The Planet Blog

Over the last few days, you may have read about a server’s complete data loss that resulted in the demise of blog hosting provider Journalspace.

In their assessment of the disaster, Journalspace found they had been replicating data to a second hard drive in their server via RAID to provide both backup and disaster recovery abilities. The data disaster occurred when the data on the first drive disappeared: this condition was immediately replicated to the second drive, resulting in total data loss. In turn, Journalspace users lost all their blog entries, ultimately leading to Journalspace’s decision to close its doors for good.

Now, it’s very easy to point the finger and say that these guys should have had a better backup strategy in place, but I’ll leave that to the experts on Slashdot … I’m more interested in using this as a proof point for the many hosting customers I know who are in the same position or worse – considering the fact that many don’t have even a second hard drive. If you are in this category, please use this as a cautionary tale, and let it remind you that you need a proper backup solution to protect your business.

A common misconception is that “real” backup solutions are prohibitively expensive. While the costs of storage solutions were relatively high in the past, prices have come down dramatically in recent years, which makes backup products correspondingly cheaper. Today you can have your data backed up – off your server – starting at just $5 a month.

It takes just one of these potential data-loss instances to make years of investing in a backup solution worthwhile.

Naturally, my preference would be that you buy a backup solution from The Planet. We have a range of competitively priced products and services for any size company. But really, I would prefer that you buy a backup solution from anywhere rather than stay unprotected … after all, the survival of your business could depend on how you decide to back up your server.

-Rob

Howdy. I’m Lyndell, a technical support specialist at The Planet. I work with customers regularly, so I thought a server setup guide could help new customers get started with ease. This documentation is based on my personal server setup experience and on the experience I’ve had helping customers with their new servers.

1. Password

Be sure to change your password. Use a combination of letters, numbers, even symbols. You can even mix capitalization. Don’t use names, birthdays and other trivia that can be dug up out of public records. Conventional wisdom says you shouldn’t write down your passwords, but Microsoft’s senior program manager for security policy Jesper Johansson suggests otherwise: “If I write them down and then protect the piece of paper — or whatever it is I wrote them down on — there is nothing wrong with that. That allows us to remember more passwords and better passwords.”

Bruce Schneier — a notable security technologist and writer — agrees and explains, “We’re all good at securing small pieces of paper. I recommend that people write their passwords down on a small piece of paper, and keep it with their other valuable small pieces of paper: in their wallet.”

2. Firewall

Firewalls block network connections. Configuring a firewall manually can get very complicated, especially when involving protocols like FTP which opens random ports on either the client or the server. A quick way to deal with this is to use the system-config-securitylevel-tui tool. Of course, ssh, web server, ftp, mail and all the ports the control panel uses need to be open.

Mail Ports

• 25 – SMTP
• 110 – POP3
• 143 – IMAP
• 465 – SMTPS
• 993 – IMAPS
• 995 – POP3S

Web Server Ports

• 80 – HTTP
• 443 – HTTPS

cPanel Ports

• 2077 – webDisk (unsecured)
• 2078 – webDisk
• 2082 – cPanel control panel (unsecured)
• 2083 – cPanel control panel
• 2086 – WHM control panel (unsecured)
• 2087 – WHM control panel
• 2095 – webmail (unsecured)
• 2096 – webmail

Personally, I closed the unsecured control panel ports 2077, 2082, 2086 and 2095. Using SSL protected ports better protects passwords and data. To access secure control panel pages without browser popups warning about invalid certificates, buy proper SSL certificates (explained below).

Other

• 22 – SSH (secure shell – Linux)
• 53 – DNS name servers
• 3389 – RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol – Windows)
• 8443 – Plesk control panel
• 19638 – Ensim control panel

3. DNS

DNS is a naming system for computers and services on the Internet. Domain names like “theplanet.com” and “orbit.theplanet.com” are easier to remember than IP address like 70.87.6.117 and 70.87.6.16.
DNS looks up a domain’s A record to retrieve its IP address. PTR records are used to look up the domain name associated to an IP address.

Hostname

Pick a hostname for your server. It can be anything DNS allows, but some names are better than others. Hostnames such as “accounting” or “hackme” may draw unwanted attention. The hostname must be resolvable by DNS, so “example.theplanet.host” will never resolve since “.host” is not a top level domain. “host.example.com” and “server.example.com” are examples of the proper form of a hostname. You’ll want to avoid using “www” at the beginning of your hostname because it may conflict with a website on your server.

In cPanel, the hostname can be easily set in “Networking Setup”. In Plesk, the hostname is set in “Server Preferences”.

A Records

If you buy your domain name from The Planet, it is automatically added to our nameservers, but if your domain was registered externally, you’ll need to go through a few additional steps to ensure your domain resolves correctly on our servers.

To include your externally-registered domain on our DNS, you should first point it at our nameservers (ns1.theplanet.com, ns2.theplanet.com). Once The Planet’s nameservers are correctly reflected on your domain, open a “DNS Change Request” in Orbit. You’ll enter both the domain name and the IP address in the form, and we will create the DNS zone file for that domain. We automatically add A records for default subdomains like “www”, “ftp”, “mail,” and if you’d like to add any other hostnames, log into Orbit and use “DNS Administration” to add an A record for your server’s hostname. If your server’s hostname is “host.example.com”, add an A record for “host”.

PTR Records

Many ISPs configure their servers that receive email to lookup the IP address of the domain in a sender’s email address (a reverse DNS check) to see that the domain name matches the email server’s host name.

You can look up the PTR record for your IP address. In Linux and Mac use the “host” command on the console or in Terminal.app. In Windows use “nslookup” in your Command Prompt. If the results of the PTR record lookup don’t match your server’s hostname, open a DNS change request asking that the PTR or reverse DNS be configured. Please include both the IP address and the server’s hostname.

4. SSL Certificates

Getting an SSL certificate is optional, but it has many benefits. SSL encrypts passwords and data sent on the network. The certificates will assure your customers that they are looking at your site securely. Browsers won’t trust SSL certificates created by the server, so you should purchase certificates externally to keep your content safe and avoid invalid SSL certificate popup warnings.

If you’re interested in learning about The Planet’s offerings in this area, visit our SSL Certificates page. Remember, any website using SSL Certificates should be assigned its own IP address. More information can be found on our support portal.

5. Protect Your Data

An old adage says, “It’s better to have and not need it, than to need it and not have it.”

Data loss can happen to anyone. I recently experienced a hard disk drive failure at home, and I can attest that recovering data without a current backup is certainly disruptive.

Control panels include backup functionality and can be configured to automatically backup regularly to the home server or an external site. For example, cPanel and Plesk can be easily set up to backup to an FTP site. The Planet offers several options for data protection and backup to fit any of your needs.

Imagine what would happen to your business if you lost just some of your data. There’s no excuse for neglecting backup when configuring your new server.

6. Know the Mail Guidelines

Some Internet Service Providers are very particular about email sent to them. As a mail server administrator, you may experience frustration when your server’s emails are not accepted by ISPs that aggressively combat spam. To better prepare for your server’s operations, you may want to verify with the larger email providers that your messages will meet their criteria for valid traffic. Read what a few of the larger postmasters have to say:

• Hotmail
• Yahoo
• AOL
• Comcast

7. Move In!

Now that the server has been prepared and the data protected, you are ready to migrate your content. Never underestimate the usefulness of control panel documentation. Here are the links for our popular control panels:

• Plesk
• cPanel
• Ensim
• Helm

Remember, The Planet’s technical support department is only a phone call away.

-Lyndell

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed an interesting trend: “The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year … Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase.”

Moore was initially noting the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit at a relatively constant minimal cost. Because that measure has proven so representative of the progress of our technological manufacturing abilities, “Moore’s Law” has become a cornerstone in discussions of pricing, capacity and speed of almost anything in the computer realm. You’ve probably heard the law used generically to refer to the constant improvements in technology: In two years, you can purchase twice as much capacity, speed, bandwidth or any other easily-measureable and relevant technology metric for the price you would pay today and for the current levels of production.

While I never questioned these assertions, I can’t say that I really investigated to see if Moore’s Law actually held true in the world of storage, especially with regard to the two key storage characteristics: capacity and throughput. Sure, prices for the same technology get lower over time – we all know that – but that’s just because no one wants the old stuff, right? Does Moore’s observation about the doubling of transistor density actually relate to hard drive capacities? What about throughput rates?

Once I started looking into historical storage-related statistics, it became clear that Moore’s Law doesn’t completely explain the evolution of storage technology. The primary driver for hard drive capacity – the disk’s areal density – has been increasing at 60 percent per year (or around 1.6x every two years), so that key metric of storage appears to correlate with Moore’s transistor observation, but drive speeds and seek times have not improved in a similar exponential manner.

This dichotomy may seem a little strange, but I think capacity limitations have been a more significant problem for the industry as a whole than throughput rates, so drive manufacturers have thrown more of their R&D budgets into improving that key characteristic first. The proven, constant increase in storage capacity reflects a focus on meeting user demand for that storage capacity, and if the incremental value of an additional gigabyte of storage decreases, I think we’ll see a similar improvement in throughput rates as manufacturers turn their focus to that other key storage characteristic. Moore’s observation focused on manufacturing with the single goal of more transistors on an integrated circuit, so we can’t really say Moore’s Law “doesn’t apply” to storage since hard drive manufacturers have several key measurements to improve at a given time.

Thanks to the trend Gordon Moore recognized 48 years ago, we were recently able to drop the prices on several of our backup products. EVault Backup is now priced at $1 per GB, down from $2, and Network Backup product is now priced at 50 cents per GB, down from $1, and they are both free for 90 days. If you’re interested in learning more about our data protection and backup options, check out my “What is Data Protection?” blog or leave me your questions in the comments section here.

-Rob

In the past few months, our team worked tirelessly to prepare for the big launch on July 7. A new shopping cart, a new site design, a new managed hosting division, new advanced services … you know, the little things. I joined the team in the midst of this development and promptly made a contribution: We shouldn’t have a product line called Backup.

Bye Bye Backup? Absolutely Not.

Backups are infinitely valuable to all hosting customers, so I would never suggest that we eliminate the solutions enabling the backup of data. However, there is more to protecting data than just backing it up. Our goal, is to provide clarity around these data protection options so that our customers can select the best one for their company, that protects their data the way they need it protected. The data protection landscape can be pretty confusing, so it’s important for us to clarify where our products fit in the midst of all these hardware and software solutions that enable you to create and maintain full backups, partial backups, incremental backups, automated backups, disk images, and just about any other copy of data that you can imagine.

Data Protection

The goal of our data protection product line is simple: to protect customers’ data from accidental deletion or hardware/application failure. Each solution in the product line offers a different means to that end, so we renamed the product portfolio to better reflect the products’ goal. The Data Protection category encompasses traditional backup, continuous data protection, bare metal recovery and some disaster recovery abilities – and you’ll be seeing more products and services added soon.

Why do I need data protection? Doesn’t my storage protect my data?

Storage products generally have some level of data protection built in, such as RAID on disk arrays, and other redundant hardware and software features such as snapshots. These features protect your data from several types of events like component hardware failure in the device or if the data is corrupted by a user or application. So, yes, the storage system will protect your data – but not against every possibility, such as the device itself losing utility power or network connectivity. At that point, a copy of the data on another device — or better yet in another data center — is required. Designing a data protection strategy that solves the wide range of potential problems at an affordable price point can be a challenge.

Planet Alpha’s Data Protection Product Portfolio

Starting on the left side of the graph, you’ll see Network Backup (formerly known as NAS, or Network Attached Storage). Network Backup is purely storage space accessible over the network … we manage the storage hardware for your backups and you can access that space directly, through your own scripts or through third-party self-installed software.

To the right of Network Backup, you’ll see EVault™ Backup (formerly known as DiskSync). EVault™ Backup serves as a traditional backup product with software from a well-known vendor. In addition to the managed storage space provided by our Network Backup solution, the EVault™ software makes scheduling and maintaining regular backups of your data quick and easy.

Our Data Protection Server (formerly known as Dedicated Backup Server) uses R1Soft’s CDPServer software to regularly update and maintain iterative changes of data. Because the Data Protection Server maintains these block-level, up-to-the-minute changes, the software allows you to execute bare metal restores to recover your entire server.

To round out our current data protection product line, we introduced the ability to license and install R1Soft’s CDPServer software on your other servers in the event you don’t need a full dedicated server-worth of space.

Which Delivers the Most Value?

The beauty of this product portfolio is its flexibility to meet your needs, so the answer to the question for you depends on how much data you have to protect and how you want to do that. Network Backup is $1/GB, and EVault™ Backup is a little more expensive at $2/GB, as it includes backup software from EVault. Both these offerings are ideal for customers with less than 300GB of data to protect. Our Data Protection Servers are available in 4 capacities and start at $279 for the 500GB version, and the price per GB can be as low as $0.20/GB.

I’m a firm believer that everyone should have some kind of data protection. You might not need the backups all the time, but when you DO, the preparation pays off exponentially.

Limited Time: Backup Bonanza

With the new lineup of Data Protection products, we recently launched a great new promotion to enable all of our customers to try Network Backup and EVault™ Backup FREE for 90 days, and if you’re interested in the Data Protection Servers, you can cut the price significantly by ordering with promo code pa-dbs.

-Rob