TurfSitePH.net Blog

Winner of the New Year Promo

Congratulations to Ms. Jenny Manongdo of mannaforjenny.org for winning our New Year Promo! The renewal of your account is on us for this year.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Introducing the New Website Builder (BaseKit)

To get started creating your professional looking website, simply login to your control panel (cPanel) and on the left hand side you will see the “Website Builder” icon. From there simply click on it to get started.

Key Features of our new Website Builder:

• Easy to use, Drag and Drop Site Design / Website Builder.

• Powerful Widgets and Apps integration (Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, YouTube, many more).

• Professional Templates and designs to customize.

• Full HTML/CSS Controls.

For technical assistance on how to use the BaseKit Website Builder, you may always send us an email via support@turfsiteph.net.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Linux Versus Windows Server Webhosting

If choosing the right webhost already gives you headache, what more if you will have to choose between a Linux and Windows-based hosting server?

Let us enumerate the PROs and CONs between the two Operating Systems:

Linux Servers:

• Since Linux is FREE, webhosting servers running on this OS flavor will cost lesser than a Windows-based one;
• Linux has a rock solid core — you will never see the BSOD on a machine running this OS. “Server Stability” is the keyword here;
• There are tons of free apps that you may install in a Linux server.

Windows Server:

• Since the Windows operating system is created by software giant Microsoft — it ain’t FREE;
• If a particular app that you wish to run in your website is designed for a Windows-based machine, then choose your webhost account to run this OS;
• If you’re familiar with the Windows Desktop environment, there will be no learning curve at all to manage your website’s server running on this OS.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Check if the cPanel Ports are Open

As experienced by some of our clients, most especially those students who are working behind a network that utilizes web filtering softwares, the non-standard HTTP ports cPanel works with causes them minor headaches. Usually cPanel can be opened from:

1. yourdomainname.com/cpanel
2. yourdomainname.com:2082
3. cpanel.yourdomainname.com

At times, local firewalls allow only access to sites on port 80. If that will be the case, use the last URL. Note that the third address is a web-based proxy which provides you with the option to access your cPanel via the default HTTP port 80. This helps if your Internet Service Providers (ISP) blocked ports 2082 and 2083.

You may check if the ports are blocked executing the following commands:

If you are running Windows do the following:

1. Click Start
2. Click Run
3. Type cmd
4. Type telnet yourdomainname.com 2083
5. Type telnet yourdomainname.com 2082

If you are running Linux do the following:

1. Start your Linux/Mac OS console terminal
2. Type telnet yourdomainname.com 2083
3. Type telnet yourdomainname.com 2082

If the port is not blocked the results should look like the following one. Trying IP_of_the_server ( 10.10.10.10 for an example )…

Connected to servername.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.

Different result will means that the port is blocked.

Read more…

Popularity: 6% [?]

The aspnet_client Folder

ASP.net developers should be aware of the aspnet_client folder in their webhosting accounts. This folder is related to ASP.net runtime validation and has its own importance. This folder is automatically created when you enable the ASP.net extension on your site. The aspnet_client folder contains the client-side code used by some of the ASP.NET Web Form controls, namely Validation and SmartNavigation. The scripts contained in this folder get called by webpages that utilize controls that need these scripts. If you use a control that uses one of the scripts in this folder and the script can’t be found, then that control will not be able to do its client-side job.

The aspnet_client folder should be considered as the ASP.NET runtime component not your ASP.NET application. The scripts in the folder might change in the new version. This is why Publish Site tool will delete it first and then ASP.net will recreate it. If you had a web application developed in an older version, then published it to a web site with a newer version of ASP.NET, the aspnet_client should have the scripts from the same version of ASP.NET. So it is a good practice to let ASP.NET maitain this folder.

If your aspnet_client directory is missing, you may encounter errors with your application such as

“Unable to find script library ‘/aspnet_client/system.web/1_0_3705_272/webUIValidation.js’”

To resolve this, you can manually copy the folder to the root directory of your domain name.

Popularity: 4% [?]

cPanel Webhosting Security

PHP version 5.2 has an improved handling of remote code which reduces greatly security problems.

Tweak your local PHP settings for better security– this can be done by disabling unnecessary functions and options. Here are some sample recommended directives:

allow_url_fopen=off

disable_functions = proc_open , popen, disk_free_space, set_time_limit, leak, tmpfile, exec, system, shell_exec, passthru

Note that the above directives can cripple your code’s functionality. They have to be pasted in a php.ini file in each directory you’d like to have them applied.

Deny Perl and other bots from accessing your site. This can be easily done with the following rules in your .htaccess:

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent libwww-perl bad_bots

order deny,allow

deny from env=bad_bots

If you are not using Perl scripts, add a bogus handler for these files. In your home directory create a .htaccess file with the following content:

##Deny access to all CGI, Perl, Python and text files

<FilesMatch “\.(cgi|pl|py|txt)”>

Deny from all

</FilesMatch>

##If you are using a robots.txt file, please remove the

# sign from the following 3 lines to allow access only to the robots.txt file:

#<FilesMatch robots.txt>

#Allow from all

#</FilesMatch>

The above will prevent Perl scripts to be executed. Many exploits or backdoors are written in Perl and the above will prevent them from running. This directive will apply to all your sub-directories.

Filter possible intrusions make sure about Apache’s Mod Security. Mod Security is an Application firewall integrated with Apache. We at TurfSitePH.net can assist you with regards to enabling Apache’s Mod Security with your accounts, just email us via support@turfsiteph.net

Popularity: 4% [?]

Create Image Thumbnails in cPanel

Did you know that cPanel has a tool that can create thumbnails of existing images? This tool allows you to create a small (thumbnail sized) version of any image in a directory on your site.

This can be useful in creating a page where smaller previews of all your images can be viewed before the larger, original image is accessed, saving bandwidth.

The application is known as the Thumbnailer and can be accessed by clicking Image Manager, then clicking the Thumbnailer link. From here, an entire directory must be selected.

How to convert a directory of images to thumbnails:

1. Navigate to the directory you would like to change the images to thumbnails.
2. Click the name of the folder in blue to create thumbnails for the images in the directory.
3. Click Thumbnail Images to finish the process.

• You may use the Scale Percent text boxes to define how small the images should be.
• We recommend that you keep the Keep Aspect Ratio checked when creating thumbnails to prevent the image from becoming distorted by keeping the height and width proportional.
• You may click Reset Dimensions to return the Scale Percent values to the default settings.

After the application has completed the task of resizing your images, a thumbnails directory will be created as a subdirectory within the selected folder. The thumbnail images will be created with the prefix tn_*, where * is meant to represent the filename and extension.

Click the Your images have been thumbnailed into link to open the thumbnails directory in the cPanel File Manager.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Connect to a MS Access Database from an ASP Script

If you will be using an existing Microsoft Office Access database as storage for your website or web application, you may use the following code to connect with your .mdb file:

<%
Dim ConnectionString
ConnectionString = “DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)};” &_
“DBQ=C:\path\to\file.mdb;DefaultDir=;UID=;PWD=;”

Dim Connection
Set Connection = Server.CreateObject(“ADODB.Connection”)

Connection.ConnectionTimeout = 30
Connection.CommandTimeout = 80
Connection.Open ConnectionString
%>

C:\path\to\file.mdb is where you’ve uploaded your mdb file and almost always starts off with C:\HostingSpaces\USERNAME where USERNAME is your username.

While the above works for many of our older servers. The following works on our newer servers. You’ll need to make sure that your application is running in a Dedicated App Pool (check box under the website inside your control panel) and that MDAC is installed on the server which all of our new servers already have installed (ask our support staff if it doesn’t work).

<%
Dim ConnectionString
ConnectionString = “Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;” &_
“Data Source=C:\path\to\file.mdb;User Id=;Password=;”

Dim Connection
Set Connection = Server.CreateObject(“ADODB.Connection”)

Connection.ConnectionTimeout = 30
Connection.CommandTimeout = 80
Connection.Open ConnectionString
%>

Popularity: 6% [?]

TurfSitePH.net Twitter Contest

Want to win a 200MB website hosting plan (Windows Server 2008 or Linux based server, your choice) and a Top Level Domain (TLD like .com, .net, .org, .info, etc.) for yourself?

Then join our contest:

1. Make sure that you follow @turfsiteph in Twitter;
2. Tweet (or RT) the following:
   Follow @turfsiteph to win a 200MB webhosting plan + a Top Level Domain of your choice (valid for 01 year) Visit #turfsiteph.net now!

That simple! We will randomly select from the tweeps who tweeted/re-tweeted the message above on Thursday, 31 Mar 2011 at around 1400H to determine who will be bringing home the prize (website hosting + a TLD).

Popularity: 4% [?]

Now Accepting Payments via Cashsense at 7Eleven & M.LHuillier

Happy New Year!

With our aim of continuously upgrading our business services to our loyal clients, we are happy to announce our partnership with Cashsense (www.cashsense.com). Cashsense is a service-based payment processing company which embraces the advances made in technology within the financial sector to significantly improve cost and intra-border payment efficiencies. Cashsense enables online buyers to pay in cash instead of using their credit cards to fulfill these transactions.

We are in the process of integrating automation between our very own billing system and the shopping cart system of Cashsense. For the time being, should you wish to avail of this payment facility instead of the usual bank deposit/transfer or online payments via PayPal, please do advise on your next order(s) so that we may generate your Cashsense payment reference (to be used in 7Eleven and M.LHuilllier upon settlement). PHP25 will also be added on top of the total amount due to serve as processing fee should you opt to pay using Cashsense for your website hosting and domain name registration/renewal orders.

Please feel free to contact us via sales@turfsiteph.net or SMS 0939.914.2860 if you have further inquiries on this additional payment gateway.

Thank you!

Popularity: 12% [?]