Are you planning to run a legal adult website?  Are you finding that it’s extremely difficult to find a web host who allows adult content?  Even when you do find a host, is your adult server too expensive?

These are all common problems for businesses running adult websites and looking for an adult web host.  The most difficult part of running your adult site is often finding a reliable, affordable dedicated web host to host your business.  The next step is understanding what is allowed and what is not.

What You Need:

* Plenty of hard drive space and bandwidth!  If you are running a successful adult website on a dedicated server, you are going to see a great deal of traffic and you cannot exist on a shared server.

* Uptime – 99.9% uptime is standard.

* Managed Hosting – make sure your site is taken care of 24/7/365

* IP Address – you’ll need this for SEO (search engine optimization) and to process online payments

What You Should Ask:

Make sure you ask your future provider the following questions:

• Do you allow legal adult content?
• What are your rules on adult content?
• Do you charge extra to host adult content?

You will definitely want to be on a Dedicated Server Hosting plan if you are running an adult website.  Try our recommend dedicated host for quality adult webhosting at an affordable price.

When you purchase a dedicated server from your new web host, you’ll need to decide whether you want to manage your own server or if you’d like the web hosting provider to manage it for you. You’ll more than likely have to pay for even the most basic Managed Hosting options, so if you’re not prepared to spend the extra money every month, you can manage the server internally yourself. However, be careful with a self-managed solution – if you are not technically savvy, you are going to want to pay a little extra to have the dedicated hosting provider help you out.

So what is self-managed? A self-managed dedicated server hosting plan allows you to take over the maintenance and installation tasks associated with running your own dedicated web hosting server. These kinds of solutions are best left to experienced professionals who either have extensive System Administration knowledge or have managed their own dedicated server in the past, considering setting up and maintaining your dedicated server is not an easy task.

With self-managed hosting, you have complete SSH/root access to your dedicated server to install anything you’d like. The basic things you’ll need will be a control panel to manage the server, applications to run your website, and anything else you need to make your website appear on the internet.

Knowing what is available for tools to self manage your dedicated server will help you out a lot, so do your research well.

We have discussed managed web hosting before and even if you are comfortable in a dedicated server environment, really, why wouldn’t you ask your web host to manage the server for you when they are so low cost?

If you are aware of what managing a dedicated server entails will help you understand if it’s something you will need to include in your dedicated server purchase.  Finding affordable managed hosting solutions can be difficult.  We recommend choosing carefully.

Any reputable dedicated hosting provider should offer Managed Hosting.

Lunarpages or LPDedicated offer various levels of Managed Hosting.

Managed Hosting Lite

Managed Lite starts at less than $10 per month and we will monitor your server 24/7/365.

Managed Hosting Intense

Our Intense Managed option for $39.99 per month not only assures you that your server is in good hands but is also an affordable solution for every webmaster and includes the following features:

* Free setup of APF Firewall and Root Kit Check on the server
* Up to date notifications of exploits on popular third party software
* Upgrades of kernels, php, apache and administration panels for security per user authorization (we will send notice and you can decide if you want the upgrade to be performed)
* Monitoring of your server through Lunarpages’ internal monitoring tools
* Unlimited reboots of your server if it becomes unresponsive
* One free third party script installation per billing year
* Free installation of upgraded control panel
* Free installation of Resin if needed
* Free setup of remote backups

Managed Hosting Ultra

The Next Generation in Managed Services: $149.00 a month, available on Dedicated III, Mega and High Performance Plans.

Managed Software Backup (R1soft):

* Internally Managed disk to disk backups (50gb included)
* 2 week onsite retention

Firewall:

* Cisco ASA 5505

Managed Hosting Services:

* Free setup of APF Firewall and Root Kit Check on the server
* Up to date notifications of exploits on popular third party software
* Upgrades of kernels, php, apache and administration panels for security per user authorization (we will send notice and you can decide if you want the upgrade to be performed)
* One free third party script installation per billing year
* Free installation of upgraded control panel
* Free installation of Resin if needed
* Unlimited reboots
* 24x7x365 Phone and Help Desk support
* Same Day Hardware Replacement Guarantee
* Dedicated Support staff
* Access to Lunarpages customer account page:
o Ticket Manager
o Reboots
o Bandwidth
o Knowledgebase
o Billing Options

Remember!  Be sure to check if your web host offers Managed on their dedicated server plans!

Why choose dedicated over VPS?

• VPSs (Virtual Private Servers) allows hardware to run at a higher utilization rate.
• Management issues as VPS requires more Ethernet cables, networking and switches.
• Hardware can run at a higher utilization rate with VPS.
• Disk I/O performance may back up due to additional disk frags.
• Vulnerabilities are more common and involved with VPS.
• It is time consuming and not efficient to manage many IP addresses.
• There are sometimes software licensing advantages when running VPS.
• It can be challenging to make backups of one or two versions of less mainstream software and programs.
• They are cheaper since usually they have less power costs than one physical server.
• VPS need costly drivers like multi-port network adapters.
• VPS are more affordable requiring less power than one dedicated server.
• It is difficult to manage large number of IP addresses, MAC addresses etc
• VPS overhead is less than 5% on some modern visualization software like Virtuozzo.
• Maintaining a VPS is still more costly and patching all virtual servers with various operating systems on many physical servers requires their own maintenance.

It looks like the answer is Dedicated Web Hosting!  Check out LPDedicated.com, Lunarpages Web Hosting’s brand of dedicated affordable solutions

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:

Read on…

RootCheck scans the system looking for possible  trojans, scans the ports for malicious activity ,and checks for rootkits, and also the logs, permissions and more.

Installation Instructions
Login to your server and su to root.

wget http://www.ossec.net/rootcheck/files/rootcheck-0.4.tar.gz

tar -xvzf rootcheck-0.4.tar.gz
cd rootcheck-0.4
./install

This will take you to an interactive installation. Make sure you have CPAN on your box because rootcheck requires the Perl Modules IO::Interface.

If the installation is finished you will get this message

————————————-
Compilation successful. Ready to go.

That’s it! If everything went ok, you should be ready to run RootCheck. If you any doubts about installation, please refer to INSTALL file.
————————————-

Scanning the System
Now you are ready to run rootcheck.

There are quite a few options butthe simplest one is

./rootcheck.pl

If the installation was perfect you would get a progress screen of the scan after which the results will be written into results.txt the result is quite explanatory and gives details of all suspected files.

Hope that helps you with your dedicated web hosting RootCheck issues.

If you have a dedicated server or are looking into purchasing one for an affordable price, you will likely need to consider how you are going to monitor that server. You have two main choices:

1. Purchase a Managed Hosting Option – these can be fairly affordable and will let your host monitor your server for you. The only downside is that you have to pay a monthly fee and you don’t have access to these monitoring tools.
2. Self-Manage Your Server – Download a server monitoring tool and self-manage the server by checking every so often for server errors, etc.

Here are some of the recommended server monitoring tools for your dedicated web server:

1. Nagios – The most popular server monitoring tool that is even used in the web hosting industry for web hosting clients on dedicated and shared servers alike. Nagios offers amazing tools that are literally unsurpassed in the industry, such as: monitoring of network services (like email, PING, etc), host resources (CPU, disk usage, logs, etc), environmental factors; simple plugin designs; contact notifications via email, pager, or user-defined methods; scheduled downtime to suppress notifications; and more! This is the most highly recommended solution available on the market to help you see what your web host sees.
2. SiteUptime – Choose from 3 different levels of server management: the free account offers more than enough for basic users, while the $5 or $10 per month option offers more features. The free level allows you to monitor in 30 and 60 minute intervals for one site and receive email notifications, monthly reports, online stats, and more.
3. Host-Alert – Check your server’s uptime and errors in increments of 5, 10, or 30 minute intervals, and have these error notifications sent via email, SMS text messaging, or both. Each notification is only sent once, so there’s no need to worry if something goes down about your inbox getting spammed. Plus you can check the status on unlimited databases, pages, and websites.

This dedicated server hosting checklist is designed to help you understand what it takes to run a dedicated server. After all, it’s not just about purchasing a box – you need to know how to manage and work with it too. So here’s what it takes, your checklist for running a dedicated server:

• A powerful web hosting platform
• Managed Hosting
• 24/7 technical support – through email is best, so you can document errors and solutions
• State of the art data centers – the more data centers a provider runs, the better chances of redundant uptime for you and your server
• Guaranteed RAM
• Easy upgrades
• Great dedicated hosting deals – amazing coupons to help lower your monthly costs or incentives for staying longer
• Ability to perform website backups

What is a Rootkit?

Rootkits are programs designed to access your dedicated server systems to intrude on and compromise your server. These rootkits are often designed as Trojans so that you do not suspect but can open a backdoor to your dedicated server so that they can attach and upload suspicious programs and applications to degrade your performance or bring down your website.

What is Rootkit Detection?

Rootkit detection can be handled in two ways:

1. Via Managed Hosting from your dedicated web hosting provider.
2. Via rootkit detection programs, which are a way you can self-manage your web server.

How do rootkit detection programs work?

Rootkit detection software is designed to detect rootkits and distinguish them from normal hidden files that are not suspicious and concealed for a purpose either by you as a webmaster or by the operating system by default. Most often, rootkit detection programs compare various views of your server system to find mismatches. When there is a mismatch, it usually points to something suspicious and the rootkit check will alert you to suspicious software, programs, Trojans, spyware, or malware on your machine.

Originally, rootkit checks would perform a check on the entire dedicated server system to view all files while inside the OS and then boot the Recovery Console to see that file list for comparison. In the second list, the rootkit program will search for files that do not show up in the first list. These hidden files are often rootkit culprits!

Do they work?

As with all software programs, it depends. Rootkit management programs are not meant to be used as a standalone system for customers new to dedicated server hosting. If you fall into that category, you are still better off purchasing Managed Hosting from your dedicated service provider, as they are professionals who will know the difference between default hidden files and corrupted malware.

Also, take note that rootkit programs are sold or downloaded AS IS, so there is never any guarantee of their success.

As a webmaster, you know the importance of a good spam blocking and virus protection program, and maybe you have learned from our dedicated server tutorials how to set con jobs for scheduled tasks, how to protect your system or administer backups, but did you know that there may be things you are unaware of trying to hack your server?

One of these necessary evils of dedicated server hosting is called a rootkit. A rootkit is simply a program usually designed by hackers who attempt to take control of your dedicated server without authorization. They can gain complete access to your system or install themselves as drivers, kernel modules, or other malware. They often go undetected and can seize control of your operating system and obscure the presence of potentially harmful viruses, commands, or Trojans.

Oftentimes, once a rootkit has hidden utility programs in your system, they open a backdoor to your server at any time of the day and can thus be severely harmful to the health of your dedicated server.

If your dedicated web host has a Managed Hosting option, you should look into it, as they often perform rootkit checks to ensure the security of your dedicated server. Remember, a good dedicated web hosting provider doesn’t want your server brought down either and will do everything in their power to keep you a happy customer.