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cstine posted:A prior person at my current job loving L O V E D software raid. I see so many people in so many different places spouting off about how mdraid is just as good as a RAID controller. I'm pretty sure those people have only used $50 RAID controllers, because if they'd ever used a real controller with dedicated cache I simply can't see how they'd say it compares.
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Aug 20, 2014 04:44
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Thalagyrt posted:Backups from the host level while the VM is running without any tools to make the VM aware (none of these services have enlightened VMs) is basically equivalent to inserting a shim on a SATA cable and trying to image the disk while a computer is online and actively modifying the disk. You're very unlikely to get an actual consistent backup on a filesystem that's doing... well, anything at all. You're much better off backing up these VMs from within the guest OS instead of trying to rely on a service that's worse than simply pulling the power on the disk in the middle of a database write and imaging it. Little late, but I love the "inserting a shim on a SATA cable" analogy. I work with mostly Windows VMs, and when people say to not worry about VSS aware backups I get a giant laugh. I just always explain it as ripping the power cord out of a running production server. Your explanation is far more comical.
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Aug 20, 2014 04:50
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Moey posted:Little late, but I love the "inserting a shim on a SATA cable" analogy. I work with mostly Windows VMs, and when people say to not worry about VSS aware backups I get a giant laugh. I just always explain it as ripping the power cord out of a running production server. Your explanation is far more comical. This is precisely why I don't offer backups from dom0. There's no elegant way to quiesce the guest filesystem under Xen without putting together a toolkit to enlighten the guest - and even then, if you don't know what's running on the guest (there's no standard like there is for VSS writers in Windows) you can't guarantee a good snapshot - so even with LVM snapshots giving you a point in time snapshot, that point in time is equivalent to yanking the power out of the server and then imaging the disk. Too much potential for data corruption. I'd much rather people back up from within the guest itself, that way they can properly export their databases and such in a consistent manner.
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Aug 20, 2014 04:56
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Just thought I'd stick my head in. I work at DreamHost. I'm not really sure what 'goon operated' really means these days, but I know there's a few of us kickin' around here. We've got ~160 employees. Just to clarify, we are still independent despite the rumor that that old April Fool's Day blog post continues to perpetuate. It's still hilarious I don't care what any of you guys say. Elendil004 if you're looking to upgrade you might want to consider DreamPress. We basically give you a pair of VPSs and throw 'em behind Varnish w/memcached. Basically negates the need for messing around with any caching plugins.
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Aug 20, 2014 17:41
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JHVH-1 posted:A guy I used to work with had gone and left the place we were working and moved his family to a new part of the country to help HostGator start up a new location which he was going to help manage and then they got bought out and decided not to open that location. Was this in Provo Utah by any chance?
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Aug 21, 2014 03:05
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I need to host 3 different site (different domains) but would like to run them all through the same hosting plan. Is this something fairly simple to set up with most shared hosting plans (domains registered through a different registrar than where I'm getting hosting) or should I be getting 3 separate hosting plans?
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Aug 21, 2014 21:35
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Booley posted:I need to host 3 different site (different domains) but would like to run them all through the same hosting plan. Is this something fairly simple to set up with most shared hosting plans (domains registered through a different registrar than where I'm getting hosting) or should I be getting 3 separate hosting plans? Easy to set up with 1 plan.
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Aug 21, 2014 21:39
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Elendil004 posted:Honestly I'm pretty savvy but you may as well be explaining a working hyperdrive to me right now. I was going to say just log into the admin panel, go to the w3tc plugin settings and try enabling database caching. However I see now if you load the page with http://www.force4photos.com/ it spends a whole bunch of time waiting to forward to http://force4photos.com/ so maybe bring that to the hosts attention. Maybe the way they have that www subdomain set up or the DNS or something is making it lag. I also see there might be something up with some kind of javascript related to facebook, so if you have a plugin or theme that does facebook you might need to check that out. "Invalid App Id: Must be a number or numeric string representing the application id."
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Aug 21, 2014 21:46
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JHVH-1 posted:I was going to say just log into the admin panel, go to the w3tc plugin settings and try enabling database caching. However I see now if you load the page with http://www.force4photos.com/ it spends a whole bunch of time waiting to forward to http://force4photos.com/ so maybe bring that to the hosts attention. Maybe the way they have that www subdomain set up or the DNS or something is making it lag. Thanks, though I'm pretty annoyed with dreamhosts (lack) of customer service, which used to rock, but things change and I got in touch with another host who gave me some options.
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Aug 21, 2014 22:00
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Anyone have problems paying for things at lithium? Last time I tried to pay for services it kept locking me out and I had to open a support ticket. Once again it is doing it with an error from "Maxmind" that my IP looks sketchy. I'm not going through any proxies or vpns just a plain ol' Timewarner cable ip which is easy to verify.
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Aug 27, 2014 06:33
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I didn't have to look past Lithium Hosting's login screen to diagnose the problem. WHMCS is an abomination that should've died off years ago. You get what you (try to) pay for.
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Aug 27, 2014 06:43
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Suggestions for an alternative cheap host? Just hosting a couple wordpress sites so don't need anything elaborate.
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Aug 27, 2014 09:32
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Hosting companies are known to have overzealous anti-fraud measures (out of necessity), so I wouldn't necessarily hold it against them.
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Aug 27, 2014 10:17
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FuzzySlippers posted:Suggestions for an alternative cheap host? Just hosting a couple wordpress sites so don't need anything elaborate. Probably just keep using Lithium. Anyone with a limited budget for programmers, including us, use WHMCS for billing, it's a non-stop source of confusion and complaints but I think the billing department's programmers are too scared to try anything else and would rather just keep on truckin' with WHMCS and continue writing lovely plugins and hacks to prop it up.
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Aug 27, 2014 14:56
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FuzzySlippers posted:Anyone have problems paying for things at lithium? Last time I tried to pay for services it kept locking me out and I had to open a support ticket. Once again it is doing it with an error from "Maxmind" that my IP looks sketchy. I'm not going through any proxies or vpns just a plain ol' Timewarner cable ip which is easy to verify. Don't take it personally, we have to be careful not to approve orders that look suspicious. If you knew the number of fraudulent orders that were placed on a regular business you'd be very surprised. Just open a ticket and we'll take care of it. NOTinuyasha posted:I didn't have to look past Lithium Hosting's login screen to diagnose the problem. WHMCS is an abomination that should've died off years ago. You get what you (try to) pay for. Yes, WHMCS sucks, but the alternatives aren't a whole lot better. Writing a new billing system isn't that easy since you also need payment gateway support, product provisioning and everything inbetween. Blesta is about as good as it gets, but there is not a good way to migrate to them from WHMCS and we would lose a lot of functionality by switching. There WHMCS migrator is still beta and fails miserably on a WHMCS install with more than 100 customers. Staying on top of patches and keeping the web server hardened is about the best option for now.
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Aug 27, 2014 15:13
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I'd say 6 out of 10 orders we get are some sort of fraud/scammers/spammers/general shitbags. Automated tools catch 4 of them, and the last 2 show up when we get 38 abuse complaints for the phishing sites they're running/the 300,000 spam emails they sent/DMCA takedown notifications and so on.
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Aug 27, 2014 20:35
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When I worked in bottom barrel shared hosting, we got to the point where we simply didn't allow any order from Brazil, China, or Russia, because the legitimate:spam ratio was (without exaggeration) 1:500. Even after our fairly aggressive filters that all-out rejected orders, we'd still get tons of fraudulent orders. WHMCS sucks, in-house billing sucks more. We had a developer whose full time job was to patch our billing software for the entire 2 years that I worked there, and it barely got better, though I know for a fact that the developer was working hard. It's a monumental project. E: this was a company with average customer spend around $5/month and $1m MRR.
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Aug 27, 2014 20:44
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Comradephate posted:When I worked in bottom barrel shared hosting, we got to the point where we simply didn't allow any order from Brazil, China, or Russia, because the legitimate:spam ratio was (without exaggeration) 1:500. Heh, most of our large long-term customers are from Brazil. Some guys running hosting companies that have 20 or 30 servers with us. Of course, we don't take people from Florida without some serious digging anymore....
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Aug 27, 2014 21:23
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DarkLotus posted:Writing a new billing system isn't that easy since you also need payment gateway support, product provisioning and everything inbetween. We did it, and Thalagyrt can probably give more insight into the hurdles we encountered, but we will never go back to using a third party billing system after HostBill. I honestly don't know of any billing system out there that doesn't have issues like WHMCS and HostBill. Every single one has it's 'quirks', you just have to pick the one that has quirks that won't gently caress up your business.
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Aug 27, 2014 21:55
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DarkLotus posted:Don't take it personally, we have to be careful not to approve orders that look suspicious. If you knew the number of fraudulent orders that were placed on a regular business you'd be very surprised. Yeah except I really don't want to open a ticket every time I need to pay for something and when I did that the guy made me jump through a bunch of hoops (no, I'm not running a proxy, etc) before he would approve it. It took like 5 days to get a domain ordered. My connection is coming from **socal.res.rr.com how is that tripping anything? I've been a customer for a couple years so if I'm scamming its a pretty long con. What is the scam anyway? Get a domain, host, whatever and then reverse the charge? Use the service to spam or something that ends up costing money? FuzzySlippers fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 27, 2014 23:45
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Setting up a billing system *should* be hard and require original work. WHMCS looks like an easy workaround but you quickly get hosed the moment you need any sort of flexibility and when it breaks - and it will break - you're in for a fun ride cause the whole thing is one black box that you probably have a bunch of plugins and extensions wired into. Also, Re: fraud, we only IP blacklist Ghana because I don't think we've ever gotten a legitimate order from Ghana, ever. The rest that get flagged are gone over by a billing representative that specializes in looking for sketchy orders, stalks the customer online and may ask for a phone screen, ID scans, etc. The billing department has an ongoing competition to see who can get the funniest recording of some Nigerian male unironically trying to convince us that they're Nancy from Ohio or whatever.
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Aug 27, 2014 23:49
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FuzzySlippers posted:Yeah except I really don't want to open a ticket every time I need to pay for something and when I did that the guy made me jump through a bunch of hoops (no, I'm not running a proxy, etc) before he would approve it. It took like 5 days to get a domain ordered. My connection is coming from **socal.res.rr.com how is that tripping anything? I've been a customer for a couple years so if I'm scamming its a pretty long con. When I worked at a host I saw a lot of people signing up with a stolen credit card and then they would send out a ton of spam till the account gets turned off. There is a lot you can do for rate limiting and securing who can send mail in cPanel though. Though you still would get stuff like penis pill sites or whatever that they would send spam out from elsewhere and point it there. They stopped selling shared hosting after a while because it was too much work for small money. I remember though we had a long string of accounts being signed up for a while that all had Florida addresses. Like they got legit addresses and somehow spoofed coming from the same little area repeatedly (Maybe they had people actually local there setting it up). Then they would do something sketchy and we would have to take the server down for breaking TOS.
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Aug 28, 2014 00:42
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I think the issue FuzzySlippers is having is that he is an established customer who is trying to buy another service/domain and being treated like he's signing up for the first time and using an IP address from Moldova.
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Aug 28, 2014 01:13
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FuzzySlippers posted:Yeah except I really don't want to open a ticket every time I need to pay for something and when I did that the guy made me jump through a bunch of hoops (no, I'm not running a proxy, etc) before he would approve it. It took like 5 days to get a domain ordered. My connection is coming from **socal.res.rr.com how is that tripping anything? I've been a customer for a couple years so if I'm scamming its a pretty long con. Yeah, I was the one that worked with you. It was a very odd issue and it ends up that MaxMind had flagged your ISPs IP range has having lots of fraud reports. Any future issues will be promptly approved and resolved as your account has been noted. The scam is that people use stolen card information and sign up as if they are the card holder using their address and everything. The only way to potentially catch these orders is to verify each one manually or rely on a 3rd party service like MaxMind to check the IP against the location and any history of fraud. The fraudulent customer usually uses their account to distribute spam and malware or launch DDoS and botnet attacks. The cardholder eventually issues a charge-back which costs us $35.00 a pop on top of the non refundable domain registration charge and the headache of cleaning up the mess the malicious uses created. Fraud is very expensive and on more levels than most people even realize. Inconveniencing one customer to prevent 5 fraudulent ones is an acceptable risk. I'm sorry that it was an inconvenience and will gladly work with you to get all future orders approved until maxmind drops the fraud rating on your IP range. Our obviously lovely billing system doesn't allow for whitelisting specific customers, only all existing customers as a whole.
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Aug 28, 2014 01:16
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Spazz posted:very single one has it's 'quirks', you just have to pick the one that has quirks that won't gently caress up your business. Basically the same as ticketing software/issue tracking. You can either write your own and very quickly learn that it's an extraordinarily large project with a thousand thousand corner cases and features that users want, or you can find the one that sucks the least for your exact needs and bludgeon it into usability. NOTinuyasha posted:The billing department has an ongoing competition to see who can get the funniest recording of some Nigerian male unironically trying to convince us that they're Nancy from Ohio or whatever. I'm jealous that your customers try to keep the scam going! When I worked billing and my dudes requested ID the scammers would just not respond, or would respond with HILARIOUS photoshops. They were never willing to call us. Also on that note, despite ensuring that the request be phrased like "Please send us a photo or scan of the front and back of both your ID and the credit card used to make the payment. Please black out all but the last 4 digits of the credit card number, and the CVV code (the 3 or 4 digit code after the signature panel) on the back" we'd still get uncensored credit card pictures at least once a day via email replies to tickets. Comradephate fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 28, 2014 01:18
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Comradephate posted:Basically the same as ticketing software/issue tracking. Amen! At some point though, you do grow out of it and end up feeling like you have no choice but to write your own.
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Aug 28, 2014 01:19
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DarkLotus posted:Amen! At some point though, you do grow out of it and end up feeling like you have no choice but to write your own. A smell a goon project on the horizon!
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Aug 28, 2014 01:20
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DarkLotus posted:Amen! At some point though, you do grow out of it and end up feeling like you have no choice but to write your own. Yep. The worst one I ever had the displeasure of dealing with was a terrible, terrible front-end that tied 4 kayako installations together (the original company had acquired 3 others that all used kayako, and made no efforts to unify the ticket systems despite the fact that kayako supports multiple customer-facing views and segregated queues) and the best was at $job-1. It was ugly and unintuitive, but it worked very well and did everything I needed it to do and had a
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Aug 28, 2014 01:28
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The Community › SA-Mart > Need a billing system for hosting company - $75
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Aug 28, 2014 01:29
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Imagine four help desk tickets on the edge of a cliff,
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Aug 28, 2014 01:30
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JHVH-1 posted:I remember though we had a long string of accounts being signed up for a while that all had Florida addresses. Like they got legit addresses and somehow spoofed coming from the same little area repeatedly (Maybe they had people actually local there setting it up). Then they would do something sketchy and we would have to take the server down for breaking TOS. The Florida spammers have not gone away.
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Aug 28, 2014 02:36
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Comradephate posted:I'm jealous that your customers try to keep the scam going! When I worked billing and my dudes requested ID the scammers would just not respond, or would respond with HILARIOUS photoshops. They were never willing to call us. We do VPNs so whatever nightmare you think you're facing, we've got it ten time worse, our overhead to prevent fraud is insane. One thing we're seeing lately is romance scams, where some gently caress preys on women on dating sites and tries (often successfully, sadly) to convince said woman to order an account and take the phone call. The only way for billing to defend against those is to use a lot of not-so-politically-correct human screening methods. It costs a lot of time, money, and customer patience, but our network is really clean as a result. We're also one of the few companies that'll even consider orders from places like Nigeria - human screening can work both ways, we can find legit customers in fraud-ridden areas and have a decent following of ex-patriots in certain countries as a result.
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Aug 28, 2014 04:08
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On Linode, is there a way to mount a new disk without first editing the configuration profile and restarting the VM? I mainly just don't want to restart.
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Aug 29, 2014 23:48
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not to the best of my knowledge
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Aug 29, 2014 23:56
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Rufus Ping posted:not to the best of my knowledge FU RUFO!!!!!!! THANKS FOR THE HELP 
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Aug 29, 2014 23:57
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I'm setting up a contact form for someone on a hosting package where they only have access to cPanel (which I'm clueless about). PHP mail() doesn't work and I can't access php.ini to see what's up. Is there some option in cPanel I should be checking / enabling to enable the server to send email? Or do I need to contact support? I've read stuff about a cPanel "Tweak Settings" page, but it's not listed anywhere. e: haha all the emails were in my spam folder. I'm such an idiot. Please no one read this post. fuf fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Aug 30, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 15:08
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fuf posted:e: haha all the emails were in my spam folder. I'm such an idiot. Please no one read this post. This is a very, very common problem with PHP mail() on shared hosting. You would do well to read this about email delivery and see what you can do with it: http://blog.codinghorror.com/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code/ McGlockenshire fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Aug 30, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 17:21
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Oops. I missed Fraud talk.  I work for a 'big' cloud hosting provider, and it's a pretty constant battle to keep lovely people from mucking up our IP reputation. One really cool tool is: https://siftscience.com/ It works kind of like Maxmind but on a much broader scale, and can take into account pretty much any data you want to throw at it, which it will happily learn from. Also, yeah, those Florida spammers are 100% still around. :/
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Aug 30, 2014 17:55
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McGlockenshire posted:This is a very, very common problem with PHP mail() on shared hosting. You would do well to read this about email delivery and see what you can do with it: http://blog.codinghorror.com/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code/ Thanks for this. I'm missing something with the PTR record thing. Is it saying that spam filters will check the PTR record of the IP address that sent an email to see if it points to the same domain name as contained in the "from" field? But if it's shared hosting where lots of domains are pointing to one IP, the PTR record would never match whatever "mydomain.com" address the email is coming from, right? For instance if I run dig -x on the IP of the shared hosting server, I get a PTR record in response, but it's just pointing to some generic-looking domain belonging to the hosting company or maybe the datacentre. Or is the important thing just that there is a PTR record in the first place? fuf fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Aug 30, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 20:55
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Take a look at Mail Tester too. I've used it in the past to debug these sorts of issues, its really user friendly.
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Aug 30, 2014 21:27
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