to like it. Netcraft now considers it the third-largest web-hosting company, and developers regularly name-drop DigitalOcean as an option for hosting sites, often citing the fast solid-state drives backing up the startup’s server slices, or droplets, in company parlance, and the prices, which start at $5 per month.
Sure, it lacks some of the popular services available from larger cloud providers, like an object-storage service and server load balancing. And it hardly brings in the revenue that, say, Amazon Web Services does. Nevertheless, the company does have developer cred. And one day, the developers who prefer DigitalOcean for side projects may want to choose it for a new application at work. Which is why DigitalOcean must be paid attention to.
Plus, feature announcements are on the way.
This year, following a $37.2 million funding round, the startup has worked to expand its global data center footprint and start hiring more people. The startup now has 110 employees.
“If 2013 was about growing the physical infrastructure, 2014 has been about growing the organizational structure and the people,” Uretsky said. “We’re in the best shape that we’ve been in in terms of team size, process, and things of that sort, so hopefully 2015 is finally a year where we can really make progress on our mission, which is to bring additional products and features to market that customers are asking for, while maintaining a simple, easy-to-use product, which is also really challenging.”
DigitalOcean has been looking to upgrade its networking hardware and centralize management across switches, and eventually roll out networking capabilities for customers, Uretsky said. DigitalOcean also plans to get compliance certificates to meet certain kinds of IT standards. Graphs for RAM and disk usage should be coming down the pipe soon, too.
But even as the startup adds features and keeps prices low “I don’t think anyone really focuses on price,” Uretsky said the directive is to ensure DigitalOcean remains user-friendly.
“We need to provide simple, powerful solutions, and that’s a complex problem,” Uretsky said. “It’s almost like a noble pursuit. It is so challenging to walk that fine line between being able to deliver something easy and yet retain its nature.”
DigitalOcean raised $83M and you don’t even know what it is. Allow me to explain
There is a very interesting company in New York called DigitalOcean. Today it announced that it has raised $83 million in new funding.
You might have heard of the company developers you know have probably mentioned it in passing but you might not know what it actually does. If that is the case, do not fear. I will explain everything.
DigitalOcean maintains and provides cloud infrastructure that applications to run on. Instead of making available a long and dizzying list of instance types and storage services for developers to choose from and tie together like top cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure DigitalOcean offers convenient “droplets” of compute and storage power for rent by the hour.
More than 6 million of these droplets have been deployed, atop tens of thousands of servers, by more than 500,000 developers, the startup says.
About 100 of the Fortune 500 have tried out DigitalOcean, the startup discovered through a recent survey. Customers include Compose, Flywheel, Ghost, InfluxDB, Pertino, and TaskRabbit.
Two months ago, DigitalOcean became the second largest hosting company in the world (second only to Amazon), at least by one metric. Last year, thanks to $50 million debt facility, the company was able to go from merely leasing servers to buying them outright. It’s growing up, in other words.
But Ben Uretsky, chief executive and a cofounder of DigitalOcean, doesn’t want to give up sacrifice the company’s simplicity in his quest to make DigitalOcean a part of many companies’ IT architectures.
“Do we really need 31 flavors of ice cream?” Uretsky asked me in an interview.
To be fair, Uretsky knows the company is missing some important features, namely an object storage service that’s comparable to the widely used Simple Storage Service, or S3, from Amazon. Uretsky wants to add advanced networking features, too.
Just because DigitalOcean’s portfolio is limited doesn’t mean companies are eventually migrating to other clouds, or their own data centers, as they mature. “That’s not what’s happening,” Uretsky told me. “Our customers don’t leave us. They don’t outgrow us. Our churn rate is the same as industry average. Infrastructure is inherently sticky. Switching costs are still very high.”
DigitalOcean is definitely not bringing in as much money as Amazon Web Services — the market leader is now doing more than $5 billion in revenue annually. And DigitalOcean operates considerably less infrastructure than Amazon Web Services, which may well be running more than 1.4 million servers at this point. But. But! If there is one cloud infrastructure startup to watch, it is, without question, DigitalOcean.
“There is no competition,” he told me. “We don’t think about the competition.”
That means no battling in the cloud price wars, no feature matching (DigitalOcean has not rushed to come out with a Docker container management service, for example), and no mad rush to set up a data center in every country. All DigitalOcean has to do is just keep it simple.
Access Industries led the new round in New York-based DigitalOcean, with existing investor Andreessen Horowitz also participating. The startup employs 150 people, and Uretsky wants to double that number.
Credit to - venturebeat
Why my blog doesn't currently qualify for adsense
The blogger is website that provide you the best way to make your own blog for to post any content like text, video , images, shared links and more. Its very easy way and you learn once you will be expert in that.
Now the thing is you created blog , you published so many post . At that time you get the search on Google ( http://intuitbox.blogspot.com ) but you didn’t see that. You can search ( http://intuitbox.blogspot.com ) on various search engines like Bing or yahoo msn you failed to see. ( http://intuitbox.blogspot.com ).
About Adsence you have lost of page view but you didn’t get adsence sign up offer.
I thing you forgot so many thing rather than the post. Let’s solution is here.
If you are targeting the brand and name on Google search engine with the seo friendly blog Lets follow the following steps. After done see the result on your way.
Open the blogger.com log in your blog >> you are targeting the specific brand that people search on Google and want to see your blog in search result page so that called is your TARGETED KEYWORD.
Title>> Your Targeted keyword,
Address- Must Targeted keyword that you show on result page when people search.
Template – Use classic View >> Users get annoying because of dynamic template so don’t select use. Then create blog.
Now first thing first NOW BASICALLY SEO FRIENDLY BLOG OR WEBSITE NEED 3 THING MOST IMPOERTANT 1 >TITLE, 2 >DESCRIPTION, 3 >KEWORDS
In that BlogSpot title and description in basic setting edit it – with specific brand title and targeted keyword in description. Follow Screenshot
Here is important privacy setting you must to yes that. Follow Screen Shot.
4-Some Important things are here GO to >> Setting >> Search Preference – Write the description about the brand in 150 which include targeted keyword.
Custom Page- You can write down any links or any help contact if visitor lost in your blog website
Custom Redirects- If you have your own website you can redirect it.
Custom Robots. Txt – some advantages for SEO- go to and edit – copy and paste that code in robots txt box. Its enables indexing on search engine. >>>> > User-agent: *Disallow:
You Done All
About Adsence-
For start earning purpose you need to spend more 4 to 5 weeks daily post. And need to get maximum page view on your posts that will give you the way for get the adsence.
IF you are seeing this means you did get approved Adsence for use. So start posting best post on your blog and get the unique visitors for earning.
Okay if you seeing this so congrats ..ssss !!!!!!! You have approved Google adsence blog for to show ads on your site
Let’s Go Click on switch Account You will see this
If u have already adsence ac. You linked with to choose use another, if not click Yes
Your Website or Blog Site Name
Congrats – You have successfully added to adsence ads on your website.
l>>>Lets visit how to use Adsence
>>> NOW IN THE LIST , BUT READ MUST <<<
If you are seeing this, Here is the solution-
you need blog has 5 articles most of which are short and may not fit advertising at this moment. Also it has not been active for a long period of time and Adsense requires fully developed and established blogs or websites'. Articles published within the range of 30-50 with a number of words of at least 350-500 and above would be better. From now on, you need to keep on updating your blog with original, unique and useful contents created by you and not copied from other websites for a number of months at least six.
This is final Solution Enjoy and keep touch with us Subscribe our news letter for more update blogs.
Tags : why my blog doesn't currently qualify for adsense,why your account failed to activate for google adsence, How to make money using blog and adsence, easy steps to activate your accounts, why google not index not showing my blog,
Source- devgod
Now the thing is you created blog , you published so many post . At that time you get the search on Google ( http://intuitbox.blogspot.com ) but you didn’t see that. You can search ( http://intuitbox.blogspot.com ) on various search engines like Bing or yahoo msn you failed to see. ( http://intuitbox.blogspot.com ).
About Adsence you have lost of page view but you didn’t get adsence sign up offer.
I thing you forgot so many thing rather than the post. Let’s solution is here.
If you are targeting the brand and name on Google search engine with the seo friendly blog Lets follow the following steps. After done see the result on your way.
Open the blogger.com log in your blog >> you are targeting the specific brand that people search on Google and want to see your blog in search result page so that called is your TARGETED KEYWORD.
Title>> Your Targeted keyword,
Address- Must Targeted keyword that you show on result page when people search.
Template – Use classic View >> Users get annoying because of dynamic template so don’t select use. Then create blog.
Now first thing first NOW BASICALLY SEO FRIENDLY BLOG OR WEBSITE NEED 3 THING MOST IMPOERTANT 1 >TITLE, 2 >DESCRIPTION, 3 >KEWORDS
In that BlogSpot title and description in basic setting edit it – with specific brand title and targeted keyword in description. Follow Screenshot
Here is important privacy setting you must to yes that. Follow Screen Shot.
4-Some Important things are here GO to >> Setting >> Search Preference – Write the description about the brand in 150 which include targeted keyword.
Custom Page- You can write down any links or any help contact if visitor lost in your blog website
Custom Redirects- If you have your own website you can redirect it.
Custom Robots. Txt – some advantages for SEO- go to and edit – copy and paste that code in robots txt box. Its enables indexing on search engine. >>>> > User-agent: *Disallow:
You Done All
About Adsence-
For start earning purpose you need to spend more 4 to 5 weeks daily post. And need to get maximum page view on your posts that will give you the way for get the adsence.
IF you are seeing this means you did get approved Adsence for use. So start posting best post on your blog and get the unique visitors for earning.
Okay if you seeing this so congrats ..ssss !!!!!!! You have approved Google adsence blog for to show ads on your site
Let’s Go Click on switch Account You will see this
If u have already adsence ac. You linked with to choose use another, if not click Yes
Your Website or Blog Site Name
Congrats – You have successfully added to adsence ads on your website.
l>>>Lets visit how to use Adsence
>>> NOW IN THE LIST , BUT READ MUST <<<
If you are seeing this, Here is the solution-
you need blog has 5 articles most of which are short and may not fit advertising at this moment. Also it has not been active for a long period of time and Adsense requires fully developed and established blogs or websites'. Articles published within the range of 30-50 with a number of words of at least 350-500 and above would be better. From now on, you need to keep on updating your blog with original, unique and useful contents created by you and not copied from other websites for a number of months at least six.
This is final Solution Enjoy and keep touch with us Subscribe our news letter for more update blogs.
Tags : why my blog doesn't currently qualify for adsense,why your account failed to activate for google adsence, How to make money using blog and adsence, easy steps to activate your accounts, why google not index not showing my blog,
Source- devgod
How do I use hashtags
Hashtags are such a prominent part of tech culture today that it’s rare to find anyone who doesn’t know what they are. In fact, the hashtag is so recognized that it was added to the Oxford dictionary in 2010, and the Scrabble Dictionary earlier this year (#standards). Yet even as most people have come to know what they are, many people still don’t understand how to use hashtags.
Hashtags, once your phone’s pound sign, now have a place on most popular social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Vine and Pinterest. The hashtag is likely the most popular means of categorizing content on social media. It makes your own content discoverable and allows you to find relevant content from other people and businesses. The hashtag also allows you to connect with and engage other social media users based on a common theme or interest.
Knowing how to use hashtags is fundamental to your success on social media. Here are a few best practices to help you achieve that success.
How to Use Hashtags
Do be specific when using hashtags
Try and hone in on a passionate community that shares an interest in one specific theme. The more specific you can get with your hashtag, the more targeted your audience will be—and a targeted audience generally means better engagement. If you don’t have your own business hashtag, find one or two existing ones that really fit the photo. To use an example from Instagram’s own tips for using hashtags, if you’re after Volkswagen lovers the hashtag #vwvan will earn you a lot more of your desired followers than #van will. Twitter has created a helpful infographic to help you choose the right hashtag.
Do cater hashtags to the social network you’re using
While hashtags on all social networks have the same fundamental purpose of content tagging and discovery, the use of hashtags still varies by network. In terms of use, Instagram hashtags, for example, are often more focused on description of the photo and the tools used to take it than on a broader story or theme. This is at odds with Twitter, where hashtags tend to be more focused a topic of conversation, or a group of people (a chat for example) that you would like to engage.
Before using hashtags, do research on the proper way to use them for that particular network. Most networks will have guides for hashtag selection and use (here is Twitter’s). Also take the time to discover the most popular and most relevant hashtags on a specific subject for each network. This extra time you invest will pay off in engagement down the road.
Do come up with relevant, unbranded hashtags
Brand hashtags don’t have to (read: shouldn’t) mention your brand name, but should represent your brand and what you stand for. Herschel Supply Co. offers a prime example of what this means. The bag and accessories brand created a hashtag called #welltravelled, which they used to share beautiful travel photos featuring their products taken by their employees and followers. Seeing photos from regular people on the official Herschel account quickly prompted more of their followers to embrace the hashtag and share their own Herschel photos. As such, the company has created a growing movement that supplies them with fantastic, follower-generated content to use on their social accounts.
How not to Use Hashtags (Don’t.)
Don’t go too long or too clever
In general, if you’re creating a branded hashtag you should try to keep it short and sweet. Even though “#NewYorkCronutLovers” might target a very specific audience, no one will use the hashtag because they just don’t want to type in that many characters. You also don’t want to try and be too clever or offbeat (#CroNYts?) since you want people to naturally search for your tag. Hashtags are supposed to make things easier to find and engage with, but long, complicated hashtags can actually be more arduous. In this case, you’re better off with something like #NYcronuts.
Don’t have more hashtags than words.
In fact, don’t even come close. Social media users often used an excessive amount of hashtags ironically or when making a joke. But many Instagram users have also caught onto the fact that more hashtags can mean more reach and likes. So, they’ve overloaded their photos with as many hashtags as they’re allowed – which is reportedly 30. You don’t want to use 30 hashtags on a single post. You don’t even want to use 5 hashtags on a single post. Even if you gain followers, it’s often the wrong kind of follower— spammers or people only interested in being followed back. It generally dilutes your message and comes off as desperate. Focus instead on being specific, which we already explained above.
Don’t hashtag everything
Hashtags serve to make your content discoverable to a wide audience. The truth is, not everything you produce is going to fit into that category. If your Tweet, post or comment isn’t adding any substance to the wider conversation, you might want to consider leaving the hashtag off. For example, if a news story breaks and you simply share the news, leave the hashtag off of it. If you write a blog post that analyzes the impact of that news, then absolutely use a hashtag when you share it.
Using hashtags will allow you to make an impression on a wide social media audience. Make sure you’re sharing the best content, and making the right impression.
Hashtags, once your phone’s pound sign, now have a place on most popular social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Vine and Pinterest. The hashtag is likely the most popular means of categorizing content on social media. It makes your own content discoverable and allows you to find relevant content from other people and businesses. The hashtag also allows you to connect with and engage other social media users based on a common theme or interest.
Knowing how to use hashtags is fundamental to your success on social media. Here are a few best practices to help you achieve that success.
How to Use Hashtags
Do be specific when using hashtags
Try and hone in on a passionate community that shares an interest in one specific theme. The more specific you can get with your hashtag, the more targeted your audience will be—and a targeted audience generally means better engagement. If you don’t have your own business hashtag, find one or two existing ones that really fit the photo. To use an example from Instagram’s own tips for using hashtags, if you’re after Volkswagen lovers the hashtag #vwvan will earn you a lot more of your desired followers than #van will. Twitter has created a helpful infographic to help you choose the right hashtag.
Do cater hashtags to the social network you’re using
While hashtags on all social networks have the same fundamental purpose of content tagging and discovery, the use of hashtags still varies by network. In terms of use, Instagram hashtags, for example, are often more focused on description of the photo and the tools used to take it than on a broader story or theme. This is at odds with Twitter, where hashtags tend to be more focused a topic of conversation, or a group of people (a chat for example) that you would like to engage.
Before using hashtags, do research on the proper way to use them for that particular network. Most networks will have guides for hashtag selection and use (here is Twitter’s). Also take the time to discover the most popular and most relevant hashtags on a specific subject for each network. This extra time you invest will pay off in engagement down the road.
Do come up with relevant, unbranded hashtags
Brand hashtags don’t have to (read: shouldn’t) mention your brand name, but should represent your brand and what you stand for. Herschel Supply Co. offers a prime example of what this means. The bag and accessories brand created a hashtag called #welltravelled, which they used to share beautiful travel photos featuring their products taken by their employees and followers. Seeing photos from regular people on the official Herschel account quickly prompted more of their followers to embrace the hashtag and share their own Herschel photos. As such, the company has created a growing movement that supplies them with fantastic, follower-generated content to use on their social accounts.
How not to Use Hashtags (Don’t.)
Don’t go too long or too clever
In general, if you’re creating a branded hashtag you should try to keep it short and sweet. Even though “#NewYorkCronutLovers” might target a very specific audience, no one will use the hashtag because they just don’t want to type in that many characters. You also don’t want to try and be too clever or offbeat (#CroNYts?) since you want people to naturally search for your tag. Hashtags are supposed to make things easier to find and engage with, but long, complicated hashtags can actually be more arduous. In this case, you’re better off with something like #NYcronuts.
Don’t have more hashtags than words.
In fact, don’t even come close. Social media users often used an excessive amount of hashtags ironically or when making a joke. But many Instagram users have also caught onto the fact that more hashtags can mean more reach and likes. So, they’ve overloaded their photos with as many hashtags as they’re allowed – which is reportedly 30. You don’t want to use 30 hashtags on a single post. You don’t even want to use 5 hashtags on a single post. Even if you gain followers, it’s often the wrong kind of follower— spammers or people only interested in being followed back. It generally dilutes your message and comes off as desperate. Focus instead on being specific, which we already explained above.
Don’t hashtag everything
Hashtags serve to make your content discoverable to a wide audience. The truth is, not everything you produce is going to fit into that category. If your Tweet, post or comment isn’t adding any substance to the wider conversation, you might want to consider leaving the hashtag off. For example, if a news story breaks and you simply share the news, leave the hashtag off of it. If you write a blog post that analyzes the impact of that news, then absolutely use a hashtag when you share it.
Using hashtags will allow you to make an impression on a wide social media audience. Make sure you’re sharing the best content, and making the right impression.
Reasons Why People Still Use Facebook
We all know Facebook is phenomenally successful, but why, in light of concerns over privacy, the selling off of user data, constant changes to the default settings, and experiments on unsuspecting members of the public, does anyone carry on using it?
We asked, you answered, and the results have been pulled together to form some fascinating conclusions outlined below.
Facebook Friends Frenzy
We asked you, Why Are You Still Using Facebook? The response was overwhelming, with well over 100 people chiming in with their reasons for continuing to use Facebook. There were many reasons given, but one was mentioned more often than the rest.
The main reason people still use Facebook is because everyone else uses it. This shouldn’t come as a great surprise to anyone, as it’s a fact that with 1.3 billion users, Facebook is where all your friends are likely to be.
However, it may be of some concern to Facebook that the biggest hold it has on its users is the size of its userbase. What happens if a better alternative comes along and people decamp en masse? This explains why Facebook has been so quick to acquire potential rivals such as Instagram and Whatsapp.
This was by no means the only reason our readership gave for still using Facebook. As promised by the title there are plenty more worth mentioning. These are just 10 of the reasons our readers gave for still using Facebook…
Because Facebook works as an RSS reader for news.
Because it’s required to log in to other websites.
Because you can use it to build a professional profile.
Because you can use it to share photos easily.
Because Facebook offers free video messaging.
Because it’s an easy way of organizing events.
Because Facebook groups are better than bulletin boards.
Because it’s the easiest method for remembering birthdays.
Because it offers a simple way of spreading awful opinions.
Because it’s better than Google+.
So, what have we learned? That people are still using Facebook despite the stunts the company continues to pull. Why? Because nothing else works quite as well as Facebook does, and what alternatives there are only have a fraction of the users Facebook boasts. Ergo, Facebook wins.
Facebook wins, but only for the time being. A new rival could emerge in time, and refuse to be acquired by Facebook. If enough people start using the new rival instead of Facebook then a tipping point will eventually occur. At that (currently) fictional moment in time, Facebook becomes the new MySpace. And that’s a fate we wouldn’t wish on anyone.
We chose this comment purely because it’s a reminder that Facebook isn’t all bad. While we asked this question from a negative perspective, this commenter informed us how Facebook has actually improved her life for the better. Which is rather nice to hear.
We Ask You is a weekly column in which you have your say about a particular subject. We ask you a question each week, with the results compiled and compressed into a follow-up article the following week. This column is nothing without your input, all of which is valued.
We asked, you answered, and the results have been pulled together to form some fascinating conclusions outlined below.
Facebook Friends Frenzy
We asked you, Why Are You Still Using Facebook? The response was overwhelming, with well over 100 people chiming in with their reasons for continuing to use Facebook. There were many reasons given, but one was mentioned more often than the rest.
The main reason people still use Facebook is because everyone else uses it. This shouldn’t come as a great surprise to anyone, as it’s a fact that with 1.3 billion users, Facebook is where all your friends are likely to be.
However, it may be of some concern to Facebook that the biggest hold it has on its users is the size of its userbase. What happens if a better alternative comes along and people decamp en masse? This explains why Facebook has been so quick to acquire potential rivals such as Instagram and Whatsapp.
This was by no means the only reason our readership gave for still using Facebook. As promised by the title there are plenty more worth mentioning. These are just 10 of the reasons our readers gave for still using Facebook…
Because Facebook works as an RSS reader for news.
Because it’s required to log in to other websites.
Because you can use it to build a professional profile.
Because you can use it to share photos easily.
Because Facebook offers free video messaging.
Because it’s an easy way of organizing events.
Because Facebook groups are better than bulletin boards.
Because it’s the easiest method for remembering birthdays.
Because it offers a simple way of spreading awful opinions.
Because it’s better than Google+.
So, what have we learned? That people are still using Facebook despite the stunts the company continues to pull. Why? Because nothing else works quite as well as Facebook does, and what alternatives there are only have a fraction of the users Facebook boasts. Ergo, Facebook wins.
Facebook wins, but only for the time being. A new rival could emerge in time, and refuse to be acquired by Facebook. If enough people start using the new rival instead of Facebook then a tipping point will eventually occur. At that (currently) fictional moment in time, Facebook becomes the new MySpace. And that’s a fate we wouldn’t wish on anyone.
We chose this comment purely because it’s a reminder that Facebook isn’t all bad. While we asked this question from a negative perspective, this commenter informed us how Facebook has actually improved her life for the better. Which is rather nice to hear.
We Ask You is a weekly column in which you have your say about a particular subject. We ask you a question each week, with the results compiled and compressed into a follow-up article the following week. This column is nothing without your input, all of which is valued.
Bypass facebook check point
Hello, How to BYPASS MALWARE CHECKPOINT FOR FACEBOOK. I tried the following solution but it do not work
Step A On chrome browser click (CTRL + SHIFT + N ) to open an incognito window .
Step B Log in to FACEBOOK, ( in this step FACEBOOK will not ask you for a virus scan and it will work fine ) .
Step C Navigate to this link https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=security§ion=devices&view , remove all the chrome saved browsers if you where stuck in chrome, (you can remove all the saved browsers which is better) .
Step D From chrome normal window click (CTRL + SHIFT + N ) check all the boxes and choose
Obliterate the following items from:
Hit clear browser data button, wait till finished . (its better you close FACEBOOK window before doing this step) .
Step E log in to your FACEBOOK account normally , if you still stuck repeat the above steps and try to log in from http://mbasic.facebook.com, once you are logged in you can brows FACEBOOK normally https://facebook.com .
Is there any other way to bypass it. It has been irritating me a lot. Also i have downloaded antivirus and scanned my computer several times. However my friends Facebook open through my computer.
Step A On chrome browser click (CTRL + SHIFT + N ) to open an incognito window .
Step B Log in to FACEBOOK, ( in this step FACEBOOK will not ask you for a virus scan and it will work fine ) .
Step C Navigate to this link https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=security§ion=devices&view , remove all the chrome saved browsers if you where stuck in chrome, (you can remove all the saved browsers which is better) .
Step D From chrome normal window click (CTRL + SHIFT + N ) check all the boxes and choose
Obliterate the following items from:
Hit clear browser data button, wait till finished . (its better you close FACEBOOK window before doing this step) .
Step E log in to your FACEBOOK account normally , if you still stuck repeat the above steps and try to log in from http://mbasic.facebook.com, once you are logged in you can brows FACEBOOK normally https://facebook.com .
Is there any other way to bypass it. It has been irritating me a lot. Also i have downloaded antivirus and scanned my computer several times. However my friends Facebook open through my computer.
Migrating an Existing Parse App
The Parse hosted service will be retired on January 28, 2017.
If you are planning to migrate an app, you need to begin work as soon
as possible.
For most apps, the migration process is non-trivial, and will require dedicated development time. We recommend the following schedule:
This migration guide assumes the use of Heroku and MongoLab. These two services are easy to use, especially if you are new to deploying and managing your own backend stack. But, you can elect to use any infrastructure provider that supports Node.js environments.
After completion, you will have the following:
Here is a visual overview of the migration steps. Follow the detailed instructions after the diagram to migrate your app.
Once you have Mongo setup, take note of the Mongo connection URL. Use the database migration tool to transfer your data (found in the new dashboard under App Settings → General → Migrate to external database). Ensure that the user in the connection string has admin privileges, as the migration tool will set some paramaters automatically during the process.
The tool first takes a snapshot of your existing data and transfers it to MongoDB. Next, it will pause to allow manual verification, while continuing to keep things in sync with writes that are coming in from your live app. While you are in this state, your app continues to read and write from your Parse hosted database.
Connect to your Mongo instance and browse through the collections in the newly created database. Check the collection counts and do a few spot checks to ensure that your data was migrated successfully.
Once you're satisfied, you can finalize the transfer in the migration UI and your app will be using the new MongoDB instance. At this point, your app is still hitting
Note that you can elect to skip migrating your data and test the functionality of your Parse Server hosted app with a blank database. You can always migrate your data later.
Go to the Security & Keys section of App Settings in your Parse Dashboard and take note of the File Key, Master Key, Client Key, JavaScript Key, and dotNETKey values. Pass that into the ParseServer constructor in
You now have a Parse Server running locally that is connected to the data in MongoDB from step 1.
Native Cloud Code modules are not available in Parse Server, so you will need to use a replacement:
Because the Parse hosted Cloud Code isn’t running a full node environment, there may be subtle differences in how your Cloud Code runs in Parse Server. We recommend exercising all your critical code paths to ensure full functionality.
Expire inactive sessions - This is not yet available in Parse Server.
Revoke session on password change - This is not yet available in Parse Server.
Allow username and password-based authentication - This is currently not optional in Parse Server, username and password based accounts are always enabled.
Allow anonymous users - This is currently not optional in Parse Server, anonymous users are always enabled.
Add a Facebook app (list of apps) - The ability to restrict to one Facebook App is not available in Parse Server.
At this point, your app may be totally functional. Objects, queries, and users will work right out of the box.
It is possible to keep using the Parse hosted dashboard, since it will be pointing to the same data in Mongo. However, you should not consider this a long term solution, as the hosted Parse state may diverge and mutate data in unpredictable ways (for example: if your Cloud Code gets out of sync with the Cloud Code in your Parse Server).
Parse Server does not yet implement the option to expire inactive sessions and to revoke a session on password changes.
For most apps, the migration process is non-trivial, and will require dedicated development time. We recommend the following schedule:
- April 28, 2016: Data migrated to a self-hosted MongoDB (Step 1)
- July 28, 2016: Finish setting up your self-hosted Parse Server and release a new app pointing to it (Steps 2-12)
This migration guide assumes the use of Heroku and MongoLab. These two services are easy to use, especially if you are new to deploying and managing your own backend stack. But, you can elect to use any infrastructure provider that supports Node.js environments.
After completion, you will have the following:
- Parse Server running on your computer, allowing you to develop locally.
- Parse Server running on Heroku.
- Your app’s data stored in MongoDB hosted on MongoLab.
- Your app’s client-side code updated to point to the Parse Server instance on Heroku, ready to be released.
- No dependency on api.parse.com for the new app client.
Here is a visual overview of the migration steps. Follow the detailed instructions after the diagram to migrate your app.
1. Migrate Parse DB to Self-Hosted MongoDB
The first step is to migrate the data from your Parse hosted app to a self-hosted MongoDB. Set up a MongoDB instance that conforms to our database specifications. Due to data being compressed in the hosted Parse database, make sure to size your Mongo at least 10X the current amount of data storage you are using (you can find this information in your app's Analytics overview page).Once you have Mongo setup, take note of the Mongo connection URL. Use the database migration tool to transfer your data (found in the new dashboard under App Settings → General → Migrate to external database). Ensure that the user in the connection string has admin privileges, as the migration tool will set some paramaters automatically during the process.
The tool first takes a snapshot of your existing data and transfers it to MongoDB. Next, it will pause to allow manual verification, while continuing to keep things in sync with writes that are coming in from your live app. While you are in this state, your app continues to read and write from your Parse hosted database.
Connect to your Mongo instance and browse through the collections in the newly created database. Check the collection counts and do a few spot checks to ensure that your data was migrated successfully.
Once you're satisfied, you can finalize the transfer in the migration UI and your app will be using the new MongoDB instance. At this point, your app is still hitting
api.parse.com, but is using your
MongoDB instance. You will need to administrate your database instance
yourself, including maintaining indexes and scaling up.Note that you can elect to skip migrating your data and test the functionality of your Parse Server hosted app with a blank database. You can always migrate your data later.
2. Set Up Local Parse Server
Follow the instructions in the Parse Server Sample App and use the Mongo connection string from Step 1.Go to the Security & Keys section of App Settings in your Parse Dashboard and take note of the File Key, Master Key, Client Key, JavaScript Key, and dotNETKey values. Pass that into the ParseServer constructor in
index.js.Verification
Make sure saving an object and retrieving it via a query works:curl -X POST \
-H "X-Parse-Application-Id: YOUR_APP_ID" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"score":1337,"playerName":"Sean Plott","cheatMode":false}' \
http://localhost:1337/parse/classes/GameScore
curl -X GET \
-H "X-Parse-Application-Id: YOUR_APP_ID" \
-H "X-Parse-Master-Key: YOUR_APP_MASTER_KEY" \
http://localhost:1337/parse/classes/GameScore
3. Cloud Code
We will now migrate your existing Cloud Code to run in Parse Server. Copy your app’s Cloud Code to the parse-server/cloud directory, replacing the example main.js. You will need to replace any relative paths like ‘cloud/…’ to ‘./cloud’.Native Cloud Code modules are not available in Parse Server, so you will need to use a replacement:
App Links
There is no direct replacement , but it is relatively easy to generate these tags yourself.Buffer
This is included natively with Node. Remove any require('buffer') calls.Mailgun
Use the official npm module: https://www.npmjs.com/package/mailgun-jsMandrill
Use the official npm module: https://www.npmjs.com/package/mandrill-apiMoment
Use the official npm module: https://www.npmjs.com/package/momentParse Image
We recommend using another image manipulation library, like the imagemagick wrapper module. Alternatively, consider using a cloud-based image manipulation and management platform, such as Cloudinary.SendGrid
Use the official npm module: https://www.npmjs.com/package/sendgridStripe
Use the official npm module: https://www.npmjs.com/package/stripeTwilio
Use the official npm module: https://www.npmjs.com/package/twilioUnderscore
Use the official npm module: https://www.npmjs.com/package/underscoreVerification
Run Parse Server and make some calls to it to verify that your Cloud Code is running correctly. If you had tests setup for the Cloud Code in your Parse hosted backend, point them to your local Parse Server and run the test suite.Because the Parse hosted Cloud Code isn’t running a full node environment, there may be subtle differences in how your Cloud Code runs in Parse Server. We recommend exercising all your critical code paths to ensure full functionality.
4. Hosting
If you are using Parse Hosting, you can migrate all these web endpoints to the same Express app that is serving Parse Server. For example, you could mount Parse Server under /parse and your website at the root, like so:var api = new ParseServer({ ... });
app.use('/parse', api);
// Web endpoints
app.get('/', homeController.index);
app.get('/about', aboutController.index);
// ...
5. App Settings
Go through your app settings panel and make sure to understand how these settings will be impacted by moving to Parse Server.User Sessions
Require revocable sessions - This is required by Parse Server.Expire inactive sessions - This is not yet available in Parse Server.
Revoke session on password change - This is not yet available in Parse Server.
User Authentication
Enable new methods by default - This is hardcoded as true in Parse Server.Allow username and password-based authentication - This is currently not optional in Parse Server, username and password based accounts are always enabled.
Allow anonymous users - This is currently not optional in Parse Server, anonymous users are always enabled.
Social Login
Allow FB auth - This is available in Parse Server if a Facebook App ID is configured.Add a Facebook app (list of apps) - The ability to restrict to one Facebook App is not available in Parse Server.
6. Point Client to Local Parse Server
Update your app with the latest version of the Parse SDK (at least version 1.12 for iOS, 1.13.0 for Android, 1.6.14 for JS, 1.7.0 for .NET), which will have the ability to change the server URL.7. Checkpoint: Test Your App
Now, test your app locally. Be careful if your Parse Server is pointing to the same Mongo instance as your live app, as you could be mutating production data.At this point, your app may be totally functional. Objects, queries, and users will work right out of the box.
8. Compatibility Issues
There are a few areas where Parse Server does not provide compatibility with the Parse hosted backend.Analytics
This is not supported. We recommend sending analytics to another similar service like Mixpanel or Google Analytics.Client Class Creation
This is always allowed in Parse Server.Config
This is not supported. You can create config variables in Node that can be changed and deployed. Or, it would be relatively straightforward to create a Node version of Parse Config with a dashboard to change these variables without a deployment.Dashboard
We do not provide a self-hosted dashboard out of the box. It is possible to write your own dashboard using the JavaScript SDK and host it yourself, or, you can manage the data directly in Mongo.It is possible to keep using the Parse hosted dashboard, since it will be pointing to the same data in Mongo. However, you should not consider this a long term solution, as the hosted Parse state may diverge and mutate data in unpredictable ways (for example: if your Cloud Code gets out of sync with the Cloud Code in your Parse Server).
In-App Purchases
iOS in-app purchase verification is not supported.Jobs
There is no Job functionality in Parse Server. If you have scheduled jobs, port them over to a self-hosted solution using a wide variety of open source job queue projects. A popular one is kue. Alternatively, if your jobs are simple, you could use a cron job.Push Notifications
Parse Server implements basic transactional pushes for channels and queries. Check out the Push Guide for the details.Exporting GCM Registration IDs
Parse supports sending pushes to Android devices via Google Cloud Messaging (GCM). By default, the GCM registration IDs (stored in thedeviceToken
field) for your app are associated with Parse's GCM sender ID, which
won't work after Parse is retired. You may want to take these actions to
have your app register with a different GCM sender ID, which will make
the registration IDs in the deviceToken field exportable to other push providers:- Enable GCM for your Android project in the Google Developer Console. Take note of your project number (it should be a large integer like
123427208255). This is also known as your GCM sender ID. - Add the
com.parse.push.gcm_sender_idmetadata attribute to your app manifest so that Parse registers for push with your GCM sender ID. For instance, if your GCM sender ID is123427208255, then you should add a metadata attribute namedcom.parse.push.gcm_sender_idwith the valueid:123427208255(note that the "id:" prefix is required). This attribute requires Android SDK 1.8.0 or higher. See our Android push guide for more details on this attribute. - Parse will now register for GCM with both its GCM sender ID and your
GCM sender ID on app startup. You can use the resulting GCM
registration IDs (stored in the
deviceTokenfield of ParseInstallation) with other GCM push providers.
Schema API
This is not supported.Session Features
Parse Server requires the use of revocable sessions. If your app is still using legacy sessions, follow this migration guide.Parse Server does not yet implement the option to expire inactive sessions and to revoke a session on password changes.
Social Login
Only Facebook and Anonymous logins are supported.Webhooks
This is not supported.Welcome Emails and Email Verification
This is not supported out of the box. But, you can use a beforeSave to send out emails using a provider like Mailgun and add logic for verification.9. Set Up Parse Server on Heroku
Follow the instructions for deploying the server to Heroku.10. Point Client to Heroku Parse Server
Now, update your client to point to the location of the API that you deployed on Heroku.11. Checkpoint: Test Your App
Test your app now that it uses the Heroku backend.12. Publish Your App
You can now publish the new app, which will utilize your new backend. You should encourage users to update to the new version of your app. On January 28, 2017, any calls to the hosted Parse backend service will cease to function.
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