17

Dec

2012

A Few Common Issues with Shared Hosting Security

News

Shared hosting is a form of virtual hosting that requires its users to share the same server and often the same IP address. This is the most economical form of hosting as it is quite inexpensive and usually sufficient for small to medium sized websites. Even though the websites on a shared hosting server have separate domains and separate content, they are still linked by the server that they share. While it is still the most affordable hosting option, there are still some issues you may face. This is why we do not offer shared hosting for SEO Hosting purposes.

Shared IPShared IPs

Unless you have an e-commerce site and need a dedicated IP for SSL, you will share an IP address with other users when using shared hosting. This is normally fine, but you should know that some of the things your neighbors do can affect your IP address. For example, if your neighbor gets put on a spam blacklist, anyone else who shares that IP will be on it to – including you.

CPU and MemoryShared CPU and Memory

With shared hosting you will have a guaranteed amount of disk space assigned to your account but you will still have to share CPU power and RAM with your neighbors. So if one of them ends up takes more than his or her fair share, it can adversely affect the other users.

HackingYou have been hacked!

It can be quite an unfortunate event when one of your neighbors has his site hacked and you just had better hope the security breach is not serious enough to cause the whole server to be affected. if that is the case then your site could be in jeopardy as well.

Despite the above three issues, shared hosting has plenty of benefits for traditional hosting but for SEO Hosting we still recommend using either a VPS or Dedicated Server for hosting your valuable websites as it is a much more suitable environment.

14

Dec

2012

Does Your Blog have Search Engine Friendly URLs?

CMS, News, Services

With the ever increasing usage of dynamic content management systems (CMS) to power websites, webmasters have been looking for ways to make their URLs look better. We refer to these type of URL’s as “search engine friendly” URLs, but they are also user friendly as well since they give an indication of what the page/post is about. Search engines prefer static URLs to dynamic URLs, but why? The fact is that the way that dynamic URLs are created they can sometimes create nightmares in the area of SEO. Search engines do not like to index dynamic URLs and there are various reasons for this, one of them being the non-standard characters like ?, &, %, =, and such in the URL.

A standard dynamic URL that is produced from PHP, a server-side scripting language, may look like this, seohosting.co.uk/index.php?category=name&234845345u4-this-one-274763. This format however is not very user or SE friendly but by using technology like Apache’s mod_rewrite module, your page/post can have a URL that looks more like, seohosting.co.uk/seohosting-co-uk-gets-a-new-look-and-feel. This is now quite easy to achieve, especially with blogging platforms such as WordPress.

There are several reason why this should be important for you to implement these SEO friendly URLs:

People Want To Link To A Certain Page On Your Site

SEO Friendly URLs

Sometimes when people may want to link to your website and they will use the URL as the anchor text in that link. For that reason alone you should be using SEO friendly URLs since most likely you have placed your keywords in your SEO friendly URL like below:

http://www.seohosting.co.uk/most-popular-seo-hosting-plans



Look and Feel of the URLs

SEO Friendly URls

When you have not so nice looking URLs it can cause visitors to be weary of your site as it may throw up red flags in some peoples eyes as it may look like a “bad” site to visit. People may even think “hummm I wonder if I will get a virus if I visit this site?” I can only assume that many people probably feel this way about seeing such “ugly” URLs, so don’t scare away your visitors just change the way you

Copy And Pasting

Copy and Paste URLs

Finally, we have all seen what can happen to URLs that are too long. Someone tries copy and paste the URL but for whatever reason, the URL gets broken during the transmission or formatting process, and it’s basically a dead link. So don’t limit your exposure with URLs that can “break down” and are hard to



So in order to effectively use this technology, you need to make sure that your website has mod_rewrite enabled. If you do not currently have a hosting provider or if you are looking for a new one then you should make sure to find a hosting provider that has experience with blog hosting and that has mod_rewrite and other important features like it enabled by default.

11

Dec

2012

Tips for Better VPS Security

News ,

So you just got yourself a new SEO Hosting VPS but now the question is, “How do I make it more secure?”. When running a VPS you need to protect your server against various security attacks which may harm or even destroy your data.

Here are a few basic VPS security tips:

1. Keep Your Software Up-To-Date – This is one of the most important tasks of securing your server. Everyday, numerous vulnerabilities are found in various applications, services and scripts so installing the latest updates on your server is crucial and strongly recommended.

2. Disable Remote Root Logins – Your service provider will most likely give you a root account to start but you do not need to login as root every time you access your server. You should, instead, create a separate user account that can escalate to root when necessary. Disable root logins in your SSH settings to add security.

3. Enforce and Use Strong Secure Passwords – Passwords are the first line of defense for your server but they are often the weakest links in server security. You should require any users to use secure passwords and change them regularly as well as create strong passwords.

4. Use a Secure File Transfer Method – If you think FTP is secure then you would be wrong, FTP is not secure. If you have sensitive data or even if you just want to protect your password, you should use your encrypted SSH login. SFTP is one method you can use.

5. Use Correct File and Directory Permissions – There are 3 types of access permissions: read, write and execute and they are available for three different categories of users: owner, group and others. With these permissions you can determine who can access or modify the files. You should ensure that all files and directories have the correct permissions since this is important for server security

6. Backup Everything – If there is any chance that you will need something, you should have a backup for it. Routine, off-site, automated backups will ensure that if something ever goes wrong with your VPS, you can easily recover.

7. Remove Inactive Accounts – If certain user accounts are no longer being used or have not been used for a long time then they are potential security risks for your server. Since no one is using them they can be compromised and possibly used to harm your server or other servers on the network.

6

Dec

2012

Crystone’s WINTER Web Hosting Sale-$.99

News, Packages, Services

Crystone.com is having a WINTER sale on their Mini Shared Hosting Plan, ONLY $.99 a month for:

UNLIMITED Disk Space
UNLIMITED Bandwidth
UNLIMITED E-mail Accounts
$100 Google AdWords Credits

This is a limited time offer and you must enter the promo code “WINTER” in order to get this great deal.

6

Dec

2012

Important: cPanel & WHM 11.30 Security Release

News

cPanel has released new builds for all public update tiers. These updates provide targeted changes to address security concerns with the cPanel & WHM product. These builds are currently available to all customers via the standard update system.

cPanel has rated this update as having important security impact. Information on security ratings is available at http://go.cpanel.net/securitylevels.

If your deployed cPanel & WHM servers are configured to automatically update when new releases are available, then no action is required. Your systems will update automatically. If you have disabled automatic updates, then you are highly encouraged to update your cPanel & WHM installs at your earliest convenience.

Releases

Version 11.30.7.4 of cPanel & WHM addresses all known vulnerabilities. The latest public releases of cPanel & WHM for all update tiers are published at http://httpupdate.cpanel.net.

Security Issue Information

The resolved security issues were identified by various members of the development and quality assurance teams at cPanel. There is no reason to believe that these vulnerabilities are known to the public. As such, cPanel will only release limited information regarding the vulnerabilities.

Once sufficient time has passed to allow cPanel & WHM systems to automatically update their installed software to the new versions, cPanel will release additional information regarding the nature of the security issue. This Targeted Security Release addresses five vulnerabilities. Additional information is scheduled to be released December 6, 2012, via email.

This information is provide by cPanel.net