New Website Template Shop Added

As many of you will already know, we already offer Sitebuilder on many of our hosting plans but for those of you who build their own websites from scratch, we have tried to make life a little easier by adding a website template shop to the site. There are literally thousands of templates to choose from, including advanced web design templates, flash intro templates, logo templates, PHP-Nuke themes and more. The site can be found at: http://templateshop.weycrest.co.uk

Prevent "Hotlinking" or Bandwidth Theft

Hotlinking is direct linking to a remote website's files (images, video's, streaming files etc.). An example would be using an tag to display a jpg image you found on someone else's web page so it will appear on your own website, blog, or forum post. How do you know you are being hotlinked? Possibly if you are receiving domain over limit messages from us. However it's worth keeping a regular eye on your webstats and checking the referrer links. Bandwidth more accurately refers to the data transferred from a website to a user's computer and is usually measured by web hosts in Gigabytes (or GB). For example 100GB per month of Data Transfer. When you view a webpage, you are using that site's data transfer to display the files. Since web hosts charge based on the amount of data transferred. If a site goes over it's monthly bandwidth, it's either billed for the extra data transfer or suspended. How do you stop other sites directly linking to your images and media files and stealing your bandwidth? Simple. Open notepad (or similar text editor) and add the following and (this is important) save it as .htaccess (the dot before htaccess is important).

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mywebsite.com(/)?.*$ [NC] RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp|wmv)$ http://www.weycrest.co.uk/i/weycrest_dynamic.jpg [R,NC]

Obviously change `mywebsite.com` to the correct address of your website. You can also change redirection to an alternate (much smaller, and less bandwidth hungry) image. Then upload it your website using your favourite FTP program. If you do not feel sufficiently confident to carry this out contact the Weycrest Support Team and we will add it to your vhost.conf. To check if your hotlink protection measures are working or for more complex rewrite rules, here are a couple of links: http://www.htmlbasix.com/disablehotlinking.shtml

10 Domain Reseller Hosting "Lite" Launched

Following on from our earlier announcement we have introduced a ten domain reseller account for less than £100 per annum (or £9.99 per month. The details are below. Reseller Lite 10 Multi-domains Hosting Plan - £9.99 per month (£99.99 per annum) * Plesk 7 Control Panel * Plesk Power Pack (including SpamAssassin) * Reseller Access to Plesk * Brandable - uploadable with your own company logo * 500MB Disc Space * 25GB Monthly Data Transfer * 10 Domains * Unlimited Sub-domains * 20 MySQL Databases * Application Vault * 100 POP3 Email Accounts * Your Own Nameservers * Centos Enterprise Linux * Scalable, Dynamic VPS Technology *Monthly Pricing Rate Pay Annually for just - £99.99 Pay Monthly for just - £9.99 All prices exclude VAT @ 17.5% To signup click here For more information click here

"Unlimited" Reseller Hosting Plans Announcement

We launched a new "unlimited" reseller plan last week. These are a `must have` for professional developers, designers or resellers wanting a low cost entry into shared web hosting. They would also be of interest to affiliate marketers and anyone wanting all their websites in one place A reseller plan is slightly different to a standard plan in that you can host multiple domains and websites in just one account. You have complete control over the hosting plan creation and can setup your own (template) plans, determining web space, bandwidth, number of POP mail accounts. Details and prices are set out below: Plesk Reseller Pro: £19.99 per month * Plesk 7 Control Panel * Plesk Power Pack (including SpamAssassin) * Reseller Access to Plesk * Brandable - uploadable with your own company logo * 1500MB Disc Space * 50GB Monthly Data Transfer * Unlimited Domains * Unlimited Sub-domains * Unlimited MySQL * Application Vault * Unlimited Email Accounts * Your Own Nameservers * Centos Enterprise Linux * Scalable, Dynamic VPS Technology »Pay Annually - Save over £40 on monthly prices »Pay Bi-Annually - Save over £19 on monthly prices »All prices exclude VAT @ 17.5% To order click here For more information on our unlimited reseller plan, click here

Virtual Private Server Comparison

Virtual Private Servers are now fairly common on the Linux web hosting scene. One of the most popular VPS technologies is offered by hosting companies is Virtuozzo produced and developed by SW-Soft. There are "free" or open source alternatives available which are worthy of consideration. The technology offered by the Xen Hypervisor Engine is particularly exciting enabling commodity server hardware based on the AMD or Intel platform, to be partitioned into smaller virtual or private servers. Some of the later Linux distributions such as Fedora Core 4 have support for Xen Virtualisation. The additonal overhead of running a Xen Virtual Dedicated Server is typically very low. This makes it potentially more efficient than the excellent User Mode Linux (UML) which has proven itself well in the virtual hosting field. UML uses emulated system calls and disk drivers which make it slower, when it comes to context switches and disk I/O. Xen is a "hypervisor" with the host operating system a Virtual Machine (VM) under it. This makes for a very low overhead of typically 2-8%. Linux VServer is similar in principle to Virtuozzo though the implementation is quite different. However there are similarities in that VServer and Virtuozzo adopt a shared kernel with security isolation (a chrooted init) using context and capabilities to limit the power of the superuser within the VM. Though they may lack many of the features of a "true" virtual machine, such as no low level networking, and the ability to use or load certain kernel modules (for instance Xen allows you to maintain the virtual machine as if it were a real hardware device, using the common and well known up dating tools such as apt-get and yum) however these are not likely to be important to the average hosting customer who is more likely to choose a solution which is totally managed by his ISP. Another advantage to a Hosting ISP is that with Virtuozzo the file system is quota based which allows for a slight "overselling" of web space if most of the customers don't use all their disc space. In a way this is similar to normal "virtual hosting." Additionally the virtuozzo vps customer who is on a "quiet" hardware node will enjoy the full resources of the server! Despite Virtuozzo having some hardware limitations, in the hosting market which it was designed for, this is not considered relevant. However SW-Soft are widening support and compiling additional modules into the Virtuozzo kernel, indeed Virtuozzo is now available for AMD processors. Additionally Virtuozzo possesses an operating system templating system, with a cache so that popular software can be shared by multiple vps's on a hardware node and they can all be patched and updated at the same time. We are asked if a Virtual Machine with just 32MB or 64MB of RAM is actually useful for anything, but with Linux the memory is used efficiently so for testing software under different operating systems, hosting a few mainly static websites, or for use as a root shell account on a well performing network (for perhaps training purposes) they are ideal. We have put Xen Virtual Dedicated Servers to use in the following applications: * Web Server * Mail Server * DNS Server * Mail or DNS secondary * Development Box * An RPM build environment * Nagios Network Monitoring Node * Shell Account Hosting * An advanced reseller solution (with Control Panel) In an interesting and welcome move, SW-Soft have opened up and "open sourced" a subset of Virtuozzo in the form of OpenVZ. Not all the Virtuozzo management utilities are there , but OpenVZ while bleeding edge than the commercial version is stable and usable as well as supporting templated versions of 2.6* kernel based distributions such as FC4. -Paul Lee

`Weaselboy` stands trial

'Weaselboy' properly known as Peter Francis-Macrae is currently on trial in Cambridgeshire for allegedly making death threats against Trading Standards, and incredibly, the Police. Allegedly a prolific spammer, so notorious he became the only UK resident to appear on The Spamhaus Project's Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) list. He is thought to have perpetrated scams that earned him in excess of £1.5 million. One such scam is said to have offered pre-registrations for the forthcoming .eu domain with a guarantee of success, via unsolicited mail - whereas the bogus operation 'EU Registry Services' which offered the service was not actually a registrar, accredited or otherwise. Another alleged scam involved the solicitation of renewals of expiring domain names. Nominet won an injunction back in November 2003, preventing Francis-Macrae from using its Whois database. Curiously EURid, the top level registry for the .eu, chose to avoid confronting Francis-Macrae, as previous attempts to challenge him had resulted in bombardments of emails, a type of denial of service attack. Worringly this demonstrates the power of spam. One scheme apparently earned Francis-Macrae nearly £200,000 within a few weeks. It appears most of the money was spent on designer clothing and "helicoptor lessons." This tale clearly demonstrates the importance of always using a reputable accredited registrar such as Weycrest to register domains To read a BBC article on this story, go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4334948.stm.

Web Host Show Podcasts

Some interesting interviews, tutorials and opinions at the http://www.webhostingshow.com/ including an interesting podcast about how the press recently, have been giving young people who run hosting businesses a hard time. As to whether we fall into this category "you can ask, but we couldn't possibly comment." ;o)

Eat Coffee Shop

We are not very far from Canary Wharf, where there is a good choice of places to eat out and grab a quick coffee. One of our favourite places for team outing is at "Eat." You have probably been to one. Eat are quite a familiar site on London streets and shopping malls. They have saturated just about everywhere like Starbucks. We prefer the mellower tast of their Late's! It seems at the Canary Wharf branch they have undergone a complete change of staff. Most of the staff seem to come from abroad and are mostly quick and efficient. However the new coffee making team seemed to be struggling to cope with a mad rush. I'll sure they will speed up. Making fresh capucinno's, late's and esspresso's seems a complicated task however. It will be nice when they can remember exactly what we want!

Guide to Server Colocation

This colocation guide is written mainly with our colocation services in mind however it provides information which will hopefully be of general use.

All colocated dedicated servers run "headless." This means without the use of a keyboard or monitor attached. Therefore you will need to ensure that the servers gets past the BIOS screen and boots the desired kernel without having to press any keys. It might be possible to set the BIOS on your dedicated server to stop on "no errors."

If your are running Linux the kernel you will need to ensure the correct kernel is booted without intervention. This is usually determined by the configuration on /etc/grub.conf if the GRUB boot loader is used, or /etc/lilo.conf if the LILO boot loader is used. After any changes have been made to the LILO configuration remember to run "/sbin/lilo -v" and ensure there are no errors.

Also make sure the kernel "works" properly with the hardware. This is especially true if have compiled the kernel yourself or are using specialist hardware.

Most colocation facilities provide an auto power cycler from a web interface. However this can fail if the machine does not auto power back up (requiring the intervention of a techie). Most server BIOS's are equipped with either "OFF", "LAST STATE" or "ALWAYS ON". In this case you will require "ALWAYS ON." it is possible to hack cheaper ATX motherboards to be "ALWAYS ON" but it is better to consider a more expensive motherboard.

Make sure you configure the network addresses, DNS server and gateways properly prior to delivery of the dedicated server. This information will have been provided in advance by the colocation provider. Also make sure you can get back into the server remotely by having the SSHD daemon running (telnet is not secure).

OpenSSH is shipped with all the main Linux distributions. You might wish to consider configuring SSH (usually done in /etc/sshd/sshd_config) to work with Protocol2 only, disable root logins (or only allow public key exchanges with the `without-password` option) and to turn off X11 forwarding as this is not required on a production server.

Many servers have multiple ethernet connectors, so it an be helpful, if you are not using the second interface to either mask it off with tape or label the correct ethernet device.

This is sometimes called "out of band" management. Quite often a colocation provider will have a serial terminal on site. This is basically a server itself but with loads of serial ports. This enables you to connect to your server if the network has failed to your server for any reason.

The most common serial port settings are 9600 8n1 (we do not recommend running it a faster speed). If you are running a Red Hat Linux server serial console access is usually configured in "/etc/inittab." Try inserting the line below:

co:23456:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS0 9600 vt100

Servers run pretty hot mainly due to modern processors. Even in a fully air conditioned environment. It will pay you look into cooling. A lot will depend on rack density however this is one more reason why you should consider a rack optimised server, as the air cooling in a colocated environment should have been taken into consideration. You can also familiarise with the chipset architecture of your motherboard and consider setting up "sensors." You can then monitor the temperature of your CPU and motherboard and graph it using MRTG.

You may wish to consider disc or hard drive redundancy. Although the "MTF" or Mean Time to Failure" quoted by hard drive manufacturers is impressive, hard drive failure, especially IDE failure happens depressingly often. With advent of S-ATA drives there is really no excuse, expecially if your are on a budget. You should consider cheap S-ATA drives (if you cannot afford SCSI) with Linux software RAID. Modern Linux distributions come with tools to administer and monitor the performance of software RAID arrays.

It can be helpful to duty technicians if all the main power lights are working. The power light, hard drive activity light and network light can be very useful. It goes without saying that the server should be correctly labelled at the front with it's hostname and IP address so it can be identified quickly.

If you want to explore any further idea's discussed in the above or find any of it confusing do not hesitate to get in touch at admin (at) weycrest.com. You can find out more about our colocation pricing on our colocation page.

Older Servers

Today in the office we have been having a bit of a clear out of older stock. We have quite a few older Compaq 1850R servers. These have excellent machines, reliable and hard working. We still have quite a few running as test boxes, backup mail and DNS. We are also using two Compaq's DL380's running SW-Soft's OpenVZ server virtualisation software. This allows a single physical server into several logical ones, running their own independent environments.

Nice New Rack of Dell Servers

Here is a nice rack of kit of brand new Dell's hosted at our data centre. Mainly PC2850's. These will be running Virtuozzo for reseller and Virtual Private Server plan's.

Weycrest Site Changes

We have been busy make changes to the site at www.weycrest.co.uk. Many of our hosting packages include a free UK domain name.

Pura Food Demolitions

Just up the road from the Weycrest offices they have started pulling down Pura Foods. It's a large food processing factory that sits on a peninsular on the River Lea, very close to where the Lea joins the River Thames. It can be seen directly opposite Canning Town Station as you get off the Jubilee Line or the Docklands Light Railway. Here is a picture of the site taken last winter when it was still working. We will have more pictures as the site gets redeveloped for housing . So far the Energy Centre right next to the River Lea crossing has almost gone. Cranes have now descended on the site and some of the holding tanks are being carted away on huge transporters.