By Fritz Stauffacher
Eventually a growing business will find that a shared hosting plan or virtual server environment is no longer a viable option. Making the move to a dedicated server can be a daunting task. Many businesses purchase an unmanaged dedicated server, hire a developer, and have a site created. Once the site is created they often forget about the server altogether; that is, until the server goes down. Often times these servers are the targets of exploits capitalizing on unpatched updates or botnets targeting servers that do not have a good firewall policy or update policy in place.
Hivelocity’s fully managed cPanel server services are designed to help business meet three primary goals;
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- Security
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- Uptime
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- Performance
Security is our primary concern as a breach on the server can lead to catastrophe. We address this issue on several levels.
All of our managed dedicated servers are deployed with a software firewall designed to detect brute force attacks and many other common attack vectors. Brute force attacks are the most common attack we see. Brute force attacks usually involve several servers working together to guess user name and passwords to various services. The end result is usually the stealing of customer data, spam, and the uploading of malicious data to your application in order to infect end users. Any one of these scenarios can be a nightmare to deal with.
Additionally we schedule daily updates of the system and kernel on all managed servers. Updates are important to protect against recently patched vulnerabilities in common applications. The only thing we cannot automatically update is PHP and Apache. These services are not updated because it can easily break the functionality of your web application. Managed cPanel server customers will have to schedule this with our support team when they are ready.
The third layer of security is Mod Security. Mod Security actively examines web traffic and determines if it’s an attempting to exploit your web application or legitimate traffic. While this will not stop attacks on a badly coded web applications or zero day exploits it is very helpful in preventing well known attacks.
All managed cPanel servers are monitored via SNMP. SNMP allows our team to take action within minutes of an issue occurring. Our admins are constantly monitoring the following
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- Server load
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- Apach Status
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- SMTP
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- Memory Usage
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- Raid Status
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- Mysql
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- Disk Usage
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- CPU Usage
….and much more. Many times our team can detect and fix the problem before the customer is even aware. Additionally we log the historical resource usage of a server which allows us to quickly diagnose any ongoing issues with a server.
Server performance can be a difficult issue to trouble shoot. There are several variables involved which can often to be very costly to fix via 3rd party . Application performance is usually tied down to Http, PHP, or Mysql settings. Our experienced team of admins is able to quickly pin point where the bottle neck is and adjust configurations based on the unique requirement of your application.
Any cPanel dedicated server can be enhanced with our fully proactive managed services for just $49/month. The cost of adding cPanel to any of our dedicated servers is a tiered plan starting at $60/mo. cPanel itself offers many great features and benefits even without the addition of our managed services. However, if you are looking to lighten your load for just $49 our managed cPanel servers is a no-brainer. Because we are a fast update partner with cPanel our installs our the fastest around. So open a live chat now and ask one of our Account Managers if a cPanel dedicated server or a fully managed cPanel dedicated server is right for you.
