Monthly Archives: April 2010

This week in VPS.NET

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As Ditlev struggles to cope with his baby growing up, and Nick recovers from the  Dibi Conference (or should I really say his night out with new client, WooThemes.com), I give you the VPS.NET edition of as the world turns.

We're proud to announce that FreeBSD is now available for use with your VPS.NET account. It is currently in beta, however the BSD users out there should certainly appreciate this. I've been a Linux user my entire life on the web, but lately I've been getting the itch to dig into the BSD world. I'll be spending this weekend playing around with it. For those of you who wish to join me, it's available in the Chicago Cloud A location.

We've also launched a new 'report to manager' feature inside each support ticket. If you've experienced extraordinary service (as you should), click the smilie face. We'll give that technician a pat on the back. If for some reason you feel the service wasn't up to the VPS.NET standard, click the frown, and the VPS.NET management team will be immediately notified via a message to each of our Blackberries. This is a critical feature in the maturation of VPS.NET, as it's very important we find out where any service is lacking. I can promise you -- not just because I really dislike being awoken by my Blackberry -- that any issue where the service wasn't up to par will be immediately dealt with. 100% client satisfaction is of the utmost importance at VPS.NET.

As I eluded to earlier VPS.NET Managing Director, Nick Nelson, spent much of the week at the Dibi conference. A client even caught him doing his best European style pose, as you can see here. To go along with conference talk, Ditlev, Nick and myself will be attending HostingCon in July. For any of our web hosts out there, I'd highly recommend checking it out. Ditlev and Nick have both attended for several years in a row now, and always have a good time (both for business and fun!).

As a marketing major (graduate in 1 month!), I wander the web reading the various articles posted on marketing. I saw a terrific post the other day by Six Revisions on "Why Branding Yourself is Important." I think it's relevant to all of us, even if we're not a web host, designer or programmer. Your personal brand determines how people view you, and to experience any sort of success in life requires that you have a good brand.

It is an amazing 85 degrees here in Cleveland, Ohio though. It's time to head outside and play some basketball, especially after my Cleveland Cavaliers advanced in the NBA playoffs over the Chicago Bulls! It's time to bring a championship to Cleveland!

Addon Services Available

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One of the great things at VPS.NET (At least I think so) is the number of addon services that are available to you. Whether it be control panels, software, hardware, and so on, we've tried to bring you a number of different options so you're able to configure a setup that works for your needs and caters to your business. And as we grow, we're continuously adding new services to keep up with the demands of our clients. Because of this, there may be a lot of people out there who may be unaware of some new cool services we've added.

Control Panels

cPanel - cPanel is likely the most recognizable control panel available on the market today. cPanel provides a front end interface to manage your websites files, email address, mysql databases, and many other tasks. Along with the client side management, cPanel also comes with the WHM (Web Hosting Manager) interface, which provides an interface to for server administrators and resellers to perform many different tasks, such as setting up new websites, updating Apache,  and other server-side software. Each cPanel license is $10 per month.

ISPManager - ISPManager is a low resource consuming control panel software with a multi-level user system. It provides a graphical interface for server administrators, resellers and individual clients. Like cPanel, you have the ability to administrate certain functions of the web server, and each individual website. ISPManager licenses are available free at VPS.NET.

DirectAdmin - DirectAdmin provides a GUI for managing both your server and your website, while consuming minimal resources. DirectAdmin provides access for administrators, resellers, and individual users. DirectAdmin is $10 a month.

Server Administration

Pro-active, Fully Managed Administration - We realize not everyone wants to worry about their server - they want to worry about their website. We offer a fully managed hosting solution where we'll handle the migration of your website to VPS.NET, the initial VPS server setup, and then monthly security overhauls to make sure everything is running properly. With this, we also offer a 100% SLA. This solution is available for $99 a month with a $45 setup fee.

On Demand Server Administration - In addition to the fully managed solution, we have on demand administration that you're able to use when you run into a problem. On demand administration is good for kernel upgrades, PHP/Perl Installation and Configuration, Control Panel Installation and Configuration, Backup/Migration Assistance, Software Installation or Web Server Assistance. On Demand tickets are $10 each and last for 24 hours.

Server Monitoring

Server Density - Server Density is an addon tool that allows you to easily monitor your server for abnormalities through your email and/or your iPhone. Inside of Server Density you're able to track CPU Load, Memory Utilization, processes, disk usage, network traffic, and apache & nginx status. Server Density is available for $7.50 a month.

DotDefender - DotDefender is a software that monitors and logs your servers traffic, detecting any suspicious traffic activity. DotDefender is capable of running a website specific rule set, limiting the number of false intrusion detection attempts. DotDefender licenses are available for $15 a month.

Backups

Snapshot Backups - Snapshot backups are easy and effective. Using snapshot backups, VPS.NET will take a"snapshot" of your VPS node once a day, every day, and at the end of the month will retain one daily,  one weekly, one monthly and then a day of your choice for backup. When restoring, individual files cannot be restored. We can only restore an entire backup. Snapshot backups are available for $5 a month.

Rsync Backups - With Rsync backups, we give you offsite backup space capable of backing up your entire VPS Node. You're then able to use Rsync, Duplicity, or any other backup script available to automatically backup your VPS. With Rsync you're able to restore individual files. Rsync backups are $5 a month.

R1Soft Backups - R1Soft backups are the "enterprise" version of our backup solutions, with continuos data protection through a graphical interface. Multiple copies of individual files are kept on hand and can be restored as necessary. R1Soft has a license charge of $15 per month.

Control Panel Addons

Softaculous - Softaculous is a script auto-installer that has a repository of over 130 commonly installed website scripts. It integrates directly in with both cPanel & ISPManager. Licensing is available at $9 a year.

Rvskin - The Rvskin set "beautifies" cPanel, offering you 2 additional skins in 7 different colors. Even more advantageous is the Rvskin set is available in 25 different languages. Rvskin is only available for users running cPanel and is $18 a year.

Misc.

Lightspeed Web Server - LiteSpeed Web Server is the leading high-performance, high-scalability web server. It is completely Apache interchangeable so LiteSpeed Web Server can quickly replace a major bottleneck in your existing web delivery platform. Litespeed is a drop in replacement for Apache on cPanel servers. Lightspeed licenses are only available for users running cPanel and can be purchased for $14 a month.

CodeBase - Codebase is a source code hosting and project management platform. While a CodeBase account usually runs you $79 a year, VPS.NET subscribers are able to get one free of charge.

FusionIO Node - FusionIO is solid state, high performance database hosting solution. With the solid state technology, your databases are able to be transferred and processed significantly faster, dramatically speeding up dynamic content driven websites. FusionIO nodes are available in both Atlanta and London and are $50 for every 2 Gigabytes of Storage Space.

HostBill - For company's out there selling web hosting services off of our VPS Nodes, I highly recommend you look into HostBill. It's a great client management system, with payment gateway support, and a complete support suite. Best of all, it's available free of charge at VPS.NET.

Storage Upgrades, HostBill and everything else that happened this week!

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I'm not sure how, but apparently it's that time again! Time flies when you're having fun. Lets wrap up the week with a round up of everything that happened here in the VPS.NET this week.

Before we even talk about VPS.NET though, lets talk about the big tech news that happened this week. Gizmodo was able to get their hands on the next generation of the iPhone, after a developer left it at a bar! Nick and I were discussing this as it happened, and we both decided we definitely do not want to be in that developers shoes, especially knowing how Steve Jobs is. There are however some people claiming that Apple intentionally "lost" the iPhone at the bar in order to get the hype machine rolling. With the amount of press coverage this received, I do believe this puts the iPhone on the same level as Angelina Jolie, Madonna & Tiger Woods.

The big news here at VPS.NET is the ability to upgrade your nodes without having to upgrade your storage, which means that you won't need to rebuild the disk for your Cloud VPS, the most time consuming part of the process. 30 second upgrade. Instead this allows you to schedule any storage upgrades to take place at the most convenient time for you or until you need it to be done. Once the upgrade goes through, you'll only need to reboot your VPS. One of the key things this does is it makes us much more competitive with dedicated server providers. We're already able to offer a significant amount of CPU Power, RAM, Bandwidth and Disk Space, but now you're able to start out small, and continue to build up as your company does, without having the down time of manual hardware swaps.

The other news which I hope you all have already taken advantage of, is the ability to get a free HostBill license. HostBill is a complete web hosting management system, which I went over in full detail here. If you haven't taken advantage of it yet, I encourage you to do so at www.hostbillapp.com/vps.net/.

Besides bringing out some new software updates and services for you, the guys over in the London datacenter were able to get a new FusionIO cloud up for use. We highly recommend anyone with a MySQL driven site to offload their databases onto a FusionIO node, and experience ridiculously fast website loading times. FusionIO is based on high speed solid state drives, and makes read/write times blazing fast. FusionIO nodes are available in London and Atlanta now, and are $50 for every 2 Gigabytes of Storage Space.

I also wanted to point everyone out to an awesome site we advertise on, WebResourcesDepot, which offers free tips and tricks for webmasters. They have a pretty cool post up right now about making your AJAX content crawlable by web spiders. Highly recommend everyone check it out, especially for those of you where your search engine position is important (and I think that might be all of us).

Anyhow, I'm off for the week. More than likely I'm going to be spending a lot of time doing this (yes that is me!).

Free HostBill Licenses for all VPS.NET clients!

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As always, we strive to add value to our services available to our customers, and this one is especially sweet. All VPS.NET customers now have access to a free HostBill license. If you're unfamiliar with HostBill, let me give you a brief overview of everything it's able to do.

  • Full Client Management System
  • Complete Support Suite, including live chat, and full feature help desk with email piping.
  • Entire Billing System, with support for a number of different payment gateways.
  • Full Feature Product Management, including recurring and one time product purchases.
  • Server Status Monitoring System
  • Domain Registration System
  • API system that allows you to continue to add your own custom features
  • Easy migration from other platforms
  • ... and much much more!

In addition to all the features I've listed above, HostBill already has a custom built module for complete integration into the VPS.NET control panel. This allows you to view your CPU utilization, bandwidth usage, console access, and the capability to resell VPS.NET Cloud VPS Servers. There's more information on that available on our forums, right here.

You can activate your HostBill license at http://www.hostbillapp.com/vps.net/. As a note, this license will only remain active for as long as it is hosted on a VPS.NET IP Address. If at any time it is moved from a VPS.NET IP the license will cease working.

Protecting your Cloud VPS (and your computer)

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We strive to implement the best security practices we can at VPS.NET, to protect your Cloud Servers and Cloud Hosting accounts. It makes our job much simpler. Unfortunately there's one thing we can't control; your computer and your passwords. It's startling the amount of hack jobs we see that aren't caused by anything other than someone installing a trojan on your PC, thereby obtaining your password, or by a simple brute force script aimed at cracking your password. A lot of times what we then see happen, is the hacker will login to your FTP account, upload a mailing script, and send out thousands of spam emails. It makes your site look bad, it gets our IPs black listed, and none of it is any fun at all. So, lets go over a few basic security principles (and these apply to those of us who are on Macs too!).

Strong Passwords
As much as it pains me, ILoveTerry is not a good password. A basic brute force script would be able to crack it in less than 5 minutes. Even I<3Terry is on the weaker side. A strong password is something with combination of uppercase and lower case letters, numbers, symbols and is at least 8 characters long. It also should not contain any personal information, whether it be your name, street address, birthday or even your social security number. If anyone were to every try to gain access to your site, that's where they would start. Your passwords should be random and unique to each site. As easy as it is, don't use passwords over again on multiple sites, otherwise once one is leaked, you've opened yourself up everywhere. If you're still uncertain, here's a post of 500 passwords that you SHOULD NOT use.

Routine Password Changes
Before we even get into changing your password routinely, there's something I have stress - I'd yell it from the mountain tops if Cleveland had any. Change your default password! When we create your account, you're assigned a default password. It's randomly generated and still unique to you, but it needs to be changed. Next up - change your password at least every 90 days. You never know when your password is going to be leaked. By changing your password every 90 days, if your password ever gets out, you're making it likely that they're going to get an old password.

Anti Virus Software
Everyone should be running some sort of anti-virus software. There's no excuse. I know Norton and McAfee love to take over your computer, but there are several others that are entirely non-obtrusive, and do their jobs great. It's not only important to have the software installed, but also to keep your virus definitions up to date. New viruses come out every day, and viruses are modified every day, so you may find yourself unprotected at some point in time and that has rendered the software useless.

Anti-Spyware Software
Some anti-virus software has anti-spyware built right in. That's great. If yours does not, you need an anti-spyware software installed on your PC. Again, no excuse. While most spyware just likes to annoy you, and pop up random ads, there are pieces of spyware that are much more malicious, and like to steal your passwords, and credit card information.

Network Security
I expect that soon we'll see a rise in wireless internet becoming the next tool for hackers to steal your information. It's an absolute must that you secure your network. If you're running strictly a wired network, your much safer than someone running a wireless network, but you're not completely in the clear. A firewall is still necessary; even if it's something as basic as Linksys' SPI firewall. If you are running a wireless network, you've got quite a job ahead of you.

First, change the routers default password. Everyone knows the default username and password on almost all brands of routers are admin/admin.

Second, change the SSID. This is the broadcast ID that your wireless router broadcasts under. Don't make it anything that is recognizable to you! I prefer SkyNet - it's humorous to us nerds, yet no one knows it's mine. If you're okay manually setting up the network, you can even disable the SSID broadcast ID and then no one will see the router unless they manually configure their system to connect to it.

Next implement some sort of encryption policy. WEP is easily broken anymore, as the key is exchanged with each communication. If a hacker were to monitor enough packets being transferred back and forth between your PC and the router, they'll eventually come up with your WEP key. WPA is a much better idea.

Finally, enable MAC address protection. This means that only the devices you have allowed on your network can connect to the network. Unfortunately, this is not an end-all solution, as MAC Addresses can be duplicated. This does however make connecting to your network much more difficult.

Hopefully these tips prevent some of the easy hack jobs that we've been seeing. However as we all know, our security is only as strong as the weakest link so it's important that all of us continually monitor the security of our Cloud VPS, and our home computer network. If any of them are lagging behind, it's bringing down the security of the entire system.

Softaculous

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softaculous Softaculous

How special is Softaculous that it deserves it's own blog post? I'll explain my story on how I became a fan.

I run my own personal website, which hosts my RSS Reader (Fever, which I'm a huge fan of!) and then a simple Gallery script where I store pictures from various vacations. I'd link to it, since I know everyone is dying to see my mug, but a few weeks ago it was ... destroyed. I had manually installed the Gallery script 3-4 years ago, and I tried to keep it up to date. I really did. I failed at it. I wasn't even very good at uploading photos in a timely manner, so updating the software was definitely out of the question. As a result, it was hacked, and my photos were lost, along with two hours of my day that I spent cleaning up the hack job.

How is this relevant? Softaculous is an automated script installation tool, that not only installs over 130 different scripts, but it also has the tools to keep them upgraded. Had I used Softaculous it would have seriously been a one button upgrade process. So, not only does it make your installations significantly easier, but it also helps you keep your site up-to-date, and safe and secure.

If you're in the business of hosting websites from VPS.NET, I can tell you that your customers will LOVE Softaculous. They'll have access to easily install scripts like WordPress, Joomla, phpBB, CopperMine, MediaWiki, SugarCRM, Magento and so on. It'll cut down on the number of support inquires you have, broken software problems, and it'll give them that pleasure of just playing around with the various scripts available to them.

Now the other cool thing that Softaculous does is it will import any installs you did with Fantastico. Fantastico is another piece of software that automatically installs scripts, but it doesn't quite have as many scripts available, and they're not quite as fast getting updates on the scripts out, which is really important. So if 3 years ago you installed a Gallery script using Fantastico, Softaculous will support that and still give you the option of doing a one click upgrade.

Softaculous directly integrates in with cPanel, DirectAdmin & ISPManager, and is a simple install. VPS.NET offers Softaculous at a rate of $9 (£6) a year, and is available through the license manager in your VPS.NET control panel. I highly recommend it, especially for those who use one of the scripts available in it simply for ease of administration. If you're running a web host, like I said, your customers will LOVE it, and will thank you 1,000x over again for giving it to them.

On a side note, if someone can tell me how to pronounce the name (Is it Soft-a-culous?), I'll give them a shout out in the next blog post!

End of the work week round up!

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While the work week technically never ends here at VPS.NET, today seems like a good day to post a quick round up of everything we've accomplished this week!

Our new Chicago Cloud Server location is online. It's located at the stunning Dupont Fabros Technology data center. This brings our total number of Chicago clouds to 3. In addition to the new Chicago cloud, our new London cloud went live yesterday, bringing the total there to 3 as well. The London cloud is located in the UK2Group datacenter, which is the same location as the prior 2. For those curious, besides the Chicago and London locations, we also have 2 located in Atlanta, Georgia, and 1 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The new license manager module is now available in the VPS.NET control panel. You can find it under the "Edit this VPS" option. The license manager allows you to manage each of your software licenses purchased through VPS.NET, which includes cPanel, ISPManager, ServerDensity, RVSkin, Softaculous, LiteSpeed, and soon KSplice and DirectAdmin.

We've also released a few more banner advertisements and buttons for your websites. We now have both US & UK banners  and buttons available. These are great for those who participate in our affiliate program. If you're not already an affiliate, check out my post from earlier this week on why you should be and how to implement it on your site. As someone who's been building websites since the '90s, I can honestly say I really haven't ever seen an affiliate program that pays out as well as the one we have going on here.

In addition to our announcements, the activity on the VPS.NET forums is really starting to pick up. Some hot posts this week are:

VPS.NET Module for HostBill [Official Release]

How to get Akamai on Demand Streaming to work

PHP Mail() not working

New Blog

A friend sent me a link to a Gizmodo article titled, "Google's insane number of servers visualized." They created an image to show how many servers Google has in comparison to other companies, and it's truly impressive. It, unfortunately, doesn't take into account the processing power of each of those servers, but it's still fascinating to see.

That's all for me this week. Hope you all enjoy the weekend - it's looking like it's going to be a gloomy one here in Cleveland, so I guess it'll be what I call a "Netflix weekend" for me!

Using Duplicity with VPS.NET’s Rsync Backup space

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Did you know VPS.NET offers an offsite backup service for your VPS.NET server for only $5 a month? It's under "Edit VPS" in your VPS.NET control panel; just order the Rsync back up service and you're ready to go. Here's a tip on how to maximize your experience using Duplicity!

Duplicity is a piece of software that I highly recommend any webmaster look into. Duplicity backs up entire directories in a tar format, and then encrypts them using GnuPG, meaning that they cannot be viewed or tampered with by any third parties. It is still in beta, however we've put it through some pretty thorough testing and have not come across any detrimental problems. For this tutorial we're going to be backing up the /home directory and the /mysql directory, which will allow us to save all files and MySQL database content.

Installing Duplicity on CentOS5.
wget http://code.launchpad.net/duplicity/0.6-series/0.6.08b/+download/duplicity-0.6.08b.tar.gz
tar xfz duplicity-0.6.08b.tar.gz
cd duplicity-0.6.08b
python setup.py install

Because Duplicity uses librsync to keep incremental backups, we'll need to make sure that librsync is installed on your cloud VPS server.

rpm -ivh http://yum.jardiknas.org/atomic/centos/5/x86_64/RPMS/librsync-0.9.7-9.el5.art.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh http://yum.jardiknas.org/atomic/centos/5/x86_64/RPMS/librsync-devel-0.9.7-9.el5.art.x86_64.rpm

Generate your GPG keys to encrypt the backups:

gpg --gen-key
gpg --list-keys

/root/.gnupg/pubring.gpg
------------------------
pub  1024D/0A1C1C1C 2010-04-02
uid                  RsyncBackup (rsyncbackup)
<root@localhost>
sub  2048g/5D1D326F 2010-04-02

The GPG key ID in this test for duplicity is 0A1F1C50, and should be used to encrypt the backups. The key that is generated on your cloud VPS will be different. Please keep note what your generated GPG key is, as it will be necessary later. You can use the following command to test out the GPG key and Duplicity.

duplicity full --volsize=200 --encrypt-key="0A1C1C1C"  /var/named scp://1234@rsync1.cloudkeeper.net/domain.com/var_test/

Configuring Duplicity to work with cPanel
One problem that we've found is Duplicity attempts to save everything in /tmp. In most situations there is not enough space there to support the backups, so we instead need to create a new directory capable of handling our backups.

mkdir /usr/local/tmp
chmod 1777  /usr/local/tmp
ls -ld /usr/local/tmp
drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 4096 Apr  5 12:36 /usr/local/tmp/

Before we create the backup scripts, we're going to backup our databases to the /home partition. This not only creates a second backup of your MySQL databases, but it will also make restoration much easier in the event of a failure.

mkdir /home/mysqlbackup
chmod 1777 /home/mysqlbackup
vi /home/mysqlbackup/mysql-daily-backup.sh

Paste the following command into the file:

mysqldump -uDBUSER DBNAME -pDBPASSWORD >  /home/mysqlbackup/DBNAME.sql

You will need to replace DBUSER with the database username, DBNAME with the database name, and DBPASSWORD with the password for the MySQL user.

If you have multiple databases that you wish to backup, you will need to paste that line in for each database.

Now create a daily crontab to run the script. I use 12AM in the example, however for larger databases, you may wish to start it around 9-10PM.

0 0 * * 1-7 sh /home/mysqlbackup/mysql-daily-backup.sh

Now lets create two scripts that will handle our daily and weekly backups.

Creation of the daily file:

mkdir /usr/local/custom-backup
vi /usr/local/custom-backup/backup-daily.sh (nano will also work)

Paste the following script into the backup-daily.sh file. Make sure to edit the password (1234 is an example password) and domain.com to your backups settings. As well, make sure to edit your GPG key settings to the key that was generated earlier.

#!/bin/bash
export TMPDIR=/usr/local/tmp/
duplicity remove-older-than 14D --encrypt-key="0A1C1C1C"
scp://1234@rsync1.cloudkeeper.net/domain.com/home/
duplicity remove-older-than 14D --encrypt-key="0A1C1C1C"
scp://1234@rsync1.cloudkeeper.net/domain.com/mysql/

duplicity inc --volsize=200 --encrypt-key="0A1C1C1C"
--exclude=/home/virtfs /home/
scp://1795@rsync1.cloudkeeper.net/domain.com/home/
duplicity inc --volsize=200 --encrypt-key="0A1C1C1C" /var/lib/mysql/
scp://1234@rsync1.cloudkeeper.net/domain.com/mysql/

Now lets create the weekly backup script:

vi /usr/local/custom-backup/backup-weekly.sh

Paste the following into the backup-weekly.sh file:

#!/bin/bash
export TMPDIR=/usr/local/tmp/
duplicity full --volsize=200 --encrypt-key="0A1C1C1C"
--exclude=/home/virtfs /home/
scp://1234@rsync1.cloudkeeper.net/domain.com/home/
duplicity full --volsize=200 --encrypt-key="0A1C1C1C" /var/lib/mysql/
scp://1234@rsync1.cloudkeeper.net/domain.com/mysql/

Finally, add two crontabs to set the backups to run:

10 2 * * 1-6 sh /usr/local/custom-backup/backup-daily.sh
10 2 * * 0 sh /usr/local/custom-backup/backup-weekly.sh

Both backups are set to run at 2:10AM. The daily backup will run 6 days a week, backing up only incremental data changes. On Sunday, the weekly backup will run, doing a full backup of all your data.

Useful links:
http://duplicity.nongnu.org/FAQ.html
 http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/duplicity.html

(Thank you Bogdan for writing this up for me!)

Become a Cloud Hosting Affiliate with VPS.NET

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One of the coolest programs we have in place here that I want to attract more attention to is our awesome affiliate program. For every new customer you send to VPS.NET, you get $85 -- and I'm not just saying this because I work at VPS.NET, but that kind of payout is just absolutely amazing.

Now I know you're probably rollling your eyes, thinking about how hard it'll be to put something like this in place. I promise you, it's not. You don't need to entirely reprogram you site. All that is needed is an account at Aff.Biz, our affiliate tracking site -- no need to worry, Aff.Biz is entirely owned by VPS.NET's parent company, UK2Group. From there, you get your affiliate link to refer customers to VPS.NET, and you can start earning an additional income stream.

But Terry, how can I implement this?
We give you the freedom to implement it how you want; button, banner, or text link. All are okay with us. In my experience though, some sites experience better success rates with different techniques.

If you run a blog, and I know a lot of our customers do, a banner or button probably isn't going to have much luck. For these kind of sites, I'd suggest throwing out a recommendation in a post or two each month. The post doesn't need to be solely dedicated to VPS.NET; just a paragraph about our Cloud Hosting or our Cloud Servers, and a link will do the job.

For customers who have a forum, I've seen a lot of success with sticky post suggesting VPS.NET's services. It's not too obtrusive to where your posters find it annoying, but it's also readily available for when they need our services. If you have banners, it wouldn't hurt putting our banner in your rotation either. As a marketing major, I've always been a fan of hitting your target customer on multiple fronts.

For those running other sites with a lot of page views, banners and buttons actually do work out really well. I've also seen tremendous success with a "special announcement" (typically a link posted at the top of the each page) recommending our services. For those in need of banners and buttons, we have some already made up and available for your use. Your free to make your own as well, and if you're the sharing type, definitely throw them up on the forum for others to use.

Of course, if you run into any difficulties with this, drop us a line. We're here to help, and we'll walk you through every step of the way.

Also, this is about a month away, but I wanted to give you guys a heads up because it's really cool. The programmers behind the scenes are working on a module that will take the Aff.Biz control panel and put it inside your VPS.NET control panel. The great thing about this module is it will allow you to request that any referral money earned, be put towards your hosting payment. Makes everything totally seamless, and that's our goal here.

Hello World!

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I'd like to formally welcome you to the VPS.NET Community Blog. Our mission with the blog is to let you in on all the cool happenings here at VPS.NET; whether it be new features, awesome contests we're running for our customers, or  tips & tricks to get the most out of Cloud Server, you're going to find it all posted here! Exciting, right? That's actually another goal - to make this blog entertaining to read. You won't find canned press releases here, because that's just not fun, and well, I told Nick that I wouldn't do this unless he let me have a little fun.

Since I've mentioned a few things about myself now, I might as well introduce myself. I am Terry Myers - I've joined the VPS.NET team with the primary responsibility to rejuvenate this blog, I work remotely for VPS.NET out of my home office (or patio on the nice days) as their Chief Evangelist. I have 12 years experience working with websites; 8 years experience befriending Nick (tough!); 5 years experience owning a web host; and another 3 years experience managing the website of a financial service company. Immediately prior to Nick forcing me to do work, I was a 9-5er, slaving away in the cubicle environment. A little thing known as a "recession" hit though, and I was laid off, hence how Nick finally coerced me back to hosting.

We do have some really cool things happening already here at VPS.NET, which should make your hosting experience here even more pleasing.

First up is FusionIO nodes, which are high speed nodes based on a Fusion IO (high speed SSD drives!) based storage device. The advantage to using Fusion IO is it dramatically increases the performance of your website, by increasing the "bandwidth" available between the hard drive and the processor. This allows for your data to be transferred around, and processed on the server significantly faster. Any sort of mission critical, application based site will dramatically benefit being migrated over to a Fusion IO storage environment. VPS.NET is able to offer to you for a cost of $50 for every 2 gigabytes of storage needed. Offload MySQL onto one of these babies and your site will be blazin' fast.

Secondly, VPS.NET has signed with the content distribution network, Akamai Technologies. If you haven't heard of Akamai before you should definitely check them out. Akamai has 25,000 servers in 750+ cities in 69 countries, and uses a proprietary model to determine which datacenter is best for serving the content for each unique visitor. Google has now said that site speed IS a factor in search engine rankings - which means CDN is critical for your business now more than ever! Because Akamai is volume dependent, you'll need to request a quote for details on all the costs.

Finally, we're able to offer Galera MySQL replication. Galera allows your database to be synchronously replicated across multiple servers, thereby increasing database speed and stability. Don't believe me - check out that stats here. Best of all, we're able to offer this free of charge and in an easy to install image!

That's all for this post. Hopefully I accomplished my goal of keeping you all informed of what's going on here at VPS.NET, without boring you to death and hopefully Nick lets me do a second post. If you like what you see, or have any thoughts, comment below!