When a web site or hosted application out grown the shared hosting accounts, the natural progression is usually stepping up to a VPS or a dedicated server. I have seen quite a few times on WHT where people ask whether they should go to dedicated or virtual private server — usually those with budget slightly more than a good shared hosting, and looking for places to run their busy websites. Surprisingly I have seen a lot of people putting their preference on cheap dedicated servers.

I will go for a VPS, if I have limited budget, and have a busy site to host.

Netcraft: in reflecting to a previous report where HostGator sites were hacked to distribute IE exploits, HostGator responded saying that there is a bad security hole in cPanel that is currently wildly distributed.

Hackers gained access to HostGator’s servers late Thursday and began redirecting customer sites to outside web pages that exploit an unpatched VML security hole in Internet Explorer to infect web surfers with trojans. The existence of the new “0-day” exploit of cPanel leaves a large number of hosting companies vulnerable to similar attacks until they install the patch. The riusk is mitigated somewhat by the fact that it is a local exploit, meaning any attack on a host must be launched from an existing account with cPanel access.

Matt Ayres of Unixshell has just announced that orders are back!

We are back open for orders. Due to the inability for us to keep up with supply at the lower prices we’ve been forced to increase prices across the board and restructure the plans.

Current customers will NOT have their current plan prices changed.

Oh no! Why do I need another VPS for? Anyway, I have just signed up with SliceHost earlier this week, getting a 256Mb “Slice” of Xen-powered VPS, running Gentoo Linux on their dual dual-core Opteron servers. So far so good, and here’s my initial impression.

Joyent, the company behind the developer-centric hosting service TextDrive, has released a new product — Bingo! on-line disk service.

Joyent’s new Bingo! on-line disk service gives you 100 gigabytes of disk storage on Sun’s amazing X4500 platform with 10 gigabytes of bandwidth per month over WebDAV for the super-low price of $199 a year! You get one user account and the ability to serve files from a public folder (for images, podcasts, whatever). On top of this, you get a complimentary 5-user subscription to Connector, Joyent’s amazing group collaboration product.

Two hours ago I tried to go to my daughter’s website, and all that was presented was an error message from my proxy server saying (113) No route to host. D’oh. Is the server down again? The website is hosted on an OpenVZ VPS on VPSLink running Gentoo Linux, and VPSLink has been very stable and fast over the last 3 months that I have been with them.