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Web Hosting Services Reviews – I’ve been hosting websites at Hostgator long before I started this website and I still run a couple of websites with them at current time. With its quality service, the hosting company is growing fast and was named top in Texas for the recent inc 5000 Awards.

Indeed they are one of the best hosting companies you can ever get and they are in my ‘A list’ and here are the keypoints of Hostgator’s success.

*Updates: Hostgator is now my top choice of hosting. Hostgator hosting service is reliable, priced reasonable, environmental friendly, and best of all, their customer supports rocks!

Reliable server with guarnateed 99.9% uptime

Thru out the years Hostgator has never fail me as a reliable hosting service. I barely notice any downtime for my websites – while this was quite a surprise until I recently found out that Hostgator is running its own data center (huge plus point).

Also, it’s worth noting that every web hosting plan with Hostgator comes with a 45 day money back guarantee and 99.9% uptime guarantee. the deal is fully guaranteed by the company founder and CEO (Brent) himself – which is another huge plus point (responsible management team).

Host unlimited domain

Click Here to get started

Hostgator is now offering unlimited bandwidth and disk storage!. on top of that, you will get unlimited domain hosting with Hostgator. In short, this actually means that you can host ALL YOUR WEBSITES in just one single web hosting account with Hostgator.

Unlimited MySQL and POP3 email account

While most other hosting companies will only allow you to have a certain number of MySQL database, you get unlimited (I repeat, unlimited!) MySQL database with Hostgator. That’s quite an advantage if you’re planning to build a huge web application.

Room to grow

Hostgator offers shared, dedicated, reseller hosting. along with the recently launched VPS hosting plans, Hostgator offer great rooms for website growth. This makes server switching and upgrading possible within Hostgator – which in other words, huge money and time savings for you as the website owner.

Lately Hostgator had turned green by powering and cooling their server using wind power.Potential drawbacks with Hostgator

Some users might be not very happy with the price tag of Hostgator hosting. Without doubt, Hostgator is a little pricey compare to most other web host (about $1/mo extra compare to the average).

In my opinion, however, this is absolutely okay as you get what you paid – quality web hosting server with top notch customer supports. Read further on the customer reviews and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Hostgator Hosting Promotion

Hostgator hosting comes with tons of great addon features and promotions. from CPC marketing credits to discont for website templates – these promotions will definitely give a greater bang-for-the-bucks.

Click Here to get started

Web Hosting Services Reviews

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What would be the use of a linux firewall in a home network? is there any point in making one?

Linux Firewall on a home network?

What breaks my heart on Tuesdays..

These past few weeks have been hectic on my WoW schedule, with 3.3.5 out three weeks ago, for North American Servers that is, and then Ruby Sanctum’s somewhat controversial opening.

What makes new content even more crazy for the players, like myself, who strive to experience it all? Server maintenance coinciding with the reset of raid lockout periods. One could make the point that server maintenance would be bad for someone’s schedule no matter what day it is on, but I am here to contend that regular maintenance should not be conducted on the same day that raid lockouts reset.

Why is this? well, I’m sure that I’m not the only one who races through a ton of content on Tuesdays, while the getting is still good for finding fresh members to group up with. this results in a hectic raiding schedule for Tuesdays: Log on, find out what’s the weekly. See if Alliance has Wintergrasp. create a 25 man VoA group. Finish 25m, and create a 10m unique class/role group. create and complete weekly. THEN, if my guild has it set, a 10-man ICC run.

Sure, I could space out these runs, but then the potential for finding good, fresh groups becomes a lot worse. And still attempting to fit all this in on days when server maintenance runs late (2 hour delay, another hour delay, then 2 more hours, etc.), such as it did last week, is pretty much impossible. My (and others’) raid schedule gets screwed.

And then there’s days of extended maintenance, such as back on the 30th, when 74 of the N.a. servers were down for an entire 24-hour period. Raiders who wanted to get in their content early-on in the raid lockout period were instead forced to shift their schedules back a day.

So why can’t Blizzard move maintenance to a day such as Sunday or Monday, when most people are saved to those raids we’re trying to get into on Tuesdays?

I don’t have an extreme memory of things throughout World of Warcraft’s 5-year lifespan like my fellow Lore Hound, iTZKooPA. though, from farming dozens of the Vanilla and BC raids in WoW, I have learned that resets were not always the same as they are today. some raids had only a few ample days before the reset, and you could attempt them again, or re-farm them for that coveted axe or helm you’re after.

However, Blizzard has boasted (and Lore Hound has covered) that their philosophy for game theory and development is doing just that, developing. Blizzard has adapted to this “one week” lockout period for a singular raid, for every raid.

As for today, server maintenance got extended by only one hour to noon PST. not as bad as last week, at least! I’m still hoping Blizzard gains the senses to move maintenance day to another day in the week. I’m all for losing a day of WoW to have clean-running servers, but just wish it didn’t have to coincide on reset day.

What do you think, readers? is any day a bad day for realm maintenance? or would you, like me, prefer it at a different point of the week?

Late Server Maintenance Raid Lockout Reset = Raiding Mayhem …

Virtual Hosting with vsftpd And MySQL on Debian Lenny

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
Follow me on Twitter
Last edited 03/05/2010

Vsftpd is one of the most secure and fastest FTP servers for Linux. usually vsftpd is configured to work with system users. this document describes how to install a vsftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. this is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine.

For the administration of the MySQL database you can use web based tools like phpMyAdmin which will also be installed in this howto. phpMyAdmin is a comfortable graphical interface which means you do not have to mess around with the command line.

This tutorial is based on Debian Lenny (Debian 5.0). You should already have set up a basic Debian Lenny system, as described in the first seven chapters of this tutorial: The Perfect Server – Debian Lenny (Debian 5.0) [ISPConfig 2]

This howto is meant as a practical guide; it does not cover the theoretical backgrounds. They are treated in a lot of other documents in the web.

This document comes without warranty of any kind! I want to say that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. there are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

in this tutorial I use the hostname server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.100. These settings might differ for you, so you have to replace them where appropriate.

2 Install vsftpd, MySQL And phpMyAdmin

Vsftpd has no built-in MySQL support, therefore we must use PAM to authenticate against the MySQL database. So we install libpam-mysql in addition to vsftpd, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin:

aptitude install vsftpd libpam-mysql mysql-server mysql-client phpmyadmin

You will be asked the following questions:

New password for the MySQL “root” user: <– yourrootsqlpassword
Repeat password for the MySQL “root” user: <– yourrootsqlpassword
Web server to reconfigure automatically: <– apache2

3 create the MySQL Database For vsftpd

Now we create a database called vsftpd and a MySQL user named vsftpd which the vsftpd daemon will use later on to connect to the vsftpd database:

CREATE DATABASE vsftpd;
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP ON vsftpd.* TO ‘vsftpd’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘ftpdpass’;
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP ON vsftpd.* TO ‘vsftpd’@'localhost.localdomain’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘ftpdpass’;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Replace the string ftpdpass with whatever password you want to use for the MySQL user vsftpd. still on the MySQL shell, we create the database table we need (yes, there is only one table!):

CREATE TABLE `accounts` (
`id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ,
`username` VARCHAR( 30 ) NOT NULL ,
`pass` VARCHAR( 50 ) NOT NULL ,
UNIQUE (
`username`
)
) ENGINE = MYISAM ;

As you may have noticed, with the quit; command we have left the MySQL shell and are back on the Linux shell.

BTW, (I’m assuming that the hostname of your ftp server system is server1.example.com) you can access phpMyAdmin under http://server1.example.com/phpmyadmin/ (you can also use the IP address instead of server1.example.com) in a browser and log in as the user vsftpd. Then you can have a look at the database. later on you can use phpMyAdmin to administrate your vsftpd server.

4 Configure vsftpd

First we create a non-privileged user called vsftpd (with the homedir /home/vsftpd) belonging to the group nogroup. We will run vsftpd under this user, and the FTP directories of our virtual users will be in the /home/vsftpd directory (e.g. /home/vsftpd/user1, /home/vsftpd/user2, etc.).

useradd –home /home/vsftpd –gid nogroup -m –shell /bin/false vsftpd

Then we make a backup of the original /etc/vsftpd.conf file and create our own:

cp /etc/vsftpd.conf /etc/vsftpd.conf_orig
cat /dev/null > /etc/vsftpd.conf
vi /etc/vsftpd.conf

The file should have the following contents:

The configuration options are explained on http://vsftpd.beasts.org/vsftpd_conf.html. the important options for our virtual setup are chroot_local_user, guest_enable, guest_username, user_sub_token, local_root, and virtual_use_local_privs.

With the user_config_dir option you can specify a directory for per-user configuration files that override parts of the global settings. this is totally optional and up to you if you want to use this feature. However, we should create that directory now:

mkdir /etc/vsftpd_user_conf

Now we must configure PAM so that it uses the MySQL database to authenticate our virtual FTP users instead of /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. the PAM configuration for vsftpd is in /etc/pam.d/vsftpd. We make a backup of the original file and create a new one like this:

cp /etc/pam.d/vsftpd /etc/pam.d/vsftpd_orig
cat /dev/null > /etc/pam.d/vsftpd
vi /etc/pam.d/vsftpd

Please make sure that you replace the MySQL password with your own one!

Afterwards, we restart vsftpd:

/etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

Virtual Hosting With vsftpd And MySQL On Debian Lenny | HowtoForge …

Hi Dear Readers,

I am back with a new blog for all of you that will bring you news and updates about everything related to Free and Open Source Software FOSS, Open Content, Open Business and anything OPEN you can think of, yeup, its my newest blog titled “The Open Manisfesto Blog!”

As a starting point, I’ve got an amazing story up my sleeve as a first entry. with this story I am also becomming a FOSS Detective hunting down all those proprietary software giants trying to use FOSS to promote their productives “Grrrr” but not openly accepting their support for FOSS! well guess who made the latest blunder? none other than, your’s truly, MS! Yeup, and they did it with their online marketing campaign for promoting Windows Vista titled the the “Mojave Experiment”.

While surfing the Internet, I found this story link on the TG Daily website that talks about MS’s new online marketing campaign to promote Windows Vista code named the Mojave Experiment. interestingly, I don’t know why this idea hit me but I did a header scan of the Mojave website and guess what I found:

Headers for: http://mojaveexperiment.com

Connection: close
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:53:51 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: “27b85b4-bfc-62838080″
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
Content-Length: 3068
Content-Type: text/html, text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Last-Modified: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:30:58 GMT
Client-Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:53:51 GMT
Client-Peer: 72.47.200.149:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Title: The “Mojave Experiment”

X-Meta-Description: Welcome to the ‘Mojave Experiment.’ what do people think of Windows Vista® when they don’t know it’s Windows Vista? We disguised Windows Vista as codename ‘Mojave,’ the ‘next Microsoft OS,’ so regular people who’ve never used Windows Vista could see what it can do – and decide for themselves. now decide for yourself.

X-Meta-Keywords: microsoft, windows, mojave, vista, San Francisco, Switch, experiment, instant search, media, center, photo, stitch, aero, flip, parental, controls, productivity, ease of use, compatible, really

Response code: 200
Response message: OK

First the website is in FLASH and not MS Silverlight, secondly its infrastructure or the website is running on PHP, Apache and CentOS!!!!!

So much for MS’s claims that FOSS is unstable or insecure or blah blah. Gotchya!

MS's biggest blunder, uses Linux and Apache and PHP

i’m in need of advice.i have a bit of experience spec’ing and building quiet desktops and servers, running windows and linux. now, i’d like to build a small dedicated firewall, but i’m completely ignorant of available options and best practices for small form-factor machines.

i’ve done a modest amount of web research, and i’m gravitating toward a micro-itx design, although i’m open to other suggestions. here’s what i’m looking for:

(1) 2 ethernet ports(2) small, and (preferable but not mandatory) wall mountable(3) sufficient resources to run a variety of free operating systems, firewalls, and content filter software. i haven’t made final choices about software, and i want to be able to experiment with os’es and applications.(4) well-supported by popular free operating systems, without requiring heroic efforts to get them installed(5) built with high-quality components, so there’s a reasonable expectation of longevity(6) reasonably low-power, inexpensive, and quiet (but these are not the highest priorities)

one possible plan:motherboard: Intel D945GSEJTcase: M350 with PCI card I/O bracket (from mini-box or logicsupply)PCI ethernet card: ???memory: ???hard drive: ???power supply: ???

an alternative motherboard would be the MSI IM-945GSE, which has dual ethernet ports built in, but looks like it would add quite a bit to the total system price.

there is also the AOpen DE2700, which also appears to be a bit more expensive, and the fit-pc2i, which doesn’t seem to be available at the moment.

if you’re up to speed in building systems like this, i’d really appreciate your advice about the overall strategy and any specific recommendations you may have for memory, hard drive, power supply, and PCI ethernet card.

help me design a dedicated linux firewall

memcached_stats_rrd.py is a script for monitoring and graphing stats from Memcached or Membase.

Memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, and Membase is the related key-value database management system. both are open source, with packaged/commercial versions distributed by NorthScale. They both use the memcached protocol for communication, so this script will work against a vanilla memcached installation, or against a membase server/cluster.

• Memcached: http://memcached.org
• Membase: http://membase.org

script source code: memcached_stats_rrd.py

This script is useful for ad-hoc monitoring or longer term trend/capacity analysis. It collects data, stores it in RRD databases, and outputs graphs and stats in the form of PNG images. you can monitor any stats that memcached/membase publishes and graph them over specified time spans. It will generate an image file for each stat, for each time span selected.

This mini monitoring system is built with:

• python-memcached
• RRDTool
• cron (or other task/job scheduler)

Sample Graph/Image Output:

(bytes_read, 3 hour timespan, 60 sec collection interval)

(mem_used, 1 hour timespan, 60 sec collection interval)

It will generate images in the directory you specify. I have an Apache web server installed serving content from the output directory for easy web viewing. you can wrap the images in some HTML and create a little dashboard to watch your entire memcached/membase cluster, like this:

(4 hour timespan, 60 sec collection interval, 2 nodes, 3 stats each)

1) Install prerequisites

You will need the following software installed:

• Python 2.x
• python-memcached (memcached client for Python)
• RRDTool (round-robin database, logging/graphing backend)

$ sudo apt-get install -y python-memcache$ sudo apt-get install -y rrdtool

2) Configure the script

Near the top of the script, there are a few configuration settings:

# Config SettingsNODES = (‘192.168.1.3:11211′, ‘192.168.1.4:11211′)INTERVAL = 60STATS = ((‘curr_items’, ‘GAUGE’), (‘bytes_written’, ‘COUNTER’))GRAPH_MINS = (60, 180)GRAPH_DIR = ‘/var/www/’

Config Setting Definitions:

• NODES: list of memcached/membase nodes to monitor.
• INTERVAL: collection interval in seconds. This should be the same value as you schedule the script to run.
• STATS: list of tuples containing (stat_name, datasource_type), where “stat_name” is a memcached/membase stat, and “datasource_type” is an RRDTool data source type (DST). the most useful data source types are GAUGE and COUNTER. GAUGE is used to report a current value, and COUNTER is used for continuous incrementing counters.(see: http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc/rrdcreate.en.html for more info on RRD data sources)
• GRAPH_MINS: list of minutes, corresponding to time spans displayed in the output graphs. an image for each stat is generated for each value here.
• GRAPH_DIR: directory to generate out images in.

After you have the script configured, make the script executable:

$ chmod +x memcached_stats_rrd.py

3) Schedule the script

You can add an entry to your crontab (crontab -e) so cron will run it regularly. the example here uses a 60 sec (1 min) interval:

*/1 * * * * /home/perfserver/memcached_stats_rrd.py

[These instructions are for Linux/Unix, but you can configure a similar system on Windows using Task Scheduler instead of cron. the code in memcached_stats_rrd.py works cross-platform.]

Corey Goldberg: Monitoring Stats From Memcached or Membase (Python …

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This week it came to light that BP had photoshopped—poorly—an official image of their crisis command center. Apparently, that wasn’t an isolated incident. Let’s take a closer look at this view from a helicopter, shall we? UPDATED:

The photo, sent in by a tipster and entitled “View of the MC 252 site from the cockpit of a PHI S-92 helicopter 26 June 2010,” shows up here, a section of BP’s website that hopes to explain their response effort through pictures. this one, sadly, is fabricated.

The first thing you might notice out of place is the looming air traffic control tower in the upper left hand side of the photo:
Then, direct your attention to where the water abruptly changes shades of blue in a frenzy of pixelation, blurring, and a disappearing vessel:
Zeroing in on the pilot on the left, evidence of a pretty sloppy cutting job:
And last, while the helicopter clearly appears to be situated at some height above the boats ahead, the readouts on the dash appear to indicate that that door and ramp are open and the parking brake engaged, not to mention that the pilot appears to be holding a pre-flight checklist:
And so on. As one reader pointed out, the tower may in fact be an oil rig adjacent to a helipad (which would also explain why the pilots are in prep mode), but the photo’s still clearly been doctored. Badly.

Obviously there are bigger fish to fry when it comes to BP. But every time they fabricate an image like this, it undermines whatever little credibility they have left, along with all of the actual documentation of the massive undertaking this has been and will continue to be. it speaks to a company still more concerned with image than reality, in charge of repairing something so terribly broken that we can’t afford to treat it with anything but total candor.

UPDATE: BP has acknowledged that they manipulated the image and has posted the original here. [BP]

Send an email to Brian Barrett, the author of this post, at bbarrett@gizmodo.com.

BP Photoshops Another Official Image Terribly

Just bought a new low price VPS with Centos OS installed within. In my previous article, i used webmin for control panel, and now i use kloxo, since i want to know a bit about it. and here’re what i dit to install kloxo on centos 5 :

1. Login via SSH with your root account

setenforce 03. wget http://download.lxlabs.com/download/kloxo/production/kloxo-install-master.sh4. ./kloxo-install-master.sh

i didn’t install anything before, just apache. So what about mysql, php, etc? Don’t worry. based on my experienced, when i install kloxo, system automatically install anything we need, including php, mysql, phpmyadmin, and pure-ftpd server, BIND Dns Server as well.

Installing kloxo take about 5 minutes with US server, my download average is about 2,1 MBps. not bad or i can say excellent for such a cheap VPS.

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1. VB6 mysql
2. VPS Unmanaged, first Step
3. Installing Apache-php-mysql + Webmin on Centos 5
4. DamnVPS | another $5 vps review

Install Kloxo on Centos 5 | Unmanaged VPS | nayantaka | technology …

Hello all,

I’m Karthik, owner of a P2H community. I am out to search for a sponsorer who could give me an free VPS. with my present sponsorer there is lot of problem with uptime and there is prolbem with WHMreseller.

With my present sponsorer I had done a deal that I would work for him as a marketing staff and also I would place banners of them on mine and direct the premium customers to them. I was successfull in this. I would also do the same deal with you and will try my hard to redirect the customers of mine to yours. So please consider and place your offers here

Free Small VPS-please read this – FreeWebspace.net