Virtualization is no longer a niche market. It is now a pre-requisite for success in webhosting industry. Gartner’s server virtualization report of 2011 mentions a virtualization market penetration of 40% for x86 server work loads. A study by Tier1Research on Mass-Market Hosting for Winter 2011 showed that 60% of webhosts provide VPS solutions.These findings tally with the technology adoption trend we see here in Bobcares as well.

For someone entering the VPS hosting business, it is important to choose the right virtualization technology based on your market segment requirement, and cost considerations.

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When it comes to speeding up a server, the primary choice of most people is to add more hardware resources. This will certainly improve the performance, but will cost you fair amount of money. The fact is that you can improve the performance by tweaking the services. The basic principle is to identify the services consuming the most of the resources and change their settings to suit your server. You don’t have to be too much technical to optimise your server.

The web and database servers are the frequently used services in a server and they consume most of the resources. Apache and MySQL are the widely used web and database servers. This article focuses on altering the Apache and MySQL services to improve the performance. You need to have shell access with root privileges in the server to modify the configuration settings.

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Backups are alternative copies of your original data which can be used to restore the crucial files and folders, if it is lost due to any reason. Backing up data and protecting is the hardest and most important challenge on todays world. Accidental deletion, system failure, viruses, power spikes and other similar incidents are some of the reasons due to which data loss may occur. So everyone needs to keep a backup of their data in order to prevent any unfortunate consequences.

Remote backup is the best way to restore data the most effective way and it includes less human power, fewer mouse clicks and little time to restore data back. One can keep their backups as online backup or external hard disk backup. Each have its own advantages and disadvantages.

External hard drives allow users to save files from their computer on another separate hard drive. Online file backup is the process of storing the contents of your computer’s hard drive through the Internet using a third party online backup service. Online backup is a better solution for most consumers for several reasons.

1. Reliability

External hard drives have the same hardware failure issues that the internal hard drive in your computer has. They will eventually fail or crash and put the stored information at risk, whereas online backup services are not dependent on a single hard drive to store your information, which makes them infinitely more reliable.

2. Security

If your external hard drive is misplaced or stolen you immediately lose all the backup information that you have stored there. Online backup services, on the other hand, allow you to store your information remotely and securely on computer servers that are maintained by professionals. In fact, many major corporations use the same online file backup services that are available to consumers to store important business information because these services are so secure and professionally managed.

3. Storage capacity

Third, external hard drives have storage limitations. For example, if you purchase a 100 GB external hard drive it will be able to store 100 gigabytes of information before you need to either purchase an additional drive or delete some information from your existing one. The top-rated online backup services offer unlimited storage capacity for all your important files. You will never need to buy additional storage capacity or hardware and you will never need to choose which files you will keep and which you will delete based on how much storage space is available.

4. Cost

Finally, external hard drives are more expensive per gigabyte of storage than most online backup services. We recently analyzed the costs of both options and found that online backup services are about 50% cheaper per gigabyte than using external hard drives.

It is necessary to have alternative backups for your informations. As we discussed above, online backup mechanism is the best option to take a backup for your informations as it is reliable.

The above is a very rough outline on online backup , if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

About the Author :

Jaslin Jose works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. She joined Bobcares in 2011. She loves reading books and listening to music in his free time.

Blog edited by :

Appu Joseph Xavier works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves to watch movies in his free time.

When almost every business around you is moving towards virtualization, it is important to review some of the facts before making a final decision on your hosting solution. I shall provide some facts that may help you to decide what solution will be best for your growing business.

Virtualization

Virtualization is basically a consolidation of number of physical servers onto a more powerful machine capable of handling the increased load. Generally physical servers use only a small portion of the total CPU, RAM, and I/O, it makes sense to get more out of your hardware.

Dedicated Servers

For every new technology that came, people will adapt and use what works best for them, while others do it in the old fashion way. Let’s check some facts.

1. Cost

The first reason to virtualize is to save money. This may be hardware, human resource, or energy related savings. An ideal virtualization plan should result in lower equipment, power, management and hardware costs. Most businesses will review their current situation and determine where they can save money.

The cost of buying individual servers is much higher than virtualization. Even though you may save costs on hardware, the costs of the virtualization software and licensing may be high. You may have to treat each virtual server as a physical instance like before, so normal licensing costs for each virtual server stays as same.

2. Performance

Performance is not as good if you increase the work load for a single machine must handle. While the virtualization hardware is getting faster and faster each year, you still have more resources being used with virtualization. Performance needs for an application should to be addressed on a case by case basis.

Many dedicated servers are only using about 20% of their computing capacity. This is a waste of usable resource and also one of the main reason companies are looking for virtualization. Trying to get the most out of your hardware is more difficult using a dedicated server environment.

A server that is running one application will be faster than the same server running multiple applications. There are times when a virtual server cannot perform like a dedicated server and we all have to determine when that time comes. For example consider a database server. All things being equal the dedicated server wins on performance but may loose on efficiency.

3. Managing Time

Many of the virtualization products have advanced management tools that help you to monitor and review information quicker across more servers. This can reduce the human resource needed and less 3rd party software that you have to learn along with less errors. When you have more items to manage, the risk of making mistakes also increases.

Dedicated hosting solutions are more complex due to their hardware separation. Hardware management requires more time. For virtualization, many of these items are build into the software package.

4. Disaster Recovery

Most virtualization software comes with a number of features that may increase server up-time. If one virtual server fails, it will come up instantly on another machine. Load balancing is also easier. Many packages also come with their own data backup solutions such as ’snapshots’ to protect data. In case of Physical server, we have to opt other backup and recovery options.

5. Point of Failure

If you have 10 virtual servers on a single piece of hardware and if that goes down, it won’t be good. Minimizing these risks may require additional hardware like redundant physical servers and SANS. This adds more equipment and cost which are the exact items you are trying to reduce.

We can’t let our entire business shutting down due to a single failure. With dedicated servers we know that a single server failure rarely takes down everything. Virtualization increases the risk of a major event when you loose a single server. One of virtualizations selling point is the ability to load balance servers easily. We can say that the separation of services could be a good thing for many different configurations.

6. Security

Setting up a security plan for a virtual server environment is easier because you can focus on a universal security model. A more focused approach for overall security across fewer dedicated machines is easier than security for more hardware, right?

Your virtual server might be on the same physical server of another company. This is especially true if you are using a hosting company on a cloud environment. If you are leasing cloud space from a hosting provider how are they protecting your data from the thousands of other people on the cloud. The security of your virtual server depends on many factors and could complicate a few items when dealing with industry regulations.

7. Ease in IT Growth

Adding a new server or increasing RAM, CPU, or hard disk is as easy as pressing a few buttons using Virtualization. The ease of deploying new servers can decrease the time it takes to launch new products and services. When you have to add a new physical server to your environment it takes some planning. You have to purchase equipment and then load the OS, security patches, and plan out physically connecting the server to your network. Using virtualization you can usually bring up another server within minutes by using a copy of a virtual server. If you are a company adding 10 servers per month then this will be the perfect choice. The virtualization of servers does equal less hardware which can help reducing our net power usage with virtualization.

8. Migration

Many virtualization products come with software that helps you migrate applications from your older dedicated servers to new virtual servers. This means that upgrades to your environment can be much easier as long as you stay with similar virtualization products.

Final Note

Managing thousands of dedicated servers may not be great for a company’s image when there are other choices out there. If you have the money to invest and you intend on developing software for other platforms, then invest in setting up your machine to support virtualization

As I said the benefits are going to be unique to each business case, each user community and enterprise. If you have any suggestions or questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

Sajan Sebastian works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in February 2011. He loves to travel and read books.

In the world of eCommerce, security is paramount. Fear of fraud continues to keep millions of consumers from shopping online. SSL Certificates give you an easy, cost-effective way to protect your visitors and earn their trust.

To enable SSL on a website, you will need to get SSL Certificate that identifies you and install it on the server. SSL Certificates are small data files that digitally bind a cryptographic key to an organization’s details.

What are the types of SSL Certificates?

An SSL Certificate is necessary to protect websites and enable them for data security. However, there are different types of SSL Certificates and the website owners often are unsure of the type of certificate they need for their online security needs.

Dedicated SSL Certificates

Dedicated SSL Certificates are those being purchased directly from Certificate Authorities to be used solely by the owner for his domain. This is perfect for those who are confident in making their businesses go big time, quickly. It also cannot be used with other domains or even on the same location’s subdomain due to its focused security functionality, which can be very costly.

Shared SSL Certificates

From the very sense of the word, Shared SSL certificates are those security tools that you can share to other people. It would be either that you might share your certificate with others, or you share SSL certificates that are owned by companies or businesses. You may have it free or at a lesser price, but you will not have ownership with it as the name appears belong to a different person. A shared SSL certificate is used by multiple sites on the same IP address so that each site doesn’t have to get their own certificate.

Free SSL Certificates

Free SSL certificates are being offered by some companies and businesses for the benefit of customers. But there are chances that these certificates, being free of charge, may not offer the kind of protection that paid certificates have. Be sure to check if the company where the SSL tool coming from is reputable and credible.

Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificates

Extended Validation SSL Certificates are the first SSL Certificates to adhere to industry-wide certification guidelines established by leading Web browser vendors and Certificate Authorities, including Network Solutions. An EV SSL Certificate is more than just a transaction protector. Apart from creating secure transactions, it also reassures visitors about the business a site conducts. Among the new features of EV SSL Certificates is the color-coding of the Web browser’s address bar to signal secure connections.

Organization Validation (OV) SSL Certificates

This assures the validity of a Web site by verifying that the applicant is a legitimate business. Before issuing the SSL certificate, the CA performs a rigorous validation procedure, including checking the applicant’s business credentials (such as the Articles of Incorporation) and verifying the accuracy of its physical and Web addresses. An Organizationally Validated SSL Certificate is an excellent website security option for any business conducting online transactions and accepting sensitive data, such as credit-card numbers, from customers.

Domain Validation (DV) SSL Certificates

Domain SSL Certificates are fully supported and share the same browser recognition with OrganizationSSL, but come with the advantage of being issued almost immediately and without the need to submit company paperwork. This makes DomainSSL ideal for businesses needing a low cost SSL quickly and without the effort of submitting company documents.

Wildcard SSL Certificate

A Wildcard SSL Certificate can help you if you want to secure your multiple sub-domains over multiple servers all by one single certificate. It saves you time and money over buying and managing of individual certificates for every sub-domain.

Instant SSL Certificate

An Instant SSL Certificate is one of the most cost-effective fast-installed SSL Certificate to secure a webserver. Customers could be assured about a complete security of the transaction data till it reaches the intended webserver. All Instant SSL orders include a dynamic TrustLogo site seal which allows visitor to verify your business credentials in real-time - leading to increased visitor conversion rate, lower Web site abandonment and an increase in average purchase price.

Essential SSL Certificate

An Essential SSL Certificate is highly trusted in the industry as a quick, reliable solution for web security. It can be of significant value to you if you are an e-merchant as it secures E-commerce sites in no time.

Code Signing Certificate

A Code Signing Certificate facilitates the protection of software code and content for the software publishers and the users downloading it. It typically allows the software developers to include their digital signatures and information with the software.

Depending on the type of SSL Certificate applied for, the organization will need to go through differing levels of vetting. Once you have done the SSL install, it activates the https protocol (over port 443) and you can access a site securely by changing the URL from http:// to https://. When an SSL certificate is installed on a website, you can be sure that the information you enter (contact or credit card information), is secured and only seen by the organization that owns the website.

The above is a very rough outline on SSL certificates , if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

About the Author :

Nimi K M works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. She joined Bobcares in April 2012. She loves reading books and listening to music in his free time.

Blog edited by :

Appu Joseph Xavier works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves to watch movies in his free time.

Virtual Private Servers are the primary choice of customers who can’t afford to buy a Dedicated Server, at the same time need same amount of flexibility and control. This industry is facing a serious threat from Amazon and Windows Azure Cloud Platforms. This article is focused on running a VPS business which can compete with these cloud platforms.

A thorough understanding of the features that end customers looks for in these services and implementing them at much lower price tag is the key for running a successful VPS hosting services. Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. The key features of Azure are:

* 99.95% monthly availability

* Supports different OS and frameworks

* Instant deployment

* Instant Scaling of resources

* Pay only for the resources used

* Quality customer support

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud enables us to create a computing instance in Amazon’s network. The main highlights of these platform are:

* 99.95% availability

* Instant deployment and scalability of computing resources

* Web interface for managing firewall.

* Easy deployment using preconfigured images

* Custom configurations using custom images

* Pay for only the resources used

* Quality customer support

A normal deployment of a VPS server may take days with its regular routine of customer chating with the sales team, then another few days for the technician to set-up the server. Your website should provide the customers an option to create custom configurations, generate its cost and order it instantly. Providing predefined configurations and proper documentation of their pros and cons will also delight the customer. Once the customer has ordered the VPS, you should be able to deploy the server within hours.

Your plans should provide high availability. This can be implemented using high availability configurations like Xen Clusters. A lot of virtualization technologies offers high availability configurations.

Another factor is instant scaling or resources. The customer may be anticipating high traffic in in the next day and he may need to scale up the resource instantly.Scaling of computing resource can be done instantly in most virtualization technologies. An experienced support team can accomplish it in a few minutes. The only requirement is that you keep sufficient free resources in the hardware node. If the hardware node itself runs out of resources, you will need the DC technician to manually upgrade the resources. This can cause considerable downtime for server.

A web interface which allows the customer to login and perform tasks like viewing resource usage of his server, ordering new resources or servers etc will be an added advantage. The billing portal used by most hosting providers can be customized to implement these services unless you are using any third party applications like WHMCS.

Integrating a high availability configuration which provides instant scaling of resources coupled with quality customer support and competitive pricing will make the customer think twice before opting for Amazon or Azure.

The above is a very rough outline on Running VPS business competing amazon & azure , if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

About the Author :

Dipin.D works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in October 2010. He loves reading books and listening to music in his free time.

Blog edited by :

Appu Joseph Xavier works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves to watch movies in his free time.

what is a VPS?

A VPS or virtual private server which works by partitioning a single physical server. The Physical node consists of only one root operating system. Using software such as Parallels Virtuozzo or VM-Ware the same operating system can then be installed over the top of the Hardware Nodes creating multiple Virtual Nodes. These Virtual Nodes use the same registry and system files to maximize efficiency and minimise both memory and hard disk usage. This all allows for independent execution of the virtual servers without interference from the other virtual servers connected to the same physical server.

Different Types of VPS Services

1.Managed VPS hosting service

In managed VPS hosting service the hosting company supply professionals who are well trained in solving numerous kind of hosting relevant specialised problems, able to administrate and handle issues quickly. They also guarantee that your world wide web functions are at safe hands and let you able to concentrate on the other important tasks at the same time. Managed VPS hosting service supply 24/7 service to help you regardless of the location where you are located and time boundary. Further, they guarantee that your server is working actively without any issues.

2.Unmanaged VPS hosting service

In Unmanaged hosting service the hosting company will not provide any support regarding the issues related with software , resource , performance , troubleshooting or need general help in understanding server applications. The user is completely responsible for the management and troubleshooting of the issues caused in the server. Only hardware related issues will be handled by the hosting provider.

Advantages of VPS over shared hosting

1.Security

In the case of VPS hosting your file system is not accessible or viewable by any other customer, your files are ensured full privacy and security.

2.Control

In the case of VPS hosting, you are able to modify server configuration files, install applications or modify system software With administrative or root access.

3.Isolation

In the case of VPS hosting, You are fully isolated from other users and actions on the server. No other customer can slow down or affect your service.

4.Performance

In the case of VPS hosting, Your resources may be guaranteed based on your plan, nothing else on the server will affect the performance of your VPS

Why Purchase VPS Hosting?

VPS hosting is a package that gives you a big part of server for a web project. Most online web companies provide VPS servers only to several companies, all located on one server. So the possibility of bad neighbourhood common for Shared Hosting is incredibly small in case of VPS. Along with server safety you get nice amount of disk space, serious bandwidth, control panel, and a dedicated support.

A VPS server is a good choice if your project is already quite big and in the foreseeable future your site will have to host big amounts of media. For instance, your users will upload audios, videos, images or other documents that take much disk space. All these documents will stay on your server, so you’ll need more gigabytes for it. Also, VPS hosting can process more users coming to your web page.

The prices for this hosting type are quite moderate, but we advise you to check the reliability of any company offering you cheap services. Low price can cover bad functioning, poor hosting features or unreliable customers support.

The above is a very rough outline on advantages of VPS hosting , if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

About the Author :

Karthikeyan.S works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves reading books and listening to music in his free time.

Blog edited by :

Appu Joseph Xavier works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves to watch movies in his free time.

LiteSpeed Web Server is the leading high-performance, high-scalability web server . It is completely Apache interchangeable, so it can quickly replace in your existing web delivery platform. The important security features and its configurations are given below:

a) SSL (Litespeed administration security)

We need to secure the administration area. We will do this by adding a SSL connection to the administration port and configuring the server to accept connections to that port from our IP only (or from a group of IPs).

b) DDoS Protection

LiteSpeed web server is much less vulnerable to HTTP Denial Of Service(DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, thanks to the IP level throttling, connection accounting and its outstanding performance and scalability.

This is a server level setting that affects all virtual hosts. Virtual host setting will not override the server setting. If you want to block a certain IP or network, put * or ALL in “Allowed List” and list the blocked IP or network in Denied List. If you want to only allow certain IP or sub-network, put * or ALL in Denied List and list the allowed IP or sub-network in Allowed List. The setting of the smallest scope that fits for an IP will be used to determine whether to block or allow. Trusted IP or sub-network must be specified in the Allowed List by adding a trailing “T”. Trusted IP or sub-network is not affected by connection/throttling limits. Only server level access control can set up trusted IP/sub-network.

c) SuEXEC

This is another way of security. In this we have to enable SuEXEC in LiteSpeed server with applications including CGI, FastCGI, LSAPI, PHP, Python, RubyOnRails.

d) File system protection

LiteSpeed web server will serve a static file only if the following conditions are satisfied:

# “.ht*” and “.svn*” are not allowed in a decoded URL, this will deny accessing some important hidden files and directories.
# The file permission must configured with the required permissions.
# The file will not be in the Access Denied Directory list
# It does not contain symbolic links, if symbolic linking is not allowed.

e) Chroot Jail
“chroot” can change the root directory for a process. A changed root process and its children process cannot access any file beyond the new root directory. It is like putting a process in a jail, so this mechanism is called “chroot jail”. The litespeed webserver run inside the chroot jail.

The above is a very rough outline of the Litespeed web server, and if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

About the Author :

Manu George E works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares back in March 2011. He loves reading books, watching movies and listening to music in his free time.

The beta of IO Limits for CloudLinux 6.x has been released. I/O limits provides the ability to limit read and write operations on a per-customer basis. This feature allows to setup IO throughput for clients as measured in KB/sec. The limit is for both reads & writes, combined, and we set it as a single number for simplicity.

The long-desired feature was years in development and is finally ready. In addition, physical memory limits and limits for the number of processes will be shown. This completes the CloudLinux LVE offering that already features CPU, virtual memory, and concurrent connections limits.

The issues related to I/O are one of the chief contributors to shared hosting downtime. I/O limits should help customers better manage resource usage and improve overall stability of their service in shared hosting environment.

You can set new IO limits either by using LVE Manager (cPanel only), or from command line. After installing iolimits, make sure that you update lve-utils, lve-stats and lvemanager packages as well. And reboot the server to load new kernel with IO module.

IO limits helps each customer to customize his account. Thus we can see how IO limits will be an advantage to shared hosting servers in the future.

The above is a very rough outline of the shared hosting service we provide, and if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

Blog written and edited by :

Kumar K works as a Junior Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares back in February 2012. He loves reading books, watching movies and listening to music in his free time.

IPv4 and IPv6 are addressing schemes to direct traffic across the Internet. IPv6 is the next generation in the Internet Protocol. Currently, almost all of the Internet traffic is directed using IPv4 address. It provides 2^32 (4,294,967,296) possible addresses. However, the increase in demand has lead to a shortage in the IP addresses. A solution for this shortage is the IPv6 scheme, which provides upto 2^128 addresses. It will also improve performance of the network by providing features like built in support for virtual private network protocols, multicast groups etc.

Unfortunately, cPanel haven’t incorporated IPv6 support till their current release i.e, 11.32. As per cPanel sources, IPv6 support will be officially included in cPanel from 11.36. Currently, IPv6 support is available with Plesk control panel.

The IPv6 assignment to the server can be done manually. On a Red-Hat machine, you will have to enable IPv6 support by modifying the file “/etc/sysconfig/network“.

The next step is to edit the network interface file, say “/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1” and specify the IPv6 parameters.

Restarting the network service is required for this change to be in effect.
IPv6 virtual hosts cannot be added from cPanel. You will have to manually edit the Apache configuration file to add IPv6 addresses. Initially you will have add a “Listen” directive in the Apache configuration file, so that it listen to a particular IPv6 address or all IP6 addresses.

To bind to a specific IP address :

Listen [2001:db8::a00:20ff:fea7:ccea]:80

To bind to a all available IP addresses:

Listen [::]:80

Once this change is made, you can add virtual hosts with IPV6 IP addresses. This can be added in the same way as virtual hosts with IPv4 addresses. IPv6 addresses must be specified in square brackets. In the similar way, we can switch all services to be IPv6 compatible.
Since version 11.32, all daemons in cPanel supports IPv6. But the required modifications in GUI are not yet implemented. We will have to wait till the release of cPanel 11.36 to manage IPv6 from the cPanel/WHM interface. Until then IPv6 addresses and their settings have to be managed via the command line.

The above is a very rough outline of the IPV6 , if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

About the Author :

Dipin D works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in September 2010. He loves reading books and listening to music in his free time.

Blog edited by :

Appu Joseph Xavier works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves to watch movies in his free time.