iWeb Communities: Blog

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

MONTREAL (September 22, 2009) — iWeb announced today the availability of R1Soft Data Protection plans, an essential backup and disaster recovery service for its dedicated server clients.

Using R1Soft’s high-performance Continuous Data Protection® (CDP) technology, the new service allows bare-metal restore of dedicated servers for disaster recovery and business continuity. Customers can restore backed-up files and systems on a new server after a hardware failure, with file-level granularity. Backup and restoration management is done with an easy-to-use web-based interface.

The new service, powered by R1Soft’s advanced Continuous Data Protection® (CDP), offers iWeb clients near-continuous, disk backups with minimal server performance impact.  After a thorough evaluation process, iWeb selected R1Soft CDP because of its unique disaster recovery capabilities. In the event of system failure, the solution allows iWeb users to bare-metal restore their servers which minimizes downtime and maximizes business continuity.

iWeb’s new R1Soft Data Protection Plans offers diverse backup storage space from 10GB, starting at just $15/month, for Linux and Windows dedicated servers.

“Having a solid backup solution is key to deliver customer satisfaction in web hosting. With R1Soft CDP, we can offer our clients an enterprise-level backup service with a low-priced entry point,” said Martin Leclair, President of Products and Technologies at iWeb.  “Our flexible and on-demand plans give new and existing customers affordable options for data protection and have peace of mind knowing that their data is safe.”

With iWeb’s robust infrastructure and R1Soft’s reliable data protection software, customers now have the resources and backup tools for an even higher level of data availability. R1Soft’s high-performance CDP solution will protect their mission-critical servers with incremental backups around the clock, and bare-metal restores to quickly restore their data in the event of a disaster, hardware failure, or accidental deletion” said David Wartell, vice president of R1Soft, a division of BBS Technologies, Inc.

iWeb also offers Dedicated R1Soft Backup Servers for customers looking to backup more data.  The powerful, all-in-one solution boasts up to 4TB backup space, 25 client server licenses, and provides the ability to secure backups for multiple servers.

For more information on iWeb’s R1Soft Data Protection Plans please visit:

http://iweb.com/managed-hosting/backup-storage/

About iWeb
iWeb is a worldwide provider of Internet hosting services and IT Infrastructure, with three secure data centers in Montreal. Since 2004, the company’s compounded annual growth rate has been above 75%, making it one of Canada’s 100 fastest growing companies according to PROFIT Magazine. For more information, please consult the Company’s website: http://about.iweb.com

For the past 10 weeks, the iWeb development and IT team have been working on integrating R1Soft’s “Continuous Data Protection” (CDP) solution and make it available as a flexible and add-on service for all dedicated server customers.

Dedicated servers can now be provisioned with a R1Soft data protection plan, with storage space from 10GB to 500GB, from as low as $15 per month. With a R1soft data protection plan, a backup agent will be installed, and starting regular scheduled backups, saving the server’s entire filesystem to iWeb’s fully-redundant, RAID-50 storage servers.

For customers looking to backup more than 500GB and/or to backup more than one server, dedicated backup servers are still available.

The main advantage of this new backup service is its continuous feature. While it might take a minimal time to finish the first backup, next backups will take significantly less time, since only incremental differences are sent to main storage servers. It also allows you to do bare-metal restores, which is restoring a system to a brand-new hard drive. iWeb also provides a management interface, accessible through the customer hub, allowing you to choose a scheduling time, choose files to restore, and set email notifications for successful or failed backup operations.

All in all, it’s a significant improvement compared to the previous solution used by iWeb. Customers get more control with the backup management interface. It’s also more flexible, since you can change the backup storage space in the customer hub.

This is a recommended solution for any server, to backup important data, and being able to recover from disasters. One never knows when there will be a filesystem crash, a hardware failure, or an attack by a hacker or botnets.

The service is available in the order process, in the software configuration section, for any new dedicated server order (except Mac Os or FreeBSD). For existing servers, you can add it through the customer hub. Installation (and peace of mind!) takes less than 24 hours. Also bear in mind that all the hard drive is backed up with this new service, so be sure to order a storage space bigger than the space you are using.

Add a R1Soft Data protection plan to an existing server
View our new R1Soft backup solution page.

As a web hosting company, or even as a web company, iWeb has a long history with Wordpress. We have thousands of wordpress installs on our shared hosting and dedicated servers platform, and iWeb was also very early in using Wordpress, at the beginning to post status updates as well as important company news. We sponsored also WordCamp Montreal recently. No doubt it’s a compelling publishing platform, with its open-source development model, its powerful plugin and theming system, and its strong community of users and developers.

One of the direct consequences of the platform’s popularity is the constant attacks and hacker attempts. There are blog comments spam, but also bots and hackers who would try to take control of your website. For instance, we’ve had a security issue with Wordpress and the iWeb blog early this week, with a hacker logged to the dashboard. Fortunately, the issue was dealt with quickly, and we’ve introduced new measures that would prevent a similar issue, from technical measures to measures preventing social engineering.

It’s easy to overlook wordpress security, and the story above is a good example on how every Wordpress blogger should spend time on the issue. For instance, Wordpress released an update to their blogging platform last week. The 2.8.4 version fixes a vulnerability where a hacker could get access to the admin dashboard of a wordpress blog. If you haven’t updated your wordpress, you should do it now. Here are other tools which might help you:

• The Wordpress codex has an extensive resource on how to harden your Wordpress install
• The Wordpress Security Scan plugin scans your site for security issues, checks passwords, file permissions, database security. It also hides Wordpress version and secures the admin area.
• The login lockdown plugin allows you to control login usage. It prevents for instance scripts or bots doing dictionary attacks
• The Wordpress login logger plugin allows you to have logs on who tried to log into the admin area.
• WP DB Backup is a plugin which makes a copy of your wordpress database. Useful in the case a hacker went through your wordpress and publishes or deletes existing articles.

There also other efficient tactics such as preventing access to wp-admin apart from selected IP addresses, through the .htaccess file. Users or bots with an unknown address will be greeted with a 403 response.

Of course, the minimum you can do is upgrade to the most recent version, especially if it’s a vulnerability fix release, which is the case for the 2.8.4 release.