GreenGeeks is excited to introduce a feature to our hosting environment that has been months in the making. We recently surveyed our customers and asked them what features they wanted to see added to our service. You asked for it, and now you’ve got it! Drush is now available for use on all of our Shared hosting and Reseller Hosting plans!

What is Drush?

Drush is a command line scripting tool for use with our Drupal hosting packages. It is designed to make life easier for those advanced Drupal users who want to have full control over their Drupal installations.

What makes Drush different at GreenGeeks?

GreenGeeks utilizes a highly advanced security system which isolates accounts to their own file system. We also use cloud linux technologies which further protect users from one another. It is only through these systems that allows us to offer tools like Drush in a safe and secure manor. We were tired of hearing horror stories of insecure web hosts offering Drush and opening up their customers to all sorts of dangerous things. That’s why GreenGeeks is so tough on system security. We only want the best hosting experience for you!

How do I use Drush?

Information about how to use Drush can be found at the GreenGeeks Knowledgebase

The first line of defense against cyber criminals (hackers) are passwords, but weak and easy to guess passwords aren’t much of a defense. It’s important to create strong passwords that are unique to each of your important account and it’s especially important to update the passwords often. Your GreenGeeks web hosting services comes standard with 24/7 monitoring of servers and includes advanced firewall systems to protect against most attacks, however a weak password is like leaving your front door unlocked. All the cyber criminals have to do to gain access to your precious stuff is to just try and open your door.

Here are some tips to create a strong password and keep them secure.

#1. Keep your passwords unique.

Having the same password to all of your accounts is like using the same key for your car, office and home, if a criminal gains access to one they have access to it all. So refrain from using the same passwords, it may be a pain in the butt but if its a nuisance to you, it’s definitely going to be way harder for a cyber criminal to gain access to your critical accounts.

#2. Create a password that consists of numbers, letters, symbols, UPPER and lowercase characters.

The more complex the password, the harder it is for someone to guess. Ensure that your password is at least 8-10 characters long and has numbers. Also, be sure to add symbols, a mix of UPPER and lowercase letters to make your password harder to crack. Never use easy to guess passwords like “password” or “12345″ and definitely don’t use easy to find information like your phone number, date of birth, etc. If there’s anytime to be creative and original, it’s when you’re creating your password.

 #3. Verify the strength of the Password

There a ton of tools out there that will allow you to test the strength of a password such as Password Meter. Test your passwords for strength and use maximum strength passwords.

We’ve written a couple of articles on how to change your passwords at GreenGeeks:

How to Change Account Manager Password
How to change cPanel Password

You should remember that anything requiring a password should follow the same guidelines, this includes WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and other scripts that you use on your hosting account.

If you have any questions or concerns, you’re always welcome to contact our support via live chat, e-mail or phone.

Earlier this week we announced that we have upgraded all of our VPS Hosting servers to Intel Xeon E5 Processors. All of our existing VPS customers were automatically upgraded for free.

GreenGeeks VPS Hosting servers now come standard with Intel Xeon E5 Processors, DDR3 Memory, RAID-10 high-performance and highly-redundant storage array’s, multi-gigabit network connection along with enterprise class Linux CentOS and a full cPanel/WHM license. The VPS Hosting Service also comes with 24/7/365 technical support.

“To keep up with technological advancements, we are always improving our web hosting services.” said Trey Gardner, CEO of GreenGeeks. “With more and more customers doing more with their online presence, the upgrades will enable website owners and developers to take advantage of the extra processing power to get more out of their applications.”

To find out more information about GreenGeeks VPS Hosting Service visit our VPS Hosting page.

After we came across some unusual activity on many of our servers, we pushed out an article to help our WordPress users protect their WP-Admin areas from attackers. As the day went on we started to see more of the unusual activity, but this time with tens of thousands of IP addresses. This is a very well organized, highly-distributed global attack on WordPress installations across pretty much every web hosting provider in the industry.

We strongly suggest that you change your password on your WordPress installation. Something that is very hard to guess. lower case, UPPER CASE, 1234′s and $*@#&$’s.

We first noticed traces of this attack last week, it came and went. Last night is when we started to see the brunt of the brute force attack on the WP-Admin area. This caused websites to be slow and in some cases go up and down throughout the day today.

We’ve taken several steps to mitigate this attack but there is only so much that we can do and protect ourselves from attacks such as these. Servers with more WordPress installations are ones seeing the most service interruption.

This is an issue that has/is affecting not only GreenGeeks, but many other well known web hosting companies. It’s an on-going industry-wide attack. CloudFlare, with whom we work really close with has mentioned on its blog that it has pushed out a patch to protect WordPress users from this attack if they have their websites enabled with CloudFlare. Not using CloudFlare? Here are 4 reasons as to why you should. Also, if you haven’t protected your WP-Admin area, you should do that too.

*** UPDATE ***

Please ensure that you’re practicing the suggestions mentioned in our blog post: protecting against WordPress login attacks. 

WordPress as we know is one of the most popular content management systems around. That’s why WordPress is generally a target for attacks. Recently we came across a very robust DDoS targeted to the login page of WordPress sites hosted on our network and also on other well known web hosting providers. 

We take security and continuity of service very seriously and we’re very pro-active at everything we do. We’ve added a few new security rules in our already existing set of rules to protect against this type of new attack that we’ve seen. Since implementing this new rule, we’ve seen an increase in protection against these types of attacks.

While we’ve done what we can to ensure maximum security for your websites, there are a few more things that you can do to help yourself from these types of attacks:

#1. Make sure WordPress is Up to Date!

This is a no brainer. Update your WordPress installation. You’ll be surprised at how many installations are out of date. You’re automatically vulnerable when you aren’t using the latest code. Here’s a video on how to update your WordPress installation:

#2. Block Access to the WP-Login.php page

You can do this in one of two ways. The first is to install the Limit Login Attempts plugin. This will restrict access for the WP-Login file. The second is to edit your existing .htaccess file and add the following lines:

<FilesMatch wp-login.php>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Deny from all
</FilesMatch>


You will replace the xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with your WAN IP address. This can be found by typing in What’s my IP Address into Google. See the image below for an example:

Note: Some ISP’s have dynamic IP addresses, so you may not be able to log into the WP-Admin if your IP address changes. You will still be able to edit the .htaccess through your cPanel’s file manager, FTP or SSH if it does. If you’re using an ISP that changes it’s IP often, then this may not be the right choice for you.

#3. Enable CloudFlare

CloudFlare announced that it has pushed out a rule set that is now filtering Brute Force Attacks on the WP-Login.php / WP-Admin page. CloudFlare is free and can be easily installed on your GreenGeeks hosting account. To enable CloudFlare on your GreenGeeks account take a look at 4 reasons why you should be using CloudFlare

Our VPS customers who use WordPress can be affected as well. Please contact our team and we’ll let you know how you can prevent this from occurring on your sites.

GreenGeeks offers some of the best WordPress hosting services in the industry with optimized servers specifically for WordPress. We’re also always evolving to make sure that our customers always experience the best web hosting period.

As you know, GreenGeeks offers 300% Green Energy web hosting. So what does that really mean? It means that for every kilowatt that we draw from the power grid, we replace back 3 times in the form of wind energy. So not only are we offsetting what we’re using but we’re actually putting back MORE clean wind energy into the power system. This includes all of our infrastructure and work stations for our telecommuting staff.

We’ve been investing in renewable energy since opening our doors by partnering with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. In the past 13 years, the BEF has been working hard to put renewable energy investments such as those we and other partners purchase. I wanted to share with you some of what the BEF has done:

• Generated more than 5.1 million megawatt hours of clean, renewable energy through the purchase of Renewable Energy Certificates. That’s the equivalent of powering over 404,000 homes with clean, renewable electricity.
• Kept more than 1.9 million metric tons of harmful carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through the purchase of Carbon Offsets. That’s the equivalent of taking more than 405,000 cars off the road for one year.
• Kept a combined total of more than 4.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere through out partners’ combined purchases of Renewable Energy Certificates and Carbon Offsets. That’s the equivalent of taking more than 991,000 cars off the road for one year.
• Restored over 7.6 billion gallons of water to critically de-watered rivers and streams through out partners’ purchases of Water Restoration Certificates. That’s the same volume of water that would fill 11,543 Olympic sized swimming pools.
• Reached over 400,000 students with hands-on renewable energy education through out Solar 4R Schools program. That includes students from more than 200 schools in 20 states across the nation.
• Have been a driving force in revitalizing 14 watershed ecosystems in 6 western states through our Model Watershed program.

… and this is only the beginning. Remember when you purchase web hosting with GreenGeeks, you’re automatically making a difference by making a deciding to host green. If we’re not your choice, then make sure the host is green.

Go Green

TJ, GreenGeeks

After you install PageRank Status on your Google Chrome browser, an icon will be displayed near to the address bar. This icon shows the Google PageRank value of current web page that you’re on. When you click on this icon, PageRank Status shows data in five tabs:

• SEO Stats
• Site Information
• Page Information
• Page Speed
• Tools

I’ll now go through each of the sections with you…

SEO Stats page of PageRank Status

SEO Stats is the first page of PageRank Status. In this page, you’re provided with snapshot like  SEO data:

• Google PageRank: This section shows the Google PageRank of the current web page that you’re on.
• Traffic: This section shows the Alexa Rank, Compete Rank and Quantcast Rank of current web site.
• Traffic graphs: This section shows Alexa Daily Rank Trend, Alexa Daily Pageviews per user, Alexa Daily Traffic Rank Trend, Compete Traffic Rank and Compete Unique Vistors.
• Cached: This section shows the first cached date in Archive.org and the last cache date in Google.
• Pages indexed: This section shows the number of pages indexed in search engines, such as Bing, Baidu, Goo, Google, Yahoo, Yandex, etc.
• Backlinks: This section shows the backlinks number in Alexa, Bing, Google, Open Site Explore, etc.

Site Info page of PageRank Status

When you click to Site Info page, you will see four sections, it includes:

• Domain information: This section shows the Whois lookup and DNS lookup information.
• Geolocation information: This section shows the IP address, city and country.
• Social (SNS): This section shows the Facebook likes, Google +1 likes and Tweets.
• On-site: This section shows the robots.txt and sitemap.xml status, and places a link to BuiltWith.com

Page Info page of PageRank Status

Meta tags always goes inside the <HEAD> area and will not be displayed on the actual web page. Meta elements provide information about a given web page, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. In PageRank Status extension, you can check these SEO releated Meta elements and other tags by clicking Page Info tab, it will show page URL, Title, Meta keywords, Meta Description, Internal links, External links, H1, H2, Bold/Strong, Italic/em, IMG alt text, Body text and more.

Page Speed page of PageRank Status

Page load time is a very important part of web user experience, it’s also becoming a more important factor when it comes to search engine rankings. PageRanks Status shows the page load time of the current web page and rates it, and also provides the timing-related information, there is a screenshot:

If your site is too slow, perhaps you need to optimize the web site or migrate to a faster server like GreenGeeks perhaps

Tools page of PageRank Status

This page shows links to webmaster resources such as Google Webmaster Tools, Google Trends, Google Keyword Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, Baidu Webmaster Tools, Open Site Explorer, W3C Link Checker, Screen Resolution Statistics, etc.

To get this powerful SEO tool, you can free install it from Google Chrome Web Store.

The support site of PageRank Status: http://pagerank.chromefans.org.

As a CloudFlare Optimized Partner, we are thrilled to offer the CloudFlare Railgun™ technology to all our customers FREE. Railgun is CloudFlare’s latest performance optimization technology that gives you significant improvements in site load times. To activate Railgun, log into your control panel and select Railgun “On”. Read on for additional details and instructions:

Railgun ensures that the connection between our network and the CloudFlare network is as fast as possible. Railgun achieves a 99.6% compression ratio for previously uncacheable web objects by using techniques similar to those used in the compression of high-quality video. The average website can expect a 1.43x performance increase.

When a request is made to a CloudFlare server for a web page that is not in cache CloudFlare makes an HTTP connection to the origin server to request the page. It’s that HTTP connection that Railgun accelerates and secures.

Even highly dynamic websites change slowly

Railgun works by recognizing that uncacheable web pages do not change very rapidly. For example, during an experiment, the CNN.com homepage HTML was captured once, and then again after 5 minutes and then again after one hour. The page sizes were 92,516, five minutes still 92,516 and one hour later 93,727.

CNN sets the caching on this page to 60 seconds. After one minute, it is necessary to download the entire page again. However, looking inside the page, not much has changed. In fact, the change between versions is on the order of 100s of bytes out of almost 100k. Here’s a screenshot of one of the binary differences between the CNN home page at five minute intervals. The yellow bytes have changed, the rest have not.

Experiments at CloudFlare have revealed similar change values across the web. For example, reddit.com changes by about 2.15% over five minutes and 3.16% over an hour. The New York Times home page changes by about 0.6% over five minutes and 3% over an hour. BBC News changes by about 0.4% over five minutes and 2% over an hour.

Although the dynamic web is not cacheable, it is also not changing quickly. That means that from moment to moment there’s only a small change between versions of a page. CloudFlare Railgun uses this fact to achieve very high rates of compression. This is very similar to how video compression looks for changes from frame to frame; Railgun looks for changes on a page from download to download.

Railgun Technology

Railgun consists of two components: the sender and the listener. The sender is installed at every CloudFlare data center around the world. The listener is a software component that GreenGeeks manages on our local network for our customers.

The sender and listener establish a permanent TCP connection that’s secured by TLS. This TCP connection is used for the Railgun protocol. It’s an all binary multiplexing protocol that allows multiple HTTP requests to be run simultaneously and asynchronously across the link. Or in other words, a persistent connection is opened between CloudFlare’s network and ours and eliminates the overhead of TCP.

We have made it simple for our customers to get the benefits of Railgun with one click. Visit our knowledgebase for additional information and instructions on how to activate CloudFlare Railgun on your GreenGeeks web hosting account.

Late last year we announced a partnership with CloudFlare, where we make it easy for you to enable CloudFlare on your account to take advantage of the benefits that CloudFlare offers. If you aren’t using CloudFlare on your hosting account, here’s 4 reasons why you should:

1. Increase in Site Performance

We use the best quality hardware and network available, so naturally our web hosting is already fast… but CloudFlare provides an increase in website performance through their global CDN (Content Delivery Network). When enabled, the CDN will automatically cache your static files (JavaScript, CSS, Images, etc.) on their servers located across strategic data centers around the world. When a visitor visits your website hosted with GreenGeeks, CloudFlare’s Anycast technology will load those static files from a server located nearest to the visitor and your dynamic content will load from our servers. This results in faster load times due to decreased latency between server and visitor. Through feedback from customers, we’ve seen increases of 50% or more on site performance when CloudFlare is enabled.

2. Built-in Security

Security is a big focus here at GreenGeeks. We do everything to ensure our servers and customer sites are secure from a server standpoint, but most website defacement’s occur due vulnerabilities in the website code it self.  With CloudFlare, you’ll be protected against a range of threats: cross site scripting, SQL injection, comment spam, excessive bot crawling, email harvesters, and more. This is done automatically and will stop most attacks without the confusing configurations that are required with other security plugins and tools. Simply select your security level from High, Medium, Low and Essentially Off. CloudFlare will even learn about your site and traffic patterns and adjust its security on the fly.

Of the sites that are using CloudFlare with our web hosting, CloudFlare stopped over 200,000 threats in just one week.

3. Easy to Enable with GreenGeeks

It’s dead easy to install, so there’s no excuse not to enable CloudFlare. Here’s a video that Lawrence made that shows exactly how to enable CloudFlare on your GreenGeeks shared and reseller hosting accounts. For our VPS and Dedicated customers, simply contact our support by opening a ticket from within your GreenGeeks Account Manager. One of our technicians will install the Plugin for you.

 4. It’s free!

The basic service which will satisfy most of our customers will cost nada, nothing, zilch! Need I say more?

If you’re not using CloudFlare, I strongly recommend that you do. A faster site and a secure site helps with search engine rankings and really, your customers will have a much better experience on your website.

Thanks for choosing to host green!

Karl D.

We’re now offering an added incentive to our VPS hosting service plans… new customers will pay only 50% for the first 2 months. GreenGeeks offers VPS hosting solution for enterprise and cloud hosting solutions ranging from storage of 25GB up to 125 GB and bandwidth from 500 GB to 1500 GB.

“Our VPS customers are very happy with the service and performance levels here at GreenGeeks” says GreenGeeks CEO Trey Gardner. “So we thought we’d offer a sweeter deal than anyone else out there and we’d let our new customers test us out at a far lower cost of entry. Our VPS services are billed monthly so with the additional 50% off there is very little to risk to try us out and I am confident we’ll impress most if not all of our new customers. ”

GreenGeeks VPS hosting solutions utilize the latest server grade Intel processors, Memory and RAID-10 storage arrays for excellent performance and reliability. Customers will also get access to 24/7 technical support to create the complete solution along with the abundance of features that we already offer.

Learn more about our VPS Hosting services.