Alistair Macfarlane – Creative Director – Sugar Rush Creative

New for April we wanted to spend a little time introducing you to a local creative professional.

Meet Alistair Macfarlane – Creative Director of Sugar Rush Creative in Ormeau Business Park in Belfast.  Anyone who knows Stephen K from ‘the Fish’ will soon learn that Stephen likes his Coffee and we first met Ali a couple of years ago over a coffee in the coffee house close to his office and we quickly started what is a great business relationship.  Ali has a great personality and has a great way with clients and staff alike.  This shows in the quality of work that comes out of the agency he runs.  He genuinely cares about his clients and his agency has a very professional attitude to their work as well as being a fun bunch of guys to know and work with.

Ali is a great guy who is passionate about his industry and who we have no hesitation in recommending Ali and his agency for design work.  In recent months we have referred two BWF Clients to Ali and both clients are delighted with the new website Ali has designed for them.  Ali’s company are professional designers who design bespoke solutions and they have a wide skill set ranging from Graphic Design to Web Tech Solutions.

Alistair MacFarlane has been awarded the prestigious accreditation from the Society of Chartered Designers, London. He also holds membership from the Irish Institute of Creative Advertising, Dublin. Both organisations keep a strict policy of upholding the highest of industry standards which ultimately carry through to live projects within the studio.

We strongly recommend Ali for any future design work you need completed and here are his contact details:

Alistair MacFarlane
Creative Director
Sugar Rush Creative
028 9024 2223
studio@sugarrushcreative.com
www.sugarrushcreative.com

The post New for April! Meet a Local Creative Director appeared first on Big Wet Fish Hosting.

We fully manage VPS servers for hundreds of Clients – take the stress out of server management move to us today!

Join the growing number of server owners who trust us to manage their servers for them. Why risk renting an unmanaged server from some of the ‘big guys’ many of whom do not offer any form of management at all.

I spent today live chatting or calling 15 of the well known VPS suppliers and I asked them to quote me for a VPS Server with 2 CPU Cores, 2GB RAM, 100GB Hard Disk Space as well as 500GB Bandwidth, a Cpanel License, Full Management and Remote Backup with 100GB disk space.
I was shocked with what I found.

• One really well known supplier told me they did not offer any form of backup at all but that everything would be ok as the server was on RAID so I did not need backups (bad bad advice in my opinion!)

• Three of the best known UK suppliers of VPS Servers (all very well known names) told me they did not offer any form of server management and all their servers were 100% unmanaged.  This is fine until something goes wrong and then when it does you would be out a lot of money in technician charges to get things sorted.

• One supplier offers free backups but there is a £30 fee for a restore.  Even if you just needed 2 restores per year for deleted files or compromised accounts our Basic Management would be better value

• The vast majority of suppliers were more expensive than us for less product.  I challenge you to give it a try – check out our competitors prices and you will see we are great value for money.  We keep our costs down by offering helpdesk only support but for most clients that works perfectly well as we have fast helpdesk response times.

Take an example.  We supply and manage 2 servers for client.  This client had another server with 123-Reg.  Their 123-Reg server failed recently and they came to us seeking help with their problems as 123-Reg do not offer any form of server management at all and all their servers are supplied unmanaged.  An unmanaged provider will be fine until you actually need some advanced level of support and at that time it can become very expensive with many charging £50 per hour for admin time to help with any tasks.

We have a different way of working.  If you want an unmanaged server you can have it – no problem!  But we also have basic managed and fully managed servers.  We strongly recommend all VPS clients consider the Full Management option as a very cost effective add on to get the help and support when you need it.

Why not talk to us today about having us manage servers for your business – we have a proven reputation and we can supply references on request from some of our happy VPS clients.

One of our VPS clients wrote this about us. http://tosbourn.com/2013/03/other/big-wet-fish-get-marketing/

We wanted to explain our VPS management options to our clients to help you decide which management option works for you.  No matter how good (or bad) your server admin skills are we have the perfect plan for you.  We offer three tiers of Virtual Private Servers:

Unmanaged (included in server cost)

Our unmanaged servers are designed for those clients who have the skills to manage their own server.

• We will ensure the server is up and responding to ping and ssh for you
• We will set up the server initially and install and configure cpanel if you have ordered it
• We will test the server is working and serves web pages before handing it over
• We will set up and configure remote backup if you have ordered it
• We will assist with file and account restorations from backups only if there has been a hardware failure

Basic Managed (£4.99 per month on top of server cost)

Basic Management is designed for users who require only Level 1 Support and is a very cost effective option for those clients who want to run a  Cpanel Server.  If you require any support outside of the included tasks we charge £20 per hour for additional support.  Here is what is included:

• We will ensure the server is up and responding to ping and ssh for you
• We will set up the server initially and install and configure cpanel if you have ordered it
• We will test the server is working and serves web pages before handing it over
• We will set up and configure remote backup if you have ordered it
• We will provide Basic WHM / cPanel assistance
• We will help with Basic Email issues (email not working with the server). Spam troubleshooting will not be included.
• We will help with configuring ftp and assist with any ftp issues
• We will help with php compilation
• We will assist with custom php.ini files to assist with errors that occur
• We will troubleshoot default server services in case of failure
• We will install a software firewall and configure it
• We will assist with any file and account restorations (assuming remote backup has been purchased)

Fully Managed (£14.99 per month on top of server cost)

Our fully managed plan gives you the most compregensive support possible and includes full off server remote backup and pro-active monitoring of all services (http://bwf.co/gotyourback).  We will do whatever we can to our absolute best efforts to ensure your server is managed effectively.  Why employ a system admin or pay expensive data centre charges when you can use us to manage your server for you.  Here is what is included in Full Management:

• We will provide priority support – your helpdesk ticket will be handled before those who do not have priority support
• We will provide a CP Remote backup service license and configure server backups
• We will provide 100GB Remote Backup space to store your backups
• We will set up the server initially and install and configure cpanel if you have ordered it
• 24/7 server monitoring of all critical services with instant email alerts to our 24/7 team is a critical service fails
• Monthly check to confirm backups are running as they should
• Initial server secure process to ‘harden’ the server
• Kernel Upgrades, OS patches
• Backups and restoration help if needed (only on servers with backup solutions)
• cPanel/whm Updates
• PHP updates
• Mysql updates
• System pre installed services updates. (we do not update 3rd party scripts installed)
• WHM/cPanel assistance if required
• PHP compilation
• SSL configuration and installation (SSL certificates are available for a competitive price)
• Custom DNS configuration
• Email troubleshooting
• FTP troubleshooting
• High Server Load troubleshooting
• Best Effort Third Party Application Support*
• Compromised Server or Account Recovery to the best of our knowledge
• Abuse and Security help to the best of our ability
• Software Firewall Installation and Configuration
• Failed Drive service restoration, we will assist in restoring of all accounts to our ability
• Database corruption assistance
• Assistance with system alerts or warnings
• Hands on help with pre-install system settings
• High Bandwidth consultation needs

Our Full Management comes with pro active server monitoring as standard as shown below:

RAID health monitoring is probably one of the most important aspects of our monitoring. If an array become degraded caused by a bad drive we get alerted immediately and we can have a technician in our data centre ‘hot swap’ the drive and kick off a rebuild immediately. This can ensure that problematic disks are replaced the moment they throw errors and before it becomes a larger problem

* For best effort third party application support this is limited to two support tickets per month

The post VPS Server Admins? Don’t need them – I got ‘The Fish’ appeared first on Big Wet Fish Hosting.

We are the primary hosting provider for 6 of the design studios we delivered to but we wanted to include as many web design agencies in Belfast as possible.  Belfast really is a hub for creativity – we were amazed at how many small agencies we found as well as the large well known names.  It’s great to see such good work going on in Belfast.  As someone who is not a designer (I bought a template for our website for goodness sake!)  but who is a bit of a geek and manages web servers for design agencies we were incredibly well received into these agencies.  Let’s see who we can partner with in the short term to take BWF Hosting Ltd forward with a custom designed website solution like it should be…

Some agencies were not there when we called.  Some were locked up, others had lights on but no one was at home,  but I am pleased to report all the places we delivered Donuts to they were very well received. If you have not had a delivery from Moes Donuts yet then please give them a call and order some Donuts!  You can collect from their kitchen a 2 minute drive from the Westlink or you can have them deliver to your place of work or home in the Belfast area.

Thank you to:

Click here to enlarge.

• Moes Donuts for starting work at 1am to get enough Donuts ready for the masses
• Moes Donuts for partnering with us on this and giving us your Donuts at a great discounted price. It made it all possible!
• Moes Donuts for fueling us with Caramel Latte coffee all day – they deliver coffee with their Donuts and the coffee is great by the way
• Our 2100 twitter followers many of whom are not from Belfast who had to read about this all day on your timeline! Thanks for not unfollowing us!
• Pete for helping us deliver. You are and always will be a great friend of BWF
• Those who we did not deliver to – we tried to get everyone and we apologise if we missed you out – the good news is you can follow us on Twitter and look out for ways to win some more Moes Donuts delivered to your door over the next month
• Those who Tweeted today – thank you!

So who did we deliver to? Simple! We made a long long list of web design and marketing agencies in Belfast. We even initially included some local @cpanel hosting competitors on the list but we ‘chickened out’ today and delivered some more Donuts to design agencies instead!

The following agencies Tweeted about their Donut Deliveries but we did deliver to a bunch more places – not everyone tweeted at us following their delivery and this list only includes those who tweeted at us:

• Rumble Labs
• Rehab Studio
• Ecliptic Labs
• Typecastapp (formerly Front)
• Belfast Business Centre (our office reception staff)
• Pierce Communications
• Chooboo
• Sugar Rush Creative
• Wholeschool.tv
• Fresh Made Media
• Green17 Creative
• Three Sixty Create
• Momentum NI
• Fulton Advertising and Marketing Communications

Don’t just take our word for it, see what one of our happy customers said here

Thanks to everyone who tweeted pictures from today. Some of them can be seen below. Just look at those Donuts! Doesn’t that make you want to buy some right now?! Give Moe’s a call and do that!Click to view slideshow.

Check out a few of the tweets here:

The post Moe’s Donuts appeared first on Big Wet Fish Hosting.

Why not contact us today about getting your VPS Server online. We provide fully managed Cpanel Centos Servers where we handle everything for you right down to relatively inexpensive VPS servers running Ubuntu that Richard deployed. All come with a totally no obligation free trial!

I have been jumping around from server to server trying to find that perfect setup, recently i decided to embark on setting up my very own VPS server with a uk company Bigwetfish and while the information is out there for you to follow not all of it works so i thought i would compile a guide on how i set the server up that is now serving this very post.

Order Your Server

For this guide we are going to be using a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server which we have purchased from Big Wet Fish, you can get a free 30 day trial from Big Wet Fish on servers.

Go ahead and order a VPS with 512mb of ram, 20gb hard drive, Ubuntu 12.04 with no Apache and no control panel.

The End Result

By the end of this tutorial you will have setup a working LEMP stack comprising of Nginx, PHP (With PHP-FPM), Mysql, PHPMyadmin & WordPress you will also have a better understanding of how Ubuntu works and how to setup and check some of the basic functions on the server.

Using this guide

This guide presumes that you have a basic understanding of Linux and terminology used on Linux

Where you see lines of text highlighted like this that is a command and needs to be run in Terminal or Putty

This guide was designed for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, updates will be made to this guide as needed, if you find mistakes, typos or errors please comment below and i will fix them.

I accept no responsibility for loss or damage to your website or serer as a result of following the steps in this guide.

Now we have that out of the way, lets crack on.

Some Commands

During this tutorial we are going to be using a bunch of commands, let me explain some of them now before we get started

• apt-get – This is the replacement for what used to be aptitude it is the Ubuntu repository for all applications and we will be using it to install our applications, commands such as apt-get install & apt-get remove will be used throughout this guide

• Sudo – The Sudo command tells Ubuntu that we want to run that particuallr command at a higher priviliedge level than the user you are logged in as we will set this up later but a command we may use for example is sudo nano nginx.conf which would launch nano and we would be able to edit the nginx.conf file
• free – m this will display the amount of memory that is available on the server, you can find out how linux uses ram here
• nano – Nano is my text editor of choice, ubuntu as standard dosen’t come with it installed so if you would like to use it i will show you how later otherwise you can use vi or whatever you feel comfortable with.

Configuration Files

During this guide we will be editing a few configuration files, here is a easy reference list of all the ones we edit and there locations

• Sudoers Access Configuration – visudo
• SSH Configuration – /etc/ssh/sshd_config
• Nginx Virtual Hosts – /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com
• Nginx Configuration – /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
• Site Access Logs – /var/www/yourdomain.com/logs/access.log
• PHP5 Configuration – /etc/php5/fpm/php5-conf.conf
• PHP ini Configuration – /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini
• Fail 2 Ban Confiuration – /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf
• Logwatch Configuration – /usr/share/logwatch/default.conf/logwatch.conf

Logging into your sever

Okay so you have placed your order, got your IP address and root login and are all set to begin.

You will need to launch Terminal if on a mac or download and install Putty if you are on Windows, i am using Terminal as i am on a mac so i will go ahead and launch that from the Applications folder.

In the window that launches type ssh root@your.ip.adress you should then be asked for your password, enter it here then you will be asked if you would like to add the certificate to the machine choose yes you will then be logged into your server.

If you use a mac there is a great little tip for creating bookmarks for use with Terminal which you can find here

Setting up a user

When you buy a server from your chosen provider you will be issued with a root account, using this long term is not a good idea so we need to setup another account and give that account SUDO permissions so that we can edit files and other cool stuff.

You should still have that terminal open from the first stage, so go ahead and enter the following command;

adduser username - replace username with your desired username

Ubuntu will then ask you to choose a password, enter this as requested make sure it is secure, don’t forget to make a note of it, as we will need this.

Now that we have set up our new user setup we need to give that user sudo permissions. Here comes another command, go back to terminal and type

visudo

When the file loads scroll down to the section that reads #User privilege specification and under root type the following username ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL once you have entered your username in the sudoers file exit by typing :w (this will write the changes) then :x (this will exit you out of vi)

A full list of Vi commands can be found here

So still in the terminal window type logout your SSH session will now be closed, have been now been logged out of SSH.

Now we need to log back in using our new user so type ssh username@your.server.ip this will log you into SSH with the newly created user credentials.

Install Nano

Personally I don’t like vi and much prefer to use nano it is more friendly so we need to install that before we can continue.

In your Terminal window type the following command

sudo apt-get install nano

This will now install nano onto your sever so we can use it to edit our configuration files.

Disable Root Logins

Now that we know our new user is working, we know this because if it wasn’t we wouldn’t have been able to login, and we wouldn’t have been able to install nano we now need to disable the ability to login as root.

To do this we need to go back to our Terminal and give Ubuntu some more commands;

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Scroll down to the section that looks like this;

#Authentication
LoginGraceTime 120
PermitRootLogin Yes <- Change this to No
StrictModes yes

Once you have done this type

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

You have now reloaded the SSH configuration and disabled root Logins

Good Job!

Change SSH Port

SSH by default runs on port 22 hackers obviously know this and will try to brute force your server using this port so we are going to change this to something else to add a second layer of security to our server.

We need to edit the SSH configuration again so in Terminal type the following command

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Once you have the SSH configuration open in nano find the section

#Port 22

Change this to

Port 49151

We need to change this to a port of your choosing, select a 4 or 5 digit port number 49151 but make sure that another service is not using the port you select.

Once you have done that save and close the file and restart the SSH service

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

Bind SSH to another IP

As above hackers generally know that you may be running SSH on the same IP address as the webserver itself for example if your Nginx is listening on port 80 and is accessible from 10.10.10.10 then a hacker may attempt to brute force your server on that IP address to gain access.

Here we are going to add another layer of security and another fence for hackers to jump over before getting close to the front door. We are going to bind SSH to one of the free IP Addresses your server was assigned when you signed up for service.

We need to go back into the SSH configuration

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Scroll down to the section that looks like

#Protocol 2, 1
#ListenAddress 0.0.0.0
#ListenAddress : :

Un comment and change the following to look like this
Protocol 2
Listen Address 123.123.123.1
Now save and exit nano and restart SSH

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

You may be disconnected, dont worry we just need to re login using our new details

ssh -p 5431 username@youripaddress

Installing the LEMP Stack

Now that we have the basics in place, our user is created, it has SUDO permissions and we have disabled root Logins we can now begin to set our sever up.

sudo apt-get update

This will now update our repositories locally so that we can install some cool stuff, now lets install Nginx

sudo apt-get install nginx

This command will install the Nginx web server engine onto our server

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start

That will start the Nginx application, all being well you should get no Error Messages.

Now that the server has started go to your web browser and type your servers IP address into the address bar, you should now see a message saying Welcome to Nginx!

Now we need to setup a directory where all of our sites are going to live

sudo usermod -a -G www-data username

Make sure you change username for the user we created earlier

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www

What we have just done is given your user access to the folder your sites will be stored in.

Okay now we need to setup some Virtual Hosts. Create a folder for your site to do this run the following command

sudo /var/www$ mkdir -p /var/www/yourdomain.com/{public,logs}

We have just added yourdomain.com into /var/www/ yourdomain.com now also contains a folder called public and a folder called logs

Next we need to setup a virtual host for Nginx

sudo /var/www$ sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com

This will create the virtual host file for Nginx in the sites-available directory for the domain yourdomain.com paste the following sample configuration into the SSH window and replace yourdomain.com with whatever domain you are using.

server {
listen   80;
server_name  www.yourdomain.com;
rewrite ^/(.*) http://yourdomain.com/$1 permanent;
}

server {
client_max_body_size 20M;
listen   80;
server_name yourdomain.com;

access_log /var/www/yourdomain.com/logs/access.log;
error_log /var/www/yourdomain.com/logs/error.log;

location / {
root   /var/www/yourdomain.com/public/;
index  index.html;
}
}
server {
listen   80;
server_name  www.yourdomain.com;
rewrite ^/(.*) http://yourdomain.com/$1 permanent;
}

server {
listen   80;
server_name example.com;

access_log /var/www/yourdomain.com/logs/access.log;
error_log /var/www/yourdomain.com/logs/error.log;

location / {
root   /var/www/yourdomain.com/public/;
index  index.html;
}
}

The first section rewrites and 301-redirects any www.example.com to example.com; the second portion tells Nginx what port to listen on for queries to this site, where to record the access and error logs, and then finally defines the location of the site’s root directory. Surprisingly simple, isn’t it? Instead of using an .htaccess file, the redirect takes place at the onset. This is the most basic virtual host configuration, but we’ll be adding more later for PHP and WordPress.

All virtual hosts’ configuration files will be kept in the /etc/nginx/sites-available directory, but won’t be enabled unless they’re symlinked in the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled directory. We’ll add the symlink now to enable example.com, then restart Nginx.

Thanks to endofweb for this

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com/ /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/yourdomain.com sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

You may now want to check the logs to make sure there is nothing in there that needs addressing

cat /var/www/yourdomain.com/logs/access.log

If you want to add any more sites in the future you will need to repeat these steps for each site creating a virtual host for each site.

Tuning Nginx

Before we wrap up with Nginx we should take this opportunity to tune Nginx a little, open up the Nginx configuration file which is located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

You can use the options below as a starting point, as your site develops you may want to change these to better optimize your site.

user www-data;
worker_processes  4;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
worker_connections  1024;
# multi_accept on;
}

Now we need to restart Nginx to get this configuration re-loaded

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

Installing MySQL

Installing MySQL is easy peasy

sudo apt-get install mysql-server php5-mysql mysql-client

You’ll be asked for a password, use a good password and make a note of it you will need that later.

We now need to login to MySQL and add a database, user and password to do this use the following;

mysql -u root -p

Enter that password you just created;

create database databasename replace databasename with your desired database name

This will create us a database;

grant all on databasename.* to ‘dbuser’ identified by ‘db_user_pw’

This will add a user (dbuser) with the password (db_user_pw) to the database databasename

quit this takes us out of mysql

Install PHP-FPM

Installing PHP is easy and installing it into Nginx is even easier, i got this batch of code from the Media Temple Wiki Page

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:brianmercer/php
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get -y install php5-cli php5-common php5-mysql php5-suhosin php5-gd
sudo apt-get -y install php5-fpm php5-cgi php-pear php5-memcache php-apc
sudo service php5-fpm start

That is it, php is now installed we just need to fine tune it

cd /etc/php5/fpm

This command will take us to the fpm folder which resides in the php5 folder located in etc

sudo nano php5-conf.conf

This will launch nano with the php5-conf.conf file

I use the following settings in my file, feel free to edit this as you feel needed for your site or needs. The file is commented pretty well.

pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 8
pm.start_servers = 2
pm.min_spare_servers = 2
pm.max_spare_servers = 3
pm.max_requests = 500

PHPMyAdmin

Installing phpmyadmin is really easy, i had found multiple guides which show you how to setup virtual hosts but i just couldn’t get that to work so i went with using a symlink which worked perfectly here is how i have it setup;

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

The installer will ask you to choose the web server you are using, as we are using nginx just select next and move onto the next section

Next you will be asked if you would like to use the local database or not, i selected that i did want to use the database and when asked for a password i entered the same password i choose back when i was installing MySQL

So that we can now access phpmyadmin from your domain we need to create a link in yourdomain.com folder that we created earlier to do this we need to run another command

ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ /var/www/yourdomain.com/public/phpmyadmin

We should now have a link in our yourdomain.com folder to phpmyadmin you can check this by doing

cd /var/www/yourdomain.com/public

This will take you to the public directory of yourdomain.com

ls

This will list all files in that directory you are looking for phpmyadmin

One last thing we need to do is change a value in the php.ini file or we will be unable to upload any files via phpmyadmin

sudo nano /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini

Once this has loaded find the following;

; Maximum size of POST data that PHP will accept.
; http://php.net/post-max-size
post_max_size = 20M

Increase the post_max_size to around 20M

service php5-fpm reload

This will reload the php configuration

service nginx reload

This will reload the nginx configuration

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

Next we need to install some form of FTP software onto the server so that we can upload our files, we are going to use proftpd

sudo apt-get install proftpd

You will be presented with this window, when this displays standalone then choose ok

WordPress

Now that you have uploaded the WordPress core files to your FTP location we need to make Nginx WordPress ready

So we now need to edit yourdomain.com Nginx configuration file

sudo nano/etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com

If you have some configuration in the file that opens remove everything and paste in the configuration below, change yourdomain.com for the domain you are using.

server {

listen   80;
server_name  www.yourdomain.com;
rewrite ^/(.*) http://yourdomain.com/$1 permanent;
}

server {

client_max_body_size 20M;
listen   80;
server_name yourdomain.com;

access_log /var/www/yourdomain.com/logs/access.log;
error_log /var/www/yourdomain.com/logs/error.log;

root /var/www/yourdomain.com/public;
index index.php;

location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ @wordpress /index.php?q=$request_uri;
}

location @wordpress {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/yourdomain.com/public/index.php;
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME /index.php;
}

# pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
#
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri @wordpress;
fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index  index.php;
fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www/yourdomain.com/public$fastcgi_script_name;
include        fastcgi_params;
}
}

Notice that we have changed the root index from index.html to index.php

Restart Nginx for the changes to take effect

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

Now we need to make sure that all the permissions are set correctly on the folders

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/yourdomain.com

This will change the permissions on the folders

sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/yourdomain.com/public

You should now use your FTP application of choice, for me it is Transmit and download wp-config-sample.php and edit the contents according to the settings you have selected during this installation. Re-upload it to your server once you have edited it and rename it to wp-config.php

Installing Logwatch

Logwatch is a log analyses that runs every night and emails you the results, this is again not needed for the use of the website but it is useful if you don’t want to go through all the logs daily this is a great way to have them emailed to you.

Lets install Logwatch
sudo apt-get install logwatch

This will install the required components

We want logwatch to send us emails so we need to edit another configuration file

sudo nano /usr/share/logwatch/default.conf/logwatch.conf

We need to change the following information

Output = mail
Format = html
MailTo = youremailaddress@gmail.com

We now need to edit the 00logwatch file

sudo nano /etc/cron.daily/00logwatch

add the following line

/usr/sbin/logwatch –mailto youremail@gmail.com

Save the file and exit that is logwatch setup

Installing Fail2ban

Fail2ban is an intrusion prevention framework. The main purpose of it is to block IP Addresses that try to gain access to your server by using brute force login attempts, this is an optional part of the guide and offers no benifit to the site itself but does offer a layer of security.

sudo apt-get install fail2ban sudo nano /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf

Make sure the following is set in the confiuration file

destemail = youremailaddress@gmail.com

This tells fail2ban where to send the information about IP Addresses it has benned

mta = sendmail

The method in which it is to send the information

banaction = iptables-multiport

The ban method in which to ban the IP

[ssh]

enabled  = true
port     = ssh
filter   = sshd
logpath  = /var/log/auth.log
maxretry = 6

[proftpd]

enabled  = true
port     = ftp,ftp-data,ftps,ftps-data
filter   = proftpd
logpath  = /var/log/proftpd/proftpd.log
maxretry = 4

Adding a Custom Login Message

As a little bit of fun, i have changed the message that is displayed when i login to my server, you can see below that when i login my server replies with Thunder in ACSII then it welcomes me and tells people who have logged in that the IP Address has been logged.

So lets take a look at how you can do this for your sever

If you would like to use some ASCII go over to http://www.network-science.de/ascii/ and generate one, we will need that in a moment so leave the website open in the background.

sudo nano /etc/motd.tail

This is where we add our message so for me i have added

Once you are happy with the message save and exit out of nano

Now we need to remove some of the information that is displayed there

cd /etc/update-motd.d

This will take us into the directory where all the messages that are displayed when we login are stored

ls

This will list all of the files in that directory

i removed the following 00-header & 90-updates-available dont remove 99-footer as this is what calls our custom message, in order to remove these files we need to issue a command,

sudo chmod -x /etc/update-motd.d/00-header Replace 00-header with the file you would like to adjust

This will remove all permissions from the file 00-header and prevent it from loading

If you would like to allow it to show again use the following

sudo chmod 755 /etc/update-motd.d/00-header Replace 00-header with the file you would like to adjust

That’s it you should now have a fully working Ubuntu Server where you can host your WordPress blog, i hope this has been some use to someone and if you have any problems or find something dosen’t work leave a comment below and i will help you out best i can.

Useless Stats

This information is pretty pointless b

My Old Server

Operating System: Cent Os 6.2 X64_86

Memory: 1.5GB Ram

Hard Drive: 50GB

Control Panel: Cpanel

New Server

Operating System: Cent Os 6.2 X64_86

Memory: 512mb

Hard Drive: 20GB

Control Panel: None

The post Setup a Ubuntu Server with Nginx, PHP, MySQL, PHPMyAdmin & WordPress appeared first on Big Wet Fish Hosting.

So in true BWF Fashion we ordered and paid for:

• A Large Fully Loaded Pizza
• 7 Extra Hot Wings
• 7 Standard Wings
• 2 Cokes

UPDATED: It appears that The Consumerist, a sister blog of Consumer Reports, found our story and posted on it. http://consumerist.com/2013/02/11/my-web-host-bought-me-a-dominos-pizza-just-because-i-asked/

UPDATED #2: We had so much positive response with the pizza that we decided to make another go at it. This time we supported a new local business and provided free web hosting sponsored donuts to local design agencies in Belfast.

The post Pizza Time for a BWF Client appeared first on Big Wet Fish Hosting.

Host Elsewhere on shared / reseller?  Does your host do all this for you free of charge? Move to us today and Use Promo code: gotyourback to get 35% off your first year with free migration

Here at Bigwetfish Hosting we have been working hard behind the scenes to develop a comprehensive server monitoring system for the benefit of our clients.  We wanted to let you know what is available to you as a BWF Client and what we do 24/7 behind the scenes to ensure the smooth running and high performance of our servers.

Service Monitoring – Shared / Reseller Servers

Some call Nagios ‘The Industry Standard in IT Infrastructure Monitoring’ and this is the software we have chosen to be the backbone of our server monitoring.  From Chrome and Firefox plugins to iOS and Android Apps this software means no matter where our staff are notifications of outages will come through right away.

As we have a helpdesk that is manned 24/7/365 by our support staff this was an ideal place to send any notices.

The above picture shows an example of what our technicians see when they visit the web based Nagios Monitor. As you can see in this example we show that Server 29 is in perfect health and there are no active alerts

All our Shared and Reseller servers have been added to the Nagios Monitor and if any of the following instances happen on any such server we will instantly get an alert:

• A degraded RAID array
• Server load rises above a pre defined level  (level depends on CPU power)
• Apache service fails
• IMAP service fails
• MySQL service fails
• Ping returns packet loss
• POP service fails
• SMTP service fails
• SSH service fails
• Mail queue gets large perhaps indicating spamming

Pictured is the Nagios Firefox Plugin from a BWF staff members macbook. As you can see it alerts us most of the time that there are no problems. If a problem occurs this changes to a Red Alert for critical issues and a Yellow Alert for non critical issues. We get instant notification of problems. All our technicians have this running in their browsers. There is a similar plugin for Chrome as well

This alert is instant and an email is sent to our helpdesk where the technician on duty is instructed to check the server right away.  Sometimes it is a simply matter of stopping some processes to reduce load and sometimes in the case of a degraded RAID array we need to get our data centre partners to ‘hot swap’a disk.

RAID health monitoring is probably one of the most important aspects of our monitoring. If an array become degraded caused by a bad drive we get alerted immediately and we can have a technician in our data centre ‘hot swap’ the drive and kick off a rebuild immediately. This can ensure that problematic disks are replaced the moment they throw errors and before it becomes a larger problem

Management also have Apps on their iPhones and will also get the alerts as ‘Push Messages’ in iOS so even outside of office hours management sometimes know of events before a technician on the helpdesk calls them.

This is an example of a Red Alert from nagios showing us that a service has failed on a server. This allows our techs to react immediately and restart the service and fix the issue. Most times our clients are not aware of issues as we have fixed them before clients notice.

Service Monitoring – VPS Nodes / VPS Servers / Dedicated Clients

We use Nagios to monitor the health of the RAID arrays on our VPS Nodes as well as monitor the server load.

Clients who have VPS servers with us will get their services monitored if they have bought the ‘Server Management and Backup’ add on from our website:  http://www.bigwetfish.co.uk/vps/server-management-options/

Clients with Dedicated Servers get the monitoring as standard on their servers.

Hardware Monitoring

The most important part of monitoring hardware is Drive Health as if a drive fails or an array fails there can be data loss.  At BWF we monitor our drive and array health in a number of ways:

• We use nagios to monitor our RAID arrays for degraded disks and we get instant alerts when there is a problem.

• We use SMART checking on our drives to check for general drive health and specifically we check for reallocated sectors in drives as this can be an indication of a drive about to go bad.  Where we see problems we will quickly act to replace a drive hopefully even before it fails.

Here you will see examples of raw data from drive SMART checking. All the drives we use have this capability built in and we check all drives regularly

Seeing what is happening at a glance – BWFMonitor Graph Portal

We also have a fully featured graphing portal available to all VPS and Dedicated server clients and our technicians have full access to the same graphs for our shared and reseller servers.  These graphs allow us to see ‘at a glance’ what is happening on a server.  Such things we have detected on such servers have been:

• High rate of inbound traffic to a shared server causing the graph to spike.  Technicians were able to quickly stop a small inbound ddos against a specific website on a particular server by blocking the IP ranges that were causing the issues.  Had we not seen this on our monitor this would have been a problem for longer and more clients may have had issues

• Our Nagios monitor indicated a high load on a server and at the same time we noticed a spike in outbound traffic on a particular OpenVZ VPS Node.  The server owner was running compressed cpanel backups and the compression was causing server load issues.  We were able to work with the client and help him implement an rsync backup solution that required no compression and as such the server load issues were resolved

If you are a VPS or Dedicated Server client and do not have access to these graphs yet just open a ticket and we can get you access right away.

Here you will see a number of examples of graphs taken from our BWF Monitor from three servers.  All these graphs were taken around 4pm on Thursday 31 January 2013 and a brief explanation of each one will also follow.  There are lots more graphs available such as the number of logged in users, number of running processes etc and we can customize the graphs clients see on request.

Here you can see a Traffic Graph taken from the Server 14 Shared Server Page

This is an example of a 24 hour load graph from a shared server and it is useful in helping to track problems. The load spiking to 5 overnight is simply a result of the backup processes running on the server and is perfectly normal. The server shown has 8 CPU Cores so a load of 5 is acceptable

An example of one of our most stable shared servers – not much happens in term of RAM usage but this is a good sign as it means the server is working as normal

This is a graph from a client’s dedicated server. We routinely monitor dedicated servers belonging to clients as a matter of routine. This server is actually in a different Data Centre and belongs to a client who simply pay us to manage the server. Any server we remotely manage as part of our Third Party Remote Server Management Addon is treated just like a server belonging to us. We monitor it in Nagios and in BWFMonitor just as if it were our own server. This is one reason why a growing number of clients are renting unmanaged servers from another provider and paying us a monthly fee for management

We trust you see a little more of what goes on behind the scenes to make BWF your number one choice for shared, reseller, VPS or Dedicated server hosting.  We never take our clients for granted and we wanted to give you a little flavour of what our technicians do on a daily basis to monitor the servers your websites are located on.  We really have seen an increase in our server uptime as a direct result of us monitoring things so closely as it allows us to get to 99% of small issues before they become a large issue.

Whilst comprehensive server monitoring will never guarantee there will be no outages or downtime we firmly believe our proactive monitoring of all critical services for our clients helps immensely in keeping things working as they should.

We also have the strong backing of our Hosting Partners (Hostdime) and their Data Centre techs from DIMEnoc to quickly react if we do experience any outages.  The backing of a global company will give any of our clients confidence in the quality of our hardware solutions.

Trust our growing team of experts to manage your hosting account professionally.

We would like to thank Praveen one of our Red Hat Linux Certified Level 3 techs for taking this as his project and implementing this complete solution for us. You can find out a little more about Praveen on the ‘About Us’ page on our website.

The post We got your back…. appeared first on Big Wet Fish Hosting.