Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Supercharge Website Performance With AWS S3 and CloudFront


We live in a world where people are increasingly expecting more and faster speeds. In fractions of a second, your website can lose valuable visitors and in turn, money. Although most people think CDNs are for the "big dogs", they're actually super cheap and incredibly easy to use these days.
This tutorial shows you how to setup and use Amazon's Web Services S3 and CloudFront to decrease website load time as well as show the performance differences.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Creating FTP User in Plesk

How to create additional FTP user in Plesk?


You simply CANNOT create additional FTP user in Plesk as of date. What a pity! The workaround is -
You need to have shell access so that you can create the user from shell. Assuming that we already have a domain (domain-name.com) with primary FTP user (harry) with home directory as /var/www/vhosts/domain-name.com and you now want to create user sally

1) Login to shell with root access and issue
# id harry
It will show something like
# uid=10001(harry) gid=2523(psacln) groups=2523(psacln)
We will need the uid of harry later - so remember it  !

2) create user via the command below and use harry's uid like following:
# sudo useradd -u 10001 -o -d /var/www/vhosts/domain-name.com/upload_folder -g psacln -s /bin/false sally
This will let sally access the sub-folder which in our example is upload_folder


3) Now create password for sally
#sudo passwd sally
This will ask you to input password for sally this can be any password - not necessarily the same as harry

You should now be able to use an FTP client to login with that user’s name and password. This is the only good solution for Plesk for now.