Author Archives: Andy

WordPress plugin – W3 Total cache vulnerability

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Andy

To make WordPress faster many people install the plugin W3 Total Cache. It has many great features like caching and also support for pushing images to a CDN (content delivery network). There are a few options when choosing the caching … Continue reading →

Posted in Managed Hosting | Leave a comment

AWS – Promote read replica to a standalone RDS instance

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Andy

In order to scale the Amazon database (RDS) you could either reboot the RDS instance to a larger size or create a slave RDS instance called a read replica. Adding more read replicas allowes for offloading of the read-only queries. … Continue reading →

Posted in Amazon Web Services | Leave a comment

AWS Consolidated Billing & Tags

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Andy

Do you have multiple client instances setup in a single Amazon account? How can you break down the costs per customer? AWS now provide a way to break your billing down and show usage per instance, this allows you to … Continue reading →

Posted in Amazon Web Services | Leave a comment

AWS S3 bucket name restrictions and using https (secure)

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Andy

There are some restrictions when naming and accessing S3 objects. Bucket name restrictions In all regions except for the US Standard region a bucket name must comply with the following rules. These result in a DNS compliant bucket name. Bucket … Continue reading →

Posted in Amazon Web Services | Leave a comment

AWS Management Console Improvements (EC2 Tab)

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Andy

Amazon recently made some improvements to the EC2 tab of the AWS Management Console. It is now easier to access the AWS Marketplace and to configure attached storage (EBS volumes and ephemeral storage) for EC2 instances. Storage Configuration You can … Continue reading →

Posted in Managed Hosting | Leave a comment

Google Introduces Compute Engine, Google-Scale Linux Virtualisation

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Andy

Google has announced a new cloud service called Compute Engine, it offers a large scale Linux virtualisation which will be hosted on Google’s own infrastructure. It is currently in “limited Preview” – see it here This will be Google’s attempt … Continue reading →

Posted in Managed Hosting | Leave a comment

Amazon – Installing SSL certificates and Errors

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Andy

Amazon now allows you to manage Listeners, SSL certificates and also the SSL ciphers on an existing Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). These changes can happen via the AWS API or via the AWS web console. You can now add new … Continue reading →

Posted in Amazon Web Services, Development, Managed Hosting | Leave a comment

How To Investigate A Linux Server Compromise

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Andy

Usually the first signs of a server compromise are high processor load. If you have a good monitoring solution in place this should have alerted you. Some common tools that can show the compromised processes running are “top” and “ps”. … Continue reading →

Posted in Managed Hosting | Leave a comment

Amazon – RDS High Disk Usage & Logs

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Andy

Recently we took over support of an Amazon solution. It consisted of some web servers(EC2) and a database server(RDS). When we looked at the RDS disk size using CloudWatch – we saw it was eating up about 5 gigabytes a … Continue reading →

Posted in Managed Hosting | Leave a comment

Varnish – a caching guide

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Andy

Varnish can be found at www.varnish-cache.org “Varnish Cache is an open source, state of the art web application accelerator. You install it on your web server and it makes your website fly.“ – Quote from www.varnish-cache.org. It’s as simple as … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, Managed Hosting | Leave a comment