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Containers
Containers make it easy to build your own website, how you want.
Setting up, and installing Wordpress
Wordpress is the most popular CMS on the internet, and today I wanted to show you how to Install Wordpress on NodeHost in a few steps and some info you will need along the way. Launch a "container" The first and big step is to launch a new container on NodeHost. When you click on Create Container you will get a screen asking fo the type, just pick the default "PHP Running On
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Make Let's Encrypt work when using Cloudflare (ACME Challenge)
So first things first Let's Encrypt and Cloudflare are amazing, but just enabling the Cloudflare cloud and Let's Encrypt makes it impossible to auto renew domains. This rule change will allow you to auto renew with Let's Encrypt and make everyone happy. This is because Let's Encrypt will do a ACME challenge on your domain on each renewal attempt, and with the default Cloudflare settings it will fail. The simple solution is to enable a simple page rule on Cloudflare. This is a simple rule to di
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Set up a Mail Client to connect to website
Here is the server information needed for setting up your domain email with Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook or Outlook Express. You can also login at webmail.nodehost.ca. When setting up your email you will need to use full e-mail address as username. You just need to use the hostname of the sever you are on, we are using N12 in our example. IMAP hostname: n12.myws.ca IMAP port: 143 IMAP security: STARTTLS IMAP username: Your full email address IMAP password: Th
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Importing a site (Wordpress) from a CPANEL user export
This will have a lot of steps but are fairly simple. This guide will also include images along the way to help you out. Launch a site on NodeHost and upload files First step is to launch a new site on the NodeHost panel and set your domain. Now just get your SFTP info, you will find it under SFTP in the sidebar, this is how you connect to the site for uploading your files. Use that info to upload your site files, you will find them in the unzipped folder from CPANEL under homedir and then
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Setting up external DNS to point to your site
To just point your site to NodeHost the easy way, all you need to do is point 2 records to us. This will allow you to keep all current domain settings, and just point for the website (at the bottom we have the extra steps needed to setup mail using our servers mail system). Pointing your root domain and www subdomain Now this is basically all you need to do, visit your domain panel and go to the page to edit DNS records. From there you just need to replace the main record (usually . or @)
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Setting up CloudFlare and HTTPS for Free
Go to http://www.cloudflare.com and create an account (or login if you have one). Click on Add site at the top of the page and follow the steps. When done all DNS management and changes you want to make will be made on CloudFlare. Now that thats all done and CloudFlare is active you can enable HTTPS browsing... How? Well let me tell you. First visit your site overview page, and click on Crypto. The first option is the one we want, and you want to make sure it's set to Flexible. This setting all
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Using Google Apps mail with NodeHost DNS
So you want to use Google Apps email and still use our DNS system? Here is a quick guide on the setup needed in our DNS panel for Google apps. Removing our Mail settings So lets start by removing the following DNS entries we make for our service to handle mail. Remove all of them or your mail will not work correctly. A: pop. A: mail. MX: @. TXT: @. TXT: _domainkey. TXT: mail._domainkey. If you are asking about the TXT records, they all are for our servers, when we send mail
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The Importance of DNSSEC
What the heck is DNS? When you type tree.nodehost.ca into your address bar it has to be translated into an IP address before a connection can be established. What the heck is DNSSEC? It's an acronym that stands for "Domain Name System Security Extensions". Or DNS Security Extensions. It's a relatively new system that was created to improve DNS security. There is vulnerabilities in the DNS system that cou
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External or Internal DNS, Why using external DNS is better
For us as a platform it would be best for us to say, use our DNS, but this is NOT the case. Using the DNS system that also hosts your sites gives room for failure, our service for DNS is more convenient. We always recommend using a system like CloudFlare for DNS and pointing A records or CNAME (easer for management reasons) to us to load your site. This way you not only get a faster site, but a global CDN to make pages load faster around the world and save resources. Problems with internal
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Change container primary domain without removing site files
Normally if you delete the primary domain on a container all your site files will also be deleted. This is because the files are stored on the system in a folder under the primary domain. For example if your domain is example.com your files will be in the folder /home/f323/web/example.com/public_html on the system. But we do have a way to move your files in a few seconds out of the folder so you can change your primary domain. Go to the terminal On the container info screen on the left
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Deploy your site from GitLab using CI and SFTP
This is an easy thing to do for private repos (we are NOT using variables so only use on Private), using GitLab you get 2K minutes of run time per organization, thats around 2K deploys as most take around 1 minute. To start create a new file in the base of your repo with the name .gitlab-ci.yml. Here is a simple script to upload your site contents, just replace n12.nodehost.ca with the hostname of the node your site is on. Also you will need to set some info in place of USERNAME `PASSWORD
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Cloning a container from one Node to another
This is a really simple task and when you make the clone you can always go back if it does not work. So lets get started with a few types of containers that cant be just cloned over automatically. If you are using our free testing domains as the primary domain or relying on it, you won't be able to move it. You can tell if it's the primary domain as it will be the domain listed on the main containers list.  is not using "SSL" (TLS/HTTPS). This is an easy fix and one that is really recommended. All sites should be running over HTTPS with no exceptions even if your site is just static it's about protecting your users. The easy way Really Simple SSL Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https.
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One or more recommended modules are missing: imagick
We get asked all the time about the Wordpress heath check message about imagick. imagick is a command line based image processor, and we don't run imagick on our servers at all. There are benefits to using imagick including lower image sizes in slightly better quality ranges but we found the performance and integration a downside for imagick on our servers. PHP has a built in image processor for scaling and resizing images and any plugins using imagick should automatically just use the default
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Speeding up Wordpress and systems like WooCommerce
Wordpress is famous for being a resource hog, and now that all NodeHost servers are upgraded and running high level CPUs and half a GB of memory for every page load I was thinking it was time to say why and how Wordpress can be slow no matter how fast the server. Wordpress is a powerful system that on each page load can do a lot of background checks, and one is to rebuild the page visuals so the main and best way to speed up your Wordpress site is to install a cache plugin. Cache W
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How to get and use SSL (HTTPS) for free on your Wordpress site using CloudFlare
In this step-by-step tutorial, I'll teach you how to easily get and activate SSL for your WordPress website. If you don't already have an SSL certificate. Getting a SSL certificate (HTTPS) The best option is to create a Cloudflare account and connect it to your site. A full tutorial on how to do this can be found here: https://helpdesk.nodehost.ca/en/article/setting-up-cloudflare-and-https-for-free-4fn0y You can a
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Wordpress malware removal tips and help
This post will be updated as time goes on but lets start. With Wordpress when plugins are vulnerable and the issues become public it can take minutes for sites to become infected. It's a sad thing about Wordpress being so large. This post is about Wordpress Javascript redirect injected code and how to kinda help find it. In a lot of cases it's injected into the template files so if you remove and add your theme again it can usually fix it. But this can cause problems and sometimes it's not in t
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Preventing Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and how to make your site more secure
Cross-Site Scripting or XSS as it's known is using and abusing external content through embedding or loading content that should not be allowed on a webpage. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks are a type of injection, in which malicious scripts are injected into otherwise benign and trusted web sites. XSS attacks occur when an attacker uses a web application to send malicious code, generally in the form of a browser side script, to a different end user. How do you prevent Cross-Site Scrip
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Wordpress plugins that will improve site performance and speed
We know bloggers and small sites love Wordpress, heck even some larger sites use Wordpress. So we wanted to give a short list of our recommended plugins. Image Optimization Smush Image Compression and Optimization https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/ This is a great plugin for anyone with a lot of photos on a Wordpress site. It allows image compression over your enter site for free, and best of all it's got over 1 MILLION installs on Wordpress sites. Page Speed WP Super Ca
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How to enhance security and hide WordPress admin pages
In this step-by-step tutorial, I'll teach you how to enhance the security of your WordPress site by hiding WordPress directories and back-end pages from the standard user. This will make it almost impossible for a user to tell you're using WordPress, even when he/she is viewing your site's code (do note that most templates will disclose the wp engine in the header tags still). Step 1 Search for and Download the "W
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Unzip an archive from the web terminal
Sometimes you want to upload a lot of files and sometimes its easer to just upload an archive. For this we have the ability to upload an archive in both .zip and .tar with the name of archive and easily export the contents. The archive wont keep the parent folder within the zip. Once you have a archive file uploaded you can open the terminal on the container sidebar. Once yo
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Upgrade insecure elements using a little PHP in Wordpress
There are many ways to fix insecure content loading on your site, one is to go and change all elements loaded over http:// with https:// but if you are unable to as a plugin or more is preventing this you can always use the CSP header to upgrade insecure requests. For this we added this to the top of wp-config.php just after
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How backups are managed with cloned containers
Due to how backups are stored for containers when you clone a container and it creates backups over time they share the same limit of backups as the orginal container if it's still current. Because of this if you have 2 containers active with the same SFTP username they each will only be able to store 2 weeks of backups not almost 4.
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Optimizer
The Optimizer enables new levels of website peformance, unlocking both compression and cache. To use you just enable a flag in the NodeHost dashboard under your container. Speed Results The results are based on our test site, a wordpress blog with some content and plugins. You can view the non cached version here and the cached version here. Without ![](https://storage.crisp.chat/users/helpdesk/
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