Like most good hosting support folks, security tops the list of my priorities. While a good firewall, and true Web Application Firewall are the best means for helping with this, sometimes shared hosting services will not change the configurations they have in place to support the necessary security for a Wordpress website. In steps the iThemes Security plugin. iThemes acts like a WAF, in that it can detect (via a vast network) bad bots, known hackers, and most known vulnerabilities in Wordpress. I will lay out what I use on all of the sites I manage hosting for (note, this number as of today, is in the thousands), as well as enabling the necessary configuration needed to allow iThemes to do it's thing when you… Read More
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By: Kevin On: August 30, 2019
Posted In: Development Hosting Linux Server Management Software Software Source Code Ubuntu bash compression hosting linux nginx shell shell scripting web hosting
We recently found ourselves needing a new incremental file backup system... something we could use to remotely store, something fast, something secure, and ultimately something reliable.In steps Duplicity.Duplicity allows us to sync incremental file backups to our cloud storage flawlessly; it has helped reduce backup file size, allows us to encrypt the backups, and reduce the amount of bandwidth needed for transferring both backups and restores. Overall giving our developers a much needed break from their manual backups.The script in our repo contains an installer that will setup everything you will need on your servers for this, though please do note that the restore is incomplete. While we have verified manual account & app restores, we have not been able to perfect account based restores.… Read MoreBy: Kevin On: March 7, 2019
Posted In: Development Hosting Hosting Linux nGinx Security Security Security Server Management Ubuntu centos form security hosting nginx security ubuntu
Wow! It's been a little while since I have had the time to post another article. Well, here I am again, back at it.This time, I will show you an optimal way to keep your site secure utilizing a bit of nginx configuration. You will need to do some work before implementing this, so please do not attempt to simply copy/paste this and expect it to work out of the box. # Default security headers add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains; preload"; # enable, cache, and preload subdomains add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN" always; # generally only allow SAMEORIGIN frame sources add_header X-Xss-Protection "1; mode=block"; # protect against Cross-Site Scripting add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff" always; # no sniffing allowed! add_header Referrer-Policy "strict-origin"; # protect agains cross-linking add_header X-Download-Options "noopen"; #… Read MoreBy: Kevin On: July 1, 2016
Posted In: CSS Design Development Hosting Mobile First PHP Plugins Security Theme Development Updates Wordpress caching compression css design practices development javascript mobile first mobile friendly php speed up the web wordpress wordpress performance
In part I, I walked you through my server setup to achieve a 1 second load time for my site. It is a Wordpress site, with a custom theme I developed. I gandered at the possibility of by-passing Wordpress's front-end engine, however, I found myself needing some of the built-in functionality Wordpress offers. Items like custom posts, pages, and even posts are simple sql queries, however; widgets, shortcodes, and most plugins then become unavailable. So, I delved into the realm of research and found Wordpress core functionality offered the functionality I required, with very little performance hit; so I decided to simply extend some memcached functionality when pulling my pages/posts/widget/etc... The only thing I found that I lost was time, and in the end drastically improved the… Read MoreBy: Kevin On: June 10, 2016
Posted In: Development Hosting Lemp Commander Linux nGinx Security Security Server Management Software Theme Development Ubuntu Updates Wordpress bash nano nginx shell shell scripting speed up the web web hosting wordpress performance
I have successfully managed to get around a 1 second load time on my Wordpress site, While getting 250 concurrent users over a 1 minute test period. (Source: https://webpagetest.org/result/210128_Di26_15d11aa18013d1df9ebc867e1aa9c2f3/) This was done with a combination of items, stemming from the server install up to Wordpress theme development. Here is how I did it, so maybe you can too. Server Setup Here we will start from the ground up. Items you will need: VirtualBox, Ubuntu 16.04 64b Server ISO, Time My virtual machine is setup with 4G of RAM, using 2 CPU's, with 80G SSD, and a Bridged Networking adapter Boot to the ISO, and start the installation process. Everything can be setup how you wish, however, I custom partitioned, as well as, only installed the… Read More