There seems to be some connectivity issue with regarding to my VPS at Web24 (profiled at VPS AU here) right now. For my websites hosted there, the heading will load, and then part of the content, and then the browser will just stall there trying to fetch the rest of the page but they never arrive.

I do have a Virtuozzo VPS hosted in Melbourne, and the hosting company provides HSP complete control panel for me to login and view and change my account details. The column on the left also reports the resource usage of your VPS, showing you total traffic, amount of disk space, and the current “CPU usage”.

As you can see my VPS is currently using up 53% of CPU resource, out of 100% that is available. No wonder why my VPS feels so slow. However, when I actually jumped onto the VE and have a look, my processes weren’t using much CPU at all! vmstat shows my user and sys has always been under 5% combined (and under 2% most of the time). Type in upload shows that it is my 1 minute load average that is hovering around 0.5. HSP complete just conveniently interpreted to end user that VPS has used 50% of CPU resource, without trying to explain what load average is. That’s mad.

SecurityFocus: Linux kernel memory access vulnerabilities, exploit included to get you root account on stock kernels between 2.6.17 and 2.6.24.1. Web hosts responded — Holy !$#&!!! CentOS 5, Ubuntu Edgy-Gutsy, Debian Etch — all these Linux distributions are affected. Basically a local user can gain root access, and with help from vulnerable applications that allow executing arbitrary local code, a remote user might be able to take over the entire system.

Yesterday on my personal blog, I wrote about WordPress 2.3.3 upgrade due to a security exploit, and one issue I wrote in the comment, is that there are just too many blogs out there installed by Fantastico and alike, that are never updated. They are often targeted by the hackers, employed by blackhat SEO, to inject hidden links into existing blogs. Matt from WordPress agrees:

I think you also have a good point that we need to put pressure on the hosts and Fantastico to take responsibility for the blogs that they set up and stay current with releases.

Then I received DreamHost’s latest newsletter (January 2008), and in section 2 they introduced their new one-click install “easy mode”:

Last week I needed a small VPS to test a new project so I went to Web Hosting Talk VPS offers forum to look for something really cheap, and found this deal at ServerWays.com. ServerWays is a new company, with its domain registered in December 2007. It is also a one-man shop according to this discussion thread. However it does not really matter to me as (1) it is only less than $5 per month (2) it is for a throw away project. So I clicked on the Order button for their lowest spec’ed VPS 111.

This is what you get for $4.90/month, billed monthly and no set up fee.

• 100MB guaranteed memory
• 10GB storage
• 100GB/month transfer
• OpenVZ + HyperVM