Light up the cloud with our Singapore discounts!
To celebrate the Festival of Lights – Deepavali – and our phenomenal growth since first launching our Singapore range over 4 years ago, we are offering our most popular Singapore Fully Managed Cloud VPS plans with an amazing 50% lifetime discount!
- Fully managed Cloud VPS:4GB at just 74.50 USD / month ( was $149)
- Fully managed Cloud VPS:2GB only 44.50 USD / month ( was $89)
Like the Deepavali sweets, our stock is limited so grab your lifetime discount while you can.
Block malicious traffic with fail2ban
There are many ways in which you can protect your VPS – from strict password policies, through to aggressive spam filtering, basic firewall configurations and antivirus. However, no matter how fancy and elaborate your security precautions are, there will always be someone ready to launch dictionary attacks and probe for vulnerable scripts on your poor server.
Even though we preconfigure strict firewall policies on our fully managed Cloud VPS, there are some services – like the web server itself – that have to remain wide open to the world. Without those gates, there would be no mail flow or web browsing.
Consequently your Cloud VPS can be kept quite busy just fighting off failed FTP/S password probes along with the load of “404 not found” reports in your apache error logs from bots searching for common software exploits. Not to mention the wealth of failed IMAP, SMTP and POP3 connections from spammers and identity thieves trying to compromise your mailbox.
If you weren’t really careful about keeping your website software 100% up to date you have, probably, at some point, received a support ticket from our abuse department notifying you that your VPS has unfortunately become a spam crib due to malware injections or a simple password breach.
A few months ago Parallels (now Odin) introduced new security enhancements to Plesk 12. Such features as WordPress Toolkit, mobile manager application, antispam and antivirus capabilities; the platform is a great choice for any web administrator. One little gem, in terms of security, was the addition of Fail2Ban. Let’s take a look at how it works and how it can save your server from compromise.
Santa Cloud is coming to town
The final countdown to Christmas has begun and we know that all of you can’t wait to spend some quality time with your family, friends, and loved ones. OK, maybe not all of you, we suspect there’ll be at least a few programmers donning their Halloween masks by mistake:
Q: Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas?
A: Because Oct 31 == Dec 25!
If you don’t understand, don’t worry (and Google it!), but most of all don’t be scared if you see a few confused ghouls roaming the streets over the next few days – these are the good folks that make the Internet world tick so give them a hearty handshake (and maybe a bucket load of sweets: let’s face it you’re going to eat enough sugar these next few days anyway!) on our behalf!
PHP 5.6 available on our Cloud VPS platform
Over a year after PHP 5.5 was released, the latest and greatest version 5.6 has just arrived and is already supported on our fully managed Cloud VPS hosting platform.
New features in our PHP 5.6 hosting
Here are some of the highlights of this new version of PHP:
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Constant scalar expressions: you can now provide static scalar expressions, so you can now use static expressions (in the past you could only use static values), e.g. in function arguments, const declarations or property declarations;
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Memory usage using POST has been reduced;
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An interactive debugger called phpdbg has been implemented – you can access it from the command line to debug your code step-by-step;
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Uploads of over 2GB are now accepted (but check you have enough server resources before doing this!);
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php://input is now reusable;
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Many SSL/TLS improvements such as protection against attacks, improved peer verification, fingerprinting SSL certificates, and significant enhancements when using encrypted streams;
Managed Cloud VPS Migration
When it comes to switching providers, most web admins have reservations (for obvious reasons) because migrating all that data (i.e. websites, databases, email accounts, etc.) across to the new host usually implies a lot of effort and wasted time. But moving to Layershift is very different.
Our expert migration engineers handle almost the entire process and stop at nothing to ensure that the transition goes as smoothly and painlessly as possible.
Case study: Brainstorm Creative Studio
Kevin Smith, one of the founders of Brainstorm Creative Studio, was kind enough to share his insights about their recent migration from Singlehop to Layershift. We’re sure that after reading this case study you’ll stop worrying about the migration and start thinking about the benefits of moving to Layershift instead.
“Companies like Layershift are so rare, and great staff within them are even rarer, I feel very grateful to all of them for their help.”