How can you find out if your dedicated web host you have you heart set on is going to allow for media streaming?  When you are talking about dedicated hosting, streaming media should be no problem.

There should be no problem with live streaming on dedicated servers. You just need to ensure the hardware in your server meets the needed resources to serve the amount of video clients you expecting.

So if there is a script or program you had your eye on to manage the digital media, be sure to run the requirements by your dedicated hosting provider.  This way you can be sure that all of your media streaming “i’s” are dotted and “t’s” are crossed.

What would be the best way to hunt down a problem with your web site?  Before you upgrade, you may want to do some investigating.  For example, let us say you were getting DDoS attacks daily, and performance of your web sites seem to be going down hill.  Is an upgrade to a dedicated setup best?

It could be, but do your homework first.

I would recommend to determine what is excessively hitting CPU and memory of your server first to be able then to fight against the cause. If your server has cPanel, you would check CPU/Memory/MySQL usage stats in WHM. Running the “top” command in shell could also help you in figuring out which processes are the most CPU and memory consuming.

Once you have done some investigation into the cause of the issue, you will be more prepared to tackle it with your new dedicated web hosting plan.

The question is one that many web hosting customers have.  If you get dugg or slashdotted (in other words get hit up with an enormous amount of traffic, how will a dedicated hosting setup help in that process?

It is very hard to give a definite answer to your question because a dedicated server is not the only thing that is required for a very popular site. The server settings as well as the site itself should be highly optimized to meet critical demands.

For example, 1 query to DB per request doesn’t seem too much, but  providing 1000 concurrent request at any time, this results in 1000 simultaneous DB queries per each moment of time. It is a serious load even for a super-duper server with 4 CPUs, Gigs of RAM and SCSI hard drives assuming that the server also has to handle web requests at the same time and maybe it requires a some type of caching of query results or script outputs.

However, an upgrade to the dedicated server would be a strong requirement for site expecting a popularity increase since it makes all server resources available for the site to use as well as gives the site owner the control under all settings of the server.

There is a security hole in the prior OpenSSL versions, so you can upgrade OpenSSL by doing the following set of commands in shell:

openssl version

Most should be 0.9.7a. If you find a different version such as 0.9.8, please e-mail your web host to ask a system admin what to do.

mkdir /root/setup && cd /root/setup wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.7k.tar.gz tar -xvzf openssl-0.9.7k.tar.gz cd openssl* ./config make make install

For ./config, make and make install commands, allow the command to process and complete prior to going onto the next command.

/etc/init.d/httpd stop killall -9 httpd /etc/init.d/httpd startssl

Browse to a secure page on the server to test other than cPanel or WHM (provided you have any secure pages using https).

vi /etc/yum.conf

Edit the exclude line to encompass openssl so it isn’t overwritten by the old version by doing Esc+i keys:

exclude=mod_ssl* httpd* perl mysql* php* spamassassin* kernel* exim* courier* apache* openssl*

Your listing order might differ, the only important thing is basically adding the openssl* at the end of the exclude= line as the above example shows. You wouldn’t remove or add any other ones not already in the exclude line.

Save the file (:wq in vi). You are done!

How can you access phpMyAdmin via the Plesk or cPanel control panels?

In order to access phpMyAdmin if you are using Plesk you must follow the steps listed bellow:
You must first login to your control panel via:

https://www.yourdomain.com:8443/

and enter your username and password.

Once the database is created:

1. Click on the “Database” icon in Plesk
2. Choose your database you want to manage
3. Click on the “DB WebAdmin” icon

A popup window will open for phpMyAdmin (make sure you do not have a popup blocker installed to prevent this).  You can now edit tables, fields and data as well as perform backups of your MySQL database from within phpMyAdmin.

and if you are using cPanel then you must follow the steps listed bellow:

1. To access the MySQL Account Maintenance Menu, click on the    icon above the words
2. MySQL Databases on the main screen of your cPanel interface.
   Click on phpMyAdmin

Now you should have no problems editing your database files.

This will allow your site to point to your own nameservers: ns1.yoursite.com and ns2.yoursite.com.

1. Registering domain (if you don’t have one already)
Register your domain if you do not have one.  This domain will be used as your nameserver.  (eg. ns1.domain.com and ns2.domain.com)

2. Will need 2 available IPs
Your dedicated host provides 2 IPs with the dedicated server.  One is for the server itself and one of the nameservers, and the other IP can be used for the other nameserver. You can have your primary domain and one nameserver both on the same IP address.

Read on…

Continuing our thoughts on RPM, why package management?

At first glance you may say to yourself, “I can manage this myself. It’s not that many components …” In fact, for something as small as, say, cat, which has one executable and one man page, this may be so. But consider, say, PHP, which has a mountain of modules, dependencies. Keeping track of it all would be tough, if not impossible.

Package management makes it all easier. By letting a program maintain the information about the binaries, their configuration files, and everything else about them, you can identify which ones are installed, remove them easily or upgrade them readily, as well.

Installation becomes a snap. You select what you want, and ask the system to take care of the dirty work for you. Unpack the program, ensure that there is space, place things in the right order, and set them up for you. It’s great, it’s like having a valet take care of your car when you go to a restaurant. Dependencies, or additional requirements for a software package, are also managed seamlessly by a good package manager.

Management of installed packages is also greatly facilitated by a good package management system. It keeps a full list of software installed, which is useful to see if you have something installed. More importantly, it makes upgrading a breeze. Lastly, this makes verification of a software package quite easy to do. By knowing what packages are installed, and what the properties of the components are, you can quickly diagnose a problem and hopefully fix it quickly.

The Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) is a toolset used to build and manage software packages on UNIX systems. Distributed with the Red Hat Linux distribution and its derivatives (CentOS is 100% compatible rebuild of the Rehat Enterprise Linux), RPM also works on any UNIX as it is open source. However, finding RPM packages for other forms of UNIX, such as Solaris or IRIX, may prove difficult.

Package management is rather simple in its principles, though it can be tricky in its implementations. Briefly, it means the managed installation of software, managing installed software, and the removal of software packages from a system in a simplified manner. RPM arose out of the needs to do this effectively, and no other meaningful solution was available.

RPM uses a proprietary file format, unlike some other UNIX software package managers. This can be problematic if you find yourself needing to extract one component from the package and you don’t have the RPM utility handy. Luckily a tool like Alien exists to convert from RPM to other formats. It can be possible, through tools like Alien, to get to a file format you can manage using, say, tar or ar.
The naming scheme of RPM files is itself a standardized convention.

RPMs have the format (name)-(version)-(build).(platform).rpm. For example, the name cat-2.4-7.i386.rpm would mean an RPM for the utility “cat” version 2.4, build 7 for the x86. When the platform name is replaced by “src”, it’s a source RPM.

One question a lot of soon to be dedicated hosting owners ask themselves is how much should they worry about security with their new dedicated server or hosting plan.  First let me answer your question.

Should you worry?  Yes!  Server security is your responsibility as the server owner. If you don’t know much about dedicated hosting yet though you may ask if your web host has any sort of managed service.  This would put the security upgrades of most important components such as server kernel in the hands of somebody else. Please also be advised, control panel usually make the updates easy to handle, if you don’t have very customized setup.

This may cost a little extra, but is well worth the expense if you are a novice user in the world of dedicated hosting.