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Web Hosting, Web Hosting UK, Dedicated Servers, Managed Hosting, Dedicated Server | CWCS
Regular backups are included with many of our plans or available as an additional service. However, CWCS recommends customers with and without this service to also maintain regular backups of their websites on a local computer or any other storage device. Website backup includes making a complete copy of your website files and any associated databases.
Downloading your website files
The best option for backing up your website files is by using software that supports the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). CWCS recommends using either:
- PC/Windows users: Filezilla is free and easy to use and is available at: http://filezilla-project.org/.
- Mac OSX users: Cyberduck is free and easy to use and is available at: http://cyberduck.ch/.
Using FTP software a user can:
- Create and manage folders on the local computer (for website backups).
- Select all files on the Remote server side of the FTP software and copy them from the remote directory to the Local backup directory.
Backing up Mysql databases
A lot of web applications use MySql for storing the content. This can be blogs, CMSs, and a lot of other things. It is assumed that you have phpMyAdmin installed (this is available on the Plesk control panel under the database tab of each domain).
- Open phpMyAdmin.
- Click Export in the Menu to get to where you can backup you MySql database. Image showing the export menu.
- Make sure that you have selected to export your entire database, and not just one table. There should be as many tables in the export list as showing under the database name.
- Select”SQL”-> for output format, Check “Structure” and “Add AUTO_INCREMENT” value. Check “Enclose table and field name with backquotes”. Check “DATA”, check use “hexadecimal for binary field”. Export type set to “INSERT”.
- Check “Save as file”, do not change the file name, use compression if you want. Then click “GO” to download the backup file.
Backing up individual sites is important for development purposes, however for customers with dedicated servers and cloud hosting solutions we also strongly recommend whole server backup (either daily file or image backup). These solutions come as standard with Gold and Platinum support packages.
Storage of useful information on the website needs to be secure and should be less vulnerable to tampering. Web Hosting services can help companies manage their web services to great effect. Many companies are now looking at ways to minimize the losses caused due to hacking and data theft from the websites. Private cloud is one of the biggest breakthroughs that are created to solve the issues regarding storage space, bandwidth and connectivity and also achieving higher uptime to stay on the web for a long time.
Private Cloud can help in managing the storage space settings and bandwidth rate required for website efficiency at any given point of time. Online businesses that are looking to expand and foray into new ventures need to make use of cloud based hosting in order to avoid any issues with website maintenance. Private cloud is based on the services provided by multiple dedicated servers and high performance SANs that store the data information in safe data centers.
Private cloud make use of higher RAM, bandwidth and processing power in order to provide seamless service to the website owners. These facilities can be made use by the small and large companies based on the need. Choosing the service of dedicated servers will help in establishing tremendous support in boosting the overall online presence with less downtime throughout the year.
Even during peak sales periods, the website can be up and running and won’t be susceptible to crash thereby ensuring enhanced support to the end-user.
Customers also benefit from the faster access to the website. The time taken to load the page and connectivity to the server is very quick which can help the users to buy products or enroll for services without having to wait for too long period. Private Cloud platforms offer the best facilities to online firms.
For more details, please visit our Private Cloud section or contact us.
Cloud hosting is something that most of us are involved in while using the internet. The internet offers us a package of varied services, with a platform to share information, access information and form a communicative network not to mention umpteen other facilities. Cloud hosting is a means of providing a group of services from various servers together with shared physical hardware to the users, packaged as a service through a network like the internet.
The power of processing is always better and has a scope of improvement as new servers can be added to the existing ‘cloud’ and more facilities availed. The scalability is an important advantage that web hosting offers and the prevention of server crash due to high traffic on the website which happens in case of shared hosting.
Managed hosting is a service that is offered by hosting providers which is a collection of web hosting management services, involving website management and monitoring. Companies that boast of a strong online presence are in need of maintaining a constant high-performance of their website, which is offered by the hosting providers. Server administration is carried out by the web hosts instead of the server owners themselves.
It is especially important for such companies having high-popularity websites that cloud hosting is more useful than dedicated servers, as, in case of a server crash due to high spike in traffic (which is seen in the former), other resources in the cloud may be employed to maintain the high performance level of the site.
CWCS dedicated servers with the Plesk Power Pack installed can enjoy the benefits of Spam Assassin to help filter out junk email. This can be accessed via the Plesk web interface, and customised per mailbox.
1) First, login to your Plesk Control Panel and click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane.
2) Click Control Panel for the required domain name in the list.
3) Click the Mail Tab.
4) Click the e-mail address you need.
5) Click the Spam Filter Tab, and configure the basic settings – what to do with the spam emails:
If you are sure that your spam filter is accurate, you may want to set the filter to automatically delete all incoming messages recognized as spam. To do this, select the ”Delete all spam messages” option.
If you wish to filter mail with the software on your local computer, select ”Mark spam messages by adding the following text to message subject”, and then specify how spam filter should mark the messages recognized as spam (“X-Spam-Flag: YES” and “X-Spam-Status: Yes” headers are added to the message source by default). If you want to include into the subject line the number of points that messages score, type _SCORE_ in this box.
6) Press Show Advanced Settings, and configure the following as desired:
Filter Sensitivity – SpamAssassin performs a number of different tests on contents and subject line of each message. As a result, each message scores a number of points. The higher the number, the more likely a message is spam. For example, a message containing the text string “BUY VIAGRA AT LOW PRICE!!!” in Subject line and message body scores 8.3 points. By default, the filter sensitivity is set so that all messages that score 7 or more points are classified as spam. If you receive lots of spam messages with the current setting, to make the filter more sensitive, try setting a lesser value in the score required before a mail is considered spam box; for example, 6.
White List – If you want to be sure that you will not miss e-mail from specific senders add e-mail addresses or entire domains to the spam filter’’s white list.
Black List - If you do not want to receive e-mail from specific domains or individual senders add the respective entries to the spam filter’’s black list. Place each address in one row. You can use an asterisk (*) as a substitute for a number of letters, and question mark (?) as a substitute for a single letter. For example: address@spammers.net, user?@spammers.net, *@spammers.net. Specifying *@spammers.net will block the entire mail domain spammers.net.
7) Once finished with setting up the spam filter, select ”Switch on spam filtering for this email address” and then click OK.
The sign of a good business is obvious with its clientele population, as is the effectiveness of its marketing strategy through the extent of penetration into the target population. The advent and subsequent boom that social networking has seen in the recent years is astronomic. The growth rate of various social networking sites like Facebook, which has shown a staggering 145% growth over last year, only depicts the potential that these sites have in providing a rich source of clientele under one roof.
The preliminary tool given to business owners is the market research opportunity, as the prime basis of social networking is to shout aloud the current trends and interests in various products and the inclination that the public has.
Also, with the business foraying into the social network, the customer-relations are taken onto a new personal level, with the customers’ preference given even higher value than before and providing a platform for the to express their take on a new launch.
Businesses may look to raise their profile and augment sales by investing in a proper representative who might take the product to others through social networking. They might broaden their appeal with personalized marketing, and this would click with the customers as they are given an informal, non-promotional look at the product.
Also, considering the category of the target population, like I.T. professional or entrepreneurs, etc. before choosing the specific networking site to set up base camp in is vital. Sites like E.factor and Entrepreneur connect are platforms that create a community of business owners, while LinkedIn and Jasezone allows for forming collaborations, unearthing potential clients.
Social business networking sees light in creating brand-awareness via blogs and posts while building a steady network of interested people and harnessing an effective marketing strategy-the word of mouth spread.
Also, these networking strategies are effective in raising the business profile by spotting ideal candidates for job openings in a time and cost-efficient way, with a recent survey showing almost 80% of companies inclined toward this route.
CRM software giant Salesforce claims that the UK is still way behind in the adoption of a public cloud services.
When interviewed at the recent Cloudforce conference in London, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that compared to the US government, the UK was slow to adopt the public cloud.
He also criticised the UK government for hiding behind its own private cloud and refusing to move to a public cloud solution, like the US government had previously done. Benioff met with Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and the two discussed the government’s G-Cloud and its overall IT strategy.
“The UK government needs to get aggressive about Cloud services. The UK is way behind in this – and way too much into virtualisation and the G-Cloud, which is a big virtual machine that has not been executed well. Too much cost has gone into running too many data centres,” Benioff said.
It’s all about cost reduction. The US has 3500 data centres with single digit utilisation rates. It’s the same in the UK – single digit utilisation. That is not OK. It’s costing them a fortune,” he added, stressing the importance of cloud computing in the public sector.
Benioff also announced that the company will open its first data centre in the UK next year and revealed that it was already in talks with 4 vendors.
There are many benefits in moving to the cloud for all businesses, not just public sector organisations. By moving to the cloud, businesses can outsource their IT infrastructure, saving them power, hardware and staffing costs, not to mention the additional benefits to the environment.
From a business perspective, moving to the cloud will also guarantee high availability and 100% uptime for mission critical websites and applications, ensuring that you are always online and always available to your customers.
For more information on cloud servers and cloud hosting, please call our hosting consultants on 0845 203 1000 or visit our cloud servers page.
As a hosting company, our technical support team are accustomed to dealing with various support issues for our customers, but one of the most common support issues we face on a daily basis is problems with emails. Email problems can be caused by a wide range of different things, so in this guide we will address the most common problems and give you tips on what to check for if you are having problems with your email.
Applications and Webmail
The two primary ways to send and receive your email are through an email application or webmail. There are a lot of common problems that occur with both types and some that are specific to one or the other. It helps to become familiar with both types of email access as a way of troubleshooting and as a backup option if your preferred email method isn’t working. If your email software isn’t working (like Microsoft Outlook) then try using Webmail instead, this will identify if the problem is with the email account itself, or with the email software.
Receiving Email – Common Problems
Wrong Username or Password
Depending on your email provider, sometimes you are required to enter your full email address as the username when signing into your email software, for example: yourname@cwcs.co.uk. However, other providers require only the first part of your email address as the user name, for example: yourname. Try both methods in the event that there is an error with your username or password. Also check for typing mistakes, especially with webmail, where your details have been auto-saved.
Sometimes it is hard to identify if your problem is with your username or password, as they are often presented in conjunction with each other. If your username is correct then there may be problems with your password instead. Case sensitivity often causes problems as not all providers pay attention to upper and lowercase characters.
It is important that you record any passwords that you use, as many people use very similar passwords for everything, or are forced to use a random password generator. This makes it difficult to remember one password from the other, so make sure you always make a note of all your passwords.
No Response or Error Contacting Mailserver
It is common that one minute your emails are working correctly and the next minute it is not working at all. The first thing to check is your access to the internet. If you can still browse the internet as normal, then it is not your internet connection. Assuming you have internet access, next determine if the problem is with your system or the email server. If there are other people at your work/office that aren’t receiving email, it’s probably a server or network problem. Try using webmail to access your account. If that works, quitting and re-launching your email program might help. If webmail doesn’t work, the problem is likely with the email server.
Wrong Port or Security Settings
Port and security settings are more advanced and typically affect email applications accessing POP and IMAP email accounts. When email accounts are configured using specific server names, port numbers and security settings (SSL data encryption On or Off), the default values are often set during account configuration, and these may need to be changed.
For POP accounts, the default settings are port 110/SSL off.
If your provider requires a secure connection, use port 995/SSL on.
For IMAP accounts the default settings are port 143/SSL off.
If your provider requires a secure connection, use port 993/SSL on.
Sending Emails – Common Problems
Sending emails are far more likely to cause you problems then receiving emails. Security settings and port restrictions are there to restrict the number of spam emails you receive and prevent unauthorized use of mailservers, but this can also cause problems with legitimate emails that you are waiting to receive.
Wrong Username/Password
Username and Password issues can affect both sending and receiving email. As with receiving mail, check both username formats – yourname@cwcs.co.uk and yourname – and verify correct case on passwords.
Incorrect Email Authentication
Email Authentication is the way that an email application provides a user’s account information to the mailserver, using a set of protocols for verifying identity. There are different settings you can choose for Authentication – Password, MD5 Challenge-Response, Kerberos, etc.. Choices and wording vary depending on which program you use. If you get an Authentication error when sending mail then check this setting, it may not be the password which is incorrect. Alternatively, some cable and T1 providers use None (No Authentication) when you are sending email while on their networks, so you could try this option if nothing else works.
Wrong Port and Security Settings
Outgoing mailservers (called SMTP servers) also require specific port and SSL settings:
SMTP default settings are port 25/SSL off.
Secure connections use port 587/SSL on, or (sometimes) port 465/SSL on.
Try these different combinations in your account setup preferences when you can’t send email.
Attachment and Size Limit Problems
One of the most common reasons for emails bouncing back or getting stuck in the outbox is that the attachment is too large. The best thing to remember is to not send too many items in one email and keep attachments as small as possible. There is no set limit to the size of an attachment, as it varies by providers.
If you do have to sent an attachment then try splitting up your files into smaller batches for sending, or even send one item per email if you have to. Remember that you can also compress files by saving them as a .zip file.
Webmail as a Plan B
If you are having problems with your email software or you are on the move then Webmail is a very good alternative. The webmail interface to a server doesn’t send or receive messages across the internet as POP/IMAP/SMTP exchanges, but rather as web traffic. This allows email access when on networks which block dedicated email ports.
There are many other issues that could cause problems with emails, but these are the most common and will hopefully give you a starting point when trying to diagnose the problems you are experiencing.
Apache maintenance technicians are racing to fix a severe weakness in the webserver, that allows hackers to use a single PC to completely crash a system. The code, named as the “Apache Killer” exploits a vulnerability in the way Apache handles HTTP-based requests and was first diagnosed 54 months ago.
It affects Apache servers running versions 1.3 and 2 by sending multiple GET requests containing overlapping byte ranges, causing full consumption of memory on a single system.
“The behaviour when compressing the streams is devastating and can end up in rendering the underlying operating system unusable when the requests are sent parallely,” said a researcher on Apache’’s Bugzilla discussion list. “Symptoms are swapping to disk and killing off processes including but solely httpd processes.”
A DoS (Denial-of-Service) attack works by abusing the routine web clients use to download only certain parts, or byte ranges, of an HTTP document from an Apache server. By stacking an HTTP header with multiple ranges, an attacker can easily cause a system to malfunction. The latest response from Apache is that on Wednesday (24th August 2011) their developers have said they expect to release a patch in the next 96 hours.
The Apache advisory contains several workarounds that admins can deploy in the meantime.
The susceptibility of Apache’’s range handling to crippling DoS attacks wer made public in January 2007 by Michal Zalewski, a security researcher who has since taken a job with Google. He said at the time that both Apache and Microsoft’’s competing IIS webserver were vulnerable to crippling DoS attacks because of the programs” “bizarro implementation” of range header functionality based on the HTTP/1.1 standard.
“Combined with the functionality of window scaling, it is my impression that a lone, short request can be used to trick the server into firing gigabytes of bogus data into the void, regardless of the server file size, connection count, or keep-alive request number limits implemented by the administrator,” Zalewski wrote. “Whoops?”
The episode challenges the conventional wisdom repeated by many proponents of open-source software that flaws in freely available software get fixed faster than in proprietary code because everyday users are free to inspect the source code and report any vulnerabilities they find.
Assuming that claim is true, the four-year weakness in Apache’’s range-handling feature would appear to be an obvious exception.
Apache is one of the most popular webservers on the internet, with about 235 million websites using Apache, which is about 66% of the entire market, according to figures published by Netcraft. IIS ranked second with more than 60 million sites, or about 17 percent.
Computing giants Hewlett Packard has confirmed plans to stop the production of PCs, tablets and phones, with their new focus around software. As part of the refocus and planning for the future, it has been announced that HP have agreed to buy UK software firm Autonomy for £7.1bn.
HP also stated that they are considering selling their personal systems group which includes their PC making business and its webOS operating system used on smartphones and tablet computers.
The announcements come as a surprise U-turn for HP, as back in March, they announced their future strategy for integrating webOS into all of its future hardware. They launched their Pre smartphone into the market to compete with popular Android and iPhone devices, but ultimately webOS failed to gain critical acclaim from industry specialists, reviewers, operators and retailers. They also paid £727m last year for the acquisition of Palm to release the Pre smartphone and TouchPad tablet computer, which now are being scrapped.
There have been long-running rumours that chief executive Leo Apotheker, who recently joined from German rival SAP, wanted to refocus the company away from its traditional hardware business towards its smaller, but much more profitable, software lines.
The transformation planned by Mr Apotheker mirrors that of IBM, which dropped out of its traditional hardware business over the past decade.
“HP is recognising what the world has recognised, which is hardware in terms of consumers is not a huge growth business anymore,” said Michael Yoshikami, chief executive of YCMNET Advisors.
“It’’s not where the money is. It’’s in keeping with the new CEO’’s perspective that they want to be more in services and more business-oriented.”
On the sale of its PC business, HP said it “will consider a broad range of options that may include, among others, a full or partial separation… from HP through a spin-off or other transaction”.
Market rumours have previously named various private equity firms as being keen to buy parts of HP if a break-up of the company were to happen.
Developers running large transaction processing systems sometimes have to partition their production relational databases for both performance and capacity reasons. This action is known as sharding, but can be quite difficult to do… until now. We are going to look at a possible solution, known as the ScaleBase Database Load Balancer.
The ScaleBase Database Load Balancer, launched yesterday, is a proxy server that sits in front of your actual database and breaks a monolithic relational database into small sections and spreads it out across multiple physical servers.
The partition of relational databases (sharding) has been done for many years and is a popular method of increasing the performance of databases working on very large servers or spread across multiple clustered nodes. However, if you shard your database, you are basically rewriting the whole data access layer of a database management system – which is what Oracle Real Application Clusters do. Basic sharding algorithms often spread data over a fixed number of nodes, and reports and applications based on the database have to be tweaked to be aware of the shards. The backing up and tuning of each database node traditionally has to be completed by hand.
The ScaleBase Database Load Balancer wants to trick those applications, backup programs, and report writers into thinking they are talking to one database even though they are in fact talking too many. It performs exactly like a MySQL or Oracle database would at the network level to any application, but it shards the database across multiple nodes automatically. The database proxy then accepts SQL commands and depending on what those commands are, it either runs the query against the appropriate subset of the database or across all the shards at once. You don”t have to change one line of your application code, but you may have to work out a different license with your database vendor.
The Database Load Balancer is packaged up in a virtual machine that is compatible with Amazon’’s EC2 compute cloud as well as VMware’’s ESXi hypervisor. The database shards themselves can be run inside virtual machines or on bare metal. Each node of the ScaleBase tool can manage from 8 to 12 database nodes, according to ScaleBase, with the load balancer itself being just a two-socket machine with four-core x64 processors and 16GB of memory.
Currently the Database Load Balancer from ScaleBase supports the open source MySQL database, now controlled by Oracle, with the next database to get front-ended and sharded will likely be Oracle’’s eponymous database. Depending on customer demand, ScaleBase will add support for IBM’’s DB2, Microsoft’’s SQL Server, and other open source databases such as PostgreSQL. The sharding program was written in Java and requires a Java SE6-compliant runtime to operate. While all of the beta testers have deployed the tool on top of Linux, the program will run atop AIX. Solaris, HP-UX, and any other box that has the right Java support. Customers should cluster their ScaleBase sharding nodes for high availability, of course, and the architecture recommends having standaby servers for each shard as well.
The automated sharding software is the brainchild of Doron Levari, currently the CEO at ScaleBase, and Liran Zelkha, vice president of business development. Levari has been a database administrator for 15 years, and ran Aluna, a database consulting firm that was eventually sold to Matrix, the largest system integrator in Israel. Zelkha has worked for a number of large-scale database and cloud hosting projects and kept running into the same issues of performance and scalability.
“The third time we wrote a sharding layer for a customer, we knew we were on to something,” Zelkha said.
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