Reseller hosting is a shared server setup, meaning your accounts will be placed on the same server as others from other customers. This is probably the number one thing to watch out for with reseller hosting. Since you have no control over the other customers, or their customers, you have to be able to trust that the provider is setting things up properly, securely and and monitoring/maintaining the server and network properly.  Things could go wrong if not done properly… insecure setups can lead to others getting to your data, a spammer could get onto the server leading to blacklisting, or an account could suck up all the bandwidth or cpu resources. These are just a couple examples of what could go wrong. Since you’re not in control of the server, you need to be able to rely on the provider to watch for it and fix it quickly should it happen.

Leaving the server administration is also one of the biggest advantages as well. This is especially true for new hosts who probably don’t have the experience or manpower to administer servers on their own. It is also considerably cheaper to go the reseller route. A decent reseller account can be had complete with control panel, possibly some billing software to handle collections from your customers, installation script, etc. for $10 to $15 per month.

When looking for a reseller account, be aware of the disk space and traffic (often incorrectly call bandwidth) that are included. Some reseller accounts can get so large in these stats that they rival small VPS accounts. When choosing you want to selection on that meets your needs and provides some growth room. You also want to make sure that the provider will upgrade the account without having to migrate and without penalty.

A nice feature, if you can get it, is a dedicated ip address or two for your accounts. This does a couple things for you. One it limits the impact if a spammer gets onto the server. Blacklists usually are at the single ip level unless it’s so rampant on a network that they block the whole network. It also does something else… The larger hosts probably have multiple physical servers.  By having your accounts to a single ip address, migrating the account, say for load balancing the servers, becomes significantly easier WITHOUT changing ip address. If your account shares ips with other accounts, that option is out the window…

If you’re serious about growing your business, a reseller account is a good way to get started with minimal cost.  But be sure to check with the company that they will support you should you need to move up to a vps or dedicated servers. That dedicated ip address can help there too. Once the vps is up and running they can copy the data over and move the ip to the new server. We’re talking minutes of downtime… a lot easier than if you had to backup the accounts, download the backup, upload to the new server and then change dns, and potentially wait hours for dns cache to die.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment here to ask or email me at rob -at- lagniappeinternet.com

On January 12th, a series of earthquakes measuring 6.5 to 7.3 on the Richter scale devastated Haiti. There is now a critical shortage of essential supplies and support personnel to assist the people of Haiti through this crisis.

Although normally fiercely competitive, as members of the hosting community we know that the power we wield as a group is much more than we can wield individually. And so we’ve come together to help assist those affected by this disaster. With the generosity of all our combined customers, we hope to make a difference. And you can too. One dollar helps. One hundred dollars helps one hundred times more.

Please visit and consider supporting the Hosting for Haiti project today – Read more at http://www.hostingforhaiti.com/

So I was wondering what would some of the readers here want to read about?  What topics interest you?  My experience ranges from programming to building server class systems, from DOS (yeah real DOS I’m that old) to HP-UX, from MySQL & Microsoft SQL to Rocket’s (formerly IBM’s) UniVerse database system.  And I don’t know something about it, all the better… I do love learning and can usually relate 25 years of IT experience to the new information.

This ‘straight from the horses mouth’ webinar aims to teach attendees how to back up MySQL databases with ZManda Recovery Manager (ZRM)

Thursday, January 28, 2010

MySQL databases are increasingly used by high volume, high transaction applications that support businesses running full throttle 24×7. Backup and recovery operations need to be conducted in such as way that is non-disruptive to users and applications. In this webinar, we will show how Zmanda Recovery Manager(ZRM) backs up the most challenging MySQL installations, including those running on the cloud.

Zmanda supports all storage engines and provides point-in-time recovery for MySQL.

In this webinar, we will demonstrate the latest ZRM enhancements so that you can build a robust, flexible, and easy to use backup and recovery solution.

WHO:

• Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda, Inc.

WHAT:

Zmanda and MySQL: Backup MySQL Applications, including those running on the Cloud web presentation.

WHEN:

Thursday, January 28, 2010: 10:00 Pacific time (America)

The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long followed by Q&A.

Fortunately, there’s help! DigiCert put together a small javascript page that gives you the command you need. See it here: https://www.digicert.com/easy-csr/openssl.htm

One you get the command you’ll log into your server and run it. It will generate 2 files – the key and the csr. You’ll need both. You can use the csr at any of the certificate authorities to get a SSL cert issued not just digicert.

 

What: V7Network RoundTable
Where: http://www.v7n.com/chat/
When: Wednesday Oct 7 at 1:00 pm and an encore session at 7:00PM CDT
Discussion: How to identify problem areas on your web site.
Cost: FREE to all V7N members.

Win A Free Listing In The V7N Directory For Attending Our First RoundTable Live Chat!
 

 

 
“If at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0″
 
As many of you already know, our first attempt with this service crashed down around our feet when we experienced unforeseen technical difficulties. Those issues (knock on wood) have now been corrected and we are ready to get to hit the ground running offering V7Network RoundTable live training chats to the community. To thank you for your patience, we’ll be giving every person that attends a discount coupon for the V7N Directory! And two lucky winners will get free directory listings!
 
These will be structured interactive text chats covering a wide range of topics for webmasters and small business owners, focused 100% on helping our members build a highly successful online presence. At this time, our plan is to offer this training 2-4 times a month based on the response from the community.
 
The next live training chat is scheduled for October 7, 2009 at 1:00 pm CDT. We will be discussing ways to evaluate your site (and the tools that I personally use) to determine what types of changes you may need to consider making in terms of SEO and marketing techniques. Afterward, we will be opening things up for questions and answers. We will repeat the session that night at 7:00 pm CDT.
 
If what you are currently doing is working, please do not consider changing a single thing. In fact, you probably don’t need this type of training. If however you find yourself not getting the results that you have hoped for, then perhaps it is time to think about sitting down and spending some time with us at the V7Network RoundTable and see if maybe we can brainstorm through some ideas for you!
 
We will open the chat area approximately 30 minutes prior to the start of the training session. If you are not already logged in, you will need to log in using your V7N user name and password. I expect the training session to last 1-2 hours, based on the number of member questions.
 
 
 Please let us know if you will be able to attend!

But there are times you need to modify a filesystem.  For example, you may need to reduce or extend a Logical Volume on a system…  Say we have a /vz filesystem and we want to reduce it to 500GB to open some unused space for something else.

1. Backup your data – this is ALWAYS step 1.
2. umount /vz
3. e2fsck -f /dev/Volgroup##/LogVol##    … where the #’s are the logical volume group and volume numbers for /vz
4. resize2fs /dev/VolGroup##/LogVol##   500GB  … same ##’s as above
5. lvreduce -L 500GB /dev/VolGroup/LogVol##  … do I need to say it?
6. e2fsck -f /dev/VolGroup/LogVol##    …. just for good measure
7. mount /vz   … or mount -a

Sorry it’s not a better picture… but you get the point. The type is small but even my aged eyes can see it well enough to be useful. I wouldn’t want to use it all day long though.

One of the cool undocumented features is the ability to use an alternate port for SSH to connect to… Like we discussed before, you want to run SSH on another port other than 22. While in most cases security through obscurity isn’t a great idea, changing your ssh port actually cuts the attempts to break in down drastically. It could be that I missed it in the docs, but I didn’t see the ability to use an alternate port. However, it’s easy to do. When you enter the details for a session, on the end of a hostname just add a colon and the port number, so it looks like  alpha.mydomain.com:12322  where alpha.mydomain.com is the hostname, and 12322 is the ssh port in this example. Of course, use your real hostname and port number.

And yes it can use key pairs for authentication. It took a little work to get them to the server. In my case I hooked up the blackberry to the pc to get the public key off of it and then put it into the auth file with cut and paste in PuTTY. Once that was done I was able to authenticate with them quite easily.

Remember about your data charges to your wireless provider and don’t go overboard. But this little gem of a program can get you out of a tight situation when nothing else is available. You can find it at: http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/

We do recommend that you make changes to you site’s files on your local machine and then upload them (with WinSCP) all at once.  But what if you need to make a change on the fly? Sure you could log in with PuTTY and use vi,vim, nano, or one of a dozen other editors. But WinSCP can help you out there too.   You can use your existing Windows based editor with WinSCP. Personally, I love EditPlus, http://www.editplus.com/, it’s small fast and has a lot of features. But it doesn’t work over SSH (at least not last time I looked anyway).

First, setup WinSCP to get to your server like you normally would. It will need the FQDN or ip address, port number (you’re not using 22 anymore right?), your login, and your key file.  Go ahead and save the session… Now on the left side tree menu, select Preferences, and then select the Preferences… button, and a new window should appear with new left side tree navigation.  A few down, there is a leaf called a Editors, select that. It should look like this:

Click the Add button.  Select the External Editor radio box, then click Browse. Find the path to your editor, in my case that was c”\Program Files (x86)\Edit Plus 3\editplus.exe - you’re may be different depending on OS version and what program you want to use. Under editor autoselection, you might want to change the association, say EditPlus for php files or .conf files. There’s another option there too… Inside the Add dialob box, there’s an “Associated Application” – then specify the type of files you want opened with your default Windows application for that extension. For example, I use CorelDraw for .cdr and .psd files, and Windows will automatically open CorelDraw for me if I double-click in Explorer. With the Associated Application radio box, that is extended into WinSCP as well.  So inside of WinSCP if I double-click a .cdr or .psd file, CorelDraw opens automatically, and when I click save it is transferred back to the server. This is even great for using different types of editors for different files.

You probably need to change the order in which programs are checked in the list. WinSCP goes from top to bottom until it finds an editor it can use for the file. So I’d put “Associated application” at the top, then your prefered text editor(s), then WinSCP’s internal editor at the bottom.

Sometimes, you’ll have issues with backup copies that programs make, or you may just want to keep them saved locally… Sometimes this is easily accomplished. For EditPlus, go to Preferences, then Files. There is a checkbox called “Create backup file when saving”, check it if it’s not. Then hit the button next to it “Backup Options”, select your local backup directory, and check the “Create backup file of remote file in backup directory” box. And you should be good to go.

Caution… As with any changes to a system, before you use this for real (ie a real configuration file that matters to you), create a dummy file out in a directory you don’t care about, and TEST it. Make some changes to that file. Check that it works as you expect BEFORE using this for real production files. Of course, best of all is to not use this on production files directly, but to edit them locally then transfer when you’re sure they’re right, but as you know life doesn’t always work that way.

Also available are x GB or x TB of “bandwidth”. Technically it’s not really bandwidth, but traffic. Again that’s another discussion… But you’ll see it either way. The question to ask there is it incoming, outgoing or combined. You want to know ahead of time depending on what you’re doing.

Lastly is probably the fairest of them all, but also the scariest for smaller providers when buying… it’s called “95th percentile” billing. In this case you will typically have a port speed (10,100,1000mbps for example) as well as a “committed rate”. That committed rate will be how much you’re paying for every month regardless of usage. So if you commit to 5mbps, and only use 1, you still pay for 5. But the more you commit to, the less you pay generally per mbps. Even though you commit to say 5mbps, your connection is burstable all the way up to the capabilities of the line – 10,100,1000mbps (minus ethernet overhead, bottlenecks, etc.). 

That great in that if you get slashdotted, or digg’ed, your might be able to keep your site up… assuming you server, etc. can handle it. But you bandwidth is going to spike. The 95th percentile method computes the bandwidth usage as how much line is required to handle the load 95% of the time.  That is to say if chop off the top 5% or the usage TIME wise, that’s how much you need. There’s about 720 hours in a month (30 days times 24 hours a day),  5% of that is 36 hours. So if we chop off the peak 36 hours, how big of a line would be needed to handle the rest… THAT is what you’ll pay.

Using the normal logs, you can usually tell how much traffic you sent in and out. Or at least get a good estimate. That works for the “x GB / x TB” scenarios. With the “unmetered” scenario, you don’t really have to care provided you’re getting all the bandwidth you need, as there’s no overage charges… thus why people like them, even if they are shared as they often are. But (and it’s a big hairy one), your website logs are almost useless for telling what your 95th percentile usage is… Almost. It can give you an idea if you should get worried, but that’s about it. Think about it, anything less than 36hours at the full 100mbps and < 5mbps the restof the time, and there’s no overage charge with just a 5mbps commit. But 36 hours and 5 minutes (a common sampling rate) at 100mbps, and you suddenly have a 95mbps overage charge. Even if it’s $10/mbps (a pretty decent rate for mixed, excellent for premium) and you have a new $950 bill to pay. Scary huh?  The key is that any provider selling to you at 95th percentile should (and I’ve not seen one that doesn’t) provide you with real-time stats of usage.