HOSTkabob has been a personal, hobby-based business of mine for the past 6 years. As many of you know, I have also been unemployed, losing my “day job” back in June of this year. A business opportunity has come up that will require me to divest myself of all other business activity, including HOSTkabob.

Paid Web Hosting Customers

Paid hosting operations will cease around Feb. 6, 2012. All paid hosting accounts will be terminated at that time. Any account with a renewal date between now and then will be extended to that date at no additional charge. Customers who have pre-paid past that date will receive a pro-rata refund for unused months at that time, or when they move their site. If your payment is en route, it will be returned to you.

Paid Domain Name Registrations

I also need to encourage all domain name registration customers to transfer their registration from HOSTkabob.com to another registrar. I will assist in this, if possible. You should not lose any portion of your domain name registration period (I cannot pro-rate refunds on domain names, as the term and pricing is controlled by the registrar).

Donated Hosting Services and Domains

I will continue to host the donated domains, including messing-about.com, lowcarbage.com, frankhagan.com and byyb.org at no charge, and therefore will not be in violation of my commitment to the new position. Family and church groups currently hosted at no charge can continue to be hosted at no charge. I will not be able to commit to continuing support of the sites, however, so feel free to move your sites at any time.

Alternate Hosting Providers

There are literally thousands of web hosts to choose from, with a wide range of expertise. The following web hosts have earned my respect over the years, listed in order of their performance on my past projects:

• http://mddhosting.com
• http://www.hawkhost.com/
• http://www.ninjalion.com/index.php
• http://www.downtownhost.com/
• http://www.hostgator.com/

No web host is perfect for everyone. You will have to assess the hosting plans, options available, etc. to find the best fit for your site. Please let me know if I can assist in any way.

Alternate Domain Name Registrars

There are many domain name registrars, all providing nearly the same service and features, so I will mention only one here. As of Febrary 6th, I will release all paid domain names to the registrar above me (DirectI). I encourage you to transfer your domains prior to that date to any of the registrars (http://godaddy.com, http://tucows.com, etc.). The registrar I would recommend from a cost/service standpoint is:

• http://www.namecheap.com/

Disclosure: I am not receiving any kind of commission, referral fee, or payment for any of these referrals.

Thank You

The new server will be for premium hosting services, and fully managed sites. I am adding features to it for enhanced security and usability. One of those features is a server side spam filtering service with configuration options within cPanel.

Catch Spam As Soon as Possible

On our Beef server, I recommend people use a service like gMail to retrieve their domain’s email, and take advantage of Google’s built-in spam filtering. That works fine for individuals and most small organizations, but it does show the path the email takes in the header. Other options include commercial services that require changing the MX records on the domain, and they work fine. For instance, Google Apps will have the MX records changed, and the email goes directly to Google’s servers rather than through the domain. But like the free gMail option, the email headers show the path the email has taken.

Our new server is named “Chicken”. As you can see, I’m carrying out the “kabob” theme with our server names (our DNS servers are named “Pepper” and “Onion”). On Chicken I’m taking a different approach, with server-side email scanning from the well-regarded opensource project MailScanner that leaves the email headers intact. I have used a commercial installation service to install and configure MailScanner and add a plugin to cPanel for configuration, and made the mistake of calling it “commercial” software for that reason. The “commercial” portion of the project is simply the installation and configuration service, and the plug-in interface to cPanel. Jules, the developer of MailScanner, caught my error (you can see his comment below). My apologies to Jules!

Numerous configuration options exist, including white listing, black listing, and different levels of spam filtering, all easily accessed from the customer’s cPanel. Testing is on-going with only a few domains on the server, but I like what I’m seeing so far:

MailScanner Status:
57 messages Scanned by MailScanner
943.1 Total KB
10 Spam messages detected by MailScanner
2 Viruses found by MailScanner
6 Content Problems found by MailScanner
55 Messages delivered by MailScanner

I am having Mailscanner deliver all messages, except those containing viruses, to check for “false positives.” So far it seems to be working very well with the default settings.

Post edited Dec. 12, 2011, to correct description of MailScanner.

Our search for a new server for our much needed expansion may be over. We have found what we think will be a great supplier with servers in the Coloat data center in Atlanta, Georgia. With a 100gbps port and multiple bandwidth providers, this enterprise grade server should do well for our business hosting clients.

Provisioning and Testing

As always, the server will need to be fully tested after provisioning is done this afternoon. We will upgrade the server and employ our server security suite, with nightly scanning for server root kits and viruses, as well as our website exploit scanner service. Then, we will move some test sites onto the server for a few days of “burn in” with our system.

Provider Qualification

Because HOSTkabob is a different kind of hosting company, I partner with small and medium sized providers who offer full management and the kind of personalized attention I give my own customers. In each case, I get to know the owner of the company, and can call on them if an issue isn’t resolved by their support technicians. Finding the right server specs is not a problem, but finding the right provider for that server definitely is! Business is really built on relationships, not just technical specs.

Next Steps

If the server works to our expectations, we will be opening it up for new accounts by the weekend. Stay tuned!

HOSTkabob has added another DNS server. This moves all name servers off of our hosting servers. Why is this important? As we explain in our New Server Online post earlier this year, having the name servers hosted on different servers leads to improved reliability. A single server outage will not make your site “disappear” from the global domain name system.

DNS Server Location

Our first DNS server was located in San Francisco, CA, so we looked for a domestic location that would take advantage of different Internet routing. Our new DNS server is in South Carolina, just about as far from San Francisco as we can get and remain in America!

More Web Hosting Servers Coming

We are in negotiations for a new web hosting server, either on the east or west coast. Like our existing server, it will be a cPanel server serving the personal, small business, WordPress and fully managed, turnkey hosting markets. With offerings from $2 a month to our “turn key” fully managed business website plan, there are options for everyone at HOSTkabob.

Many of our customers come to us from the mega-hosts with sad stories to tell. Some have been with them for years, but as soon as there is a problem, the mega-host abandons them. The call center staff is rude, the first level techs are beyond rude, and the higher level techs are obstinate, sub-human tech-jerks. Well, not really sub-human, but it sure seems that way.

Recently, we have heard from several mega-host customers that their WordPress installations have been hacked even though they kept them up to date. In one case, the host would not allow the customer to put the site back online until he had it certified clean by a third party. As a small non-profit, they were getting hit with a double whammy … their website was the source for donations, and they would have to pay for certification that their site was clean. I volunteered to help them out, and worked with their host. And it wasn’t easy because the host’s tech support people were less than cooperative.

A Different Philosophy

Web hosts typically advertise the physical attributes of the hosting accounts … all those confusing terms and numbers that we web hosts love. But they rarely tell you what is not included … what is not “in the box”. While you always check to see if that shiny new toy has “batteries included,” knowing what to ask for in hosting is another thing entirely.

I have a different philosophy about web hosting, but I admit it is still developing. I think people are less concerned about disk space and bandwidth and how many bits are in a byte, and more concerned about service. Most consumers have no idea that their website can get hacked, and are shocked to learn that the person who knows the most about it … the web host … won’t help them when it happens.

Putting it All Together

I run a tight ship, and found out I do some things other hosts don’t. Frankly, I’m surprised. Server security is important to me, and if one of my customer’s gets hacked, I’m forced to do at least one of the things the mega-hosts do: suspend the site so it doesn’t take down the rest of the accounts. But then I search for the problem, and try to fix it. Getting the site clean and back on-line is my first priority; finding the cause of the problem is a close second, so corrective actions can be taken to prevent re-infections.

Nightly scans on our servers is a priority. I want to find the problem as soon as possible. Four separate programs scan the server each night looking for server rootkits, malware, redirect scripts and viruses. A firewall is in place to protect against brute force log in attempts. I get an immediate email report when a brute force attack has happened. And I get an immediate notice of any successful log ins as well, so I can ensure that only authorized personnel are accessing the server.

Nobody’s Perfect

No one in this business is perfect, and it is always possible that server security is compromised. But my pledge to you is that I will continue to do everything in my power to protect your sites. And when something happens … I’ll be there to help. And I’ll try to act human.

I always recommend clients keep a backup of their sites in case our server backups fail. cPanel includes an easy-to-use backup feature, and users of WordPress can use the built in Export function in Tools > Export to save a copy of their posts, comments and other content (note that the WordPress Export feature does not make copies of your images or other media, just the text content).

Server Backup Policy

But we also back up our server. I believe there are three things you need to protect against … machine, man and God. “Machine” problems occur; a database can be corrupted due to a disk failure, the server power supply can burn out, etc. The risk from “man” is when one of us does something that sounded like a good idea at the time, but corrupted or lost our data. Protecting your data from “Acts of God” means having the ability for your data to survive even if the next Katrina hits the data center.

Data Center Backups

Using R1Soft’s CDP backup product, we keep 30 daily restore points for your website. These backups are stored on a separate server in the data center in Denver, so they are there to help protect against “machine” and “man” … either server failure or a human mistake that erases data on the server.

Daily Remote Backup

Because our main backup source is in the same data center, we also backup our server to another server, in Northern California. This backup runs nightly, and overwrites the previous day’s backup. This single daily backup is intended to help protect against natural disasters … “Acts of God” as the insurance folks would put it … that could take out the data center in Denver.

Daily Development Server Backups

But we’re not finished yet. In my office near Los Angeles, I have another server that also performs a nightly backup. I keep 7 days of daily backups on this server, with each backup over-writing the one from the week before. I also keep four weekly backups, taken on the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th of each month, which are overwritten when that date comes around again.

More Backups, More Security

In all, there are at least 42 copies of your website stored in Denver, Northern California and Los Angeles. It sounds like overkill, and perhaps it is, but I take the responsibility to secure the server against data loss due to machine, man, or Acts of God very seriously.

But anything can happen, and I still recommend you keep a backup copy of your site!

Site Virtual Servers combine the flexibility of a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with the economy expected from HOSTkabob.

What is a VPS?

A VPS is a “slice” of a dedicated server, with generous disk space allotments and a guaranteed share of the processor and memory. But they can be time-consuming to set up and configure, unless you opt for an expensive fully-managed VPS.

Solutions

I took a new look at what was offered, and decided there was a need for something in between these extremes. A VPS for an individual web site, for the web site owner who wants his web site to work for him, rather than for him to work on the site. Or, a service for the web developer or multiple site host who doesn’t want to become a server administrator in his spare time. My name for this service is SVS – Site Virtual Servers. And at just $10 or $15 per month, they are great deal.

You can read all the details on my Site Virtual Servers Page. But basically, I took the best of both worlds, the economy of an un-managed VPS and the ease of a managed VPS, and applied my low cost management services to them.

Contact me directly or use our Contact Form for more information.

Experiencing Problems with PHP Scripts?

There are some “backward incompatible changes” in this release of PHP; review this list if you are having trouble with your PHP scripts: Backward Incompatible Changes.

Running Your Own or non-HOSTkabob Managed Scripts

PHP 5.3.6 includes warnings about “deprecated functions” that have been turned off in the config file (as per the PHP group’s recommendation). The functions that are deprecated, and will cease functioning in PHP 6 are:

Deprecated functions:

call_user_method() (use call_user_func() instead)
call_user_method_array() (use call_user_func_array() instead)
define_syslog_variables()
dl()
ereg() (use preg_match() instead)
ereg_replace() (use preg_replace() instead)
eregi() (use preg_match() with the ‘i’ modifier instead)
eregi_replace() (use preg_replace() with the ‘i’ modifier instead)
set_magic_quotes_runtime() and its alias, magic_quotes_runtime()
session_register() (use the $_SESSION superglobal instead)
session_unregister() (use the $_SESSION superglobal instead)
session_is_registered() (use the $_SESSION superglobal instead)
set_socket_blocking() (use stream_set_blocking() instead)
split() (use preg_split() instead)
spliti() (use preg_split() with the ‘i’ modifier instead)
sql_regcase()
mysql_db_query() (use mysql_select_db() and mysql_query() instead)
mysql_escape_string() (use mysql_real_escape_string() instead)
Passing locale category names as strings is now deprecated. Use the LC_* family of constants instead.
The is_dst parameter to mktime(). Use the new timezone handling functions instead.

Deprecated features:

Assigning the return value of new by reference is now deprecated.
Call-time pass-by-reference is now deprecated.

The “ereg” and “split” family of functions are the most common ones used. If you are running your own scripts or scripts you have purchased in the last few years, contact the author to make sure you have the latest updated version.

Choosing a web host can be difficult. You have to find the best host for your situation, and frankly, sometimes that means HOSTkabob is not the best host for you.

A TOS should not be camoflauged!

So how do you choose a host? One of the least important things is the amount of disk space and “bandwidth” (data transfer) the host offers. Yet these are usually at the top of the ads, often trumpeting “unlimited” disk space and “unlimited” bandwidth. This seems attractive, as you don’t really know how much disk space you will need, and who the heck knows what bandwidth is? You certainly don’t want to be trapped into huge overage charges like you were with your first mobile phone (“100 minutes? I’ll never go over that!”).

Look at the TOS – If You Can Find It

Web hosts publish a “Terms of Service” (TOS) that really defines what they offer, what you can do with the web space. One danger sign is when you can’t find a link to the TOS. Seriously, some hosts do not allow you to see the TOS until you are in the shopping cart, committed to buy the web hosting account. We don’t do that … our TOS is here (accessed from the “About” menu).

Hidden Limits

CPU / Memory: Nearly all shared web hosts will place a limit on CPU and memory used by your account. This is to protect all the accounts from one user who decides to run an intensive script or test his programming skills and ends up crashing the server. For hosts like HOSTkabob, these limits are a generous 25% of total resources for more than two minutes. With that kind of limit, your WordPress or forum site can safely use 80% or more of the CPU for a few seconds, as it may do when indexing or deleting posts. A sustained activity at 25% over two minutes … an eternity in the computer world! … is a high limit with so few sites on our server. Hosts with thousands of sites will have much lower limits in their TOS. And if you enjoy our fully managed services, you never have to worry about this limit as we design and optimize your site.

Inodes: Unlimited hosts will have “inode limits” in place. What is an “inode”? The official explanation is that its a disk file or folder. You start with some before you even upload a single file to your account, perhaps dozens of them. Even high inode limits like 50,000 can easily be reached. One account we host, with 933 MB of files has 19,000 inodes. Another one with just 209 MB of files has more … 19,256 inodes! If these file structures are typical of the number of files you might host, your “unlimited disk” plan will really hold somewhere between 600 MB and 3 GB. They just express the limit in a term you are unlikely to understand. I call that “lying”, but then I’m told I’m sometimes too stringent in my views!

File Type restrictions: Hosts with defined disk space really don’t care what you store in your web space, as long as its legal. You take a risk because the role of a web server is to expose the files on it to the rest of the world, so you wouldn’t want to store unencrypted personal data on it (on-line backup companies use hardened servers and encryption to ensure your personal files are safe). But if you want to use your disk space for photos of your family vacation, you can. Unlimited hosts often require files to be linked from your website, or limit the percentage of files that can be media files, etc. They may restrict video, sound or image files severely.

Backup limits: You may opt to have a host that does not back up your web site, and manage it on your own. That’s your choice. HOSTkabob uses a commercial back up solution, R1Soft, that keeps at least 7 days of backups in a different data center. We also keep our own daily backup on another server, just because we are a little paranoid about losing data. What some hosts hide in their TOS is that they keep only XX number of megabytes of backup from each account, or skip backing up accounts over a certain size. You probably won’t remember that until disaster strikes.

FTP Speed Limits: HOSTkabob is the autobahn of hosts, with no artificial limits on your connection speed. Some “unlimited hosts” impose throttling schemes on FTP transfers. They have to; because they have hundreds or thousands of sites on their servers, everyone has to share the resources.

Conclusion

There are other schemes to limit your account with the unlimited hosts. If you don’t think HOSTkabob will work for you, I will be happy to recommend another host I think can help you. I would rather see you host an account with an honest and stable web hosting company than hear about your struggles with hidden limits later on.

Server Improvements

The server is capable of running several different caching methods, but each comes with a dark side: use of memory. On a shared server, all the sites share the memory, so having a huge cache can actually harm performance. The trick is to use the caching method that provides the best bang for the buck, yet, in my opinion, allows the normal memory usage to be under 75% of total memory. Our current memory usage, with the new cache enabled, is just 66% of the total. Why is that important? It allows your site to “burst” into the unused memory space for an individual application or unexpected surge in the number of visitors.

We also continue to optimize our MySQL data base performance. This is a slow process, as we tweak the configuration and wait 48 hours to gather data on the number of tables opened, memory usage, etc. And then we re-tweak a bit. Like the shampoo bottles say, “lather, rinse, repeat”.

Site Improvements

Along with our server-side tweaks, we have found the WordPress plug in “W3 Total Cache” to be superior to our prior favorite, WP-Super Cache. We are rolling it out to our fully managed customers with busy WordPress sites. It is capable of leveraging our server-side tweaks a bit more, and provides some dramatic improvements. In one case this morning, an extremely database and graphics intensive WordPress site saw home page load time decrease from 24 seconds to under 11. We’re still working on that load time, but we have made some headway.