Labels: CPanel, Server Administration

Labels: Security, Server Administration

• A little known method of bandwidth saving tips (mostly because hosts do not want you to know) is a very simple one... using the control panel from your domain contributes to your overall bandwidth. Use your hosts domain instead
  For example: instead of going to http://yourdomain.com/cpanel for cPanel go to http://yourhost.com/cpanel (switching "yourhost" with your hosts website)
• Disable HotLinking - HotLinking is where people will link from another website to your images or downloads and not give your website any credit. Basically the images are on your website and this website just links image tags to your website, Basically they are stealing your bandwidth. There is a tutorial on how to go about this if you are not sure how to accomplish this.
• Enable caching on your website if its not dynamic. Caching will allow the end users computer to read from your server once in a while, the rest of the times it will read from its own backup copies until they expire.
• Optimize your images for the internet and shrink their size, never use bitmap files (.bmp) and stick to jpeg (.jpg) or gif (.gif) files for images, these are optimized for the internet. There are conversion programs out there and there are optimization programs, be sure to get an optimization program that will be able to retain the images quality while drastically reducing its size. More than 50% of the bandwidth on most websites comes from images.
• If you run any forums or submission scripts on your website ensure that they are secured (require a validation code for submission or login) this will reduce the possibilities of people making bots to spam your website and will reduce bandwidth usage.
• Websites that have Large images, Videos, MP3's, and large files will use a lot of bandwidth. Some websites may need these but if you are sure your website doesn't need them then don't use them. It will save A lot of bandwidth
• Limiting robot scanning can help greatly, this includes bots by google, msn, and yahoo alike. All you have to do is create a robots.txt and tell the bots what and what not to index. You can also do this with .htaccess if you are experienced enough.
• Look at your logs of visitors, if you see any suspicious activity of what you may believe to be a bandwidth hog you can block these users from accessing your website via .htaccess or cPanel

• Zip up all files meant to be downloaded - if you want to have a database of downloads or just offer a couple of downloads this will greatly reduce the amount of space and bandwidth you use. If you are offering big documents for download as well (over 250kb) you should zip these up as well.
• Optimize images - as said in bandwidth conservation, images play a majority in resources on the typical website. Optimizing images for the web is a rather crucial step in resource conservation.
• Avoid Duplicate files - Duplicate files do you no good, make your hyperlinks point to the same file rather than the same file in 2 places on your account. This also makes updating much easier as you only have to update only one file.
• Manage Backups - While backups are helpful they will pile up, Keep no more than 3 backups on your web hosting account simultaneously. Consider the fact that the backups are almost the size of your entire account, so 2 backups more than doubles your accounts disk usage in the typical scenario. Usually you should make the backup, download it, then delete it from FTP. However having a backup of the backup on the webserver will not hurt.
• File Management - Remove unneeded, unlinked files. These files will be serving you no good anyway.
• Use Dynamic Pages if you can, Dynamic pages do not require every page to be stored and can prove helpful. Instead of having multiple pages you can have one main file with a bunch of files that are included or generated via a language such as PHP. MySQL also helps in this as well, it is a further extent of space saving.

• MySQL/PostgreSQL Management - Be sure that you do not use too many, you can put different scripts in the same database for compacting. This will allow for you to meet your limit without having to go over. MySQL databases are almost always limited due to the fact they may be resource strenuous, as a countermeasure webhosts limit these to provide a cleaner service.
• If you have severly limited e-mails use them wisely, instead of using a different e-mail for a different service or function try to mix them together and have a generalization mix. So instead of having support@yourdomain.com and billing@yourdomain.com and request@yourdomain.com you could sum them all down to websitename@yourdomain.com

Labels: CPanel, Server Administration

Labels: Server Administration

I received several requests to post my backup scripts. Before I start, I think some background info is needed (i.e. what their purpose is): I've written them as part of the "Enterprise Class Backup" system we offer for webhosting accounts. Following rotation is used:

1) Full account backups:
a) on-server (dedicated hard drive used only for storing backups)
- daily backups, 7 days rotation
- weekly backups, 4 weeks rotation
- the standard daily/weekly/monthly cPanel backups are also available on this drive (1 day/1 week/1 month rotation)
b) off-server (another server in the same datacenter)
- weekly backups, 12 weeks rotation
c) off-site (stored on DVDs in a Swiss bank vault)
- monthly backups, 24 months rotation

2) MySQL database backups:
a) on-server (dedicated hard drive used only for storing backups)
- hourly backups, 24 hours rotation
b) off-server (another server in the same datacenter)
- daily backups, 7 days rotation
c) off-site
- weekly backups, stored on the monthly DVDs

Step by step guide

First of all, I'll describe the environment that's needed to run these scripts 1:1. This is a cPanel server running GNU/Linux, and while cPanel is not neccessary (you could use any other backups instead of the daily cPanel account backups, just modify the scripts), I can't say on what non-GNU/Linux OSes it would work without changes. Since we're talking about simple shell commands, they might work on other *Nix OSes like *BSD or Solaris, but I haven't tested it. You're welcome to post your findings.

a) on-server backups

You'll need a certain directory structure so the scripts work without modifications. The backup hard drive is mounted as /backup and has the following directories:

/backup/cpbackup : here are the cPanel backups. The three subdirs will be created automatically by cPanel/WHM.

/backup/rotation: this is where my scripts write their output. You need to create following subdirs: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly. You don't need to create any directories under these subdirs, the scripts will take care of that.

Let's start with the hourly rotation for MySQL backups. These aren't compressed because their primary purpose is if a client suddenly calls you in tears saying they just destroyed/corrupted/whatever their big and important DB 5 minutes ago, you can just copy back their files from the backup location to the /var/lib/mysql subdir and they'll be happy. This is my script in /etc/cron.hourly (file permissions 7xx):

code:

#!/bin/sh
rm -rf /backup/rotation/hourly/$(date +"%H")
mkdir /backup/rotation/hourly/$(date +"%H")
cp -R /var/lib/mysql/* /backup/rotation/hourly/$(date +"%H")

code:

#!/bin/sh
rm -rf /backup/rotation/daily/$(date +"%u")
mkdir /backup/rotation/daily/$(date +"%u")
cp -R /backup/cpbackup/daily/* /backup/rotation/daily/$(date +"%u")

code:

#!/bin/sh
rm -rf /backup/rotation/weekly/$(date +"%V")
mkdir /backup/rotation/weekly/$(date +"%V")
cp -R /backup/cpbackup/daily/* /backup/rotation/weekly/$(date +"%V")

code:

#!/bin/sh
rm -rf /backup/rotation/monthly/$(date +"%m")
mkdir /backup/rotation/monthly/$(date +"%m")
cp -R /backup/cpbackup/daily /backup/rotation/monthly/$(date +"%m")
cp -R /var/lib/mysql /backup/rotation/monthly/$(date +"%m")
cp -R /home /backup/rotation/monthly/$(date +"%m")

code:

#!/bin/sh
cd /backup/rotation
tar -zcf mysql_$(date +"%F").tar.gz /var/lib/mysql/*
ftp -in <open 127.0.0.1
user yourusername yourpassword
bin
hash
prompt
put mysql_$(date +"%F").tar.gz
bye
rm -f mysql_$(date +"%F").tar.gz

code:

#!/bin/sh
cd /backup/rotation
tar -zcf cpbackup_$(date +"%F").tar.gz /backup/cpbackup/daily/*
ftp -in <open 127.0.0.1
user yourusername yourpassword
bin
hash
prompt
put cpbackup_$(date +"%F").tar.gz
bye
rm -f cpbackup_$(date +"%F").tar.gz

Labels: Server Administration

Labels: Hosting, Server Administration