BuyHTTP Company Blog

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.

So you’ve decided you want to make a site with WordPress, that’s the easy part. How do you get traffic to it? The most obvious answers are SEO and link building, but both of those require lots of time to produce and visible results. The easy way is to let your visitors do the promotion for you by leveraging social networking and bookmarking.

Social Networking

Users of social networks like Facebook and Twitter are very curious and love to click links making them sources for driving huge amounts of traffic. There are several plugins available for adding Facebook links to your blog posts automatically. One of the most downloaded and, in our opinion, better plugins is Add To Facebook. Twitter traffic is even more powerful. Two plugins that we recommend are TwitThis and TweetMeme.

Social Bookmarking

Allowing your users to easily add bookmarks to sites like StumbleUpon and del.icio.us can also be helpful in building traffic to your site. The well recognized king in this area is the Sociable plugin.

What We Use

Instead of cluttering the page with several plugins linking to all of these services we use ShareThis. You can customize the feel a little bit and it allows both Facebook and Twitter posting as well as social bookmarking.

Brian Teeman is running a Joomla developer showdown, similar to extension competitions that are done with other systems. These competitions often lead to some of the most used extensions so it will be exciting to see what will be produced. Visit his site for info on the competition and how to get involved.

Do you use the cPanel x3 theme with your BuyHTTP hosting account? We have added a series of 21 new tutorials to our tutorials page. There are now 376 flash tutorials in our collection. We have also streamlined the design making tutorials easier to find.

Shortcodes allow you to show data simply by adding [shortcode] to your WordPress site. This article includes 9 very cool shortcodes you can add (it also shows the format for creating any of your own) and a list of already included shortcodes.