Have a trouble maker in your dedicated server?

Now we will explain how to suspend a user account in Web Host Manager (WHM).  Now there are a variety of reasons you might need to temporarily suspend an account.  Examples would be non-payment, breach of your own TOS, overages in bandwith and more.  Now lets say you have a trouble maker your hosting on your dedicated account and you want to suspended him.

Login to WHM, then click on Account Functions.  From there, click on Suspend/Unsuspend an Account.  Now you should see a two columned list of all the accounts your hosting on your dedicated server.  Select the account you wish to suspend.  Now you need to enter a reason for the suspension (keep it short and sweet) and then hit the suspend button.  Now if you want to unsuspend an account go into:

Account Functions > Suspend/Unsuspend an Account

Then click on the account you wish to unsuspend, and hit the unsusupend button.  Your done!  Now you can have a little more control using WHM with your hosted accounts under your dedicated server.

Your dedicated hosting account can be very mysterious if you don’t know where to start.  If you are using WHM (Web Host Manager) and cPanel though, there is no doubt that the most important thing you need to learn to do is how to create a new hosting package and add an account to your dedicated hosting setup.

The first thing you will want to do is login to WHM and click on “Account Functions”.  Then on the Account Functions screen, you need to click on the link for “Create a New Account”.  Now enter the domain name of the new account (without the www part in there).  WHM will automatically create a username for you based on up to the first 8 characters of the domain name.  You may use this or create your own.  Also please remember that a username can not start with a number.

Next you will need to create a password.  Make it 6-8 alpha-numeric characters and it should not contain the username.  You may set all the limits manually or select a pre-configured hosting plan you have already created before.  If you select a pre-configured plan all the account limits will automatically set based on the package selection.  This will save you time.

If you have a contact address you would like to associate with the account, you can enter it in the text box marked for the contact e-mail.  You can always add it later if you do not wish to do this step right now.

With the IP address setting, unless you need to setup an account with a dedicated IP, you should leave this on “Auto Assign”.  Doing so will assign the hosting account the shared IP address for the dedicated hosting plan.

Once that step has been taken care of then you can hit “Create” (at the top of the page) to create the account.  Once you get this done, you are done.  Your new account will be created, and your ready to do some web hosting on your dedicated server.

This is how you manage Crontabs and use the Crontab Manger in Plesk on your dedicated hosting account.  Crontab will allow you to automatically run scheduled tasks on the server, and if selected, receive automatic emails showing the results.

First step would be to login to Plesk, and then go down to the Crontab icon and click it.  Next, you will need to select the name of the user for whom you wish to manage the crontab.  You can also setup crontab messages to be sent to your e-mail address.

To get the task setup, click on the “Add New Task” icon under your Crontab tasks page.  On the next page you should see a web page that reads “Editing the Crontabs tasks of yourusername”.  Enter the specific parameters to set the frequency of the task.  Enter * to select all.

Now under command, you will enter the path to the fill that will execute the crontab.  Once that is done, hit the OK button and you have finished creating your first crontab on your dedicated hosting account using Plesk.

One of the first rules of security they teach you is to have a good password and to change it often.  If you have Plesk installed as your control panel of choice on your dedicated hosting plan this is how you would get that done.

First, login to Plesk and then click on "Domain Administrator".  From there, you will get All of your domain’s preferences as they are seen by Plesk.  The boxes you are looking for are labeled:

• New Password
• Confirm Password

Type your new password into the "New Password" text box.  Make it a 6-8 alpha-numeric combination, and it should not include your user name or anything else that would easily be guessed.  Type it again in the Confirm Password text box and then scroll down the page till you see the OK button.  Click it and you are done.

To change your FTP password, go back to the main Plesk start page and click on "Setup" under "Hosting".  Again make sure it is a 6-8 alpha-numeric combination.  Type it into the New FTP Password and Confirm Password boxes and then scroll down and hit the OK button yet again. 

Now your Plesk powered dedicated account has a fresh set of new passwords and is a ‘bit more secure than it was before.

By now you have already installed Apache onto your dedicated server. Now, let’s configure Apache to run with PHP4 or PHP5, whichever is your preference in scripting.

For PHP4, it’s as simple as apt-get:

apt-get install apache2 php4 libapache2-mod-php4

Since PHP5 can be automatically installed if you don’t specify the package ‘4’, you can do that or apt-get:

apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5

To test and ensure that you are now hosting with PHP4 or PHP5, create a test file called test.php in /var/www folder with phpinfo() function as follows:

nano /var/www/test.php

php phpinfo();

Now, just point your web browser to http://ip.address/test.php and you’ll be able to see your php config and default settings. If you don’t, check with your dedicated server administrators or web hosting provider.

From there, you can also edit necessary values or setup virtual domains, enable CAPTCHA, and more.

Any great web site out there, especially those on a dedicated sever, need to have an equally as great backup plan.  Thankfully if you are using Plesk, this is an easy process to step through.

First thing you need to do is login to your Plesk control panel, and then click on the "Back up" icon.  You can then backup locally or remotely.  For convenience, you can enter your FTP details and store them for future sessions.  To do so, click on FTP Account Properties and then fill out all the blanks, giving Plesk your FTP information to remember.  Now that you have that done lets backup our files.  Click on Create Backup on the main Backup page, and then you should see a screen labeled Backup file creation.

Now click on the backup method, either local, download or remotely on an FTP server.  You can also create a multivolume backup from here too.  Now under FTP settings, you should see that everything has been filled out for you.  Give your backup file a name, leave a comment to help your remember what it was about and also you can put in your e-mail address so you will be notified as soon as the backup is done.

When your ready, click on the "Back up" button.  After doing so you may wish to play with other options you have such as enabling backups on a schedule so you don’t have to actually login and do all of this to get it done each time.  You can also browse through the backup file repository too.

LAMP web hosting is probably the most popular and affordable server setting for webmasters these days. If you aren’t already aware, LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP and defines how your dedicated server will run – it will be Linux hosting with an Apache server, MySQL databases, and PHP development.

The first step to create a LAMP server setup is to install Apache on your Linux machine.

1) Download Apache from Apache Software Foundation.

2) Uncompress the archive using gunzip and tar and replace apache_1.3.11.tar.gz in the example here with the name of the current live version you just downloaded:

gunzip < apache_1.3.11.tar.gz | tar xvf –

This should create an apache_1.3.11 directory.

3) Move into the new directory you just created and use cd apache_1.3.11.

4) ./configure in the root so that your screen appears as such:

# ./configure
Configuring for Apache, Version 1.3.11
…
Creating Makefile
Creating Configuration.apaci in src
Creating Makefile in src
+ configured for Linux platform
+ setting C compiler to gcc
+ setting C pre-processor to gcc -E
+ checking for system header files
+ adding selected modules
+ checking sizeof various data types
+ doing sanity check on compiler and options
…
Creating Makefile in src/modules/standard

5) make so that your screen looks like this:

# make
===> src
make[1]: Entering directory `src/httpd/apache_1.3.11′
make[2]: Entering directory `src/httpd/apache_1.3.11/src’
===> src/regex
…
[several lines later]
…
gcc  -DLINUX=2 -DUSE_HSREGEX -DUSE_EXPAT -I../lib/expat-lite

make[1]: Leaving directory `src/httpd/apache_1.3.11′
<=== src
#

6) Install your new Apache with # make install and you’re done!

Now you are welcome to start Apache to make sure it’s working if you’d like.

As root, type /usr/local/apache/bin/apachect1 start and your browser at your brand new web server at yourdomain.com. If you see the Apache standard “It worked!” homepage, you are set.

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.

Do you want to keep yourself updated to know what you’re using on your dedicated server and when? This kind of information can be especially helpful if you are allotting a certain amount of disk space, bandwidth, or email accounts to specific clients on your dedicated server. Plus, knowing what you are using and how often will assist you in keeping your server up to date and if you need to upgrade, you will know before any issues arise.

In Plesk, via Windows or Linux hosting, you can find this information easily.

First, click on Limits

Limits displays the resource limits allocated to your account. For example, it shows you the maximum number of subdomains allowed, disk space, maximum traffic or bandwidth, maximum number of web users, maximum number of databases, maximum number of mailboxes, mailbox quota, maximum number of mail redirects, maximum number of mail groups, maximum number of mail autoresponders, maximum number of mailing lists, and a ton more.

To see account resources limits and usage, click on Report.

Report options will display all resource limits and usages, as well as users and a full list of all available scripts, utilities, and resources. For example, you’ll see Web Statistics, Web Stats, Web Stats SSL, FTP Stats, Traffic History, and can manage Report Delivery.

If you click on FTP Stats, this will show you a history of FTP activity in your website, both in upload as well as download.

If you click on Traffic History, this will display information on traffic usage by Months and Years.

To view detailed traffic statistics used by various services at the domain, click on the Traffic button.

If you’d like to keep yourself updated, you can also choose to send a copy of the report to any email you specify.

Or, you can setup a schedule for automatic delivery of reports by clicking on Report Delivery.

Accessing this information can assist you in self-managing your dedicated web hosting.

How do you setup multiple domains for one web site via the Plesk control panel?  Login to Plesk and on your Home page, click the domain name for which you wish to set up additional domain names.

Click the Domain Aliases icon.

Click the Add Domain Alias icon.

Type the desired domain alias name, for example alias.com.

Domain aliases can comprise letters, digits and hyphens. Each part of the domain alias between dots should not be longer than 63 symbols. Select the Synchronize DNS zone with the primary domain check box if you want the domain alias to use the same DNS zone resource records as in primary domain. With this setting, any subsequent changes in resource records of the primary domain’s zone will be applied to the DNS zone of this domain alias.

Select the Mail check box, if you want e-mail directed at the e-mail addresses under the domain alias to be redirected to the e-mail addresses under your original domain name.

Example: You have an e-mail address mail@yourdomain.com. You have set up an alias for your domain name, for example, alias.com. If you want to receive mail to your mailbox mail@yourdomain.com when it is sent to mail@alias.com, select the Mail check box.
Select the Web check box. Otherwise, the web server will not serve the web content to users coming to your site by typing the domain alias in their browsers.

Select the Java Web applications check box if you have Java applications installed on your site and you want them to be accessible through the domain alias.  Click OK and you are done!