Shanghai Web Hosting

One of the first things that may concern you is that whether your web hosting company has equipped enough CPUs or Processors on your server as they have allegedly done. Or you are on shared plans and are simply curious whether your web hosting provider is overselling by overloading your server a lot.

First make sure you have SSH access to your hosting server which majority of hosting businesses are now providing. Then create an SSH account and log it in to the server.

A rather simple linux bash command will help you determine how many CPUs your host has on your server:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l

This combination of pipeline command extracts server processors information from /proc/cpuinfo that contains CPU details each per line, returning a plain number which will usually be 1, 2, 4 or even more.

There you go. Now find out whether your host is cheating on you with this tip in addition to checking your server load!

Extra Tips

You can find plenty of other useful and interesting information about your hosting server and OS release at /proc. For example, for some RAM stats:

cat /proc/meminfo

For total seconds since the last reboot:

cat /proc/uptime

For Linux release and versions:

cat /proc/version

And much more. Just ‘ls /proc’ and try for yourself.

As SSH is inherently tunnel-enabled for setting up socks5 proxy servers, you can instantly turn your personal computer into a socks5 proxy server by the help of PuTTY through your web hosting server, breaking through firewalls. The idea is to direct all traffic from your local computer browser through PuTTY SSH session to the web hosting server and back from it.

Here we go:

1. First, make sure your web hosting provider provides SSH access to your hosting server. DreamHost (use coupon CASH60 for $60 discount) as well as a lot of other hosting companies do.
2. Second, download PuTTY, run it, and set up the SSH account by entering your hosting server address in Host Name (or IP address).
3. Add SSH tunnels by:
   Connection -> SSH -> Tunnels ->  give it a random Source port (in this example, ’8844′), enter Desctination as ‘localhost’ and select Dynamic and Auto, and click Add. Now there should be an item of ‘D8844′ in the Forwarded ports list.
   
4. You may want to switch back to Session to save the session for easy access so that a simple double click would trigger the connection based on all the configurations you have done so far.
5. Double click the saved session and log into your SSH account. Now you are in your web hosting server.

Leave the SSH session open and your personal computer has now become a socks5 proxy server. Open your favorite browser, for example, FF3:

1. Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings -> Manual proxy configuration -> SOCKS Host: localhost, Port: 8844 -> OK
   
2. You are now set. Fire up a tab and surf through the socks5 proxy on your local computer.

Remember though, that all traffic you use by browsing the web pages and downloading whatever stuff by the local proxy goes through your web hosting server and will be counted on the hosting bills.

Exciting! Now you’ve got your very own proxy server (socks5 server is the most versatile among all types of proxy servers including HTTP proxy and FTP proxy) that’s local, stable and in your perfect control for getting around all kinds of firewalls. Screw all those obsolete online proxy server lists with unusable proxy servers!