Yeah did some major changes on irred (the list is long), mostly around the design to make it nicer and cleaner, also on the backend, so the site should run smoother, also a new nice uploader and finally some cleanup of the public folder and new uploads, yay!!! looking good!!!
On buriko, i’ve cleaned up the design, should also run smoother, and started a companion gallery (ill post about that later).
Txxxa this sucks but seems the filesystem on that server has gone awry, so we are in the process of fsck, this is gonna take some time (its been down for 5 hours already), sorry about that everyone, but shit happens with moving parts, now depending on the outcome, we can be back in a couple of hours (problem resolved, RAID worked), or if we have corruption, ill have to bring from the backups, the hosts or mine whatever are the freshest, from what i checked, my backups are from this Saturday, so not so bad if they come from me ^_^
Ill update with more news in a couple of hours, sorrryyyy ^_^’
Update 1: Yep still going at it, that’s what happens when you put several Tb in one place, still no major issues until now, 8hours of downtime… this sucks… a bit hehehe
Update 2: Final stretch on fsck, its been down for almost half a day 11hours >_<
Update 3 – Final: Yay every site is back online and working fine, still 13hours of downtime… tsss wasn’t pretty…
Ohhh the re-launch of mamilo (means nipple in portuguese), its a simple but cool public image gallery about… guess… boobs and cute and awesome ones hehehe ^_^ yes it shares the same design as gomenasai and functions (anyone can register and upload), but totally diferent goal and language, since this is also a portuguese only site ^_^ still pretty easy to browse in any language and who doesn’t love boobs hehehe
Does it sound a bit like another site you know? … like 4chan? well its kinda in the same vibe and not, if you don’t know we already run 2 anonymous imageboards, neechan (a cleaner nicer themed imageboard) and tentakle (more gritty traditional ffa imageboard), and although its been a lot of fun running them, its a bit of a pain in the ass, with the continuous spamming, if they look so good today is because of all staffs work with the “daily cleaning”.
So what is 4kun, first i thought the domain was funny ^_^.oO(“chan” being a japanese honorific for cute young female, and “kun” for young boys), yes the site is still a imageboard, the twist is that its not anonymous, yep you have to make an account to post, OMGWORSTTHINGEVAH!!!
Well not really, i do understand the point and nicety of an anonymous imageboard, but i also understand that non anonymous board can also be fun and cool, first it will not keep the trolls away, but its way more effective at keeping the spammers away, second, because users have to jump a further hoop to registered, i think they also receive a greater appreciation for their sharing, if they are awesome at it, then they get the recognition for it, unlike the anonymous random nature of a traditional imageboard.
So there ya go, yeah its still rough on the edges, but like all s2r sites, its a work in progress and it will only get better with time ^_^
Dont look surprised when your wordpress site is hacked, is wordpress security so weak?
No, not really, its just popular and as such there are more vectors to attack its security, still as a heavy wordpress user i can give you some good tips to keep your site secure, ill divide this into setup the site and securing the site, once you should only need to do once, the other its best to be ongoing, im also assuming that you have your server setup correctly and secured as well as your wordpress is up to date and your computer is secure as well, if those are good, then what i say bellow will keep you 99% safe!
On wp-config.php when you install on $table_prefix = ‘whateveryouwant’ put a random string! – This will prevent mysql injections that might target the default wp_ table prefix (if already installed use something like phpadmin to go into the database and change the prefix there and then add it to the wp-config.php file)
On wp-config.php under define(‘WP_DEBUG’, false); put define(‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true); – This prevents editing of php files under wordpress, most people dont edit them anyways (i just login with sftp and edit directly), so people trying to exploit will have more difficulty doing so
Use a strong password – I know its silly to say but a strong unique password with lots of letters, numbers and characters is always a good thing.
Login with your default admin account, create a new account with admin privileges and then delete the old admin account – This prevents login requests or brute-force that would go directly to account number 1 or admin account
Disable user registration, go the options panel and disable user registration – If you dont intent for other users to post, there is no point in allowing registration.
Install only the Plugins you Need – Even if disabled, only have plugins and themes that you need, they could be used
BruteProtect or Login LockDown – To Prevent login attempts and brute force attacks (or in alternative find a Two-Step Authentication plugin).
Install a Clean Theme – Make sure you get a nice free theme from WordPress.org or a paid from a good provider and keep it up to date, the more complex the theme the more likely it will have code that might become insecure, so get a good one and keep it updated.
Advance Automatic Updates – Will keep your wordpress install and plugins up to date!
Akismet – It comes with WordPress for a reason, before it, wordpress comments were horrible and plagued with tons of spam.
Please pleassseeee make backups, dont trust your webhost, make your own, thats the only true way of being 100% secure, use a plugin for it, i like BackUpWordpress and Keep Backup Daily, but any you like will do!
Use Cloudflare or Incapsula – These give pleanty of extra features, like cdn but they also filter and protect your traffic from a lot of nasty stuff on the web.
Wordfence or Better Wp Security – If you want more heavy security, its totally optional and in my opinion if you are well locked down they dont add anything!
Use htaccess to lock in wp-admin if you are the only user, search for this on Google pleanty of sites explaining.
Use WordPress Jetpack plugin it protect you from some security flaws and it will help on automatic plugin installs, plus a ton of other things
Use Mx Toolbox or Sucuri Site Check to check if your site has been exploited!
The best rule of all is to be prepared for the worst, have backups and check from time to time to see if your site is up to date and everything is running fine, most of these are automated but its best to always keep an eye and if everything breaks just clean everything and put back a backup 🙂
Yes i know plenty of wordpress cache plugins comparisons posts, but i went around checking those and most are just a matter of opinion and taste or had some good data on performance both on the frontend and the backend of wordpress, my sites tend to have some optimisations built in mostly on the server so even with plugin there is some cache going on both on php and mysql as well as using nginx as a reverse proxy for the static files.
So i went ahead and made a basic wordpress site with one of the official themes and some random content, good enough, then checked some of the memory consumption and speed inside wordpress with the P3 Plugin and used Gtmatrix and Google Pagespeed to check the performance on the page, i also checked server side but as far as i can tell all the plugins didn’t use enough resources to be negligible, so what are my findings:
| Cache Plugin | Memory (sec) | Speed | Size (KB) | Requests | Pagespeed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No Plugin | 0 | 5.49 | 965 | 32 | 75/100 |
| WP Super Cache | 0.084 | 5.0 | 962 | 33 | 75/100 |
| W3 Total Cache | 3.6 | 11.33 | 965 | 33 | 75/100 |
| WP Fastest Cache | 0.083 | 4.7 | 757 | 30 | 90/100 |
| Hyper Cache | 0.008 | 5.0 | 961 | 32 | 75/100 |
| Hyper Cache + Autoptimize | 0.097 | 6.7 | 690 | 24 | 90/100 |
| Quick Cache | 0.04 | 4.93 | 961 | 32 | 75/100 |
| Quick Cache + Autoptimize | 0.1 | 5.44 | 696 | 24 | 91/100 |
| Wordfence Basic | 0.15 | 6.97 | 965 | 33 | 75/100 |
| Wordfence Falcon Engine | 0.14 | 5.63 | 762 | 34 | 90/100 |
Notes: I’ve added Autoptimize to the cache plugins that don’t have the ability to combine and minify code, to see if it helped. Also note that all of these results besides pagespeed are averages i did test 3 times to make sure, although gtmatrix does use random servers to check so the speed part can be a bit off, so dont take it literally its more important the size and requests as well as overall pagespeed ranking for true performance, yes i know i could have used a fixed server but i wanted a more normal usage scenario.
Like i said above by default my sites work and cache well enough to rate a standard 75/100 on Pagespeed, also enabling by default gzip and other small wordpress tweaks help too, still its only here as reference point, of course most wordpress sites would rate a bit lower.
I’ve used it a lot in the past, still i’ve moved on to other cache plugins because its a bit like W3 Total Cache, it has become with time less user-friendly, from all the plugins it was the most troublesome to turn on and to turn off (leaves a lot of stuff behind) also with default settings it didn’t cache much, also one of the reasons i left was that sometimes updates would kill my sites, its still a standard but i think its not good enough anymore.
This one is WP Super Cache on steroids, im sure its awesome since it has everything and then some, and although a bit easier to setup than it used to be, its kinda one that need a lot, i mean A LOT of pampering, it should only be used on large sites and sites where you control the server side and can enable the caches that W3 will use, also on my test and with default settings on it clearly was the worst plugin of them all, probably cause i should have changed something somewhere.
Although this plugin kinda broke a part of the wordpress backend (probably a css out of place), it was one of the most complete and simple plugins and you can see that it did a pretty good job and i didn’t even enable all the functions, it incorporates pretty much everything you expect in a small package, however 2 things keep me from using it, first there is no control over the html/js/css minify, and from my experience most my sites would break if i cant tweak this (Autoptimize does give you that control) the second is that the panel tries to ping ipinfo.io i don’t like plugins that do stuff like that.
The one I’m currently using on most of my sites, its simple clean and to the point and as you can see it does its job, besides one nagging issue when the plugin or wordpress updates the plugin seems to stop working and you get the “You must save the options since some files must be updated.” still unlike WP Super Cache the site doesn’t stop working, so it a safe and good plugin with very low memory consumption.
I like this one, its has a nice panel, its simple and it worked just fine, still some of its best features are hidden away for a premium package and well that makes it under perform, i would understand if these features were more high end stuff like using CDN’s or tweaks around server side, but things like minify should be part of the basic feature set and as such this plugin is comparable with Hyper Cache but with more resource usage.
Its mostly a security/firewall plugin for your site that also has a caching plugin built in, so why not try it out, it has 2 settings so i tried them both, the basic and their so called falcon engine, i did see a improvement and it worked fine, still its of course a much bigger plugin that does a lot of things besides the caching, but if you are looking for both a security plugin and a cache plugin, this might be good for you.
Its a plugin that minifies html/css/js and combines it, it can do it both on the head or move those scripts to the end of the body to help the page load, its also very flexible and you can skip files or tweak so it doesn’t break your site, some of the other plugins had these features or part of it, but this plugin gives you complete control and as such is a nice combination with other caching plugins.
Ill keep using Hyper Cache, it works well, the feature set is good enough and it doesn’t break my site ever, when i need to give a bit more i add Autoptimize or if its on Cloudflare i just tweak the html/css/js from there, it was my choice about a year ago when i move away from WP Super Cache and as far as i can tell it still was the best choice.
So I was a user of Webfaction hosting for a year, and nooo don’t take my dramatic image that Webfaction sucks! Hehehe it just sucked a little but it failed quite a bit, lets start from top shall we.
[ Rant Warning ^_^’ ] Since i have most of my domains on ResellerClub and from my tests on DNS performance, ResellerClub DNS is like me hosting my own DNS (it will be slow and probably only on one location), its kinda the bare minimum, so I’ve used other DNS services, but ended up going with PointDNS, it had the basic features and pretty good performance, but since they got bought/sold/merged into Copper, they have been changing more and more of their basic features!
I don’t mind adding new features and asking money for them, that’s perfectly reasonable, but going back on previously free features is where i draw the line, i feel cheated, well not in the sense that i have to pay (altought now i do!), but in the “you got me here with these features” cheated (ie i would never have used PointDNS if they didn’t have these features).
Taking back features is like going back on your word and so i have lost confidence, they decided to make their e-mail redirects paid, but since i only need hosted DNS for less important domains or 3rd party hosted domains (like hosted in Blogger, Tumblr…), that feature is pretty helpful for me, so I’m moving away, I still think they have a pretty good, clean and reliable DNS service, but at this point even using ResellerClub or hosting my own is a better alternative, as of now I’m moving to NameCheap DNS!
Positives of PointDNS
Negatives of PointDNS
In my quest for some good secure cloud hosting/sync aka Dropbox clone, ive tested and used a lot of diferent cloud sync providers, might as well start posting my findings, today im starting with TresorIT, coming from Hungary, being their main features their client side encription and any folder can be synced.
So lets start with the install, I installed it on a Windows7 Laptop, that went fine and started fine, standard stuff here, i do note that this soft is installed on a very strange place (it installs on AppData instead of Program Files), also it created a ton of .tresor or .tresorit hidden folders, a bit weird but nothing much.
On running its a bit bare with information, username and password (so i assume the client side encription is done with that password) and off it goes, syncing away, however there is no way of knowing what is it doing, also its not as fast as say Dropbox or Skydrive, but the worst thing is that if you turn it off and delete a file and then turn the program back on… it wont retrieve the file from the server… so whats the point here?
That is pretty much standard syncing operation (if the software is not online at the time of the deletion you bring back the file from the server or if there is a new file update the file on the server, you dont erase the file on the server), so basically if there is corruption or you accidentally delete a file, or if you need to retrieve a file from the server online you are screwed, so what are you syncing for?
Yeah as of now TresorIT is pretty much useless, if you want syncing without protecion of data you might as well choose Bittorent Sync, its way safer (cause you at least know more about the security than blindly trusting TresorIT), its way quicker (on LAN its Blazing!!!!) and well if you delete something you are also screwed anyways!
TresorIT Advantages:
TresorIT Disadvantages:
If you reeeeaaalllllly need to check them out, its TresorIT.com!
So Mega is not just for Sharing!
You know Mega! If you don’t, you probably don’t read much tech news, the very much hyped product of Megaupload founder, its basically (at least for now) a Megaupload clone, a filehost, just cleaner and easier to use with encryption built in, so why my glee of Mega?
Well i do backups of everything, from my android to my computers to my websites, backups is just part of everyday life, sure its mostly automated but its one of those things that are important especially when you invested so much time and money on your data, still there are times, especially with my websites that i need some long term storage, my backup box stores about 3 copies of all of my sites and that takes a lot of space, but these copies are rotating so if there is a slight issue, such as creeping corruption or some deleted file, those backups can become useless.
So besides my current setup, i have the need for less used/long term backup storage, but why dont I use amazon s3, amazon glacier or another alternative, thats true, but i want a simple system for backups something i can just, grab a couple of files and load it there just in case from time to time, also old dumps from my android or random files that im sure i wont need anytime soon, its not essential stuff, no need to run another system.
Mega boasts their encryption on the client side (while others like Dropbox and Google encrypt on their side, what that means is if Google or Dropbox wants they can see your files), still as with all these companies its a matter of trust, if you trust these companies to do what they say they do, however for this particular case all my site backups are encrypted and compressed so its a mute point although still a point for Mega.
Mega is just a plain better filehost, its super simple to use, the files are backed up (at least in 2 places), the uploads go without any problem (compared with Dropbox or Box or Gdrive web uploads that do hang up from time to time), the files stay forever (at least that’s the official policy), there is no filesize restrictions even though most backups are only 100Mb or so, there are some that are 1 or 2GB in size, no problem with Mega, and if i ever need to download, its blazing fast, enough said! Im sold and so should you!
Just as a broad comparison why Mega is better than most other filehosts:
General Filehost – No security, no reliability and a tendency to lose your file in a whim.
General Webhost – Better reliability but again no security, and they tend to not like you hosting big files.
Rapidshare – They change their policy constantly and its always for worst, i was their paid customer for 2 separate times and both i got screwed, never again.
Mediafire – They say they are a cloud hosting company, but well they dont guarantee that files are kept, only if a file is popular, unusable for any kind of reliable file hosting.
Dropbox – Great and reliable if you pay them, if you dont pay them you are a second class citizen, also their service only works great with their desktop client, no point.
Skydrive – They scan your files, that says it all, plus, can you trust Microsoft?
Google Drive – They want a perpetual license for all your files, plus, can you trust Google?
As a sidenote…
Box – Actually pretty good, my account with them is several years old and i never lost a file, still they have a pretty stiff filesize limit of 250Mb, so not ideal for what i need, but outstanding for small files backup!
PS: Cant wait for Mega Sync Application for Windows/Mac/Linux!
Yeah i know this could be seen as a infomercial so you guys will click on my Copy referral link (and we both will get 5GB for free), but i am very interested in cloud hosting and i do try a lot of them, i use it daily for my backups, for business and for sharing (i’ll make another post later on with more details), so testing new cloud storage is important to me, since i do have some issues with the ones i use currently.
Dropbox (Free 20GB) for syncing of work material, its absolutely flawless, but it tends to bog down from time to time (burst of CPU) and also although secure its not encrypted and i know i could do it myself and in some ways i do, but with encryption on my side there is a risk of corruption and data loss, so i avoid putting there anything that is really private, mostly work files, stuff i need on the run or that im currently working on! (Update a day or so after posting this, Dropbox decided to cut a chunk of my referrals, wtf is with that after years! they go back on referrals! thats fucked up, ill probably make a post about it tomorrow, but for today they lose their link on this post and worse, my trust).
Box (Free 50GB), i always liked Box, their web interface is really good, but the best is that my account has like 5 years and all my files are still there, i should like delete some, but the combination of 50GB and never deleting a file ever, makes it perfect for small backups and old webfiles, their sync app is pretty bad, so i dont use it (tried it twice).
Mega (Free 50GB), what? MEGA!!! yep, as it seems the fact that your files are encripted and they dont delete files and they have backups and they dont have file size limits, makes mega awesome for website backups, sometimes if its a database heavy site its pretty small, but if its a media heavy website, its gonna get huge, so mega is awesome for that and yes i do encript all files myself, so no security issues there! and super fast upload and download!
I do have a owncloud instance but i only use that to sync my music, maybe if i encript it and make automatic backups, ill use it more ^_^’
Cubby, pretty good cloud hosting, with local sync and web sync, but with their change to a paid service they basically cripled every free user to a less than useful service, before it had some interesting features now its way less usefull, that and a touchy sync (sometimes it syncs, sometimes it doesnt and says everything is synced…)
Rapidshare, this one is going down the drain, i dont know what they are thinking, i was still barely using them, but the last files i had there died a couple of weeks ago for no reason, no point using them for anything.
Mediafire, good for sharing, horrible for backups, your files dont stay if they are too popular or not popular enough, im not sure why they keep saying they are a dropbox clone, they are a basic filehost.
Skydrive, searching your files for images or whatever is beyond me, i dont care if its automatic, any host that searches your files is not a host that i will ever use.
Google Drive, im slowly moving away from Google services, but i did try it and it worked ok, i didn’t liked they changed their pricing at the time, but i dont care cause i dont want to use, that and their terms of service that give them a lifetime license to your stuff, again shit beyond me.
Well I’ve only tried for a few days, but its very similar to dropbox (thats a good thing), lightweight and i like their android app, worked great for now, quick syncing, i did wished they did something different, instead of a pure clone, still if i get more than what i have in dropbox you never know hehehe.
So yeah i put in this post my copy and my dropbox referral use it if you are interested in signing up youll get extra space, ohh and here is my Copy referral (If you sign up you will get an extra 5GB!)