I changed ownership (user) of the cache and uploads folder to apache by

chown apache uploads
chown apache cache

to enable apache to write to it

chmod was set to more restrictive value of 755 each instead of easily
exploitable (as it happened on solarvps and zone.net) chmod 777

chmod 755 uploads
chmod 755 cache

giving me the following structure

ls -l /wp-content/

drwxr-xr-x 2 apache psacln 60416 May 3 05:39 cache
-rw-r--r-- 1 comh4x3d psacln 30 Nov 14 03:26 index.php
drwxr-xr-x 83 comh4x3d psacln 3072 Apr 17 12:48 plugins
drwxr-xr-x 9 comh4x3d psacln 1024 Apr 17 12:37 themes
drwxr-xr-x 5 comh4x3d psacln 1024 Mar 25 07:04 upgrade
drwxr-xr-x 3 apache psacln 8192 May 3 05:38 uploads

by that wordpress can upload files to the uploads folder and files can
be created in the cache folder.

to restrict the folders even more I added a
.htaccess file with chmod 644 each

vi .htaccess

for uploads:

Deny from all
Allow from 72.249.95.104 # server IP address

Order Allow,Deny
Deny from all
# deny everything but the
image and text files
Allow from all


# deny
opening those files
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from all


similar file for the cache folder, but instead of the image and doc
files only meta and html are allowed, make sure to remove html from
execcgi line

I hope you appreciate this article,

best,
julian klewes
h4x3d.com

Solar VPS - Green hosting

Today I have received an email from Sean at zone.net stating that effective from four months now onwards all VPS (Virtual Private Server) business will be transfered to SolarVPS.

Sean speaks very highly of SolarVPS’ CEO and managing director and excuses for the “crap” level of support that zone.net customers had to endure in the past few months.

The official press release can be found on Solar VPS’ news section. Being transparent about communication is one of the major pillars of decent business – “I like”.

Some famous highlights include the multi-day downtime due to some failure and a for-ages taking check-disk (from 11:48 AM EST(11/7/2008) to 7:19 PM EST (11/9/2008), where as it would be more like 9am to 8pm, frankly)

Also some minor, less exciting downtimes of twelve to twenty hours recently can be recalled by some of you.

My phone-calls to the 001 yank-hotline have been answered but greeted with massive unfriendliness and really low level of knowledge stating “we are aware that our sites (cough and yours) are currently unavailable”.

I am curious what the time at SolarVPS will bring – the mail sent by Sean listed an email address by which management might be contacted directly.

If SolarVPS prolong zone.net’s sponsorship agreement I would be keen to give them a ride.

In the meantime, if you have any other recommendations or comments, feel free to contact me.

Oh- and the new site is coming, I am currently just looking into a way to politely tell IE6 visitors (still 26% over the past few months) to upgrade or switch.

Having worked in a major PR company in the last six month and having experienced the (probably worst) “almost” over-sea like IT support, I see the problems with upgrading, however believe it should be able to replace a seven year old piece of software with something newer (IE7, IE8 beta, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc).

Domain : H4X3D.COM
Primary IP address   : 72.249.95.103
Host         : zone.net
Organization : Colo4Dallas LP
Location     : US, United States
City         :  Dallas, TX 75247
Latitude     :  32°81'48" North
Longitude    :  96°87'06" West

Sometime around May I decided to have my website transfered over to zone.net as I outgrew Dreamhost.

Dreamhost, which now offers quite some cool setups (such as pimping up your server by additional ram etc), has kind of “chucked me” off due to excessive CPU use that was triggered by my WordPress install (running WP-Cache of course).
I was told, I outgrew a shared environment and should opt to either switch to their (at this time) 360$/month plan or get another hosting provider. when asked what to get, I was told “a vps with plenty of ram”.

I had a particular setup in mind and was thinking of either joining jaguar pc hosting or zone.net.

What I did like at zone.net at this point was the working live-support. I clicked “live support” – chat now and within seconds I was talking to someone who had a clue and cared about getting me to move over.

I opted zone.net as they promised to set-up my domain(s) in before of moving for free and making the transition happen without any downtime.

It worked this way, I sent my sql databases to them and uploaded a four gig rar-file to third-party server (always handy to have another one at hand). They downloaded everything and setup my VPS with CentOs, plesk and virtuozzo.

From my GoDaddy-domains I know there were plenty of discount codes around- as I couldnt find any for zone.net I blunty asked them if they had a promotion campaign running and if there was a zone.net discount code.
Their honest reply, which I appreciate, was “yes” and I was given the code to discount my setup and monthly fee by 10%. Seeing as I did not find any codes on Google, this was a good catch.

The transfer went smooth and the first weeks passed. Without any trouble, my site(s) ran smoothly, quicker than ever and with no downtime. Thanks to the watchdog module, that one employee installed, services that killed itself were automatically loaded again.

Ever since I moved my site to zone.net it has been growing prosperously with 15,000 visitors daily and increasing. WordPress and WP-Cache are working smoothly, Permalinks with htaccess are operational, too.

When I had trouble setting up WP-Cache (at one point you have to run a shell command to create a sym-link file), their Live-support helped me out in seconds.
I really liked the free and high-quality support at zone.net and the polite, yet direct employees.

The advantage of “sticking” with a company with a dozen employees is that in due progress you get to know everyone and they get to know you. You dont have to explain your setup and problems all over again, as your setup is known and sending passwords over etc has become obsolete.

Amongst my domains are also two German denic (DE) domains, the setup of them is very annoying, as you have to observe all kinds of regulations (like specific TTL time), different class C ips etc. – zone.net has been so accommodating to setup those different C-class ips for free.
I am quite sure that I would have had to pay additional money at almost every other company.

At my VPS I had Plesk and CentOS running, what I did not know is that you SHOULD not (seriously!!!) try to update your VPS (plesk) manually.
I pressed “auto-update” under plesk, and the whole vps went into full-out lockup mode. zone.net´s experienced techies had the website up within minutes, but still plesk was unaccessible.
This was the case for a week roughly and I did not receive any email for one week. This really annoyed me, but who to blame? It was all my fault- if I had not played around with things it would not have locked up so bad (internal errors all over the place). I decided to wait one week for them to find a solution, as the website was up, I was earning good money with it (around 40$ a day) and I did not care about emails… since it was only a secondary email address.

yet I wanted to have my plesk back.- so one employee worked on my vps for two days in a row and tried all kinds of hacks. still I did not work. so without asking, and I appreciate that, they cloned my “running” site and setup another vps and routed all traffic over there. wow. I did not know this was technically possible!!!

anyway, I had my plesk back and every setting I had done, was input kindly by the zone.net tech-man. If I had to do this all myself I would have lost valuable time at university that (at this point) I did not have.

Just a few weeks ago I received an email saying that my vps (and basically) every VPS had to be moved, as zone.net had bought their own network or net of servers or datacenter, I cannot remember what it was, anyway… my vps had to be moved, meaning starting at “zero”. A new vps was setup again, but since the ips changed, too I had to undergo the whole IPs annoyance with the german denic domains again.

luckily zone.net helped me out quickly and assured me things would work.
Indeed it did, the transfer went very smooth, as the old vps was not shutdown until the new one had been successfully “talking” with my nameserver.

Bad thing though was, that I lost several posts and comments, as in the meantime I was accessing (randomly) two different sites on different servers.
At one time, the old site loaded, the next hour the new one loaded and vice versa.

If you plan to transfer sites, you should not post anything and close comments. just as a matter of fact, that was my learning…

What I did not like about zone.net is that after the server move and in the meantime, they have seem to taken off the live-support. I loved to quickly address my problems and have them sorted out.

Now I have to reside to their (working!) ticket system, where I usually receive a reply within hours, but sometimes also days (but that´s my fault then again to not “bump” my tickets every now and then).

In general, I am very satisfied with the performance at zone.net, the level of support and the possibility of having almost EVERYTHING customized to my needs. I appreciate being a customer there, seriously! as soon as I experience something else, I will post it here, promised!

Yours,
jez

(lol this is almost a whole book of a post)

Google Adsense is taking the piss at the moment, that is why I changed the layout once more. See the images attached below.
Update: I changed the 468×60 banner to 336×280 in order to not break the layout for visitors surfing at lower screenresolutions (below 1024+). I use 1280×1024 if you wonder about the screenshots.

Before (three column layout)

After (two column layout)

Current layout (two column)

Internet Explorer renders it like this:

Update: The new ads are performing very good. In contrast to the mere $3,02 I made yesterday (no kidding), I already earned $7,64 today. Yay for some server money!

My website is hosted on a virtual private server by zone.net and costs $65 a month. If you want to help me fund it please donate some money. Thank you a lot!