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full root access
Linux, VPS, Web Hosting

Full Root Access in a Nutshell

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Virtual Private Server Hosting (VPS) is a type of hosting that is used to split a single server into multiple environments. Web developers prefer VPS hosting to establish their online presence. It offers more security than shared hosting, and it’s much faster. VPS hosting is the most popular and widely used solution for all hosting requirements around the world, and we talked more about VPS and how it works in this article if you want to know more VPS offers many benefits over other web hosting options, especially shared ones. One of these advantages is full root access to your server at all times. What is Full Root Access? And why should you have it on your server? Root access allows you to have full access/control to your server. Root access does not require physical access to the server. However, if you have an internet host, you will be provided with an online login credential that will allow you to access the server’s inner workings and details. You can access your server from anywhere you wish. This includes adding websites to it, deleting third-party software or applications, customizing it, making changes and all other things. With full root access to your VPS, you can do everything. Depending on what kind of website it is and how you intend to use it, you might not need full root access if you only need the server to host a personal website for example. If your website is a business website, you might need full root access and the right type of OS to support it.   Many have found full root access to be a huge advantage. Web hosts have made this a key benefit by offering packages to their clients. Web hosts don’t like people fumbling with their servers and adding whatever they want to and that’s why not all web hosts allow it.   A second aspect to be aware of is the belief that VPS users can’t have root access because their websites are all on the same server. If you’re using a shared server, this is true but not the case with VPS hosting. That’s because a VPS is essentially a single server that is split into multiple servers. This allows you to do whatever you would like to the VPS.   What are the Advantages of Full Root Access? It is important to recognize the importance of the internet in today’s lives. The internet makes it easy and fast to gather data, reach out to people, contact emergency services, book flights and trains, send large amounts of data to distant locations around the world, and much more. VPS hosting with full root rights is a valuable addition to the web hosting industry. VPS hosting is considered the middle man between dedicated and shared web hosting in almost every industry. One server is divided into multiple servers with an OS (operating systems) and independent software. Let’s take a look at the main advantages that help us be more prepared to achieve our business goals.   Take better control VPS hosting with full root access allows the webmaster greater control over site administration, which in turn gives many great benefits for webmasters since they would have root access and SSH to their VPS.   Greater Security Full root access gives you better security and scalability. VPS environments are isolated from one another, which makes them safer than shared hosting.   Higher Reliability and More Flexibility This type of hosting offers greater flexibility and security than dedicated hosting. You will be able to access your root server from anywhere in the world. This is what makes websites more performant. The advantages of having your own dedicated bandwidth and storage you don’t need to share with anyone else are numerous.   A boon for web developers This is because of the advantage of customizing the software applications yourself. Developers can then install the software on their servers. You are also protected against hackers and other mistakes by having full root access to your VPS hosting.   Data Protection VOS hosting makes it simple to backup servers. In most cases, daily backups are included as a standard. You can customize it to only get the features you need, even the OS of choice. VPS hosting offers full root access, which allows you to host two websites on one server. You can also update and modify one website without putting pressure on another. It offers a high-speed connection to your server and a fast and easy way to access it. VPS hosting with full root access is the best option to personalize your hosting environment and grow your business.

Brave & IPFS
Linux, Web Hosting

IPFS Protocol

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Imagine an internet with literal freedom of content where governments can never take any content off the internet or ban any website. Well, that’s exactly what the IPFS protocol promises. IPFS utilizes a decentralized file-sharing system that uses peer-to-peer networks instead of relying on a centralized network like the HTTP protocol. But before we explain what exactly is IPFS and how it works, we need to explain the HTTP protocol.   HTTP and HTTPS protocols Short for HyperText Transfer Protocol is the protocol that currently powers the internet and most websites that you visit and use. After you enter a website URL in your browser, your browser sends an http request which (if the server accepts) fetches the files required to build the web page you requested. HTTPS is the same as HTTP but adds a layer of security. You can learn more about both here   IPFS Short for InterPlanetary File System, which is a relatively new protocol first released in 2015. IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that utilizes multiple nodes simultaneously to download the data instead of a centralized server, making it possible to distribute high volumes of data without duplication, which will save data usage. And as we mentioned above, content censorship will be way too hard to do since the content won’t be available on a single or a range of IPs, so it’s almost impossible to block websites. As stated on their website IPFS directly challenges the HTTP protocol and is trying to be the new default protocol; however, taking the HTTP is a big challenge to take since it’s been the industry standard for decades and especially hard for IPFS because of limited browser support.   Browser support Currently, the only browser that supports IPFS protocol natively is Brave browser. Brave always supports privacy, and they firmly believe that IPFS will address a lot of the current internet issues, and they even let you host an IPFS node yourself. While Brave is a decent browser and a growing player in the market, its support isn’t enough for IPFS to achieve its goals. For IPFS to achieve their goals, they would need full native support from Chrome which has over 1 billion users. Unfortunately, IPFS isn’t natively supported in Chrome; however, IPFS already released a browser extension for it.   Conclusion The IPFS protocol is fighting for a good cause, but we don’t think that it will ever replace the HTTP and HTTPS protocols because they would literally need support from everyone in the community and the developers and they would also be fighting against industries built on the HTTP protocol head on

TCP IP
cPanel & WHM, Linux, VPS, Web Hosting

Common Protocols and Their Port Numbers

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Service names and port numbers are utilized to differentiate between services used over transport protocols such as TCP/IP, UDP and SCTP. The organization responsible for assigning the name and port number of the services is called Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or IANA for short who also maintains the registries where service names and port numbers are stored. Port registries used in transport protocols are divided into three ranges: 1-System Ports (0-1023) 2-User Ports (1024-49151) 3-Dynamic / Private Ports (49152-65535)   For service to operate efficiently, hosts that operate them and access them along with intermediate devices, like firewalls, must agree on which service is used on which port and many services will use the port listed on the IANA registry. However, with the growing use of windows and single-user Linux systems over the years, the initial port model isn’t strictly adhered to, which means It may no longer be presumed that a particular port number automatically refers to a specific service. For example, web hosts launch multiple instances of the same service, so we cannot use the same port for all. Nowadays there are hundreds and hundreds of programs and application-level protocols that have been delegated service names and port numbers along with this amount is set to increase later on. Additional confusion above port numbers may appear since IANA may de-assign a few more in usage and reassign it to a different service. Here’s a table of the most common services and their port numbers Service name   Port number FTP 20,21 SSH 22 TELNET 23 SMTP 25 DNS 53 DHCP 67,68 HTTP 80 HTTPS 443 POP3 110 IMAP4 143   On Linux machines, you can find information about the services that client applications might use in the /etc/services folder. On windows, services, port number and protocols are in the C:windows\system32\drivers\etc\services   Conclusion Dealing with services and port numbers can be messy, but you know what’s not messy? Hostilica shared hosting services. With Hostilica’s SSD server, 99.9% uptime guarantee, and qualified customer support, you can be sure that hosting your website will go as smoothly as possible. Check out our shared hosting offers here.

What is a Brute Force Attack
Linux, Security

What is a Brute Force Attack?

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You may have heard the term “brute force” when looking for information on hacking, but you may not understand what it means. It’s a common term that is often used in the security world. Basically, the attacker submits many passwords either through a dictionary(password list) or auto-generated passphrases until the computer guesses the correct combination, like trying out all the possible combinations on a safe. This attack requires minimal effort on the attacker’s part since modern computers can crack an eight-alphanumeric complex password in less than two hours. It can even take less time if your password is found in a recycled dictionary (credentials got from another breach). The most known password dictionary is rockyou which contains 14,341,564 passwords to date. Brute Force attacks can be very problematic because once an attacker is in, it is tough to catch them, so most people try to protect their websites before the attack happens or detect and neutralize the attacker while the attack is happening. How to protect yourself? Protecting your website and credentials against Brute Force attacks isn’t hard. You just need to know the best practices:   Use Complex Passwords: Using complex passwords makes it much harder for a computer to crack your password. Always make sure to include special characters such @,_ and !. You can always use cPanel included password generator to generate strong and complex passwords for you.   Increase Password Length: Just using a complex password won’t completely protect you. As we mentioned above, a modern computer can crack eight-alphanumeric complex passwords in about two hours, so make sure to increase the length of your password.   Limit Login Attempts: Limiting login attempts on your website will make it almost impossible for your password to be cracked, so if you can enable it on your website dashboard, you should.   Use Two-Factor Authentication: Two-factor authentication adds a second security layer to your credentials by sending an OTP (one time) passcode to your phone number or email so that even if your password is compromised, the attacker won’t be able to access the app unless they get the OTP code.   Implementing Captcha: Implementing captcha on your website is a great way to make sure that whoever is trying to access your website is a human, not a bot.   Conclusion Brute force attacks can cause massive problems since they are very hard to notice if they are successful; however, preventing them is relatively easy if you follow the practices above. Never take your website or credentials security lightly, and always make sure that your website is secure as possible.

CDN
Linux, Web Hosting

What is a Content Delivery Network and How It Works

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A Content Delivery Network is a vital component of any good-old-fashioned website and software these days. The content you see on your smartphones today, on almost any site or app, images or videos, or any other sort of online content will be delivered over a content delivery network. This means the internet is divided up into many different “neighborhoods” where the same content is made available across various networks – this makes it far easier for the end-user to find what they want, and the data doesn’t have to travel all over the world. They simply go to their PC, fire up the relevant software, enter their credit card details and it’s done. Simple! In terms of the technology itself, a CDN works by using IPs or IP networks that are fast enough to be able to route packets of information much faster. The reason why many companies (not just those in telecommunication) are getting a CDN is that they have a common use case which is people accessing information from mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops from different parts of the world. With a common use case such as this, there’s a much greater potential for traffic to increase on a CDN. With a CDN technology system, every server connected to the system is essentially acting as an “edge server”. The edge servers act as “redundant” connections since all the data requests will be routed through the edge servers and not directly from the source servers. This means that with each request, your computer gets the request for that data in its pool and then sends that request out along to whichever edge servers it can find. This saves time since the user doesn’t have to wait for the actual source server to receive the request. This saves you lots of bandwidth, which is especially important if your website has a lot of traffic from different parts of the world. The CDN provider also ensures that no packets are lost and that they arrive at their destinations promptly increasing the network’s reliability.   Conclusion CDN allows for faster and higher quality transmission and reception of information because all of the information is handled internally. Because of these key components, CDN is becoming increasingly popular in many different circumstances, from enterprise to residential use and from large institutions to small ones.

apache vs nginx
Linux, Web Hosting

Apache vs Nginx – What is The Difference?

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In the world of web hosting, you’ll come across two very popular web servers: Apache and Nginx. Both are the most popular web servers for Linux. They both serve over 50% of all web traffic on the Internet. It’s no surprise that these two are so popular. This article will compare the two to see which is better for your web server needs. Both Apache and Nginx have a lot of the same features. They both are open source projects. They are both made for the same purpose, which is serving content over the Internet; however, they are very different in the way they serve their content.    Apache: Since it’s release, Apache has been a mainstay piece of technology used to power various websites. Apache works well with PHP, Perl and other languages based on the Common Gateway Interface (CSI) and the HTTP protocol. Apache’s flexibility with web technologies makes it an extremely economical choice for hosting websites of all sizes. Apache is easy to install and comes with a large number of features. Apache uses a multi-process approach which means it creates a new thread for each request. Apache has a variety of multi processing modules (MPMs) which define how clients are served. Three main MPMs are used :   Prefork MPM: This module creates a new process with a single thread to handle a single connection at a time. This module is very fast as long as the number of connections is lower than the number of processes. The module performance degrades substantially when the number of connections becomes higher than the number of processes and is also very hard to scale.   Worker MPM: This module creates processes that can handle multiple threads, which means each process can handle multiple connections. This module is much more efficient than Prefork and is much easier to scale.   Event MPM: Very similar to how Worker MPM works but handles Keep alive requests better. This protects the module from getting overflowed with Keepalive requests. Apache is very flexible and user-friendly and is known for its wide support, especially the fact that it supports PHP, meaning it supports serving dynamic content, which is very important, especially if you are planning on streaming video from your server or are going to use a CMS like WordPress.   Pros: User-friendly Great flexibility Large community Support for dynamic content Cons: Spawns new process for each request which makes it much less efficient   Nginx: Nginx is also very popular as a web server. It was developed by Igor Sysoev and released to the public in 2004. Igor made it explicitly to outperform Apache and address the C10K challenge, which is serving 10 thousand concurrent connections. Nginx utilizes an asynchronous event-driven architecture. Nginx creates a worker process that can handle thousands of concurrent connections by placing each event in a loop while processing connections asynchronously. This makes Nginx much more efficient in serving static content than Apache and enables it to scale enormously on minimal resources; however, it limits the flexibility of Nginx. Another problem with Nginx is that it doesn’t support dynamic content forcing their users to pass their dynamic requests to an external processor and wait for the content to be rendered so Nginx can then relay it, which can complicate things and affect performance Pros: Lighter and more efficient than Apache Able to 10k simultaneous connection on low system resources Best for static content Cons: Community support isn’t as great as Apache Doesn’t support dynamic content natively Less flexibility   Conclusion: When both are used on the same website, they both serve the same purpose. However, there are subtle differences between the two that a web developer needs to be well aware of. Nginx is less flexible than Apache, making it unsuitable if you want a fully-configured and dynamic website. Nginx is also faster and can provide support for various protocols and different sets of coding standards. In the end, it is the preference of the website owner as to which type of web server is best.

Linux

CentOS reign is over! A new era for web servers

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What is CentOS? CentOS is a Linux distribution targeted towards Web servers. Centos was founded by Gregory Kurtzer and Lance Davis in 2004. CentOS is basically a one to one copy of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) but without RHEL branding and commercial support and is built from the same source code. CentOS appealed to a broad market since it was free and as reliable as Red Hat this contributed to gaining a large market share for a couple of years, making it the most used Web server in 2010 by a whopping 30% market share in web servers.   Red Hat acquiring CentOS in 2014 and IBM acquiring Red Hat in 2019 In 2014, the CentOS team had a market share bigger than their resources can support. So the team accepted a deal with Red Hat. This was a win-win deal for both sides. Red Hat took control of an entity that complemented their brand and CentOS developers got the resources they needed to continue working on the centOS project. However, a part of the deal involved electing a new governance board for CentOS with a mandatory and permanent Red Hat majority; this made it more acquisition than a deal since CentOS is now funded and controlled by Red Hat. In 2019 IBM officially acquired Red Hat, which led to the decision of discontinuing CentOS.   Death of CentOS and hail CentOS Stream In December 2020, Redhat officially announced the death of the CentOS project. This meant that the current version CentOS 8 will be the last version and adding salt to injury, it will not enjoy the 10-year update it should have, sending it to the grave much earlier by the end of 2021 instead of 2029. Red Hat also announced users will need to migrate to RHEL or CentOS, which was originally announced back in September 2019. For those who don’t know what CentOS stream Linux is, As CentOS community Manager Rich Bowen “ the upstream (development) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux” meaning it’s an update preview of RHEL. Many people consider Stream Linux as a beta version of RHEL; however, the distribution FAQ clearly states that CentOS Stream will not be “the RHEL beta test platform”.   Alternatives: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL): The ultimate goal of discontinuing CentOS is to move users to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Yes, it is a sly move but will save you a lot of time if you have the money for it. Red Hat already released a script for a smooth migration. Stream CentOS: Moving to Stream is an option if you want to stay within the Red Hat ecosystem and don’t want to pay for RHEL. We wouldn’t recommend this option because it can’t have the same reliability as either CentOS or RHEL since, by nature, Stream is a work in progress and always will be, even if the distribution FAQ says that it will not be used as a beta testing platform. ROCKY LINUX: Right after Red Hat announced that CentOS was finished, one of the original founders of CentOS, Gregory Kurtzer announced another clone of RedHat named ROCKY LINUX after the late co-founder of CentOS Rocky McGaugh. However, we are not sure that it will have the same stability and continuity as CentOS. Rocky Linux will be released in Q2 2021. ORACLE LINUX: ORACLE Linux has been around for some time and is another one to one copy from Red Hat offering the same reliability and continuity of Red Hat since ORACLE backs it. Migrating to ORACLE Linux will be very easy as ORACLE provided a script for it. However, the issue with ORACLE Linux isn’t a technical one but more of an ethical problem. Since every scrap of Red Hat Linux is open-source, anyone can make a clone of Red Hat, but the community has long criticized oracle for offering a paid version for technical support for a product that isn’t technically theirs.

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