Category Archives: Site Management

Howdy loyal customers,

We have some great new updates to report and too many to include in a single release or even a few. We have been experiencing some great growth the past few years and in these tough economic times we have decided its time to give a little back. We will be turning more of our marketing funds inwards to increase referrals for a period.

One of the most common mistakes among hosts these days is uncontrolled growth. Which brings us to why you have chosen JaguarPC.com as your provider with over 10 years experience in this industry. October 2008 marks our 10th complete year in business, past the dot com bombs, past the fly-by-night hosts, past the competition. From our families to yours, thank you all for the success and please let us know how we are doing.

So without further delay the hosting story of JaguarPC: I started JaguarPC in Alaska as dial-up ISP while working in the active duty Air Force. It was 1998 and I went to a technology expo one cold boring day where I met some people and read a few things that peaked my interests.  I bought my first server, a coblat raq, that I still have today and it actually works flawlessly if you can believe that. Of course it just collects dust now as a reminder of where things started.

Uncle Sam sent me off to Arizona after 5 years of Alaska where I spent another 2 years building up JaguarPC. It spent a good many years as a one man show with some occasional hired help before Masood (our current CTO) joined in to help, quickly followed by Les (our COO) .  As my time with the Air Force ran out I moved to Texas and with the help of my friends, and we took JaguarPC to the next level. Since then it has grown 1200% and we continue to set the pace for hosting companies everywhere.

I can’t honestly say just how often and how many times either directly from vendors and friends or indirectly through clients and articles, we see other hosts trying to catch up with our innovations. Many of our innovations eventually become an industry standard. If I have one regret (and I don’t) it would only be we didn’t take enough credit for all the positive changes we, JaguarPC, have brought to this industry. Which brings me back to my point, another first, another innovation.

As far as I know, and I have tried to find others but just can’t, we are the only host in history to ever automatically upgrade our clients like we did when we made our last plan changes. We literally locked all the pricing of clients as they were that day, upgraded all the plans, and kept on rolling. Most places require clients to cancel or just give up and go away when new plans come out. In many cases plans and new sales are just meant to attract new clients because in business if you’re not growing you’re dying. I understand that part but what I don’t get is how companies can forget without that client base that continues to stick around and renew services, you would be constantly turning your wheels to replace your losses.  As everyone starts to tighten down their spending we’re leading the industry with innovation again as we have done before.

Here’s a glimpse of what’s been done and what’s to come:

- Many new faces in the staff, sales, support, management.

- Several new under and above the hood features designed with one goal, focus on quality assurance.

- New support ticket system, rating and tracking features, and extended coverage with more sys admins

- Entire new ordering system for both our site and existing clients using the client dashboard

- Deployed major new capacity for our DatalockBox service, added to every shared, SDX, reseller, and VPS system we run.

- Expanded backup capacity again to reduce compression levels and increase restore times

- Rewards system launched, earn cash and points for freebies and services

- Improved affilites tracking and reporting

- New user system that allows you to create dashboard users with specific permissions; billing, support, etc

- All new Hybrid server plans, fully managed, packed with resources and features such as free cPanel for under $100.

- All new dedicated server plans now all including free managed services

And the list goes on but I’ll save the details for our newsletters, watch the press!

We’re very grateful for all the loyal clients that have taken me and the 75 souls that work for our company to these heights. We look forward to a banner year in 2009!

Google has made several changes and/or added new features to their already existing features. For example, you can now Spice up your inbox with colors and themes. This change I embraced as I am always on the lookout for a new, colorful, appealing, and/or easier-to-navigate theme for the products I use.

Then Google changed the Google Reader interface. This change annoyed me quite a bit at first as they actually made some things harder to find, such as how to “show all” or “show updated” items. It took me a week to figure out that I needed to click the tiny little down arrow to the right of “Subscriptions” to get to those menu options. When they announced the change all they said about that particular change was:

• The “Show all – updated” controls are now in the Subscriptions options menu.

I kept looking for the word “Options” and didn’t realize it was a tiny down facing arrow. Once I figured that out and got used to all the changes I like it well enough. But I think the prior interface was actually easier to navigate. Maybe it’s just me?

Yesterday Google announced “A new Google Sitemap Generator for your website“. I haven’t played much with this yet and I liked the old one well enough for my personal web site. Have you had a chance to mess with it and see if the changes are for the better?

Google even changed their favicon. While the new one is more colorful, it’s going to have to grow on me a bit for me to like this change.

Today Google announced even more changes such as Changes to engineering and Changes to recruiting.

Google is changing all over the place. None of them too dramatic in the grand scheme of things, and most are improvements in my opinion. What has been your experience?

JaguarPC, a leading provider of end-to-end web hosting solutions for over a decade, today announced the launch of its new comprehensive rewards program for JaguarPC customers to earn points towards rewards such as service credit, free hosting, upgrades and more.

“JagRewards” consists of a points-based client loyalty rewards program with various points for different actions. No expiration dates on JagRewards points means customers can redeem points for a variety of benefits including free product and service upgrades.

One of the most attractive features of JagRewards is the retroactive application of points for existing customers, which rewards long-time loyal customers of JaguarPC. The retroactive feature is automatically applied to all JaguarPC clients. Long-time customers of JaguarPC will be pleasantly surprised to find pre-populated balances in their rewards account based on the bills paid and time with JaguarPC through the years.

JagRewards awards points based on criteria such as length of time with JaguarPC, services and plans purchased, payment history and referring new customers. Some sample reward points include:

-2,500 points for signing up with JagRewards -2,500 for each referral
-1 point for each dollar spent
-250 points for each month you do not require support -50 points per month as an active client

Points can be redeemed for extra services and features on their accounts or credits for outstanding bills. Some examples include service credit, free hosting and hosting upgrades.

“JagRewards is all about thanking our loyal customers and having fun while doing it,” says Greg Landis, president of JaguarPC. “It’s an opportunity for users of JaguarPC to experience the solid reliability and dedicated service we offer while making and saving money at the same time. It’s a win-win situation, and we’ll be looking to constantly evolve the program based on feedback we receive.”

To learn more and sign up for JagRewards, please visit www.jaguarpc.com/services/rewards.php.

About JaguarPC

JaguarPC, based in Houston Texas, provides high-quality Internet hosting solutions to small and medium-sized businesses, government agencies, prominent individuals and non-profit organizations worldwide. JaguarPC’s core portfolio comprises information technology and business hosting services, as well as programming services. JaguarPC’s complementary subsidiary business is Devpond software, a web software company. JaguarPC is owned by Landis Holdings Inc., which also includes WowVPS!, ResellerZoom and HostingZoom. Learn more at www.JaguarPC.com

JaguarPC is now using Twitter. You can see JaguarPC on twitter here: http://twitter.com/jaguarpc

If you don’t know what Twitter is, you aren’t using the internet enough. From the Twitter Support page:

What is it?

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

How do I use it?

Tell us what you’re doing in 140 characters or less! Send your thoughts, observations, and goings-on in your day. Whether you’re “eating an apple” or “looking forward to the weekend” or “Heading out of town” it’s twitter-worthy.

Do I need anything special to use Twitter?
In order to use Twitter you will need one of these things: an internet connection or a mobile phone.

How can I send updates to Twitter?
Send updates to friends and family about what you’re doing in the way that works best for you. Update in myriad ways:

• from your phone


• from your logged-in home page


• from m.twitter.com.


• from any of the third party applications on Twitter Fan Wiki, made by the talented folks who’ve utilized our API.

There’s more on the support page but you get the idea. I’ve personally been using twitter for several months and it’s quite addicting.

Do you Twitter?

its 404 week at webmaster central

farewell to soft 404s

now that weve bid farewell to soft 404s

make your 404-pages more useful

Domain owners receive a email like this.

Asia Network is the company of internet services that the domain

registration is one of the major online style of our service range. Now we have something need to confirm with you.We hope you to cooperate with us.On Aug. 5th 2008,we received an application from one person named “Karl Fischer” who wants to register some domains(designsbyoldcrow.asia designsbyoldcrow.com.cn designsbyoldcrow.eu designsbyoldcrow.info designsbyoldcrow.cn designsbyoldcrow.net).According to our investigation,we found that domain names have relevance to your company’s name and trademark,so we send this email for you to confirm it.We are dealing with this

affair in these days,so we wish to get the confirmation and the assent of your company.If Karl Fischer doesn’t belong to your company and you don’t authorize him to register these domains,Pls contact with me asap in order to prevent some guy from abusing your trademarks and the company names.

In addition,I must declare that we have time limited for one person or one company’s registration.It is just 15 days.If your company has no response to us within the dispute period,we will unconditionally authorized the application of Karl Fischer.In order to deal with this issue better,please let someone who is responsible for trademark or domain name contact me asap.Thank you for your cooperate.

Best Regards,

*Eamonn Young

*Sponsoring Registrar:

Asia Network

Add:UNITS A&B 15/F NEICH TOWER 128 GLOUCESTER RD WANCHAI, HK

Tel: +852 3118 1808

Fax: +852 3065 8189

Email:eamonn@asianetworks.asia

The emails are targeting the owners of the first registered domain name.  They imply that someone is interested in registering all the other country specific extension of your domain name.

Unfortunately a lot of people panic, because they think their actual domain name may be in jeopardy.  In fact when I recived a email like this a few weeks ago that was my first thought.  Someone was trying to register my domain name.  Then I realized that was not possible.

I didn’t start looking into this until a couple of people I knew had also received a similar email

Here are a couple of blog articles that will explain this scam better than I can.  It is a scam.

Trusted MD.com

Fire Trust

Today we find in our voicemail queue that someone overnight left a rather unique message. We were rickrolled.

Wikipedia definition of “Rickrolling”

Rickrolling is an Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up“. The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a Web link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true source of the link without clicking (and thus satisfying their curiosity). When a person clicks on the link given and is led to the web page he/she is said to have been “Rickrolled”.

So… anyone gonna confess?

You may or may not have heard of the term, “Phishing” (pronounced like “fishing”). Phishing is the act of sending an email pretending to be from an online store or service such as eBay, PayPal, Amazon, major banks, etc.

The format of the email will look very similar to a standard email you would get from such a service. It might even contain the company’s logo. Here’s an example phishing email I received a while back:

PayPal is committed to maintaining a safe environment for its community of customers. To protect the security of your account, PayPal employs some of the most advanced security systems in the world and our anti-fraud teams regularly screen the PayPal system for unusual activity.

We are contacting you to remind you that on 28 September 2006 our Account Review Team identified some unusual activity in your account. In accordance with PayPal’s User Agreement and to ensure that your account has not been compromised, access to your account was limited. Your account access will remain limited until this issue has been resolved.

To secure your account and quickly restore full access, we may require some additional information from you for the following reason:

We have been notified that a card associated with your account has been reported as lost or stolen, or that there were additional problems with your card.

This process is mandatory, and if not completed within the nearest time your account or credit card may be subject for temporary suspension.

To securely confirm your PayPal information please click on the link bellow:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run

We encourage you to log in and perform the steps necessary to restore your account access as soon as possible. Allowing your account access to remain limited for an extended period of time may result in further limitations on the use of your account and possible account closure.

For more information about how to protect your account please visit PayPal Security Center. We apologize for any incovenience this may cause, and we apriciate your assistance in helping us to maintain the integrity of the entire PayPal system.

Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Team

It looks pretty real doesn’t it? Someone who’s not ever experienced receiving an email like this or isn’t very familiar with how PayPal works may fall for it. The email seems harmless and the link even appears to go PayPal.

First and foremost: PayPal, eBay, Amazon, and most likely your bank will not send you such an email if your account was truly compromised. So this is your first clue that the above and similar emails are a phishing attempt.

The link looks real doesn’t it? Take a closer look. Does the link actually go to PayPal?

No, it doesn’t. The link actually goes to http://www.blahblah2.paypal345.blarg.org.com.net/ which is something I just made up. In a real phishing attempt the link may contain the word PayPal (or ebay or your bank, etc) in the URL as this one does, but it’s not really PayPal. Don’t be fooled!

What you’ll be taken to is a site that will look like PayPal, may even look exactly like the PayPal home page, and there will be a form for you to enter your information. Usually it will ask for your account ID, password, credit card number and possibly your social security number. Once you hit submit after filling out the form, that information is collecting by identify thefts who will then use your information to make fraudulent purchases. They will very likely also purchase a web hosting account that will be used for their scam. (They also hack into unsuspecting innocent people’s websites and upload scripts and mailers to send out these notifications and collect data from people who fall for their phishing emails.)

Another clue is these emails usually contain poor grammar and misspelled words. In my example above, take a look at the last paragraph. Most major companies know how to spell, “incovenience” (inconvenience) and “apriciate” (appreciate) and if they don’t they are usually smart enough to run emails they send to their customers through a spell-checker.

When it doubt, never never never click a link you receive in email that states you need to update your PayPal account. Always go to paypal.com, ebay.com or your bank, etc. by typing the address in your browser if you need to update account information. You can always call them as well and see if your account actually does have any issues.

If you receive an email supposedly from PayPal, your bank, etc, telling you there was suspicious activity, or that you need to update your account, if there was an unverified transaction, or anything at all that directs you to click a link to correct the situation, do NOT click the link and input any information. Always always go to the the sites manually. Report the emails you receive to the abuse address for the website/service you are trying to visit. For PayPal it’s spoof@paypal.com. For eBay it’s spoof@ebay.com

MySQL provides cluserting but not fail over for end user. So here at JaguarPC Web Hosting labs we tested MySQL fail over cluserting. To setup MySQL clustering a minimum of 3 computers are required. However recommended number is 4 or more. And to setup a failover mysql cluster, we add one more machine making it 5. There are 3 parts in a MySQL Cluster:

Data: 2 or more nodes act as data. In MySQL 5.0, the data sits in memory, while in 5.1 data can go on disk as well (5.1 is release candidate). For our testing we use 2 data nodes. When one of the node dies, the other will serve the data.

Management: One machine is used for cluster management. Once the cluster is started and this machine goes down, the cluster can continue to work. So this is not critical for our fail over setup.

SQL:: 2 test machines were setup as SQL nodes in failover with a single “floating IP”. When one died, the “floating IP” moved to the second machine using arp spoofing. MySQL client would connect to SQL node using that floating IP, so for the client MySQL Server remains up and running when one of the SQL nodes die. This part of the setup is JaguarPC’s own making and is available through Dedicated Server Hosting offer.

The rough diagram for this whole setup is as follows:

MySQL client -> [ 2 SQL nodes fail-over ] -> [ 2 data nodes ]

RAM Requirement for Data Node: Since MySQL 5.0 uses RAM to hold the data in data nodes, you can use the following formula for obtaining a rough estimate of how much RAM is needed for each data node in the cluster:

(SizeofDatabase × NumberOfReplicas × 1.1 ) / NumberOfDataNodes

Say our database size is 10 GB, and we make 2 replicas and host it on 4 nodes, then we need about 6GB RAM in each node. If we store our 10GB with 2 replicas in 6 nodes, then we need 4GB RAM in each node. You get the idea.

More will be posted later about this topic.

My website was working for years on the old host but now it does not work on new host. Why? This is one of annoyances that come up because some people fail to realize that there are just too many variables at function here. For a website to operate, there are many building blocks, e.g. Web Server, Scripting Language, Database. And not only that, there are zillions of verions of these tools. If your site code was designed in the last century, it is possible that it will not work in the 21st century. No wait, if it was designed last year with the tool that was developed 5 years ago, it may not work today. Confused?

A static website that is composed of HTML/css/js is served by a web server as it is to the browser which renders and displays it to the client. However if your site is dynamic and is coded in a certain language (e.g. php or perl) that code has to run on the server to make web pages. That code may be written in a certain version of langauge which may be a mismatch between your old host and new host (or your old server and new server). As a responsible website owner you should be aware of what are the pre-requisites of your site code. Not only that, you need to regularly update the code to newest version of tools and make it compatible with them. If your site code has not changed since years, chances are that you are risking your entire hosting account and site, as many bugs that were unknown before may have been released in public. And those known exploits can used by script kiddies to hack your site remotely.

In short, a website owner needs to keep his code upto-date so that (1) it works on newest technologies and server tools (2) it is not open for remote exploits and abuse.

As a starting point, for a Linux Shared Hosting, you should be aware that PHP4 is phasing out and PHP5 is the future. MySQL4 database is also being replaced with MySQL5. So you need to learn how to update the code or get in touch with the developer/vendor of your web application to make it compatible.