Hosting Solutions

September 26, 2023

How to Delete WHM Server Backups

Equestrian Web Technology, Hosting Solutions

WHM is a powerful server interface that allows many functions to be automatically process while hosting websites. Yet managing the server can be equally taxing as keeping the sites up to date and running properly. One of the weakness of the the system is that while backups can be created automatically, deleting those backups is not automatic function, despite the backup configuration implied user interface. The problem then is, the hard drive, unless you are using a remote storage, fills the disk, causing other problems. Thus deletion must be done manually.

The simplest way to perform this task is through the terminal option of the server. Here are the setup by step to achieve this goal.

Check File System Disk Space Usage

After logging in to your server, you can now check the disk availability in on your server using the command # df -h

The “df” command displays the information of device name, total blocks, total disk space, used disk space, available disk space and mount points on a file system and the df command provides an option to display sizes in Human Readable formats by using '-h' (prints the results in human-readable format (e.g., 1K 2M 3G)).

After login to the root directory navigate to /backup folder using the command given below

# cd /backup

CHECKING AND REMOVING PAST BACKUPS

Once navigated you can see all the files and folders inside / backup folder using the command # dir

Now you need to navigate to the weekly folder or monthly folder or daily folder, whatever backup configuration you have on your server as in my case it was a weekly folder.

So, now I am going to navigate to quickly folder and after navigating the weekly folder I need to check what all backups I have inside that directory. This is what I have used –

[root@server ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs 7.8G 0 7.8G 0% /dev

[root@server /]# cd /backup
[root@server backup]# dir
transports.db weekly
[root@server backup]# cd weekly
[root@server weekly]# dir
2020-05-03
[root@server weekly]#

Now it’s totally up to you you want to delete the whole weekly folder or you just want to delete some of the backup files from there.

Deleting WHM backup using rm command

To delete the entire directory use the command # rm -rf directory_name
To delete a single file or single backup use the command # rm -f filename

The Author

CEO & Technical Director of Multimedia Designs, LLC, System Designer, Developer, Producer with 15+ years in the internet design and development space and 25+ years in the Software Development for the entertainment industry. Winner of the prestigious International Themed Entertainment Association award for interactive design. She holds a degree in Computer Engineering & Mathematics from California State University, Long Beach.

May 9, 2022

How to Switch Hosting without Killing Your SEO

Hosting Solutions

Almost nothing is permanent — people change, businesses change and, of course, web hosting changes. As most new owners think the grass is always greener with some other developer. Cheaper, better, but the reality is, websites are not simple and the landscape is getting increasingly complicated.

From a business owner, you might find yourself wanting to move from your current website hosting company to a new one. The reasoning may vary from financial causes, dissatisfaction with the current hosting provider or just a desire for change. Whichever reason you have, the most important thing is to figure out how to change website hosting companies without hurting search engine optimization, your customers expectations and mostly you SEO.

The hallmark of a successful switch in website hosting companies is keeping the switch invisible to your site users. Search engines should be aware of this move and compensate by sending quality signals to your new pages. Moreover, your SEO should be retained on the new site or even improved. If the process of switching isn’t carried out well, you stand to lose all the SEO work you’ve done for your website over the years.

Does New Hosting Affect Your SEO?

You may wonder, why are you even writing about this. Does a change in hosting effect my Google rankings? The answer is often times yes.

Does a change in hosting effect my Google rankings? The answer is often times yes.

In many cases, moving to a new website hosting company will have an impact on your website’s SEO success and long-term strategy. These effects will manifest in metric parameters such as organic traffic, lead conversions and brand visibility.

Of course, everyone hopes their move to a different website hosting company will positively impact their site’s SEO or their visibility across search engines. However, that’s not always the case.

…everyone hopes their move to a different website hosting company will positively impact their site’s SEO

Sometimes the action doesn’t work as hoped and the result is a drop in the search engine results pages or SERPs. Of course, this translates to poorer performance and decreased website traffic. In some cases, the switch to a new location might even negatively impact the user experience.

There are several ways switching web hosts can affect your website’s SEO and Google search rankings. Problems can arise if you switch to a new hosting company that:

Has international servers
Offers low-quality hosting services
Downgrades hosting plans
Performs significant structural changes

The new host’s geographical location is of the utmost importance; if the new servers aren’t located in the same country as your website, you’ll wind up losing website traffic. You also need high-quality hosting services. For instance, if the servers are overcrowded, your website will get more downtime, which negatively affects your SEO ranking.

You also don’t want a new hosting server to downgrade your plan. For example, say your website’s loading speed is higher than your new host’s acceptable performance standards. The web host will attempt to slow down your web page loading, and as a result, your Google rankings will drop. Another thing you want to avoid is a new web host carrying out significant structural changes to your website. In these cases, web crawlers may confuse your established site with a new site. In essence, web crawlers are bots that perform web indexing, or the analysis of keywords across websites, to help determine a site’s relevance and where it should rank among search engine results. If they mistake your site as a new one, that eliminates the hard SEO work and keyword research you did.

How to Switch Website Hosting Without Hurting SEO

Now that you know some of the ways moving to a new web host may negatively affect your site’s SEO performance, it’s imperative that you learn how to avoid falling into this trap. The first step is to consider the impact the change will have on the key players: search engines, website operators and customers. By anticipating these reactions, you can make the necessary changes on your website to ensure each one is addressed and keep the SEO you’ve spent a great deal of time working on.

If you guarantee search engines have all the information they need regarding migration changes being made on your website, they can smoothly adapt to your new host and safeguard your SEO. The information you should share with search engines beforehand includes:

New hosting location
New site structure
New domain
URLs
Link sources

Basically, you need to put your new house in order before tearing down the old one.

The next step is to set your website on the new hosting location properly. DNS changes should be handled carefully to ensure the domain name is correctly transferred to the new hosting location — this will go a long way toward making sure search engines can easily crawl your website in the new location.

Once this is set, you should give yourself a transition period of at least 180 days before shutting down the old site. However, it’s important to note that some hosting companies will let you keep your old domain name for up to 10 years.

Ensure your new website is fully set and effectively operational before shutting down the old server. Once you sell your domain, you relinquish all the algorithm research and SEO you worked so hard for, such as the backlinks you’ve built. Here are some ways to assure the quality of your new server.

BEFORE THE SWITCH

Before entirely moving your website, start by migrating a subdomain’s contents and employ the 301 redirect to redirect pages to your new site. Avoid doing a blanket redirect, as these tend to negatively impact SEO. Instead, do a page-to-page redirect. Other measures you should take include:

Confirming all links on your website are redirected to the new location
Checking your new site for any broken links and fixing them
Connecting with customers

In addition to keeping your search engines informed and connecting your old domain to your new one, it isn’t a bad idea to connect with customers directly. If you have a solid social media following, keep your consumers in the loop about your website changes there, too.

WP SitePlan

If transitioning to a new host server without negatively impacting your SEO sounds difficult, that’s because it is. Small businesses that aren’t well-informed about SEO can unintentionally sabotage themselves through the move. Fortunately, professional assistance is available.

MMD offers USA-based WordPress maintenance plans and support to walk with you every step of the process. We offer three different plans, all of which include daily off-site backups, real-time uptime monitoring and database optimization to ensure the quality and functionality of your website. Our most advanced plan includes unlimited desk support, the full elimination of malware and daily performance and speed scans. We do the work so your site can soar to new heights.

October 18, 2021

CDN : Content Distribution Network. The Need For Speed. Is It Right For You?

Hosting Solutions

Everybody wants it…speed, quick, fast, instant now. Wait more than 2 seconds and any marketer will tell you, your bounce rate will go up and you will lose business. Your site will be graded into a A, B, C, D or even F category. Your ranking diminished. If you are curious how your site would do, some good ways to check are GTmerix, Google Developer’s Insight, or Pingdom.

The challenge is, the internet was not made for such lighting speeds. At least not for the common man and yet that is the very thing that business are asking for, in fact demanding. But at the very same time, they don’t want to pay for the hosting that has a shot of delievering such a request. So what do you do?

Enter the Content Delivery Networks.

What is a CDN?

A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of geographically distributed servers that speed up the delivery of web content by bringing it closer to where users are. Data centers across the globe use caching, a process that temporarily stores copies of files, so that you can access internet content from a web-enabled device or browser more quickly through a server near you. CDNs cache content like web pages, images, and video in proxy servers near to your physical location. This allows you to do things like watch a movie, download software, check your bank balance, post on social media, or make purchases, without having to wait for content to load.

You could think of a CDN like an ATM. Having a cash machine on practically every corner makes it fast and efficient to get money. There’s no wait time in long bank lines, and the ATMs are placed in many convenient locations for immediate access.

CDN services were created to solve the problem of network congestion caused by delivering rich web content, such as graphics and video over the internet — much like a traffic jam. Getting content from centrally located servers to individual users simply took too long. CDNs have now grown to include everything from text, graphics, scripts, and media files to software downloads, documents, portals, ecommerce, live streaming media, on-demand video streaming media, and social media sites.

CDNs can also provide websites with increased protection against malicious actors and security concerns like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

How does a CDN work?

The goal of a CDN is to reduce the amount of time it takes to load a webpage, aka, ‘Latency’. Latency is that annoying delay you experience when trying to access a web page or video stream before it becomes usable on your device. Although measured in milliseconds to seconds, it can feel like forever to a users, and may even result in the potential viewer bailing out in frustration.

Some content delivery networks alleviate latency by reducing the physical distance that the content needs to travel to reach you. Therefore, larger, more widely distributed CDNs are able to deliver web content more quickly and reliably by putting the content as close to the end user as possible. The interesting thing is this…CDN’s are NOT hosts. So how can they do that?

They achieve this goal by having a copy of the media files in memory, aka ‘Cache’. If the content you requested is unavailable or outdated, the CDN service will store the newly fetched content to serve any future requests.

PROS & CONS

PROS

1. Quick Delivery of Assets
CDN allows for widespread distribution of servers, which is placed closer to the users makes the distribution of data quickly. This helps to load the website faster.

2. Caters to a Large Number of Users
If you own a website with a large audience base, then CDNs can be of great help to you. CDN enables a high traffic flow which can allow a large number of users to access your website at the same time without putting any extra pressure on the servers.

3. Managing Traffic Load
CDN is extremely effective at managing dynamic traffic loads. CDN with its large chain of servers ensures that the resources are scaled up and down according to the incoming traffic. Not being able to handle a sudden spike in traffic for a smaller website is a common issue.

4. Control Over Delivery of Assets
With CDNs, you’ve complete control over the deliverance of assets via different servers depending upon which servers are overloaded or under-utilized at that point in time.

5. Expands your market internationally by the use of local servers
This is the total point of a CDN. That your site can be just as fast in Italy as it can be in Japan.

6. Your SEO rankings may get better
Google likes speed. It’s network will evaluate your page, including load speeds in order to determine your overall organic search ranking.

7. Protection against attacks is easier
The hackers who want to steal your email address, covertly change your code are in full force. Having a CDN, allows you to put some distance between your real site and the invaders.

8. Supports high media sites who need help delivering
Extremely useful for websites with larger Images and videos but struggling with loading speeds

CONS

Servers are not always up to date
In order for a CDN to work, it has to have the latest media to deliver to your viewers. Thus if you have to change your site a lot, daily or even hourly, a CDN may not keep up. It can be as long as 24-48 hours to stabilize and update the content per change. This is especially true, if you are using a free service like Cloudflare. You will need to balance the need for speed, against the need for quick updates.
Location of Servers.
If there is a mismatch between the location of your servers and that of your audience, then the CDN won’t be of much help.
Support can be an Issue
Since CDNs are mostly operated over third-party infrastructures, resolving an issue can involve too much to-and-fro of communication.
Restrictions
Some organizations and countries have blocked the domains or IP addresses of popular CDNs. In this case, your audience from these organizations or countries cannot access your website, and you will end up losing some of your traffic.
CDN are not perfect
If the closet server is overloaded by demand, you might be faster loading from your own host. This is a variable that changes from day to day, if not minute by minute. If they go down, you are going to have to change quickly.
Dedicated Servers may have problems
If you own or lease a dedicated server that is hosting your site, using a basic CDN is going to have issues. The redirection of the site’s IP address, will make is so your server become invisible to the net. Your only solution would be to change your hosting to a service that also offers CDN.
There is no country or IP shield..
You may not want to do business in a particular country that has caused you problems in the past. With a CDN, there is no country or IP shield.
Sensitive Files may be at risk
Websites are built using technologies that generate a web page and thus can be viewed by anyone, including hackers. This includes custom plugins or fully customized sites. While the firewall exists on your server, it is difficult to monitor, given you site no longer is dedicated to one static IP. All data will be copied to all distributed servers.
Email may have issues with self-hosted service.
Self hosted email on your server does not port well on a CDN. Frequently it is seen as a hacker or spam as the email does not have just one IP address, it can come from many.

TO USE OR NOT?

The question of whether you should use a CDN, depends on the needs of your company. If you have a popular website, powerful server with enough resources, AND that does not change it’s content too often, it might pay off. It also depends on balancing the need of your audience (are they young, impatient and will bail) , google SEO demands, bounce rates, do you share a server with other sites and a group of other factors.

As a general guide, the question to ask are this:

What is the present load speed of your website?
How often do change the content of the site?
Do you have a dedicated server for your site?
Do you have information or plugins on you site, that you do not want distributed?
Who is your audience and how demanding are they to speed?
How is your present overall speed in relation to google ranking?
Do you self host your email?

I am sure there are even more questions that need to be reviewed. All these items must be balanced, in order to make the right decision for your business. The technology exists, as long as it works for you and not against.

To start your review, some good place to evaluate what your present site performance is:

OUR EXPERIENCES WITH CDN

Our experiences with CDN have been mixed.

While the site speed load, from the point of view of the user, does come up incredibly fast, frequently under 1 second, the down side of email functionality and purchase race conditions, outweigh the 1 second faster load speed. We have had issues with our clients with emails failing to be delivered or the mx server not being found. There have also had race conditions with our e-commerce clients. Where a product was purchased and yet since the cache did not update across the network fast enough, another customer purchased the same product, when there was only 1 item available.

Thus, as a practical application, we do not recommend a CDN unless the following conditions are true.

1. Extreme high volume of users on the order of over 10,000 a month
2. Email is not self-hosted. Use a 3rd party service like G Suite
3. Have a paid for CDN service, with sufficient rule sets to allow for conflicts.
4. Don’t use a CDN for a poorly optimized website.

Ultimately, CDN are a tool for performance. Whether it works for you, is dependent on your business, workflow needs and how much money you want to spend. It should not be used as a cover for a slow loading site.

A CDN, should not be used as a cover for a slow loading site.

If your site is taking longer than 2 seconds to load, then you have website implementation and optimization issues to attend to. We outline some of these issues in our blog “2021 Update: Website Load Speed Report.” There you can get pointers on how to decrease load speed overall.

Debbie Kurth

MultiMedia Designs, LLC
Digital Design & Technology Company
Office: +1.818.272.0819
Email: multimediadesignsllc@gmail.com

HONEST ANSWERS – GREAT PRICES

September 15, 2021

DNS : Keys to Email Delivery

Hosting Solutions

DNS stands for Domain Name System and is a protocol for exchanging data on the Internet.

When you want to visit a website, you turn on the computer, open a web browser, and type in the domain name you want to visit, e.g. mmd-ca.com. The DNS then translates the name into an IP address. An IP address is a series of numbers separated by stops (e.g. 185.54.72) that identifies resources connected to the internet.

Likewise, email is associated with a domain name with certain more advance requirements, specifically to prove who you are and that you are not sending out an email under someone else domain name. AKA, you are not a spammer.

Most of the time, your hosting provider will manage these settings and process. Sometimes to your advantage and other times not. The keys for you to know what you really need set on your domain name, from your hosting provider, to make sure that your domain is not hijacked and blacklisted.

A word of warning though: this process is a constant battle, with requirements as defined by other servers, servers your email has to go through to be delivered. These rules are constantly being updated.

As of September 2021, the following are recommend settings and choices:

Static or Dynamic IP Address?

Do everything you can to have a static IP address. It is very difficult to run a business and control your email delivery, with a dynamic home-user Internet plan. This also means you hosting will not be cheap. At the very least, be associated on a server with no more than 30 hosting accounts.

Most hosting and the associated email, that are inexpensive, will place you on a server with thosands of other accounts. Thus customization of site and email options are next to none.

This article assumes you have at least one static IP address or have a hosting provider that is willing to customize and monitor the settings on your behalf.

WHAT ARE THE DNS KEYS REQUIRED FOR EMAIL

“A” Record

An “A” record maps a name to an address. You will first need an A record for your mailserver. Your static IP address from your ISP was the first step, of course. For example, you might log into the web portal for the example.com domain and create an “A” record for “mail” for 192.0.2.21. This would create a mail.example.com published on the Internet. However, mailservers still wouldn’t know that this is where to send mail. That’s what “MX” records are for.

Name
mydomain.com.

TTL (Time to Live)
86400

Type
A

Record
162.xxx.xxx.xx

“MX” Record

The MX Record, tells other mailservers on the net, what the name of your server is on the net.
Format:

Name
mydomain.com.

TTL (Time to Live)
86400

Type
MX

Record
Priority: 0
Destination: mydomain.com

“PTR” Record

The PTR record is a reverse lookup which maps the IP address to the name. It is a key record in that many mailservers on the net, will not trust mail coming from your server unless they can do a reverse DNS lookup. This takes two possible forms. Most mailservers care that a PTR record exists at all. Strict mailservers do a forward lookup on the name your mailserver introduces itself as such as mail.example.com, verify it is the IP address that is read off the connection, and do a PTR lookup on that IP address to see if it resolves to the same name.

Name
mydomain.com.

TTL

Type
PTR

Record
28.xxx.xxx.xxx.in-addr.arpa.

“SPF” Record

SPF gives other mailservers a way to verify that mail claiming to be from your domain is from one of your IP addresses. They do this by checking a special TXT record you put in your DNS records. It is an interesting way to prevent mail spoofing.

A useful tool for creating your SPF Record is by SPF Wizard. or MXToolBox

Name
spf.mydomain.com.

TTL (Time to Live)
14400

Type
TX

Record
v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:162.xxx.xxx.xx +v=spf1include:servers.mcsv.net?all ~all

“Caller-ID” Record

Caller-ID was an earlier way to do what SPF does today. As with SPF, Caller-ID gives other mailservers a way to verify that mail claiming to be from your domain is from one of your IP addresses. They do this by checking a special TXT record you put in your DNS records.

Today, this method has been abandoned in favor of the SPF method.

DKIM Record

DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) is an email authentication technique that allows the receiver to check that an email was indeed sent and authorized by the owner of that domain. This is done by giving the email a digital signature. This DKIM signature is a header that is added to the message and is secured with encryption.

Once receiver (or receiving system) determines that an email is signed with a valid DKIM signature, it’s certain that parts of the email among which the message body and attachments haven’t been modified. Usually, DKIM signatures are not visible to end-users, the validation is done on a server level.

Implementing the DKIM standard will improve email deliverability. If you use DKIM record together with DMARC and SPF, you can also protect your domain against malicious emails sent on behalf of your domains.

The most important reason to setup a DKIM record is that Gmail uses default DKIM. Without your server defining it, there is a great possibility that your emails will either be placed in spam or bounced.

For information on how to create your DKIM signature, read googles process article.

Name
default._domainkey.serverdomain.mydomain.com

TTL
14400

Type
TX

Record
v=DKIM1; k=sa; p=”Your DKIM Signature“

DMARC Record

Newer to the authentication party is the DMARC Record. Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, or DMARC, is a technical standard that helps protect email senders and recipients from spam, spoofing, and phishing. DMARC allows an organization to publish a policy that defines its email authentication practices and provides instructions to receiving mail servers for how to enforce them.

A DMARC record is included in an organization’s DNS database. It is a record that is a specially-formatted version of a standard DNS TXT record with a particular name, namely “_dmarc.mydomain.com” (note the leading underscore). The defining elements are as follows:

v=DMARC1 specifies the DMARC version
p=Policy of mail non-compliance: none, quarantine or reject.
sp=Policy for any subdomain mail non-compliance: none, quarantine or reject.
rua=mailto:dmarc-aggregate@mydomain.com is the mailbox to which aggregate reports should be sent
ruf=mailto:dmarc-afrf@mydomain.com is the mailbox to which forensic reports should be sent
pct=100 is the percentage of mail to which the domain owner would like to have its policy applied\

A Classic DMARC record looks something like the below. Also note, that many mail servers will reject emails unless a policy has been defined. Using the p=none, will result in a error.

Name
_dmarc.mydomain.com

TTL
14400

Type
TX

Record
v=DKIM1; p=”none” or “quarantine” or “erject”;sp=”none” or “quarantine” or “reject”; rua=mailto:admin@yourdomain.com; ruf=mailto:admin@yourdomain.com