Category: Hosting

Adding a cron jobs

To add a cron job login to your hosting panel using the “admin“.

user > (youruser) > login as > cron

You will need to set the minute, hour, day, month, and day of week.

  • min (0 – 59)
  • hour (0 – 23)
  • day of month (1 – 31)
  • month (1 – 12)
  • day of week (0 – 6) (where 0 is Sunday and 6 is Saturday)

Example Time:

Every minute = * * * * *
Every hour at 15 minute = 15 * * * *
Every day at 11:15pm = 15 23 * * *
Every 4 hours at 5 minute = 5 */4 * * *
Every 15th of the month = 0 0 15 * *
Every Sunday of the week = 0 0 * * 0

The full path of your app should be
/home/your_username/web/your_domain.com/public_html/

Example command:
php /home/your_username/web/domain.com/public_html/cron.php

Suspended and Cancelled Servers

Here are possible reasons why your servers are suspended and cancelled:

  1. Delinquent or Unpaid balance
  2. DDoS
  3. Overloading server due to very high resource usage (CPU/Disk IO)
  4. Violation of terms
  5. You have initiated the server destroy.

Suspended servers are just server on offline mode. Once the issues or unpaid balance has been resolved we will put your server back online.

Cancelled servers are destroyed servers. We give 5 days grace period for unpaid balances before we initiate the destroy. Once the server has been destroyed it will be provisioned for others to use.

The offsite backups will also be destroyed.

We will not be able to restore your site with a new server. You will need to start from scratch.

Important:

You can get our FTP Repo services to store your backup files in case you are out of budget and wanted to cancel your server.

You can get the FTP Repo service from the client dashboard under “Other Services”. Once you have the FTP Repo you can submit a ticket to transfer your backups.

Hosted Email Solutions for Your Mailboxes

Although you can host your emails on your server, we recommend hosted email solutions such as google apps, zoho mail (free plan available) or other email service providers.

Benefits of using hosted email solutions:

  1. Reduce server load
  2. Better anti-spam system
  3. Better deliverability rate (IP reputation)
  4. More robust features
  5. Better and user-friendly interface design
  6. Lessen security risk due to email viruses 

Here are some Hosted Email service providers:

  • Zoho – http://www.zoho.com/mail/
  • Google Apps – http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/

 

Use Cloud Base SMTP Service for Transactional Emails

Although you can use your server to send transactional emails such as notifications, password reset and others, we recommend using cloud base SMTP service providers.

Cloud Base SMTP Service advantage:
– send millions of emails
– faster email delivery
– higher deliverability rate
– IP reputation
– Domain reputation
– lessen the chance of being blocked by email providers

Some reasons why Email providers may block your mail:

  • IP reputation
  • Spammy messages
  • Domain reputation
  • Incorrect SPF or missing DKIM
  • You have been marked as spam by recipient or by anti-spam organizations

We recommend using our SMTP Services.

Cazaratech SMTP Services

Use Cases:

– Transactional emails like welcome messages, email verification, password reset, purchase confirmation, invoices and other emails that is sent by your site.
– Your own Newsletter system.

Advantages of using SMTP services:

  1. High delivery rate
  2. Fast email delivery
  3. Higher rate limiting
  4. Reduce server load
  5. Prevent your server ip from blacklisting
  6. Prevent your server from being abused by spammers
  7. Prevent your email from blacklisting
  8. Predictable Pricing

Features:

  1. Real time stats
  2. Email logs
  3. Monthly reports
  4. Spam Filtering
  5. Hourly send rate limit
  6. SSL / TLS
  7. Daily bounce limit
  8. Overage Protection

Adding the SMTP Service

1. You can add SMTP service from the client dashboard under
Manage Services > Add Service > SMTP Services
2. Add your Sending Domains
Manage Mail > SMTP Accounts > Sending Domains
3. Add the DNS records
Manage Mail > SMTP Accounts
4. Add SMTP Users
Manage Mail > SMTP Accounts >Manage SMTP Users

Some Reasons Why Site or Server Goes Down

Sometimes you may notice that your site crashes at a specific time or day.

You can follow the steps here to try to resolve the issues.

These are some reasons which causes the issue.

1. Search engine bots
– These bots can crash your server due to too many simultaneous connections to your site. The good news is that it means your site is getting high traffic that’s why search engine bots are crawling it.

Here’s what you can do and all of these are optional as the crawling may only take a few days to go back into a normal crawl rate:
a. You can lower down the crawl rate on google or bing webmaster tools.
b. Lessen the links on your homepage.

2. Spam bots
– This is a common cause of intermittent down time. You should use some of the anti-spam features (eg. akismet, recaptcha, cloudflare).

3. Real User Traffic Spike
– Your site has too many concurrent users on at a specific time than the average traffic that your server can handle. You can upgrade your server if you want users to stay happy any time of the day even during traffic spikes.

4. Your site is under DOS / DDOS attack
– This is a common problem of most big sites. A Denial-of-service attack (DoS) or Distributed Denial-of-service attack (DDoS) is an attempt to make your server or network unavailable or unreachable to your users. This is done by hackers or competitors.

5. Heavy addons
– Some addons use a lot of server resources. You should contact the addon developer on how to optimize the plugin.

6. Firewall Block
– You are triggering a firewall rule which is causing your IP to be blocked by the server. Usually this is multiple failed login attempts. Or you triggered a modsec rule when you try to copy/paste a text/content from your text editor which includes so much HTML codes or some PHP codes. The firewall will block you as it will suspect a hack attempt.

7. Very long process of function/feature or cron jobs
– Your site executes a very long process. Some plugins causes a very long process or you executed a command/feature in your site that takes too long. This can also be bulk process like sending too many newsletter, invites or some cron jobs.

Optimizing Your Social Network Site for Better Performance

The default installation of the PHPFox script is optimized to work on most servers or hosting. However, there are still other configurations to make performance better.

Here are some articles for site optimization:

  1. Pretty URLs or Short URLs
  2. Turning off Log Site Activity
  3. Caching feed and other settings/content
  4. Limiting your custom profile feeds
  5. Disable unused modules
  6. Don’t install plugins you don’t need
  7. Limit the use of 3rd party widgets

SSL Certificate

Secure your website data with SSL certificates.

We offer two options.

  1. Free SSL
  2. Commercial SSL

Free SSL

Login to Hosting Panel using “admin” user:

http://your_server_ip:8083

user > (web/ftp user) > login as (webuser) > web > yourdomain.com > edit

Check “SSL Support”

Click “Lets Encrypt Support”

Then hit “Save” button.

Commercial SSL

1. Certificate Signing Request (CSR)

Before you can generate an SSL certificate you will need the CSR from the server.

You can generate the CSR in your WHM or Web Panel or you can request to us by submitting a ticket.

Login to Hosting Panel using “admin” user:

http://your_server_ip:8083

user > webuser > login as webuser > web > yourdomain.com > edit

Check “SSL Support”

Click “Generate CSR”

Important:
Please save the CSR and SSL Key in your computer. The key is needed when installing the SSL certificate.

If you wish for us to do it for your please submit the following info:

  • Country Name (2 letter code):
  • State or Province Name (full name):
  • Locality Name (eg, city):
  • Organization Name (eg, company):
  • Organizational Unit Name (eg, section):
  • Email Address :
  • Domain:

2. SSL certificate

Once you have the CSR you will be able to generate the SSL from your SSL provider/reseller or certificate authority.

To install your SSL certificate in your web panel:

user > webuser > login as websuer > web > yourdomain.com > edit

Check “SSL support” and fill up the required fields (SSL certificate, SSL Key, SSL bundle)

You can also purchase the SSL certificate from us.

Make sure you have enough credits/funds if you wish to purchase the SSL certificate from us. It will be deducted from your account.

To purchase SSL certificate from us please go to your account dashboard and select from “Other Services”.

After purchase please submit a ticket with the following info:

  • SSL Product (eg. PositiveSSL):
  • Company Name:
  • Phone Number:
  • Address:
  • City:
  • State/Province:
  • Zip/Postal Code:
  • Country:
  • Approver Email (preferred emails are “[email protected]”, “[email protected]”):

NOTE: Usually the certificate authority requires “[email protected]” for the Approver email. You will need to have access to this email.

3. Verification from your approver email.

You will receive a verification/confimation from the certificate authority to your approver email.

After you have verified/confirm the approver email, the SSL certificate package file will be sent to your email.

Getting Started

These steps will guide you how to create a server and setup your site with us.

  1. Domain Registration.
  2. Create a Server.
  3. Set your nameservers or DNS “A” record.
  4. Add a site in the server
  5. Add a database.
  6. Upload your files via FTP.
  7. Run the web installer.

1. Domain Registration

If you don’t have a domain yet you need to register one through a domain registrar.

2. Create a Server

To setup your site you will need a hosting space or server.

Go to your account and create a server.

dashboard > create a server

Important: You will receive an email notification when your server completed the build process. You will also receive the server details.

3. Set your nameservers or DNS “A” record.

After your server has been created you will need to set your nameservers or point your DNS “A” record to the server IP.

Option 1: Using our Manage DNS

– Login in your account and go to “Manage DNS” then add a zone/domain.

– Once the nameservers are ready, you will need to change the assigned nameservers from your domain registrar to the nameservers provided in “Manage DNS”.

eg. ns1.yourdomain.com, ns2.yourdomain.com

Note: Once you make changes in your domain, it usually take up to 72 hours to fully propagate. Usually it takes only within 24 hours depending on your domain registrar.

Option 2: Using your own DNS / Cloudflare or your domain registrar.

Add an “A” record

Type: A
Name: yourdomain.com
Value: your_server_ip_address
TTL: 1800

Note:
For TTL you can set it as low as 300 for faster propagation then later change it to 7200 or higher. You may also want to add a CNAME or A record for “www”.

4. Add a site in the server.

By default the primary domain has been automatically added when you created the server.

Our system creates automatically two users for your server.

  1. admin – You use this user to manage the server. Be careful when using this user because it has superuser privilege. You should not disclose the admin password but only to trusted people.
  2. webuser or regular user – (eg. “myusername”) You use this user to manage your site, site files, site database, mail, cron and other services for your site.

ONLY DO THIS WHEN ADDING ANOTHER SITE IN THE SERVER.

Login to hosting panel using your “webuser” or regular user:

https://your_server_ip:8083

WEB > (+) add domain

The “webuser” is a server user that you can use to access FTP.

Using subdomain for your site.

If you are going to use a subdomain (eg. dev.yourdomain.com) for your site. You need to remove the alias (eg. www.dev.yourdomain.com) that is automatically generated by the hosting panel. You can do this under “advanced options“.

Important: If the websites are under the same “webuser” then the user will have access to files of all your websites.

Note: If you did not receive the hosting panel login details in your inbox please check your spam folder or contact support.

5. Add a database

In most cases if you are setting up a CMS or script you will need a database.

To create a database please login to your web hosting panel and add a database.

Login to hosting panel using your “webuser”:

DB > (+) add database

The database information needed by CMS/scripts are:

  • Hostname (in most cases this is set as “localhost”)
  • Database name (please take note of the prefix)
  • Database user (please take note of the prefix)
  • Database user password

Before hitting the Submit button save the information someplace in your computer. You will use it on the web installer of your script.

To manage your database just simply login to phpmyadmin.

hosting panel > db > phpmyadmin

or type in your browser’s address bar

http://your_server_ip/phpmyadmin

The database user should include the prefix.
(eg. yourwebuser_user1 )

6. Upload your files via FTP

In order for you to upload files to the server, you will need an FTP client software installed in your desktop/computer.

Here are some FTP softwares:

To use the FTP software you will need FTP account info of your server/host.

The FTP user has been sent to your email when you created the server.

  • FTP HOST = Your server IP address
  • FTP User = This is sent upon server activation.
  • FTP Pass = Your FTP account password.

The site directory should be
/web/yourdomain.com/public_html/

Note: Delete the default files inside the “public_html”.

To change the password of user:

  1. Login to hosting panel using your “admin“.
    https://your_server_ip:8083
  2. user > “myusername” > edit

Using the Easy Package Downloader tool for script installation

The Package Downloader tool makes it very easy to download and extract popular scripts like wordpress, drupal and many free scripts.

  1. Download the tool from the client dashboard.
  2. Extract the package (autodl.php) and upload to your site via FTP.
  3. Run the tool via browser (http://yourdomain.com/autodl.php).

Note: You will need to generate a key to use the tool. You can get it on the tools page.

7. Run the web installer.

After you upload the files in your web space or server you can then run the web installer of the script from your browser.
Follow the instructions provided by the script.

That’s it! If you need help just contact support for FREE CMS/script installation. 🙂

Knowing the size of your site

Most people does not worry much about the size of their site. Specially if they have large disk or storage. It is very important to monitor the size of your site specially if your site is very dynamic like social sites or you are upload large video files, music files and photos.

If you are using your server for web server, database, email and other services/systems, it is very important to minimize disk usage. In most cases higher IO affects your site performance. It sometimes create bottleneck which usually causing high wait percentage of your server processes.

To know the size of your site, you  can login to your hosting panel using the “admin” user.

user > (webuser) > login as (webuser) > web

Site size is also important to backup system. Large sites requires more advanced backup system.