MySQL 5.1 offers some major improvements in some areas to MySQL 5.0. MySQL 5.1 was released over a year ago and it’s been a long wait for those cpanel users needing 5.1 features.

Upgrading is not as easy as the 4.0 – 5.0 upgrade but looks to be a reasonable procedure.

In reality, the way your business’s DNS is handled can be a gift or a curse. I can’t think of a technology that has been under more security scrutiny lately than DNS. Years after our typical DNS system was thought to be safe, huge exploits have been found having the potential to wreak havoc on large portions of the internet.

To start off with, what exactly is DNS?

DNS or Domain Naming System is basically a directory of what domain belongs to a particular IP address. A domain can have other features such as email, ftp, sub domains, all of which DNS can manage. In reality, it’s a lot more complicated than this, but for simplicities sake, it just matches a domain to an IP. An IP address is something computers understand, and a domain is something humans understand. Without DNS we wouldn’t have the internet as we know it.

How DNS affects your business…

For the purpose of this article, there’s two main uses of DNS that businesses run into. The first is the DNS that your computer or office uses to connect you to another website. When you click on a link or enter a website in the address bar, your computer goes out and through a series of DNS servers, directs your browser to the server of the website you are trying to reach.

The second, from the other side of the picture, is how the DNS of your website is registered with the DNS servers of the internet. This is important because when someone goes to visit your site, the registrar lists your root DNS servers, and the visitor queries those to find out the actual location of your site.

Where all of this can go wrong…

The easiest way for DNS to work against you, is that if someone has the ability to change the DNS entries that your DNS server would normally give you. Meaning, that if you request the IP for google.com, you are sent to the wrong server such as: hacked-spam-server.com. This is called DNS poisoning, and is a very common tactic for phishing, and malicious attacks. Old DNS servers are particularly vulnerable to poisoning.

As far as your website goes, if your DNS server is the same server that your site is hosted on, which is very common, and the server goes down or is unreachable, it’s as if your site doesn’t exist at all. This can have dire consequences from search engines and even large networks depending on how long DNS entries are cached for.

There are two similar fixes for these, both involve you not managing your own DNS…

For your office network, use a DNS provider like Open DNS. You can add open DNS IP addresses to your router, or to your computer’s network configuration. This will prevent any DNS poisoning to your network, and will also give you the ability to block spam and other websites from your network completely. You can block pornography, malware, proxies, and just about anything else using Open DNS. This is an essential tool for small business owners and IT administrators that don’t want the hassle of managing their employees browsing habits.

For your websites, use a 3rd party DNS service. DNS Made Easy (not free) is a perfect example of this type of service. Instead of entering the address of your own DNS servers, enter the addresses of the 3rd party servers with your website registrar. Services like DNS Made Easy have multiple redundant servers for DNS, so if your server goes down, search engines and browsers have the correct location of it. This way they will be more likely to return once it is back up. You can also use DNS for website fail-over, which would automatically direct traffic to an alternate server if your primary server becomes unavailable.

Troubleshooting and fixing DNS problems can be extremely difficult due to DNS caching, and the fact that you probably don’t have control over any DNS server than your own. For this reason, and to save time and money, I highly recommend using 3rd party services for your DNS.

Just to dispel any theory dissolving that old ‘Death and Taxes’ quote, internet purchases are not tax free. That’s right. As the wording goes, most internet companies don’t have to collect out of state sales tax. However, consumers, businesses and any end users still must pay a “Use Tax” on non-taxed purchases that they make through mail-order or online.

Most states currently have Use Tax which specifically requires consumers to pay their state sales tax on purchases they make online that are not taxed by the business. There are some exemptions for certain types of products and for states that do not have any sales tax, but for the most part, taxes on these purchases are required to be paid to your state government. With the exception of very large purchases, use tax is rarely if ever monitored, as it would simply be an impossible feat for any state government to handle. However, we can all be sure that states are losing out on millions if not billions in uncollected taxes, so if you aren’t paying them, enjoy the free ride while it lasts.

Here’s a Use Tax table that I came up with covering which states require it:
(Let me pre-apologize about all of the PDF links here, Government websites are about as bad as they come, and in many cases PDF’s are the only pages available.)

ConfigServer Security & Firewall (csf)

This is essentially an extension of iptables firewall that integrates with a nice GUI in the WHM interface. It makes configuring the server’s firewall a snap, and also suggests other security fixes based on how your server is setup.

The installation took about 5 minutes to complete and another half hour to fully configure. You will need ssh or other shell access to install it on a server. This is an absolute necessity for any server. I only wish I would have found it a long time ago, as it is a huge time-saver.

About 5 minutes later, after the site didn’t return, I realized that there was a real problem. I called my host and asked them to check my server out. They proceeded to reboot the server, several times, and again nothing. After several minutes of diagnostics, the cause was traced the the primary hard drive, which had failed, mechanically.

Now, I backup my sites regularly, and I backup my databases, but even so I wasn’t prepared for a mechanical failure of the server. I have a very good host, and they worked at 2AM to get my server back up by the next day. After about 6 hours they got my server back up with a new hard drive, reinstalled operating system, new control panel, and then they handed it over to me.

Even with backups of everything, it has taken several weeks to get all of the sites back up and running. The ecommerce websites were the highest priority, so they went back up first. Just Ftp’ing the data back to the server took over 24 hours because there was a lot on there and there were a lot of individual websites on there. Then there were a bunch of SSL certificates that needed to be re-created, the firewall needed to be re-configured. In all there were over 80 websites that went down with the server.

The point:
The point to this article is to remind website owners that they need to make very sure that they have a backup in the event that their website goes down. Nobody expects it to happen, and nobody wants it to happen, but it does happen.

My recommendation:
Most importantly, use a good web host. Whether they do backups for you or not, make sure that your server is monitored and manned 24 hours a day. If I didn’t have 24 hour support, I could have lost thousands of dollars in sales the next day because my website would not have been live.

Next, pay the extra money for a mirrored RAID setup with your server. Unfortunately, this server didn’t have RAID at the time, but RAID would have completely prevented this problem from becoming as bad as it did. The server would most likely have been down for a little while, but none of the data would have been lost. RAID alone would have saved hundreds of hours of work in getting all of the websites back up.

Make Daily or Weekly backups of all of your data, especially information in your database. Most websites are cached in Google which can make restoring static pages simple, but there is nothing that can restore your database. If you update your sites daily, back them up daily. If you update them weekly, then back them up weekly.

Don’t store backups on the same server as the websites. In the event of a mechanical failure, all of your data on the failed hard drive will be gone. Keep backups on a remote computer.

Note:
If you store sensitive information on your server, and you need to back it up, make sure that your backups are encrypted and not stored on a public computer or server.

Full on load balancing and redundancy:
For most websites this is a bit of overkill, but if you have the traffic volume, look into getting several servers. You can setup server clusters, use DNS balancing, or traditional load balancing. There are many ways to ensure website redundancy, so your website never goes down. These setups are very expensive, but if you have the need, then the price is probably not the issue.

If you are looking for a managed or dedicated server, I highly recommend checking out 800 hosting. They have reasonable prices and their support is excellent. Any company that drops what they are doing for 6 hours to build a server at 2AM on Monday morning, passes the good support test in my book.