| Posted by Pillhead, 06-27-2001, 04:50 PM | | Hi, I currently use donhost as a reseller, firstly I must say they offer a great service despite recent controversy.
However due to the safe mode restriction I am left with no choice than to move off somewhere else. Basically can I have any feed back on people that have used this company ???
http://www.2mhost.com/megares.html
Any help would be much appreciated, ill loose some of the benefits of donhost so I need to be particular first !
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| Posted by LBJ, 06-27-2001, 10:28 PM | | G'day Pillhead,
What exactly is "safe mode" when you're referring to DonHost's server?
With regards to 2mhost, alarm bells have to go off when you think about the following 4 points...
1./ Unlimited Bandwidth (it's simply unrealistic a la 9kd.net)
2./ A whois search would suggest they are a fairly recent start up company.
3./ Their web page looks like a quickly set up job. The layout is pretty, but the text has been barely proof read - if at all.
4./ Their physical contact information is *very* scant.
Best Regards,
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| Posted by Pillhead, 06-28-2001, 02:54 AM | | SAFE MODE is litterally security overkill. Its nice to see that they are taking security seriously, but this measure causes problems when running scripts.
Basically SAFE MODE means that any user cannot see outside space that belongs to that UID. You may think, but thats a good idea?, yes mabey, but when you have custom made scripts (PHP) and you use them to upload (like a free home page script) the files are first uploaded to the TMP directory.
After they have gone to the tmp directory they would normally go to the correct destination, safe mode prevents this, thus ruining uploads through PHP. Another problem was with the recent launch of ikonboard the forum software, the new installation procedure extracts the tar files on the server with a cgi script. Safe mode once again prevents this extraction because of having no access to the TMP dir.
There are several other problems that arrise through safe mode, being the reason why most hosts dont use it. One last problem that comes to mind would be if you use CGI for uploading the files are uploaded straight to your account but as UID 65535 (system default) then when I come to delete these files through normal FTP I cannont because I am UID 4367 or something. The only way to get rid of these files (which are in your home directory) is to get an ftp emulation script and delete them that way !
But dont get me wrong from all of this, Donhost is an excellent provider in all other ways, I would highly recommend them, they are great, there package is litteraly (hours and hours of research shows this) unbeatable, its just these trivial matters that will cause my unfortunate departure.
Thanks very much for the advice, you have brought some nice points to my attention, these seem to be the 2nd best in offer wise from Donhost so I may just give them a trial run and hope that it works out, unless someone has bad experience from them ?
Thanks again.
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| Posted by astralexis, 06-28-2001, 09:40 AM | | safe_mode is a way to run PHP4, where some security restrictions apply.
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| Posted by WebSnail.net, 06-28-2001, 03:15 PM | | Just a quick note but I get the impression from various conversations (phone and email) that Donhost are still getting to grips with particular technical issues including problems with their control panel.
All in all I guess the approach is... "when in doubt go for industrial strength protection" but I gotta admit, like you I'm looking elsewhere for a few of the more demanding site setups.
In the long term I guess that's ok as the site stays up longer but there's still areas that could use relaxing and other tightening up.
Bottom line, Donhost is not the best place for script intensive hosting. Like you I'd agree that otherwise it's a top notch host (well, so far!)
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| Posted by 2Mhost, 08-12-2001, 11:07 AM | | MOD EDIT:>>
Message removed due to having no relevance to the thread, as well as being cross posted in multiple threads.
<>
Last edited by Chicken; 08-12-2001 at 12:50 PM.
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| Posted by wmac, 08-12-2001, 08:55 PM | | Hello
Unlimmited bandwidth ? This is not logical.
I prefer to know exactly how much I am allowed to consume.
If I was you, I may chose mchost (unix) or vibus (windows).
Regards,
Mac
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| Posted by donhost, 08-13-2001, 05:18 AM | | Hi,
PHP uploads are traditionally uploaded to /tmp or /var/tmp. There are problems with using either of these partitions as either of them could be filled up by someone uploading lots of large files. If / is full the kernel will soon panic and die. If /var if full the mail queue will have no space and so emails will be bounced. We set the PHP upload directory to ./tmp which will put uploads into a directory called tmp within the directory that your PHP script resides. Create a directory called tmp and chmod it 777 and your PHP uploads will work.
I would however also point out that once our network upgrades taking place this Sunday, different services will be run from different machines and it will be possible for us to run PHP out of safe mode as a result which we will be doing. Therefore, after this Sunday this will not be an issue for you.
If you would like to read more about our network upgrades you can read a copy of our bulletin sent last week to all customers below.
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Dear Customer,
We are pleased to announce that the new improved version of our control panel and hosting technologies are ready for release. This latest release has been built on the basis of knowledge that we have learnt over the past months and the valuable comments obtained from our customers. These changes will bring greater speed, resilience and functionality to our already feature rich hosting products.
The migration to the new system is scheduled for Sunday 19th August 2001. Web sites and incoming email will be unaffected during this upgrade and a non-working day has been chosen for the work to minimise disruption to other services.
Control panel and FTP access will cease in the early hours of Sunday morning. Whilst it is hoped that the upgrade will be complete by midday, customers are advised that these services at worst may be unavailable for up to 12 hours. The availability of POP3 mail collection will be intermittent. We stress that the availability of your web sites will not be affected in any way and that you will not loose any email during these changes.
We would request that resellers take steps to inform their clients of these service interruptions.
For your information detailed information of the upgrades due to be carried out can be found below.
NETWORK FORMAT
Each server will be equipped with two network interfaces, one carrying packets destined for the Internet and the other being connected to a private LAN. This will provide a highly secure network for inter server communication and ensure that full bandwidth for Internet traffic is always available to each server. This private LAN will initially be operating only in Telehouse but will soon be extended to our Doncaster facility via an encrypted VPN to provide secure communication between the Doncaster based Windows 2000 web servers and the Telehouse based control servers.
A hardware based firewall will also be installed in Telehouse offering further enhanced security features.
SERVER FORMAT
We currently run each server with its own control panel, FTP and POP3 servers. Each server runs completely independently of all others on the network. With this configuration any one resellers sites must all be hosted on the same server. This makes it difficult to manage the load on servers.
The new system sees the implementation of separate FTP, mail, control panel and web servers. There will be a primary and backup incoming mail server, a dedicated POP3 server and a dedicated control panel server and FTP server.
The primary incoming mail server will be housed in our rack at Telehouse in London whilst the secondary incoming mail server will be hosted in our new Doncaster data centre. This configuration ensures that mail sent to any domain on our network will never be rejected as there will always be a mail server available to service requests.
FTP, POP3, control panel and UNIX web servers will continue to be hosted in Telehouse where they can enjoy high capacity Internet connections and full network redundancy.
Each web server will be a self contained unit with its hosted sites residing on local hard disk drives. This ensures that each web server can continue to serve sites even if it looses contact with its control servers for any reason.
This new configuration will also allow any one resellers sites to be spread across multiple servers providing us with enhanced management capabilities of server load and spreading risk for each reseller.
AUTHENTICATION
Our system currently uses standard UNIX password files to authenticate users for both FTP and POP3 mail accounts. As Donhost has progressed and the number of accounts on the system has risen, the time is takes for these password files to be constructed has increased. The point was reached some weeks ago when it was no longer practical or safe to rebuild the user database each time an account was added, rather the password database is built at set times. This translates to their being a delay in new accounts becoming active and accessible as well as for password changes to take effect.
The new system sees the introduction of a SQL based authentication scheme which will allow instant activation of newly created accounts as well as real time password updates. This method of authentication is also far more efficient in its use of system resources for authenticating users and so will reduce server load.
ERROR & PARK PAGES
Since each resellers sites will now be hosted on various different servers, it is not possible to implement a reliable error page and park page system. It is with regret therefore that these vital improvements must come at the expense of the error page and park page features. Error and park pages will be set to the standard web server ones, they are simple and informative and have no reference to Donhost.
CONTROL PANEL SECURITY
The control panel has sophisticated inbuilt security features to protect it against attacks. It has however been learnt over time that the existing system is a little sensitive and resellers have been locked out of their panels incorrectly. The new control panel sports a refined protection system which should put an end to these unexpected control panel lockouts.
CONTROL PANEL TEMPLATES
A greater choice of control panel templates will be available thanks to the generosity of our resellers who have invited us to make their custom templates available to the entire Donhost community.
GREATER CONTROL OVER CUSTOMER PANELS
The new system will allow resellers greater control over the features their customers can access in their individual control panels. You will be able to specify whether you client has access to FTP, FrontPage extensions and Usage Statistics as well as the features controllable currently.
MORE FLEXIBLE mySQL ADMINISTRATION
The mySQL administrator has been expanded to allow the use of SQL text files to import and export data into and out of databases.
ANONYMOUS NAME SERVERS
Personal name servers which work with .uk domain names are currently included in the reseller account. However some top level domain names including .com, .net and .org cannot be hosted on these personal name servers. This system upgrade will see the provision on anonymous name servers in the format ns.turbodns.co.uk on which you can host domain names of any extension.
SIMLIFIED SYSTEM PATHS
Customers are currently advised to use an environment variable to reference the path to their web space in scripts. This has many advantages for us but it has been noted that many customers find it confusing. We will therefore be moving away from this configuration and will release the real file system path to your web space. The existing environment variables will continue to work on existing hosting accounts so you will not need to alter your existing scripts.
In the weeks following these upgrades we will be conducting a customer survey. The feedback we obtain from this will identify improvements to be made to the control panel and also finalise the format of our Windows 2000 reseller hosting.
We thank you for your time and continued support.
Kind Regards,
Donhost Support
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I hope that is helpful.
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