Guy Scharf

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Everything posted by Guy Scharf

  1. I've been receiving notices that sites I have on servers in Seattle and San Jose are being moved to Los Angeles. If you could, what's the story behind that? Are you consolidating all your west coast services in LAX, or are some staying in Seattle or San Jose? Thanks!
  2. One of my clients is running PrestaShop 1.4.8 without any performance problems.
  3. I've used Better WP Security plugin for more than a year. It does its job, and does it well. It's important to use a security plugin. If you look closely at traffic, attempts to break in are common. More common on some sites than others, for reasons unknown to me. We have regular attempts to crack our "admin" password using a wordlist. Because of a compatibility issue between two plugins, I handle those with the "Limit Logon Attempts" plugin, but Better WP Security will do the same thing. For example, we've had a distributed attack on our admin password today. There have been more than 1,000 guesses so far, originating from a botnet with computers in places like Turkey, Phillipines, Japan, Indonesia, etc. (Geographic comments based on my spot checking some IP addresses. I didn't look them all up.) Since I have the logon limiting plugin set to block the IP after only a few failures, the plugin is blocking their botnet IP by IP. We had a similar attack yesterday, beginning around 7 am and fading away in a few hours. It started earlier today and lasted longer, but faded out by afternoon. Although the attack today lasted longer, it was just as ineffectual. Better WP Security does a good job of guiding you through ways to protect your WordPress site. I use it on each of the three WordPress sites I manage.
  4. URL is https://support.hawk...ost.com/. The menu bar below that says Home ...., below that is a tab that says "Account". Should be logon fields there. If not, try the logout button at the bottom of the Account tab and see if that gives you user and password fields. I think HawkHost was trying to integrate the account and help logons; perhaps there's a glitch. If none of this helps, you might try submitting a support ticket about not being able to see your support tickets.
  5. You need to logon to the help desk page, in the upper left corner. Then you see the options to view existing tickets.
  6. I recommend you submit a support ticket. HawkHost staff seem to respond more quickly to a ticket than to a forum posting.
  7. How about a discussion of the pros and cons of unlimited hosting (FrogHost) vs the HawkHost style, addressed to potential customers. What advantages, limitations, SLA, support differences can the buyer expect?
  8. I've looked at the 100% peaks on our sites. What I've found is they are often associated with a search engine crawling the site and making hundreds of requests very quickly. I've resolved this, and reduced the number of times I see 100% usage on the graph, by specifying a crawl rate in robots.txt: User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 2 I've also banned crawl engines that don't honor crawl-delay using robots.txt and/or .htaccess.
  9. It appears that when .htaccess denies access to an IP, the request is not logged in the raw access logs for the account. Is that correct? Is there any way to find out how many requests are being blocked by .htaccess? While I no longer see the requests I was trying to block in the logs, I don't really know how many are being blocked, and am curious. (I've just implemented stronger blocking in response to a botnet password guessing attack on a WordPress site, and am looking for any statistics on what it is doing.) Thanks!
  10. Looks like your "semi-dedicated" service can be seen as beefed up shared hosting, with increased limits on how much you can do, better backups, fewer accounts per server. Is any software and licensing supplied with shared hosting also included with semi-dedicated? I presume you still couldn't run services etc. on the service that previously required VPS? All in all, though, it looks like a very nice offering for anyone beginning to outgrow shared hosting. I have no need for this level of service now, but it is very nice to have a growth path that doesn't require VPS with its greater management tasks and software costs. I'll be interested in seeing how the flashcache works in practice. Yours is a different approach than Arvixe uses with their new servers--they are putting MySQL data on a RAID array of SSDs.
  11. It really depends on what the OP wants to accomplish. With a 301 redirect, the user doesn't have to type the subdirectory for the initial entry point, but all URLs do include the subdirectory. With the technique described in the WordPress codex, WordPress remains installed in its subdirectory but the subdirectory is invisible to the user and never shows up in any URLs. Two files have to be copied from the WordPress subdirectory to the root directory, and a config file edited lightly, to implement the codex approach. The OP said he was "new to the whole webpage designing thing," so my guess is that he wants the cleanest looking solution. I think that's the codex approach as it completely hides the subdirectory from users. It's the OP's call as to which approach works better for his website.
  12. Yes, WordPress supports being installed in a subdirectory but looking like being in the main directory. I do that regularly on my WordPress sites. (redirects are not required.) Full instructions are in the WordPress codex: http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory. See the section "Using a pre-existing subdirectory install" for your situation where WordPress is already installed in its own directory.
  13. I was thinking more of access via a browser. Sure, access to cpanel hosting account gives access to everything.
  14. I have an add-on domain for another domain name. Originally, both the primary and secondary domains pointed to the same data. I am slowly teasing apart the contents of the two domains to make them completely separate (mail is still combined and will probably remain combined). By default, cpanel suggests public_html/secondary.com as the document root when creating addon domain secondary.com. This means that the root directory is a subdomain of the primary domain, and anyone with access to the primary domain has access to the secondary domain as well. And I think it means that search engine indexing of the two domains is not completely separate. Am I correct in understanding that: If I set the add-on document root to /secondary, then somone accessing the primary domain cannot access files in the add-on domain? secondary.com would resolve to /home/hostingaccount/secondary so anyone with access to the add-on domain would not have access to the primary? I could put a robots.txt file in /secondary and it would control search engine indexing of the secondary domain without any reference to the primary? Similarly, indexing of the primary would not include anything of the secondary? My goal is to have the add-on domain be separate and distinct from the primary (except as I might include explicit html links). (Use of both primary and add-on domains is minimal so account resource limits are not an issue.) Is changing the document root the best way to do this? What other pros and cons are there to placing the add-on domain in a directory of its own instead of a subdirectory of public_html? Thanks!
  15. I have been very successful with one domain and not at all with another in getting high ranking in Google. In the case of the successful domain, the relevant search phrases were both unique and organically included in the page text. If search for with the name of the city (which would be most likely), there is essentially no similar sites so we end up at the top. I set that domain up almost two years ago. I think I was finding it in Google searches within a day or two of opening the site to robots. I did submit a sitemap through Google webmaster tools. At least three-quarters of our accesses come via search engines and perhaps one-quarter by direct links. Using the same strategies, I've not been so successful with another site, probably because there are a lot of competing sites with similar descriptions (a rental cottage in a tourist destination). While I have some search terms that will force the site to pop up, they're not ones that the target market is likely to use, so they serve no useful purpose. For the longest time (months), I couldn't get the site to show up in a Google search based on likely searches at all. Direct results in Google searches have improved only a little bit in three months. For this site, the key to traffic (and resulting rentals) that worked was being listed in a local vacation rental referral listing. In both cases, the site was blocked with robots.txt while it was being built and only released to search engines when it was done, or nearly done. Both sites are WordPress sites (the first has a blog, the second does not). You might be interested in http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
  16. I agree completely with all the points that Fowler raised. I just selected Hawk Host as a web hosting provider and moved two accounts here less than a week ago. Selecting a web host is hard, given the myriad of choices and lack of objective evaluations. One of my major criteria in support, and that is very hard to evaluate before the fact. So I look for hosting providers that have a forum. No forum, and I will avoid the provider. I look at the tone of the messages, speed of responses, participation of the provider, and and whether there is peer support. (I do try the ticketing system for pre-sales questions, but can't count on sales support translating to technical support later.) By those standards, I consider the HH forum to be lackluster. The forum could be so very much more useful to the community. One of the things I value about an active forum is that it contains a wealth of information from which I can get answers to questions without having to ask them again. Being responsive is key. I've learned that each provider staffs the support channels differently. HH seems to put its focus on the ticketing system, with less emphasis on other channels. I'm just getting used to that.