Posted on: January 31st, 2009 by Famous Phil

As expected, I completed moving all of the websites hosted on the former mthsweb1 (Matthouse Web Server 1) server over to the new mthsweb4 server.  I haven’t heard any complaints so far about the new server so far and don’t expect to hear of any problems.  Tonight I will be doing some testing on the old matthouse web 1 server before it expires later in February.  I hope to learn some new knowledge from my testing later tonight regarding apache optimization.

Earlier today, I helped a friend in the hosting business move a massive website (http://clevelandleader.com) from his server to a virtual server that will just host that website.  This website is ranked ~76,000 on the alexa scale which means that it gets an insane amount of traffic.  My best guess would be 300 to 1500 loads per second.  The site itself has a huge mysql database that is over 2GB and the sql move alone almost crashed a dedicated server with a quadcore processor (it did have a lot of other websites on it though).  Regardless, after the move, my friend didn’t realize that a default whm (cpanel, inc) installation doesn’t optimize the server nearly enough for a large website like this.  Heck, I don’t even know if whm was made for such a large website.  I did optimize the server and compile apache correctly just to handle the needs of clevelandleader.com.  I also did a lot to prevent apache from crashing with the high load.

Traditionally, with such a large website such as cleveland leader, the web server hosting the site would only run a web server, no overhead like cpanel.  I feel that cpanel has made the hosting process much easier, but I just don’t think it was made to handle such a large website.   Also, the fact that cpanel uses the root password directly means that if there is a security vulnerability and the user obtains that root password through hacking or whatever, the server could be compromised not only from cpanel’s whm but also from the terminal through ssh (or a rare occasion of console access, meaning sitting in front of the server physically).  This could present a major problem.  Most smart hosting companies use cpanel’s wheel group to give su access to certain cpanel uesrs that can then login to the terminal via ssh and then su root with the root password to gain root.  This provides a 2 password layer and adds an additional layer of security to the server.

Another pitfall that large websites face is the need for a dedicated mysql server, that is if mysql can even handle the load.  Mysql was made for small to medium sites and it was made for maybe 100 to 200 queries per second, but much more than that and it undergoes a massive strain.  Many large websites find themselves moving to more powerful database servers such as Microsoft SQL or Oracle which are much more powerful solutions that were made for high loads.

So why am I even talking about this!  I felt that this would be the best way to introduce a new idea that I’m going to begin working on within the next couple of weeks.  I have purchased the domain (http://adminreference.com) and will begin a forum where users can share their administration experience and knowledge to the world.  I am a seasoned Windows administrator and a somewhat experienced Linux admin.  I find myself knowledgable about both server operating systems and I post tutorials on multiple websites that don’t really aim for administration concepts.  I also hope that some day this can help me when I am stuck on a massive problem.

I encourage you to stay informed as I begin this new journey.  I will likely be ready to release the site sometime in the next couple of weeks.  I am not sure how to market such a website, however I’m sure as people begin coming, someone will have knowledge about that as well.

Tags: admin, administration, facebook, help, hosting, Linux, Microsoft, Personal, reference, server, Server Hosting
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
|| 6 Comments »

Posted on: January 27th, 2009 by Famous Phil

The past week has been a sad week for my family and I.  Just a quick rundown of events: A week ago from Monday, she went to the emergency room for breathing problems.  They accepted her for an unexpected irregular heart beat.  A few days later on Thursday, they found her lungs engolfed with cancer on an x-ray and CAT scan.  Sunday, she died due to complications of a biopsy to determine she had cancer.

She was a smoker for at least 40 years (to my knowledge) quitting about 3 years ago due to complaints about not being able to breathe.   I figured that when she went to the ER, she was going to be treated for empazima or something similar due to the damage from cigarettes, I didn’t really expect to hear about the cancer.  I really blame the smoking for her death and I encourage everyone who smokes to stop before it hurts them.

Believe it or not, there is actually good news from this.  My grandmother had a very short, fairly painless death.  I am very happy that she didn’t suffer.  I do miss her very much, however I know that she didn’t suffer too bad at the end.

Anyways, don’t expect much out of me for the next couple of days.  I will return to normally hopefully by the weekend.  I also hope to give an update to the server moving situation sometime Sunday!

Tags: death, smoking
Posted in Personal
|| 1 Comment »

Posted on: January 19th, 2009 by Famous Phil

As you probably know, I host websites as a side hobby to keep myself busy.  If you didn’t know, I host websites through http://www.matthouse.us.

Over the past few years, I have hosted on the OpenVZ platform (Virtual Private Server).  I started out with lxadmin and moved my way up to cpanel accounts for my clients due to many problems with lxadmin.  After a lot of newly formed concerns about security after noticing hacking attempts, I have attempted to tighten my server, however openvz has presented many challenges while performing these tasks.   At first, I was recording 20 to 30 hack attempts per day to my main webserver (mthsweb1.matthouse.us), and this was totally unacceptable to me.  I have tightened that server down but am finding that my server is much slower than it once was and I was forced to find a better solution.  This is why I’ve decided to migrate my entire customer base to a new server running on the Virtuozzo platform which is much more stable, secure and less of a pig when it comes to memory consumption.

Within the next couple of weeks, I hope to contact everyone and migrate every website over to the new server completely.  I will personally verify each site is completely transferred with minimal to no downtime as possible.  To all of my customers, I would like to thank you for your continued support.  Your support helps me learn new techniques to managing servers and providing appropriate customer service!

One additional note, I promise that I will have a photo gallery up by next weekend!  Have a great Martin Luther King day!

Tags: hosting, migration, server
Posted in My Site
|| 1 Comment »

Posted on: January 14th, 2009 by Famous Phil

Hi everyone!

I finally got around to finishing my own website after nearly 2 years of putting off making a decent design for the site.

As you probably don’t realize, designing a website is a lot of work.  It takes many hours to conceive the design and many more hours to make the design work correctly.   After getting past the design, it takes a fair amount of time to fill a site with content.  For this site, I spent a lot of time deciding on a design and filling in the content.  As a web developer, it didn’t take me very long in the grand scheme to make this website much nicer than it once was.  I believe that it took me roughly a week to put the site together after several years of debating on a design.  Most of the content isn’t finished yet, thus the beta status   I hope to have it proof read within a few weeks.  I expect to see tiny errors here and there fixed within the next month so I can remove the beta status of my site!

Since this is my first real blog post, I felt that I should add some background information about me, however my about page covers that really well, so I’m going to ask that you visit http://famousphil.com/about.php if you would like to know a little more about my background and where I come from.

My goal is to post here weekly or more frequently with what I’ve done in the past few weeks.  I hope to see more people visiting this site in the near future!  Thanks for reading this!

Posted in My Site
|| 1 Comment »