One more week has passed and now, we are here again with this week’s tips and tricks. Today we are going to deliver some useful tricks that might be useful while choosing a web hosting service provider or after choosing one to enhance its capabilities.
Check the hosting company’s backup policy
It is really important that you run your services on the right provider. In order not to have problems with your customers, it needs to have superior abilities in many areas such as accessibility, performance, manageability, and security. If you do not know much about the security of your website, you can ask for this from your server company to a certain extent. The provider companies promise to back up your data, which is one of the security measures.
It’s nice to have a secondary backup mechanism when you’re not backing up or your backup service is down. However, even if they provide this service, they will not keep the backups forever. Because of that, it will always be a good step for you to ask the following simple questions to your provider company. In this way, you can restore your site to its original state in cases such as incorrect updating, deleting the wrong file, sudden data loss, or hacking:
• How frequently do you take backups?
• How long do the backups stay without being deleted?
Note: Although the provider companies state that they take backups, we recommend that you create your backup policy. Because if you don’t, your files will become inaccessible in a case of an error in the automatic backup system.
Know what kind of server service you are getting (Platform, Software, Infrastructure, etc)
You should determine your needs beforehand without getting support from a provider and you should evaluate the plan accordingly. Otherwise, you may encounter different problems such as a lack of resources in the future. However, determining the responsible sides for the services you will run is also quite important.
How much responsibility do you and your provider company take for these services and services? You can examine the service models by checking the table below for this subject and evaluate the new plan purchases accordingly.
| IaaS | PaaS | SaaS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Applications | Customer Manages | Customer Manages | Provider Manages |
| Data | Customer Manages | Customer Manages | Provider Manages |
| Runtime | Customer Manages | Provider Manages | Provider Manages |
| Middleware | Customer Manages | Provider Manages | Provider Manages |
| OS | Provider Manages | Provider Manages | Provider Manages |
| Virtualization | Provider Manages | Provider Manages | Provider Manages |
| Servers | Provider Manages | Provider Manages | Provider Manages |
| Storage | Provider Manages | Provider Manages | Provider Manages |
| Networking | Provider Manages | Provider Manages | Provider Manages |
Manage your customers with web hosting automation
If you are a new freelance hosting provider, we strongly recommend that you use web hosting automation. By connecting many hosting control panels to web hosting automation, it can manage daily tasks, regular payment plans, invoice submissions, and support requests; and even help you with many issues such as creating an automatic hosting service. This will help you avoid administrative mess.
Turn off unnecessary services on your hosting
There may be tens of thousands of services that you do not use due to the dependencies of the automation software you have installed to run your web services. These services can cause unnecessary resource consumption on your server, slowing it down, slowing down your services, and even causing security vulnerabilities. Therefore, we recommend you remove the services you do not use from your server.
Remove risky PHP functions from your server
We recommend that you do not leave the PHP version you are using at its default settings. Just as you turned off unnecessary services from your server as in the previous topic, do the same for functions in your PHP service. One of the biggest reasons for doing this is security. When unauthorized people want to run malicious code on your server, you prevent this to some extent.
Open your PHP.ini file and go to the disable_functions header and remove the # sign at the beginning. Type the following script in the space with the equal sign and save it.
Note: If there is a function you use in the commands below, you can remove it by paying attention to the commas. You may need to restart your PHP service for the change to take effect.
ln -s, ln, ln -b, exec, eval, dl, passthru, shell_exec, system, eval, popen, fsockopen, proc_open, proc_get_status, proc_nice, proc_terminate, show_source, stream_socket_server, symlink, link, lchgrp, lchown, chown, chgrp, posix_initgroups, posix_kill, posix_mkfifo, posix_mknod, posix_setegid, posix_seteuid, posix_setgid, posix_setpgid, posix_setsid, posix_setuid, syslog, posix_getpwuid, passthru, parse_ini_file, fpassthru, cat, link, virtual,phpmail, apache_get_modules, apache_get_version,apache_getenv, apache_note, apache_setenv, curl_multi_exec, curl_exec
Reset your Virtualmin password
If you are using Virtualmin as your hosting control panel and you forgot your password, you can reset your password very easily. Open your terminal screen and choose the command below whichever distribution you are using and set your new password:
RHEL/CentOS
/usr/libexec/webmin/changepass.pl /etc/webmin root NEWPASSWORDDebian/Ubuntu
/usr/share/webmin/changepass.pl /etc/webmin root NEWPASSWORDInstall Open Source PageSpeed Module
PageSpeed service, developed by Google, which helps us to optimize our website, also has modules suitable for Nginx and Apache. When you enable this module, it will automatically optimize your site and help you make it suitable for Google PageSpeed criteria.