Chances are you’ll pick the cheapest intro package which will give you x amount of space for something like $9.90 a month. This will also allow you to host a few domains on it. This simplest form of hosting is often known as Shared Hosting which means that you share the server with up to hundreds of other users. The pros on this is that its cheap and easy to manage with a control panel and the techs take care of everything else for you. The cons of it is that you can’t have access to the inner workings on the server such as installing/upgrading software like PHP, MySQL, Perl, etc. Another minus is that you have to share resources (RAM) with others, meaning if someone else uses a lot of processes (in the case of a huge traffic spike), your website can be affected.

On the other end of the scale there’s the Dedicated Server. This basically gives you control of the entire server, so you get something like 160GB of space plus 1GB of RAM. The great thing is obviously the total control that you have over the server. However, such power comes with a price, often up to hundreds a month. Also, you’re pretty much on your own in terms of technical support. Depending on the hosts, they will have to charge you to fix something on your server.

A VPS (Virtual Private Server) on the other hand is somewhere in between. It usually comes with something like 30GB and allows you to host unlimited domains at fairly affordable price (as in the ServInt Essential VPS @ $49/mo) and is basically a partitioned dedicated server into smaller ’servers’ – each with its own processes, software, users, etc. Its usually semi-managed meaning the techs take care of the high-end software upgrade stuff such as kernels but you’re responsible for keeping your PHP, etc up to date. In our case, a typical ServInt VPS can be seamlessly upgraded right up to SuperVPS which gives you 150GB and dedicated server-type capabilities.

I’ve found this analogy helpful – Shared hosting if pretty much like renting a room. A couple of room mates might live together but you don’t really have much input into the way the house is run and you can only hope for nice house mates and landlord.

Dedicated servers on the other hand is like owning your own house. Although its nice, you’ll now have to start worrying about plumbing and heating and garbage disposals and mowing the lawn, etc.

A VPS is somewhat like an apartment. You rent the entire apartment and you sub-let it out to others, while you have some responsibilities in maintaining it, the bulk of the repairs are borne by your landlord.

I hope that little example will give you a good idea on what a VPS is. My typical VPSes take up to 50 domains on it, and if I charge my clients shared hosting type fees, you can easily do the math to see what kinds of profits you can have with one.

This article is obviously simplified for the average user as there’s also Cloud Hosting and other new technologies emerging.

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What is a VPS – A Beginner’s Introduction

Since this is more of a hosting blog, I’ll focus on banning an IP address. There are few ways to do it. First of all, you have to identify the IP address. Be very careful about this. If you ban your own IP will not be able to login to undo it! Or sometimes a client could be using a service or software to monitor your site. Don’t be too quick to identify it as a ‘hack attempt’… In my case, I’m sure of the site scrapping my content. I ping-ed the site and also cross-checked with the logs to confirm the offending IP.

If you’re running IP tables, you can SSH in and run the following:

iptables -A INPUT -s -j DROP

The other alternative is to block and IP in Plesk (I’m using Plesk 9.x)

1. Login as ‘admin’.
2. Go to Settings > Manage Firewall Rules
3. Click on Edit Firewall Configuration
4. Click on Add Custom Rule
5. Give the rule a name and change the settings as per the image below:

Its even easier in cPanel. When you login, look under the “Security” grouping and locate the “IP Deny Manager” icon. In the next window just add your IP and submit. Can’t go wrong with that! Just be careful not to enter ‘wildcard’ IPs like 202.*.*.* which means all IPs starting with 202 will be blocked.

So, there you go. A simple tutorial that will save you time (and bandwidth is someone is hotlinking your images or videos). Please leave a comment below if you have other favorite techniques or tips that you’d like to share.

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How To Ban An IP Address

There’s also other income potential when you offer related services like domain registration and web designing/consulting services. There are many domain registrars that offer an affiliate program and you can partner with a local web design team for referrals.

It does require some technical know how and research, but there’s good income potential. Some hosts also provide technical support for you for a small fee.
Its easier when you use a good control panel like Plesk that allows your clients to self-manage their FTP, email and databases.

You’ll be surprised at the number of websites that don’t require the full capacity of a dedicated server, but just need a simple hosting solution.

Here’s a quick checklist on some of the things you should be looking into.

1. A website. Get a good domain and design a simple site. Be focused on the kind of service that you offer – keep it simple and attractive. I like hosting sites that have few preset packages. Orders come through this site and you can link it to Paypal or some other payment gateway.
2. A good VPS host provider. As you know, we highly recommend ServInt as our favorite VPS host. They’re reputable and reliable, and you have a choice of 2 locations in the US.
3. A good invoicing system. We love Freshbooks. It’ll generate invoices based on your recurring schedule, you can bill monthly, bi-annually or yearly.
4. A good helpdesk system. Kayako and Cerberus are some popular choices. This’ll allow you to manage support requests efficiently. You can even hire off-shore staff from places like ODesk, Scriptlance and Elance.
5. Education – especially on Linux (basic commands, software, etc). Hanging out at forums like Web Hosting Geeks and Web Hosting Talk can be very educational too.
6. A web services partner like GoDaddy that you can get domains and SSL certs from.
7. Get the word out! Use Adwords, forums, social networks, etc to promote it. Consider giving some free hosting space to charities and non-profits in exchange for a link. That’ll help your Search Engine Optimization too.
8. Here’s a good e-book that’ll give you more information – “How To Start A Successful Hosting Company“

Any other tips or experiences you’d like to share?

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Setting Up Your Own Web Hosting Company

• Closed, private data center facilities
• CCTV Surveillance and biometric access control
• Fault-tolerant power redundancy
• Powerful industrial class generators
• 24/7 monitoring
• Liebert temperature-controlled server environment
• N+1 and redundant AC/DC UPS Power
• Ample cooling capacity
• Technical staff on premises

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Servint On The West Coast

One of the major task was to migrate email accounts from our legacy VPS running FreeBSD 4.7 to newer ones running 6.3. Here’s how I did it.

1. Copied the passwords from /etc/passwd in the older 4.7 servers.
   (Copy the part right after the name until right before the colon – e.g. mike:54YBKHNIE0.3L: ) UPDATE: Someone suggested a utility called ‘vipw’. Haven’t tried it yet.
2. Pasted them into /etc/master.passwd of new server.
   (Create the users you need first with any temp password. The paste the one above between the name and colon)
3. Ran pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd
4. Updated the MX and A record for the mail server to point to the new server. We normally migrate email and web separately to minimise downtime. Using a good DNS service like DNS Made Easy allows you to set a low TTL for these changes to take affect quickly.
5. Finally, I commented out the hostname in /etc/hosts on the old server to tell it that it no longer manages emails for this domain.
6. Finally finally, I forwarded old emails using Mutt to the new account.

Hope this helps, worked wonders for us. Clients had no disruption to their emails which meant little grief for me!

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Migrating Email Accounts on FreeBSD

• LiteSpeed web server (instead of the ubiquitous Apache) which according to GS, boasts of speeds up to 9 times faster than Apache and 50% PHP.
• Ruby on Rails ready.
• Anti Spam SMTP Proxies.
• OS Choice: CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Suse or Ubuntu.
• Free migration.

I’ve yet to try them. Hoping to get my hands on one of these babies to test the performance. I’ll publish a review if I get a chance. Helloo…. anybody from GeekStorage marketing reading this?

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Super Sweet Geek Hosting!

As a freelance Linux consultant, many of my clients are often interested in making their VPS (Virtual Private Server) as responsive as possible. Since VPS servers by nature have somewhat limited system resources (often less than 1 GB of RAM), getting the best VPS performance can be a crucial part of running a successful server. To make matters worse, most clients assume that the VPS host has already optimized their server- which simply isn’t true (even Rackspace, a wonderful VPS host, doesn’t do this). Therefore, I’ve written this article as a brief introduction to some of the more common ways to get the best performance from a VPS.

Tip #1: Disable system services.
The top way to increase your VPS performance is to disable any system services that are not necessary. Services that are never used will still use up valuable RAM and CPU time, and also possibly allow your server to be attacked remotely. If you don’t need these services, why have them? Manage the startup scripts that start these services at boot time, and disable them.

Tip #2: Configure MySQL properly.
One of the more common ways to increase the available RAM (or to allocate more RAM to MySQL) is to configure the MySQL cache sizes. If your MySQL server instance is using too much memory, decrease the cache sizes. Likewise, if MySQL gets bogged down with large requests, increase the MySQL cache.

Tip #3: Configure Apache properly.
With Apache 2.0, many system administrators and clients alike have become confused as to the proper configuration of the Apache worker threads. Check how much memory Apache is using, and adjust the StartServers and MinSpareServers directives as needed to free up more memory.

Tip #4: Clean up your modules!
Without exception, there will always be modules or features that are enabled in memory hungry server software packages (such as Apache) that simply are not needed. Take a look at the configuration files for Apache, and decide if you need FrontPage support, or some of the other extra modules that ship with the VPS software packages. Disabling unnecessary modules or plugins will decrease the system memory that server software such as Apache requires, which will give you more resources for the software that needs it!

Tip #5: Disable control panels.
Let’s face it, everyone loves the more popular control panels, such as Cpanel, Plesk, Webmin, and phpMyAdmin. Heck, I’ve even written tutorials on how to use some of these control panel software packages. However, disabling these software packages frees up quite a bit of resources- sometimes as much as 120 MB of RAM! Sometimes the best solution is to disable these control panels until you actually need them- then they can be turned on via a PHP script (albeit somewhat insecure), or via a command entered at a shell prompt.

These 5 tips should decease the amount of RAM that your VPS uses by as much as 30-40%, which might save you quite a bit of money per month. Since most providers start out their VPS plans at systems with 256MB of RAM (and upgrades from there are expensive, often costing $40/month for an additional 256 MB), optimization of a VPS server is a crucial step. In addition, these 5 tips can be performed by a talented system administrator or consultant in typically less than two hours, which can mean a return on investment after only two or three billing cycles. What you do with the extra money saved is your business- you’ve earned it!

Christopher J. Pace is a freelance Linux consultant who has worked with Linux since 2001. Currently, he provides remote Linux consulting services for sick servers.

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5 Linux VPS Performance Tips

What is OpenVZ?

OpenVZ is server virtualization software provided by SWSoft, Inc. licensed under the GPL version 2. OpenVZ is the software that every system administrator requires. It allows you to host multiple Virtual Environments (Aka VE) on a single server. The only limitations are RAM and CPU.

OpenVZ is an operating system-level virtualization technology based on the Linux kernel and operating system. It allows a physical server to run multiple isolated operating system instances, known as Virtual Private Servers (VPS) or Virtual Environments (VE).

Unlike VMWare and Para virtualization technologies such as Xen, OpenVZ is more limited in that it requires both the host and guest OS to be Linux (although Linux distributions can be different in different VEs) under the same kernel. OpenVZ claims a true performance advantage. According to its website, there is only a 1-3% performance penalty for running OpenVZ compared to using a standalone server.

As OpenVZ employs a single kernel model, and is scalable as the 2.6 Linux kernels; in that it will support up to 64 CPUs and up to 64 GB of RAM. A single virtual environment can scale up to the whole physical box (known as a “heavy VPS”) i.e. use all the CPUs and the entire RAM.

OpenVZ is divided into a custom kernel and a number of user-level tools such as vzctl, vzstat etc. OpenVZ lacks some of the features of the commercial product Virtuozzo, such as the advanced vzfs file system, templating features, to save disk space, and additional user land tools and control panels (though third party ones have been written).

OpenVZ improves efficiency, flexibility and quality of service in the enterprise environment. Each Virtual Private Server is hardware independent and can be moved to another OpenVZ-based system in seconds over the network.

Some Important OpenVZ Commands:

1. vzlist -a : Shows list of all the VPS’s hosted on the Node.
2. vzctl start VPS_ID: To start the VPS.
3. vzctl stop VPS_ID : To stop (Shut Down) the VPS
4. vzctl status VPS_ID : To view the status of the particular VPS
5. vzctl stop VPS_ID -fast : to stop the VPS quickly and forcefully
6. vzctl enter VPS_ID : To enter in a particular VPS

Configuration Commands

1. vzctl set VPS_ID -hostname vps.domain.com -save: To set the Hostname of a VPS.
2. vzctl set VPS_ID -ipadd 1.2.3.4 -save : To add a new IP to the hosting VPS.
3. vzctl set VPS_ID -ipdel 1.2.3.4 -save : To delete the IP from VPS.
4. vzctl set VPS_ID -userpasswd root:new_password -save : to reset root password of a VPS.
5. vzctl set VPS_ID -nameserver 1.2.3.4 -save : To add the nameserver IP’s to the VPS.
6. vzctl exec VPS_ID command : To run any command on a VPS from Node.
7. vzyum VPS_ID install package_name : To install any package/Software on a VPS from Node.

*Here VPS_ID refers to the ID of the Particular VPS.

Robin Dale is the publisher of Teeky.org, we offer useful & quality articles and news about Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing, OpenVZ, Virtuozzo, Dedicated Server Hosting, Windows VPS Hosting, Linux VPS Hosting UK, e-commerce hosting, cPanel Hosting, hosting tips & UK Web Hosting. For More Articles, Visit Us @ VPS Hosting UK

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robin_Dale http://EzineArticles.com/?OpenVZ-Explained&id=2485663

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OpenVZ Explained

If you’re been following this blog, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of ServInt and with their latest announcement today, you’ll soon see why! Once again (on an auspicious date), they’ve announced another round of updates. For example, the Essential VPS has RAM up to 758MB doubled space from 15GB to 30GB and bandwidth from 500GB to 1TB.

That’s an astonishing feat of doubling the capacity each of their awesome VPSes can handle. So its not just being able to fit more in, but with the extra bandwidth and RAM, it’ll be able to handle the load.

And not just that, they’ve also announced their “Dedicated Server Replacement” campaign to prove their new VPS range has better resource than many dedicated server configurations offered by their competitors.

Read my earlier post on my experience with ServInt and why I think they’re the best VPS host I’ve ever worked with.

Watch this space for a discount coupon coming real soon so you can experience what my hype is all about!

» Click here to experience the ServInt.com VPS

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No Joke Upgrade At ServInt

Always take your time to choose a good host. Once you have a number of sites and email accounts running on one, its really not that simple to migrate as you have to coordinate many issues such as database and scripting language versions, email configurations and that dreaded period in between DNS propagation…

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Tips For A Happy Hosting Experience