All businesses need websites, but getting started can be daunting. Sure, you could just communicate with your customers via Facebook, but if you're serious about doing business online, you'll want to take the plunge and sign up for a top-notch Web hosting service. Bluehost does a good job of balancing price and features for businesses that need a bit of hand-holding, while also offering plenty of options to experienced administrators. Bluehost lacks some features offered by the top services, Dreamhost and HostGator, but it's a solid service that's worth checking out.
Shared Web Hosting Packages Bluehost doesn't offer month-to-month shared hosting options. Instead, it requires you to sign up for an annual plan. If you sign up for a two-year or three-year plan, you get discounts. If you commit to staying put for three years, the service's $3.95 per month rate is attractive. That said, those who don't want lengthy commitments will probably prefer HostGator's month-to-month options.
Bluehost's offerings are identical to HostMonster's, right down to the names of its shared Web hosting plans. Of course, the fact that Bluehost and HostMonster have the same parent company—Endurance International Group—may have something to do with that. Endurance International also owns FastDomain and iPage.
The Starter shared hosting package (from $5.99 per month with a one-year contract) includes a free domain name that you can keep as long as you use Bluehost, free domain name transfer, 100GB of storage, unlimited monthly data transfers, and the ability to host a single website. The Plus package (starting at $9.99 per month with a one-year contract) adds an antispam tool as well as unlimited storage, websites, and mailboxes. The Business Pro package (starting at $19.99 per month with a one-year contract) tops all of Bluehost's shared hosting plans with a dedicated IP address, an SSL certificate, site backup, and two antispam applications. There are a lot of options, which is great, but every time I log in to Bluehost, I'm shown an ad to purchase another service or add-on. That's annoying.
HostGator, the Editors' Choice for shared hosting, gives small- and medium-sized businesses room to expand their Web presences without the aggressive upselling. The Linux- or Windows-based Hatchling plan (starting at $7.17 per month) offers unlimited disk space, bandwidth databases, and email addresses, plus support for one domain and third-party applications, such as content management systems and e-commerce platforms. HostGator's Baby plan (starting at $7.96 per month) builds on the Hatchling offering by adding unlimited domains. The top-tier Business plan (starting at $11.96 per month) includes highly specialized options, such as a free toll-free phone number and a private SSL certificate. HostGator has a well-rounded shared Web hosting package.
Virtual Private Servers If you need more power, expect high volumes of traffic, or have specific compliance requirements that prevent you from using shared servers, Bluehost's virtual private server (or VPS) options are worth considering.
Bluehost offers four tiers of Linux-based VPS hosting, ranging from the $29.99 per month Standard (30GB of storage, 2GB of memory, and 1TB of monthly data transfers) to the $119.99 per month Ultimate (240GB of storage, 8GB of memory, 4TB of monthly data transfers). As with the shared Web hosting plans, VPS hosting plans include discounts for longer-term contracts. Unfortunately, Bluehost doesn't offer Windows-based VPS.
Those are attractive plans, but Hostwinds—the Editors' Choice for VPS hosting—beats out Bluehost with packages that include unlimited monthly data transfers and Linux- or Windows-based server options. Don't underestimate the importance of a Windows server option. If you plan to build (or migrate) a site built on an ASP.NET framework, you'll appreciate Hostwinds's Windows-based VPS offerings.
Dedicated Servers Bluehost has many dedicated server configurations, too. The servers start at $149 per month and can be outfitted with a Linux operating system and up to 1TB of hard drive space, 16GB of RAM, and 15TB of data transfers per month—the same specs as HostMonster. Those are solid numbers, but Arvixe$3.20 at Arvixe - Shared—the PCMag Editors' Choice for dedicated Web hosting—one-ups Bluehost with a choice of Linux and Windows operating systems and unlimited monthly data transfers.
WordPress Hosting If you're looking to create a WordPress-powered website, consider Bluehost's four Linux-based packages: Blogger ($24.99 per month with a one-year contract), Professional ($74.99 per month with a one-year contract), Business ($119.99 per month with a one-year contract), and Enterprise ($169.99 per month with a one-year contract). These plans are of the managed WordPress variety, which means that Bluehost performs automatic site backups and protects your installation with WordPress-specifc security.
Bluehost doesn't require you to install the content management system, as it comes preinstalled. Once you're logged into WordPress, you can create posts, pages, and galleries as you would with any other self-hosted WordPress site.
Bluehost caps your site's traffic based on the number of visitors, but the caps are removed if you sign up for the high-end Enterprise plan. The Web host's storage starts at 30GB and tops out at 250GB.
1&1, the PCMag Editors' Choice for WordPress hosting, has no such traffic caps at any hosting tier. It also boasts a choice of Linux- and Windows-based servers, and a curated list of recommended WordPress themes and plug-ins.
Bluehost also lets you set up non-managed WordPress sites. When you click the control panel's WordPress icon, you're taken to the Mojo Marketplace, from which you can install the WordPress app. Like iPage, Bluehost lets you set up a fresh WordPress installation or directly import an existing one. Installation is straightforward, and you can browse through the marketplace for additional themes and applications.
Site Creation Bluehost has a lot of tools for building sites, filtering spam, managing email, collecting site statistics, and managing domains. For building a website, you can use the WordPress content management platform, create a website using Weebly (an excellent website-builder), upload files using FTP or File Manager, or use the goMobi Mobile Web builder if you bought the add-on. Weeby's drag-and-drop functionality let me quickly build an attractive page complete with slideshows, contact forms, social media links, and more. Weebly's free version gives you basic functionality (you can create six pages and add custom HTML), but upgrading to the $8.99 per month Professional tier offers even more flexibility (custom themes, password protected pages, and more). Check out the PCMag Weebly review for a deeper dive.
You can also go to the Mojo Marketplace to download other content-management systems or site builders. It's an entirely separate interface, but if you want to expand your site's capabilities, the marketplace is a good place to start. Using Bluehost's Mojo Marketplace is a similar to running sister-site iPage's marketplace.
Email If you have a website, you will most likely eventually want email accounts. Bluehost lets you create up to 100 email addresses with its most basic plan. Other Bluehost tiers let you create unlimited email addresses. If you think you want a lot of email addresses, consider the many alternatives that let you create unlimited email addresses with the starter plans, such as Arvixe, Dreamhost, and iPage.
Setting up an email account in Bluehost is a breeze. You don't set up an account during the Web hosting sign-up process as you do with Arvixe. Instead, you click on the email accounts icon from the control panel and create email accounts one at a time. Along with setting a password, you can also assign storage quotas or leave them as unlimited. This is fine, but I really wish more providers would provide a bulk email tool similar to what Network Solutions offers.
E-Commerce You can grab email-marketing tools such as DaDa Mail (starting at $34.95 per year), software that lets you send email-based newsletters to a subscriber list. For an online store or the ability to accept payments, you can get e-commerce applications such as Magento, ShopSite (for shopping cart software), and TransFirst payment gateway. With Magento, I was able to create an attractive store by dragging and dropping website elements. Magento has more flexibility than ShopSite, but if you aren't looking for an elaborate online storefront, ShopSite's simpler interface may get you up and running faster. For small businesses, that time savings may be worth it.
I also like the fact that Bluehost supports PostgreSQL along with the more popular MySQL. This means I'm not limited to installing software that runs only with MySQL.
Security Features Bluehost's security features are pleasantly surprising. It offers three antispam tools—Apache Spam Assassin, Spam Experts, and Spam Hammer—as well as hotlink protection. You can also create filters for email accounts and users, password-protect directories, create IP address blacklists, and manage private keys and digital certificates. I'm always pleased to see secure shell (SSH) access, because it means administrators have a secure way of accessing specific configuration files.
I'm impressed that Bluehost offers CloudFlare, which enhances performance and security features. If you want SSL on your site, or you are worried about distributed denial of service attacks against your site, CloudFlare is worth considering.
Rock-Solid Uptime Website uptime is a vital element of the Web hosting experience. If your site goes down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. For this testing, I used a website monitoring tool to track my Bluehost-hosted test site's uptime over a 30-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings my website and sends me an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least one minute. The data revealed that Bluehost is incredibly stable. In fact, of the Web hosting services I've reviewed, only a handful went down less often.
Customer Service Bluehost offers 24/7 telephone support, online Web chat, a ticket-based system, and a knowledgebase—another way Bluehost is similar to HostMonster.
I tested Bluehost's Web chat on a weekday afternoon to ask about the differences between regular Web hosting and optimized WordPress hosting. The rep quickly fielded my question. He stated that optimized WordPress Web hosting has automated site backups and is designed for highly trafficked WordPress sites. I was satisfied with his response.
I called the phone support system the following morning to ask a representative about how to import my WordPress.com setup into Bluehost. A person came to my assistance in just a few seconds, and the representative walked me through the steps. That's another win for Bluehost support.
Money-Back Guarantee Bluehost's hosting packages come with a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is standard fare in the Web hosting space. That said, Dreamhost bests it with an impressive 97-day money back guarantee.
A Decent Web Host Bluehost is a respectable and highly stable Web host that makes setting up a website a breeze. The features and the user experience are very similar to stablemate HostMonster's, and the only reason I would suggest picking Bluehost over HostMonster is because of the former's array of security options. If you are looking for a Web host that's easy to get set up and running, however, you get far more for your money with HostGator—the PCMag Editors' Choice for novice-friendly Web hosting services. And if you want a Web host that will let you grow and that is furthermore designed for more advanced users, Dreamhost—the PCMag's other overall Editors' Choice for Web hosting services—is excellent, too.
Automatic creation and management of virtual machines is a topical issue for any company that provides VPS services.
If you manage a large number of machines, a command line is definitely not the only tool you may need to perform various operations including client tasks, because such operations may be time-consuming.
12 Control Panels to Manage Virtual Machines
In order to simplify routine tasks of server administrators and users, various companies develop control panels for virtual machines management, including interface-based solutions.
Don't Miss: 20 Open Source/Commercial Control Panels to Manage Linux Servers
A control panel empowers you to perform any operation with a mouse click, whereas it would take you a good deal of time to complete the same task in console. With a control panel, you will save your time and efforts. However, it's not all that simple.
Nowadays, SolusVM is the most popular software product for small and medium-sized businesses. VMware, in its turn, is a leading solution for large organizations. Both software products are commercial and rather expensive.
They deliver a large number of functions, however, some companies, especially, startups may need them. Besides, many of them cannot afford such an expensive product. For example, startups and companies in the times of crisis may experience financial difficulties. Moreover, one can find interesting, outstanding solutions integrated with billing systems including tools for VM management.
How not to get lost among a great number of offers? We decided to help our users, and wrote the following article, in which they will find answers to this question.
In this article we will describe control panels for virtual machines management, both commercial and open source, and help you choose the right solution to meet your personal needs.
1. SolusVM – Solus Virtual Manager
Solus Virtual Manager (SolusVM) is one of the most popular commercial VPS management solutions. It provides full support of OpenVZ, Linux KVM, XEN Paravirtualization, and XEN HVM. SolusVM friendly GUI allows users to manage VPS cluster with ease.
SolusVM – VPS Management Software
Visit Homepage: http://solusvm.com/
2. VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere is the world's leading server virtualization platform for building cloud infrastructure. With tons of its different powerful features, vSphere is a truely state-of-the-art software virtual machines management software. It is an ideal solution for large VPS providers with appropriate budgets and professional staff.
Commercial Linux-based VPS management control panel with full support of KVM and OpenVZ virtualizations. VMmanager presents tools for creating virtual machines, providing VPS hosting services, and building cloud infrastructure.
In case your business is just taking off, or you generally don't have large volumes, you can use a free version, which allows you to create 2 virtual machines, 5 nodes, and allocate 16 GB of RAM.
Proxmox Virtual Environment is an easy-to-use open source virtualization platform for running Virtual Appliances and Virtual Machines. The software itself is free, but support services (even access to Community Forum) are provided on a paid basis – up to 66 euro per month.
Proxmox Virtual Environment
Visit Homepage: https://www.proxmox.com/
5. Virtkick
Virtkick is a commercial "all-in-one" tool, which combines a billing software and VPS management tools. The GUI is minimalistic and easy to use even for VPS clients. Virtkick developers promote this solution to be a perfect tool for small data centers or game hosting services.
Virtkick Control Panel
Visit Homepage: https://www.virtkick.com/
6. Sadeem
With its simple and elegant design, Sadeem control panel is very close to Virtkick. The only difference is that Sadeem is designed for cloud hosting providers. However, it also includes a built-in support system and a billing platform.
Sadeem Control Panel
Visit Homepage: https://www.sadeem.io/
7. Archipel
Archipel is an open source solution for virtual machines management. With its help you're able to manage few locally hosted VM's or thousands of VPS located in different data center.
Archipel supports KVM, Xen, OpenVZ, and VMWare virtualizations, and enables to perform all basic commands such as live migration, VMCasts, packages, etc.
Archipel Control Panel
Visit Homepage: http://archipelproject.org/
8. Virtualizor – VPS Control Panel
Virtualizor is a commercial VPS Control Panel from Softaculous developers. It supports OVZ, KVM, and Xen: PV/HVM/Server virtualizations. VPS administrators and average users can easily manage their virtual machines using this software product.
Virtualizor Control Panel
Visit Homepage: http://www.virtualizor.com/
9. Xen Orchestra
XO is a commercial web UI , which provides an intuitive, powerful, and completely web-based interface specially designed to manage XenServer (or Xen+XAPI) infrastructure (VM, servers, pools, etc.)
Xen Orchestra Control Panel
For more information how to install XenServer with Xen Orchestra web interface, read our articles:
Installation of XenServer 7
Install and Manage XenServer with Xen Orchestra Web Interface
10. Feathur Control Panel
Feathur is an open source project. This is a PHP-based control panel for administrators and individual users Feathur's installers create a Linux-based Nginx, PHPand MySQL system (LEMP) with a built-in PHP MyAdmin and control of VPS via SSH connections.
Feathur Control Panel
Visit Homepage: http://feathur.com/
11. WebVirtMgr – VM Management Console
WebVirtMgr is an open source libvirt-based solution for VM management. It allows users to manage domains, and adjust a domain's resource allocation. A VNC viewer over SSH tunnel deliversa full graphical console to a guest domain. Currently hypervisor supports only KVM virtualization.
WebVirtMgr – Virtual Machine Control Panel
Visit Homepage: https://www.webvirtmgr.net
12. OpenNode Cloud Platform
OpenNode Cloud Platform is an open source server virtualization and management solution, specially designed for government organizations. It offers an easy and flexible way for creating a private or hybrid cloud for public sector services.
OpenNode Cloud Platform
Visit Homepage: http://opennodecloud.com/
We made an overview of 12 most popular control panels with web-interfaces for virtual machines management. We hope that our article helped you choose the best solution according to your specific needs, and made your business grow.
Revolutionary multi-Cloud platform to enrich multiplayer experience as Titanfall 2 goes cross platform
London, United Kingdom – July 26, 2016: GAME Digital plc today announce that Respawn Entertainment has partnered with Multiplay to host Titanfall 2.
The business partnership is a significant win for Multiplay, a wholly owned subsidiary of GAME Digital, which impressed Respawn with both their deep understanding of game server hosting plus their auto-scaling hybrid-cloud technology. The Multiplay Game Services platform is integrated with a global network of dedicated server providers as well major Cloud providers such as Google Compute Platform, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
This flexible platform will enable Titanfall 2 to utilise a far-reaching array of hosting technologies across the globe. Players will be well served with a powerful base-layer of dedicated servers, minimal latency and maximum capacity through Multiplay's cloud-bursting tech.
Paul Manuel, Director Digital Business for Multiplay commented: "Titanfall 2 is a significant win for our enterprise hosting division, and we are delighted to be working with the talented team at Respawn. We share their passion for innovation and our team at Multiplay are constantly pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved within game server hosting. Our platform combines high-power dedicated servers across the globe with the additional capability of automatically bursting into the leading cloud providers. This provides un-paralleled flexibility and fault tolerance that's simply not achievable through a single Cloud provider."
Jon Shiring, Lead Programmer for Respawn Entertainment commented: "The Titanfall 2 launch is going to be bigger and better than the last game and what's really important to me is that the game just works. We wanted to make sure we had an insane amount of scalability and reliability, so we partnered with Multiplay because they have a great deal of expertise in game server hosting and a very clever auto-scaling product that can abstract away different cloud environments that lets us focus on making games. We have been working closely with Multiplay to ensure we utilize multiple clouds as well as bare metal servers in every region our game will be on sale. Giving us more flexibility, more local datacenters, endless scalability, and the highest reliability will result in the best service we can offer to millions of players."
Multiplay Digital Services will deploy multiple Cloud providers and Bare Metal Server data centre locations in each region, designed to protect gamers from gameplay interruptions and to get them back online within minutes if an outage were to occur.
Titanfall 2 is a highly-anticipated first person shooter and is set to build on the foundation Respawn established with the first Titanfall – fast, fluid, and fun gameplay between Pilots and titans, to once again innovate and elevate the shooter genre.
Players will be able to experience Multiplay Digital Services' revolutionary multi-Cloud platform when Titanfall 2 releases on October 28th this year.
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They offer PayPal, Credit Card, and Bitcoin as payment methods. As always, please ensure you read their TOS and AUP.
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In this article we are going through the steps on how to export e-mails from DBMail mailserver to Maildir format in a Linux VPS. More specifically, the tutorial explains how to export the e-mails from an SQL database to Mbox format and then convert the Mbox e-mails to Maildir.
In this article we are going through the steps on how to export e-mails from DBMail mailserver to Maildir format in a Linux VPS. More specifically, the tutorial explains how to export the e-mails from an SQL database to Mbox format and then convert the Mbox e-mails to Maildir.
Let's say a word or two for each of the components being involved, shall we?
What is DBMail? DBMail provides fast and scalable SQL based mail services. It stores the mail messages in a relational database such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQLite. It has the following frontends IMAP4, POP3, ManageSieve and LMTP
What is Mbox? Mbox file is the most common format for storing email messages on a hard drive. All the messages for each mailbox are stored as a single, long, text file in a string of concatenated e-mail messages, starting with the From header of the message. MBOX files were used predominantly on Unix.
What is Maildir? Maildir e-mail format is a common way of storing e-mail messages, where each message is kept in a separate file with a unique name, and each folder is a directory. The local filesystem handles file locking as messages are added, moved and deleted.
0. SSH TO YOUR DBMAIL LINUX VPS First thing to do is to login to your dbmail virtual server via SSH and optionally fire up a screen/tmux session. For example:
1. EXPORT EMAILS FROM DBMAIL To export emails from DBMAIL, we're going to use the dbmail-export tool provided by DBMAIL itself. The tool supports multiple arguments and parameters (see dbmail-export --help), but in this case we're going to export all emails for a given account and period of time and also mark these emails as DELETED so dbmail-util can purge them from the database.
First off, let's setup some shell variables such as EXPORT_USER, EXPORT_DIR, DATE_FROM and DATE_TO:
once the variables are set, run the following commands:
mkdir -p "${EXPORT_DIR}" cd "${EXPORT_DIR}"
and then execute the dbmail-export tool to export the emails from the database:
dbmail-export -v -D -u "${EXPORT_USER}" -b "${EXPORT_DIR}" -s "1:* SINCE ${DATE_FROM} BEFORE ${DATE_TO}"
keep in mind though, that you may want to adjust the parameters used according to your needs. for example, if you want to export all emails for a given user not just for some period of time, you can safely omit the -s argument and its parameter
if everything went fine, you should have the emails exported in MBOX format within ${EXPORT_DIR}. What you have to do now is to convert the exported emails from MBOX to Maildir format using a simple PERL script.
Navigate to your home user directory and download the mb2md script using the following commands:
cd - wget https://vpsineu.com/wg et/mb2md.pl chmod +x mb2md.pl
Once the script is downloaded, convert the exported dbmail e-mails from MBOX to Maildir by executing:
and then transfer the Maildir emails to your another server using your preferred tool (rsync, scp, ftp etc.). For example, we are using rsync over SSH as in:
3. FINIALIZE THE MIGRATION Now, SSH to the archive/another mailserver and finalize the email migration by moving the Maildir directory to the configured emails location and setup proper permissions and ownership:
of course, you have to tune the above paths to match your setup
4. ACCESS THE ARCHIVED EMAILS The final step is to try to access the migrated emails via your webmail system or by using an IMAP client like Thunderbird for example.
ServerMania, a trusted provider of dedicated server hosting, cloud hosting, and colocation services, has announced the introduction of a new hosting affiliate program with payouts of up to $550 for each sale. With an average order value of $125, ServerMania is a high-value opportunity for marketing partners in the hosting space.
ServerMania's affiliate program equips partners with the tools they need to make money from successful referrals to a trusted hosting industry brand. For promoting ServerMania's comprehensive range of infrastructure hosting solutions, marketing partners are rewarded with 50% of the value of the first month's subscription purchase, with the opportunity to gain monthly performance bonuses. There is no minimum referral rate; commissions are paid for every subscription purchase.
Affiliates receive a $25 bonus for their first sale with ServerMania.
ServerMania provides hosting options to suit businesses of all sizes, with server hosting plans that include virtual private servers, hybrid servers, dedicated servers, and cloud servers on the company's high-availability OpenStack public cloud platform.
?ServerMania has a great reputation for reliability and customer satisfaction - we're among the most experienced infrastructure hosting providers in the industry," explained ServerMania CEO, Kevin Blanchard, "With our new affiliate program, we are giving our marketing partners an opportunity to generate substantial commissions by increasing awareness of the benefits our platform can bring businesses of all sizes."
The ServerMania Affiliate Program is designed to ensure that marketing partners are rewarded for their efforts. Affiliate sales are tracked using CJ Affiliate, the most reliable affiliate tracking service in the industry. Tracking cookies have a 90-day lifespan, ensuring partners get the credit they deserve for referrals.
In addition to managed server hosting, ServerMania offers a range of related services, including enterprise DDoS protection as standard for all server hosting plans, and a powerful backup solution. ServerMania's ability to provide a full spectrum of hosting modalities and hosting-related services make the company an attractive option for businesses seeking the leverage a broad range of infrastructure hosting without increased complexity.
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About ServerMania:
Since it was founded in 2002, ServerMania has always strived to provide its clients with enterprise-level service at an unbeatable cost. ServerMania offers a wide range of fully-customizable dedicated, hybrid, cloud, VPS and colocation hosting services. All ServerMania clients enjoy a 100% uptime SLA and are assisted by a 24/7 rapid response team - one with some of the best response times in the industry. ServerMania also carries out regular surveys to ensure complete customer satisfaction and care. For more information, visit http://www.servermania.com.
Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/07/prweb13569567.htm.
Download the Essential Cloud Buyer's Guide to learn important factors to consider before selecting a provider as well as buying criteria to help you make the best decision for your infrastructure needs, brought to you in partnership with Internap.
Choosing the operating system for your VPS has nowadays become more complicated than it was a few years ago. While Windows has been simply iterating through versions, there are a lot more distributions of Linux available for your virtual private server.
Parameters such as CPU, memory, IO, etc. have been blurring of late due to advances — particularly in the Windows operating system. Let's examine the pros and cons of each and leave you with some recommendations.
Windows VPS Hosting
Performance: Between the two OSs, Linux is definitely more efficient with CPU, memory, and IO usage than Windows in almost all accounts. Windows servers' performance improves at higher processing power and memory levels, however, but all that comes at a significant cost compared to Linux.
Application support: Popular scripting languages such as ASP, ASP.NET, C# work only on Windows server. Therefore, Windows VPS is the ideal option for those who run applications built using these languages. Windows servers are also better suited to work with database software such as MS Access and MS SQL.
Interestingly, Windows servers also support other scripting languages, such as Python, PHP, Perl, and Ruby, which are primarily built for Linux.
Control panel choices: Parallels Plesk Panel is the best-known Windows control panel software, and it's never stopped amazing us. In its recent iteration, it has completed a major overhaul of its GUI and added tons of much-needed functionality. It remains a favorite among all Windows users.
Security: Windows servers need a regularly updated anti-virus not just for the sites it hosts, but to secure itself against viruses, malware, Trojans, and worms as well. Viruses are still mostly written for Windows, so system administrators need to be extra careful when running a Windows operating system.
Cost: Windows software require expensive licenses depending on the different flavors of OS, as well as depending on the number of cores in the server CPU.
Linux VPS Hosting
Performance: Linux has the smallest footprint on server performance. It requires very few system resources to run various services and software. It is ideally suited for processing high workloads at minimal system requirements.
Application support: A vast range of software languages, such as C++, Python, PHP, Perl, Java, and more, natively work best with Linux. More developers prefer writing software applications for Linux over Windows, and this has led to a surge of Linux applications over Windows in the web-hosting industry.
Security: Linux comes better configured for security out of the box than Windows servers. While both VPSs can be secured, Linux seems to have an upper hand, as it has a huge community following that helps identify and patch issues before they can become major problems.
Control panel choices: Over the years, cPanel has emerged as the favorite Linux VPS software for most hosting companies due to its ease of management and user experience. There are several more choices available for Linux VPS in commercial and free licensing options. These include Aegir, ISPConfig, Virtualmin, Webmin, etc..
Cost: Unlike Windows, most Linux distributions are free and open source.
So Should You Run Windows or Linux VPS Hosting?
Windows VPS is geared toward two types of users — those who are already using Windows in other deployments and are more comfortable in Windows environment as well as those types of users who have to run Windows-specific applications and software.
Linux VPSs are particularly meant for low resource usage servers and for keeping maximum system resources available to the applications that you host other than the operating system itself.
The Cloud Zone is brought to you in partnership with Internap. Read Bare-Metal Cloud 101 to learn about bare-metal cloud and how it has emerged as a way to complement virtualized services.
FireEye found all of the hallmarks researchers have seen from other types of ransomware: phishing attempts, macros and customer service.
A command-and-control server that has been used to distribute a ransomware campaign has been shut down by a combination of security researchers from FireEye, the Computer Emergency Response Team in the Netherlands and several web hosting companies.
In a blog post written by two FireEye researchers, the company details how the Cerber ransomware variant works its way into Windows-based machines using fairly common methods. A malicious payload has been attached to a Word document, which has then been attached to a faulty email. Once the Word document is opened, a macro then writes a small piece of VBScript into memory, starting the process to encrypt a user's files.
Researchers also found that like many other ransomware variants, there is an element of customer service built into the malware. The decryptor supports 12 languages to facilitate payment. Additionally, the criminals offer victims a discount if the ransom is paid within a certain time frame.
The blog post's authors also found the attackers monitored a number of countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia — including Russia, Ukraine and Moldova among others — to keep the ransomware outside of certain legal jurisdictions.
[Read more: Feds confident in fight against ransomware]
"Selective targeting has historically been used to keep malware from infecting endpoints within the author's geographical region, thus protecting them from the wrath of local authorities," the blog post reads. "The actor also controls their exposure using this technique. In this case, there is reason to suspect the attackers are based in Russia or the surrounding region."
The server shutdown comes as Cerber has been spotted causing problems for cloud-based services. Last week, Trend Micro found a variant of Cerber was targeting individual and business Office 365 accounts.
Ransomware, particularly through macro-based attacks, has picked up in recent months. In the first quarter of 2016, there were 450,000 cases of macro malware, according to a McAfee Labs report — up about 300,000 cases from the same time in 2014.
[Want more stories like this? Sign up for the CyberScoop newsletter,and allow us to make sense of it all.]
The FireEye team strongly suggested turning off macros to prevent any further problems.
"Disabling support for macros in documents from the Internet and increasing user awareness are two ways to reduce the likelihood of infection," the blog post reads. "If you can, consider blocking connections to websites you haven't explicitly whitelisted. However, these controls may not be sufficient to prevent all infections or they may not be possible based on your organization."
Contact the reporter on this story via email at greg.otto@fedscoop.com, or follow him on Twitter at @gregotto. His OTR and PGP info can be found here. Subscribe to the Daily Scoop for stories like this in your inbox every morning by signing up here: fdscp.com/sign-me-on.
Everleap, a Windows cloud hosting provider, announces the enhancement of its database services with Managed SQL Server 2016 solutions. The SQL hosting solution offers private servers with the latest SQL Server 2016.
The premium SQL Server solution is designed to address the needs of businesses running multi-tenant SaaS applications that require hosting of a large number of databases or businesses that require hosting of large SQL databases and businesses that may require special custom SQL server configurations not available with typical shared SQL Server solutions.
?We launched managed SQL last year and we are excited to add the option of the recently released SQL Server 2016 technology. Customers can take advantage of new features in SQL Server 2016 like stretch database to enable hybrid hosting scenarios, and temporal tables and native JSON support." said Takeshi Eto, VP Marketing and Business Development at Everleap.
The Managed SQL server plans come with set CPU core configurations and the service can be expanded from there. Some of the Managed SQL Hosting plan details include:
Two base plans with 4 CPU cores or 8 CPU cores
Choice of SQL Server 2016, 2014 or 2012
200 GB storage and can be expanded
Customers can select the amount of RAM
Includes server maintenance, security patching and updates
Includes technical support
Free consultation and migration
Since the Managed SQL server houses databases for a single customer, server customization is supported. For example, special monitoring software can be installed or services like SQL jobs or SQL CLR can be enabled.
?Our Managed SQL delivers the power of dedicated SQL servers but is more cost-effective. It's fully managed without additional fees and it's easy to use like shared SQL hosting." added Eto.
About Everleap
Everleap is a modern hosting solution built by the team at DiscountASP.NET utilizing Microsoft Windows Azure Pack. Everleap brings together the reliability and scalability of big cloud providers with the predictable pricing, bundled services, technical support, and ease and familiarity of traditional website hosting. For more information, visit http://www.Everleap.com.
All trademarks are the property of their legal owners.
Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/Everleap/0716/prweb13560193.htm.
Future Hosting, a specialized VPS hosting and dedicated server hosting provider, has announced its biggest ever loyalty upgrades, with VPS clients set to receive substantial resource and performance increases to their virtual private server hosting plans.
Southfield, MI (PRWEB) July 20, 2016
Future Hosting, a specialized VPS hosting and dedicated server hosting provider, has announced its biggest ever loyalty upgrades, with VPS clients set to receive substantial resource and performance increases to their virtual private server hosting plans. All virtual private servers will be upgraded at no additional cost to clients.
Future Hosting offers a wide range of managed and unmanaged virtual private server plans, which range from low-cost managed servers that make great development platforms, to high-powered servers capable of supporting high-traffic websites and eCommerce stores.
All servers in the company's SSD-powered range will be upgraded without a cost increase to clients, with each receiving the resources of a higher tier. For example, users of the popular SSD2 plan, which includes 1.5GB of RAM, 35GB of SSD storage, and 2TB of bandwidth, will be upgraded to SSD4-equivalent specifications: 3GB of RAM, 65GB of SSD storage, and 4TB of bandwidth — all at no extra cost.
"Future Hosting regularly updates the hardware our virtual private server hosting plans run on, and we think it's only fair that as the technology improves, our clients see tangible benefits," said Maulesh Patel, VP of Operations of Future Hosting, "This is our biggest-ever loyalty upgrade, and the new server capabilities will make a real difference to the performance of our clients' servers."
In addition to the loyalty upgrades for current SSD-based VPS plans, Future Hosting is also moving users of its legacy VM VPS plans to more powerful SSD servers with increased resource allocations. For example, clients currently using the VM2 virtual private server plans will be upgraded to SSD3-equivalent plans, which include 2GB of RAM, 50GB of SSD storage, and 3 TB of bandwidth.
All Future Hosting SSD VPS plans incorporate a range of managed hosting services, including 24-hour support for software services installed as standard, the Future Protect backup solution, and the optional Future Engineer Pro, a pro-active management solution that includes operating system and kernel updates, and system monitoring with pro-active issue resolution.
###
About Future Hosting, LLC
Founded in 2001, Future Hosting is a privately held leading Internet solutions provider specializing in managed hosting, including Dedicated Servers, Virtual Private Servers, and Hybrid Virtual Private Servers. The company has built a strong reputation for its high-quality service, innovative pricing models, and 3-hour Service Level Agreement. Future Hosting is based in Southfield, Michigan. For more information, visit http://www.futurehosting.com.
For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/07/prweb13562805.htm
This story was originally published by Daily Mail Times (http://www.dailymailtimes.com) and is the sole property of Daily Mail Times. If you are reading this article on another website, that means this article was illegally copied and re-published to this website in violation of U.S. and International copyright law. You can view the original version of this story at http://www.dailymailtimes.com/future-hosting-announces-biggest-ever-loyalty-upgrade-for-vps-clients/80332/
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kvm, loveservers, loveservers.com, manchester, openvz, ssd, united kingdom July 20, 2016 @ 12:16 am, by Ishaq
Jack from LoveServers sent in this offer to celebrate their move to a new datacenter.
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They accept PayPal, Credit/Debit Card, and BACS/Wire Transfer as payment methods. Please see the ToS for further information before ordering.
Offer:
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iomart (Manchester, United Kingdom) Test IPv4: 185.145.46.3 Test IPv6: 2a07:4580:b0d:1::dead:beef Test file: http://lg.loveservers.com/100MB.test Looking glass: http://lg.loveservers.com/
First came the excellent 25i – CLONES Audio's commercial take on the Gaincard circuit – then a pair of 55pm monoblocks for those who wanted more control and transparency. After that, two DACs: Asher replaced Sheva. Then the POWER STATION – a linear PSU for the Mac Mini.
Evident from the company's product release pattern, designer 'Funjoe' is working backwards up the signal path, from loudspeaker output to digital source.
This week CLONES Audio announce the HOST music server for which the press release does quoth thusly:
"The HOST is the first digital music server of CLONES audio. Equipped with a high performance USB digital audio output, Ethernet port, solid-state drive for music storage, full linear power supply with the super low noise regulator modules."
One key point to tease out a little further is the HOST's linear – not switching – power supply. One Power Station board fuels the mainboard, the other the SSD drive and SHAAR USB 3.0 output.
SHAAR? That's Funjoe's take on "an audiophile grade PCIe to USB audio gateway". It sports "ultra low noise regulators for digital chips, power input noise filters, an extreme low noise master clock module with a precision 1ppm TCXO."
On the software side, HOST runs a customised Linux operating system complete with Roon Core (server); BYO Roon license. A Daphile option is offered for those who don't Roon.
Pricing on the HOST starts at €1377 (~US$1500 at press time). That's right into souped-up Mac Mini territory. However, the final invoice amount is dependent on one's choice of SSD size: 256Gb, 500Gb, 1TB or 2TB.
Insufficient for your needs? The inclusion of four non-audio USB ports suggests that user-supplied external hard drives can augment the HOST's storage capacity.
Specifications 'n stuff:
• Measurements: 322mm (W) X 260mm (D) X 90mm (H) • Weight: 7kg • Digital Output: 2 x USB • Gigabit Ethernet, 4 x USB • 2 year warranty
One final thought: if every manufacturer insists on an all caps naming convention then ultimately no-one stands out.
Further information: CLONES Audio
Related
Clones AudioHOSTmedia server
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John lives in Sydney, Australia where he derives an income from the ad revenues of DAR. John is also an occasional staff writer for Stereophile, 6moons and TONEAudio.
In Part 1 of this series we got .NET up and running on a Debian Virtual Private Server (VPS). Time to build a simple ASP.NET Core 1.0 web app that will greet unnamed sailors surfing by. But first things first: we need to harden our Linux box, which is still running out in the wild with a default setup. Then we're ready to set up NGINX and build that fancy app in C#.
Firewall
Remember how excited I sounded about VPSes because they let me build on a full-fledged system for peanuts? If you go for a standard, dumbed-down IIS hosting plan, you don't get any of that, but in exchange a bunch experts will be taking care of the entire system's safety, and they'll be doing a much better job at it than you or I ever could. The price of your freedom with a VPS is that it's your responsibility to ensure a minimum level of security.
There are apparently two ways to go about setting up a firewall in Linux. The first is for those who truly, really know what they are doing, and/or are willing to spend days learning. You can learn about that way if you Google for iptables. My way is the Uncomplicated Firewall, or ufw for short. Here's how you set it up from the command prompt.
gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo apt-get install ufw # # Many lines of output omitted # gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo ufw status Status: inactive gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo ufw default deny incoming Default incoming policy changed to 'deny' (be sure to update your rules accordingly) gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo ufw default allow outgoing Default outgoing policy changed to 'allow' (be sure to update your rules accordingly) gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo ufw allow ssh Rules updated Rules updated (v6) gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo ufw allow http Rules updated Rules updated (v6) gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo ufw allow https Rules updated Rules updated (v6) gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo ufw enable Command may disrupt existing ssh connections. Proceed with operation (y|n)? y Firewall is active and enabled on system startup
(If you didn't read the first part: I'm highlighting your own commands in bold for better readability.)
Let's unpack that:
apt-get installs ufw
With ufw status you check that the firewall is inactive. (It should be, right after install.) This one matters quite a bit. If you start disabling all connections, you might end up losing the very SSH session you're using, and then you have a fully autonomous server somewhere that no one can ever access again remotely.
The next two commands are self-explanatory: they disable all incoming connections, and allow outgoing ones. There's a school that would be much more paranoid about outgoing connections too, but then you have to work extra to download updates or modules, not to mention to call services from your own application.
Having established that our baseline is "no incoming connections," the following commands re-enable specific things, such as the ports for SSH, HTTP and HTTPS. The most crucial one is SSH, or you won't be able to get back in again.
Finally, ufw enable turns on the firewall with the rules we just set up.
Point a domain name at your server
If you already own a domain, I don't need to waste your time here. If you don't, then you might do what I did: get a free one in about five minutes. There are several top-level domains (TLDs) that let you do this; I went for a .tk domain. I'll be using vps-net-core.tk in the rest of these articles. In your own domain's management interface, point an empty "A" record at your VPS's IP address; optionally, also point a second record for the www subdomain. In my case, the setup looks like this:
Officially, that could take up to a day to propagate through the internets, but in practice I've never had to wait more than a few minutes. You can check the status by pinging your server from the Windows command prompt:
C:\>ping vps-net-core.tk Pinging vps-net-core.tk [46.101.137.211] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 46.101.137.211: bytes=32 time=41ms TTL=52 Reply from 46.101.137.211: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=52 Reply from 46.101.137.211: bytes=32 time=62ms TTL=52 Reply from 46.101.137.211: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=52 Ping statistics for 46.101.137.211: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 26ms, Maximum = 62ms, Average = 39ms
Pro tip: If you really, really don't want to blow a throwaway email address for a free domain, you can mess with the hosts file that resides in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc. The comments in that file are self-explanatory; the only trick is allowing Windows and your local firewall to modify it. Hint: copy onto your Desktop; edit there; then copy-paste back and click through Mother Doze's threatening confirmation dialogs. You do need to be an Admin for this, of course.
Optional: Midnight Commander
This is about the point where I typically lose patience with a barefoot command line. If you're familiar with Norton Command or FAR Manager in the Windows universe, then Midnight Commander will be your friend. By now you may well guess the exact incantation below; follow it to see what I see (image below) in your PuTTY session.
gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo apt-get install mc gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ mc
Serving pages: NGINX
Time to start serving pages! We will set up NGINX, but before we begin, a short language lesson is in order. I spent months of my life pronouncing it "enjinx" and trembling at the thought of the inevitable bad luck that was about to follow. Then I found out that it's really "Engine X." I wish I could recondition myself now.
Now, NGINX is kinda like Apache, only it's a lot easier to tame, and also much less hungry. Remember, we're after a tiny server that still blazes as fast as a SpaceX rocket, right?
But why do we need a web server at all? Ain't ASP.NET Core's web component, Kestrel, all about serving HTTP requests? Well, partly. It does exactly that, for sure, but it also doesn't do much else. Multiple sites (via multiple domain names) served by the same engine? Nope. Secure connections over HTTPS? Negative. As far as I'm concerned, that's also the right thing to do: let every component deal with a single responsibility, but deal with it well. Nuff said. Let's magick up NGINX on our box.
Now go to your favorite browser and admire NGINX's default welcome page:
Here's a super-cool and super-concise overview of NGINX for you, by @carrotcreative: http://carrot.is/coding/nginx_introduction
Happy reading.
A truly simple ASP.NET Core wep app
Download the first code sample, WCA.zip, and fire it up in Visual Studio. It's a slightly reduced version of what you get if you create a "blank" ASP.NET Web Application, except my definition of blank is apparently different from Microsoft's. Also, I changed a few crucial lines in Startup.cs and Program.cs to make it serve static HTML files from the wwwroot subfolder, but I'll get into the actual web development part later on in the series.
OK, so it works on Windows. Now just unzip the sample to any local folder and upload it into your own Debian home directory - I'm using work/WCA for this. You can do this through WinSCP. If you don't know what that is and you skipped the first part, now is a good time to read up.
Go to the command prompt in your home directory, and fire it right up like so:
gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ cd work/WCA/src/WCA/ gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~/work/WCA/src/WCA$ dotnet restore log : Restoring packages for /home/gabor/work/WCA/src/WCA/project.json... log : Writing lock file to disk. Path: /home/gabor/work/WCA/src/WCA/project.lock.json log : /home/gabor/work/WCA/src/WCA/project.json log : Restore completed in 2501ms. gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~/work/WCA/src/WCA$ dotnet run Project WCA (.NETCoreApp,Version=v1.0) will be compiled because expected outputs are missing Compiling WCA for .NETCoreApp,Version=v1.0 Compilation succeeded. 0 Warning(s) 0 Error(s) Time elapsed 00:00:02.1747842 Hosting environment: Production Content root path: /home/gabor/work/WCA/src/WCA Now listening on: http://0.0.0.0:5000 Application started. Press Ctrl+C to shut down.
Ha! You've got a web app listening on port 5000 right there. But... how do you get to see the pages it serves? That's a bit difficult, because you just told ufw not to let you in through that port. If you're in the mood to play around, you can do one of two things:
Tweak ufw to let you in after all.
Install a text-based web browser (!) like Lynx through a different session, and check out localhost:5000.
Alternatively, you can move straight on to the next section.
Reverse proxy
The idea is to have Kestrel, the .NET Core "web server," running confined to localhost, answering calls only locally through port 5000. But we also configure NGINX to act as a reverse proxy, which really is just a fancy way of saying that instead of serving incoming requests directly, it should forward them straight on to localhost:5000 to be answered by your app.
The configuration files of NGINX reside in /etc/nginx, and in particular, two subfolders: /nginx/etc/sites-available and /nginx/etc/sites-enabled. The basic idea is that you keep a file in sites-enabled for every domain that your machine serves. The extra twist is that you actually keep those files in sites-available and only point a symlink at them from sites-enabled. This way you can juggle multiple different config files for the same domain: e.g., one that defines the website when it's working properly, and another one that serves a "maintenance in progress" page. You can swap between the two by pointing the symlink to one or the other.
In my case, I've created /etc/nginx/sites-available/vps-net-core.tk with the content below. (Tip: I like to start Midnight Commander with root privileges through sudo mc, and then use its built-in editor to modify simple files like this.)
Now create a symlink to this file, remove NGINX's default config file, test if everything's OK, and restart NGINX:
gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/vps-net-core.tk /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/vps-net-core.tk gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ rm /etc/nginx/sites-available/default gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo nginx -t nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo service nginx restart
The third command, nginx -t, is a neat little trick. It parses the current configuration and gives you a heads-up if something's wrong. NGINX ignores whatever is in the config files while it's running and only reads them when you restart. If you mess them up, you'll end up with NGINX down until you manage to fix them.
And we're basically... there! If you still have the .NET app running in a different terminal session, you can navigate to your website (your equivalent of vps-net-core.tk) and see "Hello, sailor." If your app is not running, you'll see this:
There's more good reading about the nitty-gritty of hooking up Kestrel with NGINX at these links: https://mjomaa.com/computer-science/frameworks/asp-net-mvc/141-how-to-combine-nginx-kestrel-for-production-part-i-installation http://druss.co/2015/06/asp-net-5-kestrel-nginx-web-server-on-linux/
Publish and deploy as a service
We have just cobbled together a system that serves pages as long as you run a .NET Core app from the command line, compiled on the spot - but that's a far cry from a production system. For one, you don't want to be uploading source code but want to compile locally and deploy binaries; second, you want something service-like to be running on the Linux box, not a command line program.
Publish from Visual Studio
In your Visual Studio project, go to Build / Publish and walk through the wizard to create a new "profile." This is essentially a handful of settings telling VS how to compile your code and what to do with the output. Let's just go for the simplest mechanics: put the output into the local file system on your PC, and copy manually (using WinSCP) for deployment. In the wizard's first step, select "Custom" for the publishing target:
In the second step, after you've named your profile, stay with "File System" and choose a suitable folder. I like to keep this folder outside my project's folder hierarchy; it is, after all, not part of my code, just a kind of springboard to deploy from. I hate those braindead \bin\Release\PublishOutput defaults.
The rest is obvious, and you can use this "profile" again every time you are publishing a version of your web app. I have uploaded a sample compiled output as WCA-published.zip. Check what's inside; it contains your project's output, plus all the dependencies it needs to run.
The way I deploy it is to:
Upload the raw (unzipped) files into a subdirectory of my Linux user's home, using WinSCP
In the Linux shell, copy this directory's contents to /opt/WCA-app/app. You first need to create the directories in /opt, and you need root privileges (sudo) to be allowed to do both that and the copying.
Now change to the target directory and run your dotnet app:
Notice that we didn't use dotnet run like we did before: that compiles and executes code from a project directory. This one's different: we're executing a compiled binary. Come to think about it, this is cool. Like, way out there cool. We just copied a whole bunch of binary DLLs from a Windows box and executed them "natively" on Linux! Pinch me.
Set up as a service
There are three things to think about when you lay out the production environment:
What's the right directory structure to use?
What user will run the service, and with what privileges?
How do you wrap up your app to act as a service, starting up on system startup and responding to standard commands?
The directory structure. I wish I had found any best practices for this, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of folks running .NET Core web apps on Linux just yet. So it's down to common sense. Read all of this with a critical eye, and let me know in the comments if you have any quibbles or better suggestions.
I like to keep a dedicated directory for the site's compiled output, hence the /app subfolder. The point is, the app should not be able to write anything here, and I should be able to copy the full published package blindly into this space.
Where should the whole app, with data, config files and all, go in the first place? I opted for a subdirectory under /opt, assuming that's in line with Linux etiquette for placing your own stuff. After all, dotnet installs there too, and so does Let's Encrypt (come back to read more about that in the next part.)
Besides the executables and static content, my web apps typically need at least two other kinds of spaces. One is for system-specific config files, such as the database connection string. You want to have an environment set up on your development box, and a production environment in your VPS. You don't want to be cross-pollinating the config files of the two, so they need to stay out of the way when you deploy compiled output. This is why I have the /app subfolder, with space to spare for a neighboring /config folder later.
Finally, your app may well need its own safe stomping ground where it can write and delete stuff too: e.g., temporary files for uploads, logs etc. This can all go to one or more additional, neighboring subdirectories where you grant the executing user write privileges. But these folders should never, ever be available through a direct URL from your site's public view.
Executing user. We'll see in a bit how to execute your app as a "service" on Linux. It seems that unless you do extra work, such a service will run as root by default, which I'm not at all comfortable with. Below is the solution I came up with that works with Linux's standard privileges scheme. There may be a more elaborate way using ACLs, but I lost my enthusiasm seeing the sheer amount of incantations needed, and how even those will vary from one system to the other, depending on the file system you are using.
gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo groupadd wca-users gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo adduser --system --no-create-home wca-app Adding system user `wca-app' (UID 108) ... Adding new user `wca-app' (UID 108) with group `nogroup' ... Not creating home directory `/home/wca-app'. gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo usermod -a -G wca-users wca-app gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo chown -R wca-app:wca-users /opt/WCA-app gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo chmod -R 550 /opt/WCA-app gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo chmod -R g+s /opt/WCA-app gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo -u wca-app dotnet /opt/WCA-app/app/WCA.dll
In English:
groupadd wca-users creates a group called, yes, "wca-users".
adduser --system --no-create-home wca-app creates a system user (cannot log in interactively) that has no home directory, and is called "wca-app".
usermod -a -G wca-users wca-app adds the new user to the "wca-users" group.
chown -R wca-app:wca-users /opt/WCA-app changes the ownership of our application folder to the new user and the new group.
chmod -R 550 /opt/WCA-app grants read and execute permissions to our app directory, recursively, for its owning user and group, but grants no permission for anyone else.
chmod -R g+s /opt/WCA-app is the crucial bit. To quote Wikipedia on what it does: it "causes new files and subdirectories created within it to inherit its group ID, rather than the primary group ID of the user who created the file (the owner ID is never affected, only the group ID)." In other words, if other users create files in my app's directory, those will inherit the parent directory's group ID. In Windows terms, inherited permissions. That's apparently not possible for users in Linux, only groups: that's why we needed the group in the first place. And the reason I need all of this, of course, is that I'll be wanting to copy deployed files around as root in the future, but I want my permissions architecture to hold.
sudo -u wca-app dotnet /opt/WCA-app/app/WCA.dll, finally, executes the web app in the name of the wca-app user, just to verify that it all worked out.
Shell script. As the last ingredient, we need a shell script that's able to start the web app as a bacground process running in the name of wca-app, stop it, and restart it, on demand. We can then strategically place the script in a magic folder, /etc/init.d, and tell Linux to start our service at system startup. For this, I relied heavily on druss's script, but had to modify it for two reasons. One, his script is for a pre-release version of .NET Core, and the command you need has changed to dotnet since then. Second, his script did not work with my permissions scheme. Here's the script I ended up with:
#!/bin/sh ### BEGIN INIT INFO # Provides: wca-srv # Required-Start: $local_fs $network $named $time $syslog # Required-Stop: $local_fs $network $named $time $syslog # Default-Start: 2 3 4 5 # Default-Stop: 0 1 6 # Description: Script to run asp.net 5 application in the background ### END INIT INFO # Author: Ivan Derevianko aka druss <drussilla7@gmail.com> # Modified by: Gabor L Ugray SRVUSER=wca-app MODULEROOT=/opt/WCA-app APPROOT=$MODULEROOT/app APPDLL=WCA.dll PIDFILE=$MODULEROOT/service/service.pid LOGFILE=$MODULEROOT/service/service.log # fix issue with DNX exception in case of two env vars with the same name but different case TMP_SAVE_runlevel_VAR=$runlevel unset runlevel start() { if [ -f $PIDFILE ] && kill -0 $(cat $PIDFILE); then echo'Service already running' >&2 return 1 fi echo'Starting service...' >&2 #su -c "start-stop-daemon -SbmCv -x /usr/bin/nohup -p \"$PIDFILE\" -d \"$APPROOT\" -- \"$DNXRUNTIME\" kestrel > \"$LOGFILE\"" $WWW_USER su -c "start-stop-daemon -SbmCv -x /usr/bin/nohup -p \"$PIDFILE\" -c \"$SRVUSER\" -d \"$APPROOT\" -- /usr/bin/nohup dotnet \"$APPROOT/$APPDLL\" > \"$LOGFILE\" 2>&1"echo'Service started' >&2 } stop() { if [ ! -f "$PIDFILE" ] || ! kill -0 $(cat "$PIDFILE"); then echo'Service not running' >&2 return 1 fi echo'Stopping service...' >&2 start-stop-daemon -K -p "$PIDFILE" rm -f "$PIDFILE"echo'Service stopped' >&2 } case "$1"in start) start ;; stop) stop ;; restart) stop start ;; *) echo"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}" esac export runlevel=$TMP_SAVE_runlevel_VAR
The crucial line is the one responsible for starting the process running dotnet running your app. Below is druss's original, as well as my modified version.
The key difference is that his version already invokes start-stop-daemon in the name of the service user, while mine invokes start-stop-daemon still as root, and tells it to execute dotnet as a background process in the service user's name.
Another thing this script (or, specifically, start-stop-daemon) does is create a "pidfile" or process ID file when the service starts, containing, well, the running process's ID. It's used as an indicator to know if the service is running, and to kill the right process when stopping it. I chose to keep this file outside my app's deployment directory proper, putting it inside /opt/WCA-app/service.
To deploy the script:
Upload to your home folder. I called it wca-srv.sh.
Test it: ./wca-srv.sh start
Copy to init.d (you'll need sudo; omit the .sh)
Then:
gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/wca-srv gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/wca-srv start Starting service... Service started gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ sudo update-rc.d wca-srv defaults gabor@debian-512mb-fra1-01:~$ ps aux USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND root 1 0.0 0.9 28580 4676 ? Ss Jul09 0:19 /sbin/init root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jul09 0:00 [kthreadd] # # Many lines omitted # wca-app 601 0.0 12.0 7077296 60776 ? SLl Jul09 0:37 dotnet /opt/WCA-app/app/WCA.dll # # More lines omitted #
Unwrapped:
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/wca-srv makes it executable
/etc/init.d/wca-srv start starts the service
update-rc.d wca-srv defaults sets up the service to be started when the system boots up. (To disable that, you can use update-rc.d -f wca-srv remove later.)
ps aux lists all the processes running on your system, and the user associated with them. I use this to verify that it's really running as wca-app as intended.
Load up your site in a browser to verify the .NET Core app is running. Restart the system to verify it starts up on boot.
A few useful links about setting up a .NET Core app as a service, and about configuring permissions:
This was a bit of a marathon! But now you have a simple .NET Core app up and running as a service in Linux, and you have the fundamentals of a build-and-deploy process in place that will allow you focus on actual development. Except... we still don't have HTTPS. Check back for Part 3 to see how you can set up a free certificate from Let's Encrypt.
dedicated, ipv6, joesdatacenter.com, kansas, kansas city, USA, xeon 
July 26, 2016 @ 12:51 am, by Ishaq
