As older servers stock up more and more, fast servers that work perfectly but are not new become available. In early December DWHS will add a new section for bargain servers managed or unmanaged. This will list each older server and the exact specs.

The servers will be posted in the dedicated server page here: DEDICATED SERVERS

This is a very interesting article with the president of DWHS (Domain Web Hosting Service) calling the reasons to stay away from cheap bulk hosts like Godaddy, Hostgator, and Dreamhost. Worth the read, especially if you have a business website!

DWHS claims to the best or I should say the most advanced web hosting service available yet charge the same as bulk hosts.

Click here for the full article: DWHS calls out cheap hosts

We will be doing Routine Maintenance on Monday 05-02-2011 at 11pm Pacific Time. There should be no or little downtime during the updates and server check ups.

If you have any questions please let us know.

This is just a check up process to make sure all servers are running correctly, the upgrade of some hardware, and the upgrade of some software.

The Routine Maintenance will take less then 4 hours to complete.

Thank you,
DWHS Inc.

Western Digital said on Monday that it was buying Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for the equivalent of $4.3 billion. The move includes a combination of $3.5 billion in cash as well as shares worth about $750 million. The deal will see the WD name remain but see Hitachi GST’s CEO Steve Milligan join WD as president.

John Coyne, Western Digital CEO, argued that the move was chiefly for scale. The two would form a larger competitor and would have the advantage of better research and a wider range of products. Hitachi has focused on fields such as drives for set-top boxes as well as a greater focus on mobile hard drives.

The play is an attempt to hedge Western Digital’s position and compete against an increasingly tougher market. Hitachi has had reduced influence, while Western Digital has been in a long-running battle with its fellow American rival Seagate. Absorbing Hitachi would give the combined company greater clout.

As we all know WordPress can use too much load. Basically any php script can depending on how it is ran. After years of running our own blogs and helping people run theirs we have found some solid ways to help WordPress run smoothly.  First to check what load your Word press is using you need to contact your host and ask. They can get a daily average usually as far back as a month.

If you are using more then 3% of a shared CPU you can be at risk and your pages will probably start to lag.

To use less load or if you just want your wordpress to run fast and smooth here are some solid tips to help:

Things to do:

1. Make smaller images. Using thumbs and better compression will go a long way to lower your load use.
2. Make smaller pages, if you page is a long story or has a lot of content split it up into two or three posts. Part 1 – part 2 part 3 ect…
3. Have less posts show per page, I usually run 5 per page and keeps the posts compressed and fairly small.

Things to add:

1. The best plug ins to help load control for WordPress is Cache focused ones, here is a list of the top ones: Super Cache This will create static pages for each php page which will not require the whole script to be used to see one page. This is also good in case you have a MYSQL error, your pages will still work as normal. Another similar option is W3 Super Cache which claims to be a little better. And if you only want to cache your MYSQL in fear of the full cache causing weird errors then use: DB Cache
2. Load images only as the user scrolls down to them with Lazy Load
3. Optimize your WordPress blog with AutoOptimize
4. Add hot link protection in your Control Panel: Hot Link Protection
5. Akismet, this will block spam and junk from wasting your sites resources.
6. Optimize your Database with: Optimize DB

Things to remove:

1. Google XML sitemap generator and, I like this script but it takes lots of load to run and in most cases Google will spider your whole site anyways,
2. Global translator plug-in, this takes a lot of load to run. It basically rebuilds your hold site when requested.
3. Anything that can be run from another server, like for example a image for Skype, Feed-burner, Twitter, Facebook, most of these can be hot-linked from the site itself. It’s better to share the load with other sites when possible.
4. Misc plug-ins, if there is any plug-ins that can go then get rid of them. Even if the plug-in is not activated it’s still taking up room in the internal files of WordPress and can cause a little extra drag.
5. Tags, I know you like these but really they can actually hurt your SEO and definably require more load. Your better off just removing them and working on a smart keyword driven SEO campaign.

All of these plug-ins can be installed from the WordPress control panel. Just login and click WordPress plug-ins to add.

Say goodbye to those wimpy, eight-letter passwords.

The 12-character era of online security is upon us, according to a report published this week by the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The researchers used clusters of graphics cards to crack eight-character passwords in less than two hours.

But when the researchers applied that same processing power to 12-character passwords, they found it would take 17,134 years to make them snap.

“The length of your password in some cases can dictate the vulnerability,” said Joshua Davis, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

It’s hard to say what will happen in the future, but for now, 12-character passwords should be the standard, said Richard Boyd, a senior research scientist who also worked on the project.

The researchers recommend 12-character passwords — as opposed to those with 11 or, say, 13 characters — because that number strikes a balance between “convenience and security.”

They assumed a sophisticated hacker might be able to try 1 trillion password combinations per second. In that scenario, it takes 180 years to crack an 11-character password, but there’s a big jump when you add just one more character — 17,134 years.

Passwords have gotten longer over time, and security experts are already recommending that people use full sentences as passwords.

Here’s one suggested password-sentence from Carnegie Mellon University:

“No, the capital of Wisconsin isn’t Cheeseopolis!”

Or maybe something that’s easier to remember, like this:

“I have two kids: Jack and Jill.”

Even though advances in cheap computing power are making long, complicated passwords a necessity, not all websites will accommodate them, Boyd said.

It’s best to use the longest and most complex password a site will allow, he said. For example, if a website will let you create a password with non-letter characters — like “@y;}v%W$\5\” — then you should do so.

There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet, but there are 95 letters and symbols on a standard keyboard. More characters means more permutations, and it soon becomes more difficult to for a computer to generate the correct password just by guessing.

Some websites allow for super-long passwords. The longest one Boyd has seen is at Fidelity.com, a financial site that lets users create 32-character passwords.

On a Microsoft website devoted to password security, the tech giant tells the password-creating public not to use real words or logical combinations of letters. That keeps you safer from a “dictionary attack,” which uses a database of words and common character sequences to try to guess the code.

The Georgia Tech researchers carried out a “brute force” attack when they determined that passwords should be at least 12 characters long.

To do so, they deployed computer graphics cards, which are cheap and can be programmed to do basic computations very quickly.

The processors in those cards run simultaneously, trying to guess all of the possible password combinations. The more characters in a password, the more guesses are required.

But if your password has to be really long in order to keep up with this computational power — and if you’re supposed to have a new password for each website you frequent — then how are you supposed to remember everything?

That’s a real problem, the Georgia Tech researchers said.

There are a few solutions, however.

A website called Password Safe will store a list of passwords for you, but Boyd and Davis said it may still be possible for a hacker to obtain that list.

Other companies sell tokens that people carry around with them. These keychain-sized devices generate random numbers several times a minute, and users must enter those numbers and a shorter password to log in.

Some sites — Facebook for example — are marketing their log-ins and user names as a way to access sites all over the Web.

That’s good for the user but is potentially dangerous because if hackers figure out a single password, they can access multiple banks of information, the researchers said.

The reason passwords have to keep getting longer is that computers and graphics cards are getting faster, the Georgia Tech researchers said.

“These things are really inexpensive — just a few hundred dollars — and they have a performance that’s comparable to supercomputers of only just a few years ago,” Boyd said of fast-processing graphics cards.

Maybe our brains will have to get bigger and faster, too. We’ll need some way to remember these tome-like character strings.

Email port 25 - This is the standard outgoing email port. 99% of the time it will be fine and set in your email program by default.

Email port 26 - This is simply a alternative to port 25 and works the same. It exists because some ISP’s do not allow outgoing email which we believe unless advertised bluntly is bad business conduct. So we have set up a second port for people to get around their misleading ISP’s.

Email port 587 - Is yet another attempt to block email from users. Like most spam blocking attempts blocking all ports for email other then port 587  really does nothing other then create confusion for regular users of the internet. But if you need port 587 then DWHS can open this by request.

This process requires root access and full dedicated server.

cd /usr/local/src/

DOWNLOAD MODULES

wget www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20061022.tar.bz2
wget rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/9225/flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz
wget easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.97.tar.gz
wget superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ffmpeg-php/ffmpeg-php-0.5.1.tbz2
wget downloads.xiph.org/releases/ogg/libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
wget downloads.xiph.org/releases/vorbis/libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz

EXTRACT MODULES

tar zxvf lame-3.97.tar.gz
tar zxvf libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
tar zxvf libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz
tar zxvf flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz
tar jxvf essential-20061022.tar.bz2
tar jxvf ffmpeg-php-0.5.1.tbz2

mkdir /usr/local/lib/codecs/

yum install gcc gmake make libcpp libgcc libstdc++ gcc4 gcc4-c++ gcc4-gfortran subversion ruby ncurses-devel -y

DOWNLOAD FFMPEG and MPLAYER

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
cd /usr/local/src/mplayer

svn update

cd /usr/local/src/
mv /usr/local/src/essential-20061022/* /usr/local/lib/codecs/
chmod -R 755 /usr/local/lib/codecs/

LAME:

cd /usr/local/src/lame-3.97
./configure
make && make install

LIBOGG

cd /usr/local/src/
cd /usr/local/src/libogg-1.1.3
./configure –enable-shared && make && make install
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH

LIBVORBIS

cd /usr/local/src/
cd /usr/local/src/libvorbis-1.1.2
./configure && make && make install

FLVTOOL2

cd /usr/local/src/
cd /usr/local/src/flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6/
ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

MPLAYER

cd /usr/local/src/
cd /usr/local/src/mplayer
./configure && make && make install

cd /usr/local/src/

FFMPEG:

cd /usr/local/src/ffmpeg/
./configure –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libvorbis –disable-mmx –enable-shared
make
make install

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/

ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.50 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.50
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavcodec.so.51 /usr/lib/libavcodec.so.51
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavutil.so.49 /usr/lib/libavutil.so.49
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.so.0 /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so.0
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.51 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.51

FFMPEG-PHP:

cd /usr/local/src/
cd /usr/local/src/ffmpeg-php-0.5.1/
phpize
./configure
make
make install

NOTICE: Make sure this is the correct php.ini for the box!!

echo ‘extension=ffmpeg.so’ >> /usr/local/Zend/etc/php.ini

NOTICE: Make sure this is the correct php.ini for the box!!

RESTART APACHE

service httpd restart

Known issues: