We’ll need to following:

- Dedicated Server / Virtual Machine
- CentOS 5.x 32bit/64bit
- 1GB of RAM or more
- Latest Java JDK
- Minecraft Server

Let’s start with getting a Virtual Machine, grab one from Recon Hosting. We will recommend a VM-4 or higher.

Now, let’s get started by installing Java-JDK:

yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk

Now, let’s check if Java was installed:

which java

It should display the following if it was properly installed:

/usr/bin/java

We’re done with that now, let’s create a directory for Minecraft then install it:

1. Make sure we’re in the root directory still:

cd

2. Now let’s create the directory:

mkdir Minecraft

3. Enter the directory:

cd Minecraft

4. Time to get Minecraft:

wget http://minecraft.net/download/minecraft_server.jar

5. We’ll need to make sure Minecraft as all the correct permissions:

chmod +x minecraft_server.jar

Minecraft is now installed!

From here we’ll need to install “screen” to keep the Minecraft server running after we close the SSH session.

Install screen:

yum install screen

Now, we’ll use the screen and run Minecraft from there.

screen

Starting up Minecraft now:

java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui

(*1024 value can be changed depending on how much RAM your VPS has)
Ex. 512MB VPS – java -Xmx512M -Xms512M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui
Ex. 2048MB VPS – java -Xmx2048M -Xms2048M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui

To get back to the normal screen now you’ll have to do the following:

Control + a + d

To get back to the screen where Minecraft is running:

screen -r

That’s it for getting Minecraft up and running on CentOS!

CloudFlare is designed to take a great hosting platform like ReconHosting and make it even better. We run 14 data centers strategically located around the world. When you sign up for CloudFlare, we begin routing your traffic to the nearest data center.

You can read more by visiting our blog:

http://www.reconhosting.com/blog/company-news/how-cloudflare-increases-speed-and-security-of-your-site.html

ReconHosting provides shared, reseller hosting & bundled web designer/developer packages. We strive to create a personable relationship with our customers. We run the latest CloudLinux web server, are a CloudFlare Certified Partner & offer tons of features!

Today I would like to talk about the ruse that is unlimited web hosting. This is an impossibility and it is a marketing trick to get your money, nothing else!

You see ads all over the internet from small to large web hosting companies stating “Unlimited Web Hosting”.  So I started to do some research on what that actually meant. Most of the companies that I see offering “Unlimited Web Hosting” are usually referring to the amount of storage, bandwidth, & innodes that you are allocated depending on which hosting plan you purchase.

If you are just starting out and have a brand new out of the box web site, this is most likely not going to affect you. But if you have great SEO, great Social Marketing and become popular  you will start to feel the limits of  your Unlimited Web Hosting. Look at it this way; Why would a company like Amazon have to spend millions on the data centers where they host their site(s) when they could just order an “Unlimited Hosting Plan” from one of these internet shysters  and really reap the profits? The answer is; because it is not possible!

If you read the AUP and TOS of the companies offering Unlimited hosting you will start to see the actual limits of the service. Namely INNODES is where they get you. Another is an arbitrary claim of CPU and memory usage over a set maximum. I have even seen warnings for bandwidth usage on an account advertised with Unlimited Bandwidth. Most of the TOS’s also claim to have the right to suspend your account until the next billing cycle if you hit one of these invisible ceilings.

Bottom line is this: Unlimited Web Hosting is a marketing trick to get the untrained & inexperienced web host into their grasp! If you are searching as a first time web host or thinking of starting a web hosting business read the Fine Print before you spend your money!

We upgraded our hosting infrastructure with a new operating system called CloudLinux that optimizes your site’s performance.

Today, on a shared hosting server, you are sharing resources with other sites, your digital neighbors so to speak. Yet sometimes, unpredictable issues having nothing to do with your site, can slow server performance or worse – cause a complete outage of the server. This can be the result of bad scripting or a spike in traffic on your neighbors site, that impact your website’s performance

That’s why we updated our servers to CloudLinux. With CloudLinux, we can ensure other sites that may have issues do not affect your site. In short, this upgrade prevents a badly behaving website on a shared server from being able to slow down or take down the entire server.

That’s the heart of the CloudLinux solution and it can deliver “rock solid reliability” with its innovative Lightweight Virtual Environment™ technology. It isolates and limits resources of each site creating separation and prevents other sites from affecting you.

We are pleased to be able to offer you CloudLinux – a new solution that “crash proofs” the server so we can deliver:

• Increased server capability without increasing risk of a site of going down
• More efficient and stable server that lets you add new functions to your site without worry
• Reduced impact of unpredictable events like load spikes that can slow down or take down a server
• and this even lets us be greener because we service more customers more efficiently with less hardware

Recon Hosting uses the latest virtualization technologies from CloudLinux to improve server stability and prevent downtime on our shared hosting servers.

Shared Hosting Challenge

A typical shared server hosts huge numbers of accounts that all use the same server resources. If one website uses too many resources, it can slow down or shut down the server.  This is common for shared hosting servers and happens for like:

• Traffic spikes – a mention on a popular forum can send thousands of visitors to a website in minutes and overwhelm the server causing downtime.
• Inefficient coding – a single bug in one website’s code can use all CPU resources, no matter how powerful the server, and cause downtime.
• Denial Of Service attacks – hackers invade an insecure website and hog the server resources.

Recon Hosting Solution
We eliminate these threats by using CloudLinux, an operating system specifically designed to address the weaknesses and risks associated with shared hosting.

CloudLinux uses innovative Lightweight Virtualization Environment (LVE) technology to create isolation between websites on a shared server. By containing each website, CloudLinux prevents each one from using more resources than allocated, making sure that one website cannot affect another.

CloudLinux gives you peace of mind that your website is protected from other sites on the same server.

Click here to sign up a new hosting account.

CloudFlare, a web performance and security company, is excited to announce our partnership with Recon Hosting!  If you haven’t heard about CloudFlare before, our value proposition is simple: we’ll make any website twice as fast and protect it from a broad range of web threats.

Today, hundreds of thousands of websites—ranging from individual blogs to ecommerce sites to the websites of Fortune 500 companies to national governments—use CloudFlare to make their sites faster and more secure. We power more than 28 billion monthly page views—more than Amazon.com, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga and AOL combined—and nearly 25% of the Internet’s population regularly passes through our network.

Faster web performance

CloudFlare is designed to take a great hosting platform like Recon Hosting and make it even better.

We run 14 data centers  strategically located around the world. When you sign up for CloudFlare, we begin routing your traffic to the nearest data center.

As your traffic passes through the data centers, we intelligently determine what parts of your website are static versus dynamic.  The static portions are cached on our servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours before we check to see if they’ve been updated.  By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.

CloudFlare’s intelligent caching system also means you save bandwidth, which means saving money, and decreases the load on your servers, which means your web application will run faster and more efficiently than ever. On average, CloudFlare customers see a 60% decrease in bandwidth usage, and a 65% in total requests to their servers.  The overall effect is that CloudFlare will typically cut the load time for pages on your site by 50% which means higher engagement and happier visitors.

Broad web security

Over the course of 2011, CloudFlare identified a 700% increase in the number of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) we track on the Internet (see the chart below). As attacks like these increase, CloudFlare is stepping up to protect sites.

CloudFlare’s security protections offer a broad range of protections [link to http://www.cloudflare.com/features-security] against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about our approach is that the system gets smarter the more sites that are part of the CloudFlare community. We analyze the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped.

In time, our goal is nothing short of making attacks against websites a relic of history. And, given our scale and the billions of different attacks we see and adapt to every year, we’re well on our way to achieving that for sites on the CloudFlare network.

Signing up

Any website can deploy CloudFlare, regardless of your underlying platform.  By integrating closely with Recon Hosting, we make the process of setting up CloudFlare “1 click easy” through your existing cPanel dashboard.  Just look for the CloudFlare icon, choose the domain you want to enable, and click the orange cloud. That’s it!

We’ve kept the price as low as possible and plans offered through Recon Hosting are free.  Moreover, we never charge you for bandwidth or storage, therefore saving you tons via reduced bandwidth costs.

For site owners who would like to take advantage of CloudFlare’s advanced offerings, we also offer a ‘Pro’ tier of service for $20/month. The ‘Pro’ tier includes all of the ‘Free’ tier’s offerings, as well as extra features like SSL, full web application firewall and faster analytics.

We’re proud that every day more than a thousand new sites, including some of the largest on the web, join the CloudFlare community. If you’re looking for a faster, safer website, you’ve got a good start with Recon Hosting, but the next step is to join the CloudFlare community.

To link a domain name to a web hosting page, you first need a registered domain name and a web hosting account. Most commercial web hosts offer domain name registration along with their hosting packages, but if you purchased your domain name separately from your hosting plan or wish to transfer a domain name from one host to another, you will need to link it to your web host’s servers for it to show up online. Web hosts use specially designated “name servers,” or “DNS” servers, to point domain names to the actual IP addresses where their websites are located.

Wikipedia showed all of us the monumental power of using the Internet to illustrate a philosophical (and political) position in the face of tremendous pressure from big government.

By going dark for 24 hours, it sucked a vortex of users and media commentators into the implications of what SOPA actually means to Internet freedom.

While everyone does agree that online piracy is a serious issue and needs to be dealt with, the anti-piracy bill that was due to pass on Jan 24 with bipartisan support has too many loop holes to be effective.

The fact that the Government and large corporations wanted to mess with the innards of the domain registry to force sites like Google to shut down offenders offers the highest chance of abuse no matter how noble the goal.

It’s also interesting to see the massive cohesion of young Internet users and even the older generation in standing together on this point.

In a decade, where most citizens display apathy towards the political process and big government in general, the  SOPA-resistance illustrates that not all hope is lost.

The New York Times reported that more than 162 million people saw the site’s protest on Wednesday.  Further, over 12,000 commented on blogs announcing the blackout.

By all accounts, this was a “breathtaking majority” said Wikipedia.  The Internet is undoubtedly one of the United State’s pioneering technical achievements.  While not perfect, it is a field of innovation that is a powerhouse for small business growth.

This battleground echoes a real war taking place offline as the upcoming Presidential contest looms. Many consider it to be the most important election in American history signaling a tipping point between those who favor more government regulation versus those who do not.

This goes beyond party lines. Both parties display support and opposition in determining the final outcome and what happens with SOPA next.

The postponed bill had bipartisan support but its supporters now appear fragmented and indecisive. So Wikipedia is right, this is just one battle won; NOT the war.   Long live the resistance!

Costs and Benefits of Dedicated Hosting

Getting a server exclusively to yourself is, understandably, more expensive. Costs normally shared among several different businesses are now covered exclusively by you. However, the benefits of a dedicated server may be well worth the extra cost. Because dedicated servers are specific to your site, they have much greater capacity for bandwidth and storage space. Also, you can customize them for your specific needs, choosing the exact hardware and software configurations you want for your site. If you’re not sure what you want, the web host can recommend a good server configuration for your needs. Also, you can install more web-related tools on a dedicated server. Because shared servers are sharing resources you may find limitations on what you are able to customize. On a dedicated server, you have more flexibility to customize your site and use tools to make your site visually appealing.

In addition, dedicated servers can provide logistical advantages in terms of security. Keeping in mind that shared servers are secure, you should know that dedicated servers can be easier to defend from attacks because there is only one client using the server. Also, greater server resources can be dedicated to defending your site from viruses, Trojans, worms, and other malware. You—and only you—have the rights to determine who has access to your server.

Besides higher service fees, there are no inherent disadvantages to dedicated hosting over shared hosting. If you get a fully managed dedicated server (described below), your server will be similar to a shared hosting service. (It should be noted that not all web hosting companies provide fully managed dedicated servers—Recon Hosting does.) The only differences will be the higher costs associated with having your own server and paying for all of its bandwidth.

Managing Dedicated Servers

Web hosts can provide different levels of server support with dedicated servers (unlike shared hosting). You can ask them to fully manage your server in the same way they manage shared servers. However, you can also save some money by taking on some aspects of maintaining the server. With managed dedicated hosting, the host will monitor your server, update it, and provide a limited amount of maintenance support. You will be responsible for the rest (updating and making changes to your website). With unmanaged dedicated hosting, you provide all maintenance and monitoring.

Having different levels of support enables you to lower your cost to the web host when you get a dedicated server. This will not necessarily reduce your costs, however, since you will need to hire someone with the expertise to perform maintenance functions on the server. Keep this in mind when choosing between managed and unmanaged hosting.

Getting Started with Dedicated Hosting

The initial steps to getting started are the same with any hosting service—choose your host, figure out what hardware and operating system your site needs, etc. Your host does not design your site, but your host needs to know how your site is designed in order to get you the right server for your needs. You don’t want to be paying $245 per month for a server when you only need a $95 per month server instead. At this point, there is an added step with dedicated hosting—deciding what server you need and what level of management you expect. You can either hire your web host to maintain the server for you, or you can hire a web administrator who is also skilled in server maintenance. At Recon Hosting, we try to make managed service affordable—it is only $69 more per month than unmanaged service.

Performing maintenance on a managed server is easy—you just let your host do it. Keeping your unmanaged server running requires in-house expertise. Your technical personnel will handle server upgrades, routine maintenance checks, and the occasional customer-caused outage. We will keep the server cool and physically secure, and we will monitor the server regularly to ensure network up-time. It is up to you to keep your software up to date and secure on your unmanaged server.

Dedicated hosting provides you access to the entire servers resources. This means you can expect a more efficient website, better up-time, and fewer problems due to server load. Recon Hosting provides excellent affordable service, and we appreciate your interest.

Web Hosting Basics

There are many different types of professional web hosting solutions that are suitable for a small business:

• Free web hosting services can put up a small, resource-light website for you. However, free hosting isn’t free of limitations and has major pitfalls—it lacks technical and customer support,eCommerce capability, and professionalism needed to gain trust of customers. Additionally, the level of website security with a free host falls short in comparison to an actual web host.

• Reseller Web Hosting is a form of web hosting wherein the account owner has the ability to use his/her allotted hard drive space and bandwidth to host websites on behalf of third parties. The reseller purchases the host’s services wholesale and then sells them to customers, possibly for a profit. A certain portion of hard drive and bandwidth is allocated to the reseller account. The reseller may rent a dedicated server from a hosting company, or resell shared hosting services. In the latter case, the reseller is simply given the permission to sell a certain amount of disk space and bandwidth to his own customers without renting a server from a web hosting company he signed for a reseller account with. Recon Hosting provides a number of reseller packages to suit any small business entrepreneur.

• Shared Web Hosting is the most popular small businesses web hostingsolution. Its popularity largely stems from the fact that you share the server hardware with others, making it very inexpensive. Think of it like an apartment building; everyone shares the same structure and utility lines but have separate living spaces at a reduced cost. Because their utilities are shared throughout the building, each pays less than they would pay in individual homes with the same square footage. Like utility providers, a web hosting company monitors resource usage to ensure that one site isn’t monopolizing the system and hogging all the resources.

• Virtual Machine Hosting provides the ultimate in reliability and availability. Your site is located on a “Virtual Server,” a virtually defined entity sharing hardware of our physical cloud server that is configured to make “the cloud.” The virtual server is tailor-made for your site and has access to all the resources your site needs—even on more than one server if necessary. If your physical server goes down, your virtual server simply loads on a different location in the cloud automatically. This service can be expensive but well worth the extra cost if your website is important to your business.

• Private Cloud Hosting  is not an easy concept to explain. Cloud hosting is a system whereby several resources and servers are shared across multiple remote computing sites. Your files could actually be in multiple locations. Private cloud hosting dedicates resources to your site much the same way Virtual Machine hosting does, except it is done in the cloud. This offers increased performance over VPS or Virtual Machine as your site becomes wildly popular and you quickly need to add hosting resources. Recon Hosting offers scalability where you can easily add resources and increased performance as you need them, often within minutes.

• Dedicated Server  is for your company does a lot of business online then having your servers overloaded is commercial suicide. However the good news is that it is very unlikely for servers to actually reach their limit unless the company using them is considerably large and has a huge online presence. Knowing when to look for an upgrade to your current package is a bit of a problem. Most online business will find that the shared server they are using is more than capable of catering for their needs but if it becomes the case that your traffic is starting to use up bandwidth from others on the server then your will probably be told by the host that you need to move to another package.

Figure Out Your Web Hosting Needs

To choose the best web hosting service, decide how much availability and resources your website needs. As mentioned earlier, shared hosting handles most needs and is the most popular small business hosting solution. Cloud hosting is a necessary choice if you know your site will have heavy traffic or you know you’ll be using an application that is resource intensive. In shared hosting, your resource allotments are not as flexible because they are shared by the others on the server—cloud hosting makes up for that by making the hardware of multiple servers available to your site. Recon Hosting offers both shared and virtual hosting options to fit the needs and budget of your business. If you don’t know what you need right now then start with shared hosting and upgrade to cloud hosting as you grow.

Web Host Must-Haves

With so many hosting options for your small business, there are a few things you can’t skip:

1. Technical Support—Quality customer service is crucial. The customer support technicians are responsible for managing issues effectively and efficiently to help you keep your business running smoothly. Technical support should be running at all hours to accommodate any potential set-backs or important inquiries. Recon Hosting has 24/7 customer support with a number of ways to contact technicians, including live chat, email, or our support ticketing system.
2. Guaranteed Uptime—Having a service interruption makes the site inaccessible to customers and can reduce your income. Recon Hosting guarantees 99% uptime by hosting your data in Tier-3 data center, the same level required for major banking institutions.
3. Flexibility—Recon Hosting allows you to upgrade your account whenever you see fit. The right host for your small business will have the option to upgrade your plan to continually meet the needs of your growing website.

The Bottom Line

Start out with shared hosting. As one of the best values on the Internet, shared hosting gives the resources needed for the great majority of small business websites. If you have ironed out the features you need from your hosting service and realize you’ll need more than the norm, then virtual hosting is the way to go. Lastly, don’t downplay the importance of good technical support, uptime and flexibility.