VPS Hosting and Parallels Virtuozzo

VPS Hosting is a class web hosting service which becomes rapidly popular among site owners. The reason for this is simple. It brings all the advantages of the dedicated hosting to site owners with small budgets. However the VPS users do not need to back up their virtual servers, something they must do in dedicated class hosting.

However the price and the backups outsourced to the VPS hosting provider are 2 of the advantages of VPS server owners. Another key advantage is that when anyone uses a virtual private server they do not have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on hardware, every time when they need an upgrade. The VPS Hosting users can easy add more resources to their plans – RAM, disc space and data transfer – every time they need to use more resources.

There are different approaches to virtualization and different virtualization techniques such as VMware\’ ESX, Xen, KVM, Virtual Iron, OpenVZ and etc. Any of them utilizes different virtualization technique. If you want to learn more about virtualization techniques read Full Virtualization, Hardware-assisted virtualization, Paravirtualization, OS Virtualization.

Parallels Virtuozzo Powered VPS Hosting

On of the most appreciated virtualization platforms – both from site owners and web hosts – is Virtuozzo Containers. It is proprietary software of Parallels based on OpneVZ. Both are the world\’s leading OS virtualization solutions. Virtuozzo Containers creates isolated containers on a physical server and OS instance. Compared to other virtualization technologies, it offers the highest levels of density, performance and manageability.

According to Host Color, a VPS hosting provider, one of the long line of hosting providers that use Parallels software products, Virtuozzo has a number of key advantages that makes it preferable virtualization platform. It allows you:

• To manage a high performance virtualization solution without need of learning how to manage an Operating System
• To get scalable VPS solution and dynamic resource management.
• To fast upgrade your VPs hosting plan every time you need.
• To get a real-time change of key system resources such as CPU, memory, network, disk and etc.
• To benefit for a full native performance architecture.
• To use fully-featured client interface that enables you to convert, provision, monitor, backup, recover, analyze, troubleshoot, repair, migrate, self-manage and to execute many other operations on your Virtual Private Server.

Promotional Listing: Host Color says that its Virtuozzo powered VPS Hosting plan – VPS Start that features 256 MB RAM, 10 GB disc space and 100 GB data transfer per month – is probably of the most affordable one in the industry.

Microsoft Going After The Creator Of Downadup Worm

Microsoft have announced $250,000 reward to anyone who can give them information that will allow the law enforcement bodies to arrest and convict the person who is responsible for creating the Conficker Internet worm. The virus infected millions of PCs.

Microsoft told IT media that the worm constitutes a “criminal attack”. Residents of any country are eligible for the reward and should contact their international law enforcement authorities, the company said in a statement.

The Windows producer partners with security companies, domain name providers, and others companies to coordinated its response to the worm, also known as Downadup.

Among organizations involved into the pursuit are Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), VeriSign, NeuStar, CNNIC, Afilias, Public Internet Registry, Global Domains International, M1D Global, AOL, Symantec, F-Secure, ISC, Georgia Tech, the Shadowserver Foundation, Arbor Networks, and Support Intelligence.

The worm is active since 2008. It spreads through a hole in Windows OS and exploits a vulnerability that Microsoft patched in October 2008.

It also spreads via devices like USB drives, and network shares by guessing passwords and usernames.

“The worm seeks to update itself by using a long list of pseudo-randomly generated domain names to contact over HTTP and then grab new code”, said Jose Nazario, manager of security research for Arbor Networks. According to him the algorithm for this domain name generation scheme has been cracked (by F-Secure and others) and has been used to pre-compute the names for pre-registration to prevent hostile parties from using this update feature. This has been facilitated – greatly facilitated – by ICANN, TLD operators, and various registrars working together with Microsoft and others to identify the names and grab the ones they need to. These records can then be pointed at sinkholes to discover Conficker-infected hosts checking in.

Symantec has announced that within the last 25 days it observed an average of 453,436 IP addresses infected per day with W32.Downadup.A and 1.7 million IP addresses infected per day with W32.Downadup.B, the company said in a blog posting.

Infected machines from the worm are estimated to be around as 12 million. The could be used for a launch of distributed denial-of-service attacks on web servers or for a seeding a new worm.