It is important to keep your eye on your resources when you have a dedicated hosting plan so that you know when and if something is about to or has gotten out of hand.  Here I hope to give you a few handy tips when it comes to monitoring your site resources and statistics in Plesk.

First thing you need to do is login to your Plesk control panel, and click on Limits.  As you can see Limits displays the resource limits allocated to your account.  It lists such details as:

• Maximum Number of Subdomains
• Disk Space
• Bandwidth
• Maximum Amount of Traffic
• Maximum Number of Web Users
• and more…

Now click on Up Level at the top of the Limits window for your domain, and click on Report.  The Report will show you all account resource limits & usage, as well as users and a full list of all available scripts, utilities and resources.

FTP Stats will show you a history of FTP activity on your site - both in upload as well as download. 

Traffic History will display information on traffic usage by Months and Years on your dedicated hosting account.  To view the detailed traffic statistics used by various services at the domain, click on the Traffic button.  The page will open displaying the traffic usage table.  You can send a copy of the report to an e-mail address you specify too at the bottom of the Report screen.  You can also set up a schedule for automatic delivery of the reports. 

The last detail about monitoring dedicated resources inside of Plesk is the Web Statistics Preferences screen.  From here you can set some of the preferences that will dictate the display of refers in your stats.

Now you should be a little more handy when it comes to stats and resources inside of your Plesk control panel via your dedicated web hosting account.

Using a good anti-virus program is key to protecting yourself, your visitors and the server from being infected by something nasty.  Here is what you need to do to use Dr. Web Antivirus in Plesk.

Select the mailbox for which you wish to configure Dr. Web. Once you have clicked on the e-mail address from the Plesk mail management screen,  you can enable Dr. Web for both incoming and outgoing mail.  Select the choice you want, and then hit OK.  Also it is worth taking note of the fact that you could do it for an either/or situation too.

That is all you have to do.  Now your protected from any viruses getting to you from this direction.  Did you know that Dr. Web offers leading frequency of updates and a comprehensive database of viruses? 

They track more than 100,000 of them. 

The heuristic virus scanning technology detects new and unknown viruses without the traditional virus fingerprints and this makes Dr. Web an effective anti-virus solution.

Plenty of first time Plesk (and dedicated hosting) users are often confused when it comes to adding users to a new MySQL database.  They can create the MySQL database with no issues, but adding a user can be a little trickier.

The option to create a MySQL database user should become available after you click on the database name from within Plesk.  As you can see sometimes it is the obvious issues that get in our way the most.

Plesk offers a powerhouse of tools and services to use to manage our dedicated hosting servers, but as with anything it pays to read up on it before you jump in with both feet.  All control panels are pretty much the same, they just have different ways of getting these jobs done.

When shopping for or using a dedicated web hosting server or plan there are a few questions you should be asking yourself.  Your needs are the most important factor to a successful setup.  Are all your needs covered?

Do I Really Need It?

This is the question I tackle most often, does your project or web site really require a dedicated hosting setup.  Now dedicated web hosting is good for a number of different things.  For example, if you want to have a number of different web sites all on the same machine.  That is a good reason.  If you a running a server that has unusually high server loads.  That also may be another good reason to go dedicated.

What Do I Really Need?

What is it that you really need from a dedicated hosting provider?  The most important would be support.  A good dedicated support team is hard to find, and is one of those things you won’t know that you have till a few months down the road or when the first big issue comes up that you can not tackle on your own.  Server resources would be another key factor to weigh in as well as disk space and bandwidth.

Are My Needs Being Met?

Are you getting everything that was promised to you?  Once a year it might be a good idea to review your web hosting setup to make sure you are getting everything that you have paid for and perhaps see if you might need to upgrade or downgrade your current dedicated hosting setup.  There is often a lot of customization you can do with the dedicated hosting field so see what your dedicated hosting provider delivers to you.

Know of anymore important needs that need to be tackled when it comes to dedicated web hosting?

You want to be the next Facebook or MySpace, you had better have a deep pocket.  Now putting aside the fact that you would need a lot of users, social praise and traffic to make this all work - according to one web site resource these are the current stats for Facebook on the hosting side of things:

30,000 databases & 1,800 db servers

1200 dedicated servers

805 caching servers

Now with any dedicated hosting provider out there you could get a good start if nothing else.  Many of the social network clone scripts will run on a VPS or dedicated hosting plan too.  This is just to give you a little insight on what you may be getting yourself into.

Are you a business owner in the need of a little dedicated hosting?  Your not alone.  There are many of you out there and here are some special tutorials just for you.

• What is Necessary for an Ecommerce Website?
• What is Business Web Hosting?
• Dedicated Server Hosting
• Plesk Power Pack Web Hosting Features
• Fantastico Web Hosting
• Dedicated Hosting for Small Business Owners

Sure there will be plenty more in the future, so as always keep checking back for more help business owners out there.

After yesterday’s article I thought I would also list an alternative way to help secure the SSH.  You can also secure your ssh changing default port (22).  Change the port that SSH listens for connections on:

      #Port 22

      Port XX    (where XX = your new portnumber)

You can choose something like 22202 or something you can remember.

You are now done editing the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file (save your changes, and quit your editor).
Another important thing dont forgot to allow the port you choose from firewall:

      /etc/apf/conf.apf

Then you add there your new ssh port.  Hope you enjoyed.  Any good dedicated hosting provider should be able to provide you with additional help if needed.

By default SSH will give root and any local user secure access to the server. For security reasons it is a good idea to change this setting and specify the users which are allowed to have SSH access. The configuration file for SSH is called sshd_config and is either in /etc or /etc/ssh

Login to the server and on the command prompt do:

[root@office root]# vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

things to change:

#don't allow root to SSH in to the server:

PermitRootLogin no

#users allowed to login:

AllowUsers user1 user2 user3

Now do a “shift zz” (hold down the shift key and tab 2 times the z key)
The configuration file now is saved and closed and you have to restart ssh:

[root@office root]# /etc/init.d/sshd restart

Stopping sshd:                                             [  OK  ]

Starting sshd:                                             [  OK  ]

[root@office root]#

Now you can SSH to your server with your username,then do a su on the command prompt and type in the root password to become root.

Big businesses and even startups and web 2.0 networks all have one thing in common – they need to market their website audience and they need to do it well and without getting spam-blocked by the end-user.  There are actually several ways to avoid getting blacklisted, because unfortunately, even on a dedicated server, this can happen to you.

The first way to avoid getting blacklisted is to only market to customers or pre-sales clients who know they are entering into your mailing list and/or will need your product or service. Make sure you are using a mailing list client that has the option to include an unsubscribe link, as your marketing techniques are illegal otherwise. Also, if you have the ability to have customers opt or even double opt-in to receive the promotions and marketing materials, this would be a great idea.

Another thing to keep in mind is the number of emails you are marketing to. If you have a customer or marketing base that consists of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of email addresses, you’ll need to be especially careful. Sending out over 500 emails in one hour is the biggest concern of any dedicated server hosting customer, because not only can you get spam-blocked for sending out that many emails that quickly but your server might also get blacklisted by certain email providers like AOL and Yahoo, who are quick to act on spam-related issues.

A good way to keep the number of emails sent per hour down to a safe amount is through using cron jobs, which can be scheduled to send, for example, 5 emails per minute. If you have a customer base of 1500 recipients, that will only take 5 hours to complete. The best way you can handle this many emails is to talk to your dedicated web hosting provider upfront to see what their specific restrictions are for sending emails and marketing customers using mailing lists.

Dedicated hosting offers a lot of options.  One of those options for the experts out there is to use the control panel of our choice.  Over this next week I’ll share with you some of my favorite control panels out there.  You shouldn’t judge the quality of your Web host by the control panel they offer alone. It is an important piece to the web hosting puzzle.

cPanel

The folks at the cPanel Web site say, “cPanel is designed for the end users of your system and allows them to control everything from adding / removing email accounts to administering MySQL databases.” The fact of the matter is though that they do that and so much more. Most often used on Redhat Linux based systems, cPanel provides support for over ten different flavors of Linux. There is no Windows or OSX versions yet however. Their interface is clean, with more options and features than you could shake a stick at. It is easy to see why they are the number one control panel used today. They do have several competitors though, chomping at the bit to take their space on the top of the mountain. cPanel used to have a demo control panel up for folks to test drive, however I could not find a trace of it on the cPanel Web site anymore.

Plesk

Plesk is available for both Linux and Windows Web hosting servers. This alone gives them a little advantage over cPanel. Their interface looks much like Windows XP. You have all the soft colors and big icons that you would ever need. I have to give them credit though, because it does look great. They have all the basic features that cPanel has as well. Take Plesk for a test drive and see what you think!

H-Sphere

Created by Positive Software, H-Sphere is yet another pretty control panel that you might have access to. It too provides support for Windows and Linux based machines. From complete automation to key functionalities, it has many features. Compared with Plesk and cPanel it leaves you with wanting a little more. Perhaps in the next few versions it will be able to catch up. The organization inside the H-Sphere is not that great either. Take H-Sphere for a test drive and see what you think!

Part one is over, but there are still two more segments to go!  Next I will take a look at DirectAdmin, Interworx, Helm, and Ensim. If you have any arguments, comments, questions or suggestions just let me know and I’ll be more than happy to do a follow up article with what you have had to say.