BuyHTTP Company Blog

WordPress has just released 3.0 with some impressive new features. 1,217 bug fixes and enhancements, to be precise. Check out the video below for some of the highlights.

Joomla has released 1.5.16, a security release in the 1.5 line. All versions of 1.5 are affected and all users are encouraged to upgrade.

I thought I would take some time and talk about one of the least thought about parts of the hosting package for most clients, the backups. It’s something that until you need it, you’re not very likely to even think about it, and you’re probably not going to think about it when looking for hosting.

To help keep the chances for data loss to a minimum we employ a three part process for our backups.

Step 1:
Since we run cPanel as our control panel, it only makes sense to use the built-in backup system that cPanel provides. The only drawback is it can create a heavy load on the system, especially with larger accounts. If you’re using a host that only uses cPanel backups and your account uses more than 30-50,000 inodes, chances are they aren’t taking backups of your account due to this heavy load. We take a full cPanel backup of every account each week and keep those backups on hard drives on the server.

Step 2:
Every week we also transfer full backups off of each server to a completely separate datacenter. This is done in case something happens to the datacenter, we can still access account data. This is a critical aspect of our business continuation plan, and is something we strongly believe in.

Step 3:
This is the crown jewel of our backup process. Taking advantage of the industry-leading backup technology provided by R1Soft we take full backups of every file on each server 4 times each day. This includes not only all account files, but also server configuration files, operating system files, etc. Their technology allows backups to be taken without causing noticeable load on the servers, helping keep sites running as fast as they should. It also allows users to restore backups of their own files, choosing from several different restore points going back months. R1Soft provides the best system for backups, and we’re proud to be able to offer it free as a part of all of our shared and reseller plans and as an addon for all servers as well.

Step 4:
This is a bonus step, and not really a true backup method, but all of our shared/reseller servers run hot-swappable, hardware RAID-10 drives. This gives not only the best data-protection available, but also offers the best read/write speed and is another component that helps keep servers fast.

Hopefully this gives you a better understanding of how we’re working every day to keep your data as safe as we can.

Buyhttp is one of the first hosting companies to offer free continuous data protection to shared and reseller hosting customers and they love it, the seamless integration with cPanel makes it easy to login to the backup server and restore individual files anytime without the need to contact support.

Continuous Data Protection, CDP for short, perform a low level block backup with differential and incremental options which lower server resources utilization significantly and reduce backup window to seconds or minutes instead of hours.

Buyhttp Data Vault is also available to anyone with a dedicated server for a very good price, if your host doesn’t offer CDP Buyhttp is here to help. As a dedicated server customer you can set your backup interval to as low as every minute to create over 100 recovery points every day. CDP uses compression and end-to-end strong encryption for low bandwidth usage and secure transfer, CDP is able to backup open files and with MySQL plugin you can backup open tables with restore option down to the individual database table.

CDP support all main flavors of Linux, Windows XP, windows server 2003, please visit our website to learn more about the many features of Buyhttp Data Vault CDP or contact our sales team if you have any pre-sales question.

Looking for a dedicated server to run multiple virtual machines using VMware ESXi platform?

We recently added the free edition of VMware ESXi to our list of  installable operating system to professional and enterprise servers which comes with 60 days trial period, to keep using the server after the 60 days trial is over you’ll need to sign up for a FREE unlimited license from WMware website below.

https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/

The benefit of running ESXi on a dedicated server is that you can run 2 different operating system like Linux and Windows side by side on the same box or running applications that requires different flavor of Linux like CentOS and Ubuntu for example, plus all other virtualization benefits like dividing the server resources any way you like, assign virtual CPU, RAM and Disk as per your application requirement, console access to all VMs, creating a VM snapshot and many of the cool features available from the VMware vSphere Client which is a free download from the client area at VMware website.

Our PowerEdge DELL servers are fully compatible with VMware ESXi which also include hardware specific features for DELL servers.

Note: Buyhttp only provide the hardware, software licensing is the responsibility of the customer.

Unlimited hosting is here!

So what is unlimited hosting? is it really unlimited? is it for me?

As we pointed out in a previous post, unlimited hosting is for the most part a marketing term for the same old hosting plan but with a little twist.

Hosting is not about disk space and bandwidth only it’s more about server resources like CPU, RAM, Disk Space, Network, etc… and like every other host out there that offer unlimited hosting, there’s always a limit hidden somewhere, if it’s not disk space it’ll be inodes (number of files), CPU, Memory, number of processes, number of connection or a combination of them.

How our unlimited hosting is different

What we did is we created the right mix of server resources using the right combination of server hardware, limiting the number of accounts hosted on each server to provide a good performance and not overload the server, the new plan include unlimited disk space and bandwidth, large number of inodes, CPU and RAM enough to run just about any personal website.

Is unlimited hosting right for me?

If you’re running a non critical personal site that doesn’t requires high level of server resources or top of the line server hardware and performance you’ll be fine with unlimited hosting but if you’re running a business critical website that requires an enterprise class hardware, the best performance and uptime possible then you’re better off with a business hosting plan like our GIGA and the newly added GIGA+

Are you looking for a virus and malware scanner for your VPS or dedicated server running cPanel?

cPanel comes with clamav a free virus scanner as a plugin, all you have to do is login to your WHM manager to install it with just a few clicks.

Login to WHM > scroll down to the “cPanel” section > click on “Manage Plugins” > select “install and keep updated ” for clamavconnector and cPanel will install the plugin for you and create the link  “Configure ClamAV Scanner” under Plugins section of WHM.

You can use this configuration screen to activate the virus scanner for all or selected users to perform manual scans.

Now to the best part, how to schedule a server wide scan?

First you’ll need to create a temp directory to use as a quarantine area, /tmp/virus for example

# mkdir /tmp/virus

Then add this cron job to crontab to schedule a weekly scan of your /home directory and send the results to your email address (admin@yourdomain.com)

#crontab -e

5 0 * * 0   nice -n 19 clamscan -i -r –move=/tmp/virus /home | mail admin@yourdomain.com -s “***** Server Name – Infected files *****”

WordPress has released version 2.8.2. This releases fixes an XSS vulnerability with URLs not being fully sanitized when viewing in the admin. It is recommended that you upgrade to protect yourself from this issue.

One of our clients has written up a good overview of how to quickly and easily turn your Joomla 1.5 installation into a multi-site setup. The basic steps:

1. Setup Joomla on your main domain
2. Park the second domain on your main domain
3. Add a php header redirect to your template’s index.php file

If you want multiple templates for each site that is also easy to control. So if you need to control multiple sites from one Joomla installation, this will work perfectly for you.

View the writeup at docs.joomla.org.

WordPress has released version 2.8.1 of their popular blogging software. Along with 51 fixed bugs there was a possible security issue addressed with unprivileged users able to access admin pages for some plugins. For that reason this upgrade is strongly recommended. If you don’t want to do the upgrade yourself you can order our upgrade service.

Some highlights of this release:

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Translation of role names fixed.
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
• Stricter inline style sanitization.
• Stricter menu security.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• RTL layout fixes.