Apache is the service, which makes your website available online for the world to see. So, while modifying the Apache’s configuration is not advisable at all if you don’t know what you are doing, you can still enhance its performance with a few simple tweaks.

Apache Optimization
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Apache can be a big memory user. Apache runs a number of ’servers’ and shares incoming requests among them. The memory used by each server grows, especially when the web page being returned by that server includes PHP or Perl that needs to load in new libraries. It is common for each server process to use as much as 10% of the server’s memory.

To reduce the number of the servers, you can edit your httpd.conf file. There are three settings to tweak: StartServers, MinSpareServers, and MaxSpareServers. Each can be reduced to a value of 1 or 2 and your server will still respond promptly, even on the quite busy sites. Here, the ‘prefork’ values are the ones that must be changed.

All Apache settings are stored in the httpd.conf file, which is located at /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf/

The optimal Apache configuration should look like this:

1. KeepAlive On
2. MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
3. KeepAliveTimeout 1
4. MinSpareServers 5
5. MaxSpareServers 10
6. StartServers 5
7. MaxClients 150
8. MaxRequestsPerChild 1000

Restarting MySQL & Apache

Once you have performed the required operations, you will have to restart the Apache service.You can do this via the command line

Restart Apache: /etc/init.d/httpd restart

We are glad to announce that our newest Premier dedicated server is now available to everybody. The Premier Server is by far the most powerful machine offered by Hosting Boost.

This Intel Xeon L3427 powered Quad Core unit boasts a Turbo boost technology, which makes its real clock speed 3.2 GHz. The CPU also features a Hyper Trading technology. Its total disk space is 4 TB, divided between 4 separate Western Digital hard drives. There are 4 GB of dual channel DDR3 RAM memory – a solid guarantee that all operations on the server will run smoothly.

More details about our premier dedicated server can be read from here.

Additionally, our Semi-Dedicated Servers are now available at reduced prices!

The Semi-dedicated 1 server package will now cost AUD $100 per month and the Semi-dedicated 2 server plan will cost you AUD $130 per month.

We are glad to inform you that today we added a new TLD extension to our ever expanding list of available domain names. All our visitors from Sweden can now easily register a domain name with the .SE extension!

There is just one thing that needs to be known about the .SE TLD – each domain name will be deleted within 60 days after the expiration date. There are no Redemption Periods. However, once a domain name is deleted, it will be available for public registration once again on a first come, first served basis.

.SE domain names can be registered for a period of one year. There are no limitations as far as the WHOIS information is concerned – this means that they can be registered by anyone in the world.

And don’t forget – a domain ending in .SE will achieve a much higher search engine ranking when it comes to regional searches. So, if you have a business in Sweden already, or plan to expand, get your .SE domain name today to get a better ranking.

Hosting Boost Team

When you are building your own website, sooner or later you run into the question – how to handle duplicate content? What do I mean by that? Imagine that you have a highly visited web page, which receives most of the daily visits. You are planning to re-design the website, and give this web page a new URL and a fresh new look, but don’t want to lose all that traffic from that old page. And you can’t keep both of them online, since they will have most likely the same content text-wise – something, which is often penalized by search engines. How do you proceed from there?

The best practice is to do a 301 redirect. The 301 message on the Internet is handled by the search engine as: moved permanently. Here is how you can make a 301 redirect for your web page:

With PHP:

The code needs to be placed in the Header section of the website, so that the search engine can read it first.

Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );

With .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old\.php$ http://www.domain.com/new.php [R=permanent,L]

The code above will direct all the traffic from the old.php to the new.php page.

With the rel=”canonical” directive:

If you run an online store and want to sell a custom made handbag, which is available in several colors, and decide to dedicate a separate page on your site for each color, then you have about 3 or 4 identical pages. You can use the rel=”canonical” element to direct all traffic to the page with the most popular color. To do that, you need to add the following line of code:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/my-prefer-handbag.html" />

inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs:

This will lead a search engine to point all the traffic from the similar pages to the page you have specified.

And if you don’t like to meddle with code, or with new file creation, or anything like that, you can use the handy URL Redirection Manager available with all our shared web hosting plans, where a simple web interface will allow you to choose which pages to be redirected and what redirection code to be used.

In the beginning of December, Google released a new user agent, the Googlebot-News. Just like the regular Googlebot, this bot will crawl your website for any news, which will later be indexed in Google News. This can give additional edge to people who are running their own news-oriented sites and want to get better Google rankings.

With this new addition, you can now choose which sections of your site will be crawled by the news bot and which can be crawled by the regular Googlebot with the help of the robots.txt file.

Here is how you can manage both the regular Google bot and the Google news bot:

The following allow for all pages to be crawled by both the news and the general Googlebot

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

If you wish to prevent the Google news bot from visiting your site, but you wish to allow visits from the general bot, you can use the following lines:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /

If you change the place of the Googlebot-News and the Googlebot in the last setup, you will allow the Googlebot-News to crawl your website and forbid the Googlebot to do so.

You can also disallow certain folders of your website for both bots:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /news

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /archives

This way, the news bot will not visit the /archives folder, and the Googlebot will not visit the /latest_news folder.

Dear our valued customers,

We are glad to inform you that Spamhaus has removed us from their blacklist and all email problems related to this issue have been resolved.

Last week, some of our mail servers are blacklisted at Spamhaus. As a result some of the messages sent by our customers are not delivered to the recipient(s). We have been working hard on improvements to our mailing system to resolve the problems addressed by Spamhaus. We have made a few modifications to get our mail servers to be delisted. We believe that there will be no further problems with outgoing email.

Regards

Hosting Boost Team

If you got any suggestion, please feel free to drop it.

Author: Hosting Boost, web hosting company, offers you the reliable hosting service for your both personal and business websites. Competitive hosting prices are available. If you got sales enquiry, please feel free to contact us at sales@hostingboost.com.au

One of the first rules in every marketing strategy is targeting – we have a product, it’s time to decide who will need it. It’s the same with websites – if you have a website, you should know what type of people will be interested in visiting it.

This is why, if you have a website, which is targeted at a specific country and if you wish to be ranked higher in the search engines, one of your best solutions is a country specific domain. For a search engine it will be much easier to understand that your site is targeted mainly at Australians if you have a .AU domain name, for example. Sub-domains, such as au.my-domain.com, will not be ranked as high as real TLDs. This is especially the case with search engines, which have different versions for different regions of the world, such as Google or Bing.

How come country specific domains are ranked higher? Well, when a user enters a search engine, the page will detect the user's IP address, and if possible, will serve the regional version of the search engine or primarily, with results from the same region.

Hosting Boost web hosting company is currently offering competitive price for .au domain name registration at A$19.70/year.

Wordpress announced yesterday that they are releasing WordPress  2.9.1.  This release addresses a handful of minor issues as well as a rather annoying problem where scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly due to incompatibilities with some hosts.  So give 2.9.1 a try.  Download 2.9.1 or upgrade automatically from the Tools -> Upgrade menu in your blog’s admin area.

WordPress is the leading Content Management System (CMS) for blogs in existence today, with more than 8.000.000 blogs using it. And this makes it a good target for any kinds of attack – more users mean more targets in the eyes of website attackers. However, a lot of websites and users mean also a lot of ways to defend your website – WordPress would have never gotten so popular if it was unsecure and unsafe to use. For those who miss to read the post about how to secure your Joomla website.

1. Upgrade to the latest version.

The first and most important rule with a CMS script is to always use the most current version available out there. A lot of times, a simple update will save you tons of trouble. With WordPress, you will be constantly reminded if a new version is out there via a notification on the top of the Admin section. If you see that a new version is available, the time for updates is now. And always remember to back up your data before an update – this means not only your web files, but also your database where all of your posts are kept.

2. Remove the basic reference

Sometimes, you might leave the wordpress link in the footer to let everyone know which blogging platform you use. Now it is a bullseye for hackers looking for new targets. Your users don't need to know you use wordpress, remove this reference for hackers. Wordpress adds the version info into the meta tag which can be found within head tag. So please do remove the following line from header.php. This is even more dangerous since it tells the hackers exactly which exploits will open your site wide open.

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /> <!-– leave this for stats please -->

3. Secure your wp-admin folder

Secure your /wp-admin/ directory. Adding a simple .htaccess file will do the trick – you can restrict the access and allow only your personal computer to log in, or make the /wp-admin page password protected. Both steps take a total of 5 minutes and add an additional level of security.

Here's the sample code how you can lock down /wp-admin/ folder with .htaccess file so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory. You can place it directly at /wp-admin/.htaccess . This is what it looks like:

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Access Control”
AuthType Basic
order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist office IP address
allow from 12.13.14.15
# whitelist home IP address
allow from 12.13.14.16

This file says that the IP address 12.13.14.15 and 12.13.14.16 are allowed to access /wp-admin/, but all other IP addresses are denied access.

4. Choose secure password

When starting your quest for securing your WordPress installation, the first task is to choose secure passwords – check how many users will have administrator rights for your WordPress installation and make sure that all of them are using secure passwords. For a password to be completely secure, it must be composed of not just words, no matter how complicated, but also of numbers, special characters and combinations of upper-case and lower-case letters.

Also, change your admin username – by default, the administrator account for each WordPress installation is simply named “admin” and most people never bother to change it.

5. Update your plugins

Another tip is to update your plugins – an old version of a plugin with known exploits can get you in a lot of trouble. Most of the plugins will notify you if a new version is available, so that you can act quickly. And always be careful with the plugins you use – double check user comments and reviews concerning problems before installing a given plugin.

6. Update your file permissions

Be sure that you are the only one allowed to both modify and execute them. All file permissions should be set to 644 and all folder permissions – to 755. You can do that via the File Manager tool we provide you with. However, some plugins require specific files to have 777 permissions set – read carefully the given plugin’s readme file before installing it.

If you got any additional tips, please feel free to share with us.

Author: Hosting Boost, Australia web hosting company, offers you the reliable hosting service for your both personal and business websites. Competitive hosting prices are available. If you got sales enquiry, please feel free to contact us at sales@hostingboost.com.au