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dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

mcsuede posted:

They're definitely in the top of my initial research of shared hosts. Seem quite fast, great options. I'm sure they oversell like every shared host but oh well. I'm also thinking I could base the network on a shared host like HostGator and simply use cloud serving for media if the demand starts to spike before having to move to a full VPS solution.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I see a lot of people do what you are doing and I think there are some things you need to re-think. You're worried about speed and future growth on a site that hasn't even launched yet. There's nothing wrong with doing a little planning ahead, but you're already talking about VPSs and cloud serving before the site is even up and drawing a regular audience. And then you're wanting to start out on a host spending a maximum of $15 a month.

If you're really sure that you need to be putting a lot of thought into expansion at this point, then you should just be starting out on a good VPS to begin with rather than a shared host. Otherwise, I think your focus is better spent on getting the site up and running and building up an audience, and you can worry about expansion later on when that time comes. It takes much more work getting regular readers than it does to move a Wordpress site to a new host.

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dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

doubtful posted:

I'm on nixihost as well, they are having routing problems...it's been down for nearly 48 hours now though I wonder if something else is up

http://twitter.com/nixihost

They're doing an un-planned move to a different data center it looks like. That has to be something more than just a routing issue.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

a llama posted:

I'm not sure what strange argument you're making but in your own words:


I don't see how you can back Fantastico as a good product considering the point you made yourself is that every single piece of software will have bugs. Why would you add another layer of software to an equation that doesn't need it. It is just going to make it more vulnerable.

When you install cPanel on your server, you're installing a product backed by a company with over 125 employees dedicated to fixing, releasing and testing it's product.

When you install Fantastico on your cPanel server, you are installing a product that may have a development staff of 10 people, limited resources and unknown amounts of potential issues.

This isn't a good argument at all. The number of staff involved has nothing to do with security. Some of the biggest companies (Adobe, Microsoft, and yes Apple) have the most security issues despite having hundreds or thousands of employees.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

samglover posted:

We are running a 40k+ visitor per month WordPress blog on A2 Hosting's "unlimited" shared hosting. We are apparently using up too much processor time, and they want us gone.

I guess we need a managed VPS or dedicated server. All I want is my regular cPanel interface. I don't want to have to learn to administer a server. I am also terrified of moving everything over with minimal downtime, so a little hand-holding may be in order.

Where should I go?

You should check out a Wiredtree VPS. They are managed, and they will also migrate your site over for you. Their service is great, and response times to tickets are always really fast, usually less than 15 minutes. Liquidweb is another host on the same level of service/price. Those are typically the top 2 recommended managed VPS providers over at Web Hosting Talk.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Mithra6 posted:

I'm completely new to this. My background is IT. I have an idea for a web app that could potentially have thousands of people at a time using it. I know a programmer who can probably do it. I know she uses Ruby on Rails a lot and MYSQL. For this kind of venture, what kind of hosting am I looking for? How do I figure out bandwidth needs? I think she can probably help with this, but I'd like to do some independent research as well.

edit: by web app, I'm thinking of, at least on the surface, something that just looks HTML based. No Flash or anything like that.

There's 2 ways this is going to go in the thread. People will tell you to just tell us your idea so that we can more properly answer your question. You'll probably not want to. We'll tell you that ideas are a dime a dozen, and it's the execution that matters, so no one is going to steal your idea as it's probably not new anyway. And then you'll decide to tell us so you can get a better answer, or say you can't share your super secret idea and not get a good answer. That's usually how it goes.

There's unfortunately no way anyone can try to properly answer you with the information you've given. All you've said is it could be made with Ruby on Rails and MySQL, and no Flash. If we knew what this was going to be it would help find out if this will be database heavy, file transfer heavy, back end processing heavy, etc... I'm not trying to be difficult, just trying to show that a good answer will really need more information.

If you're really adamant about not giving out information though, then the best you can do is look for a VPS provider that you can easily upgrade with. Start small and scale up as you see it is needed. Upgrading VPS packages is usually quick and painless. If you do actually have thousands of people using your site at a given time, you're probably looking at dedicated hardware requirements which gets a lot more expensive and tricky to upgrade. So look for a VPS provider that also does dedicated servers. I recommend WiredTree since they have awesome support and good prices. Check the Web Hosting Talk forums for coupons.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Bensa posted:

When hosting services advertise X domains (not sub-domains) does it imply that you can have multiple users/home directories and the domains linked with only their own ones? I need to run two extremely low bandwidth space pages but with the sites completely separate so not running on a sub-domain obviously. Using only one hosting account would simplify everything and drop the costs further.

Yes, but it would all be under your account. Assuming you are the only one administering these 2 separate sites, this sounds like what you want.

Bensa posted:

And does anyone have recommendations about shared hosting in Europe? Wehostingtalk.com seems to recommend 040hosting.eu and the pricing seems right but the complete lack of any mentions about sub-/domains is a bit iffy.

Click on the "More info" tab where their shared hosting plans are listed, it's right there that subdomains are available for all accounts.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Fangs404 posted:

Hey, this might be what I need. Thanks.

If that ends up being the case, post back if you would. I have the same issue with a website at work, and I just haven't had the time yet to look into what is needed to get automatic updates working.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

orphean posted:

These are good hosts too. I just recommended WiredTree because they tend to underpromise and overdeliver on customer service and support and it sounded like you might be utilizing support often :v:

I was with you on WiredTree until recently. In fact, I've recommended them in this thread before. But their support has gone downhill recently, and they've had some rather bad outages as well. They're probably still a decent hosting company overall, but the level of support isn't what it used to be. I've been with them for 2 years now, so I'm not just going off of one isolated incident or anything. I've actually solved my own tickets when their techs had no clue, which isn't what I pay for managed support for. So I'm moving back to Linode and will just run my server myself again.

All that being said, they're not horrible and are probably still better than a lot of other hosts out there.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

ferretsrule posted:

I've got four unused PositiveSSL certificates that I got free when I registered some domain names, but I have to use them by the end of May or they will disappear.

I don't need SSL on my sites, should I let them expire or is there anything else I can do with them?

Chain them together and make one super SSL cert.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Gnack posted:

I'd like to install Diaspora on a web server and I'm wondering where I should go to get a hosting plan capable of supporting something like that. For reference, the requirements are listed here:
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Installing-and-Running-Diaspora

Would I be able to accomplish all of that with a VPS? The sticking point is the sudo access that I'd need, not knowing a whole lot about VPS I'm not sure if they give you sudo access or not?

Unless it's a managed VPS, you would have root access as everything is up to you. http://www.linode.com/index.cfm is an awesome VPS provider, and is great for people just starting out learning VPSs like it sounds like you are. It's $20/mo for their lowest VPS, but the ease with which you can wipe everything and start over in literally 2 minutes is well worth it. Plus the forums and irc channel are good for beginner advice, as is their Wiki.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Killer_B posted:

Hytek became unresponsive as a host regarding support tickets, and other forum members experienced various other forms of problems with him, most of them regarding a horrible billing system, and rather ambivalent customer service.

My experience regarding tickets, they were nearly immediate to respond to tickets regarding that I'd sent payment for the current invoice; Outside of that, a minimum of 3-5 days to respond, if they responded at all.

The post referenced a little earlier, sealed the deal for me. On the plus side, the new host is much more responsive, and I'm paying less for an annual billing cycle.

Man, web hosting is something I would never pay annually, or even bi-annually for. It's a totally unregulated industry in terms of selling one thing and delivering another. Even for hosts I really trust (Linode, Wiredtree, etc...) I would never pay annually. The small cost savings aren't worth the huge risk of getting screwed over. Go spend a few minutes over at webhostingtalk.com and you'll begin to see what I mean.

I hope it works out good for you, but for so many people it doesn't. At least regularly back up your data to somewhere that you have control over, not your host.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

VerySolidSnake posted:

Inmotion Hosting was hacked pretty bad today. All my sites have a huge "YOU HAVE BEEN HACKED" message on them, even sites that are still in development without a registered domain name. The hack happened at 4am and it is still not fixed. They shutdown their call center and live chat support, and now I'm in the dark.

If it was easy to move 75 websites I would, but I feel stuck with them even after this.

A lot of hosts will help you move your sites when you sign up with them, you might look into that. Hopefully you'll start keeping your own local backups from now on, it's not too hard to set something up that can sync changes from your webserver to your own computer, and then you never have to touch it again until you need it. It gives you a lot more flexibility and control when things come up with your host.

Edit: Something like this might work for you if your computer is Windows: http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/windows_backup_agent.html here's the version they sell for syncing to your own systems, rather than to rsync.net: http://www.superflexible.com/index.htm

dvgrhl fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Sep 25, 2011

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

VerySolidSnake posted:

I do have backups of all live sites on that server, using rsync and a nightly MySQL dump that downloads to my local server. What I do not have are backups of the development sites. A lot of the work I do is cheap and fast, then the people I sub-contract for make their own edits. Never thought of backing up a site that is not finished and on it's own cPanel account with an impossible to guess password, but I guess I was just proven wrong.

Also, what's stopping this group from targeting another host? My worst fear is packing everything up and moving, then getting hacked again.

That's good that you have backups, a lot of people don't do that. Regarding this happening at another host, I would argue that your chances would go down by moving to another host. They're not being very transparent about how it happened, just saying that they are "apply[ing] patches to the security problems that allowed this to occur." link But it only happened to them, this isn't a Wordpress or CPanel exploit that lots of people are getting hit by. It was some security issue unique to them, so what confidence can you have in them? If it were my sites, I would be moving.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

VerySolidSnake posted:

There is no way I could do this smoothly. I'm a one man show with 75 sites to move, it would take days of unpaid work. Then there is dealing with MX records, tracking down all the login details to domain names to change A records (that are owned by each client, the ones that wouldn't change the nameservers), CNAME's, etc etc etc. This is so frustrating and it had to happen at the busiest time of the year.

People talk about the best web hosts like they do with hard drives. Everyone is happy with the original brand they chose until it fails, then they go to the next one. I'm sure a lot of you guys will refer me to your favorite, but that is just because they haven't let you down yet. I was happy with InMotion for 5 years.

Every host will have something happen with them at some point, that is true. However, Inmotionhosting have not taken one sliver of ownership of this, let alone let anyone know how this happened. That is crazy. If sites I host got defaced because of my provider, I sure as hell would want to know every detail of what happened. If they take the silent route like Inmotionhosting is, then I would be out of there. Maybe you can't do it right this second, but if you're not making plans to be gone in the immediate future then you are just setting yourself up for this situation again.

At the very least, a good host will explain exactly what happened and what they did to correct it and ensure it won't happen again. You are a host yourself, you have 75 sites that were potentially affected by this. What assurances can you give them by staying with Inmotionhosting?

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

VerySolidSnake posted:

Here are the relevant parts of the email I received last night at 1am:


They recommend changing all passwords, so I'm going to go through and change every cPanel and MySQL password. A lot of the sites are WordPress and Joomla, they could of copied the config files very easily.

But anyways they rolled back my server one day and everything is back to normal. So what are the best recommendations for managed VPS servers?

edit: Found some sites that were still defaced, what a loving nightmare. (I was on a VPS, not shared)

I used Wiredtree for 2 years on their VPS plan, and they were really good the time I was with them. Response times were almost universally less than 15 minutes, and they also have free phone support. I started with their VPS512 plan, but then jumped up to their Hybrid plan. They have a really good reputation over at http://webhostingtalk.com.

It looks like you'd even save money by switching: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1077312. Make note of the promo codes if you do sign up with them. Plus they'll help move your sites over. Good luck.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Oh My Science posted:

If you don't mind me asking, how do you manage client sites? Do you use Cpanel (or something like it)? Or is there something better I should look into if I go with Linode? To be honest I was already leaning towards them, but have little experience setting up my own hosting environment.

I have a Linode that I run CPanel on. I only have it because the people I host are used to it. Otherwise I probably wouldn't use a panel. But, if you're used to it then it's $15/m for a CPanel VPS license, that is optimized to use ~100mb of RAM. It's really easy to set up a Linode with CPanel, you basically just deploy the initial OS install and then run the CPanel script and it does the rest for you.

Linode also has a great IRC channel, and a good Wiki for help. So while you're expected to manage your Linode yourself, there are resources if you need a little help and are willing to try to fix it yourself.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Anaxite posted:

Is BuyVM any good? I've got a Linode VM right now and my bandwidth needs have gone up, but money's a bit tighter right now. Even if it's OpenVZ, BuyVM looks really cheap.

If you've been with Linode for a while, it never hurts to reach out to them and see if you can make a different deal for more bandwidth. They are really pretty much the top of the unmanaged vm game, unless you are at their Fremont facility.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Fangs404 posted:

Nice, that's good to know. And yeah, I did read it as an endorsement. Comping you 3 months of service is really awesome of them. The reason I asked about the backup service is because I do use it, and I wanted to know if it was effective here. Sounds like it was, so I'll definitely keep using it!

The only problem with the backup service at Linode is that you don't get a notification if it fails. I mean, if you check the Linode Manager you will see that it failed, but there is no email sent. That situation happened to me, and when I asked why I didn't get notification sent they said they are working on it. I did get comped for the days it failed, and thankfully I didn't need it.

It woke me up to keeping my own backups, which I am now doing with a mounted S3 bucket and rsync and mysql dumps. It's not the fastest file system, but it works well for my backup uses.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Trinitrotoluene posted:

Wondering if I could get some advice on a decent web host. I'm currently on the Dreamhost shared service, which to be honest is good value for money but the site I am developing has outgrown it. What I'm after:

-Budget between $30-$40 dollars a month
-VPS or Dedicated (I don't want to go on to shared hosting)
-Bandwidth and diskspace are not much of an issue, the primary thing I want is speed
-Would need to get MYSQL and PHP hosting (assuming apache) on there.
-A host that is established (goon run or not I don't care)

Any suggestions welcome!

Are you planning on managing the server yourself, or do you need the hosting company to manage it? If you're managing it yourself, I highly recommend Linode as their VPSes are some of the fastest out there. If you need management though, Wiredtree is pretty great if you can go just a little bit more in your price range. They are offering 50% of the first 2 months with the code "makethetransition" on their VPSes. See: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1077312

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Sonnekki posted:

Just renewed my domain name and was about to pull the trigger on buying an annual plan on Linode, and then I thought about this thread.

I'm glad I didn't do that. Consensus seems to be month-to-month with lots of backups. Makes sense, but it didn't occur to tired me :v:

Thanks guys, you're awesome. :cheers:

I would call this the Linode exception. Having done business with them for as long as I have, I would be fine with doing annual with them if it made sense to me for the situation. I think the main point where annual payments become problematic are when people do it without having used the host first, or for very long.

That being said, the monetary savings by paying annually typically isn't worth the potential losses if things go bad with a yearly payment. But for me and my experience with Linode, I'd not have an issue doing that.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Fangs404 posted:

Honestly, if you want cheap and reliable, go with Dreamhost. They're always running insane deals like a year's hosting for $10 or something. I was with them for 4 or 5 years before moving, and I hardly ever had any downtime. Support was always super fast to respond, too (I had a response for every ticket I submitted about 30-45 minutes after submitting it).

Any host that offers yearly hosting for $10 will just potentially put Ubik in the same position. You really do get what you pay for. Sometimes it doesn't bite you, sometimes it does.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Biowarfare posted:

Rackspace - use them if you can spend a few thousand. Otherwise don't. Their cheapo cloud server has lovely SAN issues or something, I dunno. I've been getting crap iowait and got full dataloss once.

VPS.net - Don't. Looks nice, SAN performance really bad. (WELCOME TO THE CLOUD)



If you feel like installing webserver and everything yourself, AWS/Amazon - remember to set up proper redundancy and multiple geographic regions if you want the redundancy.

If you don't, pick something like wiredtree or knownhost or gigenet (NOT their cloud, everything else is not cheap though).

Seconding Wiredtree for managed hosting, and adding Linode for unmanaged. Either one will treat you well.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Comradephate posted:

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.

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.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat
I'd also throw in Wiredtree for a good managed VPS. They have what they call a "Hybrid" VPS that is basically a VPS with more dedicated resources and fewer other users on the system. But as Biowarfare said, you could probably get by with a smaller VPS. I'll also second that "green" hosting is something to stay away from.

Talk to Knownhost and Wiredtree and see what they would be able to help you with. "Managed" means different things to different providers. Some will just ensure the server is up and running, others will help with performance optimization.

Then head over to Web Hosting Talk forums and browse the VPS offers section. Wiredtree and Knownhost typically run specials there that give you more RAM or diskspace or bandwidth for free with a coupon code.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

gmq posted:

I have been using Linode for almost a year and so far I have avoided installing any kind of mail server. Most of the hosted sites use WordPress so I just install something like Configure SMTP using their google apps address to deal with outgoing email and call it done.

The thing is, I'm not sure if I'm being stubborn and that a mail server is not that complicated to setup (for multiple domains/addresses) or if I should just continue avoiding it. Any experiences?

EDIT: These are all my sites so it's not like I'm charging people for that plugin hack job. :v:

Email on Linux is really frustrating. I've read some decent guides over the years that make it better, but it still seems uneccesarily complicated. I try to avoid it myself where I can. Google apps is a good solution I think.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

I use he.net for dns, and namecheap for domains and SSL certs, and it's been great.

thegasman2000 posted:

I am looking for some hosting. Its somewhat different from my regular reselling hosting in that it will be a backend for a large iPhone app were launching. I probably want VPS and some redundancy. Can I get 2 VPS deals and sync them? Could that share the load so I dont rape bandwidth on one account?

Any good deals / Goon Deals?

Linode allows you to pool bandwidth across your VPSes, so if you got a couple Linodes to load balance with you'd be sharing their total bandwidth. But depending on what kind of syncing you need to do, that could eat into your bandwidth.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Crankit posted:

I want to run my own website (inc wiki), email hosting, jabber, but also have some scheduled DB updates that grab data from elsewhere on the internet; I've never done anything exactly like this, but I used to be a [bad] sysadmin.

Is it normal for webhosts to allow everything I would need or would I have to look at more expensive dedicated hosting stuff?
Is there any way to get hosting that might outlive me, suppose I die, or go to prison in 3 years but I want my stuff to hang around for at least another 15?

I think most webhosts would do most of that just fine, not too sure on jabber hosting though. That may require you getting a VPS. As far as being around 15 years down the road, I think you'd have to worry about things like the hosting company still existing then, having payments kept current in your abscence, and patching exploits so the site doesn't get jacked.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

rawrr posted:

I was looking into elance and odesk, thanks.

I guess I don't quite need a VPS, but I want something a step up from shared hosting. I just don't like the feeling of sharing with 7000 other accounts on the same server. A Small Orange offers a "business" plan with fewer accounts per server, but apparently that just means 3500 accounts instead of 7000.

That actually sounds exactly like you need/want a VPS. Linode has a lot of instructions in their library for sercuring your server that are really newbie friendly, plus there is the awesome IRC channel where you can get all sorts of help. The Linode 512 plan is $19.95/mo, so you could always get one for a month and play around and see how comfortable you feel with it all before deciding to move your site over. Worst case, you're out $19.95 and you got some Linux command line experience. And Linode is open about how many plans share a host: http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#how-many-linodes-share-a-host.

Some general security tips:
  • Don't install an ftp server
  • Don't permit root login with ssh
  • Don't allow password login with ssh, only authorized key
  • Don't run apache as root
This is optional, and a little more advanced, but I also recommend installing this: http://www.configserver.com/cp/csf.html. It helps you manage the firewall, which can be a little intimidating for beginners, blocks ip addresses that attempt to bruteforce or port scan the server, and has a nice security scan tool that assesses some common security issues and gives you a nice report http://www.configserver.com/cp/csfdemo/report.html.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

rawrr posted:

If I were to buy an unmanaged VPS, and secure it by following the steps here: http://library.linode.com/securing-your-server, how secure would the server be? Would it be as secure as a shared server?

The first steps in that guide are good. But for the firewall and fail2ban steps, I would skip those and install this if you're up to it http://www.configserver.com/cp/csf.html. It will manage the firewall and do everything fail2ban does and then some. If you did that, I would say you have a very secure server.

The next page on that Linode article http://library.linode.com/hosting-website has good steps for everything you need to get your website up and running, and with some good configurations. This is where you can re-introduce security issues if you're not careful. After you get everything installed, run the the csf system check tool to see common security issues and how your server measures up for each one. It's by no means an exhaustive security list, and not "passing" an item isn't necessarily bad, but I think it's a really good starting point if you're still new to server security.

And as Anaxite said, you're only as secure as what you run on your server. For example, if you're running an out of date Wordpress, you leave yourself open to issues. If you run outdated plugins even, you could have issues. So be mindful of what you put on the server, and keep it up to date.

I'm also a fan of logwatch http://library.linode.com/server-monitoring/logwatch/ubuntu-10.10-maverick which gives you a nice summary of system logs. If you do get a Linode, I am sure you'll get plenty of help here and especially over in the Linode IRC room if you run into any questions.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Phiberoptik posted:

Anyone have recommendations for good forums software?

E: Any thoughts on IPB? They have a hosted solution that seems decent.

How about Titan? :D

What kind of requirements do you have? Number of visitors, features you want, free/paid, etc... There's tons of forum software out there, so you'll have to give some criteria if you want meaningful suggestions.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

gmq posted:

Is the default configuration for csf secure enough?

"Secure enough" isn't really a measurement you can meet. It really depends on what you are doing with the system and what you have running on it. At a minimum run the included "Check server security" and see what gets reported back. It's not an exhaustive list of things to check, and having something in "warning" status isn't always a bad thing. But it is a good thing to run through and just see what comes back.

Personally, I think the list is fairly good and I would recommend getting as many of those items from "Warning" to "OK" as you can without impacting what you need the server for.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

DarkLotus posted:

The short answer... If you're site is causing issues with shared hosting and you're asking if your site is ready for a VPS, chances are yes. You could try another shared host and end up with the same issues, or you could move up to a VPS and never have someone tell you you're using too much CPU or RAM.

But they can tell you that you're using too much disk i/o. VPS's are a big step up if done correctly from shared hosting, but they are still shared and still have limits where impacting other customers will get you booted.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

DarkLotus posted:

Correct, but disk I/O does not appear to be the problem with their site so I didn't mention it. Chances are, they'll never have disk I/O issues as long as they aren't swapping. And honestly, if disk I/O were a concern, they would have had issues with shared hosting long ago.

Except show me how you can use a lot of disk i/o, or bandwidth, without using cpu. A lot of shared hosts use undefined amount of cpu usage as a way to terminate accounts that actually use any amount of resources. I'm not disagreeing with you that a VPS is a good step up for his issue, but there's a lot that goes into cpu usage. And really, I have no financial stake in what he chooses to do, but you do, so I think blanket statements like "you could move up to a VPS and never have someone tell you you're using too much CPU" needs to be qualified.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

slingshot effect posted:

I've got a personal blog that's blown up in popularity and my current hosts are threatening to bounce me if I don't move off a shared hosting acct and stop bogarting all the resources. My site's virtual memory thingo is throttled 24/7 and it's starting to lose me a lot of traffic because Wordpress is constantly pooping itself because it can't load everything. Their VPS offerings are massively out of my budget and start at around US$350 a month - this is a personal blog without any income generation; I can't piss a lot of money away on something that's still just a hobby - and although I've been with them for ten years, I think it's time to move on.

What's the current opinion on Rackspace's ~*~cloud~*~ hosting? I'm waiting on some sales dude to get back to me with some prices, but I like the idea of being able to scale services on months when I know my traffic is going to spike.

I'm open to other suggestions, both onshore in Aus and offshore. I don't serve up rich media or anything, it's just a Wordpress blog with a few reviews, a bunch of pictures and a lot of traffic. A managed service would be idea, and with Cpanel or something so I can fart around and look at stats/make gimmick email aliases.

What is your budget per month? Also, you should be looking into some form of ads to at least cover server costs if you have enough traffic that a VPS is needed.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

rawrr posted:

Thanks for this - how has your experience been so far?

Tempted to move things over from Linode - aside from pretty abysmal download speeds (averaging 2-4MB/s) , everything looks pretty good so far on DO - good documentation, good interface, responsive support. Somewhat worried about long term reliability, but not sure if I'm worried about it enough to not save $15/month over linode. Part of me also feels uneasy paying only $5 for a server for ecommerce use, though.

If your ecommerce isn't doing enough more than $15/mo to stay on a solid host like Linode, then don't worry about moving to an unknown host. I'm all for being fiscally responsible, but that seems like very little money to risk anything I was generating income from.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Cartesian_Duelist posted:

Really curious about something. If I were to AJAX some JSON for the end user every two seconds, how much server load do you think this would add up to?

This really depends on what is involved in putting together the JSON response. Is it coming from a database query? If so, that could increase the server load significantly. It's almost certainly less load to do requests at larger intervals, and just return more information each response - if possible.

For instance, let's say your JSON contained the link to an image that you wanted to display in a slideshow on your page. Rather than making a new request every 2 seconds for a new image link, do one request every 30 seconds that contains 15 links. Then on the client side just loop through displaying those images every 2 seconds, and when you reach the end make a new Ajax request for 15 more links.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Pilsner posted:

Anyone got some first hand experience with a good low-traffic ASP.NET host? I'm talking a few 100 MB of storage and maybe a few hundred visitors per day if things go wild. I need IIS of course with the URLRewrite module. I don't need a database, but the possibility would be nice.

I live in Europe, but my visitors will mainly be American. Some sort of global coverage (if such a thing makes sense) would be nice, but it won't matter too much.

I've looked at http://www.smarterasp.net/ judging a few stray reviews, but I'm open to anything.

Maybe a low end Windows VPS from BurstNET? http://www.burst.net/winvps.php

I've been considering picking up one of their mid-range ones for a while now. You'll see some complaints about them over on WebHostingTalk, but almost universally it is the customer who is the issue not BurstNET. They seem to have a good reputation for a "budget" host.

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Nobody Interesting posted:

Are we cool with just linking to the hacker group's own site here? I mean they do have private data stolen from other places on there.

It's probably ok to point people interested to this: http://straylig.ht/zines/HTP5/0x02_Linode.txt

dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

rawrr posted:

So it sounds like CC info etc were indeed accessed, but just never released since Linode namedropped HTP on their blog?

It's hard to say for sure since both sides would have reasons not to be honest. But, Linode doesn't have the best track record for security now, and they weren't really forthcoming when all of this was going down, so I would probably lean towards HTP's side of the story being accurate. If I had an active CC with Linode I would change it.

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dvgrhl
Sep 30, 2004

Do you think you are dealing with a 4-year-old child to whom you can give some walnuts and chocolates and get gold from him?
Soiled Meat

Fayk posted:

Changing your CC would always be safe/pragmatic, but do you think Linode would risk claiming it's okay - and risk any kind of litigation or fallout from the CC companies over lying like that?

You'll notice they only claim "We have no evidence decrypted credit card numbers were obtained.", not that they don't have any evidence that encrypted credit card numbers were obtained (hint: they were). https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/. So yeah, I think Linode isn't being 100% forthcoming about the situation. Linode also doesn't address the claim that the private key was stored right on the server with everything else, just that they have a "complex" passphrase on it - which why would we even need to care about unless the private key was indeed taken like claimed.

So yes, I do think Linode is trying to make people think it's all okay when in fact it's worse than what they are letting on.

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