Dedicated Server Reviews

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.

Day three of Layered Tech's third annual LT PACT started bright and early at 8:30 a.m. (perhaps a little too early considering it's Vegas, according to a few of the attendees) with a keynote by Tier 1 Research's founder Andy Schroepfer, someone we haven't seen as much of at hosting events as of late. But, as always, he was an absolute pleasure to listen to.

Insightful, engaging and well-spoken, Schroepfer's presentation "The $1.2 Billion Dollar Bet Against Hosting" took a look at the state of the declining American economy in general versus rising oil prices and how much of a game changer that has been for the IT industry.

Schroepfer talked about how rising oil prices affected business on the Web and encouraged a digital economy. What this translates to is the more expensive gas gets, the less people will want to go OUT shopping. Thus, they will be more inclined to turn to the Web to spend their money. So businesses need focus on being able to deliver their product or service effectively through the Internet.

The keynote also touched on one of the biggest topics throughout the event, cloud computing. Last year it was all about the grid, this year it's all about the cloud. Schroepfer expects the cloud to become relevant to enterprise very soon - much sooner than James Staten's projected timeline for when cloud computing would be embraced by the enterprise market - and believes it will eventually "kill" the dedicated market because end-users will be demanding a pay per play hosting model.

Other interesting highlights throughout the day included an interactive panel about the business of blogging (moderated by Aaron Phillips, VP of sales and marketing for FastServers and featuring Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, John Pozadzides, CMO for Layered Tech and Lorelle VanFossen, a woman who was blogging about blogging before blogging was called blogging. Say that three times fast!) and The Nutbra. I'm not even kidding. It somehow pertains to intellectual property. But you quite possibly had to be there to believe it.

The event wrapped up with Layered Tech's annual Texas Hold'em Poker Tournament (which, I admittedly did quite poorly on) BUT WHIRtv producer/videographer Matt did the WHIR team some justice by placing in 6th!!

Check out the pics from the event from our Flickr page here.

Thanks to some work started by Ville Skyttä, MySQLTuner is now included in Fedora 9 repositories:

# cat /etc/fedora-release
Fedora release 9 (Sulphur)
# yum info mysqltuner
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, priorities, refresh-packagekit
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* updates: mirrors.usc.edu
* fedora: mirror.unl.edu
* livna: mirrors.tummy.com
Available Packages
Name : mysqltuner
Arch : noarch
Version : 0.9.1
Release : 4
Size : 11 k
Repo : updates
Summary : MySQL high performance tuning script
URL : http://mysqltuner.com/
License : GPLv3+
Description: MySQLTuner is a MySQL high performance tuning script written in perl that will provide you with a snapshot of a MySQL server's health. Based
: on the statistics gathered, specific recommendations will be provided that will increase a MySQL server's efficiency and performance. The
: script gives you automated MySQL tuning that is on the level of what you would receive from a MySQL DBA.

In addition to Ville, I’d like to thank Jason Tibbitts for reviewing and approving the new package.

Need to get a message out in a hurry?  Autoresponders are a great option for this and they are easy to create with your dedicated hosting plan using the Plesk control panel. 

First thing you need to do is to login to your Plesk control panel, and go to the Mail section under Services.  Next locate the existing POP account that you would like to make an autoresponder.  Click on it, and then select the "Autoresponder" menu item.

If you would like to send an attachment with the autoresponce, you will need to upload the file to the attachment repository.  You can do that by going to "Attachement Files" under the Mail autoresponders screen.  Browse for the file you need and then hit the "send file" button on the screen.  After that has been done it will be added to the repository. 

Now go back to the main Mail autoresponder page and click on "Add New Autoresponder" to get going.  You can from there give the autoresponder a name.  This can be anything you’d like and is for reference only. You can also have a copy forwarded to a specific address.   Next you need to setup the rules for the autoresponder.  You can set it to always respond or just when there is or is not specific words in the message body or subject.

Next setup your reply to address if needed, and select your mail sending format to be plain text or HTML.  Under the "Reply" section you can then type in the text you need for your autoresponce.  To make sure you stay within your e-mail limits if needed, you can limit it to only send this message to not more than "X" amount of people.

Now save your settings and your autoresponder should be ready on your dedicated hosting account using the Plesk control panel.

Although Thursday was the first day with actual sessions, it was technically the second day of the event, so don't worry. You didn't miss a re-cap of Day 1 because there really wasn't conferencing, per se, that happened on Day 1. Except for a cocktail party, which you can read about here.

Day 2 kicked off with an opening presentation by LayeredTech's new CEO Jack Finlayson, where he took us though on all the MAJOR changes that have been going on at LayeredTech, like the new additions to the executive team (including himself, of course), the consistent financial growth (he said around five percent growth month-to-month), new offerings to customers through deepened partner relationships, like the recent Hyper-V announcement with Microsoft, and of course, the strategy behind the FastServers.net acquisition and what they brought to the table for LayeredTech's customer-base.

A snapshot of Jack Finlayson, LayeredTech CEO, during his opening presentation.

He also pointed out the new logo and name to the audience. I'm still trying to get a hold of a good image to give you an accurate understanding of what I've been describing. But I'll post one as soon as I get it! I did want to elaborate a bit on my previous description though (a stylized "L" and "T" put together to form a blue square on top of black line layers) by adding that the "black line layers" are supposed to be a stack of servers.

As for why the company decided to make this change now? Jack says it happened particularly because of the FastServers acquisition and wanting to develop a logo that not only embraced what both LayeredTech and FastServers were about, but to portray an image that was more professional and would reflect its dedication to managed hosting, an area of the industry Jack says the company will be moving towards more and more, with a particular interest on the enterprise market. Not to say the company won't continue to be focused on its current customer-base of SMBs, but it seems focusing on managed services for the enterprise market is a theme that has permeated quite a few of the sessions today...

Although I don't usually comment on how entertaining or yawn-worthy a session was, I believe Jack's presentation deserves a bit of attention, simply because it was effectively engaging even though it was at eight in the morning. Jack is a pretty funny man. Like Billy Crystal, dry-humor funny. He also wasn't afraid to poke fun at himself, which is always appreciated as a member of the audience. It was also interesting that he took his presentation to an "analog" level at one point by literally getting out a white board and using a red marker to draw a diagram to support his discussion on the three areas companies try to compete on: technology, quality and support and price. And the fact that he peppered his discussion with amusing little anecdotes along the way made it particularly memorable.

Jack had much more to say on his vision for LayeredTech, which we got in a video interview with him on WHIRtv, so look for that in the coming weeks.

A snapshot of James Staten, Principal Analyst - Forrester Research, during his keynote presentation, "Cloud/Grid Computing: A Classic Disruptive Technology."

I won't get too in depth with the keynote on Cloud Computing as a Disruptive Technology made by James Staten, the analyst from Forrester Research, but I will say he had a LOT of interesting things to say around the idea of cloud computing, why it was a disruptive technology, who was using it and how (since Enterprise IT, the primary market, has been reluctant to embrace it), and where he saw it heading in the next three to five years. We asked him to discuss all this in a WHIRtv interview as well, which we will be bringing you soon.

Day 3 of LT Pact continues tomorrow so stay tuned for more thoughts from the event in the coming days.

In the meantime though, check out some of the pics Candice has been taking at the event. More to come on that front as well!