Shanghai Web Hosting

Rackspace Cloud is the de facto leader in cloud hosting. Make no mistake, and you would find them to be the most cost-effective solution AND the best supported cloud offer. No joke.

Rackspace Cloud Pricing

1. Cloud Servers – $0.015 / Hour

But that’s just for the Cloud Servers which is priced at $0.015 / hour or $10.95 / month, no matter what you choose for the system, Linux or Windows. You manage, monitor, and secure the system yourself.

Cloud Servers bandwidth pricing

2. Cloud Files – $0.15 / GB / Month

State of the art programmable cloud storage for online data hosting / retrieval at comet speeds, Cloud Files is priced at $0.15 / GB / Month.

Cloud Files bandwidth pricing

3. Cloud Servers with Managed Service Level – $0.135 / Hour + $100 / Month

This is the ultimate Cloud Servers plan with Managed Service Level which is priced at $0.135 / hour plus $100 / month. It includes the simple Cloud Servers plan and the Cloud Files plan. Rackspace manages, monitors, and secures the system for you.

Cloud Servers bandwidth pricing

4. Cloud Sites – $149 / Month

Cloud Sites is like their classic Dedicated Hosting in the cloud. It’s fully managed with a worry-free SLA. Current pricing starts at $149 / month. It includes the simple Cloud Servers plan and the Cloud Files plan. Rackspace manages, monitors, and secures the system for you.

Cloud Sites pricing

5. Cloud Load Balancers – $0.015 / Hour

Load balancing solution on-demand, Cloud Load Balancers starts at $0.015 / hour.

Cloud Load Balancers pricing

Cloud Load Balancers bandwidth pricing

More Facts

1. Cloud Servers (Managed Service Level) and Cloud Sites are mutually exclusive. You can’t order both at once.
2. Bandwidth costs vary by product.

Unmanaged hosting wasn’t my thing at first but as I was eager to learn something new and it’s just much cheaper than managed hosting, I found one with the most positive reviews – Linode.

It’s all simple and to the point. Period. And I never looked back after using them. Though it’s very much painful for me to manage the vps box myself, it’s a great learning experience after all and I did learn a lot!

Linode is probably the cheapest VPS in all unmanaged hosting companies but it’s far from the worst. In opposite, they are the best and most cost-effective. RAM of 512MB hardly comes by at less than $20 / month these days. And they have got a very hearty community of users! They are eager to help those who need tips to set up and harden their boxes against security breaches.

Their control panel is very cozy – not fancy but just to the point. Everything’s well aligned where they should be. Very well organized. Easy to use and very intuitive. I love it very much.

They also have a very comprehensive documentation library that you could look up stuff in case you don’t know how to do something by yourself.

The only down time I experienced was a power outage or something that lasted about 3 hours. Other than that, it’s all a breeze. The server is responsive and stable.

I would recommend Linode to anyone who’s good at managing the hosting server themselves!

4.8/5 from me.

Need ultimate web hosting on a dedicated server?

How about Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz, 2GB RAM, 2×73GB SCSI?

Hosting the server at one of the top Data Centers of United States?

With 10TB free bandwidth?

How much do you think this setup would cost you per month?

$300?

$200?

$100?

Well, now you can get this server hosted by The Planet for just $89 per month. Just use this The Planet hosting coupon code.

If you are just like me who is disgusted of reading through large chunks of texts for the only particular thing that he’s interested, securing Linux can’t be any more straightforward with this exhaustive list written by Kurt Seifried. Specially made for Linux novices who are just starting to harden his servers against malicious attempts, it is a good read not only because it’s useful but also because it’s easy to follow and digest.

Here we go: http://seifried.org/security/os/linux/20020324-securing-linux-step-by-step.html

Unmanaged hosting often comes with very competitive price compared to managed hosting environment, however, the drawback of which, is the steep learning curve for server noobs that unfortunately includes me. It’s meant for technically proficient ones after all.

This simple tutorial will walk you through the steps needed to set up a working web server that’s ready to serve websites from a bare bone Linux distro (Ubuntu, in this case). It serves to be a survival guide of unmanaged hosting for novice Linux server administrators while at the same time documents my findings and learned tips for myself.

We will take Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) for example. Though all things are done at a Mosso 256 MB Cloud Server, 99% of them should work without a problem at other unmanaged hosting providers as long as the Linux distribution is identical. After this tutorial, you will have a working VPS or dedicated hosting server with update to date softwares and beginner security, in addition to necessary software packages to run and manage a LAMP web server: FTP, Apache 2, PHP 5.2.6 and MySQL.

Here we go. Suppose you have made the decision to go with one of the Linux distros of which I’d suggest Ubuntu and installed a plain version of it from the hosting control panel, now:

1. You will be given a bare IP address, of course, when you have finished installing the Linux distro from the contrl panel provided by your hosting company. Download PuTTY and set it up to connect to your hosting server of that IP as the root via SSH. The root password should also have been revealed or emailed to you.
2. Change the root password to a new one.
3. Customize the default SSH listening port of 22 to a custom one.
4. Build up necessary iptables firewall rules.
5. Customize shell environment and make the prompt ls command listings a little more colorful so it’s more readable.
6. Enable vi code highlighting (enabled by default in Ubuntu) and change the dark blue color for comments to a lighter blue.
7. Update the software source lists in Ubuntu by:
   aptitude updateAnd set the proper locales:
   locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
8. Upgrade the current distro to its latest:
   aptitude safe-upgradeFollowed by:
   aptitude full-upgrade
9. Install the essential tools and packages for development, the build tools:
   aptitude install build-essential
10. Install MySQL:
    aptitude install mysql-server mysql-clientThe installation will prompt you twice for the root password.
11. Install Apache:
    aptitude install apache2 apache2.2-common apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils libexpat1 ssl-certChange server name in the Apache configuration:
    vi /etc/apache2/apache2.confAnd add the following directive at the end of the file:
    ServerName kingChange ‘king’ to whatever you’ll name your own server. For beginner SSH users, nano would be a better choice for its intuitive editing capabilities. After restarting Apache web server gracefully by not interrupting connected clients:
    apache2ctl gracefulYou should be able to view the demo web page at http://(your server IP address).
12. Install PHP5:
    aptitude install libapache2-mod-php5 php5 php5-common php5-curl php5-dev php5-gd php5-imagick php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-mhash php5-mysql php5-pspell php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl
13. Turn off server signature:
    nano /etc/apache2/conf.d/securityAnd change:
    ServerTokens FullTo:
    ServerTokens Prod
14. Change the hostname of your server. Open and edit /etc/hostname:
    vi /etc/hostnameTo a top level domain you have registered for your website. And add it in /etc/hosts:
    vi /etc/hostsIn this way:
    127.0.0.1 example.com
15. Reboot by:
    shutdown -r now
16. Install the mail module for your hosting server, Postfix, so the php function mail() works:
    aptitude install postfix telnet mailxJust choose ‘Internet Site’.
17. Install FTP daemon service so you can FTP stuff to your server as any user.
18. Install rsync so that you can easily synchronize and backup files between 2 remote hosting servers:
    aptitude install rsync

FTP is an indispensable feature of servers that host and serve websites as it enables us to easily upload stuff to the remote server. On a Ubuntu server, with a little help of aptitude command (the package management program descended from Debian), you can install the most simple yet most common FTP daemon program for your server: vsFTPd.

apt-get install vsftpd

It is started automatically after successful installation. Stop it:

/etc/init.d/vsftpd stop

So that you can customize the configuration file:

vi /etc/vsftpd.conf

And make it look like:

pasv_enable=YES
pasv_max_port=8010
pasv_min_port=8001

anonymous_enable=NO
local_enable=YES
write_enable=YES
local_umask=022

idle_session_timeout=3600

chroot_local_user=YES

pam_service_name=ftp

Restart the FTP service:

/etc/init.d/vsftpd start

Now you can try connecting to the FTP and transferring some stuff.