Tag: Apache

In our modern world of smartphones and applications, it is more important than ever to have a fast, responsive website that impresses your visitors. Created by the development team at Facebook, ReactJS is a JavaScript ‘framework’ or method of building web pages and apps that can ‘react’ to user interaction and external changes. ReactJS does this via components that can refresh themselves and their contents without a page reload. Better still, these components are modular. This concept means they can be coded quickly (called ‘hacking’ in the ReactJS community) and reused easily between projects.

In our last tutorial, we showed you how to install Apache’s mod_fcgid and provided Linux scripts to assist in transitioning from mod_php. In this next section, we’ll be discussing how to configure a baseline setting for PHP optimization.

When it comes to PHP execution, mod_fcgid (also called FCGI) is one of the heavyweight contenders. There are a few rival handlers, like PHP-FPM or mod_lsapi, which come close to matching its execution speed, but they generally leave something to be desired when it comes to fine-tuning and resource consumption. FCGI is built for speed and includes a myriad of Apache directives that can be leveraged for resource regulation.

Similar to Dropbox and Google Drive, Nextcloud is self-hosting software that allows you to share files, contacts, and calendars. But, unlike Dropbox and Google Drive, your files will be private and stored on your server instead of a third-party server. Nextcloud is a GDPR and HIPAA compliant hosting solution, so your files will be encrypted along with the ability to audit. For this tutorial, we’ll be installing our Nextcloud instance on our Ubuntu VPS server.

Sites with SSL are needed more and more every day. Its ubiquitous enforcement challenges website encryption and is even an effort that Google has taken up. Certbot and Let’s Encrypt are popular solutions for big and small businesses alike because of the ease of implementation.  Certbot is a software client that can be downloaded on a server, like one of our Ubuntu VPS servers, to install and auto-renew SSLs. It obtains these SSLs by working with the well known SSL provider called Let’s Encrypt. In this tutorial, we’ll be showing you a swift way of getting HTTPS enabled on your site.  Let’s get started!

What Does Varnish Do?

Varnish is a website accelerator. It’s designed to decrease the time it takes for your website to load and an ideal tool for improving performance on busy, mission-critical sites.

Mod_security, also commonly called Modsec for short, is a powerful WAF (Web Application Firewall) that integrates directly into Apache’s module system. This direct integration allows the security module to intercept traffic at the earliest stages of a request. Early detection is crucial for blocking malicious requests before they are passed along to web applications hosted by Apache websites. This provides and extra layer of protection against common threats a server faces. This article will explore the installation of mod_security along with the CRS (Core Rule Set) in an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Server running Apache 2.4.

What is Poweradmin?

Poweradmin is a web-based graphical user interface to interact with PowerDNS. It is released under the open source GPL license. It makes it easy to create and edit zone files and interacts directly with the SQL server. Poweradmin has full support for most PowerDNS features, including all zone types (master, native and slave), supermasters, for automatic provisioning of slave zones and full support for A, AAAA, CNAME, HINFO, MX, NS, PTR, SOA, SRV and TXT record types, validation against RFC’s. It also has user and permission management setup for controlling user permissions with templates.  In this tutorial, we’ll be showing you how to install and configure Poweradmin as well as some records.

Our previous article in this series focused on defining and fitting MPM to match your environment.  Building from our last tutorial we will be discussing specific details on how to adjust the previously mentioned Apache configuration directives on the various types of Liquid Web VPS servers as well as Core managed servers.  

How directives behave and which directives are mainly available hinges on the loaded MPM. As discussed in our previous series, MPM is short for MultiProcess Modules, and they determine the basis for how Apache addresses multiprocessing. Using our last article on Apache MPM Modules as a springboard, we will use this section to cover the following subsections: