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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FTP which stands for File Transfer Protocol and is most commonly a method of transferring files over the internet.  Believe it or not you’re most likely using FTP without realising it.

FTP is most commonly used to download files from the internet, and is the back bone of music or gaming sites.  But it is the ability to transfer files over the internet that we will focus on as it is essential for anyone creating a web page be they amateurs or professionals.

So, let us assume you have finished developing your new site, have added a domain through Plesk and now wish to publish it on a server so that it is accessible to anyone who wishes to view it on the world wide web.

If you are using Plesk you can use your Plesk control panel’s File Manager to upload and download files, or you may wish use an FTP client — a software designed to transfer files between two computer devices across the internet.

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So first things first; the web is a massive place and you keep hearing that the successful companies are those that find the right niche market. So what is a niche market? Well a niche market is simply a group of consumers that have a specific need or interest that you are targeting. These consumers tend to be into similar actives requiring similar products and or services. By creating a niche that caters to their needs you are automatically creating a connection and affinity with these consumers making your online sales and marketing process easier.

So what should one look for? Well you need to find a product that consumers need and are looking to purchase before you start marketing. Many online store have failed because they’ve focused on marketing a product before finding out if there are people interested in it, and whether there was sufficient demand, or if there are already competitors out there with a strong market presence.

Niche markets have been around since the dot go, whether its guilds, or craftsman or Microsoft focusing on the needs of PC users with their operating systems, or Coca Cola, or Nike. All these are niche brands that have become ubiquitous.

Finding a niche market

Selecting a niche market is more straightforward than it first appears. It is always best to start by focusing on a market that ties into your area of expertise or interest as you will always be more successful in something that you are passionate about. It also minimises on the inevitable frustration and learning curve of start ups that means instead of viewing it as tedious monotonous work you will find it quite fun and are constantly growing both your knowledge and your online business.

Researching your prospective market

Once you’ve found a product and niche that you wish to tackle its always best to undertake some deep research into the market you are looking to break into by checking out the competitors, finding out what sort of demand there is for your products and or services and how your prospective customers would go about finding these items online, what key words they’d search under, etc., etc.

Social networking and finding your audience

Forums, news groups and chat rooms are good hunting grounds for specialist niches. By monitoring the activity and traffic flows on these sites you can determine what is in high demand and what your prospective customers are looking for.

So as you can if you are interested in setting up an online e-commerce hosted website in 2009 then setting up a niche market is the first and most important step. Take the time to find out what your consumers may be looking for and use that to determine how you should market your site should significantly increase the probability of your businesses success.

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Were gonna give you a crash course on everything that relates to your own blog, and why your out there in the blogosphere conversing with us all! So whether you are looking your focusing on sales, lead generation or let people know more about your brand and what you stand for, if you are an internet marketer, a consultant, or a professional blogger, we’re going to let rip and give you some light reading just before Christmas to prepare you for 2009.

So what’s it all about, and what are the basics of blogging?

Before we start a word of caution, you may already be using WordPress and are up to speed with why its the best blogging tool out there, you may have things that you won’t want to change, in that case we won’t take offence but would suggest reading through the post in case you’ve overlooked anything you might wish to use. We’re just sharing our experience in what we’ve found to be how WordPress can best be used to help with your online marketing plan, so don’t worry it won’t be the end of the world if your blog is established and working differently :-).

Now if your not using WordPress as your blogging platform, then you might want to ponder and consider the ramifications of not being on the best blogging platform on the blogosphere and bookmark this page

The benefits of a self hosted blog

In our opinion if your a FTSE 100 company, a professional blogger, small business or an enthusiastic hobbiest blogging away who wants to share his passion with the blogosphere the WordPress self hosted blog is the best platform you can use for your online marketing.

So, we aren’t saying that the other platforms shan’t work, but we will put our case across as to why we believe you should use a WordPress.org blog.

Flexibility and scalability

Well, the breadth and depth of a WordPress site ranging from a static website, to a membership site, or even a full blown complex multi-author blogging blog.

Fully integrated into Web 2.0

Well, although other blog systems and online alternatives can ‘plugin’ to social networking outlets, a self hosted WordPress blog can do it like no other, and prior technical knowledge is definitely not required!

Open source

It’s open source meaning its free, continuously updated and has an extensive support community should you get stuck and are ready and able to wade through the myriad of forums to answer any issues or questions that may arise.

Simple and easy to maintain

It really is simple and straightforward to get going and start blogging. Anyone, and I really do mean anyone can do it, once you pick up some basics titbits you can build on your blog, and go out and fully market your site, either do a little research and set it up from scratch and get rolling, or heaven forbid find a web hosting provider that has WordPress setup as one of its hosting packages and off you go!

If you look around, you’ll find that most major players on the blogosphere are hosting their own WordPress blog, well we believe that once you try it you’ll agree with us and them. So happy reading over the Christmas hols. Wishing you a very merry christmas.

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Web hosting companies calculate your bandwidth usage by using one of three different methods.

• Per use
• capped
• 95% use

Each method is quite different so make sure you understand what your needs are with how they compare in your webhosting hosting plans.

So first things first, a bit of a basic grounding; data transfer is measured in bits or bytes where:

8 bits (b) = 1 byte (B)
1024 bytes = 1 kilo byte (KB)
1024 kilo bytes = 1 mega byte (MB)
1024 mega byte = 1 giga byte (GB)

And data transfer is the measure of these bits or bytes being transferred over a period of time. So for example 100 Mbps means 100 mega bytes are being transferred in one second. Saying all that, for all intents and purposes most hosting companies designate 1 month as the period of time; so If your hosting plan states that you have 50 GB of bandwidth, that you can transfer as much as 50 GB of data in one month as part of the package before incurring additional charges, etc. etc.

To calculate usage, your host relies on usage reports (Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is one example) that show your web site’s average incoming and outgoing traffic, once that is ascertained, the following formula is then applied:

( Monthly Average incoming + Monthly average outgoing data ) /8 x 60 sec x 60 min x 24 hrs x 30.5 days = Total month’s bandwidth

Per Use Method

Under the per use method of bandwidth calculation, the web hosting company calculates your usage in a month and invoices you the price per Gigabyte, Megabyte or Kilobytes. Most hosting providers, then charge in predetermined blocks that may or may not vary per package (e.g. blocks of 10 GB etc. etc.) so that if you exceed your usage, they would charge you an additional amount for the incremental block of bandwidth used.

Capped Method

Under the capped method of bandwidth calculation, your web hosting provider will allocate a certain amount of predetermined bandwidth per month. If you exceed this bandwidth usage your web site will either become inaccessible or is considerably delayed. While this sounds like a bad option, most hosting providers use this method because it’s a fixed cost, and easiest to determine. If your hosting provider uses this methodology you should pre decide a plan with more bandwidth than you expect to use and monitor it to make sure that you will not exceed it.

95% Method

Under the 95% method of bandwidth calculation hosting provider looks at your total bandwidth usage for the month, it then discards the top 5% of use. The remaining 95% of transferred data will be used to calculate your usage. So if your site exhibits occasional usage spikes, this might be a good method for you as the peaks will not be included in your bandwidth usage calculations.

Knowing this, you should check your web host’s control panel to determine your average usage. Then we suggested you add on a certain percent for growth you expect or can determine from your historic usage patterns and then make sure that you use a plan that matches your site’s bandwidth needs.

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To make sure that your adventure is smooth, hassle free and you get what you need, there are a few pointers that are worth looking out for to get your site up, and make sure that it sends the right image.

Free Web Hosting

Well, let’s face it, this is a question that everyone asks, and when it comes to web hosting what better way to reduce your costs then by hosting your site for free.

On the surface what can go wrong? Its free after all, isn’t it? Well, at this stage its worth deciding on what you want to use your site for? After all, there is no free lunch in a sense and these organizations need to recoup their costs, and make a profit right?  Most of these free hosting sites, provide you limited web space, and littered with advertisements.  The drawdown with this, is that although it is free, people coming onto your site may view your site as being unprofessional, click through the advertisements and become someone else’s customer or just decide not to come back.

So who should use free hosting? Free hosting is useful for some people.  If your creating a fun personal website or blog, then free hosting might be an option for you.

Limited Option Hosting

Not all hosting companies are created equal, some can only provide you with the basics; so if you find that you cannot incorporate email accounts, shopping carts, or web forms, then you might want to decide what it is your looking to get from your site, and if you think you will be soon be needing any of these services, then it is best to move on, however if you have a basic informational site you may find that this is more than adequate for your needs. NB We find it is always useful to have a web form, and your own email domain name as a way for prospective customers to get hold of you, it just looks more professional provides your customers multiple ways of getting through.

If you feel you need more, than try to assess what it is that you do need, how reliable does it need to be? What services will you need and find useful, and which services are superfluous? So a few pointers;

• Adequate bandwidth for your need, and what quality are you getting?

• How much storage space do you/ will you need? Is there room to grow? Can you scale up?

• Can have multiple email accounts? Do they have professional email hosting?

• Are you using a database? Do you need mySQL or MS SQL? Are they capable of securely hosting your database?

With the exception of MS SQL these are products and services that should be included in any hosting plan worth its salt.

Cheap Web Hosting

Here is where things begin to get a little more difficult.  Some hosting companies advertise their site as ‘cheap hosting’ whilst others look down on these solutions.  The question that is probably worth asking here, and throughout the purchase purpose is what am I using the site for, how is it powered, what software would I need, and how reliable should the services am looking for be?  At the end of the day there is an element of paying for what you get so it is always worth being a little cautious when prices are that low and seeing if there is something hidden in the small print when purchasing hosting from £2 per month.  It might pay dividends later on to raise the bar a little bit, and go for packages in the £5 to £10 range.  Many may still consider this as a cheap service but there are many more reliable providers offering shared hosting that fall into this bracket.

So, bear in mind some of the outstanding issues, write down a list of criteria that you need, look into the reliability of their equipment? Have they mitigated single points of failure (SPFs)? What is there up time? What can go wrong with their setup? How reliable is the support? How much support do you need?

In short, take your time, as a little bit of extra effort here can pay back many times over in the future.  If your site is important, and reliability and resilience are important to you, then you may want to look into VPS hosting as a step up from using a shared platform, or even your own dedicated or advanced hosting setup.

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