Category Archives: cPanel

How Many Servers Does A Web Hosting Service Need?

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How Many Servers Does A Web Hosting Server Need?

How Many Servers Does A Web Hosting Server Need?

Web Hosting customers don’t always realize what goes on behind the scenes of their web hosting service. The layman often thinks that the web hosting service is just another software installed on a monster computer, bit of which are sold to the end user. But there’s a lot more that goes on behind setting up a web hosting service. While some hosts use separate machines to run services like email, FTP, HTTP etc., some hosts install all these services on a single machine. This article takes you into the web hosting world and shows you which software servers are running to give you the best web hosting experience with different services.

Web Server

The web server is one of the most important parts of your web hosting service. The web server is what actually delivers your web page to the user’s browser. It also handles different requests for information that your browser makes and also takes care of incorrect or erroneous requests. When you see 404 error pages or warning messages, these are all served up by the web server. Web hosts commonly use IIS, Apache, Nginx and Tomcat amongst many different web servers. Web servers use the HTTP protocol to communicate with the user’s browser. The administrator also has the capability of restricting folders, files and websites through the web server configuration.

Mail Server

The mail server is essential when providing email service. The mail server allows the sending and receiving of email on specific ports. The mail server helps filter the received mail to different users’ folders and thereby allows multiple domains to be hosted on a single physical machine. Mail servers are also capable of redirecting mail and applying conditional filters to weed out unwanted mail and fight spam. Most mail servers allow the use of third party plugins or software to aid them perform their functions. For example mail servers can intelligently use third party RBLs or black lists to identify if a mail sender is actually a source of spam which should be rejected before he can reach the mail server. Mail servers usually use IMAP, SMTP and POP3 protocols to serve their purpose.

FTP Server

Almost every web host offers FTP services to transfer files. But most users don’t realize that this requires an FTP server at the hosts end. An FTP server allows connections using the FTP protocol, for the transfer of files. This aids users in downloading or uploading files in simple, quick and efficient way. FTP servers control the bandwidth usage, user connections, authentication system and even file management for the user. FTP servers are inexpensive to maintain and are now considered as included in any web hosting package.

SQL Server

An SQL server is a database management server which allows users to create and store data in relational tables, using the Structured Query Language or SQL. On windows machines, Microsoft MS SQL is installed, whereas Unix based hosting systems usually come with open source alternatives like MySQL, Postgresql, MariaDB among others. Web hosts sell databases based on the package that the user takes. Each database requires CPU and memory resources to function properly. Databases form up the backbone of most websites which have a Content Management System or which store a large amount of data.

Others

Some web hosts offer their own DNS service, for which they need to run a DNS Server on their systems. The DNS server just maps the domain name to the servers IP address so that when a visitor is using a service on a website, he is served up the right information from the right source. Premium web hosts offer File Sharing services and have a Web DAV Server either separate or integrated into their Web Server (as above). This allows users to quickly sync files to and from their website onto their mobile devices. Almost all web hosts also provide an SSH service so that users can connect securely to different ports for different services on the account.

While web hosting may seem like an easy business, managing all these services can be quite a task, which web hosts need to do on a daily basis.

When Do We Need MySQL Databases With Our Web Hosting?

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Whenever you buy web hosting, your hosting provider is sure to include an option called “Databases” in his price quotation or package details. But not many of us know what are databases and why we need them when setting up a website. This article aims to explain a couple of reasons why we use databases and when we need them for our website.

The database systems we usually get with our web hosting accounts are all relational database systems or RDBMS. If we take a Windows hosting server we usually get Microsoft SQL aka MSSQL and if we take a Unix based system we usually get MySQL. Both these systems put your website data into tabular layouts for fast and easy retrieval.

Databases are a collection of rows and columns, where each row or column is related to the others in some way. Due to this relation, information from this database can be retrieved quickly and efficiently as compared to if the data was stored in any other unstructured format. You can consider a database as a collection of multiple spreadsheets which are all related to each other in some way or the other.

Security

A major advantage of having your data stored in a database is the ability to protect the database from unauthorized access, or the ability to protect a database record from being tampered with. A simple example would be the storage of login credentials. In a simple way, login credentials can be stored in a simple text file and be read by your script which does the authentication. However, your file will always save the password stored in plan text, making it vulnerable to anyone who has access to it. Databases have the ability to encrypt the entries using a hashing algorithm to obscure them. Further, to read or write to the database, you need to specify login details, something which is not easily possible with an ordinary text file or spreadsheet.

Efficiency

Due to the manner in which data is stored in the database, retrieval and storage is most efficient. Unlike a spreadsheet, where anything and everything can be stored in any cell, SQL restricts the type of information stored in each row or column based on certain conditions. This validation is inherent in the properties of SQL and is an added advantage for a programmer or developer. Due to the various inbuilt mechanisms that are present in RDBMS systems, they are the most preferred method of storage and retrieval of data.

An article on the DatabaseJournal Blog explains this in a lucid way:

“…The problem with text files is during a read, if the text file is large, it can take quite a bite of time to open and scan the contents of the file looking for what we want. Also, if we wanted to see all the sales to a specific customer, the entire text file would have to be read, and every line occurrence of the customer name would need to be saved in some temporary place until we had them all. If we saved to a spreadsheet instead of a text file, we would have a Sort feature built in. So we may be able to find all the sales to a specific customer quicker, but again, if the file was large, opening the spreadsheet could take a great deal of time.”

Administrative Control

Database systems also have various control mechanisms which allow easy administration of the database and tables within it. The most important part is user management. Each user can be given specific rights to the database, thereby allowing limitation in access so as to secure the data from being tampered, modified or altered. Database Administrator’s can tweak many settings of the database thereby restricting the flow of data, the connection speeds, maximum number of connections to the server and even adjust what hardware resources should be allocated for performing a task.

Taking a backup of your website in cPanel Paper Lantern

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We all should regularly take backups of our website, whether we like it or not. A backup is like a flashlight, you never know when you may need it. You may never need it or may need it once in 365 days. But if you do need it and don’t have it, you will regret it.

1. Login to your cPanel account (For more see this article)

2. Select the Backup option in cPanel

3. Under the Partial Backups option, you can choose which parts of your website to backup.

The Home Directory option will allow you to backup all files in your account, except for the MySQL databases and the cpanel account configuration. This option will download a .tar.gz file i.e. a compressed tarball which contains the entire folder structure and files inside your hosting account.

The Database Backup will allow you to download a backup file for each individual database. The file format for the database backup is dbname.sql.gz i.e. it is a compressed file, which contains a .sql file of the database.

You can also download domain wise email forwarders, in .gz format by clicking on the Email Forwarder option.

 

Do note: If your internet connection is interrupted or there is some download issue, your downloaded file may be incomplete or corrupt. Always verify downloaded backups before relying on them.

Prevent Your Domain Names From Getting Stolen

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Prevent Your Domain Names From Getting Stolen

Domain Name Hijacking is becoming a common buzzword on the internet. Many organizations and businesses pay a large amount of money every year to ensure that their domain names remain secure and protected and are not stolen or lost. This article explains how Domain Names get stolen and how you can prevent your domain name from theft.

Registrant Email Address

The most vulnerable link in the security chain of your domain name, is the Registrant Email Address.The Registrant Email Address indicates who the owner of the domain name is and which email address should have control of the domain name. All important communication for the domain name is done with the Registrant’s email address only. Renewal Reminders, Expiry Details and even WHOIS record changes are sent to the Domain Name Registrant’s Email Address. If you enter a wrong WHOIS email address at the time of Registration or if a wrong email id is on record, then that wrong email id will have control of that domain name. It is extremely important to have a correct WHOIS record and also to ensure from time to time that the details are accurate and uptodate.

Phishing and Fraud

A common way of stealing domain names is by sending a phishing mail to the registered email address asking the owner to verify his / her details or to login to their domain control panel through a link in the email. That link actually goes to the hijackers website, which requests the owner to put in his control panel login credentials into a form. When the user submits the details, the hijacker has received the gift-wrapped password. This allows him to simply login and change the details or transfer the domain to his own account.

Hacked Email Account

If your email account was compromised, you should change the passwords of all your control panels and sensitive login credentials. A lot of damage can be done when the attacker compromises your email account. In one instance, the attacker had access to the gmail address of the Domain Owner. He didn’t change the password or fool around in the account, to prevent any suspicion from being raised. He simply set a filter, to grab all password reset emails or domain verification emails, hide them from the Inbox and send them to his own external email address. This way, even when the Transfer Approval Verification mail was sent to the gmail address of the domain owner, it was simply forwarded to him where he clicked the approval link and confirmed the transfer. This could have been prevented if the user had been a bit more alert and monitored their gmail account activity regularly.

Bad Registrar

Having an unscrupulous Registrar or a vulnerable Registrar is also a big threat to your domain name’s safety. By Registrar I also mean the Registrar’s Resellers and Affiliated vendors. If you have a problem with your Domain Reseller, you can always escalate the complaint to the Domain Registrar who is bound to take the corrective action. However, sometimes the registrars are also not very cooperative and can give you a tough time. This has been seen in many Domain Theft Cases, where due to the negligence (if not connivance) of the domain registrar, the domain name was stolen or lost to a hijacker. The only remedy which then remains available is opening up a dispute with ICANN, to compel the Registrar to give back your domain name.

Domain Lock

The best way of keeping your domain name safe is to ensure that it is “locked”. All Registrar’s provide a Registrar Lock feature which allows you to prevent your domain name from being transferred out when the lock is enabled. This means that you can lock your domain name till the time you want to actually transfer it out. If you have registered your domain name for a long period, it will be a good idea to keep the domain name locked. The lock can be toggled on/off through the Domain Control Panel provided by the Registrar or Reseller. Hence it is very important to have the Domain Control Panel in your hands as well.

Why you should think thrice before taking a Dedicated Server

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We are all prone to wanting more in almost everything life offers. This is also common to buying website hosting - we want more. More hosting space, more processing power, more RAM and more bandwidth as well. We want a bigger, meaner machine which has all the bells and whistles that your money can buy. But we rarely stop to think, whether we really need it and whether that is really the solution to everything. This article tries to reason why you should rethink your purchase of a Dedicated Server for your website or web application.

Why you should think thrice before taking a Dedicated Server

Misled by Developers

The most common cause of goofing up a dedicated server decision is due to being misled by your software developers or designers. Many a time, they have no clue how much of the resources they will really need and want to save themselves the trouble of migrating your data at a later stage, hence they coax you into believing that you need a monster configuration server which will magically solve all your problems. The less experienced the developer is, the less empirical or statistical evidence he will show you, for justifying the purchase. 3 years back, we received an email from a friend, asking us for a very high configuration machine. When we realized he was being guided by his developer, we suggested that they do a trial run on a small 5 GB shared hosting account. Till date, they have not needed more than that and are very happy we saved them the huge expenditure.

Warped Estimates

Before we suggest a Dedicated Server, we request the client to send us an estimate of his requirements and how he has come to that conclusion. Most of the time, the client has made wrong calculations and drastically changed the entire estimation by using predicted figures, which may not actually work in a production environment. This may mean that he has either under-estimated the requirement and will need to upgrade the server in the short term or he has overestimated the requirements and goes for an overkill solution. There are numerous benchmarking tools, which can help predict the exact amount of resources that the website or application requires and also helps test the limit of those resources.

Over-ambition

In the past few years we have often heard from atleast 10 different clients, that their future plan is to make an “online portal like Facebook”. While that may seem like a very progressive thought, it is often accompanied by a lack of planning and exaggeration. Ofcourse everyone wants to be the best, but they want to do it overnight, without looking into the path travelled by the industry giants. This over ambition eclipses their decision of doing some realtime tests and then jumping into the project in full swing. We often see that those who take a dedicated server, drop the idea by the 5th or 6th month, when they realize that their requirement was miniscule or their goal is not achievable at the time.

Laziness to troubleshoot

Another common reason why people want to go in for a Dedicated Server is because they don’t want to get down to the root of the issue of high resource usage, but instead would like to work around the issue by pumping in more hardware resources. A blaring example would be that of a small time ecommerce portal, which was so badly coded that the SQL queries kept getting throttled due to being slow, clumsily written and buggy. Rather than modifying the query to its optimum best, the webmaster chose to add more CPU resources by upgrading the server. This solved the problem for a few weeks, till the query started taking more time. Thereafter he went in for a better configuration server. This time, in a few weeks the same problem cropped up and he realised that the problem lay in his SQL coding and not in the server. He has now happily switched to shared hosting and has got the SQL beautifully optimized. His laziness definitely cost him time and money, but it also made him wiser for the long-term.

Create a new email address in cPanel

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This article explains how you can create a new email account in the cPanel Paper Lantern Theme.

1. Login to cPanel with the username and password. cPanel can be accessed by visiting http://yourdomain.com/cpanel . For more information on the cPanel username see this article.

2. After logging into cPanel go to the Email Section >> Accounts

 

3. In the Account Creation Form, type in the email address that you wish to create. Then type in the password that you would like to use. Make sure it is complicated and difficult to guess. Set a mailbox quota or leave the default value to 250 MB. Click on the Create Account button to complete the account creation.

 

 

4. The email accounts that you have created will be visible at the bottom of the page. You can use the same page to create more email accounts like this.

 

You can send and receive emails by going to the Webmail at http://yourdomain.com/webmail

or configure your email accounts in a mail client like Outlook, Thunderbird or Mac Mail.

Do You Need To Take Care Of A Website Hosting Account?

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Do You Need To Take Care Of A Website Hosting Account?

Do You Need To Take Care Of A Website Hosting Account?

Setting up a website is become easier day-by-day. Whether it is paying for hosting or buying a template or installing a CMS, everything now requires just a couple of clicks. However, there are some things which are unavoidable and must be followed as a set of best practices to keep your website and web hosting account in good health.

Virus and Malware Scan

Adding this to your weekly maintenance check list is a must. Scanning your entire hosting account for virus and malware activity will help you stop a disaster in time. Although most of the time you will see that you account is clean, sometimes, in public upload folders or in incoming mail attachments you may notice a trigger being set off. Cleaning up these infections will help you to avoid more maintenance in future. As they say “A stitch in time saves nine”.

Resource Usage Check

Some hosts allow you to see your Resource usage on the shared hosting server and also show you how much of RAM, CPU and Apache Processes your account has used in the past few days. This can be a key factor in diagnosing issues and understanding how your website performs under different conditions. Noticing irregular behaviour at an early stage can avoid a major outage of your account. One of our clients noticed a large spike in CPU resources every night. Upon further investigation he identified a runaway rsync script as the cause. This avoided his site being throttled or limited by the server software. Checking the resource usage atleast once in 7 days is a good practice.

Backups

We don’t need to say this, but taking regular backups has hurt no one. Not only should you take backups for an emergency or downtime, but taking backups before each modification to your website will allow you to revert to a backed up version in case your code gets corrupt or your programmer goofs up. Before installing anything new or updating your CMS version be sure to take a backup. Spending a little money on backup will save you hundreds of dollars when you really need to go back to a previous version of your website. As a standard practice, you should backup your entire account atleast once a week preferably at off-peak hours. Download the backup on a remote machine.

Updates

You will be surprised at the amount of updates you will need to carry out on your website, especially if you have a database driven CMS. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and other similar CMs systems push out updates atleast a couple of times a month. with auto installer software, updating is a piece of cake and can be done in seconds. However, you must also understand the implications of every update on your website code and customizations to the system. Ideally you should check for new updates every 2 days, so that a critical security flaw in your web app can be quickly patched before it is exploited by hackers or malware.

Suspicious Activity

Your web hosting control panel will definitely have the ability of showing you the activity and error logs of your account. These can be especially useful when you want to diagnose an error or understand your web apps behavior. An additional utility of the logs is to detect patterns of suspicious activity and timings of such behavior. Logs can help you avoid a major problem by showing you the patterns of the activity that you really want to know. An ideal interval for checking logs would be atleast once a week. Checking the visitor logs, apache error logs and any custom logs that your CMS generates can be extremely helpful.