EnvyGeeks ~ By Jordon Bedwell

Lower Pricing ~ More time per slot

EnvyGeeks — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:18:28 +0000

EnvyGeeks has done it again, and not only have we done it again, we've added more! We have extended our slots to 1 hour (previously 30 minutes) and reduced the price of 30 minutes by $10 (previously $30 per half hour). We did this because a lot of people would love to get our service, but the prices are way to expensive for them! To top that off, we have lowered the price of server management, our basic package is now $100 a month and our extreme package is only $200 a month! Previously our extreme package was $400 a month, but a lot of clients wanted to jump to extreme and just couldn't justify the cost, and now they can. To top that off, we now offer managed hosting, in two packages, 1GB of ram for $160 a month or 2GB of ram for $260 a month and it includes all the perks of management. To kick off the opening of our new managed hosting, we will be offering a free upgrade to Extreme management for our managed hosting packages for the next two weeks. So go check out our new services and pricing now.

How to [truly] securely enable Root login

EnvyGeeks — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:15:24 +0000

Recently we had a spur of clients ask us to enable root for them. Mostly because we don't allow our clients to root into most of our dedicated servers, we force clients to login as a normal user and then sudo -i into root (root login is completely disabled, no password so no ability to login ~ no su). The problem was, even though we had fail2ban, this would not stop a large bot-net attack as fast as they could cycle, unless we got really strict, which we can't because of a catch 22. Either be real strict and have to deal with abnormal amount of requests that we could not cover feasibly while keeping up our goal of being efficient or reduce security a tiny bit and come up with a user-name that would be as hard to guess as the password making it twice as hard to haxor up our shit. The problem here is, as we saw more and more root requests come in and we rejected more and more unlocking (we always tell them they can enable it themselves but we will not cover it ~ if our investigation concludes a brute force into root) we started to take this as a challenge. Not really since we already knew how to do it.

Case Study: SEO and Index.PHP Removal

EnvyGeeks — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:22:38 +0000

Removing index.php from most applications results in a subjective removal. Index.PHP is still available to impact SEO (possibly ~ depending on Engine) and Index.PHP is available for Rewrites. Our biggest example is Expression Engine and Code Ignitor, and WP back in the day. Removing Index.PHP allows for "SEO Friendly" URL's but does not create an SEO friendly site. EXP: /url is available via /index.php/url and / is available via Index.PHP.

A donation from EnvyGeeks

EnvyGeeks — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:08:08 +0000

It's that time of the year. EnvyGeeks has a strong faith in giving back to the community that supports us. Every month EnvyGeeks secretly donates some of our hours back to charity such as soup kitchens and people who can't afford our services but severely need it. We do this not only because it's good to remember where you came from, but to give back. This month we are are offering up something we hope the world will love FREE services for a select few people, and donating $15 of every Single-slot single-problem help purchase by a client to the American Red Cross.

Installing Exim4 for PHP only

EnvyGeeks — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 12:49:24 +0000

Many times and many more times I hear about people who install Exim4 and then forget to properly secure it, or even disable parts of it. This is most of the time the case on a lot of companies default images for VPS servers and even on Debian/Ubuntu default install on it’s own. Today we are going to learn how to install Exim4 and configure it for PHP only email because most of the time we use external email providers for our actual emails, so lets get started shall we? First we need to start by installing exim4

Bash Looping Tips and Tricks

EnvyGeeks — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 11:48:33 +0000

Here are some bash programming tips that some Linux administrators will find useful. With the soon to be public release of my client IPTables script, I feel the need to explain some of the methods and tricks I use in my bash programming and to help spread good programming in Bash scripting.

Hardened HTTP Server /etc/sysctl.conf

EnvyGeeks — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 06:27:26 +0000

The following /etc/sysctl.conf is a basic hardened /etc/sysctl.conf for a server that contains an http server, smtp server and mysql as well as the average applications that a normal web server would contain.

A Thought on Passwords

EnvyGeeks — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 06:11:36 +0000

as the world turns many people often don't realize how much information they give away. how much of this information can actually hurt them and how to combat this. what do I mean by this? I mean simply put, that, if you give out information and you are entirely uniform in your thinking you could lead yourself to the ultimate demise, the same demise that plagues a lot of people, password hacks.

NGINX Efficiency Tricks

EnvyGeeks — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:31:54 +0000

NGINX (pronounced Engine-X) is one of the most lightweight and efficient HTTPD servers you could ever come across, but it's no stranger to lack of performance tuning from the average user. Today we will be going through some basic tips and tricks to keep NGINX performing in tip top shape and learning a bit about how to adjust spawns based on situation.

Optimize a Site for Speed

EnvyGeeks — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 06:46:37 +0000

Speed of a site, it's not just about how fast a server is, but how fast the front-end is too. It's a multi-way street, that is for sure. Everybody knows this. EnvyGeeks takes high-impact and makes it low-impact for it's audience, high-availability is always a thing of concern, whether it be speed or other. As part of a 3 Part tutorial from server to site to celebrate my one month happiness with VPS.Net, we will start with our sites. How can we improve their speed and make them faster.