Wikipedia goes Offline in protest at PIPA and SOPA bills

Today the English version of Wikipedia is down (Wednesday 18^th January), for the first time ever, in protest at the SOPA/PIPA bills.

Visitors to http://en.wikipedia.org today will see a message explaining the reasons behind the blackout, which says:

“For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.”

A ‘Learn More’ button further explains that “Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours, beginning at midnight January 18, Eastern Time. Readers who come to English Wikipedia during the blackout will not be able to read the encyclopedia: instead, they will see messages intended to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA, and encouraging them to share their views with their elected representatives, and via social media.”

Click the Learn More link to see how you can help stop SOPA.

Demonoid.me is also down today in protest - http://www.demonoid.me/

Reddit.com will also be down for 12 hours - http://www.reddit.com/

Google has blacked out its logo and added a Take Action link - https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

WordPress.com has censored its homepage - http://wordpress.com/

TuCows.com is protesting through its homepage - http://www.tucows.com

MIchaelMoore.com also down - http://www.michaelmoore.com/

As are countless other less known sites as you can see from the list of blackout sites found on Etsy.com, many aren’t black yet but are likely to go down later on in the day - http://www.etsy.com/teams/7722/business-topics/discuss/9631420/page/1/

As responsible netizens we strongly believe that although we are a UK Web Hosting provider we feel that it is our duty to inform the wider web community and allow them to take the actions that they see fit.

Do you agree with these organisations or do you feel that this issues are valid and Congress should implement these laws?

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In just over two days he has revamped his image, sent out over 24 - some politically unfriendly — Tweets ranging from criticisms of the British economy, Obama’s stance on terrorist detentions to Iowa’s Secretary of State elections.

Naturally some of these tweets have been ‘withdrawn’ but Twitter being twitter, there has been no shortage of people re-tweeting them.

The democratisation of the web, and the levelling of the playing field is what makes the web such a viable and powerful tool.

Happy tweeting Rupert.

Octagenarian Tweeter

Follow us on twitter @bytehousehost

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Plesk’s power pack is a set of high quality easy to install addons for the Plesk Control Panel. They are a collection of popular applications that utilise the Plesk application vault to easily instal and setup the applications.  It comes with an easy to use interface to manage the MySQL database.

It comes with MySQL server support and MS SQL server support on the Plesk Windows platform that enables users enables users to deploy and manage MS SQL Server databases with a few clicks using the user interface. Plesk for Windows can use and manage both local and remote instances of MS SQL Server Standard or Enterprise edition.

Tomcat Support

The Plesk power pack also provides the TomCat servlet that provides the environment for executing Java Servlets and to enable hosting with JSP support.

Multi-Level Helpdesk

The new Plesk for windows interface can also include a multi-level help desk that is designed to communicate, track and monitor support issues for users at every level of the system.  This allows you to organise and manage all your of your customers’ support issues from a single centralised location.

Application Pack

The application pack or application vault is a repository of site applications that allows administrators the ability to easily add, deploy, configure and remove applications for any domain on the system.

An example of some of these applications are;

• Mambo (site builder)
• post-Nuke (CMS)
• osCommerce Ecommerce software
• phpBB (bulletin board)
• Coppermine (photo gallery)
• phpBook (guestbook)

ColdFusion Support
This module allows administrators to configure ColdFusion paths and enable or disable ColdFusion support during setup.

SpamAssassin Anti-SPAM Software

This provides you the ability to install the “SpamAssassin” Anti-Spam Software in the base installation with a built-in configuration interface for SPAM rules server wide.

Plesk Control Panel

Plesk is an easy to use even user friendly control panel that even starters find relatively straightforward. It has multiple easy to navigate skins and great stability that allows you to manage multiple accounts on a single server and maximising your profits.

It is one of the market leaders in the control panel world and has over 5 million accounts world wide.

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There are two easy steps that are often overlooked;

1. Tell Google about it: Add URL page
2. Get other websites that have relevant topics to link to yours - the greater the relevance to your site, the higher the benefits that accrue to you and the other website.

Following those easy tasks you’ll be able to let Google know that your site exists, and quickly rank it up for the keywords that are relevant to your site. Of course the speed that your site ranks up is dependent on the content of your site, and the number of relevant cross links that you have to your site.  So if you miraculously get linked to by the BBC, or your site gets dugg then you will get some great ranking to your search engine.

Once you are on the search engines, you need to ensure your site is frequently updated with relevant and useful content. The more frequently your site is updated, the more likely both users and search engine robots will check the site.

If you follow these things, and keep your site content fresh and relevant then your site’s Google PR or Page Rank will improve, and your site will move up the rankings.

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So, when to use FTP versus a secure FTP; we start with the basics by giving you an understanding of File Transfer Protocol, FTP, and the different File Transfer options available to you with ByteHouse’s hosting packages.

FTP - File Transfer Protocol

Ye old faithful, this is the long standing protocol used by webmasters over the ages for uploading files onto their hosting platforms. FTP is the acronym for File Transfer Protocol and does just that by allowing you to transfer and upload your files easily and quickly and transfer (by uploading and downloading) your files across and up.

On signing up, you will be emailed your standard FTP login details and password which can be changed and modified via your control panel.  Once you have your username and password you can use a FTP client - we’re a big fan of FileZilla - to login and and connect to your shared, VPS or dedicated hosting platforms.  Once connected you can easily and simply upload your files.

SFTP - Secure File Transfer Protocol

So, what’s the difference you ask?  Well simply, SFTP or SSH File Transfer Protocol is a secure encrypted method of uploading your files.  It allows you to upload your files to your web space through the same FTP client as FTP but with the added benefit of encrypting your files before uploading them.  You see, unbeknownst to you when you upload using FTP everything is transferred between the end user and the server in plain unencrypted text, this includes both your FTP username and password. So anyone with the knowledge and desire to monitor traffic on your network can easily harvest your details and access your account.

So when would you use FTP? Well, in our opinion never! By using a secure connection network anything transferred between the user and the server is done in an encrypted format which would be difficult to decipher. So, by simply selecting SFTP rather than the default FTP - by selecting from the Servertype drop down and choosing SFTP rather than FTP it may take a little longer, but am sure you’ll agree is well worth it baring in mind the added security.

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Posted by Ramsey Dehani

There has been a lot of talk around the rising sophistication of malware writers and hackers recently, with companies like McAfee releasing statistics (http://newsroom.mcafee.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=3607) and even Google getting attacked.

In addition to this, countries such as China and Brazil have been accused of allowing the web-hosting of hackers and criminals.

But now network security firm Sophos has put the matter to rest with its own list of the ‘dirtiest’ hosts (http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2010/02/03/worlds-top-10-dirtiest-webhosting-countries/).

Now the ones near the top are no real surprise. It is hardly a shock to discover that the US hosts the largest number of ‘dangerous sites’ (37.4% to be exact) considering the wealth of content hosted in the nation.

But interestingly enough, web-hosting in the UK was found to be among the cleanest and safest of the major economic powers, with barely 1.6% of malware sites hosted out of the UK.

Whether this is a testimony to the security of the UK’s web-hosting practitioners is among the best (a nice thought and one that we at Bytehouse (http://www.bytehouse.co.uk/) would of course love to perpetuate) is unclear.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, commented on his company’s findings: “These hacked sites are particularly dangerous because of the large amount of traffic they may already receive, and because visitors may feel they can trust any unusual pop-ups they see.

“One of the growing methods through which hackers exploited legitimate websites during the last 12 month was the placing of malicious adverts (known as “malvertising”). Websites that fell victim to malvertising attacks, and thus passed infections on to their readers, included the New York Times and technology website Gizmodo.”

In Europe, Turkey, Poland and Germany were all found to host more ‘dangerous’ sites than the UK.

Host in the most secure data centre in the UK with ByteHouse’s high standard physical and network security

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Assessing load factors and resource requirements, how many people are going to visit your site and whether the hosting package you’ve signed up to is going to be able to sustain the load of enquiries you believe you’re going to get is an important if not critical issue.  There is no point in you spending vast amounts of time, marketing and PR to drive traffic to your site if all that it causes is for your site to keel over due to the massive load that it is unable to sustain.

We’ve all heard of horror stories of well advertised and marketed sites that underestimate or just don’t quite factor in the number of visitors  that they visit to the site, and very soon after their site launches it comes crashing down again.

A few easy steps;

First and paramount it is worth calculating what the average page size is for your site?  This varies for sites from one extreme — sites that stream videos — to the smaller text only micro sites.  But on average these vary anywhere between 5 Kb to 50 Kb depending on how many and how well optimised the images are on the site.

Next it would be worth calculating how many peak visitors you believe you will be getting, and what the maximum reasonable concurrent users might be.

A recent client came to us for their hosting requirements.  Naturally they did not wish for their new online shop to be anything but a success on the first day especially as they were promoting it at their party conference.

We calculated the usage and place our client on our Windows VPS package for rapid scalability, and powerful processing (our VPS hosting solutions run on 8 core XEON blades). Due to our BGP4 routing and 100MB connectivity we were comfortable with any rapid large influx of simultaneous concurrent users.

So if you’ve always wanted a ‘Honk for Change’ car sticker but never known where to get one you can visit the conservative shop’s site at http://shop.conservatives.com.

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VPS web hosting provides an ideal framework from a value and quality prospective as it provides the majority of benefits of a dedicated environment at a fraction of the cost, especially when factoring in the disaster recovery benefits of VPS hosting.

VPS web hosting provides an excellent framework for the
majority of growing client’s hosting needs and rapid scalability.  Should the need arise due to rapid growth or if one where to come up against the occasional times when VPS hosting is not the ideal hosting environment then one is easily, seemlessley and rapidly able to switch over to a dedicated hosting platform, but on the whole this is an ideal hosting platform for most clients.

The medical screening company, a medical insurance screening provider
was a client that started off life on a Linux VPS platform and scaled without moving on to ever more powerful VPS hosting platforms until finally migrated
over to a dedicated system as their marketing, brand awareness and
traffic numbers rapidly increased.

At the appropriate time we were able to quickly and seamlessly migrate them over to a dedicated hosting environment.

We find that Virtual Private Servers are an excellent way for
clients to move away from shared hosting and grow their business before
migrating over, should the need arise, seemlessley onto a dedicated hosting platform.

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RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bytehouse.co.uk [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?datacenterhosting.co.uk [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?datacentrespace.co.uk [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?virtual-rack-space.co.uk [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?virtual-rackspace.co.uk [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?virtulisation.co.uk [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?virtulization.co.uk
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.bytehouse.co.uk$1 [R=permanent,L]

As you can see this is fairly self explanatory.  We set some conditions for rewriting based on the host header using a regular expression type syntax.  You can see that by the ^(www.)? we are saying the www. portion of the host may not be in the header but we want to catch those URL’s aswell.  The [OR] parameter is required otherwise a logical AND is assumed.

In the last line a rewrite rule is applied if any of the prior condtions are met.  In this case a redirect is returned to the browser of www.bytehouse.co.uk  The [R=permanent,L] at the end says that a “Permanent”(301) redirect should be returned and that this is last rewrite rule.

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Yesterday a problem arose where a Qmail machine had a queue full of undeliverable emails that we wanted to delete.

Luckily, like most things with sys admin, it’s easy-when-you-know-how and this problem was no exception.

Installation and Configuration

qmhandle is just a perl script and requires a little configuration.  It can be downloaded from here http://qmhandle.sourceforge.net

The only configuration that was required was in the “USER CONFIGURATION” section near the top of the script where the use of deamon tools was commented out and instead the use of the rc scripts was enabled by uncommenting the lines:

my ($stopqmail) = ‘/etc/init.d/qmail stop’;
my ($startqmail) = ‘/etc/init.d/qmail start’;

Using qmhandle

Statistics can be gathered similar to that of qmail-qstat for example:-

#qmHandle -s
Total messages: 11
Messages with local recipients: 0
Messages with remote recipients: 11
Messages with bounces: 0
Messages in preprocess: 0

Print a summary of message in the remote queue

#qmHandle -R

355926028 (16, 16/355926028)
Return-path: #@[]
From: MAILER-DAEMON@EXAMPLE.NET
To: postmaster@EXAMPLE.NET
Subject: failure notice
Date: 31 Mar 2009 14:53:58 +0100
Size: 19742 bytes

Total messages: 1
Messages with local recipients: 0
Messages with remote recipients: 1
Messages with bounces: 0
Messages in preprocess: 0

Read a message in the queue

#qmHandle -m355926028

Delete a mesage in the queue (notice how qmail is required to be stopped before anything can be deleted from the queue)

#./qmHandle -d355926028
Calling system script to terminate qmail…
Stopping : Deleting message 355926028…
Deleted 1 messages from queue
Restarting qmail… Starting qmail:                        [  OK  ]
done (hopefully).

Deleting multiple message from the queue can also be achieved.  For example to delete all messages with the subject “failure notice” the following command can be used:-

#qmHandle  -S”failure notice”
Calling system script to terminate qmail…
Stopping : Looking for messages with Subject: failure notice
Deleting message: 355926066
Deleting message: 355926028
Deleting message: 355926062
Deleting message: 355926060
Deleting message: 355926064
………….

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