When you look back on a previous year, you can often label it as your best year, worst year or busiest year. I can look back on 2013 and say that it was without a doubt our most exciting year to date. Before looking into what 2014 means for A2 Hosting and our customers, let’s look back at 2013 and the 5 biggest events of the past year.

We provide backup services on all of our Managed hosting accounts. Most quality hosts do. But whether we’re lucky enough to be your host, or you’re with someone else, it’s important to not rely solely on your host’s backup services. For your sensitive data, you should have additional backups elsewhere. That means your database and any custom code as well. It’s unlikely that your data would ever become totally unrecoverable, but unlikely things do eventually happen to someone. If you are that someone, you can avoid potential disaster by having an independent backup of all your sensitive data.

PHP developers have so many powerful frameworks to choose from it can be tough to keep up with them all. Each of the top tier frameworks has something to offer, though, and compelling reasons why you might choose it rather than all the other options. The Yii Framework is one of those top tier options. One of the big tools it brings to the table is its powerful code generation. Yii comes with both command line and web based code generation utilities which will alleviate the drudge works of creating Model classes for your DB schema, along with all the associated CRUD code.

Like many of my blog posts, they start with a question that I’ve read on a discussion board. As you probably guessed, this post is about how to discover a new niche to start a website about. Of course I make it easy by saying it only takes 3-steps, but remember it’s up to you ultimately to create the content (and if it’s a blog a continual stream of fresh content) for your website to succeed. This point leads me to step one: