Threats to Online Businesses are not new in today’s widely spread internet world. To achieve highest security for an online business SSL Certificate plays an important role. The term ‘SSL’ is basically related with website hosting services. It’s expected from Webmaster to think and implement the security systems in a smarter way. The websites with SSL certificates are the most trusted websites on the internet, the simplest way to identify such websites is the starting of URL as ‘https://’ where as you will find other normal websites starting with ‘http://’. SSL certificate is a Digital certificate assigned to a website which approves the identity of a Website as a secured website. When a website deals with online transaction involved with money the people are very conscious about its reliability and how secure it is to make payment thorough those websites. The specialty of SSL opted websites is that every information is encrypted for security purpose before it passes thorough networks, to avoid an the leakage of sensitive information. So if one is dealing through an SSL secured website then he can be sure that the information he is providing through it will remain fully confidential and secure.
Following are is some of the information that is contained in the SSL Certificate
- Name of the owner of the SSL Certificate
- Serial Number and the Expiry date of the Certificate
- Copy of the certificate owners public key
- Digital Signature of the Certificate issuing authority
We saw ‘What Is WAMP And WAMPServer’ in the last post, here we are going to learn about ‘LAMP’ which is nothing but a substitute to WAMP when one has hosted his website on ‘Linux Hosting Server’. LAMP consists of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python, where Linux is an operating system, Apache is a Web Server, MySQL fulfills database requirements and PHP/Perl/Python work as scripting languages. The idea of LAMP was originally invented in 1999 by ‘Michael Kunze’ in a German magazine, though the four elements were not approached to work together but in the later period these open source applications were made available for free of cost and as a bunch called as ‘LAMP stack’. Because of having the ability to make a strong web application platform, LAMP gained the popularity in very early stage in such a way that in today’s market LAMP services are available as by default with almost all the website hosting services providers.
There are multiple security options available while using LAMP, you can configure Apache and PHP to remain hidden so that your information would not be leaked by any possible hacking attacks. You can find more about LAMP security at :- Is Your ‘LAMP’ Secure Enough?. LAMP tools are easily available with the features of easy configuration and being very robust. Being as an open-source application, LAMP is supported by the larger community, which constantly adds features and development to meet the requirements of it’s users. For deployment, configuration and maintenance of LAMP, one needs to spend very little effort and time, furthermore you don’t need any type of administrative details for it.
As Security is one of the most important concerns in the internet world for webmasters, they should always keep their security system arrangements up to the mark, because hackers are always searching for new possible techniques to control your website and misuse it for their motive. Security measures can be classified in many categories, but a securing a website should cover security of web application as well as security of the web hosting server on which the web applications and website are hosted. Here I would like the share the information over security options on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) as it is the most widely found combination among Linux Hosting Servers.
Instances in which a Web Hosting Server responds to the web browsers which are used by the visitors of the particular website residing on that particular website, that server provides a particular ‘header information’. Apache web servers are known for publishing many details of its environment as well as sometimes PHP also can be found responding in such header parts. Hackers may take advantage of this exposure in such headers of you website. Furthermore if he succeeds in knowing the factors like the type of web hosting services, type of server used, the web hosting platform, the version of scripting engine and other applications then it becomes an easy task for hackers to trace specific bugs or security loopholes. This makes the task easy for hackers to achieve their motives.
But still one can configure both Apache and PHP in such a way that it will remain hidden and will keep the possible attackers in the dark.
In previous posts we saw Cursor Movement commands, Text Modification commands, and commands used in Input Mode. In this post I would like to share the last line mode commands used in a VIM editor.
So following are the last line commands of VIM editor.
w - this command is used to save the file with the same name when you opened it to edit it.
w filename - This command works as same as we use ’save as’ with windows applications, which allows you to save the new copy of a file with your desired name. The substitute command to ‘w filename’ is ’sav filename’, the same task of saving a copy of file with other name can be achieved by using ’sav filename’ command.
n.m w filename - this command is used for saving the content of line number ‘n’ to ‘m’ to the given file name. If you want to refer to the last line number (whatever it may be) then you should use ‘$’ instead of ‘m’.
e filename - This command is used to edit another file than the current one. It’s handy for toggling among the multiple files when used with the following ‘e#’ command.
e# - After using ‘e filename’ when you want to come back to previous file then you should use ‘e#’ command.
e! - This command is used to discard the changes made to a file.
r filename – This command reads the contents from a file and inserts it below the current line.
So these were last line VIM commands used to operate a Linux hosting server.
Forgetting passwords is one of the most common incidents when one works with a lot of computer devices and web hosting servers. Not remembering the password and being unable to access the computer or server is very frustrating. But fortunately you can reset the forgotten passwords on both Linux Hosting and Windows Web Hosting accounts. Here I would like to share the process of resetting the root password on a Linux Hosting account.
- You can reset your password by rebooting a system in single user mode.
- After booting your server, you can face GRUB boot loader where you should select kernel by using arrow key, because from it you can boot the system.
- Press the key ‘e’ to enter in to edit mode for editing a entry.
- Choose the second line starting with the word kernel, and again press the key ‘e’ to append to the ‘single user mode’.
- To the end of line insert a space and type ’s’ and hit ‘Enter’ button.
- Now press ‘b’ for booting the system kernel in single user mode.
- You will come to shell prompt where you need to type ‘passwd’ command to reset the password.
- Enter your new password and hit the ‘Enter’ key.
That’s it. Here you have successfully reset your password. Now you can reboot the system for normal use.
VDI is a short form of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, which is a technology developed as a utility for managing web hosting services within a data center. This technology basically designed for providing better manageable environment with desktop, better security, supervision with easy operation of help-desk. Almost all of know about the widely used virtualization technology which provided the cheap vps hosting as a more reliable and cost effective web hosting service option for webmasters. Similarly Virtualization also provided benefits to web hosting services providers by saving lot of things terms of energy, electricity, space (rack-space) and better manageable web servers. VDI is a technology which is also related to Virtualization and it allows a user to have full control to end users of desktops, applications and data which is accessed directly from data center but still it can be experienced like their own personal desktop.
For a webmaster it is very essential task to keep desktop systems updated with the latest required versions of softwares and applications, drivers, security systems and other required stuff. Without using a VDI this all is done by creating images manually which contains operating system, applications, drivers, security arrangements and other critical stuff making it very much time consuming. If any mistake happens while creating these images one can face a lot of errors while deploying them, which will waste more time, efforts and also money. But with the use of VDI image creation and management can be done in more improvised and predefined manner, because you need not to create the image manually.
VDA also allows any legacy hardware of external devices to accessed and used without any interruption. Security provided with VDA is up to the mark as with VDA integration your desktop data get the protection of firewalls. Speedy deployment of applications with better management, time and cost cutting, end user satisfaction with the minimum possible errors are the main features a data center can get by adopting Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
Apache Servers are one of the most important web server softwares of Linux hosting services and generally it has no demands from the webmasters opting for Windows Web Hosting services. A patch can be defined as a small application or a program of software designed for fixing the existing problems or drawbacks with it’s current version. This fixing can be in terms of vulnerabilities, bugs, inabilities and uncompetitiveness compared to other similar competing softwares. In short the patch is the difference between the previous version and upgraded version of a software. Similarly Apache patches are designed to improve the performance of Apache within different areas. Official Patches released by Apache can be treated as upgraded versions of Apache. If one has the Apache source product installed then the patches will be installed or updated automatically, otherwise the files will be there in the actual patch and one can find them under any of the ‘reloc’ directories. Being an open source a person can develop a patch as per his requirements and can also share it with others. But though the patches are developed with the purpose of fixing problems and bugs, a wrongly developed patch can affect inversely with the performance of Apache. Few of the developers also have provided the patch management softwares in the market to manage the patches with the ease. Even few of such softwares can update multiple computers at the same time withing multiple networks.
The range of these patches is very wide and one can choose from the basic home editions to ones which can mange high number of commercial computers networks. The choice is available according to the webmaster’s needs to make their web hosting services more suitable for their website.. Patches related to improvising security features are supposed to be most popular patches among webmasters.
Note : The official patches downloads are available at - http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi
RAID is an important feature of Web Hosting Services which is provided as main feature with Dedicated Server Hosting services. and it comes with various levels, a web hosting client can choose it as per his requirements.
- RAID-0: This RAID technique has striping but lack of data redundancy and that’s why it can only provide the good performance without fault-tolerance.
- RAID-1: This is based on Disk mirroring and includes minimum two drives which duplicates the data stored. Without any striping read performance is improved. It provides best performances for multiple users with fault-tolerance feature.
- RAID-2: Striping exists here across multiple disks with error checking and correcting (ECC) information.
- RAID-3: One drive is used for striping and storing parity information. Error checking and correcting (ECC) information features is used for detection errors. After calculating the exclusive OR (XOR) of data stored on the other driver, data recovery can be achieved. The drawback with RAID-3 is it can not overlap I/O because I/O operations address all drive at the same time. RAID-3 is recommended for single user systems which have long record applications.
- RAID-4: It is targeted towards the large stripes, so that webmasters can read records from any single drive, which provides the benefit of overlapped I/O for reading operations only, for write operations no I/O overlapping advantage because all writing operations need to update the parity drive.
- RAID-5: This level of RAID is based on rotation of parity array. Drawback of no write operation with overlapped I/O in RAID-4 is removed in this level. Unlike RAID-4 both read and write operations can be overlapped with RAID-5. It stores parity information but lacks data redundancy, despite this absence of data redundancy its possible to reconstruct data by using parity information. Minimum three disks are required for array in RAID-5. For the multi-user systems which perform less critical and limited write operations, RAID-5 is recommended.
Still there are many levels of RAID which will be shared in next post.
Colocations services are introduced with the purpose of providing the facility of relocation of all the hardware and networking components to a most reliable place called as Data center. By opting for colocations services webmasters can get rid from the critical arrangements of cooling systems and maintenance of the network required to keep servers in best performing conditions.
Following are few features of colocation services which I would like to shared in this post.
Rack-space
Is your server placed at the the place feels like a store room? such kind of places are always filled with dust and nets, and wiring connections just become a nightmare to handle. After opting for colocation services your servers and other hardware components are placed in specific racks which are specially designed for it’s placements.
Data Center Facilities and Ultimate Cooling Systems
Many of you may know the ‘Data Center, a place build by web hosting services providers, specially for maintaining servers, that the reason why colocation services are also known as Data Center Services. These data center are built keeping the facilities like manageable cooling systems, backup generators, surveillance security systems and other types of physical security.
Higher Scalability And Stability
Webmasters who run their websites on Dedicated Servers are the people for whom colocation services are very beneficial. Internet connection speed is one of the most important factor, so far performance of a web server is concerned. Bandwidth is another important factor which tends to get increased as the days pass and your business grows. A web hosting services providers are professional companies with the super-fast Internet speed attained by using ‘fiber optic cables’ and this enhances the stability and scalability of your colocated web server.
Maintenance Cost Cutting
As its basic industrial concept that any product produced on commercial basis, lowers the production cost for it, similarly maintaining the all infrastructure and cooling system for a single server is very costlier. Colocation services in a Data centers are provided on commercial basis to multiple clients and the cost of infrastructure and cooling systems are shared by all of them which makes it affordable for all.
Note: - For colocation services provided by Host.co.in you just need to pay for bandwidth required, cooling and rent of rack-space your servers occupies.
The .htaccess stands for ‘Hypertext Access this file used for configuring a web hosting server and to control its activities. This file plays an important role in security and performance of the websites residing on that particular server. It is popular among webmasters for keeping control on their websites.
There are multiple ways to configure .htaccess file, in this post you can see following two important factors of .htaccess file.
.htaccess
Authentication and Authorization.
The .htaccess file controls and provides, authenticationa and authorization for the visitores of your website, it also has to ability to restrict certain pages of your websites from getting views by particular visitors. This is a great utility to get rid of spam-bots, spam mails, form submissions and uwanted comments. Through .htaccess file a webmaster can block any particular domain name of IP address from which is facing spammy visits. This was all about blocking the access and further more a webmasters can also set specific permitted access by setting password (.htpasswd file) for his websites, so that authorised people can only enter in to protected webpages which may contain sensitive data, of his websites. This uritlity is very useful for a blog or a collaborated website where multiple people are responsible for updating them.
