Q. I’m setting up a firewall on my Cpanel VPS/Dedicated Server. Which ports need to be kept open?

A. This a list of the ports that need to be kept open:

20 FTP
21 FTP
22 SSH
25 SMTP
26 SMTP
53 DNS
80 HTTP
110 POP3
143 IMAP4
443 HTTPS
465 SMTP (TLS/SSL)
993 IMAP4 (SSL)
995 POP3 (SSL)
2082 CPANEL
2083 CPANEL (SSL)
2086 WHM (Web Host Manager)
2087 WHM (SSL)
2095 WEBMAIL
2096 WEBMAIL (SSL)
3306 MYSQL (only if you want to allow incoming connections)
6666 - CHAT

Obviously you can close down ports 465 and 995 if you are not using secure POP or IMAP.

Virtuozzo and OpenVZ Compared

We get asked often what is the difference between Virtuozzo VPS and OpenVZ as we offer OpenVZ as a lower cost option on root and Cpanel/WHM VPS Hosting. OpenVZ is very much a stripped down development platform, albeit a very usable and robust one. Here are the main differences:

• Greater VPS density - Virtuozzo due to its memory and file sharing capabilities enables higher number of VPS’s and better performance of VPSs. Basically more VPS’s per server.
• Management Tools & GUI’s - Virtuozzo is supplied with management, monitoring, troubleshooting, and admin tools which can significantly reduce management, administration, and deployment costs. These include VZPP, VZCC, VZMC
• Command Line Utilities - Virtuozzo ships with a number of additional command line utilities such as vzstat, to assist the management of the VPS’s and hardware node.
• Support and Maintenance - Virtuozzo™ being a commercial product supported and maintained by SWsoft (though SWSoft also offer paid support for OpenVZ).
• Virtuozzo ships with advanced recovery, monitoring, and Back-up tools. With OpenVZ these are supplied by the development community.
• Virtuozzo has additional support for physical to VPS and VPS to physical migration tools. These tools allow trivial conversion of existing physical servers into Virtuozzo™ VPS (and vice-versa) to create a virtualized infrastructure.
• Virtuozzo ships with additional traffic accounting tools for bandwidth management and control for individual VPSs in addition to aiding the security of VPSs running on the same host.
• Virtuozzo offers greater integration with the Plesk Control Panel, with discounts on Plesk licences

So the VPS end user might not notice a big difference between a Virtuozzo and OpenVZ from the “inside” apart from the lack of an “offline” control panel to manage the VPS.

Q. Does Weycrest offer OpenVZ VPS Hosting as well as Virtuozzo Hosting?
A. Yes, we offer OpenVZ as a lower cost alternative, on Root and CPanel/WHM VPS Hosting. We don’t offer Plesk hosting on OpenVZ, as the licencing cost is not as attractive as Plesk on Virtuozzo and Plesk is well integrated into the Virtuozzo Control Panel (VZPP).

Q.What is OpenVZ?
A. OpenVZ is server virtualization software, allowing you to host hundreds of Virtual Environments on a decent server (the main limitations are RAM and CPU).

• OpenVZ is one of the test beds for Virtuozzo, a proprietary software server virtualisation product provided by SWsoft, Inc, but licensed under the GPL version 2
• OpenVZ is an operating system-level virtualization technology based on the Linux kernel and operating system.
• OpenVZ allows a physical server to run multiple isolated operating system instances, known as Virtual Private Servers (VPS) or Virtual Environments (VE).
• Unlike VMware and paravirtualization technologies such as Xen, OpenVZ is more limited in that it requires both the host and guest OS to be Linux (although Linux distributions can be different in different VEs) under the same kernel.
• OpenVZ claims a true performance advantage. According to its website, there is only a 1-3% performance penalty for running OpenVZ compared to using a standalone server.
• As OpenVZ employs a single kernel model, and is scalable as the 2.6 Linux kernel; in that it will support up to 64 CPUs and up to 64 GB of RAM. A single virtual environment can scale up to the whole physical box (known as a “heavy VPS”) i.e. use all the CPUs and all the RAM.
• OpenVZ is divided into a custom kernel and a number of user-level tools such as vzctl, vzstat etc.
• OpenVZ lacks some of the features of the commercial product Virtuozzo, such as the advanced vzfs file system, templating features, to save disk space, and additional userland tools and control panels (though third party ones have been written).

We can now offer Linux Virtual Private Servers based on Ubuntu 6.0 (Dapper Drake). These VPS’s will be made available with either a Plesk Control Panel or as a basic root server.

Ubuntu is based upon Debian and is rapidly becoming one of the more popular Linux distributions.

We will put up a new web page for Ubuntu and Debian based VPS’s shortly, however the basic specs are below:

Ve10 Ubuntu VPS:

• Disc Space 10GB
• Monthly Traffic 150GB
• Guaranteed RAM 256MB
• Burst Ram 512MB
• Monthly Price: £29.99 ex VAT

Ve20 Ubuntu VPS:

• Disc Space 20GB
• Monthly Traffic 300GB
• Guaranteed RAM 512MB
• Burst Ram 1024MB
• Monthly Price: £49.99 ex VAT

Ve30 Ubuntu VPS:

• Disc Space 30GB
• Monthly Traffic 450GB
• Guaranteed RAM 1024MB
• Burst Ram 2048MB
• Monthly Price: £74.99 ex VAT

More detailed specifications can be found at our existing Centos VPS page:

http://www.weycrest.co.uk/vps-compare.php

If you wish to order a Ubuntu VPS just follow the sign up links on the above page and quote “Ubuntu” in the comments section of the order form.

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Ans. Yes we offer both cPanel/WHM Reseller Hosting and

Plesk Reseller Hosting on Linux (with Windows to be added shortly).

We currently have a 10 domain Plesk reseller hosting “taster” account  from just £69.99 which allows you host up to 10 websites in a single account.

Our Unlimited Plesk Reseller Hosting Accounts can be found here:

http://www.weycrest.co.uk/resell.php

Our Unlimited cPanel/WHM Reseller Accounts can be found here:

http://www.weycrest.co.uk/cpanel-reseller-hosting.php 

Ans. Yes it possible to map and share a network drive to your VPS, then you can drag and drop files across to your hosted webspace without having to use FTP.

If your are using the Plesk control panel in your VPS, samba can be configured using the supplied Plesk module. However we would recommend creating a VPN first, and then configure samba to only listen on the VPN network interface  (typically tap0) as a security measure.

Ans: All Weycrest support VPS (Virtual Private Network) Technology using OpenVPN. Weycrest VPS’s are created with the neccessary device nodes and kernel TUN/TAP modules loaded.

Indeed Plesk 8.1 incorporates a VPN modules allow ease of configuration of the VPN endpoints, on the VPS itself and on your home / or office PC. (OpenVPN can be installed on your Windows or Linux PC).

The VPN setups a private address range (typically 172.16.0.x ) at both ends. You can then ping your VPS as if it was on your private LAN as if the internet never existed.

Ans: Yes the following iptables or firewalling modules are included in your VPS including NAT.

ipt_REJECT ipt_tos ipt_limit ipt_multiport iptable_filter iptable_mangle ipt_TCPMSS ipt_tcpmss ipt_ttl ipt_length ipt_state iptable_nat ip_nat_ftp

Ans. Yes we can provide cPanel & Web Hosting Manager as a control panel option on our Centos or Fedora Core VPS’s. The price is currently the same, as for Plesk.

We recommend a higher spec VPS for cPanel.

Also Weycrest we recommend Plesk for VPS useage as it better integrated
into the VPS software.

You can specify your control panel choice in the comments section of the order form?