Tips and Tricks Posts

This guest blog comes to us from Dave Meizlik, Dome9 VP of marketing and business development. Dome9 is a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. With Dome9, you get secure, on-demand access to all your servers by automating and centralizing firewall management and making your servers virtually invisible to hackers.

Three Tips to Securing Your Cloud Servers

By now everyone knows that security is the number one concern among cloud adopters. But lesser known is why and what to do to mitigate some of the security risks … I hope to shed a little light on those points in this blog post, so let’s get to it.

One of the greatest threats to cloud servers is unsecured access. Administrators leave ports (like RDP and SSH) open so they can connect to and manage their machines … After all, they can’t just walk down the hall to gain access to them like with an on-premise network. The trouble with this practice is that it leaves these and other service ports open to attack from hackers who need only guess the credentials or exploit a vulnerability in the application or OS. Many admins don’t think about this because for years they’ve had a hardened perimeter around their data center. In the cloud, however, the perimeter collapses down to each individual server, and so too must your security.

Tip #1: Close Service Ports by Default

Instead of leaving ports — from SSH to phpMyAdmin — open and vulnerable to attack, close them by default and open them only when, for whom, and as long as is needed. You can do this manually — just be careful not to lock yourself out of your server — or you can automate the process with Dome9 for free.

Dome9 provides a patent-pending technology called Secure Access Leasing, which enables you to open a port on your server with just one click from within Dome9 Central, our SaaS management console, or as an extension in your browser. With just one click, you get time-based secure access and the ability to empower a third party (e.g., a developer) with access easily and securely.

When your service ports are closed by default, your server is virtually invisible to hackers because the server will not respond to an attacker’s port scans or exploits.

Read Two More of Dome9′s Security Best Practices

Too often, new customers can get overwhelmed by a small administrative task on a Linux server. One of the more common questions I see in technical support is when a drive partition runs out of space. The website appears offline, and on of my coworkers advises you to just free-up some space. “Just?! Where can I find files that are deletable without affecting my website?”

Don’t worry … it’s really quit simple. If you can use FTP (File Transfer Protocol), you can handle this bit of server management. Depending on the exact problem, we might instruct you to free up space by removing files in one of the following directories:

• /var/log
• /usr/local/cpanel
• /usr/local/apache/logs
• /usr/local/apache/domlogs

The reason these directories are usually overlooked is because they are not accessible by normal FTP users — users who only upload website content. When you upload website content to the server via FTP, the FTP user is limited to the directory structure for that website. Directories starting with “/var” and “/usr” cannot be accessed by these non-root users (The “root” user can access anything). And while root is a powerful user, for the sake of security, it is not normally allowed to log in over FTP because FTP is not secure … That’s where SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) comes in.

Most FTP clients support SFTP, so you don’t have to learn a new environment to securely access any file on the server. Every FTP client is different, but I’ll illustrate with FileZilla because it’s free and available on Mac, Windows and Linux. If you don’t already have an FTP client, I highly recommend FileZilla. Because there are a few ways to use FileZilla to get an SFTP connection, I can share different options for you to try:

Quick Connect

The Quick Connect bar is the quickest way to connect to your server. Start FileZilla and look immediately under the toolbar for the Quick Connect bar:

Enter the hostname (IP address or domain name), “root” in the Username field, the root password in the Password field, and “22″ in the port field. Remember, port 22 is for SFTP, the same as SSH. Click the Quickconnect button to connect.

Using the Site Manager

The Site Manager lets you save your login details. Start FileZilla and you’ll see the following:

To open the Site Manager, click the left-most icon in tool bar or go to File >> Site Manager in the menu.

Enter an IP address or domain name for your server in the Host field, and select “SFTP” as your protocol. You’ll enter the root user’s login information, and you’re ready to connect by clicking the “Connect” button or you can click the “OK” button to save and close the dialog box.

If you just saved your settings and the Site Manager is not open, click the Site Manager icon again. From there, you can select the site under the “Select Entry” box, and you just have to click “Connect” to initiate the SFTP connection with your saved settings.

If you see a pop-up that warns of an “Unknown host key,” clicking the “Always trust this host, add this key to the cache” option will prevent this interruption from showing in the future. Once you click “OK” to complete the connection, your FileZilla screen should look like this:

Notice the “Remote site” section on the middle right of the FileZilla screen:

This area in FileZilla is the directory and file listing of the server. Navigate the server’s file structure here, and click “/” to access the top of the folder structure. You should see the “/usr” and “/var” directories, and you can explore the filesystem to delete the files technical support recommended to create space!

Message Log

If you have a problem connecting to your server by FTP or SFTP, the open area below the Quickconnect bar is the Message Log. If you can copy and paste this text into a ticket, you’ll help technical support troubleshoot your connection problems. Below is an example log of a successful FTP session:

Status: Connecting to server.example.com...
Response:   fzSftp started
Command:    open "root@server.example.com" 22
Command:    Trust new Hostkey: Once
Command:    Pass: **********
Status: Connected to server.example.com
Status: Retrieving directory listing...
Command:    pwd
Response:   Current directory is: "/root"
Command:    ls
Status: Listing directory /root
Status: Calculating timezone offset of server...
Command:    mtime ".lesshst"
Response:   1326387703
Status: Timezone offsets: Server: -21600 seconds. Local: -21600 seconds. Difference: 0 seconds.
Status: Directory listing successful

And here’s an example of a failed connection:

Status: Resolving address of example.com
Status: Connecting to 192.0.43.10:21...
Error:  Connection timed out
Error:  Could not connect to server
Status: Waiting to retry...
Status: Resolving address of example.com
Status: Connecting to 192.0.43.10:21...
Error:  Connection attempt interrupted by user

If you have any questions, leave them in a comment below. Enjoy your new-found SFTP powers!

-Lyndell

In the past couple of months we’ve added some really cool Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) features to the Softlayer Mobile application, including Lives Tiles and Notifications. While a basic Live Tile implementation is relatively easy, there’s a fair amount of coding and architecture requirements to facilitate cooler Live Tile functionality and Notifications … And we’re all about doing things cooler.

Live Tiles is a such great feature of Windows Phone 7 largely because it gives the developer much more control over the device’s user experience when compared to other mobile OSes. Live Tile functionality in its simplest form can be just ‘Pinning’ the Tile to the Start Menu with a deep link to a specific location within the application so that when clicked the user is taken to that location within the app. This can save the user a lot of time in having to navigate deep into an app if they know where they want to go. More advanced features of Live Tiles include programmatically giving the Tile a custom background image and displaying a notification message on the background when the Tile flips.

Adding a Live Tile

To add a Live Tile, a user simply clicks and holds the module they’d like to pin to the start menu. When the context menu appears, the user can select ‘pin as tile,’ and he or she will be taken to the Start page where the new Tile is displayed:

The Magic Behind Sending Notifications

We really wanted to be able to notify a user when a notable event happens on his or her account (new ticket is created/updated, when a bill is overdue, etc.), and Windows Phone 7 provides some pretty phenomenal functionality in that area … I wouldn’t be surprised if other big mobile OSes copy Windows Phone 7′s notifications in the future. When it comes to implementing notifications in SoftLayer Mobile, we needed to handle a few things:

1. Get a Unique App+User Channel URI from Windows Push Notification Server
2. Register URI & Channel Name with the Softlayer Registration Service (WCF we created)
3. Store this URI, Channel Name and the user’s Account in a DB
4. Periodically poll for new tickets or updates (since we don’t have a mechanism yet that can ‘push’ this alert when any notification event is triggered)
5. Send Notification (whether it’s a Toast or Tile notification) to device via the unique URI & Channel name.

I was going to include the architecture diagram here showing this relationship and process, but the designer sitting next to me told that nobody wants to see that.

What do the Numbers on the Tiles Mean?

We wanted to make our Tiles show information that the user would find useful, so we send the account’s total unread ticket count to the main app’s Tile, and we display the account’s unread ticket update count on the “Ticket” Tile we pinned to the Start screen:

Why is the Tile Flipping?

We also have the ability to have the Tiles flip over and show an image or text on the TileBack, so we use that to explain the number shown on the Tile (so you don’t have to remember):

What is a Toast Notification?

A Toast Notification is a message that pops up on the screen for 10 seconds. If the user clicks on it, he or she is taken to the application, but if the notification is not clicked, it will disappear. Here is the Toast Notification that is sent to a user when a ticket is updated if they subscribe to Toast Notifications:

How do I Enable Notifications in SoftLayer Mobile?

To enable Live Tiles, all you have to do is turn on the ‘Use Push Notifications’ option on the Settings view.

You’ll be asked if you’d like to receive Toast Notifications, and if you click ‘OK,’ you’ll start getting them:

We Love Feedback and Requests!

Now that you have Live Tiles & Notifications in Softlayer Mobile for WP7 (and coming soon for iPhone & Android), what else would you like to see in the mobile clients?

-Erik

As a hobby, I dabble in WordPress, so I thought I’d share a few security features I use to secure my WordPress blogs as soon as they’re installed. Nothing in this blog will be earth-shattering, but because security is such a priority, I have no doubt that it will be useful to many of our customers. Often, the answer to the question, “How much security do I need on my site?” is simply, “More,” so even if you have a solid foundation of security, you might learn a new trick or two that you can incorporate into your next (or current) WordPress site.

Move wp-config.php

The first thing I do is change the location of my wp-config.php. By default, it’s installed in the WordPress parent directory. If the config file is in the parent directory, it can be viewed and accessed by Apache, so I move it out of web/root. Because you’re changing the default location of a pretty significant file, you need to tell WordPress how to find it in wp-load.php. Let’s say my WordPress runs out of /webroot on my host … I’d need to make a change around Line 26:

if ( file_exists( ABSPATH . 'wp-config.php') ) {
 
        /** The config file resides in ABSPATH */
        require_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-config.php' );
 
} elseif ( file_exists( dirname(ABSPATH) . '/wp-config.php' ) && ! file_exists( dirname(ABSPATH) . '/wp-settings.php' ) ) {
 
        /** The config file resides one level above ABSPATH but is not part of another install*/
        require_once( dirname(ABSPATH) . '/wp-config.php' );

The code above is the default setup, and the code below is the version with my subtle update incorporated.

if ( file_exists( ABSPATH . 'wp-config.php') ) {
 
        /** The config file resides in ABSPATH */
        require_once( ABSPATH . '../wp-config.php' );
 
} elseif ( file_exists( dirname(ABSPATH) . '..//wp-config.php' ) && ! file_exists( dirname(ABSPATH) . '/wp-settings.php' ) ) {
 
        /** The config file resides one level above ABSPATH but is not part of another install*/
        require_once( dirname(ABSPATH) . '../wp-config.php' );

All we’re doing is telling the application that the wp-config.php file is one directory higher. By making this simple change, you ensure that only the application can see your wp-config.php script.

Turn Down Access to /wp-admin

After I make that change, I want to turn down access to /wp-admin. I allow users to contribute on some of my blogs, but I don’t want them to do so from /wp-admin; only users with admin rights should be able to access that panel. To limit access to /wp-admin, I recommend the plugin uCan Post. This plugin creates a page that allows users to write posts and submit them within your theme.

But won’t a user just be able to navigate to http://site.com/wp-admin? Yes … Until we add a simple function to our theme’s functions.php file to limit that access. At the bottom of your functions.php file, add this:

############ Disable admin access for users ############

add_action('admin_init', 'no_more_dashboard');
function no_more_dashboard() {
  if (!current_user_can('manage_options') && $_SERVER['DOING_AJAX'] != '/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php') {
  wp_redirect(site_url()); exit;
  }
}
 
###########################################################

Log in as a non-admin user, and you’ll get redirected to the blog’s home page if you try to access the admin panel. Voila!

Start Securing the WordPress Database

Before you go any further, you need to look at WordPress database security. This is the most important piece in my opinion, and it’s not just because I’m a DBA. WordPress never needs all permissions. The only permissions WordPress needs to function are ALTER, CREATE, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, DELETE, DROP, INDEX, INSERT, LOCK TABLES, SELECT and UPDATE.

If you run WordPress and MySQL on the same server the permissions grant would look something like:

GRANT ALTER, CREATE, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, DELETE, DROP, INDEX, INSERT, LOCK TABLES, SELECT, UPDATE ON <DATABASE>.* TO <USER>@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '<PASSWORD>';

If you have a separate database server, make sure the host of the webserver is allowed to connect to the database server:

GRANT ALTER, CREATE, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, DELETE, DROP, INDEX, INSERT, LOCK TABLES, SELECT, UPDATE ON <DATABASE>.* TO <USER>@'<ip of web server' IDENTIFIED BY '<PASSWORD>';

The password you use should be random, and you should not need to change this. DO NOT USE THE SAME PASSWORD AS YOUR ADMIN ACCOUNT.

By taking those quick steps, we’re able to go a long way to securing a default WordPress installation. There are other plugins out there that are great tools to enhance your blog’s security, and once you’ve got the fundamental security updates in place, you might want to check some of them out. Login LockDown is designed to stop brute force login attempts, and Secure WordPress has some great additional features.

What else do you do to secure your WordPress sites?

-Lee

With a little one on the way, I’ve been spending a good amount of my free time starting to search for a new home for my growing family. While the search continues, I’ve learned a thing or two about what to look for and what should be done before taking the plunge, and as I’ve gone through the process, I can’t help but notice lot of parallels to what it’s like to purchase a new server:

• It’s an Investment

  Just like purchasing a new home, deciding to purchase a server is a huge investment. As you start shopping around, the costs may seem staggering, and while most servers don’t cost as much as a small home, your new server will be your business’s new home online. When you consider the revenue your site will generate (and the potential cost of not being able to properly support demand), you won’t want to skimp on the details. The truth is that like any investment, you can reap great rewards with proper planning and execution.

• You Have to Know What You Need

  One of the best tips I’ve incorporated in my home-buying process is the need to differentiate what you want, what you need, and what you can live without. Unless you’re royalty, you’re likely living on a budget. As cool as it would be to live in a 10-bedroom mansion with an indoor Olympic size pool, there’s a lot there that I don’t need. That sort of home palace also falls way outside of my personal budget. The same could be said about a business.

  I’ve heard plenty of stories about companies who slash their IT budgets in order to cut costs, and even the greatest IT departments have to live within their budgets. As you’re determining what your next server will be, you need to understand the purpose (and needs) of your workload: Will it be database server? An application server? Will it be an additional web head? Are you using it for mass storage? You need to plan accordingly. I’m sure you’d want a new Xeon E5-2600 server with all of the bells and whistles, but if you don’t need that kind of performance, you’re likely just going to burn through your budget quicker than you have to. Know your budget, know your needs and purchase your server accordingly.

• You Should Get to Know the Neighborhood

  I don’t intend on purchasing a home in a high-crime area, nor do I plan on moving into a neighborhood with exorbitant HOA dues for services I don’t intend to use. Your new server is going to have a “neighborhood” as well when it comes to the network it’s connected to, so if you plan on outsourcing your IT infrastructure, you should do the same research.

  You want your critical environments in a safe place, and the easiest way to get them in the right “neighborhood” is to work with a well-established host who’s able to accommodate what you’re doing. A $20/mo shared hosting account is great for a personal blog site, but it probably wouldn’t be a good fit for a busy database server or front-end application servers for an application dependent on advertising for revenue. A mansion worth of furniture doesn’t fit very well in a studio apartment.

• You’re Responsible for Maintenance

  Ask any homeowner: Continuous improvements — as well as routine maintenance &mdashl are a requirement. Failure to take care of your property can result in fines and much more costly repairs down the road. Likewise with any server, you have to do your maintenance. Keep your software up to date, practice good security protocols, and continue to monitor for problems. If you don’t, you could find yourself at the mercy of malicious activity or worse — catastrophic failure. Which leads me to …

• You Need Insurance Against Disaster

  Homeowner’s insurance protects you from disaster, and it provides indemnity in the event someone is hurt on your property. Sometimes additional insurance may be required. Many professionals recommend flood insurance to protect from flood damage not covered under a typical homeowner’s insurance policy. Ask any systems administrator, and they’ll tell you all about server insurance: BACKUPS. ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA!!! The wrong time to figure out that your backups weren’t properly maintained is when you need them, more specifically in the event of a hardware failure. It’s a fact of life: Hardware can fail. Murphy’s Law would suggest it will fail at the worst possible time. Maintain your backups!

I can’t claim that this is the guide to buying a server, but seeing the parallels with buying a new home might be a catalyst for you to look at the server-buying process in a different light. You should consider your infrastructure an asset before you simply consider it a cost.

-Matthew

“If you build it, he will come.”

I hope I’m not alone as I find myself whispering those words in my head as I read them. If you’ve seen Field of Dreams*, you know that Kevin Costner mysteriously hears and sees things no one else can see, and he seems like a lunatic when he follows the instructions of his invisible guide. He builds a baseball diamond on his farm land, and famous baseball players like Shoeless Joe Jackson come to play from the afterlife. He took a risk to build something with faith that it would yield results.

It’s a lot like the way most visionaries and entrepreneurs take risks to make their marks on the world.

Taking an idea from inception to market is much like building a baseball field in the middle of your farmland. You can factor in all the “knowns” (size, shape, materials, etc.), but in the end, you have to trust that consumers will come. Faith in a product or service drives the concept forward, and second-guessing it or working at it halfheartedly can destroy its slim chance of success. As a company so keenly focused on innovation ourselves, we find that other innovators are drawn to us, and because I’ve had the unique opportunity to work with many of our extremely successful companies, I thought I’d put together a few simple questions you might ask yourself as you transition from inspiration to action:

1. Is your idea possible to execute? Will it be easy for the market to understand and adopt?
2. Are there technologies available to deliver the idea or will you need to build your own?
3. Are the resources you’re using to build the product the best you can leverage?

If you answered, “No,” to the first question, you might want to hit the drawing board to come up with a new strategy or approach as you aim to meet the unmet needs of the market. Don’t get discouraged at this point … By spending more time simplifying and clarifying your idea, you’re saving an exponentially greater amount of time that you’d waste having to redefine or reposition your product down the road. If you answered, “Yes,” move on to Question 2.

Question 2 will start setting a baseline of the amount of effort required to get your idea to a functional state. You might hang on Question 2 for a while as you learn more about available technologies or lay the groundwork for your project, but by doing so, you’ll have a more concrete estimate of the timeline you can expect. Once you feel confident and comfortable with the answers to Question 1 and Question 2, the last step you need to take is to Question 3.

Question 3 can be pretty far-reaching — people, technologies and even hardware/software. These are some of the “knowns” that I referenced earlier. Note that “the best you can leverage” is not necessarily going to be “the best available.” Startup ideas generally are equipped with startup resources. Cost, expertise and comfort are going to play a huge role in the adoption of resources.

One of the big roadblocks many budding entrepreneurs run into is that they have trouble preparing for success. Build your product with the expectation that it will be successful. Know what you can do to accommodate the spike in demand you’ll see when Oprah and Bono give you a shout-out.

SoftLayer has been successful because we did our best to answer with those three questions, and as we continue to grow and succeed, we live and breathe innovation. We’d like to think that we’re some of “the crazy ones” Apple referenced in its epic “Think Different” campaign, and we want to empower our customers to be a little crazy themselves.

-Clayton

*If you haven’t seen Field of Dreams yet, you should find a way to watch it immediately, if not sooner.

I immediately fell in love with CSS when we were introduced in late 2000. The ability to style a whole site outside the HTML was a fantastic concept and probably my first true introduction to separation of style and content. Put your words over here, and put how you display those words over there. So simple! Since then I have always been an advocate of cascading style sheets. Today’s tip will involve an effortless addition that will have your readers say, “Ooooh. That’s a clever little change.”

I find that when I read articles and blogs online, I not only read with my eyes, I scan the page with my mouse. Especially if it’s a wordy article or not styled in smaller columns, I highlight the text by clicking and dragging to help me maintain my focus. Up until recently, whenever you selected text that way in your browser, your operating system would choose the color of the background highlight. For Windows, this is generally blue. For OS X, this is whatever you’ve set your preferences to (which is light blue by default).

For those of you that use a newer version of Webkit (Chrome or Safari) or Gecko (Firefox), the site designer can determine what color to highlight your selection of text, and CSS has made it easy.

/* Webkit */
::selection {
    background: #972F2C;
    color: #FFF;
}
/* Gecko/Mozilla */
::-moz-selection {
    background: #972F2C;
    color: #FFF;
}

As of today, Webkit browsers are the only ones that support ::selection without browser prefixing. Firefox requires the -moz- prefix. Here we have set the highlight background color to “SoftLayer Red” (#972F2C) and made the text color white (#FFF). It should be noted that earlier versions of Webkit and Gecko did not support anything but the background property. There is still limited support for which CSS properties are allowed during selection. You are unable to change font-style, font-size, text-decoration and many other properties, but we can hope support for most of the properties will be available in the future.

This is pretty cool so far, but we can take it one small step further. Just like other selectors, we can apply the ::selection selector to other elements and style each one differently.

h2::selection {
    background: #B72E33;
    color: #FFF;
}
p::selection {
    background: #ACEFB2;
}
div::selection {
    background: #E4DB80;
}
span::selection {
    background: #C780E4;
    color: #FFF;
}

This produces the following:

Surprise your readers and give them some highlight goodness.

Happy coding!

-Philip

The iptables tool is one of the simplest, most powerful tools you can use to protect your server. We’ve covered port redirection, rule processing and troubleshooting in previous installments to this “Tips and Tricks” series, but what happens when iptables turns against you and locks you out of your own system?

Getting locked out of a production server can cost both time and money, so it’s worth your time to avoid this. If you follow the correct procedures, you can safeguard yourself from being firewalled off of your server. Here are seven helpful tips to help you keep your sanity and prevent you from locking yourself out.

Tip 1: Keep a safe ruleset handy.

If you are starting with a working ruleset, or even if you are trying to troubleshoot an existing ruleset, take a backup of your iptables configuration before you ever start working on it.

iptables-save > /root/iptables-safe

Then if you do something that prevents your website from working, you can quickly restore it.

iptables-restore < /root/iptables-safe

Tip 2: Create a cron script that will reload to your safe ruleset every minute during testing.

This was pointed out to my by a friend who swears by this method. Just write a quick bash script and set a cron entry that will reload it back to the safe set every minute. You'll have to test quickly, but it will keep you from getting locked out.

Tip 3: Have the IPMI KVM ready.

SoftLayer-pod servers* are equipped with some sort of remote access device. Most of them have a KVM console. You will want to have your VPN connection set up, connected and the KVM window up. You can't paste to and from the KVM, so SSH is typically easier to work with, but it will definitely cut down on the downtime if something does go wrong.

*This may not apply to servers that were originally provisioned under another company name.

Tip 4: Try to avoid generic rules.

The more criteria you specify in the rule, the less chance you will have of locking yourself out. I would liken this to a pie. A specific rule is a very thin slice of the pie.

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -s 10.0.0.0/8 -d 123.123.123.123 -j DROP

But if you block port 22 from any to any, it's a very large slice.

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j DROP

There are plenty of ways that you can be more specific. For example, using "-i eth0" will limit the processing to a single NIC in your server. This way, it will not apply the rule to eth1.

Tip 5: Whitelist your IP address at the top of your ruleset.

This may make testing more difficult unless you have a secondary offsite test server, but this is a very effective method of not getting locked out.

iptables -I INPUT -s <your IP> -j ACCEPT

You need to put this as the FIRST rule in order for it to work properly ("-I" inserts it as the first rule, whereas "-A" appends it to the end of the list).

Tip 6: Know and understand all of the rules in your current configuration.

Not making the mistake in the first place is half the battle. If you understand the inner workings behind your iptables ruleset, it will make your life easier. Draw a flow chart if you must.

Tip 7: Understand the way that iptables processes rules.

Remember, the rules start at the top of the chain and go down, unless specified otherwise. Crack open the iptables man page and learn about the options you are using.

-Mark

This guest blog features Fruition, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. Fruition’s SEO and SEM reporting web app provides highly accurate reports on search engine rankings and onsite signals that impact your Google and Bing rankings. In the video below, learn a little more about Fruition (and a few key SEO/SEM tips for small businesses) from Fruition’s Brad Anderson, and scroll down to read about SEO Goals and Key Indicators.

SEO Goals and Key Indicators

Google’s Feb 2012 Update

Between February 25-28th Google rolled out another big set of changes to their algorithm. These changes knocked down a lot of short cuts that SEO companies were using, including blog networks. The red flags have been there for a long time. Blog networks are easy to uncover simply because of the complexity of trying to setup a truly diverse hosting environment. It is not just separate C-class IP addresses it is also registrars, DNS, admin login IP addresses, plug-in profiles, etc. There are so many easy ways to group sites as being related or identical that it is not worth the effort of trying to take short cuts with your linking. Instead focus on what is going to have a lasting impact on your SEO:

• Page Speed – Improve your code, increase your hardware, etc.
• Better Onsite Content
• Usability

These three factors will have a lasting impact on your SEO during 2012 and beyond.

Get Your Strategy Together

Successful internet marketing campaigns have one thing in common: Comprehensive strategies. Today’s marketplace makes it extremely difficult to compete in one area of internet marketing without complimenting that work in several other areas. For example, why invest in search engine optimization if you don’t have a quality website to convert the traffic to leads or sales? Why invest in a mobile app if you aren’t going to optimize the listing to generate a high volume of downloads? These examples show how a comprehensive strategy to internet marketing is the best approach for future success.

Fruition.net has been successful in this comprehensive approach by staying at the forefront of each individual strategy. At the core of these strategies is a collection of goals and key indicators we use to monitor, adjust, and track performance. Below you will find a few of the most important goals for each area of internet marketing.

Comprehensive Internet Marketing Strategies

Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website with the end goal of improving your ranking on the major search engines. Here are the goals and key indicators you should be tracking to evaluate the success of your SEO campaign:

Read Frution’s Tips for SEO/SEM Domination »

Unfortunately, having “book knowledge” (or in this case “blog knowledge”) about backups and applying that knowledge faithfully and regularly are not necessarily one and the same. Regardless of how many times you hear it or read it, if you aren’t actively protecting your data, YOU SHOULD BE.

Here are a few questions to help you determine whether your data is endangered:

1. Is your data backed up?
2. How often is your data backed up?
3. How often do you test your backups?
4. Is your data backed up externally from your server?
5. Are your backups in another data center?
6. Are your backups in another city?
7. Are your backups stored with a different provider?
8. Do you have local backups?
9. Are your backups backed up?
10. How many people in your organization know where your backups are and how to restore them?
11. What’s the greatest amount of data you might lose in the event of a server crash before your next backup?
12. What is the business impact of that data being lost?
13. If your server were to crash and the hard drives were unrecoverable, how long would it take you to restore all of your data?
14. What is the business impact of your data being lost or inaccessible for the length of time you answered in the last question?

We can all agree that the idea of backups and data protection is a great one, but when it comes to investing in that idea, some folks change their tune. While each of the above questions has a “good” answer when it comes to keeping your data safe, your business might not need “good” answers to all of them for your data to be backed up sufficiently. You should understand the value of your data to your business and invest in its protection accordingly.

For example, a million-dollar business running on a single server will probably value its backups more highly than a hobbyist with a blog she contributes to once every year and a half. The million-dollar business needs more “good” answers than the hobbyist, so the business should invest more in the protection of its data than the hobbyist.

If you haven’t taken time to quantify the business impact of losing your primary data (questions 11-14), sit down with a pencil and paper and take time to thoughtfully answer those questions for your business. Are any of those answers surprising to you? Do they make you want to reevaluate your approach to backups or your investment in protecting your data?

The funny thing about backups is that you don’t need them until you NEED them, and when you NEED them, you’ll usually want to kick yourself if you don’t have them.

Don’t end up kicking yourself.

-@khazard

P.S. SoftLayer has a ton of amazing backup solutions but in the interested of making this post accessible and sharable, I won’t go crazy linking to them throughout the post. The latest product release that got me thinking about this topic was the SoftLayer Object Storage launch, and if you’re concerned about your answers to any of the above questions, object storage may be an economical way to easily get some more “good” answers.