Account Locks Out Due to Brute Force Protection in cPanel WebHost Manager (WHM)

Occasionally, when user or website administrator attempts to login to cPanel’s WebHost Manager (WHM), or remote or local log in via Telnet or SSH to Linux console to the web server, the login is denied and not allowed. The following error message may appear.

This account is currently locked out because a brute force attempt was detected. Please wait 10 minutes and try again. Attempting to login again will only increase this delay. If you frequently experience this problem, we recommend having your username changed to something less generic.

The brute force protection on cPanel-powerd web host is provided by cPHulk, which prevents malicious forces from trying to access the server’s services by guessing the login password for that service. When an account on the system has experienced too many failed login attempts, the particular account will automatically been “protected” by forbidding further login attempts, including all-important root account. cPHulk Brute Force Protection will also block out an IP address which has been detected to send too many unauthorized logon attempts.

As a result, server’s owner are potentially been locked out of the server if the cPHulkd is enabled, even the wild-guessing brute force hacking is done by hackers in another corner of the world.

When WHM locks out an user account, especially “root”, the best way is to wait for 10 minutes to see if the account will be unlocked. If the locks persists, webmaster and administrator who still can remote login via SSH to the server as root can manually remove the lockouts via following steps:

1. Type mysql at console to access MySQL client.
2. At MySQL client prompt, enter the following commands (preceding with mysql>)one after one, pressing Enter each time:
   mysql> use cphulkd;
   Expected result: Database changed.
   mysql> BACKUP TABLE `brutes` TO ‘/path/to/backup/directory’;
   mysql> BACKUP TABLE `logins` TO ‘/path/to/backup/directory’;
   Above command will backup the brutes table, the main table used by cPHulk to record locked accounts and denied IP addresses.
   mysql> DELETE FROM `brutes`;
   mysql> DELETE FROM `logins`;
   Above commands will remove all blocked IP addresses and locked accounts from the system, enabling full access again. If you’re familiar with SQL statements, it’s possible to use WHERE clause to specify logins or IP address that you want to remove only.
   mysql> quit;
   Exit MySQL client.

If you can’t login to the server due to brute force protection, you probably have to contact web hosting service provider support to physically access the server to remove the Brute Force Protection. To avoid future blockage or lock out, it’s recommended to add own IP address as Trusted Hosts List whitelist in cPHulk Brute Force Protection. To do so, go to WHM -> Security -> Security Center -> cPHulk Brute Force Protection. Inside “Configure cPHulk”, click Trusted Hosts List link.

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An Explanation Of Bandwidth: What It Means And How Much You Need

One of the more difficult things to get your head around when it comes to choosing a web hosting service can be how much bandwidth you need.  Even if you have owned several websites before and are by no means a novice when it comes to choosing a hosting company, it is easy to be dazed and confused by everything that a hosting company’s website can throw at you.

There are some certain factors when it comes to bandwidth:

1. You need to find the right bandwidth option for you.
2. If you don’t, you will find you have an underperforming website, face additional charges, or both.

What is Bandwidth?

In its most basic definition, bandwidth describes the level of traffic and data allowed to travel and transfer between your site, users, and the Internet.

Each web hosting company will offer a particular level of bandwidth. This is often a good indication of which hosting companies have the best networks, connections, and systems. Usually, the more bandwidth a web host can provide, the faster and the better those three factors will be.  At the same time, you should try to avoid attractive looking ‘unlimited bandwidth’ offers, as these are often not all that they seem (more on this point later).  Unmetered bandwidth should be more along the lines of what you are looking for.

Your Network Connectivity

You probably already know that the Internet is defined and created by the millions of computers around the world that connected by networks. The bigger the connection, the faster the network, and the more bandwidth that is available for a site.

If you are familiar with your home internet connection, you have probably encountered bandwidth at some stage. This was probably in terms of your connection speed. After all, speed is a lot easier to understand for the layperson than a technical sounding term such as bandwidth.

Bandwidth at Home

10 years ago, you might have used a frustratingly slow DSL connection, with a speed of 1.5MB per second. Replace the word speed with bandwidth, and you will understand easily. Your bandwidth allowed a maximum of 1.5MB per second to transfer from a network to your computer.

The reason broadband and fiber optic internet was invented and quickly became popular was because of how slow a DSL connection was.

Within Web Hosting

Source: Austinseoguy.com

To focus back to web hosting, you can liken a DSL connection to a shared server. On its own, the connection or server is very powerful; when being shared by dozens or hundreds of people, it slows down to a crawl.

You can still see this today if you go to an internet café or a library; the connection will be noticeably quicker if you go early in the morning and are the only person in there than if you go at peak times.

Bandwidth and the Relationship With Web Traffic

We are going to use another analogy to help make bandwidth clearer. In this example, the bandwidth is the number of tables in a restaurant, and the web traffic is diners. The simple math is this: the more tables there are in the restaurant, the more diners there are that can eat in there at any one time.

Translate this back to the Internet: the higher your bandwidth, the more people can visit your site and have an enjoyable experience. Remember, however, that it takes a very special restaurant with skilled employees to manage operations when the venue is full to capacity. How your site operates under the stress of high traffic will be crucial to your success. What is the use of high bandwidth if your site cannot cope? You might be able to facilitate 400 visitors a day. What would happen if they all turned up at once?

This is an important consideration to make when choosing a bandwidth option and it might require you to carry out some detailed research into your likely visitor demographics. The most likely outcome will be that you decide to pay for more bandwidth so that there is consistency in your website performance across the day for all visitors.

Considering Bandwidth and Web Design

Do not be one of the unfortunate people who falls into the trap of thinking that downloading something is only associated with YouTube or iTunes. Almost every act a person does online involves downloading something. The bigger and more complicated your web design, the more bandwidth you are going to use up whenever someone visits even your homepage.

Thankfully, modern web design trends are moving towards simplistic, minimalist designs. This means you can make your own site look like this without looking like you are merely trying to save yourself some additional money!

The Big Question: How Much Bandwidth Do You Need?

This answer to this question depends on a variety of factors. While that might seem like a cop-out, it is actually a very positive thing, because it means you can really start to nail down how much bandwidth you need specifically for your site. This is great for when you start searching for a hosting company and can immediately dismiss anyone who starts telling you to buy more just for the sake of it.

The Bandwidth Formula

If you are not offering any file downloads from your website, apply the following formula to discover how much bandwidth you need:

Daily visitors x Daily page views x Average page size x 31 x Tolerance number

If you will have downloadable content on your website, it gets a little more complicated, but is still a reasonably straightforward equation. If you do not remember your math from school, remember that you have to work out the brackets first!

(Daily visitors x Daily page views x Average page size) + (Daily file downloads x Average file size) x 31 x Tolerance number

Finding the Answer

So this makes sense to you, we have produced the following table that you can reproduce, or print and use yourself, which will help you come to the answer. We have also included example numbers that we will use to revisit the equation at the end.

Element	What it Means	Number (Our Example, Populate this with Your own Numbers)
Daily visitors (average)	The number of daily visitors you expect your site to have.  Calculate an average across the month.  Do not over-complicate it and work it out day-by-day.	200
Daily page views (average)	Again, calculate an average projection across the month.	650
Average page size	What is the average size of your pages, all things included, in KB.	60
Daily file downloads (average)	How many times will content be downloaded from your site on a daily basis in terms of additional files independent of your web pages?	10
Average downloaded file size	How big is the average file you can download from your site?  Err on the side of caution and always go bigger if in doubt.  Measure this in KB, too.	850
Tolerance number	This is basically your ‘room for error.’  If ’1′ is your estimate, make this number 1.33, or 1.5, depending on how confident you are in your projections.  If you believe your site may grow quickly, aim for a higher number.	2

In case you are wondering; the 31 comes from the maximum number of days in a month.  With most hosting companies, bandwidth allowance monthly, so we are taking the numbers and multiplying them by 31. Do not miscalculate and double check every number, otherwise you could find yourself with only a fraction of what you require, or paying more for bandwidth that you do not!

Remember, too, that most hosting companies will offer bandwidth based on GB per month, so remember to convert the number from KB to GB.

The Solution

This is what our hypothetic website would need:

(Daily visitors [200] x Daily page views [650] x Average page size [60]) + (Daily file downloads [10] x Average downloaded file [850]) x 31 x 2

Simplified, this gives us:

7,800,000 + 8500 x 31 x 2

The answer to which is a huge looking 484,127,800KB, which is around 462GB. For this website, the required bandwidth would be 462GB.

Choosing Your Solution

Bear in mind that a number such as that represents what you would see from a reasonably sized website turning over a good sum of money. A small business might only require up to 5GB, if that, when they first launch their website. It is also unlikely that when you first get started you will have a lot of content to download. However, this is still a great equation to keep in mind if you are looking to project costs for when your business grows and you are expecting to see significantly high traffic levels hitting your site.

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Learn Where And How To Put Keywords In Your Copy

Lack of well-chosen keywords and phrases on your Web site is a truly terrible mistake to make, as search engine spiders depend on these to find your site; as well as search engine users. If you have not targeted specific and precise keywords for your website, then you will not be easily found. Period.

Lack of Targeted Keywords Equals Lack of Traffic

For example, if you sell used art textbooks and just insert the non-specific word “book” into your Meta tags and site content, guess what? Not only will you probably not show up in at least the first fifteen pages of search results, but users that actually find your site by some quirk of fate will most likely turn around and leave as soon as they get there (unless, again, by some quirk of fate, they are looking for used art textbooks. Not gonna happen.).

Keyword Tools

So how do you figure out these keywords and phrases? Here are a couple of great keyword tools that can help you do this:

• Digital Tracker Keyword Suggestion: Digital Tracker is absolutely invaluable. I use this every day.
• Free Keyword Suggestion Tool:Displays how many times a certain keyword was searched for in a given month. Shows all related searches for the entered keyword.
• Google Keyword Tool: "The Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaigns and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends."

All of these keyword tools can help you get a clear idea of what people are actually searching for, and then you can use those words within your site copy and structure to attract more people to your site. It's all about providing the better user experience - if people can't find your site, no matter how great your service or site is, you're not providing that good user experience.

Where To Put Keywords

Now that you've got your basic keyword research started, you need to know where to put these keywords on your Web site.

• Title Tag: The title tag is a great place to use your keyword phrases. The title tag consists of those words you see at the top of your browser window in the blue space, and it is what search engines grab for the title display in their search results; so obviously, it's an important part of your search engine optimization strategy. Here's an example: [Keyword Phrase] - How To [Keyword Phrase].
• Headline: Most people who read on the Web scan Web pages quickly. This is why headlines are so important - they give your reader a chance to get what they need fast with a minimum of fuss (again, back to that great user experience). Use your keyword phrase again in the headline: How To [Keyword Phrase].
• Content: Now you need to write your keyword phrases into your site content. This is where it can get tricky, because it's easy to just write that keyword phrase where ever that keyword phrase might fit into where the keyword phrase could go (see what I mean? sounds terrible!). Be natural about it - easier than it sounds, but with practice you'll get it.

Keywords Increase Web Site Traffic

No doubt about it - if you're able to place well-researched keyword phrases into your site content and structure, you will attract more searchers to your site, and provide a better user experience because they will be able to find what they are looking for. More than anything else - high rankings, increased traffic, etc. - the top goal should be to provide the best user experience for every single person that comes to your site, and making sure your keyword phrases serve their needs is a big part of that.

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How to Change your WordPress Username (alternative)

To make sure you have a strong administrator username choose uncommon combination of words and preferably include some numbers and symbols, for example “sky723-156”. To change your default WordPress admin username follow these steps:

1.  Login into your WordPress admin panel using your admin account.
2. Select the ”users” area from your dashboard panel, and click on “Add New User”.
3. Fill in the form and choose ”administrator” in the ”Role” drop down menu (remember to enter a strong web password and also check the password strength indicator to confirm that your new password is strong enough).
4. When finished, click on ”Add New User”.
5. Log in again using your new WordPress admin username.
6. Navigate to the ”Users” area.
7. From the users list tick the box of the previous “admin” username and select ”Delete” from the drop-down menu.
8. Next, you will be asked about the articles posted under the the previous ”admin” username. Select the option “attribute all posts and links to:” and select your new administrator password. When ready click “Confirm Deletion”.
9. Make sure that the “display name” of your admin user is different from the username, especially if the admin user posts any blog articles. If the actual username is used also as ”display name” of the writer, a hacker can easily identify the admin username and target the account.

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How to Change your WordPress Username

First thing you need to do is login to your cPanel. Scroll down to the databases section and click on phpMyAdmin.

Next you need to select the database that your blog is hosted in.

Click on the table wp_users on the left hand side. Then click edit on the username that you want to edit.

Change the user_login value to whatever you want. For example you can replace ‘admin’ to ‘bob’

Hit the Go button and you are done.

Go back to your site and login with your new username.

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Sharing Folders in Outlook 2010

This document shows how to change the permissions of a certain folder to allow others access to its contents. The following instructions are for Microsoft Outlook 2010.




STEP 1


Open Outlook 2011 and click on the folder you would like to share and then click the Permissions icon.


STEP 2


When Permissions window appears click Add User.



STEP 3


In the Search textbox type the name of the person you wish to give permissions to.



STEP 4


Select the name of the person from the list and clickAdd ->, then OK.




With the correct name selected, click the boxes to allow amount of access you would like the person you are sharing permissions with to have and click Apply, then OK.

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W3 Total Cache Settings

Today I’m going to take you through all of the W3 Total Cache settings for your WordPress site and explain which ones you should use for optimal performance. After you’ve finished reading this, your pages will load a lot faster resulting in a better browsing experience for your visitors.
 

Installing W3 Total Cache

Before I begin to talk about the various W3 Total Cache settings, I’ll quickly take you through the steps required to install the plugin. If you’ve already installed W3TC, you can skip this part.

Once you’re sure the you aren’t using any other caching plugin, such as WP Super Cache, go to the ‘Plugins’ section in the WordPress Dashboard, click ‘Add New’, then type ‘W3 Total Cache’ into the search box. Click ‘Install Now’, then ‘Activate Plugin’. That’s it, you can go ahead with setting it up now.

 

W3 Total Cache Settings

You will see that a ‘Performance’ button has been added to the left-hand panel of your WordPress dashboard, click it and select ‘General Settings’. Now use the following settings:

- Page Cache: Enable
- Page Cache Method: Disk Enhanced (Disk Enhanced is best for shared hosting)
- Minify: Enable
- Minify Cache Method: Disk
- Database Cache: Disable
- Object Cache: Disable (Enabling database or object caching on shared hosting will decrease performance, only use these if you have a VPS or dedicated server)
- Content Delivery Network: Disable (A CDN such as MaxCDN can give your visitors a faster and more consistent browsing experience, you can set this up in W3 Total Cache settings after you have configured the rest of the options)
- Browser Cache: Enable (This is a great feature that tells the visitor’s browser to load static items from their local machine instead of re-downloading from your server)
 

W3TC Page Cache Settings – General

- Cache Home Page: Enable
- Cache Feeds: Enable
- Cache SSL: Disable (You can enable this for better performance if your site uses SSL)
- Cache URIs: Disable
- Cache 404s: Disable
- Don’t Cache Pages For Logged-in Users: Disable (This is a matter of preference and will depend on the type of site you’re running. Disabling it will make sure that Administrators never see cached pages while they’re logged in)
 

W3TC Page Cache Settings – Cache Preload

Cache Preload displays pre-cached pages to all of your visitors. If you have any problems with it you can simply disable it.

- Automatically Prime The Page Cache: Enable
- Update Internal: 900
- PPI: 7
- Sitemap: Your sitemap will be located at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
 

Minify Settings

Minify basically combines multiple files on your site into a single file to reduce HTTP requests.


 

CSS Minify Settings

- Enable: Enable
- Combine Only: Disable
- Comment Removal: Enable
- Line Break Removal: Enable

Note: If you have problems with styling after changing these, disable all of them except the first one.

Now got to the JS Minify Settings and select the same options as you did for CSS. The rest of the Minify settings can be left on their default values.
 

HTML & XML

- Enable: Enable
- Inline CSS: Enable
- Inline JS: Enable
- Line Break Removal: Enable
Note: If you have a poorly coded theme, you will have problem displaying your site correctly with these enabled. You can test these settings and disable them if you experience any problems.

Skip Database Cache, Object Cache and CDN.
 

W3 Total Cache Settings For Browser Cache

Under ‘General’ change the following…
- Set Expires Header: Enable
- Cache Control Header: Enable
- Set Entity Tag: Disable
- Set W3 Total Cache Header: Enable
- HTTP Compression: Enable
- Prevent Caching Of Objects…: Disable (uncheck)
- Do not process 404 errors: Disable (uncheck)

For the CSS, JS, HTML, XML and Media settings, leave everything on the default settings except eTag, disable that for all of them.
That’s it. Those are the best W3 Total Cache settings for WordPress sites on shared hosting. Remember to empty the page cache and you’re good to go!

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