TalkHosting.net

Just came across this coupon that I thought some of you might like

Full URL to the coupon is here.

So I’ve run into this issue with a lot of clients…apparently GoDaddy techs are oblivious to how custom nameservers work because they always throw the blame on the web hosts, instead of telling their customers how to create custom nameservers. So after going back and forth with a client telling them that GoDaddy is wrong and that our servers are configured correctly, I came across this nice little tutorial that worked perfectly for the customer.

1. Point your web browser to http://www.godaddy.com/.
2. Log into your account by clicking on the “My Account” link located just below the menubar of the webpage. If you don’t have an account yet, you will have to create one.
3. Enter your login name or customer number in the entry box labelled “Login Name or Customer Number”.
4. Enter your password in the “Password” entry box located below the “Login Name” entry box.
5. Click on the “LOGIN” button located below the “Password” entry box.
6. Good! Now that you have logged into your account, select the “Manage Domains” menu item from the “Domain Names” drop down menu located on the left side of the webpage.
7. Below the “Domains Names” menu, select the domain for which you will be creating nameservers. If you do not have any domains, you will have to register one. For example, awebsite.com.
8. In the bottom right hand corner of the webpage (you may have to scroll down), expand the “Domain Host Summary” box by clicking on the “+” icon.
9. Click on the “Click here to see details or to modify” link below to begin creating the your nameservers.
10. On the right side of the webpage, enter the host name of your first name server in the entry box labelled “Host”. The most common names are “ns1″ or “dns1″. For example, ns1.awebsite.com or dns1.awebsite.com.
11. Just below, add the IP of the nameserver in the “IP Address” entry boxes. For example, 128.98.34.112.
12. Now create the nameserver by clicking on “Add New Host”.
13. You will need to create at least 2 nameservers. To create a second nameserver, repeat steps 10 to 12. Common practice dictates that the second nameserver will be named “ns2″ or “dns2″. For example, ns2.awebsite.com or dns2.awebsite.com.
14. By convention, the last part of the ip address of the second nameserver will be incremented by 1. For example, 128.98.34.113.
15. At this point you could add additional nameservers but it is not required. To save your nameservers, click on “Save Changes”.
16. Excellent! You have successfully created private nameservers at GoDaddy.com! Remember that your changes may take up to 72 hours to take effect (propagate).

Restarting services on your machine is pretty straight forward, and all of the common ones can be found within WHM.

service csf start
service csf stop
service csf restart

• courier-imap
• cpanel
• crond
• csf
• exim
• httpd
• iptables
• killall
• mysql
• named
• pure-ftpd
• snmpd
• spamassassin
• sshd
• syslog

Dayton, Ohio - July 15, 2008 - Web hosting industry trade show, the HostingCon event conference, has been acquired from Interjuncture Corp., by iNET Interactive, to be effective July 31, 2008, immediately following the close of HostingCon 2008.

While Interjuncture Corp. will be responsible for all aspects of HostingCon 2008, iNET Interactive’s staff will be on-hand to address any questions from attendees and exhibitors, and to discuss the details of HostingCon 2009.

Troy Augustine, President and CEO of iNET noted, ”We are excited to be able to add HostingCon to iNET Interactive. HostingCon - the world’s largest physical gathering of hosted services professionals - is a perfect complement to Web Hosting Talk - the largest online gathering of hosting services professionals.”

Founded in 2005, HostingCon is the world’s largest conference and trade show serving the hosted services industry. This year’s event, to be held July 28 - 30 at Navy Pier in Chicago, is expected to draw over 1,500 hosted services professionals and nearly 100 exhibitors. The event features keynote addresses from Serguei Beloussov, the Chairman and CEO of Parallels, and Mark Rogers, the Director of Cloud Computing Services at Microsoft.

The addition of HostingCon is a natural extension for iNET Interactive, further strengthening its position as the leading media company serving the hosted services industry. The iNET Interactive portfolio also includes Web Hosting Talk, the largest online community serving the hosted services industry, HostingCatalog, the industry’s only pay-per-click ad network, and various specialty hosted services directories.

HostingCon was founded by George Roberts, the CEO of Interjucture, and Frank Spaulding, Interjucture’s COO. The pair will remain involved in HostingCon as members of its advisory board.

George Roberts remarked, ”Although Frank and I will remain involved as advisors, we are very excited to hand over the reins to iNET Interactive. We have complete confidence that iNET Interactive will continue to grow and develop HostingCon with the same passion and commitment that Frank and I have applied.”

HostingCon is the world’s largest conference and trade show serving the hosted services industry. Founded by George Roberts and Frank Spaulding in 2005, the annual event has grown to over 1,500 attendees and nearly 100 exhibitors from more than 30 countries.

Founded in 2002, iNET Interactive embraced social media before the term was coined. iNET Interactive operates some of the most prominent online communities, including Web Hosting Talk and HotScripts.com, designed for technology professionals and technology enthusiasts. Its vertically-focused communities incorporate user-contributed ratings, reviews, and discussion augmented with professionally-produced content.

For more information about HostingCon, please visit: www.hostingcon.com.

To learn more about iNET Interactive, please visit: www.inetinteractive.com.

During my daily lurking of WHT, I often like to stop and read the “Web Hosting Offers” section just for kicks, or to see what the latest deals and specials are. Very rarely will you come across any legitimate offers in the shared/reseller section, as most of the hosts in there are new companies who love to post their 800Gb space, 8000Gb bandwidth @ 4.99/mo, FREE domain specials, yet in all actuality, they don’t have the resources to backup their offers.

But back on topic…Most of these companies attempt to come off as professional as possible, and try an trick you into believing that they are a multi million dollar company, with their own Data Center, and their own hardware. It’s sad to say, but the truth is that most of them are running their company off a vps or a single dedicated server. I think one of the biggest signs of them being a small company is the fact that they use a free live chat client. I mean how can you be taken seriously as a company if you are using Crafty Syntax as your means for live support? Granted it somewhat works the same as LiveResponse, ChatStat, etc, etc, but it’s still a free-piece-of-crap-open-source-windows95-looking chat client. No matter how hard you work or how much time you put into customizing it, it still does not look professional, and I feel it reflects on the overall view of the company. I may be the only one to feel like this, but hey…take it or leave it.

I’m gunna go over the “layman’s term” definition of Overselling in todays market, and how actually, when you do think about it, it can be possible.

The current definition of overselling, as the way people these day’s see it, is a company (host) that provides entirely too much space, and other features, for an unbelievably low price. To name a few that come to mind, you have HostGator, LunarPages, and DreamHost. These are all great examples of the “overselling” industry.

They’ve taken the cheap approach really, and the way they see it is, the bigger the numbers they offer, for the lower the price = more business. To put this in math terms, you could see it as “S / P = $$$”. The only bad thing, if you could consider it that way, is that, well, it may not be overselling anymore!

Now, I bet by now, you’re wondering “What is this guy smoking?” Well..that’s for me to kno(I’m not smoking anything, I’m quite serious actually). In this day and age, the cost of technology and bandwidth has been reduced greatly. You can easily have a server at the datacenter, just one server, that has over 1TB of storage to that machine itself. These big companies like HostGator and the others have the money to invest, that they can own hundreds, if not thousands of these machines. Put that together with a nice fiber mixture into your datacenter, and you have the building grounds of a well formed overselling host.

We’re making the move from the “Hosting Industry” to the “Overselling Industry” and the thing is, we don’t even realize it anymore. It’s become a part of our life, the little guys like myself, competing against the big guys, trying to do everything we can just to get our foot in the door, to hopefully either one day own our own properly formed Company, with big corporate offices, or keeping our hopes in being bought out by one of those big guys.

Like I was saying above, before I got kinda sidetracked there, it’s becoming quite cost efficient to run one of these overselling hosts. Most hosting offers you see these days offer you the most they can, and they just put in one of those “safety clause’s” into they’re Terms of Service, saying like you can only use 50k inodes (50,000 files) on that account, or that your account can only use such percentage of the processor power. This safeguard isn’t there to harm you, it’s there to protect them.

Oversold hosts are commonly targeted by warez sites, and spammers, because of the large amount of resources that they offer. People like this think that because it’s a big company, that they aren’t going to get caught sending out 100k emails, or hosting 20gb of files. Companies like these also have the kind of support staff that they need to constantly be on top of things.

I sure have drifted off track alot in this post, haven’t I? Well, even though it’s drifted, it all relates to the same subject. Overselling. Is it the way of the future, or still a lame business tactic? You decide

Here is a quick tutorial on how to modify your servers MOTD, which is the message you receive when logging onto your server. First SSH into your server, and edit the MOTD file

# nano /etc/motd

Then insert your message. Companies normally place notes there about previous issues with the server, or something related to the server/customer. Since this is my personal colo box, I like to mix things up, so I like to put things there that will give me a smile when I hop on my box. After you edit the file, save it, and log off then back onto your box.

You should now see your new MOTD. The image for mine is too big to post on the blog, but you can see it here: MOTD

In my movement to help educate everyone in the web hosting field I’ve posted some more useful commands that I’ve come across. They are all pretty basic, and will come in handy when monitoring a server, or trying to troubleshoot an issue.

w
- Shows who is currently logged in

top
-Lists all of the processes running

kill -9 PID#
-Stops whatever PID# you specify that is running

service httpd restart
-Restarting Apache

service chkservd restart
- Restarts the service monitoring process

Hostname
- Retreives the hostname

rndc reload
- Picks up on new entries (ex, freshly created domain names), that weren’t automatically picked up by Apache

df -Hha
- Checks bandwidth usage

free -m
- Checks memory usage

du -sh
- Checks disk usage

ps auxwf | grep httpd | wc -l
- Counts how many httpd processes are running

ps aux
- Shows all system processes

Below are a few common exim commands that may be helpful

exim -bp|grep TalkHosting
– Will show the mail in queue for TalkHosting

exim -Mvh MESSAGEID
– View message header

exim -Mvb MESSAGEID
– View message body

exim -M MESSAGEID
– Force delivery of message

exim -v -M MESSAGEID
–View the transact of message

exim -M MESSAGEID
– Force delivery of one message

exim -qf
– Force the queue to run

exim -qff
– Force another queue run and attempt to flush the frozen message

exim -Mvl MESSAGEID
– View the log for the message

exim -Mvb MESSAGEID
– View the body of the message

exim -Mvh MESSAGEID
– View the header of the message

exim -Mrm MESSAGEID
– Remove message without sending any error message

exim -Mg MESSAGEID
– Gives up the message, and sends a bounce to the Sender

exim -bpr | grep frozen | wc -L
– To see how many Frozen e-mails are in the queue

exim -bpr | grep frozen | awk {’print $3′} | xargs exim -Mrm
– Deleting Frozen Messages

exim -bp
– To check the mails in the queue

exim -bpc
– To find out, how many messages are there in the mail queue

/scripts/eximup –force
– To force exim update:

For my first tutorial I will show you a quick an easy way of changing the permissions for all folders and files in a given directory via Putty. These two commands will come in handy when all of your files and directories have permissions that are not correct.

To change the permissions for all files in your current directory you will use:

# find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

And for directories:

# find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;