The Christmas season is coming, the people around the world will start with the preparations, all the online stores will start offering discounts on their products online, registering the highest number of annual sales.

During this period, all owners of an online store, call for the audits required to prepare for Christmas period. This article will give some tips to be prepared to handle a larger number of orders, requests and demands within your own online business, it is obviously too late to hand updates to the code of your e-commerce, as well as to prohibit the possibility of changing critical components, which are not tested in this period.

Upgrading The Server And Your Web Hosting Plan

Depending on your e-commerce store which would be hosted on shared hosting or within a dedicated solution, it is useful to take some precautions:

Check your plan and upgrades: If we launch a promotion that can bring a greater number of visits, then it’s time to even think of expanding its shared hosting plan. In this case, we contact the provider to request a change to a higher priced plan, specifying the fact that it takes more resources for the website, and then the plan itself should be moved into a more powerful machine.

Troubleshooting the ISP: To find your main domain, website or e-commerce locked in the month of December is not a good news, we see that any faults with your ISP, from the perspective of technical and commercial, are resolved. Needless to require version upgrades or changes to the plan webhosting at this time, the only requirement may be a change and a server upgrade.

Upgrading your Dedicated Server:  If your e-commerce is hosted on a dedicated server, it would be useful to contact your service provider for the adjournment of the same. If they are not already the best performance, it is unthinkable to go to support an increase in visits. Increasing the RAM could be the necessary first step, followed by a reconfiguration and tuning your server, something we see in a few lines.

Cloud Computing Or Cloud Hosting: If we do not have the possibility to increase the resources of our area of shared hosting or on our dedicated server, then the best solution is to include the use of an instance of Cloud Computing effective only for the month of December, or at least only for the period in which we expect to be able to have a greater number of visits. In this case ESDS offers cloud computing solutions with pricing that it can be used for the required time.

You ignore the discourse of performance on the ISP side, it is important to understand if you (are) really ready to face an increase in visits with the configuration of server or instance of cloud computing. The first thing to do if we are not experts, is to contact your ISP or service ‘system to ask a tuning of the server.

What we need to verify exactly:

Apache : We are going to verify the configuration and memory consumption
Nginx : If we use this webserver, we just go to prepare a configuration tailored for our system, basic already get superior performance with Apache
MySQL : The use of tools to identify the problems of MySQL will save you a lot of time.

Finally, after working on our webserver, it is essential that an e-commerce website takes very little time for opening pages, first check which ones are current through one of the many online tools, we recommend PageSpeed Tool By Google.

Here we can get some information about our web site, an acceptable speed should never go more than 1.5 seconds to open, but we talk already about a very high result. To get further information, it is necessary to use Google Webmaster Tool, which gives an indication of how fast our site is, compared to all those tracked by Google.

Once you understand that the speed of the pages is not acceptable, there are several solutions that can be used. First we have to see if our e-commerce platform allows you to do caching, images in all statistical components. Solutions such as Magento or OsCommerce and have these options and you need to identify the best plugin and put it in production, but this is a change that could present problems so it should be applied at night, checking operation.

Optimizing your site must begin with the classic rules:

• Using verified HTML code, corrected at a syntactic level and setting
• Union and compression of JavaScript code for easier loading
• Loading the JS code at the bottom of each page
• CSS compression and compression of images with CSS Sprites

There are dozens of guides on the net. We will definitely prepare further test to check the speed of loading. We can think of to use the handy YSlow, which is a plugin for Firefox, or Chrome’s console directly. It will show the loading times of the individual components of the page.

Our Forum community is available for any further information. You can simply open a new topic!!

It is very common nurtured false belief that “to summon a website, simply install Joomla! and ready ” .

While Joomla has been engineered to provide facilities to a wide range of users, including those with little or no programming knowledge level websites, this does not mean at all that maintain safety on our sites is governed by the same advantage .

Then, if it may be true that “to summon a web” with Joomla! enough to know you’ve actually set it up and “put together a website,” but one thing is the ease of use, flexibility and extensibility that provides Joomla! and quite another to maintain the security of our sites within acceptable levels.

Suggestions

Review each question that are presented below:

• What version of Joomla are you using?
• What third-party extensions you have installed?
• What version of Apache / MySQL / PHP are you using?
• What type of server hosting you have hired?
• What security measures are currently implemented?
• What version of Joomla are you using?

An acceptable level of security is to use the latest stable versions of each of the applications that make up our website and the Joomla is no exception.

While Joomla CMS is a pretty sure of itself, which takes care to avoid unwanted intrusions through your code, or that when it detects a vulnerability to high or low, is quick to repair it as soon as possible.

What third-party extensions you have installed?

If Joomla is responsible for ensuring your code to avoid unwanted intrusions by the same both for what is the core of the application to the extensions that come natively with the installation of CMS. There are lots of extensions programmed by third parties (the CMS installed later) that are not under the control of quality or safety of the Joomla!, but of the respective authors of each of those extensions.

While the purpose of upgrading to the latest stable versions of the extensions we are working with, we face the same criteria applied in the previous paragraph and for the same reason, it should be emphasized that, contrary to what might happen with CMS currently extensions under a security aspect, may have been poorly programmed by their respective authors, or lack of support or updates in this regard.

It is difficult for the eye of someone who is not skilled programmers to distinguish between the variety of tastes and colors with which we get the extensions (seen from a look of “secure programming”).

When an extension programmed by third places on record, in a manner similar to that used by the authors of Joomla, They are implementing security policies designed to thwart intrusion attempts known by its code, or , updated as soon as possible if new security flaws detected, we would, again, in conditions or acceptable level of safety.

In the opposite case, we would be with that third-party extension in particular, unfavorable security conditions, and therefore in a very low level of security is acceptable.

While it provided “vulnerable extensions list” does not mean that “the other extensions that do not appear in that list are safe, viewed from the code and about the chances of malicious intrusions known through it.”

Take these lists as a means commonly used to stay informed and continue to report, among all, on extensions that allow malicious intrusions through your code and get more and more complete lists (perhaps an extension that appears on this list only vulnerable to an earlier point in their development and later to the version mentioned in that list, solved the security problem on their part).

The extensions use only reputable and stable, supporting and updating the security issue, you will greatly limit the extensibility of your project, but will keep within an acceptable level of safety.

In this brief article we will cover the installation and configuration of Apache on CentOS and some other functions required in today’s web servers. Although there are already plenty of material about it, a simple Google search returns a number of texts already, I decided to write about it because it is something simple that sometimes escapes from memory, having published the text is easier to see later and also did not find here any similar text in Vol.

To begin, let’s put some basic descriptions, because there’s always a first-timer. CentOS is a distribution Linux Enterprise class derived from source code freely distributed by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintained by the CentOS Project. The version numbering is based on the number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For example, CentOS is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The basic difference between them is the provision of support paid on acquisition of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Functionally, it can be considered as clone systems. CentOS provides greater access to industry-standard software, including full compatibility with the software packages prepared specifically for systems Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This gives you the same level of safety and support via updates that other Enterprise Linux solutions, but without cost. Supports both server environments for mission critical environments and workstations and also has a Live CD version.

CentOS has numerous advantages, including: an active and growing community, a rapid development and testing of packages, an extensive network for downloads, accessible developers, multiple channel support including support in India. and commercial support through partners. Centos Apache server (Apache HTTP Server, or simply, Apache) is the most successful free web server.

It was created in 1995 by Rob McCool, then an official of the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications). In a survey conducted in December 2007, it was found that using the Apache represents 47.20% of active servers in the world. It is the core technology of the Apache Software Foundation, responsible for more than a dozen projects involving technology webcast, data processing and execution of distributed applications.

The dedicated  server is compatible with the HTTP protocol. Its features are maintained through a structure of modules, including allowing the user to write their own modules – using the API software. It is available in versions for Windows OS and the various other POSIX (Unix , Linux, FreeBSD, etc.).

PHP (recursive acronym for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”) is a computer programming language interpreted freely and widely used for generating dynamic content on the World Wide Web such as Wikipedia.

MySQL is a database management system (DBMS) using SQL (Structured Query Language) as an interface. It is currently one of the most popular databases, with more than 10 million installations worldwide.

In the latest Linux distributions so-called RedHat based distributions installation ligament Apache+PHP+MySQL presents no special problems. But, as always, sometimes there are little pitfalls that often confuse novice admins, owners of dedicated web servers, and programmers.

We describe this process as an example with Fedora Core 4.

We go to the server as root and type the following commands:
yum install httpd (this we have established in apache);
yum install PHP (this we have established in php);
yum install mysql-Server (this we have established in mysql);

and the final touch:

yum install php-mysql
without this bunch of php + mysql will not work.

The default is typically not installed in GD libraries (often used by various scripts) and mbstring (the library require phpmyadmin). For this, we collect the following commands:

yum install php-mbstring
yum install php-gd

Also, I am still faced with the fact that the characters of other languages appear as question marks. This is because the Apache force indicates all files to UTF-8. This can be fixed in the configuration file of httpd.conf .

Look there are lines:

# Specify a default charset for all content served; this enables
# Interpretation of all content as UTF-8 by default. To use the
# Default browser choice (ISO-1 eight thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine), or to allow the META tags
# In HTML content to override this choice, comment out this
# Directive:

# AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

And check that before AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 always stood the pound sign.

Here’s the secret installation. Now write ntsysv and put an asterisk in front of emerging service httpd and mysqld to ensure that these services are started automatically after reboot.