Web Log Update

Hosting Your Blog with Cyberwurx

January 25th, 2010

A question we are often asked is, “Why don’t you have a blog hosting plan?” Our favorite answer to that question is: “We have several!”

Virtually all of our plans support blogging. The most-used blog software, Wordpress, is easily installed on any of our managed hosting plans, as well as our un-managed plans. Starting your blog here, or moving here will give you several advantages over choosing a free host:

Advertisements. With free hosting you are often prevented from advertising on your blog, but with us, you are free to do whatever you want with your hosting service. We also NEVER put advertisements on your page, or registration, or anywhere. The only way someone could even find out you host with us would be from looking at your domain’s DNS servers.

Better Control. Free blog services often restrict you to using pre-made site templates, making your site look like hundreds of others that share a host. When you host with us, you are free to change whatever you want about your site, allowing you to fully control it.

Branding. Many sites force you to use a sub-domain of their domain for your blog address, such as blognamehere.blogsite.com. When you host with us, you can choose whatever domain you like for your website!

For all of these reasons and more, you should consider hosting your blog with us!

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CyberWurx Celebrates New Game Server Hosting With LAN Party

January 8th, 2010

CyberWurx, a leader in the web hosting industry, is breaking into Game Server Hosting and kicking off the event by sponsoring a LAN party in Atlanta, Georgia.

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) January 13, 2010 — CyberWurx, a leader in the web hosting industry, recently announced their entry into the Game Server Hosting arena. To introduce their new service to gamers and industry professionals, the company is sponsoring a LAN party in Atlanta, Georgia. Participants will get a taste of what kind of game server and hosting solutions CyberWurx can provide.

CyberWurx has been offering shared hosting, dedicated servers and colocation hosting solutions to their customers since 1997. After more than a decade of offering fully supported web hosting solutions to businesses and organizations of all sizes, the company is poised to bring that same dedication to the increasingly popular field of game server hosting.

Nick Gray, Datacenter Manager at CyberWurx, explains, “It’s a natural outgrowth of what we do best – provide hosting solutions that work, backed by outstanding customer service. The online gaming industry is growing rapidly, and dedicated, efficient game servers are crucial to an exceptional gaming experience. We’re sure our LAN party will prove to participants that we are ready to provide all the support, technology and expertise that’s needed to provide a seamless gaming experience.”

In 2009, CyberWurx was the host company for the annual Atlanta LAN Fest for charity. The two day event in June drew hundreds of gamers to participate in games such as Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4 and Left 4 Dead. Proceeds went to various charities, including March of Dimes and Relay for Life.

Gray comments, “The success of our hosting duties at Atlanta’s premier gaming event in 2009 was an example of just what our company is capable of providing in terms of game hosting expertise. When we were ready to launch our newest service, we knew a local LAN party was the most appropriate way to bring it to the attention of the public. Of course, we’re also excited about the opportunity to give local gamers another chance to demonstrate their skills and network with others in the community. It’s going to be a true celebration of the joy of gaming.”

CyberWurx currently offers both managed and self-managed dedicated servers, virtual private servers, reseller hosting options, and load balancing solutions that can be tailored to the individual needs of their clients.

About CyberWurx:
Based in Atlanta, Georgia, CyberWurx is a privately owned web service provider specializing in customized hosting options, including shared hosting, dedicated servers, colocation hosting, and virtual web hosting solutions. The company currently boasts over 7,500 servers and owns two Internet Data Centers that are powered through separate substations. CyberWurx prides itself on providing affordable, fully supported and secure IP solutions for organizations and businesses of all sizes. For more information on CyberWurx, contact Nick Gray at 404-681-9888 or visit www.CyberWurx.com.

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Making the most of your colo or un-managed hosting by utilizing our Lantronix IPKVMs.

January 4th, 2010

One of the most often under used pieces of equipment we offer for use to our customers are our Lantronix Spider IPKVMs. They are frequently used for their main purpose of being a remote keyboard and mouse, but we have found that our customers never utilize 2 of the most interesting abilities of these devices, serial interface and .iso mounting.

The Spider’s ability to use a serial interface can be very useful as it will allow you to configure many different kinds of serial devices without having to use one of your other machines to interface with it! As an example, we can connect the IPKVM to a Cisco device and have you on a console to it in significantly less time than it takes to find which of your machines are close enough and find a proper-length cable. That is also assuming that you can easily access the console from your server.

ISO mounting can be extraordinarily useful. We use it for all our installations that require unique or rarely used install media (as opposed to our normal PXE installs). It allows us to change

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Hosting Provider Location

December 16th, 2009

A question people often ask themselves when choosing a hosting provider is, “Where should I host my server?” Many people feel that it is important that the host be physically located close to them, or close to their customer base. Although it can be argued that hosting locally can improve local search engine results (this is unlikely), the main reason most people think they should host locally is largely ungrounded. This is because there is very little correlation between transfer speed or load times and the physical location of a server. Much more important is the amount of hops between your server and your customers, but I’ll get into more of that in a bit.

The circumference of the earth is 24,901.463 miles. This means that theoretically speaking, you can get to any part of the earth (by traveling in a straight line along the surface) in 12,451 miles or less. Since data sent over this distance is done so via light on a fiber-optic cable, we can use the speed of light to calculate how long it takes data to make this trek:

(12450.7315Miles/1)*(1 hour/670616629 Miles)*(3600000 ms/1 hour)=(66.838 ms)

This means that in an ideal world, where you were on the north pole, and your server was on the south pole (and assuming your server can instantly process data, which it can’t) you could access a website hosted on the other side of the planet in .132 seconds(66.8 ms there and back). This is less than half the time it takes you to blink.

This means, at least in a theoretical sense, that the physical distance has virtually no effect on transmission speed. The majority of transit time is actually created when your information gets off a cable, is processed by a router, and is then sent back out through another cable. This is what is commonly referred to as a ‘hop’. Trace-routes and pings are the easiest way to determine the speed and “distance-away” of your prospective server. Although some forms of routing can in fact hide hops from such simple utilities, you can still estimate how many of these your data encounters by performing a trace-route, and get an overall feel for your total transit time by using the ping command.

So next time you are wondering where you should host, make the decision using pings and trace-routes instead of miles!

Posted in Atlanta Colocation, Custom Server, Cyberwurx, Dedicated Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Virtual Hosting, Web Hosting | Comments Off

Cyber Wurx: Meet the Tech Nick

November 30th, 2009

Name: Nick

Birthplace: Suwanee, Georgia, 1985

Georgia born and raised, Nick has had a passion for computing devices since age 6, when he received his first Apple IIe. With the addiction started, his fascination of computers bloomed into a continued insatiable desire to learn more about computer technology. Along that path, like many computer obsessed teens in the late nineties, he fell in love with computer gaming and the LAN party scene. Since then, Nick has been involved with the planning and running of several Atlanta area LAN parties. Nick states, “Everyone in the gaming scene at Brookwood High School would group up over the weekend for our weekly LAN party. We threw one heck of a party!”

Obsessed with computer networks, Nick went on to compete in the 2004 competition for Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) in network design. His team placed second in state. He went on to work several odd jobs here and there until Cyber Wurx welcomed him to the team.

Nick currently lives in Lawrenceville and can be found playing the latest games in his free time.

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Spam-reduction Tip: Catch-All Aliases

November 11th, 2009

People are always asking us, “Why am I getting so much spam?”

The answer is never the same, as each person’s spam woes are different from the next. One of the issues we see most often that is easily correctable is the unnecessary use of catch-all aliases.

A catch all alias is a email alias that takes any mail sent to anything@domainexample.com to a mailbox (or multiple mailboxes). This sounds like a great idea, as you always receive a customer’s email, even if they misspell the first half of the address. The big problem with this tactic is that spammers have been exploiting this technique for years. One of spammer’s favorite techniques is to use a list of common names, and then email every name in that list @yourdomain.com. As a user, you would never see this, but if you have a catch-all set up on your domain, you may be getting 5-6000 emails in a hour from one of these attacks. Removing your catch-all alias can drastically reduce your spam levels.

Another often overlooked evil that a catchall alias can cause is actually blocking mail through your ISP. This can happen when you forward a catch-all alias to your email address with your ISP. This results in so much spam getting forwarded to them that they block you as a spammer. Getting rid of catch-all aliases can help solve this problem as well.

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CYBERWURX: Meet the Tech Kyle

October 15th, 2009

Name: Kyle
Birthplace: New Orleans, Louisiana, 1979

Born in New Orleans but raised in the Atlanta area, Kyle was fascinated by electronics from the moment he could hold a screwdriver. Because of this, any electronic toy, appliance, or computer in the house was in imminent danger of being disassembled. The current status of the device was irrelevant, it could be plugged into an outside outlet during a thunderstorm and it would still be at risk. Due to a sharp ability to solve problems, a few minor emergencies resulted in the development of some reasonably safe electronic modification practices. This new-found ability to not die began a passion for serious hardware modifications to various electronics and developing a broader understanding of circuits.

Eventually Kyle fell in love with his family’s Commodore 64. As he grew accustomed to the welcoming brown keys, he also became its repairman. Through several hardware modifications, including thermal dissipation improvements and power regulation hacks, the beloved family friend long outlived its expected life-span. This enabled him to spend long hours improving himself by writing Basic programs and playing Karateka.

Kyle received his first IBM PC (A 486 DX/33) at the ripe young age of 13, and quickly fell in love again. After spending hours reading technical manuals, he would regale his family with in-depth explanations of the nature of the 640k DOS lower-memory limit and the methods by which the operating system’s designers worked around it. Largely uninterested in the subject but supportive of education, his parents were more than happy to encourage his new-found love of software. They also saw great benefit in software’s inability to explode or electrocute.

In 2004, Kyle finally escaped the horrors of fast-food management in favor of part-time work on the sunny shores of Linux administration with Cyber Wurx. Within a few months, he was a full-time employee, and has since become a senior technician. Kyle is currently responsible for several junior techs as well as overseeing the daytime technical support operations for Cyber Wurx.

Kyle lives in the Atlanta area with his wife, a veterinary technician. They share a house with a small army of cats and dogs. In his spare time, he plays bass guitar in a successful local band. In the event he has any additional time, he usually plays video games or in very extreme cases, does housework.

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Linux vs. Windows

October 6th, 2009

If you search Google for “Linux vs. Windows” or any similar search string, there will be no end to the flame wars over the rivalry between the two groups of operating systems fans. The two biggest things you will read about are how expensive Windows Licensing is, and how insecure Windows is. I think there is more than enough information about this on the internet already. Here are some “Windows vs. Linux” issues that you are less likely to have heard about.

I think it is best that I start out by listing my experience. I currently have 5+ years in system administration experience. 3 of those were in a Microsoft shop, with several dynamic .asp based sites, including a Sharepoint site. I am currently the Windows guy at a Linux dominated hosting company. I learned in a Microsoft shop and then transitioned to the Linux environment. I recently read in a forum post online:

“There is hardly anything that cannot be done using linux, php and mysql”

This is true and beyond, but it is just as true for Windows as it is Linux. Some of my first web-servers, back when I was just messing around in my parents’ basement, were windows(XP) running Apache with PHP and MYSQL. If you are trying to run a windows application in Linux there is wine, and if you are trying to do the opposite there is Cygwin (although more and more Linux apps are getting non-emulation ports to windows every day). Many people choose to run a Microsoft Server because they have access to a developer that prefers ASP.NET. .NET Linux emulation is getting better every day, and there is a web server in late beta right now called Cherokee that is running it(apparently with no issues). (www.cherokee-project.com)

What this situation typically boils down to are these two issues:

A: Are you going to have to incorporate this server into an Active Directory/Are you adding on to currently existing Microsoft Infrastructure? If the answer is yes, you will probably want to go with Microsoft. Samba is getting better and better every day, but there always seems to be some issue. Plus, if you are looking at making this decision, you are probably not the only IT guy at the Microsoft shop. Just because you can set up samba and get it working, don’t expect your coworkers can.

B: Resources. The cost of licensing has already been mentioned here, so that is all I am going to say about that piece of the Resource-Hogging-Pie. If you are getting a dedicated server or a VPS, you are going to need significantly more hardware to get the same performance from a Windows server as you would a Linux server. This is because you can (and most often do) run Linux ENTIRELY from command line. This allows the system to free up a significant amount of resources for serving that it would otherwise have to use as a windows manager.*

*I am aware that Server2008 has the ability to run without a windows manager, I just have not had the opportunity to use this technology yet.

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Managed or Un-managed? Which hosting service is right for you?

September 30th, 2009

One of the most important choices one must make when you have decided you need external hosting, is whether that hosting should be managed or un-managed. This choice is made even more difficult by the fact that there is no standard list of differences between the two, and each hosting company seems to have their own set of rules. We have found that the easiest way to determine what is best for the customer by assessing their needs beforehand, as opposed to adjusting their services when their needs are not being met.

Consideration 1: Operating System
The application or service that you need to have hosted, is it operating system dependent? If this is true, then you will want to look into un-managed hosting. Currently we only offer our management services for our in-house distribution of Debian. We have considered adding support for other operating systems, but so far we have found that the vast majority of our customers’ needs are effectively met by Debian. Focusing on one distribution allows us to offer the best possible service to our customers since we are able to focus on training technicians for a single operating system and tool set.

Consideration 2: Applications
The next thing to consider is the services you require. The standard services we offer are Apache, MYSQL, PHP, and backups. We also occasionally manage web technologies outside our standard set on a per-user basis, so there is a good chance that we can provide you with management that fits your needs. Anything outside the realm of web-servers you would also want to go with un-managed hosting. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, voice over IP technology, cluster computing, game hosting, and many others.

At this point, if you don’t require services that we don’t provide managed hosting for I would strongly suggest you go ahead and choose it. Keeping a web-server up and running can be a stressful and time consuming process that never sleeps. In our experience, most customers would be better served by carefully assessing their needs beforehand rather than trying to adjust their services when their needs are not being met. Managed or un-managed, Cyberwurx provides exceptional service and up-time, at the best value the hosting industry has to offer. If you have any more questions about our hosting, please email us at sales@cyberwurx.com

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CYBERWURX: Meet the Tech Aaron

September 10th, 2009

Name: Aaron
Birthplace: Flint Michigan, 1983

Born in the home of the Industrial Revolution, Aaron moved to the Atlanta Metropolitan area in 1996, narrowly escaping a life of oil, gasoline, and unemployment. Concentrating his education on computer science, Aaron decided to change focus to system administration when he realized that he enjoyed small scale scripting over large project and application development. With 10+ years of hardware, and administrative experience in multiple environments (Microsoft, Mac, Linux), Aaron has become a valuable asset to Cyberwurx’s administration team. He is currently working on his Cisco Certifications.

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