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So I currently run a website and forums that have quickly out-grown their hosting. Last month I pulled 600 gigs in HTML only and had over a million page views. This month we're 70 gigs in and at 500k visitors already. The forums are running SMF and have over a thousand registered users, with about 100 or so active at any one time. The main site is simply a wordpress blog with comments disabled to announce new releases. Because of this I hit my shared hosting's (Lithium by the way) CPU limit constantly. Yesterday it became really apparent and today its been a constant thing. I can only assume it is going to grow from here. On the flip side of this is I barely know what I am doing. I get concepts of things but there is a reason the site is wordpress. I have some other people around me that can also help with this, but managing a server beyond the forums and website it self is something we'd like to avoid. The break seems to be if I should simply switch to a different web hosting itself or go with a VPS. I'm not exactly sure where the limit is, but the forums itself add about 55 users a day and that number is climbing. I've been looking at wiredtree for a VPS but it seems a little too good to be true. 3000 gigs a month, Dual Xenon, AND CPanel? Am I looking in the wrong place? EDIT The site is https://www.technicpack.net VV yes KakerMix fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Feb 11, 2012 |
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Feb 11, 2012 03:46
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Is it the link in your profile by any chancE? edit: You don't even have caching or anything? Install w3tc for wordpress and see if that fixes anything. Your Wordpress page is taking forever to load, your forum isn't too bad Impotence fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Feb 11, 2012 |
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Feb 11, 2012 03:51
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Fastbreak posted:Though I have only just ordered it and haven't begun to use it yet, the guys at hostdime were really fast and helpful. Will report back in a month with performance! Thanks man and it was great working with you! IM me again if you have any other questions or anything. Always happy to help!
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Feb 11, 2012 14:22
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Can anybody recommend a decent Twitter integration plugin for Wordpress? Just normal stuff like "tweet this article/site" and let's me configure hash tags and what not.
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Feb 16, 2012 21:26
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The WhoIS for a domain I own, thaumic.net, still lists me as the owner, and has all my contact information, but my old hosting service, made2own, which I also registered my domains through, has vanished without a trace. The registration is up for renewal this March, so I'd really, really like to get this sorted out now before a squatter swoops in and steals it. Is there anything I can do regain control of my domains and transfer them somewhere else, or am I hosed?
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Feb 26, 2012 21:19
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KakerMix posted:So I currently run a website and forums that have quickly out-grown their hosting. I can vouch for WiredTree, been using them for almost two years now to run a forum with 40K plus members with over 15 million posts and nearly a million views a month. Never had an issue with them, and they're always willing to go the extra mile for you.
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Feb 26, 2012 21:28
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Rincewind posted:The WhoIS for a domain I own, thaumic.net, still lists me as the owner, and has all my contact information, but my old hosting service, made2own, which I also registered my domains through, has vanished without a trace. Well since all the contact info points to you I don't think you're completely hosed. I think you're going to have to go through ICANN or figure out who the actual registrar of your domain is (I don't think made2own was an ICANN registrar) and go through them to get the domain unlocked and get the EPP Auth Code so you can transfer it somewhere. With less than a month before it comes up for renewal you should probably do whatever you're going to do with some haste.
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Feb 26, 2012 21:59
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Rincewind posted:The WhoIS for a domain I own, thaumic.net, still lists me as the owner, and has all my contact information, but my old hosting service, made2own, which I also registered my domains through, has vanished without a trace. I'm pretty sure the domain is registered through enom.com. Contact their support, let them know your host is non-responsive and that you would like to transfer your domain elsewhere. They'll want a copy of your photo ID to prove ownership and then they'll send you the transfer code so you can take your domain to a different registrar / host. I've helped countless goons get away from the mess M2O left them in, some came to Lithium, some did not. Either way, you shouldn't be in a situation like this so if you need additional help let me know!
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Feb 26, 2012 23:03
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I know a lot of you have Linodes, may want to check this out: http://bitcoinmedia.com/compromised-linode-coins-stolen-from-slush-faucet-and-others/ Looks like it was more or less handled for now, at least.
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Mar 2, 2012 06:46
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Comradephate posted:I know a lot of you have Linodes, may want to check this out: Yeah, this is a really weird issue. I sort of wonder if it wasn't an "inside" job, meaning an employee or former employee that had access to the super user account that was used to do this. The fact that it targeted only bitcoin systems, 8 total at that, and was done relatively quickly, means whoever did this knew exactly what to do. The time from intrusion, to detection, to mediation was relatively quick from what I have read. So someone had to know exactly who to target, as well as having the super user password. That being said, I can't believe there weren't precautions in place for the super user account to only allow access from whitelisted ips, or something else of that nature. It will be interesting to see what else comes out about this.
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Mar 2, 2012 07:29
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In other news, bitcoin true believers apparently put the equivalent of $220k on a $10-20/month VPS (which is a shared system) and no security settings at all?
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Mar 2, 2012 18:17
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Bob Morales posted:I'm sure all hosts are susceptible but the biggest issues I've had with shared hosts are being on a box that's getting DDoS attacks, or the shared mail server is getting blacklisted for spam. Apologies for pulling an older quote, but I'm looking for new hosting and I'm trying to figure out how to prevent getting blacklisted when we've done nothing wrong. Is getting mail servers blacklisted a common issue? Is there a way around it without going to Google Apps/Mail? We've never sent a mass mailing yet there are certain domains we can't send email to. We've spoken with the hosting provider and they said everything was clear. We've spoken with the internet provider and they say it's not their fault. Sorry if this is an obvious question, we're just tired of having to keep track of who we can send email to with which account.
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Mar 5, 2012 17:13
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We normally get blacklisted by a customers server - we have 500-20,000 people sign up for our programs and most of them get sent a daily email message. They can opt-out of it, of course, but I'd say 90% of the people get them. So every morning at 5:00 or whatever, we blast their domain with thousands of identical emails. Some people use Yahoo or Gmail accounts but the majority use their company email - it is a company-sponsored program after all. We haven't bothered to make some kind of detection system (probably just analyzing our /var/log/maillog would work), but if the emails don't go out, we'll get a call or email from the customer and sure enough we'll get blacklisted. So then we have to call the IT department of company X and tell them to un-block us. Most of the time when a company signs up with us, we meet with their IT staff and they add our servers to some sort of whitelist in their spam filters (and usually put our web servers in their web filter/proxy configuration)
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Mar 5, 2012 17:24
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Bob Morales posted:We normally get blacklisted by a customers server .. etc We're not sending emails like that. We are essentially using the email servers as our personal email accounts.. If we do send out a "mass" email, we're talking maybe 20 people. We're just trying to email our friend George and AT&T, or Comcast, or wherever kicks it back to us.
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Mar 5, 2012 17:38
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Heads up, everyone who likes NameCheap.com on Facebook is able to register a .com domain for $1.99 tomorrow (March 6th): https://www.facebook.com/NameCheap?sk=app_141044522626772
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Mar 5, 2012 18:24
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Kalma posted:We're not sending emails like that. We are essentially using the email servers as our personal email accounts.. If we do send out a "mass" email, we're talking maybe 20 people. We're just trying to email our friend George and AT&T, or Comcast, or wherever kicks it back to us. It can happen for different reasons. Some blacklist maintainers are overzealous and will block a whole big range of IPs because of one person sending out a blast of mail for a day or two. You can use this tool to check which lists you are on: http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx You can contact your host and have them help get you removed or take care of the problem. If you go through the site of whichever blacklist you are on you can often find the reason they have it listed.
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Mar 6, 2012 02:01
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JHVH-1 posted:It can happen for different reasons. Some blacklist maintainers are overzealous and will block a whole big range of IPs because of one person sending out a blast of mail for a day or two. The problem with that is that we don't show up on any of the blacklists. I sent an email to ping@mxtoolbox.com and then asked it to check blacklists. The first run of 36 lists returned "Ok" on all of them but 1 timeout, and the "Check all Blacklists" returned "Ok" on 107 with 13 time outs. When I send an email to one of the people I can always count on to return for me and follow the directions to unblock myself, it says I'm not blocked. I didn't mean to take things off tangent.. I thought it was web/mail hosting based, not IP based... though it happens with two different service providers (with the same mail servers, using outlook) We've been fighting it for a while and no one can fix it or accept blame.. we usually just end up using a gmail account to send to the people we can't send to with our "real" email.. but that causes trouble when we're trying to find old information.
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Mar 6, 2012 03:35
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Kalma posted:Apologies for pulling an older quote, but I'm looking for new hosting and I'm trying to figure out how to prevent getting blacklisted when we've done nothing wrong. What's the actual error message you get?
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Mar 6, 2012 03:40
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We use http://www.returnpath.net/ to check our reputation for our various IPs for sending email.
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Mar 6, 2012 03:49
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Kalma posted:The problem with that is that we don't show up on any of the blacklists. I sent an email to ping@mxtoolbox.com and then asked it to check blacklists. The first run of 36 lists returned "Ok" on all of them but 1 timeout, and the "Check all Blacklists" returned "Ok" on 107 with 13 time outs. Have you sent mail to an account like the gmail and then looked at the headers? You can also check the mail log when a message is rejected and it can sometimes help point to where the issue is. There are some things you can to to improve chances of mail going through to some hosts. Places like hotmail often are more strict in some cases. Like you want to make sure the hostname on your server resolves back to the IP for one. That often will get your mail rejected because it looks like its being bounced off some place. Another help is setting up something like DKIM (domain keys) so it shows in your DNS that you are a verified sender. If the mail goes through but not to everyone, it is usually something like that.
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Mar 6, 2012 06:19
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E-Mail delivery is a massive pain in the rear end these days, if you're sending low amounts of email then usually it's better to use a service like mailchimp. However to do it yourself you just need to set a few things up: Your IP you use to send mail must have a PTR record pointing to your email server's hostname. You should set up DKIM in your MTA and DNS records. You should set up SPF in your DNS records. You can check these are all working by sending an email to check-auth@verifier.port25.com - they will reply with the result of the tests. Hotmail uses SenderID which is very similar to SPF, you can set this up as well in your DNS but the easiest way is to just create SPF records and use the form below to register it with hotmail: https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=senderid&page=support_senderid_options_form_byemail&ct=eformts&st=1&wfxredirect=1 You should also sign up for Hotmail SNDS - This shows you details on how Hotmail is handling your E-Mails. Also sign up for Hotmail's JMRP as well as feedback loops for all other major email providers, these send you an email whenever someone clicks the spam/junk buttons. After setting these up on a fresh IP with no associated reputation you should be able to deliver to most providers, however many of them will limit the amount of emails you can send per day (Hotmail especially) until your reputation levels rise, which mainly depends on the content of your emails. If your IP already has bad reputation due to previous abusers then your best bet is to get a brand new IP.
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Mar 6, 2012 07:25
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Bob Morales posted:What's the actual error message you get? SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<info@Emailaddress>: host sbcmx6.prodigy.net [207.115.36.20]: 553 5.3.0 nlpi160 DNSBL:ATTRBL 521< My IP Address >_is_blocked.__For_information_see_http://att.net/blocks doomisland posted:We use http://www.returnpath.net/ to check our reputation for our various IPs for sending email. I looked at that, it says we don't send enough email to calculate scores, and when checking blacklists it says we are on None. JHVH-1 posted:Have you sent mail to an account like the gmail and then looked at the headers? You can also check the mail log when a message is rejected and it can sometimes help point to where the issue is. Hotmail/Gmail/etc don't seem to care. It's sbcglobal and comcast are the primary culprits. I will look into DKIMs, and see if I can implement something like that. Gism0 posted:E-Mail delivery is a massive pain in the rear end these days, if you're sending low amounts of email then usually it's better to use a service like mailchimp. Thank you for all of this. I don't have time to figure out how to do this today, but I will look into mailchimp, and see if I can get the mail to work straight through outlook/mail servers. Kalma fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Mar 6, 2012 |
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Mar 6, 2012 21:17
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Gism0 posted:E-Mail delivery is a massive pain in the rear end these days, if you're sending low amounts of email then usually it's better to use a service like mailchimp. These are good tips. I really hate when we get a customer at work with a complaint like "my mail isn't working". It means running through each step and testing what they hosed up in their mail client, or diagnosing why the mail isn't getting where it should go. Either way one of the most annoying sys admin tasks.
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Mar 7, 2012 02:32
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Mailchimp looks nice but it can be expensive. We use Interspire email marketer (http://www.interspire.com/emailmarketer/) for our mailing list and newsletters. The license for the software is $495, and if we sent emails to 20,000+ subscribers with mailchimp it would be $150/month. Adding 5,000 more subscribers would make that $240/month! We already have a server to run the software on, but if we didn't we'd be looking at that as an extra cost. That doesn't count the other emails we send out, either. But we don't send those through Interspire, we basically just have a Ruby script that sends them all out from our apps.
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Mar 7, 2012 03:08
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Gism0 posted:Also sign up for Hotmail's JMRP as well as feedback loops for all other major email providers, these send you an email whenever someone clicks the spam/junk buttons. This goes for blacklists as well. Some lists do completely suck or even try to take your money, but not all of them. Don't assume that because you got listed you're out of luck. Try to contact them. The biggest thing for people who deal with spam/copyright/phishing/general network abuse is being able to communicate with someone who is showing an effort to get to the bottom of the issue.
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Mar 7, 2012 03:27
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Bob Morales posted:Mailchimp looks nice but it can be expensive. The main thing authenticated smtp hosts do is to stay whitelisted, guarantee delivery, etc. The web interface is just a nice plus..
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Mar 7, 2012 05:15
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So, I need a recommendation or two. Currently I'm running a lower end dedicated server out of ServerBeach. They've been fantastic to me, but I can't justify the cost of a dedicated server anymore. So instead, I'm looking for something along the lines of a cheaper VPS. This would normally be all well and good, and I wouldn't be here if that's all I needed. But unfortunately, I need a significant amount of storage, storage that many VPS hosts simply do not offer (or not within any sort of reasonable price bracket). I'm looking for at least 80GB of storage /if/ they provide their own backup service, otherwise I will need ~140 in order to give myself room to create a backup file. Bonus would be if the provided VPS has an installation option for WHM so I don't need to install and license it separately. Right now, I'm paying $155 a month. I'm hoping I can get this down to $100 a month or less, WHM licensing included. The usage rates for everything else are minor: ~300GB of bandwidth 1 core is fine Preferably 1.5-2GB of RAM, can make do with 1GB. If anyone has a quality VPS or cloud server that they can recommend that meets these specifications, that would be fantastic. I know it's a bit specific, and I may be out of luck, but I'm hoping not. Right now, softlayer's cloud offering seems to be the only thing in the ballpark right now, and they're just over $100. Edit: Somewhere in the continental USA is fine. Cool Matty fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Mar 8, 2012 |
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Mar 8, 2012 02:22
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Any specific location
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Mar 8, 2012 02:31
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Biowarfare posted:Any specific location Anywhere in the USA will be fine, I'll edit my post to add that, thanks.
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Mar 8, 2012 02:34
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Can't go wrong with liquidweb/knownhost/wiredtree really Should run you 40-60
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Mar 8, 2012 02:36
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Biowarfare posted:Can't go wrong with liquidweb/knownhost/wiredtree really Or Server Axis for even cheaper and just as reliable. I've had good experience with them. The only downside is they are not geographically diverse. They only have a presence in Chicago.
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Mar 8, 2012 02:48
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mooky posted:Or Server Axis for even cheaper and just as reliable. I've had good experience with them. The only downside is they are not geographically diverse. They only have a presence in Chicago.
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Mar 8, 2012 02:58
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I like what I'm seeing out of Server Axis. Somewhat odd that I have to get an SSD server to get WHM as an option, but the 40-mbit unmetered has better pricing for storage, plus they apparently have free backup. (Sidenote: Liquid Web didn't make me too happy just now. I expected a call to verify the account to look at server configurations, instead they called to confirm my order... an order I never placed! That was a quick way to lose my confidence!) VS003.0G-0096.0G40U 18/18 CPU 3.0GB RAM 6.0GB SWAP 96GB DISK 6k IOPS 40mbit B/W $84 Any other thoughts on that Server Axis option? It looks like the best deal out of the bunch for what I need. Edit: +$9 for the WHM, which is fine. Edit 2: KnownHost actually looks good as well, now that I found the extra disk space option! Looks like I have a lot to think about. Thanks for the recommendations, and if anyone has further advice/recommendations I will be checking back (probably not going to order until next week). Cool Matty fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Mar 8, 2012 |
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Mar 8, 2012 03:31
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Cool Matty posted:I like what I'm seeing out of Server Axis. Somewhat odd that I have to get an SSD server to get WHM as an option, but the 40-mbit unmetered has better pricing for storage, plus they apparently have free backup. They have other non-ssds here: http://serveraxis.com/vps-classic.php They are a licensed cPanel Reseller or NOC, you might be able to add cPanel to any VPS for the $9 / month if you submit a ticket or email them before you order. You won't be disappointed, they have great uptime and support.
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Mar 8, 2012 03:36
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mooky posted:They have other non-ssds here: I saw that, but strangely they don't offer the same backup option, so I would need to purchase significantly more disk space to work with that unfortunately (and I forgot to mention, it costs me ~$20 to backup to Amazon S3 right now, so that would be a factor if they do not provide backup).
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Mar 8, 2012 03:39
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Aren't part of the whole point of backups in case of issues with the primary (such as billing) that would take out both your production and backup
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Mar 8, 2012 03:40
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Biowarfare posted:Aren't part of the whole point of backups in case of issues with the primary (such as billing) that would take out both your production and backup I download locally as well, but this is more of a "customer deleted critical file and needs it back" thing. Besides, having an automated backup solution on their end makes restoring much, much quicker and painless.
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Mar 8, 2012 03:53
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Just throwing out there that my server is still up and running with hostdime.com and I couldn't be happier. I am even trying to send some more business their way by having them host for a client.
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Mar 8, 2012 23:20
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I have a dumb hosting question. Who in the world is the market for high-end unmanaged dedicated servers? I can't see how spending $300+ a month on a dedicated server makes any sense whatsoever. If that's affordable why not just buy a 1U and get it colo'ed somewhere for less money? I feel like I'm missing something.
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Mar 9, 2012 18:39
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orphean posted:I have a dumb hosting question. Who in the world is the market for high-end unmanaged dedicated servers? I can't see how spending $300+ a month on a dedicated server makes any sense whatsoever. If that's affordable why not just buy a 1U and get it colo'ed somewhere for less money? CAPEX vs. OPEX (in some companies it is much more difficult to get approval for capital expenditures). Accounting would also have to handle depreciation and all that. Spares. If you're getting a high-end dedicated server, the company it is through will have to handle all RMA and hardware SLAs. If you're doing this on your own, you handle it. If something fails, you either need to have it handy or be able to get it locally. Waiting for a part to ship while your server is down would not be good times. If you were colocating your own hardware, you'd ideally want a redundant pair (or at least a cold spare).
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Mar 9, 2012 19:09
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