Building your first server is extremely quick and simple. To create your server login to the Dediserve billing portal at https://billing.dediserve.com and select ‘Cloud Machines

On your Cloud Machines overview page, you’ll see your machines listed, these machines are built, they simply represent the products that you’ve purchased. To get started building your server, select your product of choice, in this example – we have two 256MB Cloud machines, we’ll select one of them. On the machine overview page, select ‘Create new virtual machine’ to get started.

Selecting ‘create new virtual machine’ will prompt you for some basic information, such as the servers hostname, the operating system you would like installed, your password, and a range of resource allocation options for system RAM, CPU core allocation and disk space.

In this example, we’re creating a machine based upon CentOS 5.5 x86, using our full 256MB of RAM, 1 CPU Core, and 11GB of diskspace. When you’ve entered the information requested, simply click ‘Create new virtual machine’!

Upon clicking ‘Create new virtual machine’ you’ll be returned to the server overview page with confirmation that ‘Virtual machine has been created successfully’ at this stage, the machine has been sent for provisioning and the deployment will take approximately 5 minutes. During this time the status will remain ‘Pending’ and the lightbulb indicator icon will show inactivate.

Once the machine has been built, the status will indicate ‘on’ and the icon will be lit.
Click on your servers hostname to view advanced controls for the machine.

Following Feedback from the last post on our R1Soft Special Offer I am going to outline the ease of which you can easily restore individual files from your R1Soft server.

First Login to your R1Soft backup server and select the server you wish to restore files from.

After you see all the restore points (the ones with blue cylinders next to them), choose a restoration date (the dates are in the names next to the blue cylinders) and click the “+” sign next to that as well. It will open up /home. Do the same for /home, and you should see the structure of your entire site as it was at that restoration point. Browse using the “+” signs into the different folders to find what you want to restore. Click the checkmark box next to any folder or files you want to restore, and click “restore selected files” on the top right. All of the above is depicted below and highlighted below. In the following image, we are restoring the “imgs” folder in “public_html”:

You will be taken to the last step:

The highlighted lines are described below:

Overwrite existing files: If checked, it will overwrite your newer files with your older files that you are restoring

Encrypt file data over network: If checked, the data will be encrypted through the server for more security. This should be used if private information including credit card, contact information, etc is being passed through the files. It will not cause too much of a delay in restoring if checked, but it will slow it down a small amount anyway.

You can now proceed to click “OK” on the bottom right.

At this point, the software will automatically start the restoration of your files and folders. When it is done, the progress bar will stop moving and it will say 100% next to it.

The theme for this weeks blog post are going to be security related, we hope to over the coming weeks build up a useful portfolio of tutorials and helpful guides you can use as reference on your server with us. Today i will be covering install SSL certs on your cpanel server, cpanel is the most common control panel running on our customers servers, and we offer a pre-built cpanel template to allow you to deploy your cpanel server on our cloud in mintues.

How to generate a CSR in cPanel

1. Login to your cPanel control panel.

2. Find and click on SSL/TLS Manager.

3. Click on Generate, view, upload, or delete your private keys.

4. Scroll to the bottom of the page to the Generate a New Key Enter the domain you want to create an SSL Certificate for in the Host text box or select the domain from the drop down menu. This should be the name through which the certificate will be accessed (usually the fully-qualified domain name, e.g., www.domain.com or mail.domain.com)

5. Click the Generate button.

6. The private key will be saved in cPanel so there is no need to copy it. Click Return to SSL Manager.

7.Click on Generate, view, or delete SSL certificate signing requests.

8.In the Generate a New Certificate Signing Request section, enter the following information:

9. Host – The domain that you enetered or selected when generating the private key.

Country

State – The state in which your organization is located. Do not use an abbreviation.

City – The city in which your organization is located.

Company – The legally registered name of your organization/company.

Company Division – The name of your department within the organization (frequently this entry will be listed as “IT,” “Web Security,” or is simply left blank).

Email – Your email address where the CSR will be sent.

Pass Phrase – Make up a password to be associated with the certificate. You will need to remember this password later.

9. Click the Generate button. The CSR will display in the window.

10. Copy and paste the entire CSR (including the BEGIN and END lines) into the Dediserve order form.

We are currently doing a special promotion of a FREE SSL cert with all new machines, existing customers can also avail of a one time special offer of just €6.95 ex VAT per annum for the Rapid SSL certificate.

Simply open a support ticket once you have signed up for the server, with your SSL details and we will generate the cert for you.

As revolutionary and Cost effective as Cloud Hosting now is, the fundamentals of server management remain very much the same, meaning security is still a hugely important part of managing your server.

In this post we can going to look at some simple security steps that we recommend to all customers who deploy windows machines on our cloud platforms.

1) Install a good Antivirus, e.g. ESET NOD32, AVG, Kaspersky, AVAST.

2) Configure your firewall to only what you need, e.g. Disable all un-needed Incoming Rules

3) Lock down certain Services to YOUR IP. Within your advanced firewall settings, doubleclick your inbound rule for RDP (port 3389), click scope and add your IP address into the “Remote IP Address” section.

4) Turn off Auto-Update. Update manually regularly, and be sure that hotfixes/security patches will work with the software you are running

5) Take regular backups before running the lastest update, so you can easily roll back if it breaks something..

Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments below and i will add to the list.

From Account Sign-Up, to Building and getting your LAMP Stack cloud server online – In Only – 4 minutes and 10 Seconds  – dediserve’s cloud platform – for when you need a server now!

Here at dediserve we generally only put together templates based on tested and secure operating systems that are a couple of years old, after all not many want to take the risk of hosting their data on bleeding edge OS releases, however we do have some customers that require the lastest release for their testing/development machines.

So i have put together this tutorial on upgrading your ubuntu 8.04 LTS template with us to the latest Ubuntu server release 9.10. Simply follow the steps below via the command line on your server.This needs to be done in stages from version 8.04 through to 9.10.

If you are upgrading a Live Machine ensure you have taken a Back-up Via your Dediserve control panel.

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Here at dediserve, we understand the massive importance security plays in the day to day management of the data on your server, in a recent blog post we went through a short tutorial on setting up IPTables on your Virtual Server.

As a follow up to that blog post we will now look at an additional peice of opensource software that will enhance the use of IPtables whilst reducing the amount of work needed in terms of administration on your server.

This is done by installing and setting up the opensource Fail2ban software on your linux virtual machine – Fail2ban scans log files like /var/log/pwdfail or /var/log/apache/error_log and bans IP that makes too many password failures. It updates firewall rules dynamically to reject the IP address.

For this installation i will be using Ubuntu 8.04:

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One of the most important aspects of managing your linux virtual server , is to know what exactly your server is up to at any one time.

Being on top of this allows you to tweak your server for better performance dynamically before your load times start to suffer.

You should look out for issues Including:

• Storage bottlenecks
• CPU and Memory Bottlenecks
• Network Bottlenecks

All these have the ability to slow down and undermine the performance of your server. Below i will provide some free/opensource monitoring tools you can use to access this information via the command line on your linux server.

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