I'm running a shared hosting environment and I'd like to know if it's even possible to secure the Apache while it's running mod_php. I know I could go suPHP with PHP-CGI, but that'd increase drastically the server load.
So what should I do to best secure the server?
So far now I did:
- Apache:
Installed mod_security and mod_evasive.
- PHP:
Set register_globals=OFF
Set disable_functions = ini_restore, popen, exec, shell_exec, system, passthru, proc_open, proc_close
Set safemode=ON
Set open_basedir to user's directory on virtualhost
Is that would be a secure environment for my users?
I have seen some shared hosting providers include cPanel. As far as I understand cPanel is to manage and install apps on VPS. Why would you need that on shared hosting?
I am in a shared hosting environment. Their php's setting does not have open_basedir set and safe_mode is off.
I was poking around their server and noticed that using some simple system() calls within a php script, I was able to access /etc/passwd and therefore access all their client's public_html.
I am currently calling them to let them know of the vulnerability. But out of curiosity, is it normal that I can read all the other site hosted? They do have config files with mysql pasword in it.
Has anybody successfully used nginx in a shared web hosting environment?
It seems quite powerful and looks like it would be well suited for such an environment, combined with FastCGI, looks like it could serve a lot of hits on relatively inexpensive servers.
The main problem I'm foreseeing is a demand for mod_rewrite, which may cause some support headaches.
Anything else I'm not thinking of?
(I did search but the last post I found was from 2007 with no replies, and necroposting is bad)
One of my friends uses a popular shared hosting provider, and I was assisting him with a web site issue earlier.
I noticed the following warning in the host's control panel:
"[MySQL databases] may not be used for log evaluation operations, ad clicks, chat systems, banner rotations, or similar applications putting extreme loads on the database under any circumstances."
Is 40 max_user_connections for MySql typical in a Shared Hosting environment? Or are there Shared Hosts out there that allow more than 40 max_user_connections per account?
A friend is looking for shared hosting with secure ftp, or pgp encryption or both. Do you know of any host that offers them? Would a vps have these features?
We have several VPS's reselling shared hosting, and as we grow our shared hosting operations, I've realized how its almost impossible to have every user, developer or who ever is accessing our shared accounts to properly lock down their scripts eg set proper permissions... But what I don't get is how larger shared hosting providers (which we plan on becoming) fully lock out homedir/User A from being able to access, view or write to homedir/User B's files no matter if User A's executed scripts, processes, protocols is requesting User B's files...
In a shared environment you can't rely on your customers to lock down their stuff and they are trusting you to take reasonable precautions to protect their stuff at the same time... This should be basic security but its almost impossible it seems to achieve in a shared env.
Obviously there are VPS's with completely isolated layers but in a shared env it shouldn't be too big of a request to have one persons stuff not easily visible by another person no matter if SSH is being used or a script of any kind.. bottomline... think of a hotel ... a "shared environment"... one guest can't just go in someone else's room easily. The hotel owner ensures that guests rooms are not available for other guests to access, this is a reasonable policy and the hotel owner would be in deep s**t if other guests had access to other guests rooms....
Here are the reasons why I think "secure shared hosting" is essentially a paradox...
1. False sense of security - SuPHP, Suexec, open_basedir..
Problem is even if you're using SuPHP or open_basedir or other security practices, someone on that server could still possibly "view" other users files which could include database config files and other files that you wouldn't want someone to read/access. These files could include xml, dat, txt etc any other file that a user might not want another user in another homedir to access that isn't protected by SuPHP or SuExec...
2. People often say.. well its your users responsibility "Rely on your end users to choose proper permissions for their files"... This is like relying on your hotel guests to deadbolt their door instead of having an autolock on their door when they close it.
I'm sure your clients would expect you to "section off" their account reasonably from another user however these doesn't seem possible at least with Apache that requires "nobody" to have to access files... And the problem is you can't rely on your users.. Besides, most open source scripts (WP, Joomla, Magento) and people here in this forum recommend 644/755 permissions as being the ideal permissions for most files/folders however if a user makes all of their files 644/755 other users can still possibly access those files.. You still would be giving world-readable access... Many people still use PHP as an Apache DSO, so under normal circumstances where scripts are installed in pub_html a user is FORCED to use world-readable permissions on their config files for their apps to run. For instance with our cPanel install, when we provision accounts in WHM, it creates .htaccess files with 644 permissions .. well why would it do this if .htaccess shouldnt be read by other users .. same goes with xml files, or other non-php/cgi files outside or inside the pub_html directories of a users homedir/ that shouldnt be viewable by world users...
Bottomline, until "world" readable/writable/executable permissions completely are ignored in a users homedir/ for not just PHP/CGI but for any file I think shared hosting security no matter what patches you have added to Apache or your system (Suhosin ,SuPHP etc) ... is a paradox... It shouldn't even be possible in any home dir no matter how responsible/irresponsible a user is for one user to be able to view another users stuff. The whole point and reason panels such as WHM or any panel uses the /home dir is to separate that users files/mail/etc from another users.. So, logically, there's no reason why a script would need access to anothers home dir/ knowing its a shared environment and on a shared hosting env it shouldn't be allowed to go outside of that users /home/ dir ...
POSSIBLE SOLUTION:
So I think a server admin should be able to enable a "mod_shared host" lets say in WHM or something that will get rid of global permissions eg there will only be 64 not 644 for any file in /home/<user>/... If someone chmods something to anything in Y ... XXY ... Y is completely ignored and set to 0...
If the server admin wants to override such settings, there could be an override feature but by default, just as PHP open_basedir restrictions settings in WHM work for PHP, the same should go for all files/scripts part of a home dir (any extension), under normal shared hosting shouldn't be accessible by any method (FTP, SSH, any apache module/process - CGI, Java etc) regardless of DSO, SuPHP...
Until then... How could large shared hosting providers sleep at night knowing that they are not protecting everything in their users home directories? This should be a simple and reasonable request that a user would expect when signing up for Shared hosting... Obviously there are other possible security leaks, breaches can occur but this should be basic security...
Shared hosting shouldn't be like open kindergarten cubbies with a curtain protecting the contents, instead, anyone signing up for shared hosting would expect their host to at least have a high school locker with a pad lock ....
Or am I missing something? Is there a solution already for this reasonable security practice of protecting users from each other user without referring them to a VPS or a dedicated? How do the big shared hosting operations have a large shared environments with hundreds of users on a box NOT allowing others to view/access other peoples stuff?
I've asked people on cPanel forums as well as our hosting provider, everyone has mixed responses and no real "answer" so I wanted to get your thoughts...
I have a small reseller account but all the domains are managed by myself. Security has not been a problem because the sites are simple, but now I have a need to deliver and recieve private files. I know how to keep the website itself secure writing my own sessions, using explicit variables, storing sensitive data outside of the web directories and that sort of stuff but it is my 'neighbors' that bother me. If one of them gets hacked or I get a bad neighbor sharing the server I do not want them to have access to my files and passwords.
A few years ago I wrote a browsing script that I found out had the ability to escape my own area and roam freely around every area on the server with unlimited access to every file. When I complained about it, the server admin said that I had nothing to worry about. When I pressed the issue I was told that nobody could invade my files because it was against the rules to go into other people's account. It turned out most server administrators left things open to eliminate scripting problems for their users and there was really no way to lock down a server without breaking a lot of scripts. At the time I moved to a more secure server but they eventually opened things up because of too many complaints and help requests.
Have things changed? Have they worked out the issues with shared servers? Is there a way to tell if my host has implemented proper safeguards (if any viable ones exist)?
A good friend handed me a SLES disc awhile back and I'm loading it up now to give it a shot on a whitebox with one of my test domains and IP's. Anybody have anything to share?
I'm running SQL 2005 in my hosting environment, and plan on offering as part of my plans.
The one issue I'm having is any user can view all the databases. My main issue is I need to store client information (sorry, I only can afford one server) into the database. Basically I'm creating *all* the backend panels, management, etc in ASPNET/C#.
The database will have FTP, email, payment, etc stored it in. Should I hold off and only offer mySQL? I DO NOT want the users seeing my databases like that. They can't access them, but still. I don't know what Microsoft was thinking!
I was thinking about developing my own SQL Manager where you could execute scripts, edit/create tables, and do everything you needed right inside of your webbrowser. This is, of course, a lot of work when you can do it easily in SQL Manager express. I imagine my way would be easier since I could make a list of blocked commands, run a check on the commands the user is executing, and block them.
By the way, I'm running Windows 2008 x64 w/IIS7 and the entire panel will be custom made by me and two other programmers, with me being the lead developer.
my friend and i are working on some web-based-commerce ideas and at current we're at godaddy.com. i can only imagine the vitriol they've rightfully earned here, as we decided to be done with them when the $30 SSL license they told us we could get one night quickly became $78 because there was a new "turboSSL server" package we needed, nevermind the guy the first time said with our hosting options we only needed to go through them for the SSL license, so basically, either the first guy lied to us or the second guy tried to hustle us, either way, i dont like companies whose sales model is revealed like the plot in a horror movie, so we're looking to go elsewhere.
basically we're looking for a virtual private server setup, although actually another question i'd love to ask someone is if joomla is better served on unix/linux or windows, with a few dozen accounts needed, and by accounts i mean domains and whatnot, as right now it's basically the blanket idea that you grab the names you need, or might go to if you change your mind on company names...
so basically, with all the people here talking about bad experiences with places, are there any good experience type places where someone can get competent tech support, no hustling in sales pitches, and quality service at a nice solid price?
again, sorry to show up and start asking for things, but i'm not necessarily well versed in these arts yet... rest assured once i have some information i shall contribute to the community and help others who are in my position now
I'm looking at optimizing our dynamic content delivery process and there are some interesting claims regarding fastcgi vs. mod_php.
What I am wondering about is assuming apache serving ONLY php content, why would fastcgi perform any better than mod_php? The memory footprint of spawned workers exists in both solutions.
Wouldn't context switches and buffering in fastcgi actually lower performance?
What could be gained by using a different web server (nginx/lighty) ? The primary bottleneck would still be physical memory (assuming <255 workers) ?
When cpanel has apache 2.2 available. I am planning on switching my servers over to it and to SuPHP from mod_php. There are hundreds of accounts on my different servers and I am worried about the transition. I know cpanel has a permission conversion script, but I dont completely trust it. The biggest issue to me though, is all the users that have php_values and flags in their htaccess files that would then be needed converted to php.ini's. Has anyone created a conversion script for doing this in an automated fashion?
I might not even convert my full servers to this and just do with the partial ones (less than 25%), but I really think it would benefit the customers and myself with the nice added layer of protection of suphp.
I don't know where to ask this question so hopefully I'm in the right forum. I have a friend that owns his own company and travels alot. He needs a place where he can store his work files (mostly document like word, excel, pdf, drawings, etc...) which contains very sensitive information. He need a place where he or the people in his team can transfer files and that he can setup access levels for his users. He need access to his files with a secure tool such as sftp or something else that you guys can recommend.
Also, since some files can be very large he requires a good transfer speed from everywhere in the world. He's looking at around 100GB of storage space and a very high transfer allowance. He will probably need to host his website also. Do you guys think it's better to host the files and website separately?
I work for a small web design firm with about 100 clients/domains and we are starting the search for a new hosting provider. We need a managed dedicated server with an offsite backup. We are also looking for a company that knows what they are talking about. If we have a Linux or server question they need to be able to give us a quick straight answer. Also, if they could help us transfer all our hosting accounts from our current server over to the new one that would be a BIG plus.
We have been thinking about Rackspace or 1and1.com but were wondering what the community thought. Any recommendations?
I'm trying to find at least three web hosting companies to choose from to host a Joomla websites on a shared server. Would consider dedicated if the deal was right. I have a friend of mine who wants to create a church website, and is looking for the best deal. I use Netfirms which I have never had an issue with, but I didn't want to be bias, and would like give him other options to choose from.
Is there a good WebHosting Review site, I could check out, or maybe someone could recommend their top three. I reading threw the forums here and I noticed there are not that many complaints with Hostgator. Again, I just want to see if there was anything out there better.
This question gets asked a lot in our Helpdesk and I figured I would post our knowledgebase article here to help anyone else wondering the Pros and Cons of Unlimited Domain Shared Hosting vs. Reseller Hosting. If anyone has anything else to add, I appreciate any feedback on how we can improve our KB article.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Given the present state of shared hosting, many clients may ask "Why would I need a Reseller account if I can host unlimited Addon and Parked domains within a single shared hosting account?". There is certainly enough Disk Space and Bandwidth provided in many of today's hosting packages, so why bother to purchase a Reseller account?
Many don't realize the drawbacks of hosting large numbers of domains within a single hosting account until they've already packed tens of them onto a single package.
So how do you know whether a Reseller account or Shared Hosting account is right for you? The answer is in how you plan to provide access to others and how "mission-critical" the sites are. You should consider the following factors when deciding on hosting a large number of domains:
1. Who will be managing these sites?
2. How important is site security between sites?
3. Will these domains need dedicated SSLs?
4. How resource intensive will these sites be (RAM, CPU, MySQL)?
In a nutshell, Reseller plans are for those who wish to host websites for other sub-clients and a shared hosting package is for a single individual managing multiple personal domains. We'll go over the 4 points above in greater detail.
1. Who will be managing these site?
If you personally own multiple domains and wish to host them within the same hosting space, you can easily do so with an Addon or Parked domain. An addon domain will allow you to host a new domain within a subdirectory of your hosting space. A parked domain will allow you to have multiple domain names point to the same content. Since addon domains reside within the same user space as your main domain, you can manage all of your domains with a single login. You can see the problem if you want to provide another user with access. Since all accounts are managed with a single set of login credentials, if you give another user access to their addon domain you are also giving them access to your main domain. If you have vital information stored on your main domain and you are hosting another domain as an addon domain for someone else, you cannot provide them access to their hosting without compromising the integrity of your main domain.
When hosting sites as a Reseller, your clients in turn will want access to their account and will want exclusive rights to their disk space and server resources. With a Reseller account, each sub-account you create gets its own username, password, and isolated user space on the server. Individual clients of yours have access to their user space and their user space alone. In addition to the isolation with regards to access concerns, each account also gets their own cPanel access. All of the same great features that you use to manage your sites can also be given to your clients. Next time client Y wants to add an email account, you don't have to do it for them for fear of giving them access to your cPanel, you can simply give them their login details and they can manage their own email accounts.
2. How important is site security between sites?
This is along the same lines as point 1. This is not necessarily related to who you are hosting for, but what content you are hosting. Imagine that you are a webmaster and you are hosting your own personal site-in-a-box community forums (such as PHPBB or vBulliten) on your main domain and a company website for a paying client on an addon domain. It is not uncommon for popular scripts to have security flaws in older versions. Script authors will often update security flaws in later versions of their software. For this reason, it is very important to keep scripts up to date on your site. But let's assume you forget to update your scripts for a couple of months and an unscrupulous individual takes advantage of a well known security hole. Using this exploit, they gain access to your forums and any subdirectories. Since you are hosting another domain as an addon, they now have access to this domain's content as well. A site defacement on this company's site may not bode well for you when they are considering you for web master services in the future.
If these two domains had been separate into two individual users (i.e. two subaccounts created through a Reseller), their content would've been inherently isolated server side by Linux's user management. Sure, your forums still would've been affected by the security hole, but the break-in would've been isolated to your site alone.
Going back to our example, let's say that instead of a corporate website as an addon domain you are hosting an image gallery site for all of your cats. In this case, it may not be a big deal if a compromise in your main domain spreads to your addon domain. After all, they are both owned by you and you're only losing some time and effort to restore these sites from your local backups (which I'm sure you've actively maintained ). But then again, you are losing time and time is money. If these sites had been separated into individual users, again, you'd only have to restore one site's content.
The idea here is isolation. Reseller plans provide you with the peace of mind to know that if one of your users doesn't keep up with their site's content as actively as they should, their actions won't negatively impact the content hosted on other domains. If you and those you host in your addons are diligent webmasters, maybe this point won't have much bearing on your decision. Only you can say for sure.
3. Will these domains need SSLs?
As of this writing, SSL certificates must have a dedicated IP address to be installed. If you are hosting multiple domains on the same shared hosting package, you can still install an SSL (or purchase a dedicated IP address and install one) but you are limited to exactly one SSL on your account. If you are hosting multiple domains on the same package (and consequently the same IP), you must choose which domains gets to have the dedicated SSL.
Sub accounts of Resellers can each be placed onto separate IP addresses and, as a result, can each have their own dedicated SSL installed.
Of course, both shared accounts and Resellers' sub accounts can use the server's shared SSL free of charge. However, some clients prefer to see their domain in the URL bar when they visit https.
4. How resource intensive will these sites be (RAM, CPU, MySQL)?
We've already established that disk space and bandwidth will be no problem. But what about CPU, RAM, and MySQL resources?
It's important to be aware of the resource needs of your website. As administrators, we have to make sure all users "play nice" on the server. We can't have user X eating all of the CPU cycles computing pi to the trillionth decimal place while you are trying to serve web pages to your loyal visitors. We have to monitor the actions of all of our users and in the event someone is stepping beyond the bounds of acceptable resource consumption, we have to take action. In most cases, this entails disabling the abusive script, but in extreme cases we have to suspend the abusive user account to prevent other domains from encountering performance degradation on their sites.
If you are hosting 100 domains as addon domains, all serving nothing but static HTML pages, maybe you will stay off the radar.
But considering most sites are more complicated than static HTML, you may want to be aware of how many sites you host as addons and what content they serve. If you're hosting the latest and greatest Joomla modules, with up to date news feeds, integrated forums modules, polls, blog posts, etc your site can certainly require a degree of CPU to serve your pages. Now imagine you have 5 or 10 of these sites all hosted as addon domains. The resources these sites need to generate their content can quickly add up and before you know it you've got a friendly email from Acenet, Inc. in your inbox wondering why your user is consuming 2 of the 8 CPU cores on the server. That may be an exaggeration, but you get the idea. In the event your resource usage becomes so excessive that we have to suspend your user, now all of your sites are down instead of whichever one may be the direct cause of the spike in CPU, RAM, or MySQL consumption.
If each of these had been separate Reseller accounts, the offending account could've been suspended temporarily while we work through the cause, leaving the rest of your domains live and kicking.
The conclusion here is that you need to be aware of the needs of your sites in a general sense. Hosting unlimited domains within a shared hosting space is certainly a nice feature. For those webmasters who have multiple presences on the web, it's very convenient to be able to manage all of their personal domains from a single control panel. For those entrepreneurs who are hosting multiple domains for other individuals, the features and security associated with a Reseller plan and the inherent isolation of Linux users is a must have. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
I'have a problem with my aps setup on sanbox.When i create on customer ccp when i click finish i have this error. I must only test.
Error: Instance of application with id 124 and version '1-4' can not be provided: There is no resource of class 'Shared hosting Apache' with provisioning attributes 'Web Cluster' in subscription with id 1.:There is no resource of class 'Physical hosting (IIS)' with provisioning attributes 'Web Cluster' in subscription with id 1..If i add the shared hosting apache resourse i get this error : There are no "apache" services that satisfy given attributes: "Web Cluster".
I am developing a website for a client of mine (the client is a close friend and know's that he is getting a newbie). This site will be larger (project wise) than anything that I have ever done (everything I have done in the past has been FrontPage). We will be using several third party applications that need to run on the server as well as our own custom developed applications. We do not yet know how much access to the server's deeper structures we will need for all of the applications that we want loaded on our server to run. Things we have in mind: oscommerce, mysql, php5, apache, linux, vbulletin, blogger, phpbb, adserver, ect... Would these things run ok on a shared host and would I have full authority to configure them without needing full access to the server? Or will I need access to the entire server (dedicated server) in order to have full customization capabilities? I guess all I am trying to figure out at this point is will shared hosting for a large project limit our abilities to use 3rd party apps, or do most 3rd party application designers build their stuff to work in a shared hosting environment anyway? If we need to get a dedicated server we will, but if we can get away with shared hosting for a while (especially during development when the site will not be generating revenue) it would be nice to avoid the price of a dedicated server. Many thanks for your comments, insight, and expertise! Also, if anyone can sight some common scenarios that may require a dedicated server over a shared hosting plan, that may help me to understand what the limitations of a shared hosting plan vs. a deicated or virtual dedicated server are.
Here is my dilemma, thanks to a thread in these forums I was directed to a hosting website called pc-core.net and I was interested in using them, because it does not appear that they oversell at all. My question is regarding the fact that they have the shared hosting for $12/month with ~5gb of disk space and 50gb of transfer. I then just looked at reseller hosting for the heck of it, and noticed i could get a reseller hosting account with 45gb storage and 450gb of bandwidth for $10/month. Even though I wont be selling hosting, or anything like that, can I use a reseller hosting account like a normal shared hosting account?...just with more space and bandwidth?
I'm new to the VPS scene, so could someone tell me the difference between VPS and say shared hosting or dedicated hosting? Actually I really like to know what a Virtual Private Server actually is.. I know shared hosting is typically a single account on a server with several hundred other accounts which is used primarily for the sole purpose of hosting websites, and I know that dedicated hosting is functionally the same as colo except that you rent the server, instead of having your own purchased server plugged into some network. So what is VPS?
Do website builders generally go with shared hosting or dedicated server? I mean, if they work on several websites would they get a dedicated server instead of shared? From what I understand through reading shared hosting is basically if you only have one website. So one with multiple websites would go with a dedicated server?
