Modwest Blog

Stop SOPA: How could SOPA affect web hosting?

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by Jennifer Stephens

Today is Blackout SOPA day and we're joining in by blacking out the Modwest logo on Facebook and Twitter.

If you haven't heard of SOPA, here's a summary by Wired: Why We've Censored Wired.com.

As the article states, "Under the current wording of the measures, the Attorney General would have the power to order ISPs to block access to foreign-based sites suspected of trafficking in pirated and counterfeit goods; order search engines to delist the sites from their indexes; ban advertising on suspected sites; and block payment services from processing transactions for accused sites. If the same standards were applied to U.S.-based sites, Wikipedia, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Google and Wired could all find themselves blocked."

Read quotes from the bill in Mashable's op-ed piece, "Why SOPA is Dangerous."

If you want to get involved, here are a number of helpful links:

Blackout your own account at Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

Blackout your website.

Sign the petition.

Join the growing list of participating companies.

Contact Congress.

Follow @BlackoutSOPA and use hashtag #BlackoutSOPA.

I like Google's simple statement posted at the top of its petition page: Let's "End Piracy, Not Liberty."

UPDATE: PIPA and SOPA Co-Sponsors Abandon Bill

Jennifer Stephens, MBA is the Customer Engagement Manager at Modwest, a Missoula native and Gonzaga University J-school grad who loves a good latte, music, and social media. She can be contacted at jstephens@modwest.com.

timthumb.php vulnerability

As Modwest hosting supports WordPress installs, we wanted to make you aware of a timthumb.php vulnerability that affects both themes and plug-ins which utilize the timthumb.php script. The vulnerability lies in a coding error that allows would-be attackers to backdoor malicious .php scripts while masquerading them as benign thumbnails.

According to articles I read, the original blog about this issue was posted on August 3, 2011 at ++Zen Blog. Here's an up-to-date list from Sucuri Research Blog (August 17, 2011) of plug-ins and themes being scanned by attackers.

If you utilize these products, mimize the risk of being exploited by acting promptly.

PHP 5.3.6 Now Available at Modwest

We've recently upgraded our standard Modwest Grid hosting environment to Debian 6 enhanced with PHP 5.3.6.

New accounts get the new suite of software by default, and existing customers can upgrade in OnSite.

Just be sure to read about the differences before switching.

Enjoy!

 

Modwest to Attend LinuxFest Northwest April 30th

To our friends, customers, and everyone else in the Pacific Northwest:

Modwest loves Linux and will attend LinuxFest Northwest on April 30th and May 1st in Bellingham Washington.

About the event:

LinuxFest Northwest is an annual event held at Bellingham (WA) Technical College. Linux and open source experts, users and enthusiasts share their experience with a wide variety of free and open source technologies. There is no charge for parking nor for admission to the exhibits and presentations.

If you can make it to the event, please stop by the Modwest table to grab a free sticker and other goodies, and chat with System Engineer Tom and Community Manager Marianne about Linux, PHP, the weather, etc.

Hope to see you there!

Wordpress 3.1 Now Available at Modwest

We just upgraded our Wordpress autoinstaller to the latest and greatest, version 3.1. Over at wordpress.org, they say:

This release features a lightning fast redesigned linking workflow which makes it easy to link to your existing posts and pages, an admin bar so you’re never more than a click away from your most-used dashboard pages, a streamlined writing interface that hides many of the seldom-used panels by default to create a simpler and less intimidating writing experience for new bloggers (visit Screen Options in the top right to get old panels back), and a refreshed blue admin scheme available for selection under your personal options.

There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts, new CMS capabilities like archive pages for custom content types, a new Network Admin, an overhaul of the import and export system, and the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries.

With the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before. The only limit to what you can build is your imagination.

If you've already installed WordPress on the Modwest Grid, log into your admin area and click the link to upgrade. Otherwise, to install WordPress on the Modwest Grid, follow the steps in this article.

Happy blogging!

A Look Back On The Year That Was

Posted by: John Masterson, Modwest co-founder

Another year has passed us by, and the time has come to reflect on the year that was.

First, a quick recap of new features and key events from 2010:

• In January, we celebrated our 10th birthday!
• We introduced our new "use what you need" Yep web hosting plan.
• We rolled out a new application autoinstall feature in OnSite, startiing with WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
• For thorny technical issues, we can now connect to your computer (with your permission) to assist via CoPilot.
• Due to popular demand, you may now contact us via live chat.
• We improved our spam filtering controls.
  
• Because we do web hosting differently, we renamed our system The Modwest Grid.
  
• VPS customers, we doubled your memory.
  
• We developed a coupon system that can give new customers discounts on signup. Keep your eye on Twitter and elsewhere for deals.
  

There were a number of valuable discussions in the Modwest Community in 2010, and the top five community topics were:

• What features do you want added to OnSite?
• What programs do you use to build your website?
• What applications should be available to auto-install on your site?
• What Modwest-branded goods or general giveaways would make good prizes for community contests?
• What browser do you use most often?

Finally, here's a few more stats that somehow illustrate what happened at modwest in 2010:

• number of miles that staff use alternative transporation to get to work: 5,476
• approximate # of web hits received on the grid: 4,700,000,000
• approximate # of spam messages identified: 130,000,000
• number of trouble tickets resolved: 9,255
• number of chat sessions handled since November: 189
• lbs of food donated to food bank: 90
• website uptime: 99.9%
• mail uptime: 100%
• database uptime: 99.99%
• number of pints poured from the kitchen kegerator: unknown
• approximate number of inches of snow that landed on our patio across from Caras Park: 26
• number of customer service phone calls answered = 4321
• number of customers that migrated to our newer hosting environment = 213
• number of people to join Modwest Community = 384

 

We hope your numbers were as good as ours. Happy New Year!

 

Bursts Bursting

Modwest offers Virtual Private Servers (VPS) with "Base" memory and "Burst" memory limits. Or so we thought.

When originally designing our VPS offering, the container software, Virtuozzo, only had UBC, User Bean Counters, for limiting resource usage. Before we deployed, a new, better resource management system, SLM - Service Level Management, burst on to the scene. Not wanting SLM to catch them hanging out with the lame kids, our engineers, grinning grins, hastily tossed UBC to the sharks. SLM was so simple: just one setting for memory limits, split into a soft and hard limit. There was but one catch; Virtuozzo documentation was not explicit about what soft and hard meant. A trifle! Of course, soft and hard equated respectively to base and burst! All was well in the VPS hosting world.

Time passed. One day, not long ago, a customer contacted us about a vanished JVM process. Leaping to action, Modwest Search and Rescue located a log, clearly showing Virtuozzo determining the VPS was exceeding its memory limits. Things had gotten ugly: Virtuozzo had slain the JVM process with authoritarian flair. All the while, mockingly, utilities in the affected VPS, like top and free, danced high-spirited jigs with gigs of free memory. In their lab, our engineers nodded knowingly while consistently prodding Virtuozzo to become homicidal, when it shouldn't. When asked for a remedy, though, the techs stared blankly, bursting with despair. How could Virtuozzo see red, when the customer resided well within their burstable memory limits?

The hardware running Virtuozzo was bursting with memory. ( Go ahead and geek out over a system with 64GB of memory. ) As you can see, the orange is cache, and is readily available memory. So, wouldn't a container be able to use all its burst memory, for as long as needed? No, Virtuozzo lorded the free memory in front of the starving containers, laughing all the while. It "took care of" any that got greedy. We had just used up our last batch of Robin Hood software yesterday, too!

Spelunking for answers, deep in the caves of 'man vzctl', we found a scrawl regarding SLM memory limits:

slmmemorylimit has 2 components: limit on average consumption and every-moment limit.

Coupling this with our experimental data, we mapped "average consumption" to "soft" and "every-moment" to "hard." It was a shame the anonymous author didn't have time to include the time in "average consumption" calculation. Are we talking about two seconds or two infinities, here? Not much of a useful limit when it could be that wildly variable. Certainly something was to be done! We burst into the daylight, ready to decide us some decisions! After much typing, all agreed that a rogue time variable bursting in on our memory limit calculations wasn't a selling point.

Let the news burst forth: Burst memory is no more, and base memory is bursting with at least twice its previous numbers. In other words, VPS customers, we just doubled your memory allocations.

The memory limits changed like this:

Plan	Old Base Memory	New Base Memory
VPS1	0.5GB	1GB
VPS2	0.75GB	2GB
VPS3	1GB	2.5GB

All existing VPSes, and those not yet brought by the stork, will benefit right away from these increased limits. Enjoy!

 

Posted by: Tom, System Engineer

Don't Blacklist Me!

Posted by: John Masterson, Modwest Co-founder

Have you ever sent an email to a friend or colleague, only to find out the message was never received because your provider's mail server was on a "blacklist"? Or, perhaps you received an error message just a few minutes after sending, which cryptically explained that messages from your IP address are not being accepted?

As a defense against unsolicited email (spam) and viruses, most mail server administrators implement some sort of filtering that reject or delay mail from computers that send out lots of junk. These lists of junk-spewing computers are often referred to as "blacklists". There are a lot of reasons that servers can end up on blacklists, like when professional spammers set up servers to send billions of messages from countries with little or no law enforcement resources to deal with internet abuse. Nobody wants the email coming from those servers.

Unfortunately, there are also situations where innocent senders are erroneously labeled as spammers because of one "bad apple".

One way in which Modwest mail servers have found their way onto blacklists from time to time is due to a customer's website being exploited to send spam. This can happen when spammers discover a vulnerability in a popular web application, like WordPress, OSComerce, Joomla, or ZenCart, which allows them to send their junk mail right from the customer's website.

How You Can Help

Exploited sites are a problem for all web hosts and their customers. You can help ensure your site stays safe by promptly applying security updates from your web application vendor (e.g., WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, ZenCart, X-Cart, phpBB3, etc).

Until recently, that scenario would result in the junk being relayed through our central mail system, mail.modwest.com. If enough junk got out before we detected and stopped it, sometimes big email providers like Yahoo, AOL, Gmail and Hotmail would temporarily stop accepting mail from Modwest.

While we could generally convince them to remove the block within a day or two, it was a headache for everyone -- especially the innocent bystanders who just wanted to send mail to their friends and colleagues.

So, this week we're beginning a gradual change that separates mail generated by websites from everything else. Mail generated by websites includes forum reply notifications, ecommerce receipts, and so forth -- as well as junk mail generated by exploited sites.

The benefit of this change is an exploited site will now be much less likely to cause email delay or rejection problems for everyone else. And, you don't need to do anything different with your website or email.

A second, more esoteric change we made this week was in how our domain aliases are handled. A quirk of our system was that some remote mail servers would consider bounce-back messages from invalid addresses at domain aliases to be "backscatter", which they considered evidence of spam. We've solved that problem too.

Finally, we've expanded some of our front-line filtering to reject mail from a few persistent sources of spam.

Combined, these changes should reduce the spam you receive, and help prevent you from being falsely labeled a spammer. Of course, if you are a spammer, you'll be hearing from us. :)

Introducing the Modwest Grid

Posted by: John Masterson, Modwest Co-founder

A few weeks ago, I tried to explain to my brother one of the differences between Modwest and a lot of other hosts. After failing to succinctly describe the advantages of our web hosting system on the phone, I took some time to write it all out. Here's the result:

Many web hosting companies set up standalone servers, each providing all services for the customers on that server. In contrast, Modwest runs a load-balanced cluster of servers to distribute the task of serving web pages and handling email among many servers.

The standalone server philosophy adopted by many of our competitors is pretty simple. It has the benefit of being easy to get started, since you just need one server. You install all the server software to support required internet services clients expect (such as a hosting control panel and the alphabet soup of HTTP, MySQL, POP3, IMAP, DNS, FTP, SSH), and then start selling. In theory, as your customer base grows, you eventually get a second server, a third, and so on.

While it has the advantage of simplicity, one way the single-server approach can get you into trouble is when one or more customers on a server gets a sudden influx of traffic, whether due to a big advertising campaign, a link from a popular site, or just viral word-of-mouth success. Suddenly, the server goes from humming along nicely to an overloaded condition: alarms sound, performance slows to a crawl -- or fails completely -- for all customers using all services on that machine.

We do it a different way.

Google found many years ago that it makes a lot of sense to deploy massive computational power not with huge expensive "enterprise" servers, but by using thousands and thousands of commodity machines. So, when any one server fails, the impact on user experience is generally non-existent. And Google can obviously handle massive amounts of traffic.

While nowhere near Google's scale, we've pursued a similar strategy with the Modwest hosting system. We have a large group of servers responsible for serving the web pages of thousands of our customer sites, we have a separate group of servers responsible for handling their mail services, and multiple MySQL servers that do nothing but database queries for these websites.

We call this "group of groups" the Modwest Grid. 

Is this the same as "cloud hosting"? Not exactly. There is some similarity in that with both Modwest and cloud hosting you have massive computing resources available should your site suddenly need it. But with the cloud, you pay variably based on computing resources actually used. At Modwest, you get it all for one price. Cloud hosting is more similar to the standalone philosophy, except that the standalone server can expand and contract its computing resources (and bill you accordingly) as demand fluctuates.

What does the Modwest Grid mean to you, the site owner?

• If you (or another customer) gets a link on the front page of Digg or Huffington Post or MSNBC, there's a lot more "headroom" at Modwest to accommodate the increased traffic. That's because sudden influxes of web traffic are divided among multiple servers, increasing the work each must do by just a fraction of what a single standalone server would suffer.
• If another customer's script runs out of control and somehow takes a server down, there are plenty of others to pick up the traffic and avoid any interruption in service.
• If a webserver physically fails for some reason, other servers seamlessly pick up the workload.

As this more detailed explanation sunk in, my brother had an "a-ha" moment. Hopefully you too now have a better understanding of the benefits of the Modwest hosting architecture. If you have any questions, feel free to add them as comments below, or contact us.

Customer Profile: The TMR Zoo

One of the most interesting things about being in the web hosting industry is the diversity of businesses and organizations with whom we have the opportunity to interact. As requested in the Modwest Community, we've begun a series of blog posts profiling customers, and this time around, it's The TMR Zoo.

Here's a transcript of our interview with the site owner:

Modwest: What's the purpose of your site?

TMRZoo: Fun.  That is the most important single word.  We want to make the TMR Zoo a fun site for the average guy to visit and kill some time on, but it has also been a great, fun experience for me and my staff and I think that is witnessed in the content we put out.  We have a little bit of everything for any guy... sports, beer, music, TV, movies, video game, hot women... if you can't find at least one thing you are interested in on the site, you're probably not a guy.

Modwest: What makes your site a success?

TMRZoo: Although we are very happy with our site traffic, it is only a small portion of what we consider successful.  The greatest success, to me, is when I receive emails, phone calls or in-person comments saying how much people like the site.  If I need to pick a single moment of "success" it has to be when Howard Stern read one of my articles on the air and was very complimentary of it.  As a fan of Stern for over 20 years, hearing him read my work and mention my name to millions put a smile on my face
that had to be sandblasted off.

Modwest: What sort of software application(s) does your site use?

TMRZoo: We are a Wordpress-based site.  I try to stay within the realm of plugins and widgets that are available through Wordpress since I really don't know code all too well.  The flexibility WP provides has been ideal since I have staff all over the country who can just log in via the web and post articles from anywhere in the world.  Some of our featured contests are custom pages, but they are nowhere close as easy to work... since I am the furthest thing from a programmer.

Modwest: What do you envision is the next step for your website?

TMRZoo: I would LOVE to be able to feature some high-quality exclusive video of events we attend as well as hosting parties or bikini contests, etc. at local venues.  I guess the next step is to transcend our realm from being web-only to a larger spectrum... but everything will be for the purpose of the website, and broadcast on the website.

Modwest: What do you like best about your site?

TMRZoo: My staff and I have done so much and met so many different people that we wouldn't have been able to do if we weren't affiliated with the site.  I have the best group of guys in the world to work with and nothing makes me happier then when they can reap the benefits of our popularity.  We've walked through
famous breweries throughout the country with the head brewmaster via a personal tour, we've interviewed famous musicians from popular bands and since we are considered press, we can attend ad experience events on an entirely different level than the average person. Being invited to parties at the Playboy Mansion several times wasn't bad either. ;)

Modwest: Any suggestions for other website owners?

TMRZoo: You absolutely MUST have fun with what you are doing.  If you consider running your site a chore, then you will most likely not succeed.  The site is not my full-time job... I am a successful architect, I have a wife, two kids, a mortgage...  there is no way the Zoo would still be around if I didn't have a blast doing what I'm doing.  If you are like me, and you laugh out loud when writing articles, you know you are doing something right.  Your audience will most likely be enjoying it as much, or more, than you.  If you are not having fun its pretty likely no one else is either.

Modwest: You've been a Modwest customer since 2008 -- is there anything you'd like to share about your experience hosting with us?

TMRZoo: This is my second web experience with Modwest and I wouldn't even consider any alternatives.  The database set-up process couldn't be easier, whether it be a WordPress or VBulletin install, or a database I create myself for our custom site features.  Every question I have ever posed has been answered almost immediately and the staff has been incredibly helpful.  Customer service is top-notch.

I definitely recommend the WordPress/Modwest combo to experienced users, but in my opinion, it is the only way to go for the newbies.  The start-up process could not be easier.

If you're a Modwest customer and would like to be featured here, please contact our Community Manager.