The summer has had me getting to grips with the nitty-gritty of internet web hosting, caused by a consolidation and move of all of the websites and services that I host to a new server. I had been using HostPapa in a shared environment for several years but the traffic and resource usage of these sites had been on the increase for about 18 months, to the point that HostPapa invited me to pack up and leave.
After a detailed survey of requirements and possible alternatives, I elected to move to the affordable but much more powerful next-step-up of a virtual private server (VPS) solution from HostingUK. I’ve known these guys since they set up business in the late 90’s and felt comfortable that I would get good support from the people behind the business. I haven’t been disappointed.
The new server runs CentOS 6.4, a version of the Red Hat Linux operating system and has the usual LAMP features of Apache Web server, mySQL and PHP, with the Parallels Plex 11 management panel.
My development has been firstly in the area of learning how to set it all up using the Plex panel: it’s a very powerful tool but it’s not quite plug-and-play. The DNS for each of the domains on the site is best managed at the registration server using their nameservers: they have redundancy built in and although the VPS can be its own NS, if it goes down for any reason, this can lead to problems with mail transport and SEO indexing. Within the DNS records for each domain, minimum configuration requires appropriate A, MX and CNAME entries as well as TXT or SPF records to stop your mail from being forever consigned to the spam folder.
Further learning has included getting down and dirty with the *nix command line, from basic file operations to examining logs, setting up CRON and managing and installing further packages. I’ve installed Munin to help identify what normal operation looks like. One of the things that my new insight has given me is an appreciation of just how much sustained attack is endured by even the smallest of websites by the likes of Turkish, Chinese, North Korean and other interests. The importance of having decent passwords is underlined when you see 20,000 (yes, twenty thousand) attempts to guess the root password in a single day.
The summer of code has reminded me of what I’m best at, and what I enjoy doing.
