Web Hosting

MICROLITE8 Plesk 12 Upgrade

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MICROLITE8.COM – Upgrades

During the period 14th/17th February the server hardware and plesk panel will be completely upgraded.

HARDWARE: The new hardware will improve the performance and reliability of the server. Response times and security will be greatly increased. The server will also be migrated to our new UK datacenter. The old IP address was 184.173.23.13. The new IP address will be 5.77.60.33.

SOFTWARE: The core OS of the new server will be of the latest stable version. PHP, MySQL  and all other features will be of the latest production versions.PANEL: The Plesk Panel will be upgrade to Plesk 12, the current latest version of Plesk. This will provide the very latest features, functionality and security for your accounts.WEBMAIL: AtMail is now replaced with the awesome RoundCube. Your username is in the format name@yourdomain.co.uk. Your passwords are unchanged. If you do have a problem with your mail password simply change it or request support to change it for you.COST: These are no-cost upgrades, there will be no additional charges to your account.

Plesk 12 User Guide: http://download1.parallels.com/Plesk/PP12/12.0/Doc/en-US/online/plesk-customer-guide/

Please refrain from making significant changes to your web site during this period. The migration of the data will take many hours. We request that you put off any changes until Monday to avoid an inconsistent transfer of your site data.UPDATE: 17/02 05:00 – The Plesk 12 migration is complete and live. All files have been migrated. If you suspect your have any missing files, databases or email please log a ticket with the helpdesk with details. The old server will remain online for 7 days and we can re-migrate any accounts during this time.UPDATE: 17/02 06:00 – During the migration process, some customers may have some emails duplicated. This is because during the copy, for caution, we overlapped to ensure no emails were missed. This means some emails may be copied twice. Clients can just delete any unwanted emails if this occurs for them.

MICROLITE5 Plesk 12 Upgrade

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MICROLITE5.COM – Upgrades

During the period 7th/8th February the server hardware and plesk panel will be completely upgraded.

HARDWARE: The new hardware will improve the performance and reliability of the server. Response times and security will be greatly increased. The server will also be migrated to our new UK datacenter. The old IP address was 184.173.23.61. The new IP address will be 5.77.60.29.

SOFTWARE: The core OS of the new server will be of the latest stable version. PHP, MySQL  and all other features will be of the latest production versions.PANEL: The Plesk Panel will be upgrade to Plesk 12, the current latest version of Plesk. This will provide the very latest features, functionality and security for your accounts.

WEBMAIL: AtMail is now replaced with the awesome RoundCube. Your username is in the format name@yourdomain.co.uk. Your passwords are unchanged. If you do have a problem with your mail password simply change it or request support to change it for you.

COST: These are no-cost upgrades, there will be no additional charges to your account.

Plesk 12 User Guide: http://download1.parallels.com/Plesk/PP12/12.0/Doc/en-US/online/plesk-customer-guide/

Please refrain from making significant changes to your web site during this period. The migration of the data will take many hours. We request that you put off any changes until Monday to avoid an inconsistent transfer of your site data.UPDATE: 07/02 05:00 – The Plesk 12 migration is complete and live. All files have been migrated. If you suspect your have any missing files, databases or email please log a ticket with the helpdesk with details. The old server will remain online for 7 days and we can re-migrate any accounts during this time.

UPDATE: 07/02 06:00 – During the migration process, some customers may have some emails duplicated. This is because during the copy, for caution, we overlapped to ensure no emails were missed. This means some emails may be copied twice. Clients can just delete any unwanted emails if this occurs for them.

Plesk Server Upgrades – Incoming

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So that we can continue to provide high levels of performance to all our hosting clients we are planning a number of upgrades to both server hardware and control panel software for 2015.

Plesk 9 – We know many of you love this old panel but unfortunately it’s time to say goodbye to it. All Plesk 9 servers will be upgraded to Plesk 11.5 during Q1 2015. Plesk 11.5 provide higher performance, security and a multitude of new features over Plesk 9. The server hardware will be completely replaced with current high performance hardware.

Plesk 10 – The remaining Plesk 10 servers will be upgraded to Plesk 11.5 during Q1 2015. The server hardware will be completely replaced with current high performance hardware.

Plesk 11/11.5 – Besides security and panel updates, these servers will remain as they are.

Plesk 12 – From Q2 2015 we will be rolling out Plesk 12 for all new accounts. We will offer free migrations from Plesk 11/11.5 to Plesk 12 when requested.

We are committed to ensure we have the highest performance and security available for all of our clients. We will update you directly when your server is affected with specific upgrade dates. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact the Helpdesk.

How to redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS using an .htaccess file

Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS using .htaccess

So you have installed your SSL Certificate and now you want to use it. Paste the following code to the beginning of your .htaccess file to redirect all non-https to https.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]

Find all WordPress folders with 777 permissions

How to find all folders with 777 permissions


As the owner of a dedicated server provided shared hosting services, you will find that many of your clients will install applications such as WordPress. So far so good. However, once they start getting stuck with file and folder permissions, they generally go crazy and set everything to 777 in order to fix the problems. Great, they get their site working! Now begin your problems.

With these liberal file and folder permissions together with some not-so-well written plugins, it is only a matter of time before the hackers and crackers target these weak WordPress sites and start injecting all manner of redirects and mail spammers on your server.

Using ‘find’ to locate those weaknesses

So, here is a nifty solution to find all those weak WordPress installations. The following find will list all WordPress installations that contain folders with 777 permissions:

find /var/www/vhosts/*/httpdocs/wp-content -perm 0777 -type d | grep -v "wp-content/"

Give this a whirl on your Plesk server and take a look at the list, navigate to each folder and tighten up the permissions as below:

cd /var/www/vhosts/dodgydomain.co.uk/httpdocs
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
chmod 750 ../httpdocs

These permission changes eliminate all unnecessary 777 permissions.

Ok, let’s automate the whole process

What? You have lots of these? Then here is a nifty script to automate the process for you:

df=`find /var/www/vhosts/*/httpdocs/wp-content -perm 0777 -type d | grep -v "wp-content/" \
| sed "s/wp-content//g"`

for line in $df;
  do
    echo $line
    cd $line
    find $line -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
    find $line -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
    chmod 750 $line
  done

This makes things a little more difficult for any would-be injection attempts. If your directory structure is different to the standard Plesk structure simply modify the find command as required.