it’s the the time of year again to reflect on the past twelve months. We at Flosoft.biz had a very exciting 2012 with many new clients trusting us for their Hosting Requirements. Our new ranges of products went down very well – we certainly don’t simply place products on the market, but listen to you and react to your wishes. You, our clients, always came first and always will come first at Flosoft. biz.

Then there was of course Le Web in London in June and in Paris in December, this unbelievable conference organized by Geraldine and Loic LeMeur – we are so proud to have been a small part of it! Honestly – there is no better conference to meet the right people at the right time in the right place than Le Web. Make sure you don’t miss it in 2013!

And this is the time of year to say thank you to you all. Thanks for your support, for all your ideas which you shared so freely, and thanks for making Flosoft.biz the most reliable partner when it comes to Hosting the Realtime Web.

We wish you a pleasant break and every success in 2013.

Claus, Florian, and the Team at Flosoft.biz

as you know, we’ve got our new datacenter Beauharnois in Quebec, CA in which we’re offering Startup, Pro and Ultra servers.

We made a decision to not offer any Eco servers in the beginning located in North America as we’re quite busy working on other commercial solutions.

However, we thought that we’d offer a handful of Eco servers to our eager supporters and their friends.

So, for a few days / hours (all depends on how quickly you guys snatch up these servers), we’re offering a very limited edition of the Eco server.

Dedicated Eco E-Limited
Intel Atom D425 1.8 GHz (512 KB cache) (64bits)
Gigabit Ethernet NIC (100Mbit/s Switchport)
4GB of RAM
2 TB of HDD

Pretty sweet spec! But that’s not all: the price!

We’ve decided to offer it at €20 / month! On top of that, we’ve decided to get rid of the setup fee on longer term contracts!

The result:

Monthly payment: €25 / month + €50 setup
3 months: €20 / month + €25 setup
6 months: €20 / month + €0 setup
12 months: €20 / month + €0 setup

We’re accepting orders from now via the link below! Please note, there is only a very very limited amount of servers available, and these won’t be available in the near future as a full commercial offer. See it as an early christmas present!

Order Link: https://client.flosoft.biz/manager/cart.php?a=add&pid=131

Enjoy!

Florian Jensen

As this is quite a big step for us, we decided to something different: We’re offering the Startup Entry server configuration for either €79.00 (20% discount) or €89.00 (10% discount), depending on how many orders get placed by this Sunday, as well as no setup fee (instead of €50).

So, if less than 10 orders get placed until Sunday, the lifetime price will be €89.00. If more than 10 get placed, we’ll discount a further 10% off the lifetime price (resulting in a price of €79.00) of the server (and we’ll credit early takers the price difference as well).

The Startup Entry 2012 version is based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge platform, boasting a Core i3-2130 and it’s 2 hyperthreaded cores clocked at 3.4GHz and 16GB of DDR3 memory. We’ve also got a massive 2x1TB of storage onboard the server.

The server is great for an initial production environment. If you’re looking to host a heavy website, or a lot of small ones, a gameserver or CPU intensive applications, this server is a great start, and a great way to get to know our North American datacenter.

So, go out and tell all your friends, and bag yourself a 20% lifetime discount!

Claus Kraemer, Christian Loch, Florian Jensen, Sabine Spaeth, Albert Kamm, Rafael Erkert and Harald Gmelin attended the Business-Barbeque of Flosoft.biz Photo: Karen Huettig

Aichwald’s Deputy Mayor, Albert Kamm, was pleased: “There is always something new at Flosoft.biz!“, said the CEO of Team Kamm Data, a software specialist for car repair companies. Albert is also a very successful and well-known politician. “It’s nice to talk about whatever you like with business partners and colleagues – and there is nobody checking their watches”, he said.

Florian Jensen and Claus Kraemer, founders of Flosoft.biz could welcome a choice group of guests at their HQ in Aichwald/Germany. IT-Manager Christian Loch and his colleague Cedric Weber work for the Eberspaecher group, a major player in the automotive world with offices and factories around the globe.

Harald Gmelin and Rafael Erkert attended on behalf of Activation GmbH, a fast growing IT service provider working for clients all over Southern Germany. Sabine Spaeth, Key Account Manager with Esslingen’s renowned Insurance House Karl Beck noted: “Information Technology is becoming more and more important. And of course it’s highly interesting and beneficial to talk to these guys who really know their business.”

Florian Jensen had flown in from London on Saturday morning, and he was the one to bring an extra smile to the faces of the Flosoft.biz guests: He had purchased Spotify gift cards for everyone present (and an extra few for the kids at home). “That way they can all enjoy the vast catalogue of Spotify as well magical apps such as Soundrop who happen to be one of our customers.”

Soundrop came to us a few months ago with the challenge of having to accommodate more and more users and thus requiring more bandwidth as well as low latency connectivity to their users.

Scaling an application is always challenge; it requires planning and making sure contingencies are prepared for. Many startups choose the Cloud (VPS) method, but that’s often a very expensive alternative and only delays the problem by a few months. At some point you won’t be able to afford the Cloud infrastructure and / or you’ll reach the point where adding more small Cloud instances won’t solve your problem anymore. This is why thinking about a scalable and affordable architecture from the beginning is key.

In the case of Soundrop we’ve set up a handful of Pro SSD dedicated servers, subsequently allowing them to make use of our lossless network and a good amount of memory and CPU power.

This allowed them to handle 14000 concurrent users connected to their service generating close to 160 Mbit/s of traffic on a single application server while Alesso and Sebastian Ingrosso were rocking away.

It’s great to see people challenging our infrastructure every day and pushing our services to the edge. We’re looking forward to the next challenge heading our way and finding new ways of solving it.

We will stop sending out invoices with PayPal as payment method on the 01.05.2012 and stop accepting PayPal payments on 01.06.2012. If you have any questions regarding this, please contact our support team.

Tip: Do you want to get only 1 invoice a month for all your services?

No problem! Just contact our team, and we’ll align your services to a single date that’s convenient to you, so that you only have 1 invoice a month to pay.

A major vulnerability was discovered in Plesk, allowing full access to the panel. The versions from 7.6.1 to 10.3.1 are vulnerable. Versions 10.4 are not affected.

To find out if your server is vulnerable, see the following article: http://kb.parallels.com/en/113424

To apply the Plesk micro-updates, please follow this article: http://kb.parallels.com/en/9294

For more information: http://kb.parallels.com/en/113321

Important

It is strongly recommended to change all passwords for Plesk users and Admin account: http://kb.parallels.com/en/113391

Check and clean your server in case it would have been exploited:

1.) Delete the backdoor:

Delete all files in the /tmp directory on your server. You should see files named ‘u’ or ‘id’ for example.

2.) Locate cgi and perl scripts

Type the following command: ls -al /var/www/vhosts/*/cgi-bin/*.pl . You’ll see in each cgi-bin folder of the file. .pl or .cgi with different names.

Example: preaxiad.pl, dialuric.pl, fructuous.pl .

Delete all these scripts if they are not yours.

3.) Secure your site

Injections took place on wordpress, drupal and /or joomla. Make sure your sites use the very latest version of the CMS. Disable via plesk panel in the hosting section the CGI-BIN option for sites that do not use this option.

Also change the ftp/sql password of your sites.

4.) Locate the source IP

You can grep the name of script.pl in access_log of your site to find the IP that performed the injection.

For example:

zgrep 'preaxiad' /var/www/vhosts/YOURDOMAINHERE/statistics/logs/access_log*

It should return a line like:

12.34.56.78 - - [01/Mar/2012:02:37:55 +0100] "GET /cgi-bin/preaxiad.pl HTTP/1.1" 200 181 "" "Opera/7.21 (Windows NT 5.2; U)"

Use the IP at the beginning of this line to see if other sites are affected.

zgrep 'ip.in.question.here' /var/www/vhosts/*/statistics/logs/access_log*

This will then return the list of logs to sites the script have been called.

Need help? We’re here!

Our team can help you to verify and update your Plesk service. If you need help with any of the steps above, please contact our support. Depending on your service with us, this intervention might be charged (we will inform you of this in advance).

The intervention will include:

• Removing scripts / backdoors
• Check the presence of the fault
• The microupdate and update of your plesk

The Flosoft.biz Stand at MME_2

We at Flosoft are well aware of our social responsibilities. That’s why we started supporting cultural events of regional importance in Aichwald/Germany, where our HQ is based, MME_2 (Momente, Menschen, Emotionen) is one of the outstanding events this spring.

More than 800 spectators gathered at the market square and enjoyed a brilliant light show provided by internationally known artists Matthias Rapp and Wolfgang Steeb. In addition a 45-minutes fotoshow with the most interesting, funny and important pictures showing all aspects of life in the Swabian town proved fascinating. Our involvement was well worth the effort – we had invited a number of German clients, and quite a few showed up and enjoyed the evening with us. Another important point: The media liked us and printed some really pleasing pics, which you can find on our Facebook page.

It’s definite: We will support MME_3 in 2013!

Monitoring TWiT servers while waiting for the news

I guess everyone interested in technology, spent the last 2 hours following Apple’s iPad announcement. One of the leading media networks that have been covering the announcement live was TWiT.tv.

We’re happy to share with you that TWiT.tv’s iPad / iPhone and Roku stream is hosted on one of our servers using Wowza for HTTP Live Streaming.

Now handling a peak like that is normally a big challenge, with there being a substantial increase of live viewers, so we decided to keep an eye on the single fine tuned dedicated server, to make sure that no viewer would be left out. Here are some of the stats we saw:

Network Throughput

One of the challenges with video is that you continuously need a large amount of bandwidth in comparison to just serving web pages.

MRTG Graph

As you can see on the graph above, the single server had a peak network output of 1203.2Mbit/s. That’s more than a Gigabit per second!

CPU Load

The server boasting 2 quad core CPU’s didn’t even break a sweat. With Wowza being set up to share the load across the different CPUs and cores, it never broke a sweat while streaming the 720p stream to more than a thousand users simultaneously.

We’re looking forward to the next big event and breaking the 2Gbit/s mark! Oh, and in case you missed the live stream, you can watch the special here.

We would like to thank all of you out there for your incredible support. We are really looking forward to working for you in the future. By the way: You might have expected this anyway, but let’s make it official now. We have developped new and very exciting products which we will present early next year – so keep checking our website

We wish you a pleasant and relaxing festive season and a very successful year 2012!

Florian Jensen and Claus Kraemer