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Finding the best uk web hosting service for your website can be rather complicated to say the least. There are almost endless options all clamoring to be the top hosts or the least expensive service, this can make it almost impossible for webmasters to tell if their claims are fact or fiction.

The best way to select a hosting company is to take the selection process in each steps:

Your Needs for Web Hosting

The very first item to look at in finding and selecting the best hosting service for your needs is to actually identify what those needs are. What sort of website are looking to host? Personal homepages will have very different hosting requirements than from large company websites. To find the best uk web hosting service for you, it is important to determine exactly what you plan to host now, and take into consideration anything you are planning to host in the immediate future.

Rate

Different web hosting companies offer a large variety of prices. Competition from overseas is priced temptingly low for many, but there are many different factors to consider. Don’t stop at price alone, and if you plan on using your website within a professional capacity, it is important to move beyond free hosting. Free hosts are great for small and fun sites, but are not suited to the needs of internet marketers – even those who are just starting out. Rate should not be a top determining factor until you have narrowed a list based on other criteria such as:

Reliability and Speed

The best web hosting services will offer uptime above 99%. This should be a guarantee to motivate the company to keep all servers up all the time. Naturally, your visitors should also be able to access your site quickly.

Bandwidth Transfer and Disk Space

The bandwidth requirements grow with your site. Web hosting companies pay for bandwidth, so you, the one using that bandwidth will also be billed accordingly. It is better to pay for the required amount of data transfer upfront rather than get a surprise bill in your e-mail for having gone considerably over your allotted amount, therefore, disabling your account. Also, be sure you have the appropriate amount of disk space reserved. Most websites can operate with less than 500 megabytes.

Technical Support

It is highly important to be able to reach the hosting company if your website begins experiencing problems. The best web hosting support one can hope for is available 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week. Most know this, so take their stated hours with a grain of salt. Always check the companies with email at random times to see if they really have support available to help 24/7.

Scripts and Special Features

Websites have different needs, and the best web hosting service for you should accommodate those. Email addresses should be standard as well as the capacity for a variety of scripts. Be sure to see if other features like, for example, shopping carts and secure servers are available or standard.

Control Panel

How much control does the hosting company offer webmasters? It is very inconvenient to work through customer service every time to modify a password or change email addresses. Be sure the web hosting companies you choose offer some sort of control panel to manage your web hosting in a convenient way.

Laws Hosting provides the best uk web hosting environment and we will assist you with any questions or problems you may have regarding your hosting.

Spamhaus has uncovered a fake spam filter company which was pirating and selling DNSBL data stolen from major anti-spam systems including Spamhaus, CBL and SURBL, republishing the stolen data under the name “nszones.com”.

Read full article here

Here’s a little how-to for dealing with “w00tw00t” scans on webservers. Laws Hosting already implements this procedure, but its nice to know.

You might see these scans in your logs as:

.. "GET /w00tw00t.at.ISC.SANS.DFind:) HTTP/1.1" 400 ...

Using Iptables

The quickest method of making sure it never reaches your webserver (and thus wasting resources like processor, disk space [log files], etc) is to use iptables, and it can be done with a one-liner like this:

iptables -I INPUT -d xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -p tcp –dport 80 -m string –to 70 –algo bm –string ‘GET /w00tw00t.at.ISC.SANS.’ -j DROP

Simply replace xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with the IP of your web server. If you want to use this for a range of IPs (ie., you’re using failover IPs to host web servers), simply replace the “-d xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” portion with:

where start.xxx.xxx.xxx and end.xxx.xxx.xxx are the first and last IPs of your web servers respectively.

If you wish to have a fancier option, one where it will for example blacklist an IP for a certain period, etc., have a look at SpamCle@ner’s website.

They go deeper into this subject and have provided two scripts near the end of their article. Simply save one of these scripts in a file named, for example, /opt/blockw00t.sh and make it executable with:

You can run it manually with typing “/opt/blockwoot.sh” in the shell or to automatically load it at boot time you can add it to your /etc/rc.localfile, or on Debian/Ubuntu systems add it to your /etc/network/interfaces like so:

As you probably know, Laws Hosting is a Linux UK Web Hosting company. TheWHIR recently published an articled entitled the Key Benefits of Linux Hosting. It’s kind of a lengthy article, so I thought we’d breakdown the main benefits listed in a short list found below. Voile!

• The most important feature of Linux hosting is its flexibility;
• Cost effective;
• Extensible;
• Stability;
• Takes less CPU power to operate functions;
• Fast processing time.

Even if you don’t use Linux to run your desktop PC, you can certainly take advantage of Linux UK Web Hosting offered at Laws Hosting. The operating system that you use for your desktop PC should not impact your choice of web hosts. Linux web servers make hosting easy. The primary hosting tasks are almost identical for both Linux and Windows web servers, but the advantages found with Linux hosting are vast. Learn more about such advantages and more below.

A Brief Look at Linux

• Linux is a free, UNIX-based operating system. Unix is a computer operating system that is powerful, designed for multitasking and built to be used by a number of people at once.
• Linux is Open-Source. This pertains to a type of program whose source code is usually free and is readily available to anyone interested in using and/or working with the program.
• The Linux operating system is specifically praised for its functionality, adaptability and robustness.

What Is Linux Hosting?

A simple explanation is “web hosting on a Linux-based server allowing developers to create their site within the Linux Operating System”. A Linux server enables web developers to use popular and powerful open-source programs like PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, Ruby, SSH and many more to build their site.

Do I Need to Know How to Use Linux to Use Laws Hosting’s Servers?

No. A benefit of hosting your site at Laws Hosting is that you get to experience all of the advantages of Linux Hosting (explained below), but you don’t necessarily need to know how to use Linux thanks to the DirectAdmin control panel. All of our web hosting accounts are managed with this award-winning control panel. DirectAdmin makes web hosting account management a breeze even for those who are brand new to the Linux server hosting environment.

Main Advantages of Linux Hosting From Laws Hosting

Since a server’s operating system controls the basic, vital functions of the server, it is important to be aware of the advantages one will experience when choosing a Linux host.

• In addition to the amazing hosting support that Laws Hosting customers receive from our staff, keep in mind that Linux has a huge, active network of helpful developers. Those hosting their sites in a Linux environment will have access to this invaluable support community. With such a large number of developers, Linux is a very progressive platform; new ideas emerge rapidly and more innovative work can be done within the community. The many advantages of Linux Hosting ultimately stem from this huge developer community.
• A Linux host is perfect for those looking for a developer friendly environment. Laws Hosting offers our customers support for the open-source tools, like PHP and Perl scripting, that are needed to create their sites.
• Linux hosting has a well earned reputation for stability and security. This can once again be attributed to the gigantic open-source community of developers, all of which work tirelessly to find, patch and fix any bugs that are discovered.
• Open Source software is generally free. This cost-effectiveness factor allows users to spend their available resources on activities like promoting their site or project instead of on costly software.
• Those hosting their sites on the Linux platform experience faster page loads and better performance. The speed and performance of Linux can actually be attributed to another key benefit, its flexibility. Linux is flexible in the sense that it is highly suited for fine-tuned, task-specific system configurations. This gives system administrators the ability to configure Linux servers to perform at an optimal level.

Everyone  seems to have to more passwords than close friends these days and the combinations of numbers and letters are already difficult to remember but now experts at the Georgia Tech Research Institute are suggesting anything less than 12 characters could be quickly cracked.

The issue is the additional computing now on offer, in particular the processing power of the chips now the norm on graphics cards.

The researchers have discovered that the number-crunching power of modern graphics cards could offer a new way of cracking passwords, with their power on par with multi-million dollar supercomputers built just a decade ago.

The research found seven character passwords ‘hopelessly inaccurate’ and with processing power increasing year on year, a combination of upper-case, lower-case, numerals and symbols in a 12 character password offered better protection.

Do you think passwords are becoming an unsafe security measure?