Month: February 2012

  • Make a delightful day for your users

    Users will forget what you say.  Users will forget what you do.  Users will remember how they feel. So design a beautiful day for your customers.  Make it a memorable day. Many businesses present a boring, me-too face.  Some start-ups go overboard and swamp a useful app with delightful funkiness.  Neither is likely to create…

  • Per minute billing

    We have recently had a couple of questions/comments about how/whether we do per- minute/hour/day/month billing. Our goal is to only charge you for the minutes you use on a server. When you first get a server we pro-rate the service fee for the current calendar month, create an invoice and charge your credit card before…

  • Success through kick ass users

    Kathy Sierra presented at Webstock 2012.  And her talk compelled me to start thinking deeply about how I go about writing apps and helping users. The best indicator of success is when, after using your app (or service or company), the user thinks ‘I’m awesome’.  NOT: the product or company or service is awesome. I…

  • T-shirts are a coming…

    T-shirts are great.  They cover a good part of your torso.  But not the arms.  So your elbows get to breathe. We think it is so important for your bare elbows to touch your desk while you’re admin-ing your server that we’d like to give a few of our most precious customers a free t-shirt.

  • Cron script for checking disk space

    Here is script for those that interested in not installing a daemon like monit, and just rely on a simple bash script to send notifications when the disk space is low. It is a quite common of a server crashing even though it has been well configured, that rotates logs, etc, but still receives an…

  • Distrubution release support (CentOS4/Debian 5)

    Linux distributions keep moving forwards, and as they progress older releases stop receiving security patches or updates. As part of our commitment to maintaining reliable and safe services, we would like to highlight the following announcements… CentOS-4 End Of Life The CentOS-4 distribution (current version 4.9) will be at End of Life on February 29,…

  • Plesk updates and server security

    Recently we were advised of a significant vulnerability in all older versions of the Plesk Panel. If you have not done so recently, we strongly recommend you schedule some time to update. Extended details about that are available. You can follow their instructions to update your Plesk instance.  Or please just pop in a support…

  • Linux kernel CVE-2012-0056 vulnerability

    You have probably all heard about the recent local privilige escalation in recent Linux kernels by now. If not you can read all about it here. This only affects our recent Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric” VPSs, which by default were installed with a Linux 3.0.4 kernel. The 3.0.4 kernel was also tested to work with some…

  • Centos brcm-iscsi.log

    We have noticed a log related to iscsi daemons filling up disk space on a few of our Centos 5 VPSs lately. There have been a few reports of this in other places: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-1046154.html It seems after you do a yum or apt-get update past Centos 5.6, this unneeded service will sometimes get enabled: #…