The Tech Bench: Plesk and cPanel log location reference guides
Ever wonder where the MST looks to investigate events on your server when you submit a ticket? Knowing the locations of various log files for both cPanel and Plesk can be invaluable when trying to understand why, when or how an event occurred on your server.
Below are breakdowns of log file locations for both control panels. Be sure to check the ServInt KnowledgeBase for handy (but large) graphic representations of of both cPanel/WHM and Plesk log locations as well. Read more
The Tech Bench: Jailshell in cPanel
Jailshell is a level of shell (SSH) access that limits a user to his or her specific directory structure. Under regular SSH when users log into their servers they are taken to their home directory and can execute commands within their directory structure.
Under SSH that user can also travel to any directoy on the server and even use “ls” to get a directory listing, they just cannot open the files or interact with them. Jailshell, on the other hand, logs users into their directory structure and locks them in (much like a prison or jail cell), disallowing them from openly traversing the directory structure outside of their home.
Jailshell is easily implementable in cPanel. You can switch an account’s shell access in WHM by navigating to Manage Shell Access, under the Account Functions header. Read more
ServInt’s Latest VPS Upgrade and Why We Keep Giving You More
Today is an exciting day at ServInt — because we’re announcing the largest free product upgrade in the history of our VPS platform. Basically, we’re upgrading our entire VPS line from Essential through SuperVPS. Today, VPS clients will begin to see dramatic upgrades in up to 24 different resource allocations associated with their hosting account, including highly requested upgrades to burst resources and disk i/o. Current customers will see an instantaneous drop in their server load as we actively allocate fewer customers per server than ever before. This decrease in density will mean more CPU resources for every customer, at no additional cost. All packages will receive a 20% increase in disk space. Signature and above will receive additional RAM guarantees and across-the-board increases to all product specifications — and our SuperVPS line will include even bigger CPU guarantees.
It’s no coincidence that this upgrade comes on the heels of our recent data center expansion in Northern Virginia. In the past 12 months we’ve made substantial capital investments in our network and data center infrastructure, further customized and refined the code that augments our virtualization software, and invested in a 60% increase in our customer support staff. Increasing the power of our hosting platforms is one of the first things that these investments are allowing us to do, and we’re happy to pass along the benefits of these new efficiencies to our loyal customers.
As I’m sure you know, most hosting companies don’t operate this way. It’s far more common for hosts to increase profit margins by packing customers more densely onto their new, improved networks. But ServInt has always believed that passing infrastructure improvements on to our customers and increasing the value of our products is the best way to build a loyal customer base and ensure long-term growth. That’s why we’ve regularly performed upgrades for our clients in the past and why we continue to look for new ways to reward our customers for their allegiance.
We don’t usually get this business-y on the ServInt Source, but I thought it was important for you, our current and (hopefully) future customers, to understand what we value here at ServInt — and to understand the theory behind the decisions we make. Every product offering and improvement—frankly, every dollar spent at ServInt—is meant to increase the value of the customer experience. Our business model is not simply built on attracting the greatest number of customers, but is tied to the health and quality of our customers and their hosting experience. At ServInt, our top priority is you.
-Reed
PS: Visit ServInt’s website if you want more specifics on new package specs for the VPS or SuperVPS lines, and you can even check out the new kid on the block, the Essential+ VPS!
Photo by sparkieblues
Cloud Hosting Series, Part 3: Making Hosting Better… Not Just Bigger
In part 2 of our Cloud Hosting Series, ServInt CTO Matt Loschert made some interesting comparisons between VPS and Cloud Hosting. One of the things Matt said was “Cloud Hosting creates a world in which server instances are transient and disposable. The instance is no longer important — the communication and cooperation between instances is.” Pretty dense. Still, it got me thinking because this notion is at the heart of the promise of Cloud Hosting.
I was still thinking about it when I showed up to the local deli for a sandwich yesterday. I usually go around 2pm. Yesterday I went at 12:30. The place is tiny and normally sleepy-quiet. It’s just the owner at the counter and her son working the register. Frankly, I’ve sometimes wondered how they stay in business. But yesterday, an hour and a half earlier than I usually go to lunch, the joint was PACKED – and three times while I was there I saw groups of people come to the door, look at the line and walk out. Most of the time the owner’s just sitting on her hands when I come in. I realized that at 12:30, her business is MADE – but it’s not maximized.
So what does this have to do with Cloud Hosting? Well, the number one goal of Cloud Hosting seems to be the ability to achieve new levels of scalability. My deli experience serves to remind that the challenge of scalability to a business is not new.
ServInt has been a pioneer in finding solutions to the needs of customers who need to scale, sometimes quickly. Our entire VPS and Dedicated lines have been built to allow customers to expand and contract their single server at will. With the tech we employ today you can do things you can’t do in the real world. In an enterprise-class VPS world my little corner deli could simply grow in size to meet demand by calling the landlord—in this case a hosting company like ServInt—and ordering up a bigger space. One simple move later and the deli could handle the increased number of customers.
This has been a revolutionary and tremendously successful model, but it’s not without its problems and inefficiencies. The VPS model relies on manual configuring by the hosting company and time to complete any necessary migrations. The promise of a well-designed Cloud Hosting platform offers a tempting improvement on this.
To be fair to VPS, new improvements are continually being developed that bring these basic Cloud benefits into the VPS realm. In fact, there is a lot of pressure in the industry for companies like ServInt to call what we do with our VPS products “Cloud Hosting”. After all, when well-designed and backed up by high-end hardware, VPS has high-redundancy and incredible on-demand scalability at the core level AND the individual resource level. It doesn’t fit every technologist’s dream list of what a Cloud Hosting offering should be, but what does? It’s Cloudy and that’s good enough for some people.
Imagine what it would mean to my deli owner’s business if she could rely upon scaling technologies like the ones that I’m describing here. When the deli is packed, the owner hits a button and the deli magically gets bigger. When the rush ends, the owner hits another button and the new store shrinks back down. The landlord simply bills the deli owner rent and utilities based on the size of his restaurant at any given time. It would truly allow her to maximize her business. This kind of scaling may be fiction in the real-world, but in the Internet it’s very real – and available today. You can achieve that kind of rapid scalability right now, by either purchasing a scalable platform such as a VPS, or a Cloud instance configured to be used like a VPS.
But as Matt pointed out in his post, this benefit—while enticing to many—does not realize the true potential of Cloud technology. What VPS—and Cloud utilized like VPS—provides is the ability to take a single store, and either during a special promotion or just during the peak time of the day, turn it into a much, much larger single store. What Cloud Hosting promises you’ll be able to do is to take that single store and, instead, turn it into five, ten or one hundred identical stores working both independently and interdependently, increasing both redundancy and scalability in the process. At some point, no matter how big a single deli you build, if that deli becomes infinitely popular that one deli will eventually be too crowded to handle its business effectively. But if you turn that one deli into a whole chain on the fly… that’s another matter.
But here’s the thing – right now that kind of scaling doesn’t work right out of the box. Right now it takes coding. And so, frankly, a whole lot of people are getting Cloud instances and using single-instance scalability – basically using a Cloud instance like a VPS. And that’s fine for many. This industry’s next steps will be in taking the true scalability promise of Cloud and making it attainable to a general business consumer. Once we do, we’ll truly achieve what Matt Loschert was talking about when he described a world in which individual server instances are transient and disposable. Once that is achieved, so will incredible levels of scalability, to greater degrees than we have imagined — and incredible levels of redundancy as well.
So just how does a hosting company build out a Cloud solution? Coming soon in part two of this post, I’ll talk about what providing businesses with the ability to scale like this looks like behind the curtain from a nuts-and-bolts perspective.
Photo by Liber
Cloud Hosting Series Part 2: VPS to Cloud?
I have to admit, I’m a bit baffled by some of the messages I’ve heard coming from our competitors and from customers recently about what Cloud Hosting means to our industry. I often get questions from customers and read advertising from other hosting companies that equate Cloud Hosting to being the obvious replacement for dedicated server or VPS hosting. We hear things like, “upgrade to our Cloud solution” and “host your website in our Cloud,” as if your website wasn’t working on its current platform, or with the advent of Cloud, your website would stop working all of a sudden.
Don’t get me wrong, Cloud Hosting has its place in the market, and it will become increasingly relevant with time. In fact, as a platform, Cloud will become a necessity over the next few years. But, right now – are you ready for it?
In the SMB realm, our industry continues to sell hosting as it has since pre-Cloud days. It’s all still server, VPS, or instance focused. Everything goes back to a software architecture and design philosophy that places the greatest emphasis on managing your operation on the server level, and automating as much of that operation as possible, hence the the proliferation of control panel software over the past 10 years. Control panels attempt to simplify web hosting management, a task that was previously highly technical and arcane, requiring deep knowledge, typically gained after years of experience.
If, as a customer, you think of Cloud Hosting through this server-centric lens, you won’t reach the promise of Cloud. You can have your server in the Cloud, but it won’t give you and your hosting company anything more than a way to more quickly and flexibly provision and bill for VPSs. If you’re looking at hosting the way most do who have been consuming hosting services in the era of mass-market server virtualization, Cloud Hosting offerings in the market today can seem marvelously underwhelming. It’s virtualization with provisioning automation, or — put another way — it’s hosting where provisioning control has been given to the consumer.
Okay, so then why does anyone care about Cloud? What has truly captured the attention of the industry is not what Cloud Hosting currently is for the SMB community, it is the promise of what it can and will be. Cloud will revolutionize hosting, but not in the way that some seem to assume right now. It is not going to make server management more simple, or optimize the software platforms of today. And it won’t simplify your life. Cloud will, however, make possible a paradigm shift in the way that applications are hosted on the Internet.
What makes Cloud revolutionary is the mental shift that it allows in developing web-based applications. The ability for the hosting consumer and/or software developer to control resource provisioning allows development that goes in a completely new direction. Cloud Hosting creates a world in which server instances are transient and disposable. The instance is no longer important — the communication and cooperation between instances is. The developer writes provisioning logic into his application because, by breaking the functional requirements out into logically separable parts, he can build a system that can auto-scale to meet individual application requirements.
The problem is that many seem to assume that they’re going to bring their old applications, control panels, and knowledge to the Cloud, and that it’s all going to work even better. That’s not really the case. You will
be able to bring these things to the Cloud, but they will not take advantage of the true benefits of the Cloud. One solution to this problem is time – time for developers to begin writing applications to Cloud APIs and using technologies that allow for simple inter-server cooperation and synchronized data sharing and manipulation. This will naturally occur over the next few years, and it will come as a result of the creation of new development frameworks that make splitting hosting tasks into logical chunks a simple process.
Ultimately, Cloud Hosting is cool, and it is revolutionary. But right now, if you want to rush to the Cloud, ask yourself what problems you are trying to solve and who are you relying upon to solve them. For your own sake, make sure you know how your Cloud vendor will improve your operation. Otherwise, you might just end up getting sold a good old dedicated server “in the Cloud” — which you might even pay more for.
What exactly is “Managed Hosting”?
Sometimes, as industries evolve, they spawn new jargon that only means something if you’re inside the industry. To outsiders — even potential customers — these turns of phrase can seem confusing at best, and downright mysterious at worst.
So it is with the term “managed hosting.” Search the web for a definition, and you’ll get 10 different answers from 10 different companies. As ServInt’s Director of Managed Services, I want to take a minute to explain what managed hosting means to us. You may find that our definition is more expansive than those offered by our competitors.
Let me start with a pet peeve of mine. It really bugs me when web hosting companies use the terms “support” and “management” as though they were the same thing. They are not.
Support is reactive. It’s what you provide when things go wrong. It’s important, but if your goal is to achieve maximum uptime, support alone doesn’t help much — because it doesn’t avert catastrophe; it simply restores order when things go wrong.
Management — and, by extension, managed hosting — is proactive. It avoids problems. Here are some specifics from our to-do list at ServInt: we provide compatibility checks; custom requirement analyses and one-on-one product and platform consultations; custom software installations; port, service and system monitoring; OS system patches and upgrades; and personalized technical advice and assistance. In other words, we don’t just support our customers when things go wrong; we manage the hosting of their sites to try and prevent things from going wrong in the first place.
Web hosting is a service industry. There may be lots of technology behind the solutions hosting companies offer, but the service they provide is what really differentiates their solutions. That’s why you see company after company touting their level of customer service as “heroic,” “fanatical,” “stupendous,” and so forth. Service sells! All I can say is: ask questions. Make sure that when they say “service,” they mean proactive management — not just support — of your online business.
One last thing: to get the most out of your relationship with your managed hosting service provider, stay close to them. Let them know when you’re expecting spikes or surges in traffic, or when you plan to launch a new app on your site. Inform them when you roll out a killer marketing plan, or when your site’s “high season” is about to begin. That kind of information will help them help you.
Photo by Karen Eliot
Engineering is beyond the network
Hi, I’m Kevin Nicastro, ServInt’s New Director of Engineering.
After joining ServInt in 2004, I was appointed as ServInt’s lead network architect. Alongside my colleagues in our Managed Services and Provisioning Teams, we helped create the VPS, SuperVPS, and Solo Series servers many of you enjoy today. We also created ServInt’s incredibly fast, robust and reliable network, which I am extremely proud of.
Today, as head of ServInt’s Engineering Department, my team and I are tasked with developing, building, and maintaining our products and network. In this post, I’ll talk a little bit about our operating philosophy, and further explain ServInt’s strategy for improving our connectivity all over the world.
Our Largest Disk Space Upgrade Ever, Completed One Month Ahead Of Schedule!
Back in June, we announced that we would be increasing the disk space across our entire VPS line — and that this upgrade was going to be passed along to all our customers, both existing and new, at no additional cost. After weeks of hard work, I’m proud to announce that we have successfully completed the disk space upgrades — and prouder still that we did it more than a month ahead of schedule.
I should be clear — the fact that we performed the upgrade quickly doesn’t impress me so much. What impresses me is the fact that we performed this massive upgrade so quickly, without compromising our exacting standards for uptime, customer care and service reliability.
It wasn’t easy. Before our announcement we had done extensive testing. We had invested a small fortune in new equipment, and had devised the necessary workflow to get the job done right. But no matter how hard you plan you can’t help but worry when the hard work actually gets underway. Over the course of just 58 days, we managed to test each and every box to make sure it met ServInt’s standards and get everything into production without a hitch.
We implemented the change in two phases:
- All new clients were automatically turned up on new host machines (the giant servers we use to host our VPS and SuperVPS products) that were pre-outfitted with the upgraded disk space.
- All existing clients were then carefully migrated to host machines reconfigured with new resources by ServInt’s network engineers.
We made that decision because we wanted to get as many people more resources as quickly as possible, and we didn’t want to make everybody wait. Some of you may have seen your resources suddenly pop up overnight without ever having noticed the transition, and if you didn’t — well, that was the idea!
I’ve got pretty high standards for this company, and I don’t brag about our achievements too often — but in this case I really want to say that this was a fantastic example of intelligent engineering. Our team worked long hours, as long as it took, at all of our data centers to bring you these features in a way that minimized interruption to our clients’ online businesses, and I’m proud of them.
Now that everybody has their free upgrade, we hope you can put it to good use. Look for even more free updates in the future — and thanks again for your business!
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Announcing the Biggest Disk Space Upgrade In ServInt’s History. Nearly Half A Petabyte, For Free.
Reed’s Announcement! from ServInt on Vimeo.
If the point of virtualization is to make hardware abstract, why do most hosting companies charge for resource upgrades?
At ServInt, we work hard to ensure that our VPS and SuperVPS customers never have to worry about being left behind as new hosting industry technology and service standards evolve.
Sometimes our efforts to stay ahead of the curve are largely invisible: new cooling systems, network operations center enhancements, hiring and training practices, and so forth. We do this kind of thing all the time, and assume you have no interest in keeping up to date on all of it.
But sometimes we make really big decisions, and today’s announcement is one of those.
Let me get straight to the point: today, ServInt announces the largest disk space upgrade in the company’s history. In fact, we’re adding almost a half a petabyte of disk space, across our most popular VPS packages — and, whether you’re a new or existing customer, you won’t pay one cent for it.
There are lots of reasons why we took this initiative, but they really boil down to one thing: when you sign up as a ServInt customer, you’re not buying a server. You’re buying a solution.
You can buy a server from anybody. But very few companies will take the time, or do the hard work, or hire the talented people, or spend the money to make sure that their customers’ online business never falters. At ServInt, we do.
But that’s enough chest-pounding from me. Let’s look at the numbers. This upgrade affects all our VPS products as follows:
- ServInt’s Essential VPS service, priced at $49 per month, now features 50 GB disk space, up from 30 GB.
- ServInt’s Signature VPS service, priced at $89 per month, now features 75 GB of disk space, up from 45 GB.
- ServInt’s Ultimate VPS service, priced at $129 per month, now features 100 GB of disk space, up from 60 GB.
- ServInt’s SuperVPS service, priced at $199 per month, now features 100 GB of disk space, up from 75 GB.
As before, this new disk space is provided on powerful RAID arrays with industry-leading speed and is further bolstered by our exceptional free backup system.
ServInt engineering staff have already begun implementing the disk space increases for existing customers, and we expect to have all VPS subscribers up and running in the enhanced packages within the next 90 days. This upgrade will not require any effort or involvement from our clients.
This isn’t the first free service enhancement we’ve implemented for our customers, and it won’t be the last. One thing is certain: whatever improvements we deploy over the coming weeks, months, and years will be done in order to continue providing you with the solution you bought when you signed up with us as a customer.
That commitment is just one of the things that makes ServInt different, and it’s one of the things that makes me proud to own and operate this business.
Questions? Comments? Let us know in the comments below, in our Customer Forums, on Facebook, or on Twitter!
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The 5 Worst Sales In Webhosting – Part 1 of 2
We’ve already told you about the 5 worst products in webhosting, here is part 1 of a 2 part series on the 5 worst sales in webhosting.
Everybody loves a sale. The other day I was shopping for birdseed at Lowe’s, a home improvement and hardware store here in the states. As I perused the store, I noticed a sale that just blew me away.
Brace yourself for it — it’s a big one.
WOW! A whole penny off!
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