How Important to Back up you Hosting Files?

How Important to Back up you Hosting Files?

How Important to Back up you Hosting Files?

How important to back up you hosting files depends on your preferences for a good web hosting provider. Many hosting companies would include website backups as part of their server package. They also sometimes do free backup or a minimal backup fee, but it is still much important for you to have your own backups, as well.

backupFirst, you have to backup your hosting files because you have to expect inevitable events. Your service provider could experience technical difficulties or a server crash that could wipeout your data temporarily or permanently. Although this is rare in most cases, it does happen in reality. When you read hosting reviews, take note of the details concerning the provider’s redundant power sources, backup generators and data center.

Your web hosting firm remotely monitors all website status on their server. If they noticed that your website is dysfunctional due to any kind of hardware error or system crash, they will take action immediately toward recovery. In most cases, if disaster strikes, your remote storage provider will restore your site to reduce downtime and prevent loss of contents and revenue. Hence, it is really a great option backing up your website data.

Second, it is not just the web hosting company that can run into trouble. Your own computer might get stolen, suffer damages or experience a crash. No matter how good your web service provider is, there are cyber crooks (for example, hackers) who might actually break in and wreak great havoc on your website. If you do not save your contents elsewhere, you may lose huge quantities of data. Hence, you have to back-up data on your computer, external hard drive, DVD or subscribe to other online backup service providers.

When you use other online backup storage programs/systems, you would be able to save copies of your web-based data. Your backed up information would typically include web contents such as access logs, images, plug-in scripts and databases. So, how important to back up you hosting files depend, on a large part, if you consider using other backup systems as well.

Third, you may want to read your service provider’s review details when it does regular backups of your website contents. Is there up-to-the-minute scheduled backups? Or, are backups done daily, weekly, monthly, or only when the company is available? By having regular backup schedules, you ensure the security of all your information and that your web pages are made continuously available to your visitors and customers.

Backing up your website is a great solution for restoring any tampered or damaged web page contents quickly. It is thus important to also easily access your backup files whether they are stored by your service provider, on in an external drive located in other remote servers. While there is no assurance how long your web service firm will be in existence, most storage media can last for many years when handled with care and stored properly.

Start with website hosting reviews for you to see what your service provider’s offer. Most reputable web hosting companies guarantee data security at their best. So, how important to back up you hosting files is for quick restoration of all your data in case they were corrupted or lost accidentally.

{ 0 comments }

Free Hosting Vs Paid Hosting

Free Hosting Vs Paid Hosting

Free Hosting Vs Paid Hosting

It’s a matter of common sense that paid services have no comparison with free services. Web hosting is no exception, but we will elaborate the difference between two in a more logical manner. Free hosting is not a total rejection. It is good for immature, non-professional and websites with less bandwidth requirements. When it comes to business or high profile hosting, free hosting losses its scope. Such entities require a truly top quality, reliable and supportive system of hosting without any pitfalls. There are certain technical aspects which segregates these both categories of hosting in much more finer way. We are going those aspects in detail to give good account of the two practices.

Space Makes Pacefree hosting vs paid hosting

The first component of any hosting arrangement is the allocation of space. It largely depends on the nature of business and turnover of visitors. No compromise on basic space requirement is recommended for bringing value and stimulating sales. Most precise evaluation and generous allocation of space is the only way-out to add real race to your website. This is only possible with paid hosting. You cannot have many choices with free hosting. Those follow already formulated packages which cannot be optimized and customized. Paid hosting gives freedom and fosters the pace of business. Space is a vital difference between free web site hosting and paid hosting.

Data Transfer

Data transfer speed is the second most critical and challenging part in web hosting. It’s a matter of serious consideration for the people who seek paid web site hoisting. No one likes to visit the site that gives slow response and consumes a lot of time in processing requests. Instant connectivity is the need of hour. It’s the bandwidth offered by web host that defines the speed of data transmission. Free hosting companies do not offer much freedom in assigning bandwidth; they try to keep it to minimum level for a site to be operative. A good quality website requires, minimum of 5 to 10 GB bandwidth which is only possible in the case of paid web hosting.

Technical Support

Like all other forms of support, technical support plays critical role in making any web site hosting company successful. Web hosting companies hire dedicated and dynamic support team to handle the challenging and round the clock needs of their customers. It is a matter of high-cost and it can only be expected from paid web hosting. Free web site hosting seldom offer any support and they likewise those who avail such hosting have minimal need of back up support as well.

Email Services

Web hosting is a very long-term venture and visionary people foresee their future needs at the time of choosing any web host. Paid hosting companies allow maximum e mail accounts to their customers for the smooth operations of affair. Free web hosting has to follow the set patterns and they offer few e mail accounts by keeping in view the package offered.

Credibility Counts

Free web hosting companies have no concern for their credibility as they are offering complimentary services to anyone. Free web hosting is not bound to obey any moral or social ethics as they are not earning any revenue from their customers directly. On the other hand, Paid web hosting is very much concerned about their reputation and they try their level best to offer unforgettable experience to their clients and visitors.

{ 0 comments }

NginX: Load Balancing, Failover, and Geo Location (Part 3)

NginX: Load Balancing, Failover, and Geo Location (Part 3)

Okay we continue to the third part of this post title, on the previous part we use NginX as load balancer and failover, now we use NginX with Geo IP based to determine the best backend for the visitors to put, here is the illustration.

For instance, we have two backend servers located in UK and DE, then we put the visitors from United Kingdom to the UK backend, visitors from Germany to DE backend, and the rest will be divided into those two backend servers, let’s deal with it.

I assume you have installed NginX in your frontend and two backend servers, you can check the previous post for NginX installation. This GeoIP based location needs GeoIP database for the frontend server to determine where to put the visitor, so first we download and extract Lite version of GeoIP database from Maxmind with geo2nginx.pl script from http://markmaunder.com.

wget https://serversreview.net/pkgs/txt/geo2nginx.pl
chmod 755 geo2nginx.pl
wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoIPCountryCSV.zip
unzip GeoIPCountryCSV.zip
./geo2nginx.pl < GeoIPCountryWhois.csv > geo.conf
mv geo.conf /etc/nginx/

GeoIP database has been added to NginX directory, now to the configuration, here is the example of main configuration

(more…)

{ 0 comments }

NginX: Load Balancing, Failover, and Geo Location (Part 2)

NginX: Load Balancing, Failover, and Geo Location (Part 2)

On the previous post we were talking about simple dns failover using two nameservers / ip addresses, now we will move the conversation to the more exciting one, we will use frontend server to control the backend servers, here is the illustration.

One frontend server decides whether to put the visitor to the server A or server B, here i am using NginX as frontend and also NginX as backend server.

Why don’t you use another web server as the backend?

I like NginX, for me it is easy to understand NginX configuration than another web server. Before we start to configure it, install NginX on the frontend and backend servers. I’m using CentOS 5 by the way.

wget http://pkgs.serversreview.net/files/nginx-1.1.13.tar.gz
tar -zxvf nginx-1.1.13.tar.gz
cd nginx-1.1.13
useradd www
passwd www
./configure --prefix=/usr --sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx --conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf --error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log --pid-path=/var/run/nginx/nginx.pid --lock-path=/var/lock/nginx.lock --http-log-path=/var/log/nginx/access.log --http-client-body-temp-path=/var/tmp/nginx/client/ --http-proxy-temp-path=/var/tmp/nginx/proxy/ --http-fastcgi-temp-path=/var/tmp/nginx/fcgi/  --user=www --group=www --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_flv_module --with-http_mp4_module --with-http_gzip_static_module --with-http_realip_module --with-http_addition_module --with-http_xslt_module --with-http_image_filter_module --with-http_geoip_module --with-http_sub_module --with-http_dav_module --with-http_flv_module --with-http_random_index_module --with-http_secure_link_module --with-http_degradation_module --with-http_stub_status_module --with-http_perl_module --with-mail --with-file-aio --with-mail_ssl_module --with-ipv6
make
make install

in the configurations above, as usual i am using “www” user and group for NginX. Next download NginX init script and make it executable.

(more…)

{ 0 comments }

NginX: Load Balancing, Failover, and Geo Location (Part 1)

NginX: Load Balancing, Failover, and Geo Location (Part 1)

Yeah guys, let’s talk about this post title, really it is interesting, i mean for me this is very interesting :p. If you have a site, and then something happen to your server’s network, and unfortunately your site does not have backup or mirror site which is very essential because your site is your income. So the first thing you need to do is this, do not put your site in shared / reseller hosting. Why? Because in shared hosting, your site is not alone, there are so much neighbor in it, and your site could be exploited from those neighbor, for instance bug in script. Another thing is you cannot get root access from shared hosting, your creativity is limited by non-ssh regular user assigned to your account. So take a look at LowEndBox and get a vps for your shared hosting substitution.

Nuff said for the appetizer, let’s get to the main course. The simplest failover method for website is round robin dns, the illustration would be like this:

where the server has been assigned with two or more ip addresses, so if end user fail to access the server with the first ip address, it will be routed to the second ip address. To use that settings, you simply

(more…)

{ 0 comments }

What is Jailed SSH?

What is Jailed SSH?

Most of shared / reseller hosting providers that use cPanel as their control panel must have this order in their cPanel structure.

Example one Server with one IP address using cPanel

cPanel root / super user -> master reseller -> reseller -> shared

further down that many users / domains would use the ip

Example 1

also cPanel shared hosting usually creates user directory under /home directory, so normally it will be hundreds of user directory right? but the screenshot says different, there is only one user directory

Example 2

and when I up to directory above /home, there is no root directory

Example 3

It is a little bit odd right? Yes and so it is called jailed SSH.

Basically, jailed ssh creates a shell scene within a particular directory where your shell activities locked in there. This intended to locked you into that directory instead of you being able to go freely to any other directories, something like ftp server does restrict you to your home directory. Also system administrator or host can decide or restrict what command or program can run in the jailed shell scene, usually they are disabling super user commands, so only basic shell command allowed to run in the jailed ssh.

{ 0 comments }