Bigger, Better, Badder. This is the punchline of the new Softlayer which has completed the merger ThePlanet with itself after months of planning and action. Anyone who is an active web hosting provider in India or abroad must have heard news of  ThePlanet merging with Softlayer which in our industry is equivalent to two 800 pound gorillas joining forces and becoming a single 1600 pound giant! Both ThePlanet and Softlayer are rated amongst the top 10 datacenter providers globally and together they will probably be just behind Rackspace in terms of the servers hosted on their network.

What comes as a bigger surprise is that inspite Softlayer being smaller than ThePlanet in terms of the number of servers hosted and revenues generated, they are taking over ThePlanet as the VC firm GI Partners, which has had a controlling stake in both these companies prior to their merger, recognises the advanced networking, support and automation capabilities which has made Softlayer amongst the fastest growing datacenter providers globally.

Our association with Softlayer has been from the middle of 2006 from the time they had a single datacenter in Dallas, hosting about a  thousand servers on their network. Having being a client of  ThePlanet for a couple of years prior to working with SL, things started going downhill in terms of support and network outages after their COO, Lance Crosby pulled out and started Softlayer alongwith a bunch of colleagues from his previous organisation.  We had reviewed other providers including SoftLayer and I am glad we ultimately decided to go with Softlayer and have continued to use them as our exclusive provider of virtual datacenter services.

In my view, following are the key aspects which sets Softlayer apart from the rest of the crowd:

  • Network Uptime: Inspite of them growing rapidly into multiple datacenters with growing complexity of managing a large interconnected network, they have being able to deliver top notch network performance and uptime. For a web hosting provider, this is a primary requirement.
  • Proactive Support: Their support team has been consistent and extremely proactive in resolving issues, which most datacenter providers would shirk responsibility from. Needless to say, Softlayer continues to impress with their responsiveness and willingness to resolve support issues.
  • Automation: Before Softlayer, most providers would take 24-48 hrs to make your server come online. They redefined the industry by delivering dedicated servers within 4 hours or less. This helped hosting providers in delivering servers on demand to their client without having to maintain any inventory at their end.
  • Range of Services: In the last couple of years, the hosting industry has been overloaded with new technologies and innovations, which include Virtualisation, Cloud Hosting, CDN Services, Grid Computing, iSCSI Storage to name a few. Softlayer has been on top of most such innovations and has attempted to provide this as an on demand service to its clients with a low usage cost.

While Softlayer may have had been successful in the past, it does not in anyway guarantee its future success, especially after  its merger with ThePlanet. The Planet has a different approach to datacenter servces, was more focussed on providing collocation services and it might be difficult to make them follow the Softlayer way of doing things. Also, I am sure there would be some erosion of clients from the old Planet as Softlayer would not be offering colocation services and would prefer their model of virtual datacenter services which might not suit all clients of ThePlanet.

While it could be anybody’s guess in whether the merged entity can dominate the datacenter hosting industry or get overtaken by another ‘Softlayer’ in the making, I do hope that they are able to offer services which would make outsourced server hosting a no-brainer for SME’s in India, who prefer to host their web and application servers within their premises for reasons of ‘sharing their internet access cost’ and ‘physical access to their servers’ but incurring substantial infrastructure and maintenance costs in the process.
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Posted by hriday under Datacenter, News & Updates
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Your Web hosting company can be your site’s best friend or worst enemy – depending on the level of service and responsiveness. A successful Web site depends on a good Web host, but it’s just as important to select the right kind of hosting account.

Are you willing to share space on a server with other sites or do you need a server of your own? Know the answer before you make a decision.

Shared Hosting Services

Unique And Shared IP Addresses

Every server connected to the Web has its own IP address. The IP address uniquely identifies that server much like a membership number or driver’s license number identifies a particular individual. IP addresses are also tied to domain names. This relationship means that Web users can either enter a domain name or an IP address in a Web browser to access the information on a Web server.

The basic difference between Web hosting accounts is whether a site has its own server or shares one with other Web sites. That arrangement determines whether the site has its own IP address or shares one with other sites.

Most small to medium-sized sites use a type of hosting called “virtual hosting” where a number of Web sites reside on the same server. Because the sites share a server, they also share an IP address.

Large and/or busy sites usually can’t share server space because the volume of Web traffic from many sites would quickly overwhelm the server. Those sites either operate their own servers or select a “dedicated hosting” option from their Web host. Dedicated hosting means that your site is the only site residing on the server and so you aren’t sharing an IP address with any other site.

Which type is best for you? Let’s look at the good and bad points of both.

The best thing about virtual hosting is price: it’s usually really low. Depending on your site’s technology, storage, and bandwidth requirements, virtual hosting can cost anywhere from Rs. 999 per year to Rs. 9999 per year depending on your space and feature requirements. If price is your main concern, then virtual hosting may be right for you.f you run a small business and don’t expect more than 1000 visitors to your website per day, then shared hosting is for you.The only problem with shared hosting is that bandwidth is limited, so if your site becomes very popular you might find yourself running out of bandwidth quickly. But make sure you’re aware of potential problems:

Know your neighborhood: Sharing an IP address with known spam sites or adult sites raises a warning flag with search engines. Spam sites try to trick search engines into giving them an underserved high rank, so some search engines like AltaVista respond by banning the entire IP address from their index.

Check your Web host’s terms of service page to see what sites are allowed on their servers. Also ask if they offer an individual IP address for different sites on the same server. Some hosts do, but make sure the IP address and domain name resolve correctly before you start promoting the site.

Server response : Some web hosts provides free hosting service for a limited period from where you can judge the server performance and the features they would provide you for your hosting service.

Dedicated Servers

Dedicated hosting is the opposite of shared hosting. Dedicated hosting is about you being in total control of the server and what goes on the server. You decide whether to host 1 site or 10 of your sites.Dedicated hosting allows you to tailor database, email and software applications to your desire – so it works the way you want it to. This is powerful.Dedicated hosting is ideal for websites with high traffic and large businesses who want complete control over the server so they can fine tune there applications, etc.

Another benefit of dedicated hosting is you can resell the space/bandwidth to people who want to setup their own website.Unlike shared hosting, dedicated hosting will cost considerably more and a monthly payment.If your website is critical to your business, then it is highly recommend that you opt for a dedicated hosting.

Benefits of Dedicated Hosting

  • More control: You don’t have to worry about someone’s bad script slowing or crashing the server. You have only yourself to blame if that happens!
  • Faster response with high traffic loads. Because the server only responds to request for information from your site, visitors won’t have to wait in line to view your Web pages and images.
  • No bandwidth penalty. Virtual hosting accounts usually offer a certain amount of bandwidth per month to each site on the server. Sites that go over their allotment get charged extra. But dedicated hosting generally has no such restrictions because it’s assumed you need a lot of bandwidth if you require your own server.

Evaluate your needs and your financial resources before you sign up for hosting and choose your host carefully.

To know more about various hosting options, pricing  and how it could enhance your web presence  you can visit our website or write in your queries to info@diadem.co.in

Posted by anirban under Web Hosting
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Diagram of Various Tiers of security in datacenter network and at server level

security


At Diadem Technologies we take extreme precaution and safeguard of our mailing services to ensure continuous and reliable availability of our mailing services to our clients. We have all our servers located in the world’s leading datacenter which has a very secure environment with various levels of physical and hardware based protection to keep your data safe from different attacks and vulnerabilities. The servers have multi core Xeon processers and have RAID10 array of HDDs for complete data redundancy so that a hard disk crash would not affect the server operations and would not result in any loss of data on the server.

The servers are restricted to be accessed via the Public network so that no unauthorized access to the servers can be made. We use a secure encrypted VPN (virtual private network) connection that connects to the private backend network and hence the servers are only accessible to the legitimate admin users at our end.

For network level protection we have in place perimeter hardware firewalls by CISCO systems to block external threats along with CISCO GUARD DDOS (Distributed Denial of service) and CISCO Tipping point IPS (Intrusion prevention system). CISCO GUARD DDOS protects from requests that make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users and brings down the server to halt. CISCO Tipping point IPS is an advanced Intrusion prevention system that is used extensively in critical networks to monitor network and/or system activities for malicious or unwanted behavior and can react, in real-time, to block or prevent those activities. Network-based IPS, for example, will operate in-line to monitor all network traffic for malicious code or attacks. When an attack is detected, it can drop the offending packets while still allowing all other traffic to pass.

After passing through the various levels of security mentioned above we have more additional security features on the physical server for protecting the server /server applications and the inbound and outbound mails.

  • At the server we have robust software based firewalls that have been customized to add another level of security in the server.
  • We have SMTP connection tracking system to check all the connections that are being made to the server for sending or receiving mails. At this level various parameters of a mail are checked like if the IP of the sender is blacklisted in any third party Anti SPAM website, if the sender has a valid mail server, if the reverse DNS of the sender email server is valid.
  • We have enabled greylisting on the server to cut down on SPAM mails before they can enter the server. We have advanced content filtering along with anti spam software, antivirus, malware and anti root kit signatures that are updated regularly to block emerging threats immediately.
  • Once the mail is scanned with the above filters, we implement a new and unique technique to authorize defined servers only to server your emails through the use of SPF records. Any other servers would not be able to send or receive any mail on behalf of your domain. This will cut down spoofing of your emails.
  • At the last stage we have SMTP authentication enabled that allows mails to be relayed through our servers only for those who are intended to send mails hence reducing the unwanted relaying of mails.

The above illustration highlights our commitment to ensure that we provide our clients with the best of breed technologies to ensure spam free, virus free, efficient and continuous availability of our mailing services for their operations.

If you are interested in knowing more about our web hosting services and plan details, you can look us up at www.diadem.co.in.

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Posted by anirban under Linux, Web Hosting
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Below are some useful commands in Linux (applicable for RedHat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and CentOS) for regular server admin activities.

  • To find a word string in the files under a folder(s).

# find . | xargs grep ‘your-string’ -sl

  • To get the disk usages for the individual sub-directory run:

# ls -d /your/path/* | xargs du -sH

  • Replace a word string with another word string in all files in a folder.

Using ‘sed’ command:
# sed -i ‘s/ string1/ string2/g’ *.html

Using ‘find’ command:
# find ./ -type f -exec sed -i ’s/string1/string2/’ {} \;

  • When you deleting huge number of files in a folder, you might receive an error like “/bin/rm: Argument list too long”, do this instead “rm -rf” command:

# find . -name ‘*.ext’ | xargs rm

  • If you want to delete 20 days older files in folder, you can use the find command as below for your job.

This commands to list the files older than 20 days:
# find /path/folder1 -mtime +20 -type f -exec ls -d1 {} \;

Delete the files older than 20 days:
# find /path/folder1 -mtime +20 -type f -exec rm -rf {} \;
OR
# find /path/folder1 -mtime +20 -type f -ok rm -rf {} \;

You can change the older days count by increasing or decreasing the number and the file or folder by specify the “-type d” for folder.

  • Changing File or folder permission for multiple files and folder with the command
    chmod -R 777 /path/folder1/* is a risky affair, if you miss the path of folder or file the command would applicable to the root (/) folder and that can result a some wrong permission in system file/folder which leads a vulnerable system. Instead of using the “chmod” command directly, you can use it with find command for a safer modification.

For folders permission:
# find . -type d -exec chmod 555 {} \;

For files permission:
# find . -type f -exec chmod 444 {} \;

These are the most frequently used commands in Linux for day to day activities, thank you for your visit and please feel free to share any additional linux commands which you find useful :) .

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Posted by ankur under Linux
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In line with our sustained efforts in providing our VPS clients with industry leading hardware and software options, we have upgraded the HDDs on our VPS servers from the current Raptor 10K RPM disks to Seagate Cheetah SA-SCSI 15k RPM drives.

SA-SCSI (Serial Attached Small Computer System Interface) is the gold standard in storage solutions for web servers requiring enterprise class robustness with high availability and fault tolerance features, especially where large databases and mission critical applications are involved. To ensure our clients are able to get the performance of a dedicated hardware at a fraction of its cost, we  have gone ahead and upgraded all our VPS clients to the new hardware without any additional expense and they are all delighted with the improved performance which is being delivered to their applications, as a result of this upgrade.

The SCSI HDDs coupled with the RAID hardware makes it a very stable and robust platform for hosting VMs on the Citrix Xen Server platform. Furthermore, we have also upgraded the Xen Server virtualization platform to its latest version (Xen Server ver 5.6) which is more stable and has several bug fixes implemented in its current verion. We have also added more storage space to our VPS hosting plans alongwith a higher monthly bandwidth allocation for no additional charges.

Bottom line is that if you are looking for a VPS or would like to host your application, website or mail server on a dedicated server platform, you will be hard pressed to find an offering which could better ours!

Check out our new Linux VPS and Windows VPS hosting plans and talk to our sales team today!

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Posted by admin under News & Updates, Virtualisation
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In sync with the launch of our new website, we have also revamped our shared web hosting plans for both Windows 2008 Enterprise and Linux platforms and the new hosting plans are now available online. The new hosting plans have enhanced web space, bandwidth and email id allocations amongst other updates and the key benefits are given below:

  • No limits on mailbox quotas: You can now define your own mailbox capacity on a per mailbox basis and the total storage limit allocated on your domain would apply for all users on your domain.
  • No limits on web hosting space: For Linux hosting plans, we have removed web hosting space limits. The total applicable limit on your hosting plan can be used your website, emails or a combination of both, as per your choice.
  • Additional mailboxes: Starting with the SOHO plan onwards, we have increased the no. of mailboxes on every hosting plan by as much as 50% than our previous hosting plans for no additional charges.
  • Latest OS & Control Panel: Industry leading Plesk 9.5 control panel is available to all our clients. We also host ASP/ASP.net enabled websites on Windows 2008 Enterprise Edition for enhanced performance and IIS 7 Support.
  • More server storage space: We have upped storage limits on our hosting plans by nearly 50% across the board. The additional storage space is matched by the upgraded hardware to make your websites and applications run better and faster.

These feature enhancements coupled with our commitment to providing our clients with the most responsive hosting support team in the country clearly makes it a win-win deal for our clients.

Want to learn more? Check out our new Linux and Windows 2008 enterprise hosting plans and signup online.

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Posted by admin under News & Updates, Web Hosting
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Our new website is finally online. After about 3 months of planning and implementation, we have finally been able to put up our revamped site online. Though I might sound superstitious, I consider ourselves fortunate that the site has been launched on the same day when India celebrates  Rakhi or Raksha Bandhan which is an auspicious event for most Indians.

The updated site has had a major overhaul and following are the key changes implemented:

  • The backend CMS has been upgraded from Joomla1.x  to Joomla 1.5 which is considered to be the most popular CMS on the planet.
  • The site template is built from scratch and cannot be found anywhere else on the web. This gives our site a unique sense of distinction, unlike most other Joomla based websites which use free or commercial templates.
  • The site has a clean and uncluttered feel to it and we have placed special emphasis on the typography, navigation system and most importantly, meaningful and relevant content. We have dumped fancy javascripts, over the top graphics and animation which cry out for your attention in favour of a clean, simple and fast loading website.
  • New hosting plans (Windows and Linux) and upgraded VPS hosting plans have been launched with this site (more on this in our next post).
  • Pages are made SEO friendly to enable deeper indexing by search engines and more visibility for relevant organic searches on the search engines.

This is the fifth major revamp of our website over the past decade and it will be updated on a consistent basis with new services and offerings, so stay tuned with us!

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Posted by hriday under News & Updates
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It might sometime happen that your ISP assigned Internet IP might be blocked by other servers and you might not be able to access those sites or services from your PC. To know your internet IP address (as opposed to your local LAN IP), www.whatismyipaddress.com, allows you to get your ISP IP without a fuss.

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Posted by hriday under Web Hosting
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A ‘catch all’  subdomain allows you to redirect all users who might type in http://subdomain.yourdomain.com  where ‘subdomain’ could be any subdomain which you would like to redirect users from.

Why would you need catch all subdomains

Maybe you have a few subdomains but sometimes your visitors are accessing non-existing subdomains. So the most appropriate solution would be to either redirect them to your main website or at least show them a list of available pages.

Step-by-step configuration in Plesk

  1. Create a subdomain ‘z-WILDCARD’ in Plesk – under the admin section of the right domain.
    Why do we need this name?  Because this entry should be the last entry in the list of subdomains, otherwise this “trick” will not work.
  2. Add special configuration (catchall for all subdomains) to the vhosts.conf file of this subdomain.
    Normally it’s located in /srv/www/vhosts/domain.com/subdomains/z-WILDCARD/conf/vhosts.conf. You have to create it – normally you need the root user to do this. Copy the following content into the file:
    ServerAlias *.domain.com
  3. Apply the new configuration – recreate the Apache configuration. You have to run the tool websrvmng which is a Plesk tool that manages and creates the webserver configuration. Execute the following as root user.
    /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -u --vhost-name=domain.com
  4. Finally – restart Apache to load the new configuration, also as root.
    service httpd restart

That’s it! Now your users can access non-existing subdomains as e.g. doesnotexists.domain.com and you should see the Plesk page displayed for new pages.

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Posted by ankur under Plesk Control Panel
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What is vulnerability?

Vulnerability is a hole or a weakness in the application, which can be a design flaw or an implementation bug that allows an attacker to cause harm to the stakeholders of an application. Stakeholders include the application owner, application users, and other entities that rely on the application. The term “vulnerability” is often used very loosely.

Intruders are just as aware of the critical information that can be accessed through an application as the webmaster.  In many cases, their entrance and overall success is attributed to numerous factors.  Those conscious of the roaming threats typically monitor network perimeters with firewalls and intrusion detection systems.  However, these components actually encourage exploits as they are required to keep ports 80 and 443 open to support SSL and protect online transactions.  To an intruder, these ports are open doors that enable website attacks in a number of different ways.  Most network firewalls are configured to secure only the internal perimeter, leaving the company open to a wide range of attacks.  And while both intrusion prevention and detection systems are somewhat more effective, they don’t perform complete analysis of a packet’s contents.  Without an additional layer of security, a knowledgeable intruder can penetrate a web application with relative ease.

An organization dedicated to improving the security of web-based applications, the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) recently composed a list of 10 of the most common vulnerabilities in today’s applications.  The potential threats are associated with the following:

Cross site scripting:

XSS flaws occur whenever an application takes user supplied data and sends it to a web browser without first validating or encoding that content. XSS allows attackers to execute script in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, possibly introduce worms, etc.

Server-side scripting errors

Injection flaws, particularly SQL injection, are common in web applications. Injection occurs when user-supplied data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data tricks the interpreter into executing unintended commands or changing data.

The execution of malicious code

Code vulnerable to remote file inclusion (RFI) allows attackers to include hostile code and data, resulting in devastating attacks, such as total server compromise. Malicious file execution attacks affect PHP, XML and any framework which accepts filenames or files from users.

Insecure direct object reference

A direct object reference occurs when a developer exposes a reference to an internal implementation object, such as a file, directory, database record, or key, as a URL or form parameter. Attackers can manipulate those references to access other objects without authorization.

Cross site request forgery

A CSRF attack forces a logged-on victim’s browser to send a pre-authenticated request to a vulnerable web application, which then forces the victim’s browser to perform a hostile action to the benefit of the attacker. CSRF can be as powerful as the web application that it attacks.

Improper error handling and data leakage

Applications can unintentionally leak information about their configuration, internal workings, or violate privacy through a variety of application problems. Attackers use this weakness to steal sensitive data or conduct more serious attacks.

Penetration of authentication and session management

Account credentials and session tokens are often not properly protected. Attackers compromise passwords, keys, or authentication tokens to assume other users’ identities.

Vulnerable cryptographic storage

Web applications rarely use cryptographic functions properly to protect data and credentials. Attackers use weakly protected data to conduct identity theft and other crimes, such as credit card fraud.

Insecure web communications

Applications frequently fail to encrypt network traffic when it is necessary to protect sensitive communications.

Failure to restrict writes permissions and URL access.

Frequently, an application only protects sensitive functionality by preventing the display of links or URLs to unauthorized users. Attackers can use this weakness to access and perform unauthorized operations by accessing those URLs directly.

From the above list, its quite evident that simply securing your web server is not enough (though its a necessity) to ensure that your site is secure from malicious intrusion. The underlying code and applications for your website needs to be tested for common web vulnerabilities and ensured that the security loopholes are patched and secured against intrusion attempts.

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Posted by anirban under Web Application Security
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