Posts Tagged ‘Server’
Media Temple DV vs Godaddy Hosting. A Review
Last Updated on Tuesday, 17 January 2012 07:45 Written by Mike Tuesday, 29 September 2009 07:26
After 6 months with media temple hosting, this former godaddy customer is completely impressed. Here are the key differences that should make a difference to you.
The Differences:
- Email. Godaddy limits you to 1000 emails outbound per day. This is per hosting account. No matter how many domains you run, or whether you have a dedicated server or not. To get this limit raised you have to jump through hoops, comply with every can-spam policy requirement and restrictions. Your email’s must be approved and contain subscription list removal. As well as opt-in must agree to comply with their specs. Media Temple is no where near as restrictive with their shared service or grid service set to 50 per minute or 500 per hour. The DV servers have no outbound email restrictions. Abuse of this will just end up getting your domain black-listed.
- Support. Hands down Media Temple’s customer service makes Godaddy seem like a small time operation. Knowledgeable staff, quick response via phone(longest hold time yet was 17 minutes). Even though having a DV with full access, the support team will help with issues on databases, backing up data, restoring snapshots. Knowledgeable would be on the bottom of the list for godaddy.
- Price. $42 a month with Media Temple is my cost base for a DV with a dedicated 512M of Ram, 3 IP addresses and a Dedicated %10 CPU load. Root access, and a huge assortment of developers tool’s(including svn) make serving 200,000 dynamic pages per day a walk in the park. With 20 Gig of storage and a Terabyte of data transfer per month. It’s Media Temple for the Win!!! of course they have less costly plans with their GS (grid service) designed to handle large spikes in traffic at a base cost of $20 per month. There is also a cheaper shared plan. Click here and tell them jobshouts.com sent you a referral.
- Godaddy’s plans: There cheaper with shared hosting accounts available for a base of around $8 a month. No dedicated Ram or IP. Shared resources with thousands of other websites. High latency times causing slow page loads. Plus that interface is designed to sell, not be helpful. Domain management is clunky and cumbersome.
- Domain registration – This is godaddy’s only remaining feature that is worth something. They are by far the cheapest to register and maintain your domain names. As long as you don’t mind their repeated attempts at reselling their ‘other’ products, keep them as your registrar.
There that’s about it in a nutshell. I am very happy to have moved all of my web properties off Godaddy’s servers. You do truly get what you pay for.
If you decide to sign up with Media Temple, tell them jobshouts.com referred you. We get a perk from them when you do.
Geek out!
Incoming search terms:
- media temple vs godaddy
- mediatemple vs godaddy
- godaddy vs mediatemple
- godaddy vs media temple
- mediatemple or godaddy
- dv mediatemple vs dedicated godaddy
- mediatemplate vs
- mediatemplate vs godaddy
- mediatemple versus godaddy
- mediatemple vrs godaddy
Tags: Godaddy, Hosting, Media Temple, Server | Posted under Geek Tech, Reviews | 3 Comments
Securing & Hardening your Media Temple Server DV/DPV
Last Updated on Monday, 28 September 2009 12:09 Written by Mike Tuesday, 22 September 2009 01:27
If you have a DV/VPS from Media Temple you may want to take some steps to save yourself a lot of hassle down the road. In this age of web connectivity ease of access to the internet is often taken for granted. While this makes most people’s lives easier, it also makes life for hackers and script kiddies easy too.
One of the things Media Temple does not tell you, is that you need to take additional steps to secure your DV beyond its initial configuration. This is especially important if you enable root access and developers tools. Once root access is enabled your server is vulnerable to port scans, and dictionary type attacks.
Take these steps to eliminate the vulnerability and you will save your self a lot of headache from your server becoming compromised.
Step 1 USE A STRONG PASSWORD!!!! Dictionary type attacks use common names/terms to guess at what your login and password might be. Once the attacker knows what user name is in use. They can then proceed to attempt to guess a password. Never, ever use a password that is someone’s name, place, or event that could be guessed. Stick to passwords that contain letters, numbers, and even symbols a password that looks like !33$#me2x works way better than carmen.
Step 2. Configure Firewall rules. Log into your Plesk admin panel, then from the desktop page click on modules in the left navigation pane. You should see an option appear in the context window for Firewall. In the default configuration the firewall does not block much at all. Pay special attention to the SSH option. I have my DV set to only allow traffic from my IP block, while denying all other IP traffic. In an example of the rule I use. I allow 72.186.98.0/24 what this does is allow all traffic from the IP block of addresses including addresses 72.186.98.0 to 72.186.98.255. I did it this way in case my IP address changes.
Step 3. Block all non-essential services. If you are not using them turn them off or block them. Just be careful about which ones you block. You just might lock yourself out of your own server. Or a function such as email or web page serving may stop functioning.
Here is a snapshot of how my FW look, Click to view in full size.
As of this writing I have a support ticket in with Media Temple. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to implement the IP address blocking on the Plesk Admin interface. This should also be restricted in my opinion, but you could easily get locked out of your server and be unable to make any changes to the firewall configuration.
One thing to keep in mind if you do manage to somehow get locked out. You can reset your firewall rules to a default configuration by logging into Media Temples account center, selecting the DV admin and selecting advanced recovery tools. From there you can select an option to restore the firewall to a default configuration.
Here is some additional great advice from my friend and rum lover Aaron Saray. “There are all kinds of things that could be suggested. One of the biggest things I do on a VPS is disable root ssh. I make a user to log in with, and then they must sudo or su any action. Also, I like to create additional certificates to log in with my SSL connection”.
Incoming search terms:
- medatemple dv security
- media temple server harden
- mediatemple block ip address
- mediatemple dv security
- mediatemple firewall
- mediatemple support tickets
- mediatemple vps firewall
- secure mediatemple dv server
- securing mediatemple dv
Tags: DV, Hosting, Media Temple, Server, Virtual Host | Posted under Geek Tech | 2 Comments
Copy a Linux website from server to server
Last Updated on Thursday, 22 October 2009 11:21 Written by Mike Monday, 18 May 2009 12:59
First just let me say I am not a Linux expert. Far from it actually. However in the last 6 months I have spent a lot of time working on these systems. 20 Years as a Windows guy did not prep me for what I would discover.
Please note that this is not the only way to do this task, it’s just my preferred method.
Let me also say that I assume no responsibility if you try this and completely hose your site. Consider yourself warned, MAKE A BACKUP of anything you cannot afford to lose before attempting this.
I offered a client of mine to cut her hosting costs considerably by dropping from a dedicated server to a VPS. I mean why would you have a ded box with only 100-200 people a day visiting you?
So my client goes from $160 a month on GoDaddy with horrendous support, to $40 a month with Media Temple (dv). Same page load speeds, some coin in the bank still, and a hell of a lot better support IMHO.
To do this effectively, I would tarball the site, a zen cart ecommerce jewelry store. There is 5 Gigs of files(a lot of images) and a 9 Meg or so mysql Database, along with a separate wordpress blog database. I copied all the files via SSH and WGET.I prefer this method over FTP download to a local machine and then a re-upload to another server. Saves a lot of time, while NOT tying up my own connection.
To do this you will need SSH on each machine. Here is what I did.
On the source machine. We need to compress all the files into one compressed file( a tarball) that can transfer across the servers backbone pipes.
- Open a SSH terminal session. Navigate to the site root. typically /var/www/vhosts/mydomain.com/httpdocs or username/home/html/
- from the command line execute tar -cvf site.tar.gz ./
This may take some time to complete depending on the size of your site. When its done you will have your tarball(site.tar.gz) ready to be copied.
On the destination machine.
- Open a SSH terminal session. Navigate to the site root
- From the command line execute wget http://mydomain.com/site.tar.gz
- When the file finishes transfering execute tar -xvf site.tar.gz
- The files will be uncompressed into their original locations, and will have the same permissions as the originals.
Files all transfered? Time to move the data! Let me first point out that I have copied databases via Navicat v8.0, a great product for database manipulation. Not just for mySQL it also works on MSSQL, Oracle, postGRE.sql, and a host of other sql type databases.
I did a backup, and restored it to the new server. Worked well, or so I thought. Then I got the phone call “Hi, Mike! where did all those questions marks come from in my product descriptions?” I was a little miffed, took a peek at the clients site, and sure enough random ??’s we inserted in some odd places in the descriptions. How odd
So I spent a little time trying to figure it out. One of my cohorts mentioned an encoding issue. Suggested using the command line to copy the files from box to box. Ok sounds reasonable.
Nothing I found is quite crystal clear on how to move a small database(<10M) from one mysql server to another from the command line.Sure there is a ton of advice on how to export/import using phpmyadmin. Even a few on how to dump/import via SSH. Yet I wanted to learn to do this the quick way, mysql to mysql, no middle man, no SCP or WGET. NO phpmyadmin.
First I should point out that it goes without saying that you will need shell access on at least one of the machines. I have SSH and root access on both machines. should be easy right? It is, if you are using straight out of the box *nix servers without anything like Cpanel or Plesk.
I present to my geeky netizens a quick, easy way to copy mySQL data from server to server.
From the source machine execute this as root.
mysqldump –add-drop-table –extended-insert –force –log-error=error.log -uUSER -pPASS OLD_DB_NAME | ssh -C user@newhost “mysql -uUSER -pPASS NEW_DB_NAME”
Fairly straight forward, and very quick indeed. Obviously you would need change the values of USER, PASS XXX_DB_NAME to match your environment. Hopefully this works for you.
You might get all the way to a password prompt, only to be told ‘permission denied, try again later’ What????? Not so fast Tonto.
If you are using Plesk domain/server management utility, things get way more complicated when trying to do things via the cmd line. In fact too complicated to be easy. That simple command line statement above, It just plain will not work on Plesk managed systems. If that is the case, stick with phpMyadmin web based export/import. You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches. I will cover copying a database from server to server via phpmyadmin, in another blog post.
For example, everyone knows you can create a new database via SSH and the command line, However Plesk is completely ignorant to that fact. if you do not create that database within Plesk, fuhgedaboutit. You’ll never see it in Plesk, your domains files will not have the correct permissions to access it.
Same thing with Plesk permission’s and groups. I like a utility to make management of domains, and email easy. I don’t care for the SSH and file permission issues you are constantly addressing in the trade off.
Maybe its me, maybe Linux/Plesk is every sysadmin’s nightmare. What do you say.
Incoming search terms:
- how to copy from server to another server in linux
- server copy linux
- plesk 10 command line backup website
- how to transfer files from one server to another using plesk
- how to copy website to server
- copy from server to server linux
- copy website via ssh to another server
- copy website to new server plesk
- copy website tarball
- copy website from one server to another linux
