Archives for July 2006

Sex sells web hosting?

July 31, 2006 By Christoph Puetz Leave a Comment

Sex sells web hosting?

How much does normal web hosting have to do with sex? Sure, you can point out all those adult related websites, but in this case I am referring to web hosting companies using sex appeal to sell products. You might think I am referring to a nice looking lady on a web hosting website holding a phone or typing on a laptop. Wrong! Look at the attached screenshot.

Does this kind of picture really animates people to try the server genie for pricing options? How about female customers? Would they feel attracted by a website appearance like this at all? Is this web host doing himself a favor by favoring a sex-related appearance to gain customers? How much credibility does this give a business?

From my external point of view I do not feel that this web page is very appealing? It does not motivate me to even try the price generator that is the main feature on the page. Don’t get me wrong – I do like a nice looking lady on a website, but a) this genie is just not my type 😉 and b) this kind of advertising does not fill me with confidence in getting reliable web hosting from this provider. I want the web host to concentrate on the servers in the data center. I want the web host concentrate on server performance and uptime. I do not want the web host to think about the hot babe on his website that gets some lonely guy drool while he tries the price offer generator on the website. Sex can sell, but I think there are better ways than this specific offer.

Reseller Hosting – Httpme.com

July 30, 2006 By Christoph Puetz Leave a Comment

Reseller Hosting – Httpme.com

Many web hosting businesses start out with a reseller account and then move up to more dedicated equipment as the business grows. It is a very affordable way to get started in web hosting without making a huge investment into own hardware or loading up on a big monthly expense by leasing a dedicated server.

We here at the Web Hosting Resource Kit use a combination of leased hardware and reseller accounts for our different ventures. As a long time customer of HTTPME.com we feel we have a very good insight into the quality service that HTTPME.com provides. Here is a review of our own experience.

We are using HTTPME.com services since 2003. We were there when Aussie Bob sold the business to Voxtreme.com, we pretty much left with Voxtreme.com losing its grip on quality, and we came back when Steven of Insiderhosting.com bought HTTPME.com from Voxtreme. So, we have seen the up and downs at HTTPME.com first hand. The "new" team over there is fanatical about support and the features provided with each account become more and more. Almost anything a reseller can dream of to get from his reseller host – HTTPME.com covers it. RVSkin, RAID, CPanel with Fantastico, and external backups are just a few highlights provided by Steven and his team.

Quote:

Our servers are state of the art 2U Intel Dual XEON 2.6GHz, 2x512KB cache, 2.0GB ECC RAM, 3 x 120GB SATA Hard Drives with Hardware Raid 1 for hard drive redundancy, Hardened Secure Kernel and Redundant Power Supply Units. End Quote

We loaded some very demanding scripts onto our own reseller account and those servers have yet to show any issues with that. Performance has always been great and uptime is excellent, too. So, the promises made on the HTTPME.com website are not empty words. Speaking of support: The support over at HTTPME is outstanding. We average about 1-2 tickets a month and our experience has been extremely satisfying. One minor ticket slipped through the cracks once (we had to wait for a dedicated IP address for a site and none were available), but the moment we reminded them about this still open "low priority" ticket, support jumped at it, apologized and fixed it. Usually all our tickets were taken care of (solved!!!!) within 30 minutes at the latest.

Network connectivity is awesome. Steven recently added another top tier provider to the already impressive list of quality providers. It is not a surprise that HTTPME.com is used by so many folks from around the globe. The connectivity to any place on this planet is outstanding.

Prices. HTTPME is not the cheapest provider of reseller hosting accounts out there. But over the years we can confirm that in web hosting you often get what you pay for. For anyone serious about their website or business, should think twice before going with a $15 reseller account and what kind of support and value they hope to get out of it. At HTTPME.com the higher prices are fully justified and worth it. We could not sleep at night if it would not be for HTTPME.com keeping those servers running.

Last but not least the forums community at HTTPME.com is awesome. It has slowed down a little bit over the years, but the core group of people populating the boards is awesome. No matter if in need of personal support or when having a technical question – the community steps forward and helps.

So, if in the market for a web hosting reseller account or a multi-domain account, HTTPME.com is always our first choice.

http://www.httpme.com

Please not that we are not affiliated with HTTPME.com and that our review is based on our own experience.

Dedicated Servers – Softlayer.com

July 29, 2006 By Christoph Puetz Leave a Comment

Dedicated Servers – Softlayer.com

A fairly new player on the market is Softlayer.com. Apparently mainly staffed by former ThePlanet.com personnel, Softlayer is currently one the most recommended providers when it comes to reasonably priced dedicated servers with high quality data center support. We evaluated Softlayer.com this week – piggy bagging on a friend getting a dedicated server from Softlayer.

Sales inquiries via email and phone were handled fast and satisfying. We received all necessary information we asked for. An email asking about any existing specials was replied within 30 minutes (week day). The Softlayer website is clearly structured and the main products are highly visible. Important pieces of information like hardware, network, and more are easy accessible from the homepage without having to search for the links. With one click a customer can get detailed network information + has access to 2 test files to test network download speeds. Softlayer concentrates a lot on customer service by providing large toolsets for clients to manage their servers and services.

Softlayer Information

• Intel & AMD Dual Core Servers
• Private Network – Cross Connects
• IDS / IPS / DDOS Protection
• Windows / Redhat / CentOS / BSD
• cPanel & Plesk Control Panels
• Remote Reboot and Console
• PPTP & SSL VPN Gateways
• Internap / Savvis / Verio / Abovenet

Softlayer offers support via helpdesk software, phone, Flash Tutorials, a knowledge base, a large FAQ section, as well as their staff is available for hire for a reasonable $75.00 per hour if extra server help is needed.

Prices are very competitive. We have our main hardware with ThePlanet and when trying to configure comparable servers, Softlayer beat ThePlanet easily. Both companies let you configure servers on their website and that makes it pretty easy to see what services and features are available at what price. We were actually very surprised to see that ThePlanet is becoming so expensive.

Looking at forums like Webhostingtalk.com – Softlayer has built a very good reputation within the short time they are in business. They seem to be one of the major players in the market when it comes to dedicated servers. As mentioned above – we are able to see how Softlayer is doing as a friend has got a server with them.

Softlayer.com
Toll Free: 1-866-398-7638
Local: 1-214-442-0602

Please note: This review is NOT sponsored by Softlayer Technologies nor are necessary endorsing their products or services. This brief review is based on our own experience, reports from friends, as well as by monitoring forums.

Update (January 1, 2008): We have worked more with a competitor of Softlayer and have experienced great service and awesome uptime with LiquidWeb. If you are in the market for a new dedicated server, make sure to check out the current server specials at Liquidweb.

ServerMatrix / ThePlanet Support – Two Thumbs Up

July 22, 2006 By Christoph Puetz Leave a Comment

ServerMatrix / ThePlanet Support – Two Thumbs Up

This week my websites on one server suddenly became unavailable after a bad update from Red hat/CPanel had BIND fail to start properly. BIND is the DNS server piece of the server that allows for name resolution of the sites located on this server. Shortly after 1 AM on Friday morning the affected web server stopped working. My monitoring did not pick up the service failure. Well, it picked it up, but the email did not reach me as it went to my Gmail account and I usually do not check that at 1.00 AM in the morning. So, I need to revisit my monitoring and work out something else.

Anyway – when I realized that something was wrong I checked the server via SSH, ping, and ran a trace, too. I could not connect. I logged onto to my support portal at ThePlanet.com and submitted a ticket to see if there were any hardware problems. Once the ticket was submitted I then tried to connect to the server via IP address (actually by accident) and that worked. I logged into WHM (Web Host Manager) and checked the service status. Once I saw the DNS service down, I tried to restart it, but that failed. When those things happen the first thing I do is to check the CPanel.net forums for issues. If I experience a not-normal problem, chances are pretty high that somebody else has run into this problem before. And I did not even have to search very hard to find an existing thread talking about the about the problem. Before I was able to implement the solution I found at CPanel.net, my email started working. ThePlanet support staff had already fixed the problem – within less than 10 minutes after the ticket was submitted. I still logged into the server to check if they did what I would have done and indeed that was the case.

I am renting hardware at ThePlanet/ServerMatrix for over 2 years now and except for one case support requests have been taken care of fast and issues were solved to my full satisfaction. This last incident confirmed my good feeling that I have about ThePlanet/ServerMatrix. In my opinion these guys rock.

Apache HTTP Web server configuration Tutorial

July 11, 2006 By Christoph Puetz Leave a Comment

Quick Apache HTTP Web Server Configuration Tutorial

This Linux tutorial is for the Apache HTTP web server (Version 1.3 and 2.0). Web pages are served from the directory as configured by the DocumentRoot directive. The default directory location is:

    * Red Hat 7.x-9, Fedora Core: /var/www/html/
    * Red Hat 6.x and older: /home/httpd/html/
    * Suse 9.x: /srv/www/htdocs/

The default home page for the default configuration is index.html. Note the pages should not be owned by user apache as this is the process owner of the httpd web server daemon. If the web server process is comprimised, it should not be allowed to alter the files. The files should of course be readable by user apache.

Apache may be configured to run as a host for one web site in this fashion or it may be configured to serve for multiple domains. Serving for multiple domains may be achieved in two ways:

* Virtual hosts: One IP address but multiple domains – "Name based" virtual hosting.
* Multiple IP based virtual hosts: One IP address for each domain – "IP based" virtual hosting.

The default configuration will allow one to have multiple user accounts under one domain by using a reference to the user account: http://www.domain.com/~user1/. If no domain is registered or configured, the IP address may also be used: http://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/~user1/.

The user directory generated by default using the useradd user1 command will set protections too tight for use with Apache. You must use: chmod 711 /home/user1. The default for directory creation is correct by default but if not use: chmod 755 /home/user1/public_html

When creating new "Directory" configuration directives, I found that placing them by the existing "Directory" directives to be a bad idea. It would not use the .htaccess file. This was because the statement defining the use of the .htaccess file was after the "Directory" statement. Previously in RH 6.x the files were separated and the order was defined a little different. I now place new "Directory" statements near the end of the file just before the "VirtualHost" statements.

For users of Red Hat 7.1, the GUI configuration tool apacheconf was introduced for the crowd who like to use pretty point and click tools.

Files used by Apache:

    * /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd – Start/stop/restart script
      (Note: Debian uses the directory: /etc/init.d/httpd)
    * /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf – Configuration file
    * /var/log/httpd/access_log and error_log – Red Hat/Fedora Core Apache log files
      (Suse: /var/log/apache2/)

Start/Stop/Restart scripts: The script is to be run with the qualifiers start, stop, restart or status.
i.e. /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart. A restart allows the web server to start again and read the configuration files to pick up any changes. To have this script invoked upon system boot issue the command chkconfig –add httpd. See Init Process Tutorial for a more complete discussion.

Also Apache control tool: /usr/sbin/apachectl start

Apache Configuration File: The file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf is used to configure Apache. In the past it was broken down into three files. These may now be all concatenated into one file. See Apache online documentation for the full manual.