Business is good so we’re hiring again! This on-site, part-time developer position could easily grow to be a full-time gig for the right person. See the details here:
The most secure shared hosting – Brownrice!
Until recently our shared hosting servers suffered from some of the same vulnerabilities that many of the volume-based hosting providers do. Namely, if one site on a shared server was hacked it was possible for the hacker to deface other sites on the same server that had files or directories with loose permissions. I.e. 777 permissions.
Yep, even if you diligently keep your site and code up-to-date your site could still be hacked because someone else’s site on the same server was hacked.
Ugly, eh?
Read about this nastiness in action at Network Solutions, Bluehost, Dreamhost, and GoDaddy here: Continue reading The most secure shared hosting – Brownrice!
Eight-core server for $168 per month
We’ve got a dual cpu, quad-core server available on our racks right now that could be yours for $168.00 per month. Yep, that’s 8 CPU’s and 4GB of RAM powering 1 Terabyte of drive space in a 3ware RAID 5 array. This is a great deal.
The keys could be yours today if you’ve got the game to tame this beast.
And if you don’t have the game we can manage it for you starting at $99 per month.
No contract required, just a credit card.
Questions? Contact us directly: info@brownrice.com or 575-758-4175
~ Oban
Brownrice hosting and programming in the news
A brief history of Brownrice Internet from our local newspaper, here: Brownrice Internet: Connecting Taos to the World
Web site security for the common web site owner
As a small hosting, systems administration, and programing company we’re on the front lines of Internet security. In the old days (oh, say pre 2003) our security focus was on upgrading and protecting the server’s operating system. Hackers would probe servers, find vulnerable applications (Apache, portmap, sendmail, etc.) and compromise the machine in the hopes of gaining root access.
Not any more. Hackers could care less about the OS. They attack web sites since a compromised web site provides them nearly everything they need; the ability to send spam, find user data, and attack other computers. And hackers tend to reach for the low hanging fruit – web sites that run out-of-date open source software such as Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal (among a host of others.)
Continue reading Web site security for the common web site owner
Easy, big-time scalable web hosting: Clustered hosting
What is Clustered Hosting you say? It’s the top-of-the-line shared hosting service that we provide to clients that need high scalability (i.e. those with high traffic sites that a dedicated server might not be able to handle) but who don’t have the budget or technical experience to set up their own scalable server solution.
In a normal, shared hosting scenario ($8.95 per month), we place up to 200 web sites on a single server. Though this may seem like a lot of sites on one server it’s actually far fewer than large, volume-based providers typically place on a theirs. With Clustered Hosting ($99 per month) we currently have seven servers that host ten web sites. Yep, that’s less than 1.5 web sites for each server.
Continue reading Easy, big-time scalable web hosting: Clustered hosting
What the heck does Brownrice do?
My Mom has a vague idea. So does my wife. My kids think we fix computers, eat candy, and watch the fish tank – none of which I can deny. Our clients usually know some of what we do, if we do it for them. With the exception of myself, my staff, and a very small sub-set of our clients who utilize all of our services no one knows what the heck we do. So here goes:
Change default character encoding for PHP files on Centos
Geek alert! Only read this post if you are massively geek/developer oriented!
A client emailed in this weekend to find out why their recently imported database data was displaying weird symbos for any place of their sites “higher level” characters. We’ve done a lot of character encoding work for our biggest client and feel we know our stuff in this realm. As such we prefer to set up our Apache web servers, and PHP installs, to use the UTF-8 character set. After a little research by us, and the customer, it turned out that their database data was encoded in iso-8859-1 so symbols like á would look like this: ®
Like usual, we instructed the client to insert the directive below into an .htaccess file:
AddCharset ISO-8859-1 .php
But it didn’t work.
After testing on a couple of different servers it turned out that PHP, and only PHP (not Apache), controls encoding on PHP files. This seems like a no-brainer in retrospect, but it had Dave and I confused for a bit. At any rate, this is what one does to override the character set in an .htacccess file for PHP files:
php_value default_charset ISO-8859-1
We’ve added this to our support FAQ for future reference as well.
How to (un)successfully advertise on the Internet, Part 2
This is Part 2 in bi-weekly series by Oban Lambie. Part I is here.
The Product
I wish I could tap into some super-entrepreneurial mental database to come up with exotic new products and services, but I can’t. Sometimes, however, one falls flies right into the window (that would be a “bluebird” customer), He even told us exactly how to build the product.
I love customers like this.
This nameless customer said, “I prefer to shake hands with the people I do business with.” (What?!? How un-Web 2.0! Where do handshakes fit into online social networking?!?)
He’d spent the previous year paying a large company to host his network of web cams. They were slow to respond to his requests, when they responded at all. Their video players where choppy and they plastered their own logos all over the web cam players. The final straw came when our customer asked that his own logo be used instead and they refused.
Could we fulfill his requests and host his network of web cams?
Continue reading How to (un)successfully advertise on the Internet, Part 2
Keep those pesky SSH attacks at bay
If you’ve been playing in your virtual server you might notice this type of entry in /var/log/messages
Feb 11 12:21:10 load1 sshd(pam_unix)[397]: authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=mail.kwpskt.edu.hk user=root
Feb 11 12:21:10 load1 sshd(pam_unix)[398]: authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=mail.kwpskt.edu.hk user=root
Feb 11 12:21:11 load1 sshd(pam_unix)[402]: authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=mail.kwpskt.edu.hk user=root
Feb 11 12:21:11 load1 sshd(pam_unix)[404]: authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=mail.kwpskt.edu.hk user=root
Feb 11 12:21:12 load1 sshd(pam_unix)[406]: authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=mail.kwpskt.edu.hk user=root
Feb 11 12:21:13 load1 sshd(pam_unix)[412]: authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=mail.kwpskt.edu.hk user=root
Those lines are bad guys trying to get into your machine via brute force dictionary attacks.
If you maintain good passwords there’s little to worry about here. However, if like me these things annoy you there are a variety of ways to get rid of them.