Hardware is constantly outdated which, normally, presents a big problem for dedicated hosting clients. You get a server today and in 6 months your provider will naturally be offering a replacement of your server for new clients- with bigger and better stuff. While we can't entirely solving that problem, we decided recently to begin only offering a minimum of 2GB of RAM on new servers. To show our commitment to our very loyal clients, we are providing a free RAM upgrade to bring each and every client to 2GB of RAM. As far as we know, this is the first time a hosting provider has gone back and mass upgraded it’s clientèle on this level. Here’s the bottom-line impact and the reason providers don’t normally do this: 1,200+ ...

Hello Everyone, This is a big post and I’m very excited to be making it. Over the past year we have been developing a new control panel – a new customer portal. The system is finally ready for release and I wanted to explain why it is cool and some of its major advantages. LEAP is entirely browser based. It is tested on Windows, Macintosh and Linux using Opera, Mozilla, Internet Explorer and Safari. The system is a graphical, Windows-like interface for managing your servers. But, it’s more than just a pretty interface, it’s a fully functional control panel – allowing you to add servers, managing existing servers, and administer those servers remotely using built in SSH and RDP clients. The ...

By default most computers are left vulnerable to attack the moment they are attached to a network because they either have an inadequate firewall or no firewall configured on their machine. This is the case, in many situations, for both servers and your own desktop at home. It is for this reason that I am often asked the question “How good is an operating system-based firewall”. The answer is different for each situation.

In the home situation, it can be used as your primary firewall (for example, you do not have a router between your DSL, cable, or FiOS modem hardware) provided you have configured it correctly (or at least allow the operating system to manage it for you). In a dedicated server hosting environment, however, it is extremely important to have a firewall of some type enabled and to manually configure it to filter your incoming traffic.

It happens all too often. I client calls us and tells us they just deleted a folder or a file that was extremely important, usually for a presentation that is to be made in no more than 30 minutes. Now, if they have backups on our backup servers, that is fine, we restore the file in no time because they are available right there. This isn’t the normal situation though, most people don’t feel that making backups is important, or think that we just do it because they have the server with us (we don’t). If these backups don’t exist, and your server crashes, gets hacked, explodes, runs away, or heaven forbid a natural disater occurs, your data is gone. There is no way around ...

Spanning-Tree Protocol (STP) is a link management protocol that provides path redundancy while preventing undesirable loops in the network. When it comes to Ethernet networks, in order for them to function properly only one active path can exist between two stations. Loops occur in networks for a variety of reasons. The most common reason you find loops in networks is the result of trying to simply provide multiple levels of redundancy. When having multiple root switches in a network used to provide this redundancy, the problem that will arise is infinite loops between the switches and the end workstations they’re connected to. If a loop exists in the network topology, the potential exists for duplication of messages. When loops occur, some switches ...

The most important aspect of any MySQL-Driven web application is tuning MySQL to perform at it's peak. Typically the SingleHop Technicians do this all manually, which takes a lot of time and perseverance. However, recently Igor from the Development Team introduced this very easy to use script -- mysql-tuning-primer.sh The script was developed by Matthew Montgomery from MySQL Inc. -- not bad for a "Novice" MySQL Technical Support Specialist. I'd love to see what MySQL's Senior technicians can do! Anyway, onto the script... Currently the script handles recommendations for the following:

• Slow Query Log
• Max Connections
• Worker Threads
• Memory Usage
• Key Buffer
• Query Cache
• Sort Buffer
• Joins
• Temp Tables
• Table (Open & Definition) Cache
• Table Scans (read_buffer)
• Table Locking
• Innodb Status

The script can be easily ...

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