Hardware is constantly outdated which, normally, presents a big problem for dedicated hosting clients.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+ servers potentially impacted (We feel in the area of 50% of these effected).
We’re also going to be reducing approximately 20% of our customers bills that pay for 2GB of RAM.
In all, over the course of a year, hardware expense and loss of revenue: Well over $100,000.

Sounds meek, right? To an accountant it might not be the best move, but our business is experiencing exponential growth. That’s largely based on our very loyal clients and reduced advertising costs because so many of you are talking positively about our services on various forums and websites. We’re showing our appreciation for your business and we would love to hear your feedback to this giveaway, or feedback on our services!

With the announcement of LEAP, we’ve had some extremely exciting times at the company. That’s going to get better with more announcements next week as we continue to pass up the competition in terms of new features and services all aimed at giving you more control over your infrastructure and done at affordable prices. (or in this case, an upgrade for free!)

Overall, we’re happy to be in the position to do it, and we hope that you appreciate the efforts and service that you receive from SingleHop.

To take advantage as an existing client, go here: http://www.singlehop.com/servers/free_ram_upgrade_offer.php

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 system features automatic server provisioning technology as well as advanced graphing and management features. In a nutshell, it’s what every dedicated server customer dreams about – a dream that has gone unanswered by just about everyone. It’s a dream that we’re answering now with the first public release of LEAP.

To watch a cool video (less than 5 minutes long) and learn everything you can about LEAP, click here:
http://www.singlehop.com/poindexters_lab/leap.php

If you have any questions or comments, please post them in this thread.
Dan Ushman

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 it. That is why making sure you have backups of all of your data is so important.

The first thing thing you need to do is figure out where you are going to store backups. You can store them in one place, and that would be fine, but it also leaves a single point of failure. I would recommend keeping your backups in at least two places, perhaps keeping a copy on your home computer, and one at a remote backup server. You could also just use two remote servers in different physical locations. We do have backup servers in our datacenter, just ask your account executive if you are interested.
After you have figured out where you want the backups to go, you should figure out what data is important enough to you to backup. The best way to go about this is to just backup everything short of the operating system itself. Get all of your web content, settings, databases, mailboxes, dns zone files, user accounts, and the list goes on.

With cPanel, this is easy. There is a built in backup function that will automatically backup all of your stuff daily. If something were to happen, all you would need to do is move the backup files to a new cPanel server, and restore them. It will restore everything back to it’s previous functionality relatively quickly. Windows, with or without a control panel, is pretty easy as well. It has a program called ntbackup that you can schedule backups with, all you need to do is choose the location, the files and folders to backup, and when to do it. It will do the rest for you. If you run a Linux server without a control panel, setting up backups can be a bit more complex without a backup program. You can use a mixture of tar, cron, and scp or ftp to run backups when you would like. If you need help with something like this, just let us know, we would be glad to help.

I cannot stress this enough, making backups of your data is absolutely vital. If you use your server to host sites or applications that bring you money, not having backups is like asking to lose it all in a second. If you keep backups, you may have some downtime, but at least what is important to you can be recovered.

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 see stations appear on both sides of the switch. This confuses the forwarding algorithm and allows duplicate frames to be forwarded.

Spanning-Tree comes in to play by only allowing a singular path to destinations when having multiple (redundant) links such as this. In a STP environment, the switches exchange information amongst themselves using bridge protocol data units (BPDU) and will then listen in on all ports for this BPDU message. Once a bridge is turned on, it automatically assumes that it is the root bridge in the STP tree. The STP software chooses a root bridge and calculates all paths from the lower bridges back to itself. In the event of hardware failure of a root bridge in the redundant environment, a new root is elected and port paths would be recalculated.

Here at SingleHop we currently utilize three and very soon to be 4 uplink providers. With this uplinks STP is a must in our switched environment to provide multiple redundancies in case one goes down, another link is there to takes it place within a matter of seconds. At this stage in our continuously growing network topology there’s virtually no way you’ll ever lose the connection to your dedicated server. That is of course you don’t reboot the server itself, then that’ll be your expected momentary loss of connectivity.

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 downloaded to any linux-based server running MySQL, and is Plesk and WebMin friendly!

function check_for_plesk_passwords () {

## — Check for the existance of plesk and login using it’s credentials — ##

if [ -f /etc/psa/.psa.shadow ] ; then
mysql=”mysql -S $socket -u admin -p$(cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow)”
mysqladmin=”mysqladmin -S $socket -u admin -p$(cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow)”
else
mysql=”mysql -S $socket”
mysqladmin=”mysqladmin -S $socket”
fi
}

function find_webmin_passwords () {

## — populate the .my.cnf file using values harvested from Webmin — ##

cecho “Testing Stored for passwords:\c”
if [ -f /etc/webmin/mysql/config ] ; then
user=$(grep ^login= /etc/webmin/mysql/config | cut -d “=” -f 2)
pass=$(grep ^pass= /etc/webmin/mysql/config | cut -d “=” -f 2)
if [ $user ] && [ $pass ] && [ ! -f ~/.my.cnf ] ; then
cecho “Setting login info as User: $user Password: $pass”
touch ~/.my.cnf
chmod 600 ~/.my.cnf
echo -e “[client]\nuser=$user\npassword=$pass” > ~/.my.cnf
cecho “Retrying login”
is_up=$($mysqladmin ping 2>&1)
if [ "$is_up" = "mysqld is alive" ] ; then
echo UP > /dev/null
else
second_login_failed
fi
echo
else
second_login_failed
echo
fi
else
cecho ” None Found\n” $boldred
second_login_failed
fi
}

After downloaded, simply run it from the command line and read the output:

Looks like I have some work to do! Until next time, happy hosting!