Jelastic Version Control Enhancements
Jelastic, the self-scaling Java and PHP cloud hosting platform, was recently updated to 1.9.2 for all Layershift customers. Jelastic 1.9.2 includes many new features, advancements and visible changes that make it easier to develop and deploy applications.
Source Control Management (SCM) or Version Control Systems (VCS) are a developers second best friend (their best friend being the Jelastic platform itself of course!), so we’re going to focus on those platform enhancements in this blog post.
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Git submodule support
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Automatic check and update feature (optional)
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SVN and Git update logs
Spam filter showdown: SpamAssassin vs MagicSpam
Without a high quality spam filter, your mailbox can quite easily become overrun with hundreds of junk emails in a matter of days. As a solution to this we offer both MagicSpam and SpamAssassin as spam filtering modules within Plesk.
Although MagicSpam and SpamAssassin have similar goals they achieve them in largely different ways. SpamAssassin works by checking the content of each inbound email for certain keywords and phrases that are deemed suspicious. Whereas MagicSpam checks that the email was sent using best practice methods and that the sender isn’t listed on any email blacklist (DNSBL) as a known spammer.
When they’re installed and integrated with Plesk both solutions become incredibly easy to manage allowing them to be enabled, disabled and configured with the click of a button!
WordPress plugins – the good, the bad and the ugly!
WordPress is a very powerful and mature platform. Even though it started life as a blog system, today thousands of customers use it to power their entire website – many on our managed Cloud VPS service which is an ideal wordpress hosting option (even if we do say so ourselves!).
Plugins play an essential part in increasing the flexibility of the system to do exactly what you need. As one of the success stories of open source software, one of the great things about WordPress is that anybody can write a plugin. So there are already thousands of plugins already written – there’s a good chance somebody already wrote the plugin you’re looking for.
But, as I said – literally anybody can write a plugin. You don’t need to be a great software developer, you don’t even need to pay any attention to the OWASP top ten web application security risks; anybody with any level of coding expertise and skill can write a plugin.
So there are thousands of pre-written plugins to choose from, to give your WordPress powered site the extra functionality or feature that you crave – what could possibly go wrong?
Which PHP mode? Apache vs CGI vs FastCGI
There are multiple ways to execute PHP scripts on a web server. We’re often asked about the difference between these modes, so here it is!
We offer the three most common PHP handlers across our Linux Cloud Hosting range:
- Apache module
- CGI
- FastCGI
Each of these has its own advantages and disadvantages.