Posted on: March 31st, 2011 by Famous Phil

First, I’d like to wish you a happy April Fools day!  I’ve never really been into the pranks that most people do on this day, and the idea I had fell through due to the lack of time (go figure).  The good news is that there is always next year!

For a project I had to do in a Distributed Computing class, I ended up having to configure a Tomcat 7 server running on CentOS 5.5 (a Redhat Linux derivative).  I always document my actions when I charter into unknown waters, so I thought I’d post my documentation for the public to see.

Before I begin, this project required the use of Amazon Web Services for deployment.  Being previously unfamiliar with AWS, I thought I’d outline some pros and cons to the service compared to traditional VPS hosting.

I like AWS because I can quickly create servers and delete servers on the fly without having to pay up front or rely on a support member who can only work so fast.  AWS also has the ability to expand dynamically for the load to a server.  For example, if you are hosting a site on AWS, and they detect your site is under a high load that the server can’t handle, more servers will be deployed on the spot to handle the increased traffic through an automatic load balancing mechanism.   Also, unlike most VPS providers, AWS provides a physical firewall that is in front of your AWS server, so you don’t necessarily have to worry about configuring a software firewall which might not always work perfectly.  Finally, the AWS servers are very fast, I have never seen any kind of a speed issue with them.  On other providers, this isn’t always the case, especially if the server is virtualized using OpenVZ (where the provider can oversell the server resources easily).

The biggest disadvantage of using AWS in the long term (for hosting) is the pricing scheme.  AWS uses a simple pricing scheme that charges you for every hour your server is running and is active.  This adds up to roughly $5-$100/month depending on what you get.  Then on top of that, AWS also charges for bandwidth by the GB.  Although this pricing scheme is fine for very little traffic or a lot of traffic, for the average amount of traffic (about 1-2TB / month), this pricing scheme isn’t the best compared to other providers.  For example, the virtual server that hosts my website costs me $20 per month, it has so much disk space and bandwidth (2TB included).  If I were to ask AWS for the same thing, I’d pay $10 for the server, and then roughly $100 for the bandwidth every month (if I were to use it all). Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: amazon, apache, AWS, CentOS, EC2, Tomcat, Web
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Technology
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Posted on: March 10th, 2011 by Famous Phil

It seems like its been a while since I last posted to my blog.  As usual, the mid semester grind is hitting my time hard, so I don’t have the resources to write here as often.  Thankfully this is my last semester as a Masters student, *yay*.   So coming up soon, I will be writing a blog on regular expressions, I’m still in the process of making it, so it might take a while.  I’ve also got a great blog for April fools day, so stay tuned for that!

Now onto the topic of this blog.  This is a video blog (go figure, right?).  Actually, I was asked by the IEEE student club at UB (http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/ieee) to redo my lecture series on developing websites.  I know that my website isn’t the best visually designed website in the world (and I’m actively looking for talent that can help me fix this in exchange for my programming skills), but I do know a lot about how to code websites well.

Being the kind of person who likes to share knowledge, I agreed to give the lecture series with updated information.  John suggested that I video tape the lectures and post them to my blog, which I thought was a great suggestion.  So in the next 5 to 6 weeks, I will be posting youtube 720p HD recordings of the lecture series to here.  Feel free to watch it and make comments about my presentation skills.  I know that I’m not perfect, so I’m always open to suggestions!

As always, thanks for reading!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Tags: adobe, development, education, Google, hosting, html, ieee, mysql, php, putty, student club, university at buffalo, vim, Web, website
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, My Site, Programming, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: February 18th, 2009 by Famous Phil

As the owner of a hosting company, I have made several decisions regarding which server to use, what kind of control panel should I provide, should I add features to my hosting, how many resources should I include, etc.  In my opinion, one of the most important decisions in hosting is choosing how your users will use the service, meaning what control panel should I use?  There are many options for Linux including, Plesk, LXAdmin, and the most popular: CPanel.

CPanel is the control panel that I choose to use for Matthouse hosting accounts, but why did I choose CPanel, what are its advantages and disadvantages?

I suppose I should first begin with a small description of what CPanel is.  CPanel allows the hosting client to modify all aspects of their site from an easy to use web-based interface such as FTP accounts, Email accounts, statistics, subdomains, additional domains to host, etc.  CPanel makes it very easy for the hosting company to give the client total control of their website without the requirement of providing full server access.

Here are the advantages of using CPanel:

1. Its very easy to install, just install Linux and run the installation script, it will configure most of your server automatically
2. Cpanel provides a very easy visual interface where you can manage your server.  There are several panels that are meant for administrators, clients, and even email users.  There are also very easy to follow tutorials posted on CPanel’s website for those users who may not know where to start
3. Cpanel automates most of the hosting experience which reduces stress on the hosting company

So, what are the disadvantages of hosting with CPanel?

1. I personally believe that CPanel is meant for websites that are small to medium. CPanel itself is a resource hog and requires at least 256MB of ram on the server to run, and this amount probably won’t even run a website getting 200 hits a day without running out of memory or running into swap space on the server.    Most servers will have much more RAM than this, but a base install should not require more than 50 to 60MB of ram.
2. On a default install, CPanel usually is optimized for a dedicated server with 4 to 16GB of RAM.  Even the VPS Optimized version of CPanel requires additional configuration to keep CPanel within check.  If you don’t do initial configuration in Apache, etc, you may run into memory errors easily since Apache will start up 20 to 30 processes at 1 to 6MB a piece.  In addition, most of the Apache configuration is default and many modules are missing such as Source Gaurdian which will protect PHP code from hurting your server.  In addition, CPanel doesn’t secure SSH or FTP, you you should still install a firewall and tighten SSH security.
3. CPanel is software which contains vulnerabilities just like any other software.    Cpanel updates run nightly, however what happens if someone discovers a security risk and decides to attack your server before the updates are pushed to your server covering the vulnerability?  To come back to my past disadvantage of Cpanel is meant for small to medium sites, I believe this aids to the arguement that big sites are more likely to be hacked than smaller sites.
4. CPanel costs money to license. This is rarely a factor to most big sites and companies because they have that kind of money to spend for something easy to use, however CPanel licenses are not cheap.  This really could be neither and advantage of disadvantage, but its worth sticking on my list of points to consider.

So when would I recommend a CPanel installation?  Thats simple, I’d recommend it for hosting companies that host many sites on a single server.  It reduces stress on the hosting company, and generally these servers have plentiful resources to handle CPanel in its entirety.  Also sites that are generally on shared CPanel hosting are not big enough to have a good probability of being hacked.

When would I not recommend installing CPanel.  I would personally say never install CPanel on a large site that gets over 5000 unique hits a day or more.  CPanel may make administering the site easier, however most sites that are this big bring in a lot of revenue  and paying for CPanel could be just slightly cheaper than hiring an experienced server administrator or a friend to run the server without CPanel.  Installing the core components and configuring them manually will also ensure that you have minimal code that can be hacked (Yes, web servers are software).  I’ve always been taught that the less code you use, the less likely there will be problems with it.

Thats all the time I have.  I might follow up on this depending on how many comments I receive.

Tags: CPanel, Host, hosting, Linux, Manager, Web, WHM
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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