Wurv Hosting

Black Friday Sale!

Tad — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 09:42:33 +0000

This is our sweetest deal EVER and you don’t even need to freeze waiting in line to get it!

November 25th through the 28th we’ve got some crazy deals – they are recurring, meaning you lock this deal in for life!

The Door Buster:

50% off Any Package FOR LIFE (When Paid Annually)

There are only 10 of these available!

Coupon at checkout: friday50

After that:

30% off Any Package FOR LIFE (When Paid Annually)

There are only 30 of these available!

Coupon at checkout: friday30

Ready? Pick your plan here!

The not so fine print:

Transfer from your old host to us may be delayed due to the volume of this promotion. (Should still be complete with 24 hours.)

If you have any questions please ask them here.

VPS.net Cloud Hosting – Our Experience.

Tad — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 01:35:07 +0000

I’d like to share my experience with VPS.net. I’ll cut to the summary right now: cutting edge can be dangerous!

Back in February of 2011. Our WordPress managed hosting company Wurv.com was growing at a steady pace, and we found ourselves with some clients that had been kicked off their old host for “high resource usage” well, we have some pretty beefy servers so we were confident that we’d be able to handle the loads. (I’m speaking of two clients in particular.) Not long after bringing these online and integrated with our other shared servers we began to see frequent MySQL and PHP issues on these servers. We needed to move these high traffic sites, and fast.

Fortunately I had been playing around with VPS.net, which is easy with $1 per day nodes. I had done a few installs of different distributions, and tinkered with the different add ons that are available. There are lots of options. LOTS! So when I needed to move these clients to their own server, I needed one that was easy to scale, and would be ready fast.

With lot’s of locations to choose from, it was nice to pick the best spot based on where the traffic was coming from. I choose SLC-F, for you VPS.net newbies, that’s Salt Lake City, Node F. I spun up 2 nodes with CloudLinux and added Server Density monitoring. Once all the files were moved and the DNS had propagated, Server Density automatically bumped it up a node. I was excited that I could let this server take care of it self in many ways.

Then in the ultimate in bad timing, within 24 hours the server wend down. I tried to reboot, and it never came back. Turns out SLC-F was a newer node, and the SAN died in some way. A “SAN” in laymen’s terms means that the server OS is on one machine and all the storage is on others. I was stuck in a big way. In a mixed blessing though, the sites had not been up on this server to have had any new data put on them. This allowed me to put them up on an alternative site. I will say that Nick and team were very honest and upfront with everything that was happening and credited me for the sever time. The level of transparency is phenomenal at VPS.net read Yoast’s post/interview here,

I am a current customer, but only use as a testing environment at this time. I would love to move our whole infrastructure to VPS.net, but I’m still scared after the incident above. However, many big name sites including our favorite Woothemes.

Why You Need More Than Just Hosting.

Tad — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:23:10 +0000

Today a well known host, highly regarded by the WordPress community was hit in a massive fashion by hackers. My heart sank – dealing with that amount of damage is unthinkable (700,000 sites). The shear number of folks that I follow on my personal Twitter account that were having their Sunday ruined by this was disheartening. In the rest of this post I’ll talk about Wurv Hosting’s approach to safety and redundancy . Regardless of who your host is you can use our methods to help you rely less on that one single server that is holding your precious site.

Protect The Frontend With CloudFlare

CloudFlare is free, and we’ve been using them since shortly after launch for most sites. They do a good job at keeping certain shady characters from even reaching your server. As an added bonus, they act as a Content Delivery Network to speed up your site across the globe. If you follow there system updates on Twitter @cloudflaresys you’ll notice that they are ultra transparent about what’s going on with the network.

Backup OFF the Server

If the server is dead or compromised, having a nice backup there is not really that nice is it? If your host does not offer off server/out of their data center backups then you should do it yourself! (We provide offsite incremental backups daily, BTW.)

Options For Offsite Incremental Backups

There are tons of WordPress Backup Plugins, we’ll only talking about low resource usage hosted services.

CodeGuard

CodeGuard is one of the most compelling offerings with a Apple-ish Time Machine like restore feature. If files back on the server have a problem, you literally push a button and your files return to normal!

VaultPress

VaultPress: Not cheap, but being provided by Automattic, it’s the most tightly integrated solution.

Code Garage

Code Garage is a WordPress specific offering that does backups, as well as security scanning for your site. They really saved our bacon with their excellent Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner plugin. We’ve been evaluating partnering with Code Garage to be our off server backup provider.

Have a Plan!

If you have all the tools in place, will you know what to do to keep downtime to a minimum? Write out exactly how you’ll handle things if your site is compromised. You should plan for what you’ll do if WordPress is hacked, and what to if the server is down or hacked as well.

Plan For:

WordPress Hacks
Server Hacks
Server Down
Hosting Issues

Why Wurv Hosting isn’t just hosting…

(And how we handle these issues.)

Who’s involved?

If you are a current client, or we’ve talked on Twitter, you might think that I’m the only one around here. I respond to most support requests and reach out to the public whenever possible. We are a small niche company, so I’m able to stay very involved with everyone. While I’d love to have the cash flow that 700,000 sites would bring us I love that I know every site on our network. The total number of sites we host is well under 1,000. Yes you read that right – we are very small – but it’s for a reason. Quality over quantity!

Who’s at the datacenter?

That’s what makes us unique. We don’t own any. We’ve partnered with some of the best network providers to bring your sites to life. This allows us to provide 24/7 support to keep the network going, while letting the rest of us focus on the added things that make us unique.

Everybody to the party!

All sites are setup with these things to keep you safe and quickly recoverable.

Added to the CloudFlare network.
Added to daily incremental offsite/cloud backups.
Added to our updates dashboard so we can trigger WordPress core and plugin updates.

When we are attacked…

It’s a scary world, so it’s not IF attacked, it’s when.

WordPress Compromised

If WordPress is compromised we delete the site completely and restore from the latest backup. It’s off server so it will be a unaltered version of your site. We restore the database as well to make sure it’s clean.

Server Down

If you are on CloudFlare, no problem. CloudFlare will serve a copy of your site until we fix the issue. Zero Downtime.

Server Hacked

This is what happened today at the large host that was hit. In this case the server worked, but was serving a “you’ve been hacked” page. This is worse than just having a server down! In this scenario we would take the server offline so CloudFlare will begin to serve the cached version of your site.

In Closing…

We hope that this post will help you take measures to keep things safe and easily fixed. All in are there are 3 major things your site should have:

A Great Webhost
Front end protection/malware scanning.
Offsite backups.

Questions? Drop us a line here.

Wurv’s CloudFlare Partnership

Tad — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:28:54 +0000

Wurv WordPress Hosting Partners with CloudFlare to Deliver Enhanced Security and Faster Speeds for Clients

SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA (June 1, 2011) – To protect and provide more bandwidth power to client websites, Wurv WordPress Hosting announces a new collaboration with CloudFlare to offer enhanced speed, security, and stability for every site on their servers. Sites hosted by Wurv are now faster and more secure than ever which promotes a better experience for site visitors, the prime directive of a good hosting service.

Wurv has added the sites it hosts to the CloudFlare community. This means that web traffic for Wurv-hosted sites now routes through an intelligent global network that automatically optimizes the delivery of web pages so visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. CloudFlare consists of a community of webmasters who pool their knowledge and serve as a virtual fraud and abuse team for fellow CloudFlare sites. Through this web of vigilant webmasters, CloudFlare also blocks threats and limits abusive bots and crawlers from wasting bandwidth and server resources.

The Wurv-CloudFlare collaboration further demonstrates the quality of support Wurv provides to its established clients. Site owners who host with Wurv already enjoy uncrowded fast servers and offsite backups. “I’m excited every time we work with a new client,” says Wurv owner Tad Gilliland. “Hearing the positive client reactions after our customized, personal setup process is why we do this.” Wurv’s collaboration with CloudFlare enhances the speed, security, and support they offer to clients. Tad Gilliland of Wurv says, “Our clients use WordPress because it’s a very good website development tool. They host with Wurv because we help with all the best tools to ensure their WordPress site functions optimally and can be easily managed. This collaboration with CloudFlare is one more way we can demonstrate to our clients that we are committed to offering the very best hosting experience we can provide.”

With Wurv-hosted sites now routed through CloudFlare’s intelligent global network, Wurv hosting clients benefit from the combined efforts of many webmasters communicating with each other to ensure CloudFlare sites perform optimally. Like sending up a warning flare into “the Cloud,” webmasters communicate with others in the CloudFlare system at the first sign of surges in use, massive spam mailings, and other online events that put a drag on internet speeds. These warning flares to the other webmasters also using the Cloud help keep internet pathways for CloudFlare sites speedy and free from clogs.

For more information about Wurv’s collaboration with CloudFlare, contact Wurv here.

About Wurv WordPress Hosting

Founded in 2009,Wurv WordPress Hosting offers a customized website setup using the WordPress system that includes WordPress advice and support. Wurv provides more than just another generic web hosting experience. With a mission to help WordPress users everywhere succeed, Wurv offers a range of hosting options and extras such as offsite backups and instant installation as well as personalized custom setup to ensure clients have support and peace of mind about site security and stability.

Website: http://wurv.com/

About CloudFlare

CloudFlare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com / @cloudflare) makes sites twice as fast, protects them from attacks, ensures they are always online, and makes it simple to add web apps with a single click. CloudFlare supercharges websites regardless of size or platform with no need to add hardware, install software, or change a line of code. The CloudFlare community gets stronger as it grows; every new site makes the network smarter and stronger. Thanks to our awesome sauce technology, more than 250 million people have experienced a faster, safer, better Internet. CloudFlare is based in San Francisco, California.

Website: http://www.cloudflare.com/