Are You Using A PHP Framework Yet? You Should!

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Sajan Parikh

PHP continues to be a widely used web programming language as it's one of the easiest languages to pick up, learn, and make beautiful things with. However, the reasons PHP is such an easy language allow for some absolutely terrible code to be written and put into production. Without some help, you'll never be able to create applications on a large scale with a large team easily. You might think you can, but you can't. Why? PHP on it's own is very poorly structured, doesn't enforce any sort of order, nor does it impose any discipline on you. Which is fine for small things, but can become a monstrosity of a codebase in a larger application. This is where PHP Frameworks come in.
Continue reading →

[Important] Secure Your WordPress Password Immediately – Global WordPress Brute Force Attack

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Jake Neeley

It is highly recommended that you ensure your WordPress login password is a secure password comprising of at least 8 characters and includes special characters (@#$%^&*), a variation of upper and lower case letters, and numbers.

Common Password Example:

secretword123

Secure Password Example:

Z4Tn@V^oes

Continue reading →

Search and Kill Processes With One Line [Command Line]

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Sajan Parikh

Alright, this may seem a bit long winded. I promise though, it really is just one line! Also, yes there are probably tens of different ways to do this. Some maybe even better than what I outlined below. If that's the case, definitely give me a shout in the comments below.

We've all written a python, bash, or php script to process or manipulate a ton of data. Maybe do some video transcoding, process backups, or generate cat memes all day long on a cron and email everyone on your mailing list. At some point you're going to screw up and you'll have hundreds of runaway processes going on your system either with a bug or some other fatal situation that may cause resource abuse. What's worse is that these scripts might be running in the background on an infinite loop and you don't have a real easy way of terminating them.
Continue reading →

Apache MPMs – Prefork, Worker, and Event

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Sajan Parikh

If you're still using Apache when the world is slowly moving to NGINX, you're looking for every optimization to keep up as much as you can. You might tweak what modules are loaded, play with Keepalives, fiddling with Negotiations, FollowSymLinks, and Overrides, you might even be throwing more hardware at it and pretending you didn't. However, if you're running a ridiculously busy site and don't want your web server to topple over due to memory usage, you should really look into what MPM you're using.

The MPM, or Multi Processing Module, you use is responsible for just about the entire HTTP session. From listening on the network, taking requests in, and most importantly, how to handle children. No, we're not talking about 5 year olds, we're talking about child processes and threads. For Unix based machines, Apache offers three MPMs to choose from; Prefork, Worker, and Event. While there are many other MPMs available for Apache on different systems, we're going to focus on Linux and what you're most likely going to see (and what I have experience with). These MPMs handle the processes and potentially threads that the Apache web server uses to accept, process, and server HTTP requests.

Continue reading →

Apache Worker, I Command Thee!

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Sajan Parikh

If you're running a web server, no matter the traffic, you've most likely looked at pretty graphs from your server and turned into a efficiency nut of some kind. You're always looking at what is using your RAM, what's eating up your CPU, and what's clogging up your network. If you're not, you should be! While there's tons of tips, tricks, and techniques you can apply to your server to run your software stack as efficiently as possible, KeepAlives settings in Apache are something that many people overlook and can have a dramatic impact on Apache's memory usage. We're really only going to focus on two Apache directives found in your main Apache configuration file.

On Debian/Ubuntu = /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
On RHEL/CentOS = /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

KeepAlive (On | Off)
KeepAliveTimeout (# of seconds to stay alive before timing out)

In short KeepAlives are a way for Apache to process multiple HTTP requests over a single TCP connection. This can help serve your files quicker by the client (visitor's browser) and the server (Apache) not having to reestablish a new TCP connection for each and every file on your web page. Although, if used improperly, this can hurt your server by keeping these connections open longer than they need to be and causing unnecessary memory usage by your server. This memory usage is what we're going to tackle a bit with KeepAlives.

Continue reading →

Five Downsides to Using Flash-based Storage Arrays

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Jake Neeley

A flash solid-state drive (SSD) is a non-volatile data storage device that uses flash-based memory to hold information. There are several different kinds of flash memory; the most commonly used is NAND but this is likely to be overtaken by other technologies. A flash array uses multiple flash-based devices to store information in place of a conventional hard disk drive.

SSDs and conventional hard drives are typically used together to create a hybrid array; however, some data storage solution providers have adopted all-flash arrays. While purely flash-based arrays have some attractive features, they also have significant drawbacks.

Continue reading →

Flashback: The Invention Dynamic Random-Access memory (DDR) and its Application in Cloud Servers

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Jake Neeley

If you are like most of the general population (you automatically not who we're talking about if you have a cloud server ), then the words, RAM, SDRAM and DDR memory have you stumped to the point you can't figure out what any of them are or why it matters; basically, they’re the same and just different types of random-access memory (RAM). We're going to get basic here so if this bores you then geek out on one of our more popular posts from last year, Installing Percona Server on a CentOS VPS.

Continue reading →

4 Years of Cloud – A look back at VPS.NET

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Terry Myers

Today we’ve reached a monumental achievement in VPS.NET history. Some of the very first cloud servers ever deployed on VPS.NET infrastructure have reached the old age of 4 years old. While the under lying hardware powering the cloud servers has been upgraded numerous times, our customers have been able to reliably, and safely count on VPS.NET to host their data over an extended period of time.

Taking a look back at the history of VPS.NET, there’s been many changes and upgrades to the infrastructure, all aimed at benefiting the customer. During the initial startup phase of VPS.NET, Radar powered our cloud management system. Since then Radar has been spun off into its own company, OnApp, which now powers 1 out of every 3 public clouds in the world. Just recently, we announced that all of our clouds will be upgraded to OnApp 3.0, which will provide our customers with numerous performance increases, faster cloud server deployment, resulting in an even more reliable hosting experience.

Our infrastructure has also dramatically changed -- in the past, our network powered by trusty old reliable Cisco 6509’s, have now been upgraded to Cisco Nexus 7000 series. Our SANs, which started as white box CentOS machines, are now all powered by HP series enterprise SANs or in our latest clouds, 3Par 7000 Series SANs. Earlier this month we announced our hypervisors will be upgraded to E5-2620 processors, providing users with 6 powerful CPU cores to host their cloud server.

Finally, the team of VPS.NET has grown dramatically. During our infancy, we shared many of the same resources with our sister UK2 Group companies. Now VPS.NET has a fully dedicated team of over 100 people, located around the globe, in our offices in Logan, Utah; Kochin, India, and L’viv, Ukraine. Of course, the contributions of key members in the past, like Ditlev, Carlos, and Nick, are all remembered, and still greatly appreciated.

We look forward to many more years of hosting you. And as always, we’ll continue to innovate and lead the cloud hosting industry!